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.