Book report

11.29.10 By Kellyanne Mahoney

Once upon a time there was a teacher a few years from retirement. One day she discovered that her new principal was planning to bring in observers to assess her competency in a new pedagogical method that was being mandated of all teachers at her school. The principal was a big believer in “reform” and was bent on seeing evidence of change particularly in the pedagogy of older teachers. Those who resisted, the principal assumed, “were apathetic or stupid,” said the teacher.

The teacher’s solution: vinyl blow-up furniture.

The morning of her observation, she arrived early with her students to move the desks out of their rows and hyperventilate into the inflatable chairs. By the time the observers dropped in, the students and teacher were already ensconced upon a large semi-circle of inflatable furniture and intently engaging in the lesson. The observers did not stay long, but left elated by her innovative pedagogy. The teacher swears she taught the same lesson she would have otherwise, and that the tenor of her class was the same as any other, aside from a few more suppressed giggles than usual. That afternoon, she and her students deflated the chairs and shifted the desks back into her much maligned, neat rows. “Reform accomplished,” she concluded.

This is a true story about a teacher I admire greatly. She was the one who first related to me Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale of the “Emperor’s New Clothes” and the parade of reformers who would undoubtedly march through my future career in teaching. Before she presented me a copy of the book with a wink, she also told me that story to commemorate both her retirement and the close of my first year of teaching.

That first year I learned that observers seem to look more kindly upon young blood. Administrators and veteran teachers alike praised me for my classroom management, high level of content knowledge and relative prowess as an entertainer. (This last quality seemed most shocking to me: Students finding amusement over the “happy accident” of my odd personality quirks.) In my classes, students always appeared attentive to and even curious about the highly intellectual content knowledge I was, with unique flair, delivering. Observers noted that my students were “on task.” The evidence: Students asked me questions and took copious notes. For me this point was validated by the fact that students were able to regurgitate these notes back to me on formal tests. At the end of my first year of teaching, I felt that—although there was much room for improvement—I was by and large a “good teacher.” This self-assessment was based not only upon the observations made of me that year and the results of my students’ final exam scores from my class, but also because I reminded myself a little of my own favorite teachers. While I paled in those teachers’ comparison, I felt I was on the right path.

However, the authors of the book “Instructional Rounds in Education” would in some ways beg to differ. According to its authors, Elizabeth A. City, Richard F. Elmore, Sarah E. Fiarman and Lee Teitel, the book is intended to “help education leaders and practitioners develop a shared understanding of what high-quality instruction looks like and what schools and districts need to do to support it.” In it they outline an “instructional core” that has at its heart the theory that “the task predicts performance.” In its first chapter, they critique classrooms where teachers with high content knowledge and some degree of pedagogical skill pontificate while well-behaved students sit mostly idly by without ever much elevating their role in the interaction. They write, “We frequently hear educators talk about how well the lesson went, without reference to what students were actually doing and the visible evidence of what students actually knew as a consequence of teaching. Mostly, the lesson has ‘gone well’ when it has gone according to plan.” During my first year of teaching the (somewhat unintended) “plan” more often than not was for students to memorize with great accuracy all of the interesting things I had to say. While not entirely useless, the task my students were performing most days was not, in hindsight, terribly rigorous, (at least according to the working definition of “rigor” that is even today being debated by educational experts.)

The authors of “Instructional Rounds,” in describing the “instructional core,” refer to educational philosopher David Hawkins’ theory of the triangular relationship between the teacher (I), student (Thou), and subject matter (It). In this model, the teacher constantly observes student learning—as the student interacts with “it”—in order to serve as a facilitator in the student’s acquisition of new knowledge. Citing this theory of “learning as interaction,” the authors warn against attempts at improving student learning that target in isolation either pedagogical skills, content, or the role of the student. Hawkins uses a compelling metaphor to depict reform movements that aim to raise the level of general pedagogy, for example, without regard to teachers’ level of content knowledge, saying: “Without an ‘it,’ there is no content for the context, no figure, no heat, but only an affair of mirrors confronting each other.” I think this image gets at the root of many veteran teachers’ reluctance to jump aboard the bandwagon of the next “new thing”—be it an en vogue teaching strategy, flashy new curricula or an avant garde classroom model. So many of these initiatives are perceived by classroom teachers as out-of-nowhere and one-dimensional. On top of this, these changes are often introduced in a punitive way by administrators who are only one step ahead of teachers in understanding the nature of the reform. The authors of “Instructional Rounds” call attention to this point, writing: “We learn to do the work by doing the work, not by telling other people to do the work, not by having done the work at some time in the past, and not by hiring experts who can act as proxies for our knowledge about how to do the work.” If more school officials adhered to this principle, I think there would be a lot less of them looking like emperors with no clothes.

This is what I find most likable about the “Instructional Rounds” approach: That its authors don’t seem to be peddling any wares (besides the book itself); but rather they are urging school officials to set up their own grassroots networks for diagnosing and addressing problems of practice. Most other approaches to bailing out struggling schools seem to carry with them a hefty price tag in the form of outside educational consultants and expensive new materials. I think this issue alone causes teachers—particularly more experienced ones—to bristle at the call to change.

And I guess this sort of brings me back to my original point about being content after my first year of teaching at the thought that I might be emulating the practices of my own favorite high school teachers. This seemed fine to me because I learned okay, right? This is a question that I still grapple with as I press forward with revising my teaching to better align with 21st Century learning objectives. Have I drunk the proverbial Kool-Aid that is whispered about in the faculty lounge?

While it’s true I learned okay in my own schooling, many of my peers didn’t. Furthermore I could have probably learned a lot better in some subject areas more than others. Much of this is of little fault to most of my teachers in the same way that Hippocrates’ many accomplishments should not be discounted because of his now discredited medical theory of Humorism, for example. Just like medicine, the field of education should also be seen as a work in progress that has not yet been perfected. This is another argument that is made by the authors of “Instructional Rounds.” They write, “We have deliberately drawn on the medical model in this work, not because we think educators ought to act more like physicians, but because medicine has, in our view, the most powerful social practice for analyzing and understanding its own work.” Perhaps, the greatest divide that exists in allowing classroom teachers to adopt some of the analytical practices of doctors however is time. Even on a classroom level, daily formative assessment is tough to manage. I know that having students fill out daily “exit slips,” for example, would better inform my instruction—but the reading and analysis of over 140 of these formative assessments at the same time one is also expected to be managing and teaching five classes of nearly thirty students is a steep order for even the most skillful teacher. If teachers are truly expected to be part of a team that is building a better school-wide practice, even more time needs to be built into their day to do this. And, of course, like doctors would be, this time should be fairly compensated.

So in summary, I will again sing the praises of those teachers who came before me that did the very best with what they had to work with—one of those things being me. At least I can write a half-decent book report.