Teaching as a discipline

I'm really taken with this question that came up in class last weekend of whether teaching is an academic discipline, in the sense that Ford and Fordham (Ford & Forman, 2006) use it:

In any academic discipline, the aim of the practice is to build knowledge or, in other words, to decide what claims "count" as knowledge, distinguishing them from those that do not. Deciding what counts as knowledge implies authority, and thus the raison d'etre of academic practices is how these practices ground disciplinary authority. (Ford & Forman, 2006, p. 3)

So if teaching is to be/come an academic discipline, then we need to sort out what knowledge it might build, who and where the members of the discipline might be that are deciding whether knowledge claims are valid, and what the practices that are imbued with disciplinary authority might be.

First, what knowledge claims might teachers want to make? Broadly, I think knowledge claims in teaching can get sorted into three categories: claims about students, claims about teaching, and claims about the discipline (e.g. mathematics). For instance, teachers make knowledge claims about students when they say things like, “Only 30% of my kids mastered standard 7.3.b” or “My kids struggle with doing their homework because they don’t have support at home.” The former is a claim about students’ mathematical knowledge; the latter is a causal claim about a group of students’ participation in institutional activities. Teachers can also make claims about teaching; for instance, what constitutes a best practice or an effective pedagogical strategy. “When I taught solving proportions, I told my kids to make the fish.” Finally, teachers can make claims about their discipline. A math teacher might claim, “The answer to number 7 is pi over two.”

How these claims get warranted, and what counts as an acceptable warrant is a question of considerable interest. Researchers (Huberman, 1983; Lortie, 2002) have found that teachers’ knowledge claims are often warranted by personal experience and a pragmatic “what works” rather than some underlying framework or theory of what constitutes. This marks a significant difference between teaching and the scientific communities described by Ford and Fornam; personal anecdote and experience carry less weight as a warrant in the disciplines. Thus the work of moving the teaching profession along the path of becoming a discipline will involve a change in the kinds of warrants that are accepted by the community. This is likely no small task.

This raises the question of who the community is; a related question is one of scale: how does one bound the community? However one chooses to bound the disciplinary community, the very nature of a disciplinary community requires disciplinary interaction, by which I mean interactions that build and ground epistemic authority within the discipline. Such interactions are perhaps a subclass of what Ford and Fordham called disciplinary practices. So what might be some plausible candidates for such practices, if teaching were to become an academic discipline? Looking at evidence (in a variety of forms) of students’ learning might be one. Another might be to collectively examine (either live or through some representation) the work (the actual, in-the-classroom interactions between teachers and students) of teaching in order to make claims about the effectiveness of some aspect of a lesson (i.e. something akin to a lesson study).

One additional issue to consider is how to multiply witnesses (Shapin & Schaffer, 2011) – how the knowledge generated by disciplinary practices might get shared. This points to both the infrastructure of the profession of teaching, which has historically been weak (Mehta, 2013), and the organization of local schools, whose organization has been heavily influenced by Tayloristic notions of efficiency. How might the infrastructure be strengthened to support teaching in a disciplinary sense? Some public record of teaching cases could be helpful. These exist in small quantities (e.g. http://www.timssvideo.com/) but one centralized location that systematically organized teaching cases around some framework could be a productive tool for teaching and learning. With respect to the institutional organization of local schools, teachers need reduced teaching loads and more time to collaborate. Of course, time alone is insufficient (Little, 1990); but coupled with other structures or protocols, more emphasis could be placed on the disciplinary practices noted above.

Of course, I don’t think I’ve said anything revolutionary here. Most of this is probably low-hanging fruit. Are there other factors I haven’t considered? What else might be a candidate for the disciplinary practices of teaching?

References

Ford, M., & Forman, E. A. (2006). Redefining Disciplinary Learning in Classroom Contexts. In Rethinking Learning: What Counts as Learning and What Learning Counts (pp. 1–33). SAGE Publications, Incorporated.

Huberman, M. (1983). Recipes for Busy Kitchens: A Situational Analysis of Routine Knowledge Use in Schools. Science Communication, 4(4), 478–510. doi:10.1177/0164025983004004002

Little, J. (1990). The persistence of privacy: Autonomy and initiative in teachers' professional relations. The Teachers College Record, 91(4), 509–536.

Lortie, D. C. (2002). Schoolteacher. University of Chicago Press.

Mehta, J. (2013). The Allure of Order. Oxford University Press.

Shapin, S., & Schaffer, S. (2011). Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Princeton University Press.

teaching and its predicaments: incentives for success

This semester, I'm taking a class on the social nature of teaching. One of the assigned readings is David Cohen's Teaching and Its Predicaments. I have been wanting to read this book for a while, so I was excited to see it on the reading list. Inspired partly by Raymond Johnson and Michael Pershan and by my own desire to keep track of my thinking, I'm setting out to write about Cohen's book.

One of the reasons why I am excited to read this book is that it explores plausible explanations for why there is a long history of failed efforts to reform teaching practices in the United States, a topic that is near-and-dear to my heart qualifying exam topic. Where others have explored this topic from an historical or political-science approach, Cohen explores it as an examination of the work of teaching itself. In other words, he sets out to answer the question: what is it about the work of teaching that makes it resistant to change?

To answer that question, he starts off by placing the profession of teaching into a broader group of what he calls human improvement occupations. Others in this category include psychotherapists, social works, pastors, and organization developers. Cohen makes three main observations about the nature of work in this group: first, that expertise is a necessary but insufficient condition for occupational success; second, occupational success is dependent on clients' participation; and third, there are competing forces that are generated by workers' dependence on their clients - because occupational success depends on clients' improvements, how one defines client improvement in part determines how one defines success. It's this third point which I think is the strength of Cohen's argument, and I'd like to unpack this a bit.

What he is arguing is that teachers' dependence on student success for their own professional success creates incentives for teachers (and, I would add, other stakeholders and institutions) to define improvement in ways that are easily accomplished. What does this look like in practice? For example, when student success is defined in terms of achieving a certain grade and teachers use grading structures in which points are easily attained - for example, reward students for completing a volume of work without attending to the quality of the work. I think his argument here is likely consistent with the experience of many brand new teachers who find that they had to lower their expectations for what students could accomplish. Teachers, take note for a moment of what Cohen is not arguing: all teachers lower their standards so that they can feel good about themselves at the end of the day. Rather, I think this is a cautionary tale - there are incentives to do so, and if we are interested in defining student success in more ambitious terms, then we should be aware of the associated tensions that can arise when we make success more difficult for all to achieve.

One thing I am wondering about so far (I'm three chapters in - more on Chapter 3 in a future post) is how Cohen will attend to issues of equity in teaching. In Chapter 1, he notes that recent reforms in the United States (e.g. NCLB) had the aim of improving teaching by holding teachers accountable to more rigorous standards for student success. However, he doesn't discuss how those reforms have differentially affected students of color. In Chapter 3, he starts using the term "responsible teaching," but it's not clear exactly what he means by that - it could include attention to issues of equity, but so far he hasn't clearly defined what he means. Hopefully this will get cleared up soon.

Exemplar: on the limits of teaching as explaining

From a recent classroom observation:

T: Some of the things that we need to remember [gestures to screen]. Parallelograms are quadrilaterals that have opposite sides equal and parallel. So remember that on a parallelogram, the sides that are opposite of each other [gestures to parallelogram on screen] will be the same length and will be parallel to each other. On both sides. That's how you can identify all that's a parallelogram. So is a square a parallelogram? Would a square be considered a parallelogram?
SS: [silence]
T: Opposite sides are equal, and they're the same length, and they're parallel to teach other. So, on a square, are their opposite sides not parallel? [silence] Just answer that. Are their opposite sides parallel?
S: [timidly] Yes?
T: They are. Are they the same length?
SS: [confidently] Yes.
T: Yes, because a square is the same all the way around, correct? So is a square a parallelogram?
SS: Yes.
T: How about a rectangle?
SS: No.

Granted, this is a short excerpt from a longer class in which lots of good teaching and learning happened, but this little exchange jumped out at me as a great example of what seems a typical teaching-as-explaining moment. It's difficult to infer any evidence that the students have understood the teacher's explanation; to the contrary, the students seem to be playing the Yes/No Guessing Game. I'll also add that though it may not be apparent in the transcript, the teacher's questioning becomes rather aggressive. Starting when she asks "So is a square a parallelogram?" the first time, when students respond with silence, she repeats her question in a more aggressive tone, signalling that, in her view, the answer to her question should be obvious. I wonder how and to what extent this influences the ways in which students respond to her line of questioning.

One final curricular thought: it seems that her students have learned about squares and rectangles before moving up the hierarchy to the more general case of parallelogram (and earlier, she makes a reference to moving sequentially through a curriculum). To my way of thinking, it makes more sense (particularly in the context of thinking about area, which is what this unit is about), to start with the general case (parallelogram) and then to understand squares and rectangles as instances of a parallelogram. Can anybody make an argument for the ordering this teacher was following?

Establishing a discourse-rich classroom

I watched a teacher this week setup an activity in which one of the "rules" (her word) for the activity was that students should challenge each other's thinking. She went on to explain that you shouldn't just let your partner write down their answer, but say things like "Why did you do that?" and "Are you sure? How do you know you're sure?" and "I don't agree with you. This is what I think." She admonished the students that this should be "good discussion time." So this is great . . . these are all things I'm sure any teacher would love to hear while listening to student discourse.

After the teacher finished with her rules for the activity, the students got to work. Except there was none of the kinds of discourse that the teacher said she wanted to hear. So what went wrong? I can only speculate (since I only got to see a single class period that was in the middle of the school year), but there are two things I'd like to suggest.

The first is that classroom discourse is a reflection of the norms (both explicit and implicit) that you establish in your classroom. Establishing those norms early in the school year is important, but maintaining them over the course of the school year takes work. Perhaps if those norms have been firmly established, then establishing rules for an activity is one way to reinforce those norms. However, if the norms were never established in the first place, setting up rules for discourse is setting yourself up for failure.

Second, what the teacher was really wanting her students to do is engage in mathematical argument. This is a disciplinary practice, and sociocultural theories of learning tell us that these kinds of social practices are learned through legitimate peripheral participation in a community that is engaged in those practices. In this case, I would argue that if the teacher wants her students to engage in this type of argumentation, then she herself, as the more knowledgeable person in the room, needs to engage in that type of argumentation. By doing so, she creates a classroom culture in which that kind of discourse is normative. I recognize the limitations of my data, but given the kinds of student discourse I heard, I would bet that what I saw in the single class period is fairly representative of the classroom. In particular, the teacher's discourse was what we hear in the typical American classroom - lot's of IRE questioning, though there were some superficial attempts to press students to explain their reasoning. For example, when she asked a student how they knew the expression they'd chosen correctly represented the area of a compound shape, the student responded "order of operations" and the teacher moved on to the next problem, accepting the student's response as an adequate warrant, even though "order of operations" by itself doesn't tell us anything about why the student's expression was an accurate representation of the area of the shape.

So, how do you achieve the kinds of student discourse in your classroom that you want? What early-year activities do you engage in that help establish norms? Do you model disciplinary practices for your students? How?

Dewey the prophet?

I've been wanting to read Dewey since I started graduate school and have finally got around to it - we're reading excerpts from "How We Think" in the Philosophy of Education class I am taking. So far I have not been disappointed. His thinking about teaching anticipated some of the common contemporary critiques of the current accountability-driven testing regime and the current reform efforts to push towards more conceptually grounded instruction. A few highlights:

• “The operation of the teacher’s own mental habit tends . . . to make the child a student of the teacher’s peculiarities rather than of the subjects that he is supposed to study. His chief concern is to accommodate himself to what the teacher expects of him, rather than to devote himself energetically to the problems of subject-matter. “Is this right?” comes to mean “Will this answer or this process satisfy the teacher?” - instead of meaning, “Does it satisfy the inherent conditions of the problem?”"

• “Sheer imitation, dictation of steps to be taken, mechanical drill, may give results most quickly and yet strengthen traits likely to be fatal to reflective power. The pupil is enjoined to do this and that specific thing, with no knowledge of any reason except that by doing so he gets his result most speedily; his mistakes are pointed out and corrected for him; he is kept at pure repetition of certain acts till they became automatic. Later, teachers wonder why the pupil reads with so little expression, and figures with so little intelligent consideration of the terms of his problem. In some educational dogmas and practices, the very idea of training mind seems to be hopelessly confused with that of a drill which hardly touches mind at all . . ”
  
  
• “No one other thing, probably, works so fatally against focusing the attention of teachers upon the training of mind as the domination of their minds by the idea that the chief thing is to get pupils to recite their lessons correctly . . . Their is no great difficulty in understanding why this ideal has such vogue. The large number of pupils to be dealt with, and the tendency of parents and school authorities to demand speedy and tangible evidence of progress, conspire to give it currency . . . Knowledge of subject-matter - not of children - is alone exacted of teachers by this aim; and, moreover, knowledge of subject-matter only in portions definitely prescribed and laid out, and hence mastered with comparative ease. Education that takes as its standard the improvement of the intellectual attitude and method of students demands more serious preparatory training, for it exacts sympathetic and intelligent insight into the workings of individual minds, and a very wide and flexible command of subject-matter - so as to be able to select and apply just what is needed when it is needed.”