IMPROVING TEACHER EDUCATION: WAYS OF DEVELOPING METACOGNITION, MEDIATION AND EDUCATIONAL EMOTIONAL AWARENESS  IN TEACHERS OF PUPILS WITH DYSLEXIA

A thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy 

by

MADELEINE MOHAMMED

SCHOOL OF EDUCATION BRUNEL UNIVERSITY
1.1.1.1	
1.1.1.2	
1.1.1.3	
1.1.1.4	
1.1.1.5	SEPTEMBER 2001

ABSTRACT

In the account of the research I look at metacognition, mediation and educational emotional awareness in order to try to describe, develop and ultimately facilitate their development in the teachers whom I help educate because I believe that teachers can improve their practice if they utilise these areas in their own learning. I believe a result of that utilisation can be improved learning for their pupils and I am interested to find practical ways in which that might take place in the context of teacher education in dyslexia. In order to do this I have carried out a review of the literature surrounding the main concepts in which I explain the concept of metacognition, the link between metacognition and intuition and explore the role of metacognition in cognitive skills training. I go on to explain mediation and discuss the influence of Vygotsky and Feuerstein on mediated learning experience. I then explain the nature of emotion in an educational context, linking the areas of cognition, emotional intelligence and dyslexia and exploring the link between metacognition, mediation and emotion.

I have undertaken an action research case study that I present in the form of a narrative which, in part, is an autobiography of my own learning. I have based the case study on my monitoring one year of a post graduate teacher training programme I ran for teachers of people with dyslexia. I attempt to clarify my understanding of the chosen methodology of action research in the context of qualitative research. I go on to describe the principles and process of using action research, the methods of data collection and the selection of data for analysis. I present four examples of sessions from the course in order to describe and analyse them so that they will form evidence for my claims to improve both teacher education and my own practice as a teacher educator.
Finally I explore the criteria by which my research might be assessed and I go on to link these criteria to a discussion of the contributions to knowledge I claim to have made in the substantive area of dyslexia and teacher education, a new theory of learning concerned with educational emotional awareness and the authentic representation of teacher researcher knowledge.

CONTENTS OF THESIS
1.1.1.6	ABSTRACT	
CONTENTS 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CAMEO
1.1.1.7	
1.1.1.8	
1.1.1.9	CHAPTER 1.Introduction to the Research			page  8				
1.1	Introduction 
1.2	Introduction to the Research Context
1.3	Autobiography of Learning
1.4	Specific Research Context
1.5	Dyslexia Explained 
2.	1.6	Research Aims
3.	1.7	Conclusion

3.1.1.1	CHAPTER 2.Main Concepts and Literature Review		page  23
2.1	Introduction 
2.2	Introduction to the Main Concepts
2.3	Metacognition Explained
The Seventh Sense and Intuition
Metacognition and Cognitive Training
2.4	Mediation Explained
The Influence of Vygotsky
Mediated Learning Experience
2.5	Emotion Explained
Emotion and Cognition
Emotional Intelligence
Emotion and Dyslexia
2.6	The Relationship between Metacognition, Mediation and Emotion
2.7	Conclusion

CHAPTER 3.Methodology						page  49
3.1	Introduction 
3.2	Action Research as Qualitative Research
3.3	Constraints of Action research 		
3.4	The Principles of Action Research	
3.5	Action Research – Cycles into Steps
3.6	Using Action Research:
3.7	Choice of Data Collection and Analysis Methods
3.8	Data Collection Research Phase 4	
3.9	Conclusion

CHAPTER 4. Data Analysis					page  70
4.1	Introduction 
4.2	Rationale for Data Selection 
4.3	Data Analysis Example 1: Applying Mediated Learning Theory
4.4	Data Analysis Example 2: Developing Understanding of Language in Mediated Learning
4.5	Data Analysis Example 3:Developing Understanding of Critical Incidents
4.6	Data Analysis Example 4: Developing Educational Cameos and Educational Emotional Awareness
4.7	Conclusion 
CHAPTER 5. Discussion and Conclusions				page  95
5.1 	Introduction 
5.2	Criteria for Assessment
5.3	Contribution to Substantive Area of Teaching and Learning in Relation to Dyslexia and teacher Education
5.4	Contribution to New Theory of Learning: Educational Cameos 
and Educational Emotional Awareness
5.5	Contribution to Authentic Representation of Teachers’ Knowledge
5.6	Summary of Reflections
5.7	Conclusion 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

APPENDICES

Appendix 1	Summary of Action

Appendix 2	List of Archive Materials

Appendix 3	Conference Papers and Publications

3.1.1.2	FIGURES
3.1.1.3	Figure 1	Action Cycle into Steps				page 56

Figure 2	Action Steps						page 65

Figure 3	EEA Cycle						page 92

Figure 4	Stages of an EEA Cycle				page 93

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank:

•	My family and close friends for being a source of support, solace and humour 
•	Harry Chasty for inspiration
•	Feuerstein for the gift of confidence
•	Pam Lomax for her tenacity in challenging my ideas and assumptions
•	Robert Fisher for gentle encouragement and metacognitive insights
•	Mary Flecker, my critical friend and fellow tutor for enduring good sense
•	The teachers on the 1997 training course who became my co-researchers with such enthusiasm and good humour
•	Ben Renshaw for the courage to ‘show up’

4.	
5.	
6.	
7.	Cameo 
I was sure the paper I had prepared for a validation meeting would be OK: I had worked hard. I had checked my paper against the criteria given- though if I’m honest, when I re read the paper the day before the meeting, I began to have some doubts but I just didn’t have the energy to address them. My turn came, and although the research group tried not to be too negative, it was clear that the paper was not up to the standard required……. As I listened to the comments I was transported back to my early years at school ( although it was unrecognised at the time, I have a learning difficulty related to poor auditory and visual memory and reading comprehension) to the feelings of vulnerability and shame. Back to standing by the teacher, nearly the only one in the class who couldn’t read, desperately trying to fathom what the code was that would allow me to do what the others did apparently so easily…back to standing in the dining hall before lunch, mouthing the times tables while the rest of the school chanted the answers so confidently, praying that nobody would find me out ……the feelings threatened to overwhelm me but I hung on, smiling and nodding- still I didn’t want to be found out- until after the meeting when I could escape to my car… panic… anger…hurt… a confusion of strong feelings all crowding in. Then something made me think …’wait a minute, what’s going on here?’ I’d been working on emotion in teaching and learning situations and here I was being ‘hijacked’ by emotions that were inappropriate and out of proportion.
So I took a step back from the feelings: I tried to recognise them, I questioned where they were coming from and in so doing immediately felt calmer with more sense of control, but also freer to think, to reason, to learn from the experience. An experience that could have been negative and destructive was instead positive and regenerative.
Written as a way of dealing with a difficult experience that arose during a validation meeting 7/01/1998

Improving teacher education: ways of developing metacognition, mediation and educational emotional awareness in teachers of pupils with dyslexia.

7.1.1.1	CHAPTER 1  INTRODUCTION TO THE RESEARCH

Success in life is to maintain this ecstasy, to burn always with this hard gem-like flame. Failure is to form habits. To burn with a gem-like flame is to capture the awareness of each moment; and for that moment only. How may we always be present for them? - to garner not the fruits of experience but experience itself ? 
                                           [Tom Stoppard: The Invention of Love ]  

1.1 Introduction  
In this chapter I introduce the general and specific contexts of the research, explain my own autobiography of learning and the nature of dyslexia and go on to outline the research aims. 
7.1.1.2	
7.1.1.3	1.2 Introduction to the Research Context

As part of my research into my practice as a teacher and teacher educator/ trainer I have tried to help/ mediate with teachers to come to a better, more metacognitive, understanding of their own learning, with the idea that, through gaining insight to their own experiences as learners, they might improve their practice as teachers. 
However, the process of my research has been marked by moments of both cognitive and emotional shifts and part of my interest in them has been to see if the identification and analysis of such moments could be useful to others in the educational relationships in which I engage. I like the Stoppard quote above because it gives off an energy, a determination to be in the moment that resonates with my attempts to capture moments, in educational contexts, that might allow the one experiencing the moment to, even briefly, ‘burn with a gem-like flame’. Parker refers to such ‘special’ moments 
as turning points which changed her understanding of her learning (Parker, 1998), and uses the metaphor of the twists and turns of a snake’s body to represent such critical incidents (Lomax and Parker, 1996). I have developed the notion of using the metaphor of a cameo both to represent the content of this aspect of my research and as a process by which I could gather, describe and analyse qualitative data as part of an action research study (Mohammed, 1997). The writing approach is familiar to historians and cultural anthropologists for whom ‘narrative form’ and ‘autobiography’ are accepted research methods and modes of representation recognised for their power to portray personal experiences (Bruner, 1990; Samuel&Thompson, 1990; Clandinin, 1992; Cortazzi, 2001). Cortazzi writes: ‘there is increasing recognition of the importance and usefulness of narrative analysis as an element of doing ethnography…narrative is now seen as one of the fundamental ways in which humans organise their understanding of the world’ (ibid. p384). The centrality of the ‘I’ is an integral part of the Action Research methodology: the style of writing ‘gives voice to the researcher’s first hand experiences in the field, a requirement that legitimates use of the active first person authorial voice’ (Taylor & Dawson, 1997).

I have researched metacognition, mediation, emotion and transfer because I think they are key elements in effective teaching and learning. I chose to preface the thesis with a cameo that I have written because the writing of the cameo demonstrates some of the understandings that I have come to in my research. The process illustrates also aspects of self study as part of the action research methodology I tried to employ in the wider research case study of my practice as a teacher educator. The cameo was written in response to a difficult experience I had had during a validation meeting. Writing the cameo provided me with a ‘turning point’ moment (Parker ibid.) which I am interested to explore in the thesis in relation to Vygosty’s ‘zone of next development (Vygotsky, 1978).  In my own research I have developed such moments as cameos - moments of affective impact that signal shifts in understanding (Mohammed, 1998). 

I wrote the cameo that prefaces this thesis as an act of cognition, but the impetus for writing it was an act of emotion, in that the feeling that preceded the writing and my response to the writing, i.e. what it made me feel, was what began a shift in metacognitive awareness of emotion and understanding.  In this shift, the interaction of emotion with cognition, mediated by metacognition, resulted in learning, in this case learning about myself as a learner, writer and researcher. Metacognition here was the key agent: if I had not looked metacognitively at how I felt, then at what that made me think and, conversely, at how I thought made me feel, I would not have experienced a new understanding. The moment need not in itself be particularly dramatic. It is the impact the moment has on cognitive and emotional understanding rather than the moment itself that characterises it as a ‘turning point’, that makes the moment metacognitively recognisable, memorable and ultimately meaningful. It is this sort of shift that I want to characterise as educational emotional awareness (Mohammed ibid.) and which has formed the unifying thread of the autobiography of both the specific and broad action research case study described and analysed in this thesis. 

I want to clarify that there are, in a sense, two case studies which have made up the autobiography of learning in this thesis: one is the specific study of a period of time of my practice as a teacher trainer/ educator of teachers wishing to specialise in dyslexia; the other, broader, is the study of my development as an action researcher in an area of education that has increasing relevance to the quality of teaching and learning in general.  At the time of starting to write about my research mention (TES 5.2.99 and general media)) had been made of the results of a three-year study, Bright Futures, from the Mental Health Foundation (1999), the preliminary, published report of which is called The Big Picture. The findings showed that one in five British children of school age had a mental health problem and that one in ten had significant problems that required specialist help. There were found to be many factors involved but one of them was education: an important societal change listed as having an impact on children and young people, for example, was the increasing emphasis in the education system on academic achievement. Although dyslexia was not mentioned specifically in 
the preliminary report, it is a cause of under achievement in school (Riddick, 1996) and 
as such it is a stressor in an environment which places emphasis on achievement. One of the risk factors listed in the report is that of ‘specific developmental delay’; another is a ‘communication difficulty’; another is a ‘learning disability’ (p.8): all of these are involved in dyslexia.

Other statistics at that time (source: TES 22.1.99) stated that a third of all pupils in an Inner London Borough starting secondary school had a reading age of eight years or less. Not all those affected would have dyslexia: the consensus among many researchers and concerned organisations is a conservative estimate of 4 per cent of the population having severe dyslexia with another 6 per cent having mild to moderate dyslexia  (Riddick ibid.). However, whatever the other causes of the reading delay in that instance, my experience as an educator involved for twelve years in the assessment and teaching of children and adults with learning difficulties told me that underlying the statistic was a picture of huge loss of self esteem and emotional distress in such children which needed addressing alongside the learning/ literacy difficulties. 

One of the points made in the summary of ‘The Big Future’ was that ‘schools have a critical role to play in creating emotionally literate children’. Specialist teachers can be in a unique position to help mediate emotional literacy by the fact that they work in small group/ individual settings. Through my research I became interested in exploring ways to mediate with specialist teachers I helped train a better understanding of the concept of emotional literacy and how they could develop it in their pupils in the context of the learning situations they created.                  

1.3 Autobiography of Learning

Narrative is increasingly being used to represent the human element in the description and evaluation of experience in a range of disciplines (Cortazzi, 1993; Polkinghorne, 1988; Riessman, 1993). Cortazzi (2001) describes narrative as ‘a major means of making sense of past experience and sharing it with others’: the nature of autobiography is that it is made up selected aspects that are shaped by the teller in the telling, with an audience in mind. An autobiography also carries an element of performance and voice which seek interpretation and justification particularly if ‘the narratives are accounts of epiphanic moments, crises, or significant incidents’ (Cortazzi op.cit.) On considering the foci of my chosen area of research, I feel it is relevant to narrate the development of my own metacognitive awareness, how that was mediated to me and how my feelings about my own learning were an integral part of that learning. 

The process began with the realisation when doing my degree, in 1972, that taking exams required knowledge of a formula and that, if I took an overview of the formula, I could fit my existing knowledge to it and, thereby, answer most questions on a given paper.  The only way hitherto I had succeeded in exams such as 'O' and 'A' levels was by cramming close to the exam; if I tried other ways I simply did not remember what I had revised.  I viewed knowledge and learning synonymously, as a series of facts to which I could hold on only transiently, in order to pass exams.  I did not trust in my own ability to formulate ideas on my chosen subjects; I felt I had to memorise the words of others. Later, when teaching at secondary level, I decided I wanted my pupils to make the most of their resources by being aware of the system and what it required.  I suppose I tried to teach a primitive form of study skills, based on my own experiences as an inefficient student.  I doubt if I was particularly successful.  I continued to teach in the 'talk and chalk' way: I thought if I told my pupils and they listened, they would be taught, the natural assumption being that, therefore, they would learn.

Later still I trained with the Dyslexia Institute in 1986, studying for a British Dyslexia Association diploma in Specific Learning Difficulties. The emphasis in Dyslexia Institute was beginning to shift, under the direction of Harry Chasty, then director of the Dyslexia Institute, from the teaching of reading, spelling and writing towards a broader perspective of teaching those skills alongside other skills that would enable the learner to learn effectively and, thereby, use what compensatory abilities they might have to 'shore up' the areas of weakness/difficulty. As an inefficient learner myself, I found this perspective exciting and challenging. A literacy programme remained the core of the teaching I learned about but taking the wider approach allowed me to incorporate the development of learning skills, whereby I felt I could actively enable my pupils to build up awareness of the process of their learning, thus enabling them to become active participants in the learning process rather than passive recipients of knowledge.  I came to understand this process as being that of the development of metacognition.

However, my own development as a learner and as a teacher was most profoundly affected on taking part in Stages I and II of the training for teachers in Feuerstein's Instrumental Enrichment Programme (IE). The programme had been successful in a variety of teaching situations and could be viewed as a way of addressing the needs of specific learning difficulties.  Feuerstein and his colleagues believe that intellectual ability is not fixed but that it can be influenced; this adaptability he calls Structural Cognitive Modifiability.  The Instrumental Enrichment Programme, translated by a mediator, is the means they developed by which ability might be enhanced.  The programme consists of a series of problem solving tasks and exercises based on fourteen areas of cognitive development.  The purpose of each instrument is not the learner's acquisition of a body of knowledge, but the development, refinement and articulation of effective thinking whereby the learner's cognitive style becomes active, self motivated and independent.  An important element of each instrument is the 'bridging' process whereby the mediator generalises the content of the instrument into academic and real-life problem situations. For example, in the first instrument, Organisation of Dots, the experience of activities involving principles of planning, comparing, decision making based on evidence and accurate use of language describing these processes, is given but then bridged beyond the immediate activities of the instrument into other concrete and hypothetical situations requiring these cognitive structures.  The idea is that later the pupil is then able to generate problem-solving strategies when faced with 'real-life' situations in school and in the outside world.

Inspired by Feuerstein and, in turn, inspirational in the development of thinking/learning skills in the philosophy of Dyslexia Institute teaching and teacher training, Harry Chasty had set up the chance for senior members of staff to be trained in Feuerstein's methods.  Quite simply, it changed my life: it changed my perception of myself both as a learner and as a teacher.  I had never before been so excited by anything to do with learning, always regarding it as difficult and full of intricacies to which I was not privy.  With the IE programme it did not matter that I could not remember important dates in history or virtually any of the content based subjects I had studied or, indeed, any of the important 'facts' about Dyslexia, such as the names of luminaries, and which side of the brain did what.  I realised that I could be intelligent, have integrity of thinking, could apply learning skills to other situations, could learn from difficulties, develop strategies to overcome difficulties, apply them and modify my response in other situations.  It constituted one of the few times I had ever felt confident in my competence as a learner.  I felt that someone had given me a gift.  I began to feel very strongly that my concern as a teacher was to try to impart this gift to my pupils.  I wanted them to feel good about their learning ability instead of bad about their learning difficulties.  I wanted to enable them to use their abilities to intervene in their difficulties.  I wanted them to have a sense of inner competence that would enable them to keep reading, spelling, writing and number difficulties in proportion.  Here I stress that I am talking about pupils who are having their literacy difficulties addressed: I realise that the teaching of learning skills should run parallel with the teaching of literacy skills for such pupils. Of primary influence in the development of my philosophy has been Harry Chasty, once director of and consultant to the Dyslexia Institute who was the psychology lecturer on the BDA course on which I trained, and who continued to challenge my ideas on teaching and learning. As stated previously, Dr. Chasty was instrumental in bringing the philosophy of IE to Dyslexia Institute and allowing several of its teachers the chance of training.  Certainly his philosophy underpins the ethos of the Dyslexia Institute and that of the DILP: thereby it underpins for me the philosophy of teacher training.  To Dr. Chasty's often quoted words " if a child cannot learn the way you teach, can you teach the way it learns" I would add "and can you teach the child how to learn". 

My concern in acting as a dyslexia tutor and course director of a training course for specialist dyslexia teachers has been to impart this sense of competence to the teachers who are in training so that they, in turn, may impart it to their pupils.  Thus, I tried to develop in my lectures the themes of small skills building to bigger skills, of teaching such skills overtly but also of developing such skills by the way in which we teach: for example, I would tell teachers of the concrete ways in which they could extend and improve memory skills. Overall, however, I have tried to foster metacognitive awareness in the teachers, which they in turn, impart to their pupils, that they are, to take the same example, extending memory competence all the time by the way they teach as well as when teaching specific memory strategies. It seems to me that metacognitive awareness of learning by both teacher and student is that which underpins successful learning, and that which has the potential to transform the dyslexic learner's view of himself/herself as impaired, to one of being in control, of having the skills of learning at his/her finger-tips, rather than always trying to grasp transiently the content of learning that so often seems out of reach.
8.	
9.	The next main stage in the development of my learning was when I decided to study for an MA: I chose to research the mediation of metacognition but balked at the more traditional quantitative methodologies because I knew that was not where my strengths lay. It was with some relief that I was introduced to action research methodology by Professor Pam Lomax, a leading figure in the field who felt passionately about the potential of action research to liberate researchers and recognise the practitioner as ‘expert’.  Again I experienced a ‘turning point moment’ in that first session: this was my ‘zone of next development’. I was ready to move from my then present understanding to another level and when qualitative methodologies of research were mediated to me it was with a sense of recognition and excitement that I began to integrate new understanding that I could become a researcher of my own practice, that I could be regarded as an expert of that practice and that I could transfer the added dimension of action research to my practice in a way that was both metacognitively and emotionally satisfying.
10.	
11.	 I went on to register for a PhD, hoping to extend and deepen my learning, again choosing action research as the methodology. Two years into my research there began a lengthy period of intense and painful personal experiences that meant that I could not function at the cognitive level I needed to. It was ironic, considering that the contribution to knowledge I hoped to make concerned aspects of emotion in teaching and learning and there I was directly experiencing how far reaching the affective element could be. When some sense of stability in my personal life began to return I decided that I did not have the academic energy to give to completing several more years of a PhD but felt that I had a sufficient body of work to submit at M.Phil level. After some difficult months trying to pull together what I had, I realised that I was delaying moving forward to completion of the thesis. When I questioned this, tried to analyse what was holding me back, what the gain was for me in not completing, I realised that it was to do, not with cognitive difficulties arising from the level of study, but with emotional difficulties around my confidence as a researcher and my fears about my future once my studies were no longer there as a buffer. On making this realisation, there followed a moment of immense clarity that led to my being able to recommence my work, not in a rather resigned, pragmatic way but with a real sense of renewed academic vigour. On reflection, just as I write this, I think I had experienced another transition to my personal ‘zone of next development’ and it felt good! The process that I have described is exactly the process of educational emotional awareness (EEA) that I have been researching, a metacognitive awareness of which is that which I want to mediate to others. Moreover, the means of reaching that turning point moment of clarity was exactly that facilitated by the EEA cycle (see Chapter4: 4.6) I had devised as a result on researching my practice as an educator of teachers. I decided there was a god after all -but that is another level of enquiry all together. 

12.	1.4 Specific Research Context 

The specific case study traced a year (1997) on a post graduate teacher training course run by Dyslexia Institute, validated at the time by Kingston University. The course was designed for teachers, with a minimum of three years’ teaching experience, and other related professionals wishing to specialise in teaching pupils with dyslexia. On that particular course there were 21 trainees: 19 experienced teachers, one educational psychologist and one speech therapist. The course was in two modules each of fifteen weeks: Module 518 The Dyslexic  Learner as an Individual and Module 519 The Dyslexic Learner in Context. The course started in the January term and ran one day a week for thirty weeks, spread over three academic terms. Dyslexia is widely accepted as a fundamental language difficulty which adversely affects many more aspects than reading and spelling (Thomson, 1990; Pumfrey & Reason, 1991;Dockrell & McShane, 1993; Riddick, 1996;Hulme & Snowling,1997). The aim of the course was to enable teachers to address these many aspects as well as to develop highly specific expertise in the teaching of reading and spelling to pupils who are not able to learn by the usual means of classroom teaching. The course was based on the Dyslexia Institute Literacy Programme [DILP]  (Walker et al, 1993) a structured, multi-sensory teaching programme such as the type widely recognised as the most appropriate way of teaching people with dyslexia (Auger et al, 1992; Rosner, 1993; Rack et al, 1994; Bloomfield et al, 1997; Ott, 1997; Thomson et al, 1997;Edbury et al, 1998; Thomson et al, 1999). As course director I devised the week by week programme and allocated, by negotiation, the lecture and workshop sessions between myself and two other tutors (see appendix 1for detailed breakdown of my input on the 1997 course). Traditionally the training course sessions were either lecture type (i.e. transmission based) or workshop type (i.e. trainee participation based). My intention was that the sessions should contain elements of both, with the emphasis on a multi-sensory, interactive approach encompassing the topic of each session and that I would try to model explicitly a metacognitive approach in my own teaching style so that metacognition was not just a topic for study, more an integral part of the teaching process.  
12.1.1.1	
12.1.1.2	1.5 Dyslexia Explained: 

The terms ‘dyslexia’ and ‘specific learning difficulties’ are often used synonymously, 
 although some see the latter as an umbrella term for a variety of learning difficulties of which dyslexia is but one ( Pumpfrey & Reason, op.cit.; Dockrell& Mcshane op.cit.).    In general, educationalists and educational psychologists tend to use ‘specific learning difficulty’ whereas clinicians, voluntary organisations, concerned lay people and those who are affected by dyslexia use ‘dyslexia’. Recent research and relevant statistics reveal that between 2% and 4% of the population may have severe dyslexia, while a further 6% may be mildly or moderately dyslexic (Ott, 1997; Reid, 1998). Genetic research also suggests that chromosomes 15 and 16 may have a causal effect ( Paulesu et al, 1996; Hulme et al ,1997;Temple, 1997). Gender imbalance in dyslexia has been reported from a variety of research studies and there appears to be some consensus  that dyslexia is more common in males than females (a ratio of 4:1) , and some research suggests that left handed boys may have an even higher risk factor (Halpern, 1992). 

Defining dyslexia gives rise to a number of problems and inconsistencies which could be developed more extensively but to which I want to refer only briefly for the purposes of this thesis. Riddick (op.cit.) writes that different definitions highlight different aspects or levels of the problem and proposes that looking at the links between the different levels of explanation allows clarity about the links between biological causes, cognitive impairments and affected behaviours (such as poor reading and spelling), whatever definition the individual ‘camps’ of opinion/ evidence favour. Thus, there is no one agreed definition of dyslexia but one put forward by the World Federation of Neurology (1968) is still commonly used:
Dyslexia is a disorder manifested by difficulty in learning to read despite conventional instruction, adequate intelligence and sociocultural opportunity. It is dependant upon fundamental cognitive disabilities… of constitutional origin.
Definitions which rule out, as does this one, other causative factors are referred to as exclusion definitions: this type of approach can favour the identification of middle class children and may have led to educational hostility as it could be assumed that socially disadvantaged children and those without ‘adequate intelligence’ would not be diagnosed with dyslexia, whereas the cognitive impairments underlying dyslexia are evenly spread across the population (Thomson, op.cit; Riddick op.cit.). Similar problems occur with the ‘discrepancy’ definition of dyslexia which assumes a relationship between actual and expected performance based on intellectual ability as, again, this would favour more intelligent and more middle class children (likely to be exposed to more ‘chances’ to acquire reading) as the gap between actual and expected performance would be more noticeable. Other difficulties with this definition occur because some discrepancies, such as that between reading and spelling, can diminish as children get older (Korhonen 1995), masking other specific cognitive impairments, such as poor short term memory, which still put the older dyslexic at a disadvantage in situations like examinations. Some researchers, noticeably Stanovich (1994) and Frith (1999) reject the discrepancy model, citing scarcity of clear cut differences between discrepant and non-discrepant poor readers in reading patterns, heritability and brain anomalies, although it could be said that these views fail to consider the appropriateness of the IQ tests used in the assessment of cognitive potential (Turner, 1997). Some IQ subtests rely on short term memory, for example, which would disadvantage the dyslexic and give misleading ‘overall’ scores as short term memory is an area of difficulty for those with dyslexia. 

The Division of Education and Child Psychology (Thomson, 2000) now favours a description of the various characteristics of the learning process (mainly involving phonological skills, Gillon et al, 1997) that are affected by dyslexia, similar to the model of a syndrome of difficulties identified in the seventies (Newton, 1970; Miles, 1974). This syndrome included weak auditory and visual short term memory (particularly sequencing) but also sound blending, sound discrimination, naming and labelling skills, all of which are associated with a phonological deficit. Indeed, there has been a recent tendency to identify phonological processing as a core deficit in dyslexia (Snowling, 1996) at the expense of other disabling features readily recognised by teachers of dyslexic children, namely difficulties in organisational skills, arithmetic and table skills and a whole variety of patterns of behaviour that affect learning, and the teaching, of the dyslexic individual. Miles (1993) now writes of an identifiable pattern of difficulties, no single one of which is significant until it is joined by other manifestations: these usually include difficulties in learning to read, write and spell, limitations in short term memory and phonological awareness. The following definition, devised by The Dyslexia Institute (1996), embraces the idea that dyslexia is a complex syndrome with different individuals showing different aspects but that prevalent are the underlying difficulties with short term memory and phonological  recognition:
Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty that hinders the learning of literacy skills. This problem of managing verbal codes in memory is neurologically based and tends to run in families. Other symbolic systems, such as mathematics and musical notation, can also be affected.
Dyslexia can occur at any level of intellectual ability. It can accompany, but is not a result of, lack of motivation, emotional disturbance, sensory impairment or meagre opportunities.
The effects of dyslexia can be alleviated by skilled specialist teaching and committed learning. Moreover, many dyslexic people have visual and spatial abilities that enable them to be successful in a wide range of careers.

Having such a definition allows for flexibility and also provides an imperative for teachers when attempting to address the learning difficulty, in that there is consensus that dyslexia is not just a difficulty with reading and spelling: thus any remediation programme must take into account these other factors and appropriate programmes devised according to the individual pattern of difficulties manifest in the student. A large part of a teacher training programme also would focus on the recognition, explanation and remediation of individual patterns of difficulty and my role as training course director would be to mediate a level of understanding that would enable the teachers to develop these quite specific skills. As I gained experience as a trainer of such specialist teachers I found, in turn, that my own practice was greatly enhanced by explaining, mediating and modelling a metacognitive approach: it was this understanding of my practice that led me to want to research further the areas of metacognition, mediation and transfer in the context of dyslexia.  

12.1.1.3	1.6 Research Aims
In my research proposal I stated that my aims were:
•	To investigate how metacognition, mediation and transfer can be integrated within an action research approach to training specialist teachers of pupils with dyslexia.
•	To develop strategies for effective mediation of metacognitive practices to teachers on a teacher training programme delivered by my institution.
•	To evaluate if metacognitive practices have been transferred to teaching practice both during and subsequent to the training programme.
13.	
I amended the title of my original research proposal by adding ‘emotion’ as a subject of the case study because, as a result of carrying out the action research into my practice, I came to the realisation that the affective dimension was interwoven with the cognitive in effective teaching and learning. I chose to focus on metacognition, mediation, transfer and, latterly, emotion because I felt that they were concepts that were crucial to effective teaching. When I made the decision not to submit at PhD level I decided also to discontinue the research into transfer as I felt I could not sustain this aspect of the research. However, the concepts I continued with are relatively abstract and experience told me that understanding them could pose difficulties to the teachers who came on the course. By researching concrete ways in which I might describe, develop and influence them both in myself and in others I was hoping to make them more accessible to teachers as aspects of effective practice.

After considering where the ideas about emotion I had developed while researching my practice fit in the original research aims, as detailed above, I could see that they could be incorporated into the first research aim and that they could be thought of as one of the strategies developed to fulfil the second aim. My research led me to develop other, related aims: although the content of the training course and the related lecture/ workshop sessions were prescribed by the course requirements, I decided that an aim of my research also was:
•	To develop ways in which the delivery of the prescribed course might be improved.
 Whereas an overall research aim was:
•	 To improve my practice as a teacher educator/ trainer by helping the trainee teachers gain insight to their own experiences as learners who might then improve their practice as teachers.
 I based these aims on my personal theories of education, based in turn on the educational values I hold, which are outlined in Chapter 3 (see section 3.6)
14.	
15.	1.7 Conclusion 
In this chapter I have I have tried to give a clear picture of the research in terms of its general and specific contexts, my own autobiography of learning, an explanation of dyslexia and the research aims I developed in order to extend my understanding of my practice.

CHAPTER 2 MAIN CONCEPTS AND LITERATURE REVIEW
15.1.1.1	
15.1.1.2	2.1 Introduction 
In this chapter I engage in a discussion of the literature about the main concepts from which the research was generated. I explain the concept of metacognition, the link between metacognition and intuition and explore the role of metacognition in cognitive skills training. I go on to explain mediation and discuss the influence of Vygotsky and Feuerstein on mediated learning experience. I then explain the nature of emotion in an educational context, linking the areas of cognition, emotional intelligence and dyslexia. Finally I illustrate the link between metacognition, mediation and emotion.

2.2 Introduction to the Main Concepts

I started the research wanting to look at metacognition, mediation and transfer, to try to describe, develop and ultimately facilitate/ influence their development in the teachers whom I helped train because I believed that teachers could improve their practice if they utilised these areas in their own learning and teaching (Mohammed & Lomax, 1998). I believed a result of that utilisation could be improved learning for their pupils and I was interested to find practical ways in which that might take place. However, as explained in the previous chapter, as the research developed I began to become interested in the area of emotion in teaching and learning and I realised that I would not be able to cover the area of transfer as well unless I extended the research to PhD level, hence the change in the research foci. Transfer, defined as the process whereby the usefulness of what is learnt is internalised by the learner in such a way that it can be applied in and adapted to other learning situations (Nisbet & Shucksmith, 1984) is a complex area, primarily in establishing evidence that it has occurred, so, also as explained in the previous chapter, with some reluctance I decided I would not approach it for the purposes of this thesis. 

Initially I was interested in the actual ‘moment of knowing’ and what that meant, trying to identify it, when it happened: later I became interested in how it actually felt. According to Rosanoff (1991) this ‘inner knowing… is usually accompanied by a strong physical, visual and/or emotional sensation’ (p16). According to Goleman (1996) ‘ the intuitive signals that guide us in these moments come in the form of limbic- driven surges from the viscera that Damasio calls ‘somatic markers’- literally, gut feelings’ (p53). At the beginning of my research I was trying to explain the moment in terms of:
1.	How that moment could be recognised: for example I experience it as a definite physical response, literally a ‘gut reaction’ as described above.
2.	If recognition of the moment and of how it felt, could be linked to the development of the metacognitive awareness that I was concerned to find ways of mediating to teachers.  
As I began to read more widely and as I began to research the story of my own practice, I became aware that cognitive, or even metacognitive, aspects were not enough to consider: that there were affective aspects to teaching and learning that needed to be considered also. Moreover I realised that looking at these affective elements involved more than a consideration of self esteem. The literature on self esteem is extensive and I decided that I would not usefully explore that for the purposes of this thesis because I did not want to be side tracked away from my interest in emotion . The areas of metacognition and mediation are traditionally, in Western cultures, popularly based in cognition, although Feuerstein (1990) recognises the part emotion plays in mediation and increasingly the classical body/ mind dichotomy is being recognised as an artificially created construct perpetuated as an attempt to explain human biology/ physiology/ psychology (Pert, 1998;LeDoux, 1998). Recent research favours a holistic approach that encompasses ‘ bodymind’ rather than ‘ body / mind’ (Pert, ibid.p141). Interestingly, Pert (ibid.) refers to the relationship between body and mind as a ‘bi-directional’ network in which each can alter the other, with the ‘emotional brain’ no longer confined to certain locations in the brain, as had traditionally been supposed. 

I want to define the key foci of the case study as follows: 
•	metacognition as an awareness of how one thinks so that one has an overview of those thought processes which might then be more readily accessible when needed in problem solving situations ( Flavell,1979). 
•	mediation as a process of intervention whereby the mediator attempts to interpret and then present what is to be learnt in ways that help the learner to learn (Feuerstein, 1991).
•	emotion as the range of emotional thoughts and feelings we experience when an emotional system of the brain is active …of which we become consciously aware when we experience emotion (LeDoux,1998).

There follows a detailed discussion of each of these major concepts in an attempt to contextualise both my own understanding of them and how they impact on my research. Winter writes of theory in action research as being a form of improvisatory self-realisation asserting that theory comes …not mainly from an initial review of ‘The Literature’ …theoretical resources are not predefined in advance but are drawn in by the process of the inquiry’ (Winter, 1997). I have found this to be the case with my inquiry: when I started my literature survey I found it hard to engage with the literature because I was reading in a vacuum in a way I found incompatible with my learning style because it was not metacognitive. I needed to know quite specifically why I was doing the reading and found that very little of what I was reading was retained. However, increasingly I found that the purpose for the reading was being thrown up by the inquiry, so that the reading was in context, relevant to specific ‘needs to know’. Interestingly, and pertinent to several aspects of my research, I am finding that I am now able to retain/ transfer learning from the reading that I do. 
15.1.1.3	
15.1.1.4	2.3 Metacognition Explained 

Flavell (ibid.) is credited with the first use of the term ‘metacognition’ in 1976 to describe the monitoring of one’s thinking, a process that can be developed to bring the process of learning itself to a conscious level so that control is gained over the organisation of learning. In this way it is important to establish that ‘ metacognition is not just monitoring or awareness, though they are necessary first conditions: it also extends to the orchestration (organisation) of the process’ (Nisbet & Shucksmith, 1986), that is to say that metacognition is thinking about thinking and then integrating that thinking into one’s cognitive schema. Using the prefix ‘meta’, as Fisher (1998) explains, extends meaning to ‘something that transcends the subject it is related to’ (p2). Thus, metacognition requires going beyond cognition, it requires ‘conscious executive control’ and as such becomes ‘the  essence of intelligent activity’ (Brown, 1978). The term of ‘meta-thinking’ has been used to describe ‘thinkers thinking about thinking’ (Quinn, 1997), registering features of analysing the content and process of one’s own thinking and exploring the idea that meta-thinking is a means of improving thinking and empowering the learner because it is to do with ‘relying on intelligence…not recollection, not the authority of the text book…not the authority of the teacher’ (p21). Again this resonates with my concerns to facilitate autonomy in the learner, whether teachers themselves or pupils, by means of metacognitive mediation in my own practice.

Fisher (ibid.) has written extensively about metacognition and effectively draws together the strands of thought that have influenced current theory. From Fisher we learn that Von Wright (1992) distinguishes two levels of meta-reflection, low level and higher level, which has parallels with the difference Vygotsky draws between ‘consciousness in a broad sense (‘soznanie’) and conscious awareness (‘osozanie’)’. On surveying the literature on metacognition at the time, Brown (1987) identified four areas:
1.	Verbal reports as data on self knowledge of cognitive processes (e.g. Flavell)
2.	Executive control within an information-processing framework (e.g. Sternberg)
3.	Self-regulation, control and management of a person’s own cognition (e.g. Piaget)
4.	Other-regulation, involving the social mediation of thinking by others (e.g. Vygotsky)
Brown recognises that two area of metacognition are often confused or regarded as interchangeable when they are actually separate aspects of metacognitive process: these she describes as ‘the essential distinction between self regulation during learning’ and ‘knowledge of, or even mental experimentation with, one’s own thoughts’ (Brown et al., 1983). Adey and Shayer (1994) extend this differenciation and apply respectively
 the terms ‘going beyond’, linked to 2,3 and 4 above, and ‘going above’, linked with 1 above. It could be argued that areas 1,2 and 3 are to do with Vygotsky’s Zone of Next Development and area 1 is to do with how the bridge from one zone to another is made. Fisher quite rightly points out that the distinction is somewhat artificial, rather that the areas are interlinked in ‘real’ metacognitive activity, which can, however, be usefully delineated in terms of ‘cognitive extension’ (CE) i.e. the going beyond and above, and ‘metacognitive thinking’ (MT). Fisher writes: it would be a mistake to believe that CE requires MT, or indeed any of the expanded consciousness of metacognitive activity. On this view CE is a necessary but not sufficient condition for M . This allows the possibility that metacognition is the necessary third step that follows the intuitive ‘leap’ and the ‘cognitive extension’ as discussed below in relation to Bruner’s ideas. It occurs to me that there is room here to consider the possibility also of metacognition being the means by which what I will call ‘intra-mediation’ can take place. By this I mean that mediation is generally regarded ( Vygotsky, 1986; Feuerstein,op.cit.) as a social interaction, involving as it does the ‘other’, that could be called ‘inter-mediation’. In my experience I think it is possible for mediation to take place internally, i.e. ‘intra-mediation’, between an individual’s own thought processes, similar perhaps to Brown’s notion, quoted above, of ‘mental experimentation with one’s own thoughts’. This would tie in also with the notion that metacognition could be a ‘seventh sense’ as developed below.

The Seventh Sense and Intuition

Traditionally there are five senses, ‘ sixth sense’ often being used to describe a rather mystical, intuitive super-sensitivity of awareness that has gained increasing credibility, however, as ‘intuition’ in a wide range of areas, from medicine (Benson, 1996; Watkins, 1997), to para-psychology (Rosanoff,op.cit; Gershon, 1999; Levin, 2000). Intuition has been defined as ‘ when we know, but we don’t know how we know…an inner knowing’ (Rosanoff op.cit.).   Metacognition has been referred to as the ‘seventh sense’ (Nisbet &Shucksmith op.cit.) which recognises it as a basic attribute of human behaviour, although I would see an important difference from the five primary senses as it being something that it not necessarily evident or developed as a matter of everyday experience, and thus it has implications for teaching and learning. Another interesting aspect here would be to consider whether, if intuition is called the ‘third eye’, metacognition could be called the ‘fourth eye’ but that debate, I think, is beyond the remit of this thesis!

Bruner in his autobiography, In Search of Mind , (1983) dates contemporary developments in cognitive psychology from a publication by Bruner, Goodnow and Austin in 1956, describing it as ‘a rediscovery of the concept of mind’ which puts forward the notion of the mind as ‘active and creative’. I think it is interesting to consider the relationship between metacognition and intuition. As early as 1972, Bruner was writing ‘the aim of balanced schooling is to enable a child to proceed intuitively when necessary and to analyse when appropriate’ (p83): he goes on to state that ‘the paradigm or limit of most intuitive heuristics is direct perception’ (p84) and ‘it is the characteristic of intuitive procedures that the person is not able to give much verbal justification of why… in this respect the behaviour is not fully in the control of the learner’ (p85). I think it is here that metacognition plays a part in the learner making sense of what I will call the ‘intuitive leap’ Bruner identifies, bringing the cognitive aspects of the leap under schematic control. This has implications for my research in that it is exactly this process, this leap, or moment of knowing, and how it may be developed in learning, that first caught my attention and made me want to know more. 

If intuition provides that first grasp of the essence of a concept/ idea, cognition makes it more concrete: metacognition brings it under what Sternberg (1983) calls ‘executive control’ so that the learning becomes available to the learner for present and future learning interactions. Thus metacognition enables and makes ‘translateable’ the intuition that on its own is not enough to offer explanation for the resultant cognitive development. Bruner (ibid.) writes of ‘looking at something and letting it speak’ to him ‘of its rightness or wrongness’ (p86) so that the intuitive act takes on a deliberate quality which then requires a metacognitive stance of deliberate reflection and deliberate attention being given to the intuition. Implied in this is also the confidence to take the time to think, as Feuerstein (op.cit.) stipulates: Bruner calls intuition ‘an invitation to go further’ (p88). He goes on to acknowledge that there is little known about the educability of intuition and writes of the possibility of teaching ‘non subject specific heueristics,’ ie study skills, as ‘the economical tricks of the trade’ (p96) that should be taught as early as possible. De Bono could be said to have addressed the ‘educability’ of intuition: he has been responsible for the technique of ‘lateral thinking’ which is defined as ‘…rearranging available information so that it is snapped out of the established pattern and forms a new and better pattern. This rearrangement has the same effect as insight’ (de Bono, 1969,p237). I think it likely that lateral thinking invites the intuitive leap as discussed above and that metacognition would be a prerequisite of such thinking involving as it would ‘going beyond’ the pattern.

Metacognition and Cognitive Training

Bruner (ibid.) writes about ‘skilled action’ as ‘recognising the features of a task, its goal and means appropriate to its attainment; a means of converting this information into appropriate action and a means of getting feedback that compares the object sought with the state attained’ (p112) and talks of the need ‘to make a subject your own’ that is to say that such skilled action is a means of integrating both content and process of a subject as part of one’s thinking. There are numerous cognitive skills programmes that aim to provide materials to teach various component processes involved in intellectual tasks: there tends to be similarities in terms of style, content and intention though there can be differences in the emphasis placed on the metacognitive processes they aim to develop and the theoretical stance taken. For the purposes of this thesis, I do not intend to examine these programmes in detail: Blagg (1991) gives a comprehensive account of four of the most influential (deBono’s CoRT, [Cognitive research Trust] System; Lipman’s Philosophy for Children; Sternberg’s Componential Training Programme; Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment) whilst promulgating his own programme, the Somerset Thinking Skills Course, which could be said to bear similarity to Feuerstein’s programme. All have in common an attempt to provide carefully structured opportunities for what Donaldson (1998) calls ‘the struggle to make sense …to knowing through processes of active interpretation and integration’ (p19) for, as Nisbet (1993) says ‘we do not learn merely from being told; we learn from action and interaction’ (p285). Such programmes also have in common the fact that they are ‘bolt-on’ in nature in that they are added on to the curriculum and followed parallel to it.

Pramling (1990), however, argues that metacognition depends on both content and context, stating that ‘ children’s thinking cannot be separated from the world since thinking is always directed toward something’ (p11) meaning that the focus of teaching should be that of a metacognitive approach to thinking about the curriculum content rather than on separate cognitive skills training. This resonates with recent findings based on research (Hattie, Biggs & Purdie, 1996) into the effects on student learning of learning skills intervention programmes. The aim of the research was to identify features of study skills interventions that were likely to lead to improvement in pupils’ learning. Results from the meta-analysis of 51 studies supported the notion of ‘situated cognition’ whereby the researchers recommended that training, other than for simple mnemonic (memory skills) performance, should be ‘in context, use tasks within the same domain as the target content, and promote a high degree of learner activity and metacognitive awareness’ (p99).

More recently, McGuinness (1999) has written a detailed and comprehensive review and evaluation, commissioned by the Department for Education and Employment, of research into thinking skills and related areas. The key conclusions are summarised as follows:
1.	Raising standards requires that attention be directed not only on what is to be learned but on how children learn and how teachers intervene to achieve this.
2.	Sufficient research and practice has accumulated to identify core concepts in a framework for development of thinking skills… which includes: the need to make thinking skills explicit in the curriculum; teaching through a form of coaching; taking a metacognitive perspective; collaborative learning; creating dispositions and good habits of thinking; generalising the framework to thinking curricula, thinking classrooms and thinking schools.
3.	Whatever the approach is adopted, the methodology must maximise transfer… beyond the context in which it occurs.
4.	A successful prototype for developing curriculum materials was identified: strong theoretical underpinning; well-designed and contextualised materials; explicit pedagogy; teaching support and programme evaluation.
5.	Several large scale classroom evaluation studies have successfully linked teaching thinking methodologies with learning outcomes both in the short term and the longer term, although not all interventions are equally successful. CASE, for example succeeded in raising pupils’ grades in GCSE examinations two to three years after the programme had been completed. Philosophy for Children has an impact across several and varied measures of cognitive and social development and Instrumental Enrichment has been shown to have direct positive impact on attitudes and behaviour.
6.	Although thinking skills influenced teaching is evident in the sciences, mathematics, and increasingly in history and geography, there is scope for its development in other disciplinary contexts.
7.	Subject specific and infusion approaches provide opportunities for ‘embedding thinking skills within and across the curriculum’ (p2).
8.	Information and communication technologies can be linked to a thinking skills framework in a number of effective ways but evaluation studies are needed in this area.
9.	Much of the research on teaching thinking has been done under optimal learning conditions: problems with ‘scaling up’ and transferring the effects have been identified. Significantly for my research, the most successful interventions are supported by explicit models of teacher development and training.
10.	The shift from thinking skills to ‘thinking classrooms’, as characterised by the work of Fisher (1987, 1990, 1995, 1998) invites further articulation, interpretation and evaluation in the context of schools as thinking communities and links with emerging research on school ethos.                                      (McGuiness, 1999)
                                                                                                       
Thus, McGuiness draws distinction between cognitive interventions which target general cognitive processes and approaches which are subject or domain specific whilst noting that a third way is to adopt an across-the-curriculum approach by ‘infusing’ thinking skills across all lessons. This last approach has been developed in the US (Swartz, Perkins & Grotzer, 1997) and has been adapted as a methodology for the ACTS (Activating Children’s Thinking Skills) programme in Northern Ireland (McGuiness, Curry et.al, 1997). It is also evident in multiple intelligence programmes such as Gardener’s PIFS (Practical Intelligence For Schools). An infusion approach is the one that I have tried to develop both in my own practice and the practice of the teachers I help educate: a pre-requisite of all approaches would be the development of an explicit metacognitive stance. 

15.1.1.5	2.4 Mediation Explained

The dynamic involvement of the learner in the construction of his/her own knowledge is a theme running through several theories of the psychology of learning, notably those of Piaget(1969), Vygotsky (1978), Feuerstein (1980), Belmont(1989) and Sternberg (1990). The ‘subtle, social interaction between the teacher and the learner in the enrichment of the student’s learning experience’ (Presseisen, 1992) has become known as ‘mediated learning’, which concept is part of a larger movement in the development of psychology that replaces the behaviourist’s model (that sees psychology in terms of analysis of actual and potential behaviour) with a more cognitive conception of human intelligence and learning. Both Feuerstein and Vygotsky were influenced strongly by Piaget, perhaps the ‘father’ of cognitive developmental psychology, though both developed their own approaches with greater emphasis on social mediation and concrete mechanisms that might facilitate mediation. In Feuerstein’s case this led to the development of a programme of such ‘concrete mechanisms’ called ‘Instrumental Enrichment’ which will be discussed later in this chapter (see section 2.4 p35). Mediation stresses ‘the communal understandings of knowledge, not only in the collaborative sharing of experience but in the sorting or categorising of ideas… mediation assumes that instruction goes beyond the information given, connecting the present (learning) with both the past (learning) and in anticipation of the future (learning)…rather than with mastering specific bits of here-and-now data’ (Presseisen & Kozulin ibid. p57). 
There are clear influences here on the notion of structured, accumulative learning and on ‘directed discovery teaching’ both of which form the basis of the type of teaching in general recommended as most effective for people with dyslexia and the Dyslexia Institute Literacy programme in particular.

15.1.1.6	The Influence of Vygotsky

Vygotsky suggested two possible approaches to mediation: the first becomes clear in the statement ‘ every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological)’ (Vygotsky, 1978,p.57) which seems to suggests that mediation occurs between the child’s experiences and the internalisation of those experiences as learning. The second approach focuses on the role of the ‘other’ as a mediator of meaning whereby the meaning held in an activity is formed for the child by his or her interaction with another: interestingly for modern popular psychology Vygotsky believed that this held true for the entire personality: ‘one may say that only through the other do we become ourselves’ (1983,p144). However, although Fuererstein and Vygotsky seemed to develop their theories at similar times, the former was particularly influenced by the latter’s model of the ‘zone of next development’ of which Sutton (2000) gives a particularly clear explanation when he writes of Vygotsky positing the theory that there are two means of acquiring concepts:
•	Everyday or spontaneous concepts, formed by children themselves out of their day to day experiences
•	Scientific or taught concepts, passed on ready formed through the speech of adults.

Sutton goes on to describe an essential feature of scientific concepts as their being already established within the culture, in systematic relationship with other concepts and that, as children acquire the scientific concept they acquire also this relationship, enabling them to systematise their everyday concepts and handle them in the way they have been taught to handle the scientific ones so that the process becomes part of the children’s conscious learning repertoire. It is this relationship that underlies Vygotsky’s model of the ‘zone of next development’ whereby two strata of intellectual development exist simultaneously in the learner:
•	The ‘actual’ or present level of development as shown by what a learner can do / achieve independently of an adult
•	The ‘potential’ level of development, shown by what a learner can do/ achieve with the mediational input of an adult who gives guidance, explanation and demonstration
Vygotsky called the gap between the two levels the ‘zone of next development’(trans-lated by some as the ‘zone of proximal development’) which notion has profound implications for the assessment of potential, and any subsequent teaching, in that assessment should be aimed at measuring potential as well as actual achievement and teaching should be mediational in nature as well as instructional. Also of significance is the importance Vygotsky gives to the part language plays in mediation: he argues for the need to recognise social factors as underlying psychological processes in the development of the individual: he states ‘ the social dimension of consciousness is primary in time and in fact. The individual dimension of consciousness is derivative and secondary’ (1979). These dimensions have been labelled, respectively ‘interpsychological’ and ‘intrapsychological’: fundamental to these dimensions is the interrelation between social, egocentric and inner speech. The key to understanding the two dimensions is that ‘the same basic means of action or mediational means are used in both… this applies to language in particular’ (Wertsch & Penuel, 1998) and I recognise that further development of neo- Vygotskyan ideas on language in action and mediation and language as action and mediation (Wells, 1998, Swindells 1995; Lantoff, 2000) would add to this study. I am particularly interested in the idea of language as action in that I can see that language is not only the result of a process but also the beginning of a process, as implied, at a simple level, by the notion of ‘thinking aloud’ i.e. the act of using language brings cognition into play in order to both express it and form it. However, for the purposes of this thesis I want to direct attention more towards theory into practice. While the hierarchy of concept formation and the role played by language in mediating concepts were explored by Vygotsky, it was left to Feuerstein, amongst others, to contextualise this understanding to actual teaching situations which could be put in place and transferred to the practice of others, namely that of Instrumental Enrichment (IE), as mentioned earlier.  

Mediated Learning Experience

The strategy developed by Feurerstein as a means of mediating IE in order to ‘intervene’ or ‘produce change’ is called Mediated Learning Experience (MLE), whereby the teacher, in a very structured way, enables the pupil to learn a cognitive process and to transfer that newly found ability to other learning experiences. Feuerstein (1990) puts forward twelve main criteria of MLE, the first three of which are regarded as ‘universals’ in that they need to be part of every mediated learning experience. These criteria (Sharron, 1996) and an explanation of them are as follows:
•	Mediation of Intentionality/ Reciprocity: here the main contribution of the mediator is to turn the interactive situation from random or incidental into intentional in that the mediator has the conscious intention to shape and control access to the stimuli in such a way that learning is reciprocated. This intentionality has two foci: one is the ‘object’ or stumuli: the other is the learner, thus, the object is ‘transformed’ by the mediator so that the relevant characteristics of it are experienced by the learner rather than just passively registered. It is not the object itself that is the primary target of the mediated interaction but the resultant development of the learner’s cognitive processes and part of the notion of intentionality is that this too is made clear to the learner. In a learning situation the intention is that the learner should reciprocate by realising that the real objective of the learning activity is not the ‘solving’ of a particular task or problem but the development of the learner’s thinking, the task becomes only the vehicle for this realisation. The mediator alters the instructional role from being a provider of information to being a source of constant affirmation that the learner’s responses, even mistakes and apparent irrelevancies, are importantly a means by which ‘the mental, emotional and motivational states of the learner are transformed’ (Feuerstein& Feuerstein, 1991). An example of intentionality/ reciprocity that I would employ in teaching a pupil with dyslexia would be to ensure that the purpose of the Reading Pack routine was understood by the pupil so that it did not become a rather empty ritual imposed by the teacher: reciprocity could be said to be demonstrated when the pupil engaged in the routine rather than ‘performed’ it. My experience is that the purpose of the pack needs careful mediation otherwise motivation is lost and the learning opportunity created becomes unproductive. 
•	Mediation of Transcendence: here is contained the notion that the mediation goes beyond the goals of the particular interaction. Feuerstein (1990) points out that a mediator does not limit the interaction to the initial situation, rather the mediator has always in mind the imperative to widen the particular goals to other, even not then apparent, situations so that the learner ‘transcends’ to other learning possibilities. Whatever the specific subject of MLE interaction, it always includes identification of the underlying principles and their transfer to a wide range of other situations and tasks. An example of transcendence, using the same situation above would be if the reading pack was used to create words for the pupil to read thereby eliciting from the pupil the realisation that the built in automaticity of response had an accumulative effect that is essential for effective reading. Further transcendence could occur if the teacher elicited from the pupil other situations in which automaticity of response was required, for example responding to traffic signals when driving a car, and established an understanding of the principle of automaticity in general, as well as in the particular context of literacy.
•	Mediation of Meaning: here Feuerstein (1991) establishes the ‘generator of the emotional, motivational, attitudinal, and value-oriented behaviours of the individual’. MLE becomes possible only when stimuli, events or information are infused with meaning by the mediator: once an event becomes a mere sequence of behaviours devoid of purpose or affective investment for the learner, elicited by a teacher without an attempt to make transparent the purpose, the situation loses its mediational potential. Meaning deals with the questions of why and what for by making the mediator’s understandings explicit. An example of meaning, again using the above situation, would be when the teacher ensures both that the pupil knows why the Reading Pack is part of the lesson and understands the purpose of its regular practice and gives a commitment to undertake that practice based on affective and motivational investment in his/ her own improved literacy.

As previously stated, intentionality, transcendence and meaning constitute the basic, universal criteria for any MLE interaction, the other criteria (Feuestein, 1990), as listed and explained more briefly below, may vary according to the task or needs of the individual learner:
•	Mediation of a Sense of Competence: here the notion is based on the mediator’s attempts to create and constantly reinforce a sense of the learner’s own belief in his/ her ability, both related to the task in hand and to other learning situations. Interestingly for the purposes of my own learning about the affective dimension resulting from this research, Feuerstein (1990) believes that this is one of the cognitive deficiencies most difficult to reverse and that a learner’s feelings of incompetence often have more impact on learning success than any other cognitive deficiency. Again this has clear implications for the training of teachers of pupils with dyslexia and the development of my research.
•	Mediation of Need for Challenge: here it is the notion that by framing tasks that are achievable; breaking them down in such a way that the individual learner has the possibility of success; explaining/ modelling the processes needed for success and explaining the success achieved, the mediator reinforces that competence requires an investment of time, thought, effort and practice and that the learner can be encouraged to dare to take risks in rising to the challenge of engaging affectively and cognitively with the learning task. Motivation here is a key and is particularly an issue with pupils with dyslexia who have learned early in their school career that learning situations are often painful, resulting in various behaviours that avoid the challenge implicit in such situations.
•	Mediation of Control of Behaviour: here it is the notion that in most areas of life ‘ instinctive or impulsive behaviour has to be inhibited so that the learner can successfully gather, process and express information which then determines their actions’ (Sharron,op.cit.). First must be mediated and understanding of  why there needs to be a ‘code’ of behaviour which is recognised and agreed to and which then forms a point of reference, almost a shorthand between learners and between mediator and learner. Symbolic of this code is the phrase that appears on the cover of each of the IE exercises, namely: ‘just a minute…let me think’ .The code is made up of an understanding, which the mediator may both model and explain overtly, that taking time to approach problems, breaking down the steps required, adopting a systematic and logical search are likely to lead to a successful outcome and make errors much easier to identify and therefore address. Pupils with dyslexia are often extremely impulsive and need mediated this self regulation of behaviour as a precursor for developing self reflective thought that could then act as a tool for dealing with both more complex learning and the frustration that accompanies many learning situations. 
•	Mediation of Sharing Behaviour: here it is the notion that sharing is one of the foundations of social and intellectual development, the absence of which results in the phenomena of the lonely, emotionally dysfunctional and isolated child who finds it difficult to make friends. Not being able, or not knowing how to, engage with peers and adults/ mediators can result in a range of cognitive difficulties (Sharron,op.cit.) and pupils with dyslexia often display this sort of behavioural difficulty. A mediator can model and make explicit to such pupils the sort of shared and ‘sharing’ behaviour that eases social interaction both with the mediator and their peers. In my experience, for example, pupils often need to have explained to them the function and importance of making and allowing eye contact with others. 
•	Mediation of Individuality: here the notion is mediation to the learner a sense of he/ she being ‘special’ and unique, having a special contribution to make to the learning interaction, whilst retaining also the acknowledgement of those same qualities in others. Feuerstien (1991) writes: ‘in normal human development there is a healthy tension between the need for children to develop their own personality and to distinguish themselves from their background, and the need to imitate and take comfort from belonging to a group’. A specialist teacher is in a good position to establish with her pupils the sense of specialness that they have often lost through her responses to the contributions to the learning interaction she mediates.
•	Mediation of a Need for Goal Setting: here the notion is that encouraging learners to set goals, plan for the goals to be achieved and make explicit the means of achieving goals is a very enriching form of mediation that allows for the idea of the process of achieving goals being as important as the actual successful achievement of them. This is particularly relevant to pupils with dyslexia who often do not achieve formally recognised evidence of success, despite putting in tremendous effort. 
•	Mediation of an Awareness of Change: here is the idea that the mediator makes explicit the criteria for recognising that change, hopefully positive, has occurred. Such mediation gives learners the means of evaluating themselves, whilst also building within the learner an internal need for change and improvement. Pupils with dyslexia often attend their specialist lessons with this internal need subsumed by the experiences of failure or focused on the more external systems for recognising improvement and can be passive or demotivated to hope for change.

The role of the mediator of these elements of MLE is to form the ‘bridge’ to the ‘zone of next development’ and it is here that the affective aspects of the interaction can come most into play. ‘Mediation assumes a changing nature to human intelligence, a pliability and dynamic quality in contrast to behaviourism’s static definition’ (Kozulin, 1990) this is opposed to a passive approach to intellectual performance as being endowed by genetics: rather it allows a dynamic notion of intelligence as a set of skills or thinking processes which enable us to make sense of the world and creatively use information to tackle new tasks – the ability in other words to learn from experience. Again the role of the mediator here is to provide and shape the experience, adapted to the individual, in order to optimise the learning. Thus teachers can retain a sense of a pupil’s potential for learning rather than a notion of a ‘ceiling’ to learning imposed by innate ability, this being particularly important for pupils with dyslexia whose abilities are often masked by their learning difficulties.
15.1.1.7	
15.1.1.8	2.5 Emotion Explained

The part played by emotions is of increasing interest to researchers and educators (Rappaport, 1971; Gardner, 1983; Claxton, 1984; Webb, 1990; Eraut, 1994; Goleman, 1996, Day; 1999): in order to contextualise this interest I think it is important to explore up to date understandings of the nature of emotion and the effect it has on behaviour and learning. On some level we all know what our emotions are, we have all experienced a variety of emotions, with varying levels of awareness, and it is the idea of emotional awareness in educational contexts that interests me personally.  There exists a range of understandings and definitions related to emotions: according to Le Doux (op.cit.), some scientists believe emotions are bodily responses that evolved as part of the struggle to survive. Others believe emotions are mental states that result when bodily responses are ‘sensed’ by the brain. Another view is that the bodily responses are peripheral to an emotion, with the emotion happening ‘within the brain’. Other theories see emotions as ways of acting or ways of talking, as being unconscious impulses, as being thoughts about given situations or even as social constructs that occur between rather than within individuals. With so little consensus, Le Doux sees a way forward in studying how the brain functions as a means of allowing greater understanding of emotion as a psychological process, whilst recognising cognition as ‘emotion’s partner in the mind’ (p24). There exists a long tradition of the separation of emotion and cognition, of seeing them as ‘waging an inner battle for the control of the human psyche’ (p24). Cognitive science emerged around the middle of this century and is sometimes called ‘the new science of the mind’ (Gardner, 1993), however, it is really a science of only part of the mind, that to do with thinking, reasoning and intellect.

In the first half of this century psychology was dominated by behaviourists who held the view that it was not appropriate to study the subjective mind of perceptions, memories and emotions rather only observable, objectively measurable behaviours. This view moved away from the notion of the study of consciousness, as had been prevalent since Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ statement which saw mind and consciousness as synonymous. Cognitive science brought back attention to the mind as part of psychology but not in terms of Descartes’ all knowing conscious mind, rather in terms of unconscious processes that left out consciousness. In so doing cognitive science left out those conscious states called emotions, although some cognitive scientists recognised their importance. Simon (1967) for example argued that cognitive models needed to take emotions into account if they were to represent real minds and Abelson (1963) called for cognitive psychology to focus on ‘hot cognitions’ rather than ‘cold’ logical processes.

Emotion and Cognition

Le Doux (ibid.) claims that the processes that underlie emotion and cognition can be studied using the same concepts and experimental tools whilst maintaining that the study of emotions should not be subsumed under the study of cognition. He calls for a reuniting of cognition and emotion in the mind under the banner of what he calls ‘mind science’ (p39), stating that:
‘subjective emotional states, like all other states of consciousness, are best viewed as the end result of information processing occurring unconsciously…we can study how the brain processes the emotional significance of stimuli unconsciously and uses this information to control behaviours appropriate to the emotional meaning of the stimuli’ 
I find this idea fascinating in terms of the significance of my research into educational emotional awareness while not claiming in any way that my research is ‘scientific’.  The concept of a network that stresses the interconnectedness of ‘mind in body’ is one that Pert (op.cit.), a neuroscientist, explores from the different perspective of biology and mind rather than cognition. As a result of her research into how the chemicals in our body form a dynamic information network linking mind and body, she writes of the body being inseparable from the mind and of exploring the role the emotions play in the body as expressed through neuropeptide molecules: 
‘we can no longer think of the emotions as having less validity than physical, material substance, but instead we must see them as cellular signals that are involved in the process of translating information into physical reality …emotions are at the nexus between matter and mind, going back and forth between the two and influencing both’ (p189)

Again, while not wanting to stray too far into the context of science, I can see real implications in theses new understandings for the context of education, how we view learning and how emotions can no longer be considered only in terms of the effect self esteem has on performance.

Emotional Intelligence
The mind/ body problem, i.e. how the mind relates to the brain and the rest of the body, is a philosophical as well as psychological phenomenon and it is one that Gardner (1987) discusses in the context of his ideas about multiple intelligences. 
New belief systems about what is possible in human development are crucial for a radically expanded view of intelligence, as developed by Perkins (The Mind’s Best Work), Sternberg (The Triarchic Mind) and Gardener (Frames of Mind) who paved the way for new ways of looking at intelligence which clearly should have profound implications for teaching and learning. Gardener’s influential work on multiple intelligences proposed the idea that there is a spectrum of intelligences that are crucial for success in life and one of the intelligences he identifies is that of personal intelligences about which he writes:
‘Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to understand other people: what motivates them, how they work, how to work co-operatively with them. Successful salespeople, politicians, teachers, clinicians and religious leaders are all likely to be individuals with high degrees of interpersonal intelligence… the core of interpersonal intelligences includes the capacities to discern and respond appropriately to the moods, temperaments, motivations and desires of other people… intrapersonal intelligence is the key to self-knowledge… it includes access to one’s own feelings and the ability to discriminate among them and draw upon them to guide behaviour’. (p9)

Herein lies the essence of Goleman’s (op.cit.) work on emotional intelligence which takes Gardner’s metacognitive stance towards these intelligences, focusing as it does on the awareness of mental processes while are involved in them, and developing focus on the actual feelings involved in them. Goleman writes that Gardner’s work ‘ leaves yet to be plumbed both the sense in which there is intelligence in the emotions and the sense in which intelligence can be brought to emotions,’ (p40). Salovey and Mayer (1990, p135) first proposed the model of emotional intelligence expanding Gardner’s personal intelligences into five main domains as follows:
1.	Knowing one’s emotions: self awareness- recognising a feeling as it happens is the keystone of emotional intelligence and is the ability to monitor feelings from moment to moment, which is crucial to psychological insight and self-understanding.
2.	Managing emotions: handling feelings so they are appropriate is an ability that builds on self-awareness.
3.	Motivating oneself: marshalling emotions in the service of a goal.
4.	Recognising emotions in other: empathising, which also builds on emotional self-awareness, is a fundamental ‘people skill’.
5.	Handling relationships: handling the emotions of others, this is fundamental to social competence.
Goleman usefully expands upon these domains and writes of ‘emotional aptitude’, as a ‘meta-ability which determines how well we can use whatever other skills we have, including raw intellect’, and ‘self-awareness as a sense of an ongoing attention to one’s internal states’ (ibid. p36). He goes on to explain:
‘self-awareness would seem to require an activated neocortex, particularly the language areas, attuned to identify and name the emotions being aroused. Self-awareness is not an attention that gets carried away by emotions, overreacting and amplifying what is perceived. Rather it is a neutral mode that maintains self-reflectiveness even amidst turbulent emotions.’ ( p 47)
The self- awareness and self-reflectiveness described above are fundamental to the development of the notion of educational emotional awareness that has arisen from my research and can be linked to the need for the learner to use language (spoken/written) to articulate emotions, that hinder learning.

Emotions and Dyslexia

There is a general consensus that children with learning difficulties are more likely to have behavioural and/or emotional difficulties ( Friel, 1998; Hamblin, 1993;Edwards, 1994; Hales, 1994; Varma, 1996 ; Hellendoorn & Ruijssenaars, 2000;Riddick, 2000). However, although a lot of research has been carried out into the cognitive difficulties encountered as a result of dyslexia and some research has suggested that dyslexic children may suffer loss of self esteem, McDougall (2001) points out that relatively little has focused on the day-to-day experience of dyslexia and how it impacts on emotions. Pumfrey and Reason (op.cit.) note that research into dyslexia is ‘remarkably devoid of mention of social and emotional factors and Woods (1998) remarks on ‘the need to draw equal attention to the experience of dyslexia for children, parents and teachers’. Some attention has been paid, however: Riddick (1995) identified a number of ‘daily stresses’ that accompany dyslexia in the classroom, and cites in particular those involved in dictation, reading aloud and ‘the general pressure to keep up’. McDougall (ibid.) notes that Rutter and Yule (1970) were among the first to report that reading difficulties caused children to be discouraged at school and that this theme has re-emerged in more recent studies. Chapman and Tumner (1997) have found that children experiencing reading difficulties began to develop negative self-concept and suggest that this might exert a negative influence on actual attainment.

Edwards (1994) carried out a series of interviews with eight 16-17 year old boys and found that the majority had received inadequate help, suffered humiliation and mistreatment, unfairness and discrimination, teasing and persecution. Edwards describes dyslexia as ‘a subtle, hidden handicap and a very emotive issue both to those who suffer from it and to their families’ (p20) and writes of the emotional ‘scars’ born as a result of experiences in school. McDougall (ibid.) suggests that a reason the boys in the study might have suffered so much is that they were severely dyslexic and their dyslexia had been diagnosed late in their schooling. McDougall suggests also that changing attitudes towards dyslexia may alleviate much of the difficulties and then, rather missing the point I think, goes on to suggest that ‘school life may not be easy irrespective of whether one is dyslexic or not’ as if that somehow made the difficulties less painful. In my experience this is not the case: I have taught many pupils and supervised the teaching of hundreds of children teenagers and adults with dyslexia across a continuum of difficulty and a range of experiences regarding diagnosis and schooling and have found the ‘scars of dyslexia’ (Edwards, ibid.) to be very much in evidence. 

Riddick (op.cit.) argues that being diagnosed, even if it means being ‘labelled, can have a positive effect on the individual as it gives reasons for the difficulties that are being experienced and can affect positively the attitude of teachers and peers. I would suggest that although these factors would go some way to help the dyslexic they are externally derived, in that they depend on factors outside the dyslexic. My experience as a teacher of dyslexics and mother of dyslexic daughters is that there needs to be more attention paid to helping those with learning difficulties develop the skills of emotional intelligence. This would mean that they are empowered to handle their difficulties from an internal source over which they then might have some control. 

As reported in Chapter 1 (see section 1.2), a study of the mental health of children and young people has identified a worrying level of mental health problems in that age range and particularly among those with learning difficulties. Recent reporting of celebrities with dyslexia (TES 27.7.01) gives revealing comment on the emotional toll of dyslexia: one actor remembers his childhood as a lonely and confusing time; another songwriter and musician says with some bitterness, ‘someone was having a joke when they made me’; another, an Olympic gold medallist four times over, recalls that at school he felt ‘judged as being lazy and stupid’. These individuals, and many others overcame their learning difficulties, or more likely and luckily, found the strengths that made the dyslexia of lesser importance once formal schooling had ceased. West (1991) wrote of the link between creative ability, visual thinking and academic learning abilities: Lee (1993) takes up these ideas, considering that people with dyslexia can have ‘unique learning abilities’ which make them ‘creative learners’: Davis (1995) argues that dyslexia should be seen as a ‘gift’. The reality is that any giftedness that might be present is usually discovered despite experiences at school and that there is a great deal of pain for a dyslexic learner in a society that judges its members on their level of literacy. In a study of a Young Offenders Prison (Turner et. al, 2000) 18% of the sample met the criteria for dyslexia that control for intelligence and the processing deficits of speed and phonology. From this evidence and other studies the conclusion is that ‘ whatever the complexity of social, developmental, physiological and other factors that bear on the origins of crime, the specific learning difficulty, dyslexia, may be making its hitherto overlooked contribution’. It seems to me that there exists an imperative to address the issue of the experience of dyslexia and its effect on emotional well being: I hope that my research might be of benefit in this area and perhaps in the wider educational context.  

2.6 The Relationship between Metacognition, Mediation and Emotion

I think it might be useful at this stage to consider a relatively simple example of how metacognition, mediation and emotion can relate to each other. An example of using metacognition would be if, after considering the strategies available to me, I tackled a situation (for example, learning an unfamiliar spelling) and then ‘stood back’ to consider the outcome, with a view either to use the same strategies another time or to adapt the strategies to ensure a better outcome. By so doing my thinking about problem solving would become more effective. An example of mediation would be if, using the same example, a teacher chose ways to present the unfamiliar spelling (perhaps using a mnemonic or drawing out comparisons to a spelling pattern already known) and enabled me to arrive at a strategy by which I could remember the spelling for myself, thus extending my competency and autonomy as a learner. An example of emotion in this same context would be the feelings I experienced both as I tried to master the learning and when I became aware that I had succeeded or failed. As an aside, an example of transfer would be if, using the same example, I went on to employ the strategy chosen to learn spellings on other occasions or indeed any facts in other contexts, such as dates in history. 

Clearly there are links between: metacognition, whereby a learner becomes aware of the way she/he learns; mediation, whereby a learner has been enabled to come to that awareness by the mediator and emotion, whereby there are feelings attached to the learning. The relationship between the elements is symbiotic in that, without employing metacognition the mediator would not be able to interpret / shape the learning situation; without mediation, transfer is likely to be less effective; and without considering affective elements, such as emotion, the quality of learning is likely to have less integrity. For example the specific learning difficulty of dyslexia often arouses emotions such as anger, frustration, depression in the pupil and a teacher can find herself experiencing similarly negative emotions, perhaps elicited by the behaviour of her pupil. Given those emotional states there would be little chance of effective teaching or learning taking place unless the teacher had some ways at her disposal of dealing with the affective aspects of the educative relationship. 
It was the mediation of some such ways that I was interested to develop with the teachers on the courses that I ran. As a result of some previous research (Mohammed, 1995) I had stated some intentions about my practice in teacher education, intentionality being a key element of both Mediated Learning Theory (Feuerstein, 1991: Kossulin et al 1994) and Action Research (McNiff, Lomax & Whitehead,1996). Two of my stated aims were:
•	To maintain and mediate to others a clearer understanding of the terms and concepts I had been using.
•	To use the term ‘metacognitive mediation to describe a strategy I believed to be an effective way to teach 
•	To facilitate the development of metacognitive mediation as a strategy that might improve the practise of specialist teachers of  people with dyslexia
A major aspect of my research has been my attempts to reflect on these intentions so that I might mediate more effectively my understanding of the value of metacognitive mediation as a teaching strategy that could be transferred to the practice of others. As the research progressed this reflection came to encompass my improved under-
standings about the part played by emotion in the teaching and learning process, how I might mediate that understanding and, further, whether I could develop a theory of learning related to meta- emotional awareness in educational contexts in educative relationships.

2.7 Conclusion
In this chapter I have discussed the main concepts underlying the research, with reference to the relevant literature in support of the discussion. I have also shown the relationship between the concepts and how that relationship, in my opinion plays an integral part in effective teaching and learning.

CHAPTER 3  METHODOLOGY      

“The linking of the terms action and research highlights the essential feature of the method: trying out ideas in practice as a means of improvement and as a means of increasing knowledge…”  (Kemmis and McTaggart, 1982 )

3.1 Introduction:
In this chapter I attempt to clarify my understanding of the chosen methodology of action research in the context of qualitative research. I go on to describe the principles and process of using action research, the methods of data collection and the selection of data for analysis. Finally I briefly explain the circumstances that curtailed research phase 4.
15.1.1.9	
15.1.1.10	3.2 Action Research as Qualitative Research

I chose to use qualitative rather than quantitative research methodology because I was interested in finding and describing ways I could improve teaching and learning rather than documenting statistics about teaching and learning. Miles and Huberman (1994) assert that ‘words, especially organised into incidents or stories, have a concrete, vivid, meaningful flavour that often proves far more convincing to a reader…than pages of summarised numbers,’(p1). They go on to write that data derived from qualitative 
research are a ‘source of well-grounded, rich descriptions and explanations of processes in identifiable local contexts’. They write of qualitative data being more likely (than quantitative data) to lead to ‘serendipitous findings and …new integrations’ (p1) in that there is no set hypothesis into the proving of which the research energy is poured. They posit a set of recurring features of qualitative research as follows:
•	Qualitative research is conducted through an intense and/or prolonged contact with a ‘field’ or life situation. These situations are typically ‘banal’ or normal ones, reflective of the everyday life of individuals… and organisations.
•	The researcher’s role is to gain a ‘holistic’ (systemic, encompassing, integrated) overview of the context under study, its logic, its arrangements, its explicit and implicit rules.
•	The researcher attempts to capture data on the perception of local actors ‘from the inside’, through a process of deep attentiveness, of empathetic understanding, and of suspending preconceptions about the topics under discussion.
•	Reading through these materials the researcher may isolate certain themes and expressions that can be reviewed with the informants, but that should be maintained in their original forms throughout the study.
•	A main task is to explicate the ways people in particular settings come to understand, account for, take action, and otherwise manage their day to day situations.
•	Many interpretations of this material are possible, but some are more compelling for theoretical reasons or on grounds of internal consistency.
•	Relatively little standardised instrumentation is used at the outset. The researcher is essentially the main ‘measurement device’ in the study.
•	Most analysis is done with words. The words can be assembled, subclustered, broken into semiotic segments. They can be organised to permit the researcher to contrast, compare, analyse, and bestow patterns upon them. (Miles & Huberman ibid. p7)
Miles and Huberman class action research within a collaborative social research paradigm as an approach to qualitative data analysis and identify reflexivity as a defining trait whereby the research question and related actions are subject to reflective questioning as a means of moving the research forward. 

 There were four action research steps or phases first described by Lewin (1946) and later elaborated by Elliott (1991): reconnaissance, planning, implementation and evaluation. Within the critical ethnography framework identified by Miles and Huberman (ibid.) as an example of collaborative social research is the notion of ‘practitioner research’ used to describe research which is focused upon the exploration of a practitioner’s own work with the practitioner seeking to develop new understandings of his/her own professional practice through systematic study (Webb, 1990; Lomax, 1994).  Practitioner research is often portrayed as having the purposes of ‘professional empowerment and transformation of the self, colleagues and the work context…’in a way that ‘provides a platform for changing practices’ (Brooker & Macpherson, 1999,p209). Action research shares the following characteristics with other research:
•	it leads to knowledge
•	it provides evidence to support this knowledge
•	it makes explicit the process of the enquiry through which knowledge emerges
•	it links new knowledge to existing knowledge
Action research is different from other research because
•	it requires action as an integral part of the research process itself
•	it is focused by the researchers professional values rather than methodological considerations
It is necessarily insider research, in the sense of practitioners researching their own professional actions.        ( McNiff,Lomax and Whitehead, 1996 )

Fien and Rawling (1996) have argued that the origins of reflective thinking and action may be traced to the early twentieth century writings of John Dewey (1916), a philosopher and educator, who distinguished between routine action and reflective action.  In an educational context, the former would be the day to day activities of teaching, the latter would be those activities as ‘deliberate action that results from (and I would argue is then subject to) active and thoughtful consideration of specific beliefs and knowledge in relation to past and future consequences’ (Fien & Rawling, ibid. p13). It is this definition which excites me to want to try to use the following principles with the added understanding that such reflective action is about improvement in the teaching and learning experience of all those involved .
15.1.1.11	 
15.1.1.12	3.3 Constraints of Action Research
Action research has been an important part of educational theory and practice since the 1940s (Lewin, 1946; Corey, 1953). Sarland  (2001) has looked at the claims made for action research and the criticisms given against it. The former include the idea that it empowers teachers to develop their own practice in terms of curriculum and pedagogy rather than have change imposed from ‘outside’ by others such as policy makers and academics. Other claims made are that action research improves the quality of students’ learning experiences, that it enhances professional collaboration, that it enables both individual and institutional development, and that it recognises the need to take account of teachers’ values when innovations are introduced to practice. These claims go towards forming the reason why I decided to undertake action research because they resonate with the stage I had got to in my own development. By this I mean that I had come to an understanding of my strengths, I had found in action research an arena for the possibility of improving my practice and the practice of others beyond the remit of the training course and I had begun to be able to be explicit about my educational values. Interestingly for my research, I consider that metacognition played a significant part in my feelings of being empowered by action research before embarking on the study, during the process of the study and in writing the narrative of the study in a way that gave authenticity to my account. 

Criticisms of action research include issues, that do tend to impinge one on another, to do with subjectivity and generalisability, as well as authenticity and how the claims to knowledge are substantiated. Generalisation has concerns for validity in terms of the practical application of findings to other cases and the nature  and extent of the ‘truth’ contained in the findings. Cronbach (1983) associates internal validity (a procedure of experimental design that guards against unwanted variation) with the concept of reproducibility. He associates external validity (generalisations beyond the study) with the possibility of those who have a need using the study to inform their actions in other settings and times. The emerging theory of naturalistic generalisation (Stake, 1995) holds that ‘to generalise is to resonate with prior experience or to see common features among conceptually equivalent human experiences’. As the one who presents the study from which external generalisations may be made, the practitioner as researcher is fulfilling a dual role, needing to be both part of the action and sufficiently detached from it to analyse and appraise the data resulting from the action. The researcher also has to be aware of the possibility of bias in the generation, selection and analysis of data and of failing to recognise that the accepted/known features of their practice are construed from the actions and theories of others. Tricoglus (2001) writes: ‘ a deconstruction of these ‘taken for granted’ practices requires a high level of critical reflection by the practitioner researcher but it is essential if the methodology is to be considered valid’ (p137). The issue of validity and how it can be achieved is problematic and most accept that establishing the kind of scientific objectivity that could be said to lead to validity in quantitative research is not possible or even desirable. 
 
3.4 The Principles of Action Research 
Action research involves the following principles:
1.	A commitment to educational improvement (you want to improve an aspect of your practice enough to be prepared to work on it )
2.	A special kind of research question (you have isolated an aspect and asked yourself the question ‘ How can I improve….[that aspect ] ? ‘)
3.	Putting the ‘I’ at the centre of the research (you are prepared to look at the part you  play in the aspect of your practice that you are researching )
4.	A special kind of action that is informed, committed and intentional ( your actions are based on a thorough knowledge of the context of your research; they spring from something that elicits a personal response from you; and they involve reflection, planning ,with the intention of improving practice )
5.	Systematic monitoring to generate valid data ( you will need to be rigorous in the ways you collect  and build up the data that will form the ‘picture’ of your research)
6.	Authentic descriptions of the action ( you will need to be ‘true’ to the real ‘picture’ of your actions, not an adjusted ‘picture; )
7.	Explanations of the actions ( as well as carefully describing the actions you will need to look beyond them, analyse them critically, stand back from them in order to see their significance )
8.	New ways of representing research (you can explore different ways of recording your research - self-reflection ; dialogue and conversation; narrative and story; cycles and spirals; drawings; experiential techniques.
9.	Validating claims made as a result of the research (consequent to your actions you should be able to make claims about what you now know better, understand better; about how you have improved your educational practice; and about how you have facilitated change that might be of significance to others. This should take place throughout your research and will involve others on a formal and informal basis )
10.	Making the action research public ( part of the validation process, this will involve others in the critical consideration of your actions in terms of ethics, claims and evidence to enable you to both monitor and modify your ideas and actions )
                                                                        ( McNiff, Lomax and Whitehead, 1996)	
The story of my research takes place in several contexts. There is the personal and professional context of the values which underpin my own teaching and teacher training, which are problematised in the enquiry and which I feel are in harmony with the methodology of action research. There is the context also of the research community to which I belonged at the time of starting the research. Action research is a critical activity (McNiff, Lomax & Whitehead, ibid; Butler, 1996) and subjecting my account of my research to validation by this group and other individuals / groups was one important way by which I was able to move on in understanding both of the content and the process of my research. For example I belonged to a support group, ‘chaired’ by my supervisor’, that met monthly in order to critique the work of its members: the meetings were far from cosy more often difficult and uncomfortable but I regard them now as essential for the grounding of my research. I also regularly sent my writing to the then head of teacher training at Dyslexia Institute and received valuable and expert feedback. Another important source of quite challenging feedback was my critical friend (MF) a principal tutor on the courses I ran who I would regard as an ‘expert witness’ with years of varied experience in the field of dyslexia, teaching, and teacher training. Despite the issue of power, in terms of the disparity in status, MF became a reliable, scrupulous and, at times, exacting commentator on the day to day process of my research.
 
I chose to use the form of a case study through which to carry out my research because I was interested in what Stenhouse calls the development of a ‘tradition of descriptive research in education’. He goes on to write that although ‘the basis of verification and cumulation in the study of cases is the recognition that a case is an instance … case study is a basis for generalisation and hence cumulation of data embedded in time’ (Stenhouse, 1978). This resonated with my concern to help teachers training to teach dyslexics reflect on their own educational histories in order to understand better issues that affect their practice whilst also developing a process of research that might be of wider use in teacher education.     

3.5 Action Research - Cycles into Steps

One of the outcomes of a support group meeting was that I had not described in enough detail how I collected the data I included in the report for that meeting. This leads me to try to explain here the process of the phases of my research. In my original research proposal I outlined the phases of the research in a time plan ( see appendix 1), to which I managed to adhere, on the whole. From the detailed breakdown of the phases of my research and the series of action steps that represent them there listed, the major part of the research can be seen to be based in Phase 3, January 1997 to December 1997, on a post graduate teacher training course in which I was involved. 

As part of  Phase 3 I had been involved in an action cycle of planning, monitoring, describing and analysing my input. While doing some previous action research I decided to try to adapt the cyclical spiral commonly used to represent action research (Schon, 1983; Kemmis,1988; Griffiths,1990) to a representational form with which I felt more comfortable.  McNiff (1988) writes of action research as being ‘sequential and cumulative’ whereby ‘each step acts as a springboard to the next’. The steps I developed went from top to bottom because I was interested in the metaphor of having a problem and taking ‘steps’ to get to the bottom of a solution. One of my recurring dreams is that of being at the top of a difficult way down. A then recent dream had me facing such a predicament, faced this time by a lot of scaffolding that I had to try to get down from. I felt the familiar despair and fear as I tried to wrestle with the need to get down and my dislike of the journey down. In the dream I noticed a way down to the side of the steep scaffolding which was much easier and more gradual than the full-scale assault from the top which so frightened me. I took the side way down.
The extension of the analogy of action steps, starting from the ‘top’ of a problem and working a way gradually, in a measured way, to the bottom with, perhaps, several ‘side-routes’ on the way felt familiar and more satisfying than a more conventional journey, striving to reach the top. When I looked at the sketches of steps I had been trying out and needed a way to link the series of steps I had developed, the obvious way to represent the link was to draw a spiral after the first ‘action’, linking it to the following reflection so that I ended up with an ‘action steps spiral’.

Fig 1 Action Cycle to Action Steps

 PROBLEM   
                       REFLECT  
                                             SOLUTION
                                                                    PLAN
                                                                                   ACT

REFLECT   
                      PLAN
                                     ACT
                                                   REFLECT

PLAN       
                     ACT

                                    REFLECT
                                                                  PROBLEM

Elliot (op.cit.) refers to ‘action steps’ in his representation of a sequential action- reflection process. Kemmis (op. cit.) regards the action research cycle or spiral as a means of planning and ordering research and, as such, he sees it as part of the research method. Lomax and Parker (1995) agree but go further when they put forward the view that ‘accounting for one’s work and giving an account may be seen to be brought together in a graphic representation’. On finishing that previous research, I had continued to use the idea of steps as a practical means of resolving problems 
in my practice and so have continued to use that means as a way of representing my present research. In trying to make sense of steps - made up of identifying a problem, reflecting on possible solutions, planning how to implement the solutions, acting and then reflecting on the action - I find that I am able to interpret and represent the process of action research in a personal way that keeps it uppermost in my mind while engaging in the research action. 

Each series of steps is built from the following elements:
1	Reflection resulting in intentionality
2	Step planning
3	Action resulting in a variety of data
4	Analysis of data
5    Synthesis of analysis into (i)  further reflection, moving my thinking forward    (ii)  further action, moving my practice forward
The whole is aimed at:
•	improving my practice as a teacher and teacher trainer/ educator
•	facilitating  improvement in practice of the teachers I help train
•	improving my understanding of the issues that surround the improvement of teaching and learning
•	improving my understanding of the educative relationships in which I am involved

It is my intention to problematise in the concluding discussion in Chapter 5 these and the principles of action research detailed below, as part of my criteria for assessing the validity of the research. By using a series of action steps I was able to develop an overview of each week’s input from which it became clear that a number of issues kept arising, one of which was that of emotion in the experience of teaching and learning.

15.1.1.13	 3.6 Using Action Research

Lomax (1995) has put forward six principles that underpin the process of action research:	
1.	Educational action research is about seeking improvement by intervention.
2.	Educational action research involves the researcher as the main focus of investigation.
3.	 Action research is participatory and others are treated as co-researchers rather than informants.
4.	Action research is a rigorous form of inquiry that leads to the generation of theory from practice.
5.	Action research needs continuous validation by expert witnesses from the context it serves.
6.	Action research brings good professional practice into the public arena.
In order to clarify my understanding of action research as a disciplined form of inquiry I have found it useful to try to explain these principles and relate the ones most relevant at this stage to my own research so far:

1. Action Research is about seeking improvement by intervention: I take to mean that, by carrying out the action research process and looking into elements of my own practice, and doing something about the aspects of it that do not line up to my expectations, I could improve my practice for the benefit of myself, the teachers I trained and the institution for which I worked. Underlying the interwoven aspects of my research as outlined in Chapter1 is my interest in exploring an action research methodology in order to bring about improvement in my practice as a teacher educator/ trainer. The specific case study has involved me looking carefully at my input on a programme of lecture/ workshop sessions so that each session has been subject to the cyclical problem solving approach that is characteristic of action research (see Chapter 4 section 4.1 for rationale for data selection). I have collected data in such forms as video and audio tape recordings of lectures, workshops and tutorials, questionnaires, evaluation sheets, and written responses (see appendix 2 for list of archive materials). For example, in Chapter 4 (section 4.2) I have included a sample of analysed data which has given me evidence that my understanding of the process of mediation has improved.  Intentionality is a key element of Mediated Learning Theory (Feuerstein,op cit: Kozulin et al op.cit.) and action research (McNiff, Lomax &Whitehead,op.cit.).If I had continued the research I intended that the full analysis of data included collected would have given me evidence that my intervention had resulted in improved understanding of the teachers on the course about the concepts of metacognition, mediation, emotion and transfer and the part they play in the teaching of pupils with dyslexia. I hoped also to go further, to see if there was any evidence that the teachers from the 1997 course had continued to develop these aspects of their practice in their own teaching contexts and, if so, if there was any evidence that the quality of learning of their pupils had been enhanced. (see appendix 1 for details of research phase 4). 

2. Action research involves the researcher as the main focus of investigation:I would take to mean that, by carrying out the action research process, I was empowered to take ownership of my practice and the values that underpin it.  I could, thereby, hold my practice up to my own scrutiny and that of others with more certainty because I knew it and could describe my knowledge of it with validity. Again this would require a metacognitive stance as has been the case with the research I have carried out enabling me to clarify for myself values on which to base a personal theory of education, which I hope is educational in the sense that others might learn from it. Whitehead (2000) poses the question ‘how do I live my values more fully in my practice?’ Forming my personal theory of education allows me to try to answer that question which is so fundamental to teacher integrity.  My theory has the following elements:
•	That learning should be symbiotic: there is a teacher, a learner, what is being taught and what is being learnt and sometimes the teacher becomes the learner in any given teaching/ learning situation.
•	That the educative relationships that emerge from a learning situation should allow for autonomy and flexibility in that, while a teacher may not be free to choose what to teach she/he should have the autonomy to choose how to teach.
•	That, in order to exercise autonomy and flexibility, teachers need to adopt a metacognitive approach to their teaching as well as to their pupils’ learning. 
•	That mediation is an effective way of facilitating autonomy and flexibility in a teaching situation because it is a way in which the one teaching may enable the one learning to develop their learning in ways that empower them as learners.
•	That the affective/ emotional aspect of educative relationships is a key factor to consider in a learning situation. That transfer of learning is more likely to occur if a metacognitive approach is adopted by both teacher and learner, if mediation is employed effectively and if there is awareness of the affective aspects that can complement the cognitive.  
•	That pupils with dyslexia are, by the fact that they have a learning difficulty, cognitively and emotionally vulnerable and need teaching that is both sensitive to that vulnerability and aware of the possibilty of developing compensatory cognitive and emotional strengths alongside the skills of literacy.
•	 That teachers who are training to teach pupils with dyslexia should, alongside the dyslexia specific knowledge they need, be empowered to develop the awareness and the skills that would help them to enable their pupils develop those compensatory cognitive and emotional strengths.
•	That metacognition is a key that enables me both to articulate my values and to live them in my practice. 

3  Action research is participatory and others are treated as co-researchers rather than informants: I would take to mean that action research is a collaborative process whereby, rather than only observing and documenting behaviours that are examples of the aspects of the research on which I am focusing, I can engage those involved as participants in the process.  Moreover, these participants will be instrumental in shaping the movement of the action research process, rather than being only the subjects of it. For example the move towards looking at the affective elements in teaching and learning was a direct result of the interaction with teachers on the course such as shown in the data sample in Chapter 4 (see section 4.5). I am aware that there are a number of stakeholders in the process and outcomes of my research, some of whom are: the teachers on the course; the two tutors on the course who became my critical friends; and the members of my research support group at the institution at which I began the research. I have discussed above the roles and relationships of the latter two groups of stakeholders but those of the teachers on the course were particularly interesting in that I had to be careful in my role as course director not to take advantage of the teachers’ willingness to help me. I hope I was scrupulous in my intention to bear in mind the stressors of limited time and energy available to the teachers so that there were rewards for their participation inherent in the design of the research. I was quite explicit about my research and tried to ensure that the input from the teachers came about as part of the course rather than as extra demands; many of the teachers expressed their feelings in a positive way at the end of the course, witnessed by the fact that 15out of 21teachers expressed willingness to continue their involvement after the course ended and 10 of those 15 responded to material I sent out as part of research phase 4 (see list of archive materials). Equally I tried to ensure that those teachers who were less interested felt no pressure to pretend to be so and were not made to feel excluded in any way. 

4  Action research is a rigorous form of enquiry that leads to the generation of theory from practice: I would take to mean that the form or forms the action research takes, the methods employed should be exacting in their focus, and vigorous in their execution so that the practice they mirror is examined with an integrity that allows that specific practice to develop into both specific and general theory. In my original research proposal I outlined the phases of the research in a time plan (see appendix 1). From the detailed breakdown of the phases of my research and the series of action steps that represent them there listed, the major part of the research can be seen to be based in Phase 3, January 1997 to December 1997. As part of Phase 3 I have been involved in an action cycle of planning, monitoring, describing and analysing my input. As previously described in this chapter I decided to try to adapt the cyclical spiral commonly used to represent action research (Schon,op.cit.; Kemmis,op.cit; Griffiths,op.cit,) to a representational form of action steps. McNiff  (1988) writes of action research as being ‘sequential and cumulative’ whereby ‘each step acts as a springboard to the next’. Elliot (op.cit.) refers to ‘action steps’ in his representation of a sequential action- reflection process. Kemmis (ibid.) regards the action research cycle or spiral as a means of planning and ordering research and, as such, he sees it as part of the research method. By using a series of action steps I was able to develop an overview of each week’s input from which it became clear that a number of issues kept arising, one of which was that of emotion in the experience of teaching and learning.

5 Action research needs continuous validation by expert witnesses from the context it serves I would take to mean that I should involve others who have knowledge of the areas of my concern in the processes of my research, and in giving me feedback as to whether or not I am going in the right direction. One form of validation was offered by the research community to which I belonged. As previously written, Action research is a critical activity (McNiff, Lomax & Whitehead, op cit; Butler, 1996) and subjecting my account of my research to validation by this group and other individuals / groups is one important way by which I am able to move on in understanding both in the content and the process of my research. Another form of validation as described above is that offered by the interaction with my critical friend, MF, an experienced tutor on the course who also ran courses on study skills and was able to provide me with an expert view of what I am trying to achieve. An example of this is contained in the following written comments MF passed on to me ( appendix 2): the teachers on this course seemed more fervent in their appreciation of it than any of MM’s previous courses on which I tutored…particularly in the last module they have thought more sensitively and responded more fully to the challenges of the course. For example, the standard of their seminars (part of the course requirement is that each teacher prepares and presents a seminar on a related topic) has been consistently very high; noticeably higher than on previous courses…they have discussed, thought about and filled in enough questionnaires about their own teaching and about MM’s lecturing to have got in the way of considering the meaning of their experiences on the course quite apart from responding to the questionnaires.  The comment about the questionnaires (actually feedback sheets) is quite pertinent to MF’s dislike of them, which she made quite clear to me! I valued Mf’s input greatly: carrying out the research was extremely challenging on top of trying to run a demanding course. Being able to reflect with MF on what I was doing, listening to her feedback and monitoring her reactions was a way I was able to keep up my energy and determination.

6  Action research brings good professional practice into the public arena: I would take to mean that the process of identifying a cause for concern, reflecting on it and acting upon that reflection should bring about some change for the good and that the mechanism for that change should be made available to others who might be interested, to whom it might be relevant and who might want to take elements of it to improve their own practice or the practice within their institution. As part of an action research methodology I chose to use the form of a case study through which to carry out my research because I am interested in what Stenhouse calls the development of a ‘tradition of descriptive research in education’. He goes on to write that although ‘the basis of verification and cumulation in the study of cases is the recognition that a case is an instance … case study is a basis for generalisation’ (Stenhouse,op.cit.). This resonates with my concern to help teachers training to teach dyslexics reflect on their own educational histories in order to understand better issues that affect their practice whilst also developing a process of research that might be of wider use in teacher education. 

A seventh principle 

Another aspect of action research that I think might be a principle of qualitative based research and that I explore in the thesis in terms of mediation of competence (see Chapter 4 section 4.2) is that action research allows me to be both expert and inexpert in my practice. As director of a teacher training course I am expected to know about my field: however I cannot know everything. I need to continue to learn as part of my own professional development and my development as an effective educator. Action research gives me the confidence to own up to being inexpert in some areas but willing to learn and to share that learning with others.     

3.7 Choice of Data Collection and Analysis Methods. 
I have tried to justify these choices at each stage of the action research cycle: I have also tried to explore the relationship between data, evidence and outcomes. The main means of data collection was video and audio tape as mentioned previously: the exact process on a week by week basis can be seen in appendix 1. I have also five working files (see appendix 2) containing, amongst other things, field notes, questionnaires, teacher feedback sheets all of which have played a part in the dynamic of the action research step cycles as outlined in Chapter 3 (see section 3.5). The data collection here refers to research phase 2: Examining My Practice as a Teacher Trainer/ Educator and research phase 3a: Examining Results of Action in My Practice. Video Tapes 1-12 were videos of lecture/workshop sessions: I chose to use video recordings for the reasons given by Smith (1981), that ‘the use of mechanical recording devices usually gives greater flexibility than observations done by hand’, not least in this instance because I was attempting to observe my own practice in action.  Attempting to capture data on video tape allowed what Edwards and West (1987) refer to as ‘retrospective analysis’ which is facilitated by the researcher revisiting the data for further analysis or for analysis on a different basis that might be thrown up as the enquiry develops.  
1.	I planned each lecture/ workshop session using an action cycle of action steps (see Chapter 3 section 3.5 fig.1) taking the topic of the session and problematising it by framing the topic as a question: for example, I planned the workshop in week 1 (13.9.97) on An Introduction to the Dyslexia Institute Literacy Programme as follows: 

Figure 2 Action Steps 3 (see appendix 1 week 3 13.9.97)

PROBLEM How can I create a workshop 
on DILP  that is interactive, models a 
metacognitive, mediational approach 
and facilitates transfer?          REFLECT                                          
                                                                                      
   SOLUTION

Devise a questionnaire on DILP 		   PLAN
requiring the teachers to participate,              
by interacting with each other and me 	   ACT 		

Did the session work as planned ? 				REFLECT
– devise criteria for judging ‘success’
analyse video, feedback, teacher
 responses according to criteria			        OUTCOMES

What can I learn from this session in order to improve further sessions?

2.	I videotaped and transcribed each lecture/ workshop session so that I might look closely at my practice as a teacher educator: I wanted to gain a metacognitive overview for myself of myself at work, so to speak, to see whether my intentions of modelling mediational strategies were carried out, to see if there was evidence of the teachers transferring what I hoped they would learn. An example of this last would be if, on transcribing the tapes, there were instances of the teachers beginning to use the vocabulary related to dyslexia and the literacy programme appropriately and with increasing confidence. If I had continued to look at transfer as part of the research and if the above was not evident I would then have to engage in the problem of how I could facilitate that development, by using an action research step cycle, as demonstrated above.
3.	I analysed the transcripts of the video tapes also in order to identify qualitatively issues/ themes arising from and leading to my input on the course For example, reflecting on teaching and learning as two halves of the educational coin, from the sessions on Hand Skills (week 8: 10.3.97: Action Steps 10) and Memory Skills (week 9: 17.3.97: Action Steps 11) I was able to identify a pattern of issues that seemed to be arising quite separate from the dyslexia specific context of the sessions and which I thought could serve as a means of describing/ analysing input qualitatively, and to a lesser extent, quantitatively:

•	Active Learning : Active Teaching
•	Learning Styles : Teaching Styles
•	Learning Strategies : Teaching Strategies  (under metacognitive control)
•	Pupil Autonomy : Teacher Autonomy  (within the DILP structure )
•	Metacognition, Mediation, Transfer
•	Affective Dimension for Teacher and Pupil (emotions, success/ failure, motivation)
•	Knowing/ Moment of Knowing
•	Overarching dimensions of action research and metacognition

From this came an understanding that I could trace the issues as they arose in each session, adding to the list as the course developed: what also emerged was an understanding that I could consider analysis in terms of content i.e. what the session was about, and process i.e. how the content was developed/ mediated by me to the teachers.

4.	Audio Tapes 1-17 were of post teaching practice tutorials: I chose to use audio tapes for the same reasons as for the video tapes i.e. to allow flexibility, to facilitate retrospective analysis and to facilitate self observation in action. I chose not to video tape the tutorial sessions primarily because I wanted the data collection process to be less obtrusive and to facilitate the idea of the tutorials being more conversations/ dialogue with the teachers rather than me tutoring them and being videoed so doing.
In order to have some record of the development of the teachers on the course and their interaction with me and each other, I audio taped the tutorial sessions that took place after each teaching practice lesson taught on the course. The process is explained and detailed examples are given in Chapter 4 (see sections 4.2- 4.6). Having transcribed and analysed the tapes I was able to develop an overview of the different levels of issues/ themes that emerged as follows:

1.	Dyslexia specific knowledge
2.	Dyslexia specific teaching skills and strategies
3.	Dyslexia specific learning strategies
4.	Modelling : of teaching skills/ strategies and of metacognitive, mediational approaches
5.	Mediation of specific aspects of teaching and learning eg mediation of competence
Each example of data chosen for analysis in the following chapter has elements of each of these aspects and can be linked to the criteria for assessing the outcomes in the concluding discussion in Chapter 5.

5.	The data collection and analysis here refer to research phase 3b: Teachers Teaching: Video Tapes 13-15 and Teachers Talking: Audio Tapes 18-20. I chose video and audio tape as a means of data collection in this part of my research for the same reasons as described above. The analysis of this data is not yet complete: if I had continued the research I hoped to find evidence of teachers using metacognitive mediational strategies in their teaching as well as their planning and evidence also of their trying to develop metacognitive skills in their pupils.

6.	I have videoed examples of some of the teachers teaching towards the end of the course because I wanted to see if there was evidence of the teachers transferring learning from the lecture/ workshop sessions and the tutorials to their own teaching. I asked the teachers who were videoed to talk into an audio tape directly after the lesson they had taught. The analysis of this data is not yet complete: if I had continued the research into transfer I intended to look for examples of the teachers applying their understanding of the issues that arise when teaching pupils with dyslexia as have emerged from the data from the video and audio tapes as listed above.  In doing this I hoped to link my teaching practice with students’outcomes and link student teaching practice with their own student outcomes. For example, I would have been particularly interested to see if the mediation of a sense of competence to which I have paid specific attention to modelling throughout my teaching (see section 4.3) had transferred to these teachers and if there were examples of they, in turn, mediating competence to their pupils.

3.8 Data Collection Research Phase 4:

This consisted of examining the practice of the (now) qualified specialist teachers in their own teaching context. This phase of my research did not go as expected: in the past four years I have experienced the illness and death of a brother, the ongoing illness of my daughter and a deterioration in my own health and family circumstances. I mention these factors here only to make the point that research, whether quantitative or qualitative, is not conducted in a vacuum: life impinges on cognition and emotion and the obverse is true. Emotional intelligence is something I have tried to harness in my life and my practice as a means of understanding and responding to experiences and a metacognitive stance has both facilitated and supported my efforts.

As part of phase 4 I had done or planned the following:
1.	Questionnaires following up those teachers who expressed an interest in continuing their involvement in the research
2.	Meeting with a small group of those teachers for an informal discussion based on a loose structure of prompts to elicit any issues they wanted to bring to the session  (appendix 1 Audio tape 21). 
3.	I hoped to carry out some semi-structured interviews with the teachers and, where possible, observe some teaching. From a qualitative analysis of the resulting data I hoped to find evidence, for example, that the teachers were thinking metacognitively about their practice and were transferring this to their work with their students.

3.9 Conclusion 
In this chapter I have attempted to clarify my understanding of the chosen methodology of action research in the context of qualitative research. I went on to describe the principles and process of using action research, the methods of data collection and the selection of data for analysis. Finally I briefly explained  the circumstances that curtailed research phase 4.

CHAPTER 4  DATA ANALYSIS 
15.1.1.14	
15.1.1.15	4.1 Introduction In this chapter I present four examples of sessions from the course in order to describe and analyse them so that they will form evidence for my claims to improve both teacher education and my own practice as a teacher educator.
15.1.1.16	
15.1.1.17	4.2 Rationale for Data Selection for Analysis

In order to develop my understanding of metacognitive approaches to learning and the role mediation and emotion play I have chosen to concentrate on the outcomes of the development of the process of mediation with teachers, the development of language in mediated learning, the development of my understanding of critical incidents and the development of my ideas on the emotional dimension in teaching and learning. Underlying each of these is a metacognitive stance. The first and last sessions in the examples given here result from tutorials, the second results from a workshop and the third from a lecture. The morning of the course day consists of a psychology lecture and a methods lecture; the afternoon consists of an hour’s teaching practice session, during which each teacher works with a pupil and for which each teacher supplies a detailed lesson plan which is critiqued by the tutor supervising their teaching practice. There follows a half hour teaching practice tutorial, usually in tutor groups of seven teachers: the tutor groups rotate between the three course tutors on a termly basis and each term each teacher is observed closely for one complete lesson as well as more general weekly observation. The aim of the tutorials is to facilitate feedback on the lessons just taught. After the tutorial is a one and a half hour workshop. The course is extremely demanding: I have chosen to present data derived from two of the tutorials because I am aware how challenging the teachers find the course and I have developed an approach to the tutorials which I hope allows them space to interact with me and each other on a level other than one driven by the pressure of time and course content. In the evaluations of the course written by the teachers at the end of each module this aspect of the tutorials is one which many of the teachers single out as being one of the ‘most valuable aspects’ of the practical teaching content of the course [Archive weeks 15 and 30]. The approach is closely linked to aspects of mediated learning theory and consists of mediating focused feedback with the teachers in a spirit of each teacher being invited to share a specific aspect of the lesson they have planned and taught.

4.3 Data Analysis Example 1: Applying Mediated Learning Theory

The data was collected from a tutorial in research Phase 2 [Audio tape 7: 14.4.97 week 11 of 30]. A major aspect of my practice, running parallel with the prescribed content of the course, has been my attempts to mediate an understanding of metacognition by modelling aspects of Mediated Learning Theory devised by Feuerstein (op cit.). This is based on the idea that a learner can develop understanding and skills through experiencing a teacher mediating what is to be learned. The teacher does this by a ‘bridging’ process, interpreting, extending and linking the learning with the idea that it is more readily internalised by the learner. With this in mind I analysed some data from a tape recording of a tutorial that took place. There are twelve key elements that make up Mediated Learning Experience (MLE), which is part of Mediated Learning Theory: I decided it would be useful for me to try to analyse the data with reference to the first three elements, intentionality, transcendence and meaning, which Feuerstein regards as universal to all mediated learning, and the fourth element, sense of competence, to which I have paid particular attention in my approach to tutorials on the course. I analysed the data in this way so that I might re-clarify for myself the nature of mediated learning and how far I have transferred these and any other elements of it to my own practice.       
  
The key elements of MLE, as fully explained in Chapter 2 (see section 2.4), are:

1.	Intentionality and Reciprocity (shared intention)
2.	Transcendence (purpose beyond here and now)
3.	Meaning (significance to learner)
4.	Sense of Competence (self esteem/ self image)
5.	Self Control ( of behaviour) 
6.	Goal Setting (awareness of aims)
7.	Challenge (power to take up)
8.	Self Appraisal (awareness of change)
9.	Sharing (working in a group)
10.	Individuality (specialness of contribution)                                 (Feuerstein,1991)

15.1.1.18	Extracts from Data and Analysis
 
Extract 1

N      It was difficult… I didn’t know what to teach her… what teaching point 

MM  You wouldn’t know,  that’s right, not now but when you know the letter order,    when you’re experienced with this letter order you can see how you could have quite easily taken her on ( to the next teaching point)…so that was a nice feeling was it …encouraging was it ?

N      Yes because basically, once you’ve got the routines …you know the difference between reading and spelling cards…I just quickly did a dictation…got four words in the structure… it’s amazing really how it works (laughs) 

MM    And you could all of you do that…once you know ( the letter order)

N       Absolutely… I think that’s the main thing…   how much we’ve learnt.
( Voices…  I agree…in such a short space of time…mmmm… laughter )

L       I was saying that to F (another course tutor) …I can see, although it’s limited, ( self deprecating laugh)  I can see what a huge amount I have learnt … and she said ‘When you’ve finished this course you’ll realise just how much you don’t know !’  (laughter)  … but you’ve got to have learnt a lot to realise you don’t know a lot!

MM   Exactly… you never stop learning … (but) it’s not good to feel overwhelmed by what you don’t know because everything you pick up that you do then know makes you feel that bit more competent, makes you that bit more effective... this is good! …. if you want to be thinking about something in this lesson, something that’s worked really well or something that feel you’ve learnt in particular…. 

•	1) Intentionality and Reciprocity: I intended that the teachers would feel able to discuss openly the issues that they brought up in the tutorial. In extract 1 I opened the tutorial, as I usually do, with a suggestion to the group to take some time to reflect on the lesson they had just taught, followed with an invitation to any one of the group who would like to share some aspect of the lesson. From experience I know that when teachers are asked to evaluate a lesson they tend to concentrate on their pupils’ performance rather than the part they played in the learning equation so I guided them towards this last.  I was careful to ask open questions, to respond encouragingly when any body spoke and to try to lead people on when they began to develop a train of thought. In this session the teachers reciprocated by exploring with each other quite freely their ideas about knowledge/learning.
•	4) Sense of Competence : I think that this is one of the most important aspects to mediate if learning is to be effective. Taking on the role of learner after being the one who teaches is quite daunting and teachers on the course can tend to react in different ways, sometimes becoming defensive, sometimes overly critical, sometimes losing confidence. I think these reactions stem from feelings of displacement and vulnerability which can get in the way of effective learning, particularly as the teachers are being asked to teach a system that is often quite alien to the skills and experience in which they feel secure. Acknowledging all these aspects is an important part of mediation of a sense of competence in this context; it is linked to the problematic of the expert/ non expert debate which itself underlies teachers feeling  confident in  the possibility of taking on new learning. In extract 1 for example, I wanted the teachers to celebrate with teacher N an important moment when she had realised that she had just successfully taught a pupil for whom she had not prepared a lesson (her usual pupil being absent) but with whom she had been able to transfer smoothly and efficiently her new knowledge of the structured, accumulative, multisensory system that forms the basis of the course.  I invite the teachers to accept that they too could do this: there was a good feeling in the room, excitement mixed with almost audible sighs of relief as if self -belief had been some way restored.

Extract 2

A   Like today  I didn’t know that the letter order was based on the lecture today  …. I was trying to work it out…   I didn’t know …why do we teach the ‘t’ before the ‘p’, like in ‘tip’…  I was trying to apply everything to Arabic language (teacher A is an educational psychologist/ teacher from Iran who intends to adapt the teaching programme to her own language) … (MM Right! Mmm!)… I was thinking…

L    Now I hadn’t thought of that!  When she said the word ‘tip’ it clicked, I thought ‘Yes!’
15.1.2	Discussion follows on where letters come and why in the letter order 

MM   Explain it again because I’m not sure what you’re talking about!

N      I understand
ML   She was explaining the ease with which you make certain letters (sound) the same so ‘p’ ‘t’ etc.  …

Discussion on linguistic implications of certain letters for pupils with dyslexia. 

MM   You’re right in that it’s structured and you start with the easier sounds but if you followed that through you wouldn’t come to the vowels until much further on (and you wouldn’t be able to make words)
 
Discussion trying to clarify the understanding of two of the teachers who seemed to be saying opposite things. 

MM   You’re absolutely right… you’re both right in that it does follow that you try to teach the easiest ones (letters) to say first - as you say -  but also – as you say- you need to get to a stage where you can use as many as possible of them …when they devised the Letter Order they took this into account… they also tried to keep the hand movements together so you had ‘a’ then ‘c’ then ‘d’ … 

•	2) Transcendence: I wanted the teachers to see the connection between the specific experiences they brought up and the broader picture of principles that underlie the teaching of pupils with dyslexia. In extract 2 teacher A brings up a specific observation that some letters are taught before others in the DILP programme, which allows an important point to be made about the phonetic principles that underlie the concept of the structure of letter order, which in itself underlies the basic principle of teaching pupils with dyslexia in a way that is structured and accumulative. Discussion follows on where letters come and why in the letter order, showing that the teachers were beginning to be able to transcend the particular example and see the broader picture. This could be said to be an example of how transfer of learning, sparked off by A relating her experience, can be mediated. From the reaction of the teachers during this I would say that, for some of the teachers, this brief discussion would have taught them more / they would come to understand more about the relevance of knowledge of the phonetic system of language than the very detailed lecture they had had that morning. From experience I know that teachers on the course find this aspect of the syllabus difficult to understand and even more difficult to apply to their teaching: being given the chance to articulate quite small, specific problems and then explore their context is a way in which teachers can transfer theory to practice. .

Extract 3

N      I was about to ask you, does it matter the letters you use? … if some of us wanted to change the order but still keep it structured would that have a bad effect?

MM   No… I think it depends why you’re moving something. For example, I would teach ‘i-e’ (i consonant e, as in time) much sooner than it comes in the Letter Order because I think you need it sooner… what I’m saying is… if you take the Letter Order away and think about it and think well I’d rather teach this or that in a different order… as long as you’re consistent …if you want to teach ‘i-e’ earlier or the ‘ed’ sounds together (‘ed’ sounding (id), (t) and (d), as in ‘mended’, ‘kicked’ and ‘oiled’ respectively) then you do that and then it’s up to you. It’s not sacrosanct, in fact that shows you’re adapting it to the way you think it works best because you’ve all got your experience to take into account … your experience will be different to A’s, for example. Are you going to adapt it to Arabic then? That will be fascinating… 

A       I have been thinking all along ‘How would I teach this? How will it work?’ The process will work…

MM That is fascinating... it’s interesting what you’re saying isn’t it… and N’s experience- that it will transfer, the principles are sound, you can transfer what you’ve learned on the course to a different teaching situation…

(6) Goal Setting: this element requires me, as mediator, to have thought metacognitively about the aims of both the session in which the mediation is to take place and the over-arching aims of the course. Although, as stated previously, I intended the tutorial sessions to be a time when the teachers could bring up their own issues, there tended to be common issues for which I was on the lookout! My goals were to enhance the possibility of transfer by putting the specific, practical issues raised into a theoretical context so that the teachers were learning theory in the context of practice they had just experienced. In extract 3 teacher N asks about changing the order of teaching the letters in the Letter Order. This is an issue of fundamental importance both to the teachers’ understanding of the principle of structured, accumulative teaching and to the notion of teachers having autonomy and flexibility, despite teaching a prescribed curriculum (in this case, following a Letter Order). In my response I wanted to explore the tension between these two elements so that the teachers might become more aware of that importance: effective teachers of pupils with dyslexia are ones who understand the underlying principles of teaching the ways research (Fawcett & Nicholson, 1994; Miles & Miles, 1997;Hulme & Snowling, 1998) shows such pupils learn best whilst maintaining a creative, flexible approach to their teaching.

Summary 

 I found that analysing the data using elements of mediated learning theory as a reference point has mediated to me a sense of competence in my practice. When I looked metacognitively at the interplay in the dialogue in the extracts it was as if I was able to verify, and in that sense validate, what I hope I have been achieving with the teachers on the course. I know that revisiting the data, listening to the tape, hearing the voices of the teachers, the laughter and the honesty of their shared experiences brought back to me a keen sense of the enjoyment of learning that was present in the tutorial times together. 

4.4 Data Analysis Example 2: Developing Understanding of Language in    Mediated Learning

The data was collected from a workshop on Thinking Skills from Research Phase 2 [Video tape 12:17.11.97 week 29 out of 30]. In this session I had reminded the teachers about the main concept of metacognition as referring to ‘… ones knowledge concerning ones own mental processes’ and ‘… the active monitoring…regulation and orchestration of these processes’ (Flavel et al 1970 p324). I went on to describe mediation as being at the heart of the work of Reuven Feuerstein, an Israeli professor of psychology who, also a teacher and researcher in the development of learning in children, referring to mediation as ‘… the way in which stimuli… are transformed by a mediating agent (who) …selects and organises the world of stimuli for the child’ (Feuerstein, 1980, p15). Because it was relevant to the session I defined transfer as ‘…the ability to apply a (trained) skill in an appropriate new context.’ (Nisbet & Shucksmith, 1984, p10).  I explained that I was interested in the processes of metacognition, mediation , transfer and, increasingly, in the role of emotion in teaching and learning, and the educative relationships that result thereof  because, although I felt that these aspects were crucial to good practice for all teachers, I felt they were  particularly so for specialist teachers, whose ability to develop appropriately supportive relationships with their pupils defined the effectiveness of their teaching. 
 
Aware of the importance Vygotsky places on language in the mediating process, I decided to analyse the data in response to a paper that interested me. The paper, namely  ‘Dialogues and Dialectics - action research and the dialectical form of classroom- based educational knowledge’ (Eames, 1991), had been presented for discussion at a Kingston Hill Action Research Group (KHARG) meeting. The extract of dialogue comes from session in which I was looking at both my mediational input on thinking skills and the teachers’ responses to that input as evidence of metacognitive transfer of their learning about thinking skills to their own practice. Although the aim of the session was to develop the teachers’ understanding of the subject of Thinking Skills, that metacognition, mediation and transfer clearly underlie, I wanted also to use the opportunity to link the notion of developing Thinking Skills with the notion of developing emotional awareness in both teacher and learner, using a cameo (a brief, vivid sketch of a moment of emotional impact that has a transforming effect, Mohammed 1997). This might seem a tenuous link except that I had written about such a moment as part of some previous research (Mohammed op.cit.) and the moment had occurred during my training in Feuerstein’s programme for cognitive development called Instrumental Enrichment (see Chapter 1 section 1:3 on Autobiography of Learning). By that stage in the course as a result of my research I knew I should be linking the development of thinking skills with that of emotional awareness.

Extracts from Data and Analysis   

 MM  …having batted on about cameos and having tried to drag them out of you with varying degrees of success, I realise it’s a matter of trust - it’s a personal experience ….so I thought I’d share one with you… I suppose that’s what I’m talking about when I’m talking about cameos - you have this emotional impact about something or you notice one of your pupils has   ( sounds of agreement / recognition (?) )….you wanted to say something?
HG  Yes, I wrote about it in my case study. The boy I studied, he’s 13 and he just cannot spell: we were doing the RWSC ( read- write- spell- check) routine for learning ‘January’ and ‘February’; we did it several times and he mumbled when we finished : ‘I’ve never been able to spell those before’.   Then his sister came out of the next room and he saw her and said ‘ Heh! Estelle! I can spell January and February!’  Then the headmaster walked by and he said ‘ Heh, Sir! Guess what !I can spell January and February!’  It was really something…

MM  Brilliant!  So that really is a moment isn’t it… he’ll probably keep that … that powerful feeling , that impact on his confidence…to know he could spell those words and that he could use those ways to spell others….
(I displayed my cameo on OHP and read through it with the teachers: there was an unexpected but noticeable emotional response to what I read both from myself and the teachers listening. Because of the very recent death of my brother I was feeling very vulnerable and the teachers had been very supportive of me: it seemed as if the vulnerability exposed/ conveyed in the cameo became caught up in these circumstances and produced a powerful feeling of empathy in the room which I had not intended or desired- it made it difficult to carry on the session momentarily.)
MM  ……I want to go forward from the transforming effect that learning ( the IE training) had on me….. let me give you an example … you’ve got 2 pages from Organisation of Dots, one of the instruments …I want you to spend some time looking at the cover page… what do you notice?
Voices ….. stars…. A constellation..
MM … what is a constellation?
Voices …( various definitions/ explanations)
MM … you’ve given me lots of suggestions .... good … if I were doing this as an IE exercise I’d make you be more specific, the vocabulary you use… be more exact. For example, when you say ‘it’  what do you mean by that?
JB … I mean the picture
MM… where is ‘it’?
SS … the picture is to the left of the thinking boy
MM … right, good, the thinking boy.. already by asking you to be more specific you’re really honing in on the skills you need for description. Imagine using those skills, for example, for asking your pupil to lay out the wooden alphabet… the vocabulary you’d both need for orientation..
JB … yes, mediation…
MM … good! The language,  you need to be specific ( so your pupil can learn to be specific ) … instead of saying, as so many dyslexic pupils would ‘ the thingy’ or ‘that bit over there’… you’re able to be specific. We’ve already got loads out of this! … so, back to S.. what did you say… ‘to the left of the thinking boy’ … why do you say it’s a ‘thinking boy’? … Why is it a ‘boy’… What is your evidence?
( there followed a discussion of the ‘evidence’ at the end of which one teacher said..
SS … I think we’d all recognised the text and put it together with the picture   ‘Just a minute … let me think’
MM … that text is on the cover page of all the instruments- the idea of reflection is so important … how many of our pupils don’t’ stop and think’?
NA ( a teacher who has some previous knowledge of Feuerstein’s  IE) … it’s funny, I wasn’t consciously thinking about Feuerstein but with my case study boy ( the teachers have to write a detailed study of one pupil as part of the course requirement) I kept going over and over that ‘ stop… think … respond’ … I kept going over that … I wasn’t aware I was doing that, relating it to Feuerstein, but I was.
MM … that brings up issues of transfer of learning doesn’t it? You weren’t ‘aware’ … you’d learnt about it but you weren’t ‘aware’ you were doing it, you weren’t consciously (metacognitively) thinking ‘Now I must do that, that’s the way forward with this boy’ … 

Analysis of the data 

Eames (ibid.) uses the following terms of reference when giving an example of some dialogue he intends to analyse stating the intention of wanting to see:
1	Whether it fits his definition of educational knowledge
2	What sorts of dialogues are going on
3	Whether there is any evidence of the logical form of dialectics (contra-
      diction and ‘negation of the negation’)
4    What role is played by practice

I analysed the extract on the basis of these criteria
1. Is it educational knowledge?
I understand educational knowledge to be knowledge that informs what I know about education and enhances my ability to carry out my practice as a teacher trainer/ educator. Thus, I used the session to model how thinking skills can be developed, using one of the IE instruments, Organisation of Dots, so adding to the teachers’ educational knowledge of how a cognitive development programme works. The session also developed my own educational knowledge of interactive mediation as a teaching strategy.

However, I feel the session is an example of ‘educational self- knowledge’, by which I mean the awareness in teachers of the impact of emotion, the impact of metacognitive awareness and of the moments of those impacts on their development as effective teachers of dyslexic pupils. Educational self-knowledge also impacts upon teachers’ abilities to elicit awareness in their pupils of such ‘transforming moments’ in their own development as effective learners. In turn, educational self-knowledge impacts upon my awareness of ways in which I can improve my mediation of such metacognitive awareness.

2 .What sorts of dialogue are going on?
I felt it was important to have the sample of dialogue as part of the text of the analysis rather than only being referred to because the plurality of dialogue is interconnected to one of my values as an action researcher, and as a teacher trainer/ educator, to do with the importance of aware collaboration, by which I mean that the part the collaborators play in the dynamics of the research should be made explicit. Thus, a more detailed analysis of my understanding of the levels of dialogue listed below could form the basis of a session to develop the teachers’ metacognitive awareness of the plurality of dialogue in their own lessons and which awareness could improve their 
ability to mediate effectively the needs of their pupils. I identified the following levels of dialogue:   
•	between me and the teachers and the teachers and me (overt/ spoken)
•	between me and the teachers and the teachers and me (unspoken eg listening behaviour/ body language)
•	between me and the teachers and the teachers and me (emotional exchange/ response)
•	between me and my feelings as a teacher/ mediator and the nature of some of the dialogue as being ‘guided’
•	between me and my feelings as a learner
•	between the teachers sharing their experiences
•	between the teachers and their understanding of the nature of thinking skills as a ‘liberating’ force
•	between the teachers and future pupils (projected / future dialogue) on the possibility of engaging them in the development of their own thinking skills
•	between me and the critical ‘other’ who might read this account and validate, or not, my interpretations of it
•	between me and the self as researcher 

3. Is there evidence of the dialectics of the ‘living contradiction’?
I found this the hardest question to respond to as the dialogue seemed to represent such an affirming experience for both the teachers and me but, on deeper reflection, a problem I have identified in my practice as a teacher trainer/ educator is that of training the teachers to teach a very structured language programme whilst also trying to facilitate the development of metacognitive mediation as an effective teaching strategy that, in turn, facilitates the transfer of skills. For example, in the first part of this extract of dialogue, a teacher is describing a cameo of a pupil’s learning that resulted from that structured teaching yet is also metacognitive in terms of the development of the teacher’s awareness of the transforming effect of the moment, and as such I feel it is a ‘negation of the negation’ (Eames ibid.).     
A contradiction of values I have experienced as a researcher is the conflict I feel between the demands of my research and those of my practice, by which I mean that I feel strongly that there should be integrity of intent so that my practice comes first. For example, when planning the session I had to question my motives for including the cameo I had written. I did not want to take advantage of the educative relationship I was engaged in as director of the course. On deeper reflection, I came to understand that I could ‘negate the negation’ because my primary intent was to communicate the power of thinking skills as transforming whilst also facilitating the development the teachers’ metacognition of mediation and transfer as important aspects of effective teaching. The inclusion of my cameo held up under my conviction that the use of cameos is a powerful resource in such facilitation. I did not include the cameo because I wanted further evidence for my research but because the use of cameos has transferred to my practice as a teacher trainer/ educator. Thus I felt it was the best way to mediate my understanding of the role of emotional awareness and metacognition in  thinking skills, and their transfer to the structured, multi-sensory teaching of pupils with dyslexia.

4 . What role is played by practice?   
 By this I take to mean - how can I relate the data included in this report to the wider concerns of my practice and my research but also - how can an analysis of the data improve the practice of the teachers I am helping to train?
The stated aims of my research are: to investigate how metacognition, mediation and transfer can be integrated within an action research approach to training specialist teachers of dyslexia; to develop strategies for effective mediation of metacognitive practices to teachers on a teacher training programme delivered by Dyslexia Institute; and to evaluate if metacognitive practices have been transferred to teaching practice both during and subsequent to the training programme. The stage I was at in my research was to see how far I had achieved those aims; I felt that answering the questions posed above helped me to understand further both the issues central to my practice and the processes of action research. I was interested particularly in the idea of language as action that mediates the world (Bruner,op.cit.; Wells, op.cit.) as discussed in Chapter 2 (see section 2:4) and the idea of speech as action  (Wertsch, 1998).

15.1.2.1	4.5 Data Analysis Example 3: Developing Understanding of Critical Incidents
15.1.2.2	
15.1.2.3	In including the following I want to explore the relation between critical incidents and cameos as developed in section 4.6. Tripp (1993) writes: incidents happen but critical incidents are produced by the way we look at a situation: a critical incident is an interpretation of the significance of an event…one of the best ways of justifying and explaining practice is through anecdote: carefully observed and analysed critical incidents can communicate aims and achievements  (p 48). Incidents become critical because they are significant in the development of understanding and mark a movement forward of insight: they are subject to identification, description and analysis and it is the act of subjecting them to such critical appraisal that brings about that development and movement. A possible definition of the difference between critical incidents and cameos is that a cameo is an articulation of a flash of insight/ recognition/ realisation that has an affective impact, it is then subject to analysis. A critical incident is first analysed: the insight/ realisation occurs as a result of the analysis.  There are clear connections here between the notion of a ‘moment of knowing’ and Vygotsky’s ‘zone of next development’ as discussed in Chapter 2 ( see section 2:4).
15.1.2.4	
15.1.2.5	The data was collected from a lecture session on Memory Skills in Research Phase 2 [Video tape 4:17.3.97 week 9 out of 30]. I was thinking about a lecture on the teaching of Reading that I had to prepare: I was thinking about the way in which I would try to get the information across to the teachers on the course, which led me to reflect on some data that I had collected on memory skills and the effect different modalities/ ways of presenting information had on the subsequent memorability of that information. I had forgotten to ask for feedback on a lecture on Hand-skills that I had given. The next lecture I was due to give was on Memory Skills so I decided to tie in the feedback on Hand-skills with the lecture on Memory Skills. I devised a feedback sheet (available from Archive) that required the teachers to try to remember aspects of the previous week’s lecture. In doing so I had several intentions:
•	I wanted the exercise to reinforce the learning that might have taken place about Hand-skills and Dyslexia- even though the reinforcement would have been better facilitated directly after the lecture rather than after a week had elapsed.
•	 I wanted to see if the way I tried to facilitate the remembering (i.e. I drew on the teachers’ visual memory because I felt that would call on a stronger modality than asking them to remember what they had heard. Thus for example I gave ‘clues’ pinpointing where the ‘answers’ I wanted appeared on the OHP/ handout they had been given or what the layout of the ‘answer’ looked like )
•	I wanted to engage the teachers in developing a metacognitive overview of what was involved in the exercise of remembering and of how they personally responded to being asked to remember
•	I wanted to use the exercise of the feedback sheet to mediate the main points of the theory on memory in an active way so that the teachers became participants in learning about and gaining insight to memory in a direct, relevant way rather than being told about the theory. 
•	 I wanted to facilitate the teachers’ transferring what they had learned about memory to their own practice with their own pupils

The results were both illuminating and depressing: the feedback from the sheets seemed to indicate that the teachers had remembered very little of the previous week’s lecture apart from the Dotting Speed Test (a simple to administer test that requires the pupil to place a number of dots in two parallel circles, first with the dominant hand then with the non-dominant hand. The test is timed and inferences are drawn from the speed and accuracy with which the task is completed). The teachers had had the test explained to them and had been given the opportunity to do it themselves, to discuss the outcome- what they had noticed, what conclusions they might draw etc., and to practice it on their pupils during the teaching session that afternoon.
I had made the teaching about the Dotting Speed Test active, involving all modalities but particularly the kinaesthetic, with several intentions
•	I wanted to vary my teaching style.
•	I wanted to facilitate the teachers’ learning how to use the test because it is a simple yet useful diagnostic tool in assessing possible hand-skills difficulties in pupils with dyslexia.
•	I wanted to mediate the importance of reinforcement in learning by encouraging the teachers to carry out the test later with their own pupils.
•	I wanted to model a multi-sensory way of teaching.
From the feedback sheets (available from Archive) it seemed that I had succeeded with my intentions: 21 out of 22 teachers were able to give an accurate description of the Dotting Speed Test down to the number of dots required in each circle ( although one thought it was 30 dots rather than 20 ). Only three teachers were able to recall any of the ‘answers’ to the first part of the feedback sheet and three teachers remembered the name of the author of a particular hand-skills programme asked for in the third part of the sheet (interestingly one was able to notice that she remembered the name because she remembered my having difficulty saying it; one said she remembered it because she worked it out phonetically while I was trying to say it and the third said she remembered it because she checked it after the lecture from the author’s book I left out for their interest at the end of the lecture). 

However, when I looked again at the feedback sheet I had devised I realised that the fact that I had tried to use the visual modality, as stated in my intentions above, might have influenced the ability of the teachers to remember the previous week’s lecture in that I had assumed the ‘clues’ would help them. Rather, as one of the teachers observed, I had been asking for very specific, even verbatim information. Had I asked for more general concepts/ evidence of understanding of the important aspects of Hand-skills in relation to teaching pupils with dyslexia it is possible the teachers would have ‘remembered’ more. I had been testing visual recall rather than memory of what they had learned: I had assumed that by ‘jogging’ the teachers’ memories in a specific way, by helping them to visualise the layout of the OHP/ handout, I could facilitate retrieval from memory. In effect, I had set them an impossible task! At best I was asking for one type of ‘cognitive’ learning as described by Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom, 1956).

Nevertheless, the overall effect of the exercise was to bring most sharply into relief both for myself and for the teachers, the need to engage the kinaesthetic modality when mediating learning. The following is a selection of the teachers’ responses to the last part of the feedback exercise which asked the teachers to note anything they had become aware of doing when trying to respond to the previous parts of the feedback sheet:

      the Dotting Speed Test was by far the easiest to remember because I was physically involved ….the kinaesthetic memory……motivation

    I tried to visualise the handout and remember what was said. As I didn’t read through the notes after the session I can’t remember anything except the practical dotting speed test we did

  when I do it I remember best… when I discover it because I consciously follow it through… notes on an OHP are useless to me unless I re-cast them in my own words

going through the process physically ( helps me )…… picturing myself actually doing the task

I remember whole concepts more than specifics. I remember much of what M said but less of what I saw on the OHP. I remember M speaking about pupils sprawling on the desk and free hand/ arm positioning on the page…… I remember the handout on pencil grip…… M showing us how to grip and the alternative shaped pencils/ pens grips on the market                                  

I was able to use the exercise and the teachers’ responses and observations to mediate their understanding of theories underlying Memory Skills and the teachers were left with learning based on their own experience about the ways in which they might facilitate their pupils’ learning; the teachers themselves contributed to the taxonomy that supports the development of improved memory skills whilst also acting as my co-researchers in the action research enquiry in which I was engaged.

As a result of their contributions we were able to conclude that the chances of accessing memory for learning were increased
•	when the kinaesthetic modality was involved
•	when reinforcement was facilitated
•	when there was specific motivation made overt
•	when the subject was meaningful and relevant

I felt that the session had significant implications for my lecturing style and the teachers’ teaching styles in that it brought to my and their metacognitive awareness the above factors so forcefully that we could not ignore them in our future practice as educators. Thus it seemed that I had evidence that transfer of those factors to our practice had been mediated, or at least the intention to transfer had been: in the next phase of my research, which involved looking at the teachers in training, my intention was to observe and record the teachers teaching with reference to the ways in which they might have transferred the principles of metacognitive mediation to their own practice.

4.6 Data Analysis Example 4: Developing Educational Cameos and Educational Emotional Awareness 

The data was collected from a tutorial [Audio Tape 7 21/4/97: week 12 out of 30] from Research Phase 2. I became interested in developing the notion of cameos as both qualitative data and an educational metaphor as a result of my own learning that occurred during a feedback session in tutorial time, as described at the beginning of this chapter (see section 4.2). I had been exploring the idea of the ‘moment of knowing’ during tutorial time with teachers. The exploration was tentative at first, with my just mentioning my ideas on a couple of occasions then, during one tutorial I asked teachers to reflect on moments of knowing they might have experienced or that they felt they could identify being experienced by the pupils that they taught for teaching practice as part of the course. I wanted to help them become aware of any shifts or changes that might have occurred and I wanted to mediate the process of reflection as being an important stage in improving practice. I had intended also that the very act of recalling and articulating any such moments would be part of the metacognitive process that I wanted to demonstrate to the teachers.

Some teachers began to recount moments from the previous weeks that were clearly significant to them. However, as the teachers talked, I became aware that they were talking as much about what they felt as about what they thought. Teacher L, for example, described her growing feelings of competence in lesson planning: she felt she had made a breakthrough because, when planning that week’s lesson she had become aware of ideas “popping” into her head. Before she had struggled with the whole process, feeling rather overwhelmed by her inexpert attempts, now she was aware of “other possibilities” and expressed pleasure at the realisation. She wrote the following as a result of the tutorial.

For Madeleine from L
Notes on my metacognition experience (21/4/97)
  Following my fourth or fifth teaching practice lesson I sat down to write an evaluation. I worked through each section of the lesson, weighing up the pros and cons and as I did so I noticed that ideas kept popping into my head. These ideas were for how I could improve upon the lesson and for things I could try out in the next. This was a new experience for me because previously I had had to wade through DILP, then sit and think and then painstakingly work a lesson into shape… there are now also lots of ideas for lessons that don’t have to be moulded by me… they just seem to present themselves out of the ether. I have given some thought as to how this may have come about and wonder if it could be that a good many of the DILP principles and concepts have actually filtered through to my subconscious, and so now I am not having to consider everything on a conscious level. There is also a logical aspect to it, which seems to be that having thought through one aspect of a lesson …ping! An extension to it will, (if I’m lucky) just slot into place. PS At this rate I may get to the stage where lesson plans only take me twenty minutes rather than the present norm of twenty hours!

Analysis

1 Type of Cameo :   a first person cameo (see Chapter 5 section 5.4 for types of cameo) narrated  (A.T. 7: 21/4 97) then written (Cameo 1: teacher L ) by teacher L about her own learning.

2 Content : 
•	language used: worked through… weighing up pros and cons… noticed… ideas…popping into head… how…. Improve…ideas… try out…new experience… wade through(DILP)… sit …think… painstakingly work… into shape… then… still…now… lots of ideas…… moulded…  seems to just present themselves… out of the ether…  given some thought… how… wonder if…principles and concepts… actually filtered through… subconscious… not having to consider… conscious level… logical …seems to be… ping!… extension….lucky…just slot into place

•	themes : analysis on a simple level of themes running through the language noted above reveals this teacher’s lack of confidence, her self- deprecating attitude ( I remember that was typical of L, also that she was a diagnosed dyslexic and prefaced many of her contributions in the tutorials with self-deprecating remarks). The post script with which she closes her cameo… and if I’m lucky… diminishes the degree of effort she puts into lesson planning that is evident in the language of her account, as if her success were a matter of luck rather than the result of the hard work revealed in phrases like …   worked through…weighing up… wade through… sit… think. The tone of the language in lines 1-8 changes, however, becoming lighter, as seen in the phrases … just seem to present themselves…out of the ether…  ping!… Just slot into place…  marking a movement forward in her perception of her competence in this area, the use of the word ‘just’ in particular implying an ease not hitherto evident.

•	Teacher L traces also the process of her  growing metacognitive awareness when she writes…I sat down to write…I worked through…  weighing up the pros and cons… I noticed  ideas…popping into my head…how I could improve…try out… a new experience for me. I feel she goes on to show   evidence of her developing metacognitive skills when she describes how she reflected on the change she had become aware of …  I have given some thought  how this may have come about… (I) wonder if it could be that…principles and concepts have filtered through to my subconscious… I am not having to consider everything on a conscious level… there is a logical aspect to it.
•	 I would argue that this was evidence of teacher L having developed metacognitive strategies whereby she is thinking about the process of her thinking, that this has transferred to her practice, and that this has brought about an improvement in that practice. I would argue also that the articulation itself of the cameo of her learning was a factor in that development.   
15.1.2.6	
Another teacher, Teacher N,    talked about her pupil’s feelings of delight and wonder when she had found a way to learn the months of the year so much so that she had asked her gran. to teach her the sequence and spelling of the days of the week using the same methods. Teacher N talked also about her own feelings as she realised that the methods she was learning to use could be so effective in helping her pupil to learn:
 
       We broke the first two months into syllables (orally- auditory and oral/ kinaesthetic); cut up the words (written on card - visual kinaesthetic); put them back together then wrote them (auditory, visual, kinaesthetic and oral kinaesthetic). Her success with January and February was a wonderful feeling for her. She had found a way to help her learn! She went home that week and used her new-found method to continue learning alone - March, April and May. This continued until she could write all the months. This realisation that she could succeed led her to ask her gran to use the same method to learn the days of the week!                                
                                                                                           [Teacher N]

The teachers expressed their pleasure about their separate realisations, which could represent moments of insight into both their own learning and their practice as teachers. In turn, as I listened, it came to me that the teachers seemed to be capturing the moments in relief, like cameos, with different layers of understanding ready to be analysed. For example, whilst recounting relatively simple narratives and as well as providing valuable insight into the role of emotion in teaching and learning, both teacher L and teacher N were describing the abstract, often difficult concept of transfer in ways that were immediately and graphically accessible. Having begun to develop the theory of cameos as a device for collecting qualitative data, I decided I wanted a means of representing the way I felt a cameo could be used to mediate metacognitive awareness of the affective element of a learning situation. I liked the idea of the cyclical nature of problem solving, whereby a dilemma in practice is identified and reflected upon, possible ‘solutions’ considered and acted upon. Leading to further reflection, followed by further cycles of action ( Schon op.cit; McNiff,op.cit; Griffiths op.cit.). I used the concept to develop a cycle of what I will call Educational Emotional Awareness - E.E.A. (fig 3).

Fig 3 E.E.A. Cycle 
15.1.2.7	                                           RECOGNITION

EMOTIONAL IMPACT

     
16.	ENGAGEMENT                                                      CHANGE/SHIFT

ANALYSIS
16.1.1	Stages of an E.E.A. Cycle
The first stage is one of emotional impact: the feeling of an impact on the emotions experienced in a learning situation. The second stage is one of recognition whereby the narrator recognises/ becomes aware of the emotional impact. The third stage is one of engagement whereby the narrator allows her/himself to engage in the emotions, tries to identify them. The fourth stage is one of analysis whereby the narrator analyses the emotions and the effect they might have on the learning situation. The fifth stage is one of change/ shift whereby the narrator is able to point to a change in cognition and/or feeling about the learning situation.

Fig 4 Stages of E.E.A. Cycle

2 RECOGNITION
the narrator recognises/becomes aware
of the emotional impact

1 EMOTIONAL IMPACT
the feelings of an impact on the emotions
experienced, in learning context

  
   3 ENGAGEMENT                                                5 CHANGE/SHIFT
the narrator allows her/himself to engage                 the narrator is able to              
with the emotions, tries to identify them                   point to a change in                                                           
                                                                                cognition about                                      
                                                                                the learning situation

 4 ANALYSIS
the narrator analyses the emotions and the
 effect they might have on the learning situation

My experience is that mediation can help the narrator at any stage in the E.E.A. cycle to move on to the next stage and that there are a number of relatively simple skills/ strategies that can be employed in that mediation to facilitate the metacognitive process that underlies educational emotional awareness. There is the relevance here also of the idea of ‘zone of next development’ as discussed in Chapter 2 (see section 2.4) which could be attributed to emotional states as well as cognitive states by which I mean that metacognitive mediation of educational emotional awareness could be said to play a part in the emotional development of pupils with dyslexia. I think it likely that these ideas could be of use in teaching in general and should be included in teacher education. 
17.	
18.	Summary
What started as an attempt on my part to mediate the experience of moments of metacognitive awareness in the teachers by asking them to think about how the moments felt, became an awareness on my part of the power of the feelings involved in those moments as tools, in their own right, for improved understanding of the teaching and learning process. As a result of this I began to adjust the original focus of my research into the cognitive areas of metacognition, mediation and transfer to include the notion of emotion as an element that could affect and be affected by those areas. The outcome described in Chapter 5 (see section 5.4) explores this progression in greater detail.

4.7 Conclusion 
18.1.1.1	In this chapter I presented four examples of sessions from the course in order to describe and analyse them so that they form evidence for my claims to improve both teacher education on the course I ran and my own practice as a teacher educator.

CHAPTER 5 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS 

Why is every critical moment of the fate of the adult and child coloured by emotion? (Vygotsky 1987)

5.1 Introduction 
In this chapter I explore the criteria by which my research might be assessed. I go on to link these criteria to a discussion of the contributions to knowledge I claim to have made. Finally I summarise my reflections on the content and process of my research.

5.2 Criteria for Assessment
Miles and Huberman (op.cit.) write of ‘conclusion drawing and verification’ as an important stream of qualitative analysis as follows: …from the start of the data collection, the qualitative analyst is beginning to decide what things mean- is noting regularities, patterns, explanations…the researcher holds these conclusions lightly , maintaining openness and scepticism…(the conclusions become)  increasingly explicit and grounded, to use the classic term of Glaser and Strauss [1967] (p11). In the discussion that follows I try to draw attention to the process by which my conclusions have become explicit and grounded. I decided that a way in which I might do this was to use my research aims, based on my personal theory of education, and the principles of action research as criteria for assessing the validity both of the research and my learning from it. The three are interlinked: the research began with a series of research aims (see section 1.2); while reflecting on my practice I realised that I needed to form an idea of my own theory of education (see section 3.4) based on the values I held and the two came about because I chose to base my enquiry on the principles of action research (see section 3.4). However, as Miles and Huberman point out, conclusion drawing is only half of the qualitative analysis imperative: verification is the other, by which is meant that …the meanings emerging from the data have to be tested for their plausibility, their sturdiness, their confirmability- that is, their validity. (p12). Lincoln  and Gubba (1990) give similar criteria for ‘testing’ qualitative data, in terms of 
credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability (p294-301) and I have tried to consider these in my account of the contributions to knowledge I claim to have made.

5.3 Contributing to substantive area of teaching and learning in relation to dyslexia and teacher education       
	
I have stated that an overall aim of my research is to improve my practice as a teacher educator/ trainer  (Whitehead, 2000) by helping the trainee teachers gain insight to their own experiences as learners who might then improve their practice as teachers of pupils with dyslexia. Among the stated aims and objectives of the course on which I base my research are:
•	To develop the teachers’ understanding of the processes of learning.
•	To encourage a critical stance to teaching methodologies, and enable teachers to adopt suitable and constructive approaches for students with dyslexia.
•	To develop the teacher’s ability to inter-relate theory to practice.
•	To enhance the teacher’s analytical and decision making skills.
•	To create an environment in which teachers can develop habits of critical thinking and disciplined enquiry.
It stands that it was my intention to reinforce the importance and effectiveness of existing methods in my institution of achieving these aims and objectives, as well as contributing something new in terms of mediating autonomy and flexibility in what is essentially a prescriptive way of teaching. In this way I think I can claim that I have improved ways in which a prescribed course might be delivered, which was one of my research aims. I have amended the title of my original research proposal by inserting ‘emotion’ as a subject of the case study because, as a result of carrying out the action research into my practice, I have come to three realisations at this stage:  
•	that the affective dimension is interwoven with the cognitive in effective teaching and learning.
•	 that harnessing  this interweaving requires a metacognitive stance,
•	 that, mediation of metacognitive awareness and mediation of meta-emotional awareness (educational emotional awareness) are important aims of effective teaching and learning.   

The concepts of metacognition, mediation, and emotion are relatively abstract in educational contexts and experience tells me that understanding them can pose difficulties to the teachers who come on the course. By researching concrete ways in which I might describe, develop and influence them both in myself and in others my research aim was to make them more accessible to teachers as aspects of effective practice and I think I can claim to have done that. I have presented an example of modelling mediation with teachers in Chapter 4 (see section 4.1) of this theses. The process of my research has been marked by personal moments of cognitive and emotional shifts, the re-telling of which I have come to call cameos. Part of my interest in such moments is to see if the identification and analysis of them could be useful to others in the educative relationships in which I engage. I want to call the process I hope to mediate/ facilitate Educational Emotional Awareness and present it as a cycle of emotional awareness whereby a moment of affective impact is identified and recognised; there is then engagement with the emotion, a questioning of its origin and an analysis of its impact and implications for learning, leading up to the possibility of changes/ shifts in understanding.  

I can relate this outcome also to a means of fulfilling my research aim of improving the teaching and learning experiences of the teachers on the course and of their pupils with dyslexia and suggest that the sorts of understandings and practices I have developed might be of use to those concerned with teacher education in general. One research aim which I have not fulfilled for reasons already explained was that relating to evaluating if metacognitive practices had been transferred to the practice of the teachers on the course and subsequent to the course.

5.4 Contributing a new theory of learning: educational cameos and educational emotional awareness
 
Alongside the realisation of the part that could be played by emotion in educational contexts, as described above, came the idea to use the term cameo to describe the stories being told to me by the teachers. At that stage I was using the term in the sense of a cameo being  (1) a brief sketch of something that happened that was ‘dramatic’ because it portrayed elements that involved the emotions of the ‘teller’ and that captured a small but momentarily perfect instance of realisation. I wanted to use the term ‘cameo’ as descriptive of a piece of qualitative data, similar in some ways to the way ‘critical incident’ is used ( Denicolo & Pope, 1990; McNiff, Lomax & Whitehead, op.cit; Tripp, op.cit) the main difference being that a cameo starts from a moment of insight/ recognition that has an  affective impact that is then analysed, whereas a critical incident is first analysed, with the insight/ realisation occurring as a result of the analysis.

As I developed the idea of the need to analyse cameos in order to get at the significance for learning of the moments captured, I began to see a second, extended, use of the term cameo as (2) a metaphor that could be used to represent the richness of the different layers of meaning and interpretation that a cameo could give, set as it is against a background of past/ present understandings that lend themselves to analysis in order to enhance future understanding. Just as a cameo portrait tries to capture in perfect miniature the essence of its subject so an educational cameo is the narrator’s attempt to capture, in words, an image of the essence of a moment of learning.      

One way I see the idea of cameos being used as part a teaching situation would be where a teacher recognises that a pupil’s emotions are impeding their ability to benefit from teaching (Mohammed, 2000). I want to stress here that I am referring to emotions that are related to the learning process not emotional states in general: for example I had an undergraduate student who came to me for study skills because she had been warned that she might fail her end of year exams. She was severely dyslexic and confessed to having a real fear of exams. Through using the EEA cycle with her she was able to recognise the nature of her fear, identify the physical responses she experienced in an exam situation, articulate the feelings of shame and panic, come up with other possible solutions (such as using conscious breathing techniques, repeating positive affirmative statements, and having mnemonics prepared for each topic) and integrate them by having practice sessions. The student passed her exams and went on to get a 2.1 in her finals: she attributed her success to the intervention with the emotional aspects of her difficulty that would not have occurred if the teaching had concentrated only on study skills. 

Eliciting the articulation of emotions around learning is an important part of the EEA cycle: there are two levels of emotion, conscious and unconscious. The moment of an emotion coming into awareness marks it registering as such in the frontal cortex (see Goleman op.cit. p55). As Goleman explains ‘emotions that simmer beneath the threshold of awareness can have a powerful impact in how we perceive and react, even though we have no idea they are at work… once a reaction is brought into awareness one can evaluate things anew…decide to shrug off the feelings… to change. (p55). My interest is in ways in which difficult emotions in educational contexts can be brought safely to awareness: articulation and writing about troubling feelings are proven ways of healing them (see Goleman op.cit p180). The following is a cameo first narrated and then written in response to an experience during a practical exam forming part of an ITEC massage course assessment. The narrator, N, is 19 years old, diagnosed with dyslexia at the age of 7. She has received specialist teaching spread over several years, including work on study skills, so that she is able to read and spell at ‘adult’ level (scoring at 13 years plus on standardised reading and spelling tests): that is to say, she has had her literacy difficulties addressed to a reasonably functional level. 
19.	N’s Cameo

The examiner told me to carry on massaging while I answered her questions. The sweat was dripping off my nose. I was so nervous, my mind blank, all that revision gone. A knot in my stomach and my heart was about to jump out of my chest. I kept trying to remember even a shred of what I’d been learning. M had been asking me about the different muscles and bones coming up on the train and I didn’t even have to think about the answers, I knew them all. Now nothing. I can feel it rising, I nearly get hysterical but thank God I had a bit of control left.
After the examiner had asked me quite a few questions and I failed to come up with the answers I started to cry while still massaging. Now water and sweat were dripping off my nose. I tried to wipe it away but more kept coming. I gained control because I thought I’d failed. I knew I had a ‘I don’t care, it can’t get any worse attitude’. I continued to  massage. Then the examiner asked me the name of one of the muscles on the back. So I told her and continued to tell
her all the muscles on the back. I carried on to tell her the answers to the other questions that she’d asked. I could do this because I thought I’d failed. I relaxed my brain, went out of panic mode and could then function properly.
I passed, the examiner said my massage was very good but in my own mind I still failed, not the exam but myself. I knew all the answers but I was so nervous my brain shut down. Part of me is glad it’s all over but the other part would like to do it all again, to prove to myself and the examiner that I do know my stuff.

Comments
The emotions expressed in this cameo are powerful: the narrator was extremely distressed at the time of writing but told me that she came to some feeling of peace after expressing herself in this way. If a teacher were to be presented with a student in this situation it is likely that she/he would focus on the working memory/ study skills aspects of the experience and work on how to improve them (Pumfrey & Reason, 1991). A student with dyslexia in this situation is entitled to have a teacher who has dyslexia specific skills, not least of which is the ability to recognise that one important factor in this student’s inability to function efficiently in the circumstances described was that of ‘dual tasking’. Mediating this understanding to the student could empower her to take control over a similar situation by, for example, explaining this aspect of her learning difficulty to the examiner. However, it is possible that the emotional aspects would be regarded only as the stimulus for addressing the learning problems: it is my contention that the emotional aspects of the experience are the primary presenting difficulty in the sense that the emotions impeded N from functioning cognitively. Le Doux explains how this might be: ‘you can’t have a conscious emotional feeling of being afraid without the emotional experience being represented in working memory…(p297) then later ‘ when faced with challenging emotional situations (we have no) spare mental resources. The whole self gets absorbed in the emotion.’ (p300)  That is not to say that the learning difficulties are caused by emotions but that the emotions aroused when a student with learning difficulties is put under pressure make their cognitive skills yet more fragile. A teacher needs an understanding that helping with the learning difficulty addresses only part of the problem; helping with the emotional difficulties is important and, in some cases, it is more important initially than skills/ literacy teaching. In this instance, and in others of my experience, any input of dyslexia specific skilled teaching would have had little impact on learning unless or until the emotional difficulties had been addressed.

Mediating Educational Emotional Awareness (E.E.A.) is a way of addressing such emotional difficulties: in this instance I used the E.E.A. cycle (see fig.3section 4.6) to help N to recognise the nature of the emotions, working through the stages of the cycle as described in Chapter 4 (see section 4.6 ). The articulation of the experience, narrating then writing the cameo, was the first step in this regenerative process: what could have been a devastatingly negative experience became a basis for greater understanding of the nature and origin of the emotional and learning difficulties N had experienced on which, in a teaching and learning context, could be built an informed approach to the teaching on working memory/ study skills she needed. 
In a teacher training context, a cameo such as this, alongside the E.E.A. cycle, could be used to both heighten the awareness in teachers of the emotional impact a learning difficulty can have and help develop the skills needed to address that impact. Fundamental to both contexts is mediating a metacognitive approach to teaching and learning that empowers teacher and learner to take control of the teaching and learning situations in which they are involved. 
19.1.1.1	
19.1.1.2	Facets of cameos

I am still developing my ideas on educational emotional awareness and the cameo metaphor and at this stage I am trying to clarify for myself questions about the authorship of cameos. I am aware of the ethical implications of working in the affective domain: there are considerations of anonymity, trust and confidentiality of which serious account needs to be made: there are important considerations also of where teaching/ mediation ends and counselling begins. I am clear that I do not want to stray into areas beyond my remit as a teacher/ teacher educator and that there would need to be clear guidelines established to safeguard those involved. However, taking up the holistic idea of a ‘dyslexia therapist’, a term in use when I first trained, I think that effective teachers of pupils with dyslexia need mediated to them the skills to develop educational emotional awareness for themselves and their students in the educational contexts they create. That is to say that the emotions that arise are dealt with in the context in which they arise. In a sense this is the antithesis of teaching that limits itself to a systems approach, an extreme example of which would be a computer programme, or indeed any programme, where the learning is confined to completing the stages of the programme, the teaching to monitoring the completion of the stages.  

 There are also concerns that need to be explored about the ethics of the collection of cameos such as addressed by Kompf (1993) and Cohen and Manion (1994). These questions are just part of the problematic but I have begun to clarify my thinking about other aspects so that I am clear that an educational cameo can emerge from a variety of educative relationships and contexts. As I continue to work with teachers and develop theory from practice, echoing my understanding of the idea of ‘living theory’ (Whitehead, 1993), I see the need to describe the parameters/ facets of a cameo so that, if the notion is useful to others, there emerges a clear set of understandings about what a cameo is and is not, for example, I think a cameo is a critical incident but a critical incident is not a cameo.
•	I see the two main elements of a cameo, of sketch and metaphor, as being inter-linked stages of data; the first stage is the narration and /or writing of the sketch of the moment; the second stage is the analysis of the sketch narrated. 
•	a cameo is a small piece of personal educational history rather than an epic tale of great deeds, such as Woods describes when he writes of ‘critical events’ (Woods, 1993), but the glimpse of insight can have a powerful effect on the narrator and/ or those who analyse it.
•	a cameo can be spoken and/or written: it is the articulation of the experience that is the first stage of the metacognitive process of which a cameo can be part. 
•	a first person cameo can be narrated in the first person: it is about the person relating it and it provides a glimpse of the narrator’s learning.
•	a third person cameo can be narrated in the first person about another’s learning: it can be a moment of learning that the narrator has witnessed or mediated/ facilitated.
•	a cameo can emerge from a variety of educative relationships and contexts: from a teacher responding to a pupil, or a teacher responding to her/his own teaching, to a learner responding to her/his own learning.
•	the affective element of the cameo is crucial in that it is the moment of impact of the emotions involved that provides the impetus for further analysis from which further/ improved understanding emerges.
•	the emotions portrayed in a cameo can be positive and/ negative as can the experience described: however, I see emerging as positive the outcome of the analysis and the impact it has for improved  under-standing that is metacognitive.
•	a cameo has much in common with a critical incident but an important difference is that a cameo is a description of a flash of insight/ recognition/ realisation that has an affective impact. It is then subject to analysis whereas a critical incident is first identified and analysed, the insight/ realisation occurring as a result of the analysis.
•	there can be different levels of cameos depending on the quality of insight applied by the narrator: some cameos might be straightforward accounts of a moment of realisation/ recognition with little insight/ awareness conveyed at the stage of telling; other cameos might be rich in insight/ awareness even at the stage of first telling.

I think that the development of my understanding of the part emotion plays in teaching and learning, as evidenced by my ideas on educational emotional awareness and cameos, are both in line with and go towards forming a personal theory of education as described by Whitehead (op.cit.) as ‘living theory’. My theory is based on educative relations (Whitehead, 1999) and it is within such educative relations that I see a place for the mediation of educational emotional awareness, with the improvement in practice that such awareness can facilitate. It is within that area that I see the possibility of my research making an original contribution to knowledge.      

5.5 Contributing authentic representation of teachers’ knowledge

I would place my contribution to knowledge within the action research approach in the frame of the Kemmis definition of action research as one which is concerned with improving understanding of practice, improving  practice and improving the rationality and justice of social institutions (Kemmis,1988). The provision of effective teaching for pupils with dyslexia is clearly an important social issue in contemporary education as is the effective education of teachers. I presented a paper at a conference (BERA 1999) on the theme of ‘Action for Entitlement: Researching Evidence Based Practice’. In my paper I addressed the issues of ‘action’ as being concerned with doing something about a perceived mismatch between values and practice, and ‘entitlement’ as being concerned with the cognitive and emotional vulnerability of pupils with dyslexia being acknowledged and addressed. Entitlement in the context of my research means also that teachers are entitled to have mediated to them a sense of competence that empowers them in their own learning and that might be transferred to their own practice. I think I have shown some ways in which these entitlements might be met and as such meet the criteria for action research ‘seeking improvement by intervention’ (Lomax,1995).

Also within the action research approach is the exploration of case study as an authentic representation of practitioner knowledge. In line with Miles and Huberman (op.cit.) ideas on the different ‘stances’ taken case study here is not intended to conform to laws of internal validity and generalizability, rather to be presented as exploratory and inductive, providing rich description and with its concepts ‘grounded in local meanings’ (p36) so that others might gain insights that might be useful in their own practice. For example, by eliciting the recall and articulation, and later analysis, of cameos from the teachers on the courses in which I am involved I hope to both help the teachers gain further insights into the processes of their learning and teaching and engage the teachers as my co-researchers…it is in the data and analysis moments that collaboration is most clearly realised… teachers make their own choices and are active, self-reflective researchers into their own practice and situation.  (Tripp 1993: 150). In line with the criteria that action research should ‘involve the researcher as the main focus of the investigation’ as well as being ‘ participatory with others treated as co-researchers’ ( Lomax op.cit.)I would argue that such collaboration is a way of dispersing the tension that can arise when teachers find themselves in a learning situation: it empowers teachers to explore the process and prospect of their own learning whilst acknowledging the skills and experiences they already possess. Lomax defines intra-subjective dialectic as ‘the process through which ones own understanding is transformed as one engages in the struggle to represent what one means’ and inter-subjective dialectic as ‘an engagement with the imagined or actual responses of others, where the act of representing is intended as an invitation to others to engage’ (Lomax, 1999). I would argue also that a cameo can represent teachers’ knowledge on both intra-subjective and inter-subjective levels and can form a powerful means of coming to self knowledge and entering educative relationships with others. For example, the cameo at the beginning of this paper was presented at a conference (Mohammed1998) and the responses logged and analysed (available in archives).

At this stage I need also to reflect on whether the qualitative techniques of action research I have been using have both facilitated or been facilitated by my ability to use metacognition as the basis of a problem solving strategy. When planning my input on a week by week basis I found the use of action research cycles an effective means of developing a sense of pattern- by which I mean that the cycles both required me to use metacognition and facilitated my use of metacognition in order to look at the content and the process of my practice as an educator of teachers with the aim of improving both. Using cyclical planning helped me to develop a metacognitive overview of each week’s input and of how each week’s input fitted together to form a more cohesive programme, thereby modelling for the teachers the use of reinforcement as a means of mediating learning and of facilitating transfer to practice.

As well as forming evidence of the principle of action research being ‘rigorous’ and leading to ‘theory from practice’(Lomax op.cit.), the use of video and the analysis of the results arising from the weekly sessions on the course had several interesting effects to do with researcher effect (Watt, 1995) but most relevant has been the wealth of data it has supplied me with. I had ended some previous research with the notion that… ‘I had looked at what I do and decided I can do it better’. In continuing my research I continued with the commitment to look closely at my practice in both broader and more specific terms. Preparing my input, subjecting all my lecture notes, OHPs, handouts etc. to scrutiny  has enabled me to identify themes, personal to me, running through, based on specific topics common to all my institute’s teacher training courses. Thus, although my input is based on topics recognised to be important when teaching pupils with dyslexia, through the process of action research I have been able to identify issues that are important to me personally and to my integrity as a teacher educator. Action research has helped me to identify and try to live by my educational values, which could then be used as criteria for the assessment of my research.

However the amount of data I was accumulating was daunting: I decided that an exploration of these issues in a logical, metacognitive way would be a way forward as would linking my attempts to try to identify the over-arching issues of metacognition, mediation and transfer in the teaching and learning process. It was an task of considerable complexity: when transcribing a video of a session on teaching styles and lesson planning [archive video 1] I was able to identify up to thirteen areas of interest! I decided I needed to find a way of: 
•	indentifying and relating to the topic of each lecture session
•	identifying and recognising the broader context in terms of my concerns and the literature on the various issues
•	avoiding repetition and preserving clarity
One way forward was to take up and develop the idea of meta-transcribing
by which I mean transcribing a tape/ video with a purpose or purposes  in mind as well as transcribing and looking for the purpose/ issues that arise. There has to be the latter, at least as a starting point in looking at qualitative data but I was feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of the task I had set myself and I recognised that meta-transcribing would suit my way of working with a view to describing a) identified concerns b) other themes running through that I had not been aware of initially c)being open to other possibilities.With this way of working I was able to deal relatively swiftly and effectively with the accumulation of data that I had found so daunting that it was beginning to stultify my research. I had begun to lose my way, continuing to record, gathering data for data’s sake and rapidly losing heart and impetus. The process of arriving at the decision to meta-transcribe brought a new focus and renewed sense of purpose: I felt I had begun to take control of the data rather than it controlling me!
On reflecting on the process of reaching this decision I realised I had begun to answer one of the questions I had identified in my research proposal but also that I had used a metacognitive approach to problem solving in a way that went beyond providing a cognitive solution: it also provided a much needed ‘emotional’ solution by which I mean that it ‘felt’ right - and made me ‘feel’ better! Throughout the research process I tried to elicit the ‘continuous validation by expert witnesses’ (Lomax op.cit.) by submitting reports to others (see section 3.4) and using the feedback as a rationale for adjusting and improving the practice I was trying to develop. I tested the ideas I was developing, giving papers at a number of conferences, some international, and having some work published, in line with the principle of action research that it should ‘bring good professional practice into the public arena’ (Lomax op.cit.). this was with the idea that I could clarify and consolidate my own understanding of as well as develop the understanding of others. Finally I can confirm that carrying out this enquiry into my practice in the context of teacher education has both given me a sense of being an expert in my substantive area and allowed me the confidence to realise the need for further knowledge without being daunted. Bruner described the ‘struggle and muddle’ (1972, preface b) as he worked through his ideas in his essays, recognising that knowledge is not fixed but was developing as he wrote. Using action research provides me with this sense whereby the process of writing is part of the ‘problem solving’ imperative rather than being the result of positivistic knowledge waiting only to be proven.

Section 5. Summary of Reflections 

Bruner wrote that ‘reflectiveness serves better once there is some commitment to direction’ (1972,p84): in looking at my practice in teacher education I am concerned with the notion of conscious articulation of what I do and how I do it. I am concerned also with my educational values and influences, with where my theory of education comes from and with how describing its development improves my understanding of both the theory and practice of teaching and learning. I have come to understand that striving for awareness and articulation is a first step towards change: it allows knowledge to develop, learning to take place. By this I mean that I can create a more secure understanding of the issues raised by teaching and learning and can better translate those improved understandings to my practice. It is by the ‘doing’ of the research that the learning from the research comes into being. I have come to understand also that it is not only meta-cognition but also other ‘meta’ processes (Eraut,1994,p128) such as meta-emotion, meta- intuition and meta-reflection that have facilitated the development and security of my learning about my practice. Watkins (2001) writes about meta-learning covering a ‘wider range of issues than metacognition, including goals, feelings, social relation and context of learning’. Quinn (1997) develops the notion of meta-thinking as a means of empowering the learner, to do with ‘ relying on intelligence… not recollection, not the authority of the text book…and not the authority of the teacher’ (p21). Mediation has a part to play whereby meaning, a sense of competence and autonomy can be mediated to the learner: however, as explained in Chapter 2 (see section 2.3) mediation can also be ‘intra’ whereby the learner him/her self can develop an internal dialogue about thought, emotions and intuitions which itself can create new understandings, new competencies.

Bruner writes about ‘sharing the process of education with the learner’ and adds that ‘education must no longer strike an exclusive posture of neutrality and objectivity’ (1972,p114). The same can be said about research: when considering the role of teacher as researcher, McNiff (1993) writes ‘at the heart of this process of improvement is that person’s own conscious understanding of her practice’ (p6). She continues to describe educational research as a process to aid the development of individual rationality, the creation of personal knowledge and the improvement of practice via critical awareness’ (p6). I have chosen to write up my research in the form of a narrative, an autobiography of past and present learning. As a child I had loved to write page upon page when it was story time in school; by the age of ten or so that nourishing means of self expression had inexplicably dried up. I remember feeling distressed and confused, wondering why I could not write stories any more: it seemed as though I was stifled by a self-consciousness that prevented me from expressing myself freely. Just as at different times in my life I have been aware of significant moments that I can now link to turning points towards my own personal zones of next development, so,when I continued the process of action research, with its underlying methodological and philosophical approach, I felt a sense of recognition, liberation and opportunity for growth that saw its expression in the writing of this thesis.  Tripp (op.cit) refers to such critical incidents as dynamic, allowing for and facilitating ‘constant monitoring and change’ (p10). He debates the relationship between teaching as a profession, requiring ‘reflective teaching’ and characterised by the professional’s autonomy, good judgement, flexibility of approach and ability to monitor outcomes and teaching as a ‘technically expert occupation’ requiring ‘craft knowledge’. This has echoes for me in the problematic of facilitating the development of metacognitive mediation as a teaching strategy that could improve the practice of the teachers I help educate whilst, at the same time, training the same teachers to deliver a prescribed structured language course. An area of weakness that I can readily identify in the research is that I was not able to carry the intervention through to its logical conclusion of gathering evidence of teachers transferring metacognitive mediation to their practice once they had finished the course. Other areas that I would have liked to have explored more fully are the relationship between language and mediation and language and action and the relationship between emotion and intuition in an educational context.

Parker (op.cit.)  writes powerfully about the part emotions play in the learning/ education/ research process: I particularly resonate with: the purpose of this specifically educational form of autobiography is to narrate an edited version of one’s life which focuses especially on articulation and explanation of what it means to each individual to learn… it highlights tha notion of education as a richly emotive and subjective exercise (p18). In my own research I have explored the notion that teaching and learning are not only cognitive nor even metacognitive processes but also very much emotional ones. 

I am interested specifically in the interplay of metacognition, mediation and emotion in teaching and learning and in the relationship between these elements and my intentions of improving learning in the educative relationships in which I am involved. It is in these areas that I see I might make an original contribution to knowledge. I am interested also in using action research to explore the substantive areas of the research in ways that allow me to make authentic representation both of the improvement in my practice and the knowledge I have gained.   

5.7. Conclusion
In this chapter I have explored the criteria by which my research might be assessed. I went on to link these criteria to a discussion of the contributions to knowledge I claim to have made. Finally I summarised my reflections on the content and process of my research.

Bibliography 
Adey, P.and Shayer, M. (1994) Really Raising Standards: cognitive intervention and gacademic achievement, London: Routledge.
Abelson, R. (1963) Computer Simulation of ‘hot’ cognition, in Tomkins and Messick (eds) Computer Simulation of Personality, New York: Wiley.
Auger, J. and Briggs, S. (eds) (1992) The Hickey Multisensory Language Course, 2nd edition. London: Whurr.
Bellenkey, M. et al (1986) Women’s Ways of Knowing, New York: Basic Books.
Belmont, B.J. (1989) Cognitive strategies and strategic learning: the socio-instructional approach, American Psychologist, 44(20, p142-148.
Benson, H. (1996) Timeless Healing, London: Simon and Schuster.
Blagg,N (1991) Can We Teach Intelligence ? New Jersey & London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Bloomfield, H and Combley, M (1997) Overcoming Dyslexia: A Practical Handbook for the Classroom. London: Whurr.
Bloom, B and Krathwohl, D.R. (1956) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, handbook 1: Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay.
Brooker, R & Macpherson, I. (1999) Communicating the Processes and Outcomes of Practitioner Research, Educational Action Research, 7, pp.207-220
Brown, A.L. (1978) knowing when, where and how to remember: a problem of metacognition, in Glaser, R, (ed ) Advances in Instructional Psychology book 1, Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum.
Brown, A.L. (1987) Metacognition, executive control, self-regulation and other mysterious mechanisms in Weinhert and Kluwe |(eds) Metacognition, Motivation and Understanding, Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum.
Bruner, J. (1972) The Relevance of Education.  London:Allen and Unwin.
Bruner, J. (1983) In Search of Mind, Harper & Row, New York.
Bruner, J.S (1990) Beyond the Information Given: studies in the psychology of knowing, London: Unwin & Unwin.
Bruner, J. (1991) The narrative construction of reality, Critical Enquiry, 18(1), 1-22.
Bruner, J.S., Goodnow, J.J. and Austin, G.A. (1956) A Study in Thinking, New York: Wliley.
Butler, S. (1996) A self study of experience as authority: relying on student voices to create contexts for knowing: paper presented at S Step Conference, Hertmonceaux, England.
Carr, W & Kemmis, S (1986) Becoming Critical: education, knowledge and action research. Philadelphia: Falmer Press.
Chapman.J.W. and Tunmer, W.E. (1997) A longitudinal study of beginning reading achievement and reading self-concept. British Journal of Education, 67, p279-281.
Claxton, G  (1984)  An Introduction to the Psychology of Growth and Change in Everyday Life, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Clandinin, D.J. (1992) Narrative and story in teacher education, in Russell, T and Munby, H. Teachers and Teaching: from classroom to reflection. New York: Falmer Press.
Cohen, L and Manion, L. (eds) (1994) Research Methods in Education 4th ed. London: Routledge.
Corey, S.M. (1953) Action Research to Improve School Practices. New York: Teachers College Press.
Cortazzi, M. (1993) Narrative Analysis. London: Falmer Press.
Cortazzi,M. (2001) Narrative  Analysis in Ethnography in Atkinson, Coffey, Delamont,  Lofland, J and Lifland, L (eds) Handbook of Ethnography, London; Sage Publications.
Cronbach, L.J. (1983) Designing Evaluations of Education and Social Programs, San Francisco; Jossey- Bass.
Davis, R.D. (1995) The Gift of Dyslexia. London: Souvenir Press.
Day,C. (1999)  Developing Teachers: the Challenges of Lifelong Learning .London: Falmer Press.
Day, Pope & Denicolo (Eds.)  (1996) Insight into Teachers’ Thinking and Practice, London: Falmer Press.
de Bono, E. (1969) The Mechanism of the Mind. England: Penguin.
Denicolo P & Pope M (1990) ‘Adults Learning - Teachers Thinking’ in 
Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education. New York: Free Press.
Dockrell, J & McShane, J (1993) Children’s Learning Difficulties: A Cognitive Approach, Oxford: Blackwell.  
Donaldson, M. (1998) Education and the Scope of the Mind, Olson and Torrance The Handbook of Education and Human Development  p324-344, Oxford: Blackwell.
Eames, K. (1991) Dialogues and Dialectics: action research and the dialectical form of classroom based educational knowledge, unpublished paper presented at KHARG, Kingston University.
Edbury, J. and Rack, J. (1998) Tackling literacy difficulties in second language learners. Special Children, February 1998.
Edwards,J. (1994) The Scars of Dyslexia. London: Cassell
Edwards, A.D. and Westgate, D.P (1987) Investigating Classroom Talk, Lewes: Falmer Press.
Elliot, J.  (1991)  Action Research for Educational Change, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Entwistle, N. (1988) Styles of Teaching and Learning, Great Britain: David Fulton.
Eraut, M (1994) Developing Professional Knowledge and Competence, London: Falmer Press.
Fawcett, A & Nicholson, R (eds) (1994) Dyslexia in Children: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Hemel Hempstead, Herts: Simon & Schuster International. 
Feuerstein, R. (1980) Instrumental Enrichment: An Intervention Program for Cognitive Modifiability, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company.
Feuerstein, R. (1990) The theory of structural cognitive modifiability in Presseisen, Sternberg, Fischer, Knight and Feuerstein, Learning and Thinking Styles: Classroom Interaction. Washington DC: National Education Association.
 Feuerstein,R, Klein, Tannenbaum (1991) Mediated Learning Experience, London: Freund.
Feuerstein, R. and  Feuerstein, S. (1991) Mediated learning experience: a theoretical review in Feuerstein, Klein & Tannenbaum Mediated Learning Experience (MLE): Theoretical, psychological and learning implications. London; Freund Publishing House.
Fisher,R. (1987) Problem solving in primary schools. Oxford: Blackwell.
Fisher,R. (1990) Teaching children to think. Oxford: Blackwell.
Fisher,R. (1995) Teaching children to learn. Cheltenham, England: Stanley Thornes.
Fisher,R. (1998) Teaching thinking. London: Cassell.
Flavell,J.H .(1970) Developmental changes in memorisation processes in Cognitive Psychology, 1, p324-340.
Flavell, J. .H (1979) Metacognitive aspects of problem solving, The Nature of Intelligence, p 231-235 Hillsdale N J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 
Frith U. (1999) Paradoxes in the Definition of Dyslexia, Dyslexia 5.
Gardner, H. (1983)  Frames of Mind, London: Heinemann.
Gardner,H. (1993) Multiple Intelligences: the Theory in Practice. New York: Basic Books.
Gershon, M. (1999) The Second Brain, New York: Harperperennial Library.
Gillon, G. and Dodd, B. (1997) Enhancing the phonological processing skills of children with specific reading disability. European Journal of Disorders of Communication vol.32 p67-90 1997.
Goleman, D.  (1996)  Emotional Intelligence,  London: Bloomsbury.
Griffiths, M.  (1995) Autobiography and Epistemology, Educational Review, vol.47, no.1, p75-88.
Hales, G. (1994) The human aspects of dyslexia, in Hales, G. (ed) Dyslexia Matters. London: Whurr.
Halpern, D.F. (1992) Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities, 2nd edition. Hove, East Sussex: Lawrwnce Erlbaum Associates.
Hamachek, D.E. (1986)  Encounters with Self.  New York: Holt, Reinhart & Winston.
Hamblin, D. (1993) The Teacher and Counselling. London: Simon and Schuster.
Hattie, J., Briggs, J. and Purdie, N. (1996) Effects of Learning Skills Interventions on Student learning: A Meta-Analysis, Review of Educational Research vol.66, no.2, p99-136.
Hellendoorn,J. & Ruijssenaars, W. (2000) Personal experiences and adjustment of Dutch adults with dyslexia. Remedial and Special Education, 21,227-239.
Hulme,C & Snowling,M (eds) (1994) Reading Development and Dyslexia, London: Whurr.
Hulme ,C. & Snowling, M. (eds) (1997) Dyslexia: Biology, Cognition and Intervention. London: Whurr.
Joyce,B Calhoun,E Hopkins,D (1997) Models of Learning- Tools for Teaching, Buckingham: Open University Press.
Kemmis,S  (1988)  Action Research Educational Research, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Kompf, M. (1993) Ethical Considerations in teacher Disclosure: construing persons and methods, Teaching and Teacher Education, 9, 5-5, p519-528.
Korhonen, T.K. (1995) The persistence of rapid naming problems in children with reading disabilities: a nine year follow-up. Journal of Learning Disabilities. 28(4). 
Kozulin, A. (1990) Mediation: Psychological activity and psychological tools, International Journal of CognitiveEeducation and Mediated Learning, 1, p151-159.
Kozulin A, Presseisen B (1994) ‘Mediated Learning Experience and Psychological Tools: Vygotsky’s and Feuerstein’s perspectives in a Study of  Student Learning’ Educational Psychology 30 (2) p65-75.
Lantoff, J. (2000) Sociocultural Dimensions of Language and Learning.
Le Doux,J (1998) The Emotional Brain, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Lee,C. and Jackson,R. (1993) Faking It- A Look into the Mind of a Creative Learner. London: Cassell.
Lewin, K. (1946) Action Research and Minority Problems, Journal of Social Issues, 2(4), pp34-36.
Levin, M.(2000) Spiritual Intelligence, London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Lomax,P (1995) Action Research for Professional Practice, British Journal of In-service of Education, Vol.21, No.1, 1995. 
Lomax, P (1998) Working Together for Educative Community through Research, Presidential Address to BERA, Belfast.
Lomax,P (1999) Coming to a better understanding of educative relations through learning from individuals’ representations of their action research, paper submitted to Reflective Practice 15.2.99
Lincol, Y.S. and Gubba, E.G. (1990) Judging the quality of case study reports. Qualitative Studies in Education, 3(1).
Lomax, P & Parker, Z (1995) Accounting for Ourselves: the problematic of representing action research: unpublished paper.
Maisch et al (1997) ‘Developing Practice Teaching for Social Work Students in Romania’ Educational Action Research, vol. 5 no.1.
Mental Health Foundation (1999) The Big Picture, London: Mental Health Foundation.
Mcdougall, S. (2001) Social and Emotional Factors Associated with Living with Dyslexia. Dyslexia Review, vol.12, no.2, Dyslexia Institute: Staines.
McGuiness,C. (1999) From Thinking Skills to Thinking Classroms: a review and evaluation of approaches for developing pupils’ thinking. DFEE Research Report 115
McGuiness, C., Curry, C., Greer, B., Daly, P. and Salters, M. (1997) Final Report on ACTS project: Phase 2. Submitted to Northern Ireland Council for curriculum, Examination and Assessment.
McNiff, J. (1988)  Action Research Principles and Practice London: Macmillan.
McNiff, J, Lomax, P, & Whitehead, J (1996) You and Your Action Research Project, London: Hyde Publications.
Miles, T.R. (1974) Understanding Dyslexia, London: Priory Press.
Miles, T.R. (1993) Dyslexia the Pattern of Difficulties. 2nd edition: London: Whurr.
Miles, T.R. & Miles, E. (1997) Dyslexia: A Hundred Years On, Oxford: Oxford University Press.  
Miles, M.B. & Huberman, A.M. (1994) Qualitative Data Analysis, London: Sage Publications. 
Mohammed, M. (1997) Using Cameos as Qualitative Data Conference Proceedings, CARN 1997.
Mohammed, M (1998) ‘Using Cameos to Mediate Educational Emotional Awareness’ in Cole, A & Finlay, S (Eds) Conversations in Community, Proceedings of the Second international Conference of Self Study in Teacher Education Practices: http//www.kingston.ac.uk/ed_s477.
Mohammed,M. (2000) Using cameos to help teachers of students with dyslexia see the significance of emotional awareness when mediating learning, Dyslexia Review vol.11, no.3, Staines : Dyslexia Institute
Mohammed,M & Lomax,P (1998) ‘Mediating Metacognitive Awareness to Teachers Training to Teach Dyslexics, in Golby,M (ed) Teachers’ Research Perspectives 58,Exeter: Exeter University, pp83-102.
Newton, M. (1970) A Neuro-Psychological Investigation into Dyslexia in Franklin A.W. and Naidoo S. (eds) Assessment and Teaching of Dyslexia in Children, London: ICAP.
Nisbet,J. (1993) The thinking curriculum, Educational psychology, 13, p281-290. 
Nisbet, J & Shucksmith, J  (1984) The Seventh Sense: Reflections on Learning to Learn, Blantyre: SCRE Publication 86.
Nisbet, J. & Shucksmith, J. (1986)  Learning Strategies. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul.
Parker, Z. (1998) PhD Students and the Autobiographies of Learning: unpublished paper distributed to KHARG, Kingston University, England.
Paulesu, E, Frith, U, Snowling, M.J., Gallagher, A., Morton, J. Frackowiak, R. and Frith, C.D. (1996) Is dyslexia a disconnection syndrome? Evidence from PET scanning. Brain vol.119,p143-147.
Perkins, D.N. and Grotzer, T,A. (1997) Teaching intelligence,  American Psychologist, 52(10), 1125-1133.
Pert, C. (1998) The Molecules of Emotion, London: Simon & Schuster Ltd 
Piaget, J. (1969) The Psychology of Intelligence, New York: Humanities Press.
Polkinghorne, D.E. (1995) Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis in Hatch and Wisniewski (eds) Life History and Narrative. London: Falmer Press.
Pramling, I. (1990) Learning to Learn: A Study of  Swedish Preschool Children,New York: Springer Verlag Press.
Presseisen, B. Z. (1992) Implementing Thinking  in the School’s Curiculum International Association for Cognitive Education  California: Riverside .
Pumfrey,P & Reason,R (1991) Specific learning Difficulties (Dyslexia): Challenges and Responses, Windsor, Berks: NFER Nelson.
Quinn, V. ( 1997) Critical Thinking in Young Minds, London: Fulton.
Rappaport, D.A. (1971) Emotions and Memory, International University Press.
Reid, G. Dyslexia: a Practitioners Handbook, 2nd edition.Chichester, Sussex: Wiley. 
Riddick, B. (1996) Living with Dyslexia, London: Routledge.
Riddick, B. (2000) An examination of the relationship between labelling and stigmatisation with special reference to dyslexia. Disability and Society,10.457-473.
Riessman, C.K. (1993) Narrative Analysis. Newbury Park CA: Sage
Rosanoff, N. (1991) Intuition Workout, Michigan, USA: Aslan Publishing.
Rosner, J (1993) Helping Children Overcome Learning Difficulties, 3rd edition. New York: Walker.
Rutter, M. and Yule, W. (1970) Reading retardation and anti-social behaviour: the nature of the association.  Education, Health and Behaviour,London: Longmans.
Samuel & Thompson (1990)auto/narr
Sarland, C. (2001) Becoming Our Own Experts; lessons from the past. Action Research vol. 9, no. 2, 2001.
Schon, D (1983) The Reflective Practitioner, New York: Basic Books.
Sharron, H. (1996) Changing Children’s Minds, Birmingham: Souvenir Press.
Simon, H.A. (1967) Motivational and emotional controls of cognition. Psychological Review 74, p29-39.
Skaalvik, E M (1990) ‘Attributions of Perceived Academic Results and relations with Self esteem in Senior High Schools’ Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 34, No 4. 
Salovey, P. and Mayer, J. (1990) Emotional Intelligence, Imagination, Cognition and Personality,  p185-211.
Scollon, R.  (1999) Mediating Discourse. London: Falmer.
Snowling, M.J. and Stackhouse, J. (eds) (1996) Dyslexia, Speech and Language: a practitioners handbook. London: Whurr.
Sotto,E. (1994) When Teaching Becomes Learning, London: Cassell.
Stake, R.E (1995) The Art of Case Study Research. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Stanovich, K.E. (1994) Annotation: Does Dyslexia Exist? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 3594, p579-95.
Stenhouse,L (1978) Case Study and Case Records: towards a contemporary history of education, British Educational Research Journal, Vol.4 No.2.1978
Sternberg, R.J. (1983) Criteria for intellectual skills training, Educational Researcher, 12,2,p6-12.
Sternberg,R.J. (1990)  Metaphors of Mind: Conceptions of the nature of intelligence. New York: Cambridge University Press. 
Stoppard,T  (1995) The Invention of Love London: Bloomsbury.
Sutton, A. (2000) Would the real Vygotsky please stand up, Teaching Thinking, 1, p52-55.
Swartz, R. and Parks, S. (1994) Infusing the teaching of critical and creative thinking into content instruction, California: Critical Thinking Press.
Swindells, J. (1995) The Uses of Autobiography . London: Taylor and Francis.
Taylor, P & Dawson, V (1997) ‘Critical Research Supervision: deconstructing a disempowering myth’, AERA, Chicago.
Temple, C. (1997) Developmental Cognitive Neuropsychology. Hove, Sussex: Erlbaum Taylor and Francis, Psychology Press.
T.E.S. Times Educational Supplement
Thomson, M.E. (1990) Developmental Dyslexia, 3rd edition, London: Whurr.
Thomson, M.E. and Gilchrist, P. (eds) (1997) Dyslexia; a multidisciplinary approach. London: Chapman and hall. 
Thomson, M.E. and Watkins, E.J. (1999) Dyslexia: A Teaching Handbook. 2nd edition, London: Whurr.
Thomson, M.E. (2000) Definitions, Explanations and Discrepancies in Dyslexia, Dyslexia Review vol.11, no.4, Staines: Dyslexia Institute.
Tricoglus, G. (2001) Living the Theoretical Principles of Critical Ethnography in Educational Research. Action Research. Vol.9, no.1.
Tripp, D (1993) Critical Incidents in Teaching, London: Routledge.
Turner, M. (1997) Psychological Assessment of Dyslexia. London: Whurr.
Turner, M, Sercombe, L. and Cuffe-Fuller, A. (2000) Dyslexia and Crime. Dyslexia Review vol.12 no.1 Staines; Dyslexia Institute.
Varma, V.(1996) Managing Children with Problems. London: Cassell.
von Wright, J. (1992) Reflections on reflection, Learning and Instruction, 2(1), p59-68.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978)  Mind in Society, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press
Vygotsky, L.S. (1983) Collected Papers vol.3, Moscow: Pedagogika.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1986) Thought and Language Cambridge: MIT Press.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1987) Emotions and their development in childhood, Reiber and Carton (eds)  Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky vol.1,p325-337. New York: Plenum.
Walker, J, Brooks, E et al (1993) Dyslexia Institute Literacy Programme, London: James & James.
Watkins, A. (1997) Mind-Body Medicine, California: Churchill Livingstone.
Watkins, C.  (2001) Learning about Learning enhances performance Research Matters. Spring 2001, no.13. NISN: Institute of Education.
Watt, J. Ethical Issues for Teacher Researchers. SCRE Spotlight 49.
Webb, R (1990) Practitioner Research in the Primary School. London: Falmer.
Wells, G (1998) Creating classroom communities of literate thinkers, Sharan (ed) Cooperative Learning : theory and research p.95-121, New York: praeger.
West, T.G. (1991) In the Mind’s Eye. Buffalo: Bantam.
Wertsch, J.V. and  Penuel, W.R. (1998) The Individual-Society Antimony Revisited: Productive tensions in Theories of Human Development, Communication and Education in Olson and Torrance (eds) The Handbook of Education and Human Development, Oxford: Blackwell.
Winter,R (1997) Action Research, Universities and Theory (a revised and abridged version of a talk presented at the annual CARN conference 1997)
Woods, K. (1998) Dyslexia: questions from a social psychology perspective. Educational Psychology in Practice, 13, p 274-278.
Whitehead, J. (1993) The Growth of Educational Knowledge: creating your own living theories, Bournemouth: Hyde Publications.
Whitehead, J. (1999) Educative Relations in a New Era. Pedogogy, Culture and Society, vol.7, no.1, p 73-90.
Whitehead, J. (2000) How Do I Improve My  Practice? Creating and legitimating an epistemology of practice. Reflective Practice, vol.1, no.1., p p91-104.
World Federation of Neurology (1968) cited in Critchley, M. (1970) The Dyslexic Child. London: Heinemann.

                                              
APPENDIX 1

Summary of action to date  1/9/98      
The main cycles of action are divided into series of Action Steps, as explained in the main body of the paper.

RESEARCH PHASE 1 : Reading and Reconnaisance 

Reading : ongoing literature search on content based issues: metacognition, mediated learning, transfer, learning styles, teaching styles, teachers thinking, affective aspects ( such as emotional intelligence and emotion in teaching ).
ongoing literature search on process based issues: action research methodology.

Reconnaisance : 

Action Step 1 Feedback Pack [ archive1]  November 1996- January1997
I sent a pack of examples of my lecture/ workshop handouts, overhead projector sheets and course feedback sheets to senior colleagues, critical friend [MF], and members of the 1996  DI Teacher Training Course who had expressed an interest in my research. I invited their comment on matters ranging from presentation to content, collated their feedback and instigated changes in the materials based on that feedback, so that I started the 1997 DI Teacher Training Course with an improved set of materials from which to work. 

RESEARCH PHASE 2 : Examining my practice as a teacher trainer
January 1997 - continuing

This phase involved planning, monitoring (  inc. video and audio tape ), describing and analysing my input on a Post-graduate teacher training course run by Dyslexia Institute, validated at the time, by Kingston University, for teachers with a minimum of three years’ teaching experience wishing to specialise in teaching pupils with dyslexia.
The course is in two modules each of 15 weeks: Module 518 The Dyslexic Learner as an Individual and Module 519 The Dyslexia Learner in Context. The course  starts in the January term and runs one day a week for thirty weeks, spread over three academic terms. The course is based on the Dyslexia Institute Literacy Programme - DILP and the content of the course is prescribed, as are the topics for the lectures/ workshops sessions. As course director I devise the week by week programme and allocate, by negotiation, the lecture and workshop sessions between myself and two other tutors, so that I would not necessarily give lecture/ workshop input on every day of the course. Traditionally the DI training course sessions are either lecture type ( ie transmission based) or workshop type ( ie trainee participation based): my feeling is that the sessions should contain elements of both, with the emphasis being on a multi-sensory, interactive approach that encompasses the topic/ theme comprehensively, as outlined in the main body of the paper.  

Details of Input on the 1997 course

[VT] = video tape
[AT] = audio tape

 MODULE 518
Input week 1 ( 13/1/97)
•	 Action Steps 2 Creating a Collaborative Group of Trainee  teachers   [AT 1]
•	Action Steps 3 : Session on DILP    [VT 1]
( Analysis in Work File 2 )

Input week 2 ( 20/1/97 )
•	Action Steps 4 : Session on Devising a Student Profile [VT1]
•	Action Steps 5 : Session modelling metacognitive mediational teaching strategies and the development of pupil’s metacognition in a demonstration lesson    [ video broke!!]     
( Analysis in Work File 2 )

Input week 3 ( 27/1/97 )
•	Action Steps 6 : Session on Carrying out an Admission Interview/Teacher Assessment    [VT]
Tutorial following teachers’ meeting their practice pupil and carrying out an Admission Interview    [AT 2]
( Analysis in Work File 2 )

Input week 4 ( 3/2/97 )
•	Action Steps 7 : Session on Teaching and Learning Styles [VT]
•	Action Steps 8 : Session on Planning a teaching provision [VT]
Tutorial   [AT 2]
( Analysis in Work File 2 )

Input week 6 ( 24/2/97 )
•	Action steps 9 : Session on Directed Discovery Teaching - DDT    [VT 2]
Tutorial     [AT 4]
( Analysis in Work File 2 )

Input week 8 ( 10/3/97 )
•	Actions Steps 10 : Session on Hand Skills    [VT 3]
Tutorial     [AT 5]
( Analysis in Work File 2 )

Input week 9 ( 17/3/97 )
•	Action Steps 11 : Session on Memory Skills    [VT 4]
Individual Tutorials     [AT 6]
( Analysis in Work File 2 )

Input week 10 ( 24/3/97 )        no session input
Tutorial on ‘ moment of knowing’     [AT 7]
( Analysis in Work File 2 ) 

PHASES 2 (Examining my practice as a teacher trainer) AND 3 ( Examining results of my action in practice )   OVERLAP 

Input week 11 ( 14/4/97 )      no session input
Tutorial     [AT 7]

( Analysis in Work File 3)

Input week 12 ( 21/4/97 )      no session input
Tutorial
 ( Analysis in Work File 3 )

Input week 13 ( 28/4/97 )
•	Action Steps 12 : Session on The Teaching of Reading  [VT 5]
Tutorial on issues of autonomy and teaching styles   [AT 8]
( Analysis in work File 3 )

Input week 14  ( 12/5/97 )
•	Action Steps 13 : Session on Preparing a Case Study 
    [VT 6]
Tutorial    [AT 9]
( Analysis in Work File 3 )

Input week 15 ( 19/5/97 )
•	Action Steps 14 : Session on Developing Spoken Language Skills    [VT 6]
•	Action Steps 15 : Session on Taking an Overview - ‘ 3 Things’ open-ended questionnaire
( Analysis in Work File 3 )

 MODULE 519

Input week 1 ( 9/6/97 )         no session input
Tutorial on issues of Transfer     [AT 10]
( Analysis in Work File 4 )

Input week 2 ( 16/6/97)
•	Action Steps 16 : Sessions on Testing for Teachers  [VT 7] and Preparing a Written report    [VT 7]
                                
Tutorial    [AT]
( Analysis in Work File 3 )

Input week 3 ( 23/6/97 )
•	Action Steps 17 : Sessions on Alternative Structures[VT 8] and Active Learning    [VT 8]
Tutorial
( Analysis in Work File 3 )

Input week 4 ( 30/6/97 )         no session input
Tutorial
( Analysis in Work File 3 )

Input week 5 ( 7/7/97 )           no session input
Tutorial
( Analysis in Work File 3 )

Input week 6 ( 15/9/97 ) 
•	Action Steps 18 : Session on Evaluation/ Teachers’ Evaluation of Metacognitive Strategies  (TEMS)    [VT 9]
Tutorial on Evaluation    [AT 12]  
( Analysis in Work File 4 )

Input week 7 ( 22/9/97 )         no session input )
Tutorial  on Cameos  [AT 13]
( Analysis Work File 4 )

Input week 8 ( 29/9/97 )
•	Action Steps 19 : Session on Study Skills  using M.I.C.K.    [VT 10]
Tutorial with new tutor group    [AT 14]
( Analysis in Work File 4 )

Input week 9 ( 6/10/97 )               no session input
Tutorial        [AT 14  ]
( Analysis in Work File 4 )

Input week 10 ( 13/10/97 )
•	Action Steps 20 : Session on Teaching Adults  [VT 11]
Tutorial       [AT 15]
( Analysis in Work File 4 )

Input week 11 ( 20/10/97 )           no session input 

Input week 12 ( 27/10/97 )
•	Action Steps 21 : Session on Cameos
( Analysis in Work File 4 )

Input week 13 (10/11/97 )                   absent

Input week 14 ( 17/11/97 )
•	Action Steps 22 : Session on Thinking Skills      [VT 12  ]
Tutorial    [AT 17]
( Analysis in Work File 4 )

Input week 15 ( 24/11/97 )        no session input

•	Action Steps 23 : Informal Meeting establishing  collaborative group of teachers who want to continue the educative relationship developed during the course.

RESEARCH PHASE 3    ( Examining the results of my action )

1 Teachers teaching    
•	Action Steps 24 : lessons planned    [Arch    ]
•	Action Steps 25 : lessons taught    [VT 13,14 and 15]
•	Action Steps 26 : lessons evaluated  inc. TEMS

2 Teachers talking about their teaching 
•	 Action Steps 27 : after the lesson taped    [AT  18, 19, 20]                
•	 Action Steps 28 : in tutorials  [Ats various]

3 Teachers responding
•	Action Steps 29 : to questionnaires    [ Arch        ]
•	Action Steps 30 : to course evaluations   [ Arch     ]
•	Action steps 31 : to assignments - items for formative assessment portfolio    [Arch    ]

RESEARCH PHASE 4   Examining the practice of (now) qualified specialist teachers in their own teaching context 

1  Teachers Communicating 
•	Action Steps 32 : Questionnaire following up those teachers who  expressed an interest at the end of the course in continuing their involvement in my research   [Arch  ] 
(Analysis in Work File 5 )

2 Teachers Teaching 
•	Action Steps 33 : Attempts to follow into their own teaching contexts those teachers who responded to the questionnaire, including meeting up with a small group for an informal discussion (19/9/98)on selected issues and any other issues that they might have brought [AT 21] 

20.	APPENDIX 2

21.	List of Archive Materials

Work Files 1 –5 containing relevant field notes, course materials, session handouts, raw data ( eg  video and audio tape transcripts), analysed data, data to be analysed.

22.	Video Tapes 1- 21

23.	Audio Tapes 1-22

Samples of questionnaires, evaluations, assignments.

24.	Feedback from MF, support group, JC
25.	
26.	Samples of lesson plans, teacher materials
27.	
28.	APPENDIX 3

29.	Conference Papers
Mediating the transfer of learning from theory to practice for teachers training to teach students with dyslexia at CARN, Newcastle, 1996.
 
Using cameos (descriptions of significant moments made critical) as qualitative data at CARN, Watford, 1997.

Using cameos to facilitate moments of knowing at KHARG, Kingston, 1997.
29.1	Developing Educational Emotional Awareness at S-Step, Herstmonceux, 1998.

Using cameos to mediate educational emotional awareness at KHARG, Kingston, 1998.

Metacognition, mediation, emotion and transfer with reference to training teachers of pupils with dyslexia Re-membering Education, Institute of Education, 1999: http//www.remember.mcmail.com

29.1.1	Using cameos to help trainee teachers of students with dyslexia see the significance of emotional awareness when mediating learning at BERA, 1999, University of Sussex.
29.1.2	
29.1.3	Work Published
Mohammed,M & Lomax,P (1998) Mediating metacognitive awareness to teachers training to teach dyslexics, in Golby,M (ed) Teachers’Research Perspectives 58, Exeter: Exeter university, pp83-102.

Mohammed,M (1998) Using cameos to mediate educational emotional awareness in Cole,A & Finlay,S (eds) Conversations in Community, proceedings of the second International Conference of Self Study in teacher Education Practices: http//www.kingston.ac.uk/ed_s477.
29.1.4	Mohammed, M. (2000) Using cameos to help trainee teachers of students with dyslexia see the significance of emotional awareness when mediating learning in Dyslexia Review vol.11 no.3, Staines: Dyslexia Institute.
29.1.5	
Work Submitted for Publication
Teaching About Thinking and Emotion: an action research case study of metacognition, mediation, emotion and transfer submitted to journal Teaching Thinking