What do you think?
Rate this book
Researching Your Own Practice: The Discipline of Noticing
Central to caring professions such as teaching is the need to notice and be sensitive to the experiences of pupils and teachers. Starting from this position, Researching Your Own Practice demonstrates that in order to develop your professional practice you must first develop your own sensitivities and awareness. One must be attuned to fresh possibilities when they are needed and be alert to such a need through awareness of what is happening at any given time.By giving a full explanation of this theory and a guide to its implementation, this book provides a practical approach to becoming more methodical and systematic in professional development. It also gives the reader a basis for turning professional development into practitioner research, as well as giving advice on how noticing can be used to improve any research, or be used as a research paradigm in its own right.The discipline of noticing is a groundbreaking approach to professional development and research, based upon noticing a possibility for the future, noticing a possibility in the present moment and reflecting back on what has been noticed before in order to prepare for the future. John Mason, one of the discipline's most authoritative exponents, provides us here with a clear, persuasive and practical guide to its understanding and implementation.
- GenresNonfictionEducation
290 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 25, 2001
4 people are currently reading
90 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
Read
September 23, 2024Since this is an inter-library loan, I had to rush through parts. Ideally, one would take a year to read this while trying out Mason’s suggestions. Tips I’m hoping to remember are swapping could for should, describing without judgment, and responding rather than reacting.
Favorite big ideas-
I cannot change others; I can work at changing myself.
Presence always contains absence.
Favorite big ideas-
I cannot change others; I can work at changing myself.
Presence always contains absence.
June 5, 2025
I’m in the process of marking essays by students in a masters degree I’ve been teaching this year. Part of what they are asked to do is based on this book. Essentially, they are to watch a video of a teacher teaching and to pick out a student and notice something about them that they can link to the educational theories we have been discussion over the last few months. This is one of the books they were asked to read to help them with their noticing.
Noticing is a much more complicated thing than you might expect. The problem is that mostly we don’t really notice things and even when we do they are quite fleeting and hardly register in our consciousness. One of the things I’ve noticed in reading over the essays is how rarely the students question their own assumptions and biases in what they notice and what they might be ignoring. This is true even when they say this is one of the more important themes in this book. The idea being that noticing takes work – and that work is made easier if it is theory driven. That is, you see what you are looking for and so having a new theory that tells you to look for particular things means you are more likely to see things you otherwise would not have. I’m a big believer in theories working as lenses to bring things you otherwise take for granted into view. A few years ago a friend of mine got me to do a lecture on Cinderella which he then posted on Youtube. In it, I analyse the fairytale using a whole range of different theories. The idea was that Cinderella is something people generally think they know ‘everything there is to know’ about. But by thinking about what feminism, Marxism, Freud, Vygotsky, visual discourse analysis, Foucault and others might have noticed about the story, you get to see it in quite different ways. Here’s a link to the lecture if you have a wet weekend coming up and want to listen to me stuttering and stammering my way through a couple of hours of slides. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUw-z...
Reflection needs something to reflect upon and so noticing needs to be challenging in one way or another. That is, you reflect upon things that annoy you in some way. In the context of the classroom, this can be anything at all, I guess, but one of the things that often gets under my skin when I observe classrooms is their incredibly gendered structure. A while ago I was helping to observe a classroom where boys and girls were being shown how to sew. Now, this is generally understood to be a female task – but the girls hardly asked or answered a single question – and because the person talking to them wasn’t actually a teacher, I’m not even sure she noticed this at all. I’m not sure why I have become quite so sensitive to gender issues in the classroom – but I know I became particularly aware of it in an English class at university when someone was ‘randomly’ asking students in the class their opinion on something and I noticed that in a classroom dominated by women, not a single woman was asked anything. When I pointed this out, the man was embarrassed and the female teacher said something like, “oh, don’t ask questions like that Trevor”. I assume this was reverse psychology, since I haven’t stopped wondering about it since. And once you start noticing it, it is everywhere. Our biases determine what we see – but getting to see outside of our biases requires real effort.
One of the things recommended in this book is to try to describe what you are seeing in a way that is objective in the sense of having as few value judgements place on top of it as possible. That is, to literally describe how a child moves, speaks, frames their answer, blushes, gesticulates – and to then use empathy to seek to understand what might be going on in the child’s head. Education is a complex human activity, with layers and layers of things that can stand in the way. Finding ways to observe non-judgementally is a handy tool to have to see where things might be going wrong. The other thing about it all is that it is a reflection task – that is, you might be trying to see the world through the eyes of the student – but really, you also need to see what it is that you can or could be doing that might make the situation easier for the student to learn in. That’s where challenging your own biases and assumptions ought to come to the fore. And we are a mess of these – we have all spent too long watching other’s teach and therefore we all have fallen into the habits of our previous teachers. Getting to see outside of those habits and dispositions is really hard to do.
Stereotypes are as hard to avoid as they are to notice. Most of our lives are lived in living out our stereotypes. And this is a feature, not a bug. If things weren’t automatic we would spend our whole lives as if it was Sunday morning – deciding if it is worth getting out of bed or not. One of the memes that is on repeat play on my social media feed at the moment sort of goes, everyone things people with glasses are intelligent, which is odd, since to get glasses you literally have to fail a test. And we become the stereotypes others hold of us – as the work of Claude Steele shows. Our expectations of others too often become the expectations they hold of themselves. A teacher’s role is to create new expectations in our students – expectations that they are capable.
But because our noticings are so fleeting, we need ways to being them to conscious awareness. Having a structure that we can fit them into helps here, as does taking notes and wondering over what we have observed might mean. This book provides tools for doing just this. It also encourages communities of practice where we can put what we have noticed to the test. This is an interesting book and a relatively quick read. It is obviously written mostly for teachers, but I think the lessons here are much more general than that. Developing empathy and close observation are hardly skills only needed by teachers.
Noticing is a much more complicated thing than you might expect. The problem is that mostly we don’t really notice things and even when we do they are quite fleeting and hardly register in our consciousness. One of the things I’ve noticed in reading over the essays is how rarely the students question their own assumptions and biases in what they notice and what they might be ignoring. This is true even when they say this is one of the more important themes in this book. The idea being that noticing takes work – and that work is made easier if it is theory driven. That is, you see what you are looking for and so having a new theory that tells you to look for particular things means you are more likely to see things you otherwise would not have. I’m a big believer in theories working as lenses to bring things you otherwise take for granted into view. A few years ago a friend of mine got me to do a lecture on Cinderella which he then posted on Youtube. In it, I analyse the fairytale using a whole range of different theories. The idea was that Cinderella is something people generally think they know ‘everything there is to know’ about. But by thinking about what feminism, Marxism, Freud, Vygotsky, visual discourse analysis, Foucault and others might have noticed about the story, you get to see it in quite different ways. Here’s a link to the lecture if you have a wet weekend coming up and want to listen to me stuttering and stammering my way through a couple of hours of slides. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUw-z...
Reflection needs something to reflect upon and so noticing needs to be challenging in one way or another. That is, you reflect upon things that annoy you in some way. In the context of the classroom, this can be anything at all, I guess, but one of the things that often gets under my skin when I observe classrooms is their incredibly gendered structure. A while ago I was helping to observe a classroom where boys and girls were being shown how to sew. Now, this is generally understood to be a female task – but the girls hardly asked or answered a single question – and because the person talking to them wasn’t actually a teacher, I’m not even sure she noticed this at all. I’m not sure why I have become quite so sensitive to gender issues in the classroom – but I know I became particularly aware of it in an English class at university when someone was ‘randomly’ asking students in the class their opinion on something and I noticed that in a classroom dominated by women, not a single woman was asked anything. When I pointed this out, the man was embarrassed and the female teacher said something like, “oh, don’t ask questions like that Trevor”. I assume this was reverse psychology, since I haven’t stopped wondering about it since. And once you start noticing it, it is everywhere. Our biases determine what we see – but getting to see outside of our biases requires real effort.
One of the things recommended in this book is to try to describe what you are seeing in a way that is objective in the sense of having as few value judgements place on top of it as possible. That is, to literally describe how a child moves, speaks, frames their answer, blushes, gesticulates – and to then use empathy to seek to understand what might be going on in the child’s head. Education is a complex human activity, with layers and layers of things that can stand in the way. Finding ways to observe non-judgementally is a handy tool to have to see where things might be going wrong. The other thing about it all is that it is a reflection task – that is, you might be trying to see the world through the eyes of the student – but really, you also need to see what it is that you can or could be doing that might make the situation easier for the student to learn in. That’s where challenging your own biases and assumptions ought to come to the fore. And we are a mess of these – we have all spent too long watching other’s teach and therefore we all have fallen into the habits of our previous teachers. Getting to see outside of those habits and dispositions is really hard to do.
Stereotypes are as hard to avoid as they are to notice. Most of our lives are lived in living out our stereotypes. And this is a feature, not a bug. If things weren’t automatic we would spend our whole lives as if it was Sunday morning – deciding if it is worth getting out of bed or not. One of the memes that is on repeat play on my social media feed at the moment sort of goes, everyone things people with glasses are intelligent, which is odd, since to get glasses you literally have to fail a test. And we become the stereotypes others hold of us – as the work of Claude Steele shows. Our expectations of others too often become the expectations they hold of themselves. A teacher’s role is to create new expectations in our students – expectations that they are capable.
But because our noticings are so fleeting, we need ways to being them to conscious awareness. Having a structure that we can fit them into helps here, as does taking notes and wondering over what we have observed might mean. This book provides tools for doing just this. It also encourages communities of practice where we can put what we have noticed to the test. This is an interesting book and a relatively quick read. It is obviously written mostly for teachers, but I think the lessons here are much more general than that. Developing empathy and close observation are hardly skills only needed by teachers.
July 18, 2017
I was really excited to read this book and, while I think it contained a lot of useful information, ideas, and techniques, I couldn't get over how intensely boring and repetitive it was to read.
January 13, 2025
An interesting idea presented with so many repetitions that I the pages meld into one long rant towards the end.
-1 for mischaracterizing phenomenology.
-1 for mischaracterizing phenomenology.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews