Talking About Teaching: Establishing Trust Amidst Uncertainty

Faced with a day-to-day job that is filled with uncertainty, teachers have to make countless decisions and judgments (Floden & Clark, 1988). Increasingly, it seems, we teachers are asked to not only make those decisions amidst uncertainty, but we are asked to explain and justify those decisions to others.

For instance, within our profession we are asked to explain to our colleagues why we do what we do as a way to learn from one another; this may involve such approaches as Teacher Research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Zeichner & Noffke, 2001), Teacher Learning Communities (Lieberman & Miller, 2008; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2003; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001), and more "public" teaching, which confronts some oft-held "simplistic assumptions and represent[s] the complexities of teaching" (Hatch, 2005, p. 2).