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.