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| Bookmarks: Change the metaphor and change the theory... Teaching as an uncertain craft... "Learning to teach" not "training to teach"... The provocateur who stirs the chalk dust...
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Change the metaphor and change the theory... For most of the 20th century, "teacher training" has proven itself to be the primary and most resilient of metaphors people have invoked when talking about and describing the professional formation of those women and men who have desired to serve as classroom teachers and, once practicing their craft inside one of the nation's classrooms, to perfect their knowledge and skills. Furthermore, undergraduate and graduate teacher education programs throughout the past ten decades have responded to this metaphor by providing undergraduate and graduate students training in the knowledge and skills that are purported to be causally related to classroom success. Likewise, the training metaphor has influenced the design of continuing education programs for teachers, especially as school districts throughout the nation have provided teachers decades of in-service training so that elementary and secondary teachers might better grapple with the many challenges they confront each day in their classrooms. This prevailing ideology is constructed upon a metaphor that likens teaching to factory work and teachers to factory workers. Accordingly, professional training programs are designed to indoctrinate aspiring teachers into the "one best way" of teaching, insofar as the principles of scientific management (Taylor, 1967) identify and measure that work. In their classrooms, then, teachers implement their training by planning and specifying what their students will learn and teachers use objective instruments to assess their students' acquisition of the content of instruction. While this all sounds reasonable on the surface, the ideology implicit in this model of teaching neglects the human variables (Bolman & Deal, 1997, p. 280) inherent in the teacher-student interaction. Because "teacher training"---a metaphor borrowed from industry and imposed upon schooling---is now ingrained in how people view and talk about the complex process of teacher growth and development, it is rather difficult to conceive of alternative metaphors that describe the complexities associated with how novice and experienced yet non-expert teachers "learn to teach." For example, what term (or terms) adequately describe how a novice or non-expert yet experienced teacher matures over the years into an expert or, in Sarason's words, "to become a convincing, impactful performer" (1999, p. 4)? To stimulate thinking about new ways to conceive about how teachers develop expertise, Sarason has offered a metaphor that changes how people can think about teaching. Contending that teachers find themselves today ensnared within a system that pays only lip service to understanding what the complexities associated with the role of classroom teacher actually require, he asserts that teaching requires women and men capable of performing before an audience. "Teaching is an interpersonal affair," Sarason insists, "and as soon as you say 'inter' you mean (or should mean) that teacher and student(s) seek to understand each other and it is in the process of seeking that the qualities of the teacher as performing artist can be observed" (1999, p. 132). But, for Sarason, a teacher's "performance" does not so much involve how a teacher acts in the role but more importantly how, as a teacher engages in performing before students, what it is that the teacher thinks, feels, intuits, and adapts to each student's unique individuality. Viewing the role of classroom teacher through this conceptual lens, the purpose for the teacher-student interaction undoubtedly includes much more than simply the communication of knowledge and skills deemed important for success in life. This interaction should also engender understanding in students as well as a sense of their growth and development as students progress through the educational drama. The "performing artist" metaphor opens new vistas to consider the nature of teaching as a craft as well as what it requires of teachers. As Sergiovanni (1994) has noted in his discussion concerning how schools functioning as communities, when humans change the metaphor they use to describe something, they change the theory supporting it. Sarason's (1999) metaphor shifts discussion away from instrumental theories that require training women and men as to function as classroom instructors (in Latin, instruere, "to build in") and educators (in Latin, educere, "to draw out") and towards more substantive theories that nurture the latent talent in teachers, talent that will enable their students to discover in their teachers people who are interesting, stimulating, and believable. If it is true that teachers are performing artists, then teaching is a creative expression of the human spirit more than it is a job. And, expertise evidences itself in the ways that teachers satisfy their students' need for new experiences that will take their students out of their ordinary selves and their daily lives and will assist students to see themselves and their world in new and enlarged ways. The most expert of these performing artists, then, engender in their students a genuine and heartfelt willingness to come back and to engage in the next act of learning by "get[ting] them to want to return, not to feel that they have to return" (1999, p. 144). Sarason's metaphorical shift does not imply that teachers are "paid clowns" who entertain students and hold their attention. No, in the role of performing artist, teachers engage their students' archaic and unrefined purpose for being in classrooms and, though the classroom performance, teachers transport students into new worlds of sense and experience wherein students feel understood and touched. Through this experience, students are spurred to think, both as individuals and as members of an audience. Because Sarason shifts the idea of teaching away from science and "training to teach" and more towards art and aesthetics and "learning to teach," he offers a glimpse into the nature of teaching and learning that can inspire awe and respect for the teaching profession and, especially, for those teachers who nurture their students' talent and capabilities. While this metaphorical shift enables people to re-conceive of the nature of teaching, it also implies at least two challenges for those who provide instructional leadership to teachers in the role of performing artist:
In the current context of teaching, it is unfortunate that "the degree to which a teacher regards the principal positively is in part determined by the degree to which the principals does not intrude on each teacher's turf. To put it baldly, teachers do not want principals to direct, to tell them how to teach and how to manage students. Teachers do want principals who support and encourage them from a distance, not by being a frequent visitor who seeks in any way to alter the teacher as a performer" (Sarason, 1999, p. 61). However, as instructional leaders respond to the two challenges presented by the "teacher as performing artist" metaphor, instructional leaders engage in moral leadership but not by directing teachers. Rather, these instructional leaders challenge teachers to form a community of learners who take life-long learning seriously, who value their colleagues' judgments, and who shatter any resistances to professional and personal change by engaging in continuous self-improvement. These teachers do so by testing any self-imposed limits and by taking delight in the deeply self-satisfying stimulation received from interacting meaningfully with one's audience, that is, one's students. Then, as Sarason notes---and perhaps directly attributable to this form of instructional leadership---teachers will experience profound personal, intellectual, and professional growth and development as well as recognition and respect for what they do (1999, p. 166). "What deserves emphasis is that among the major attractions of the career is that there will always be challenges and self-testing, diversity of roles, new learning," Sarason notes. "[Performers] do not see the career in static terms; built into expectations is a vision of a personal trajectory in which there is the combination of new learning and the soaking up of new experiences....And these are careers where the obvious feature is that what the performer does is always public and judged by audience, teachers, and critics. Whatever the self-judgment of the performed, in a crucial sense 'success' will depend on the judgment of others. Like it or not, the performer has to take life-long learning seriously. Self-improvement is the name of the game" (1999, pp. 136-137). At the same time, however, it must not be forgotten that while new metaphors open new vistas for considering what teaching is and requires, metaphors---like the training metaphor that has predominated teacher education for so many decades---can also constrain how one views teaching and what it requires. While the teacher as performing artist metaphor (Sarason, 2000) balances the impersonal excesses associated with the training metaphor, the performing artist metaphor neglects the fact that teaching is not a one act play performed before a single audience for one show. Teaching involves a community of students is a long-term, interpersonal engagement where shifting moods and tenors require subtle responses on the part of both teachers and their students. Teaching as an uncertain craft... While some may assert that Sarason's (1999) change of metaphor renders teaching a more self-centered practice, McDonald (1992) suggests that the move toward a more self-centered form of reflective practice is not necessarily a selfish move on the part of teachers. Arguing that teaching is a craft characterized more by uncertainty and moral complexity than by certainty and methodological determinism, McDonald insists that only as teachers engage in reflection and collegial discourse---unarguably a self-centered move---teachers learn to see beyond the good and bad that characterizes pedagogical practice (1992, p. 21). To this end, McDonald suggests that teachers must learn to "read teaching." That is, because "pedagogical knowledge is contextual rather than instrumental...it is knowledge about the limits of technique, about the place of uncertainty in practice, about all the webs---moral and otherwise---that catch teachers and their students" (1992, pp. 49-50), teachers feel conflicted as they teach students. For McDonald, this is both a healthy and authentic response to the actual conditions of teaching. Teachers, therefore, need to read their teaching---those deeply personal experiences emerging within the dynamism of the "wild triangle of teaching" (p. 1)---in order to deal with the uncertainty and vagaries of professional practice, to confront them, to highlight the ambiguities and dilemmas, and to preserve them for mulling over later (p. 70). Only as teacher read their teaching, McDonald asserts, can teachers address the professional crises confronting them and begin to conceive of the moral dimensions of their craft by which they "hold a teaching life intact in the face of the immense uncertainties that continually threaten to split it" (p. 104). However, "reading teaching" is not solely a solitary venture akin to reading a novel, although many teachers might well wish that reading their teaching remain a solitary activity out of the fear of exposing their uncertainties to public scrutiny. For McDonald, reading teaching is also a communal venture through which teachers engage in discourse as they reflect upon practice, take a critical look at the circumstances of their work, and attend to the voices of experience (1992, p. 123). Professional discourse in a community of teachers who trust one another and tell the stories they have learned by reading teaching is, for McDonald, what provides teachers a platform for learning from their successes and failures, for building support for continuous self-learning, and for experiencing wonder and awe as well as jettisoning the fear of failure. Through self-reflection and collegial discourse, teachers learn about and become more expert teachers, all of which ultimately proves beneficial to students. In the end, this self-centered move is, as McDonald notes, hardly a selfish move. McDonald's (1992) analysis of the oppression and silence that teachers experience---whether self-imposed or otherwise---reminds instructional leaders that one of their responsibilities involves liberating teachers from the bonds of oppression. Reminiscent of Freire's (1998) battle to liberate the Brazilian poor by teaching them to read the narrative of their lives and circumstances, a program for professional development that relies upon reading teaching as its primary theoretical foundation implies at least five challenges for instructional leaders, that is, if they are to assist teachers to read teaching and to engage in textual analysis of the teacher-student-subject matter triangle:
"Part of the work of administering a school," McDonald notes, "is engineering the construction of a story that aims to integrate the school's grate variety of perspectives and carry its energies through the tangled middle of its giant narrative" (1992, p. 70). In light of the fifth challenge noted above, another part of the work of administering a school McDonald does not mentioned is that, as instructional leaders enable their teachers to read their teaching and to engage in textual analysis of their individual and collective experiences, instructional leaders forge "teaching decorum," that is, they build a school culture whereby the virtues commonly associated with expert teachers gradually characterize what all of the members of this community of teachers aspire to become. "Learning to teach" not "training to teach"... Since the early 1970s, educational researchers have moved beyond strictly empirical analyses of teachers’ skills and dispositions to investigate a far more complex phenomenon, namely, how and where teachers "learn to teach." An early advocate of this line of inquiry, Berliner (1986) suggested that novice teachers differ from their more experienced colleagues. Likewise, he noted, more experienced teachers, although they possess the tools that novices do not, differ in practice from their more expert colleagues. Asserting that "knowing that" differs from "knowing how," Berliner was the first to engage in systematic inquiry, asking: "What do expert teachers know that novices and more experienced teachers do not?" and "How do they acquire this knowledge?" "In the ill-structured domains---like teaching---where surety about right action does not exist, the choice of a sensible solution strategy for a problem is an even more complex task than is solving problems in well-structured domains" (p. 13). Carter (1990) later summarized the growing body of learning to teach research, suggesting that learning to teach is based on a knowledge conception of teaching that is directly related to classroom performance. "Professional" knowledge is not the formal subject-matter knowledge or procedural rules that guide what teachers do. Instead, teachers acquire professional knowledge as they struggle at teaching, that is, as they hone their pedagogical skills by reflecting upon and aiming to refine classroom practice. Expert teachers process multiple bits and pieces of information imported from the classroom environment and, by attending to these cues, expert teachers formulate plans, make decisions, and evaluate alternative courses of action as a seamless decision-making process. This refined ability demarcates experts from their non-expert colleagues who as of yet have learned how to teach but not with the subtlety, artistry, and cognitive complexity their expert colleagues do. Note, too, that expertise does not correlate with length of service in the profession. That is, one can remain a non-expert teacher for years and perhaps even decades, if one does not reflect sufficiently upon and endeavor continuously to refine classroom practice. How is it, then, that expert teachers overcome the deficiencies of their novice and experienced colleagues? Kagan (1992) believes the learning to teach studies provide evidence that, during the course of the first five years of professional practice, non-expert teachers overcome their deficiencies by critically examining their interactions with students. These teachers do not allow personal beliefs and images about teaching and learning to prejudice their reflections. In addition, these teachers acknowledge where their beliefs and images are incorrect or invalid and adjust accordingly. In sum, teacher knowledge (i.e., the mental images they carry of themselves and their students) as well as beliefs and problem-solving skills interact powerfully to promote student learning, but only if teachers reflect upon what actually is transpiring in their classrooms. Along the way, another individual substitutes authority by introducing cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) into the non-expert teacher’s mind, upsetting the comfortable status quo of this teacher’s well-ordered world and revealing where the teacher’s preconceptions do not gibe with classroom reality. "To be functional," Kagan notes, "procedures must become standardized and reflect an integration of management and instruction; in this sense, class control and instruction appear to be inextricably interrelated to pedagogical tasks. Until such standard procedures are routinized and fairly automated, novices may continue to focus on their own rather than their pupils' behaviors" (p. 145). But, the learning to teach literature suggests, these standardized procedures need to be questioned by teachers, too. Otherwise, teaching and learning are likely to become atrophied into stultifying classroom routines. While there may be no hard and fast rules governing the development of expert teachers (Berliner, 1986), the learning to teach literature unearths what appears to be a fundamental pattern to professional development. These women and men come to the profession with a keen desire to teach; but, it is in actual classroom practice not pre-service training where teachers learn to teach (Kagan, 1992). Without sustained reflection on practice, chances decrease that non-expert teachers will develop into expert teachers. And, unless someone substitutes authority for that of the novice and experienced teacher, the odds increase that classrooms will devolve into unimaginative meeting places characterized more by rote educational decision making and impersonal "teacher-proofed" curricula than by more deliberative interventions and authentic educational decision making (Burlingame & Sergiovanni, 1993). What activities might instructional leaders engage in to promote learning to teach in their schools? The learning to teach literature suggests several activities:
It seems that expert knowledge about teaching is not a body of propositions or prescriptions derived from an external discipline or process-product studies, as the "training teachers" metaphor implies. Rather, the learning to teach literature suggests that expert knowledge is more of a series of situated conceptions about teaching, conceptions grounded in the common experience of classroom events. For experts, classroom ecology and teacher thinking interact in a way that, as these teachers reflect on their classroom practice, more expert teachers make valid interpretations about what classroom phenomena mean. The expert teacher's actions, then, evidence "a rich store of knowledge that enables them to make sense of immediate scenes and bring past experiences to bear on these scenes to invent, virtually on the spot, actions that fit these circumstances" (Yinger, cited in Carter, 1992, p. 304). Aesthetically, expert teachers evidence what their less-expert and non-expert colleagues do not evidence, namely, teaching decorum. Their decision making also gives evidence of practical virtue, as Aristotle defines it, as expert teachers bring theory and skill to bear when making decisions about what they ought to do in classrooms. But, perhaps most importantly, expert teachers are role models for their less-expert and non-expert colleagues as their lives and their work inspire others to inculcate the expertise that hopefully will one day characterize them, if they have the patience and persistence to engage in the practice of learning to teach. In this sense, instructional leaders forge a school culture characterized by teachers who provide moral leadership for one another and their students as well. The "provocateur" who stirs the chalk dust... At its worst, the "teacher training" metaphor translates the negative assumptions associated with McGregor's (1960) Theory X into instructional leadership practices expressly designed to tell teachers what to do. That is, since teachers are neither interested in nor are desirous of engaging in professional development, it is imperative that someone in the school organization---in this instance, the instructional leader---provide teachers the training they so desperately need if they are to communicate instructional content. And yet, as Wasley (1994) notes in contradiction to Theory X's negative assumptions, there are many teachers whose desire is to develop professionally---to become good teachers---by changing how they think about teaching as well as instructional practice. These women and men are not under any compulsion to change; in fact, records kept about their performance portray that they are exemplary instructors. But, each of these teachers experiences a deeply-felt, personal need to face up to the challenge of professional change if they are to become the type of educator that each desires to be. Possessing an internal locus of control, these teachers desire to be "origins" of their professional growth and development rather than "pawns" driven by an external locus of control (DeCharms, 1968), for example, an instructional leader. But, Wasley (1994, p. 2) notes, these teachers immediately confront and have to overcome two obstacles if they are to develop professionally. The first is a school culture (what McDonald calls the "silence of teaching" [1992, p. 12]) that prevents many of them from engaging with other like-minded colleagues in professional discourse about the curricular and instructional issues they are dealing with inside of their classrooms. The second impediment is the limited time available for these teachers to study the curriculum as well as to prepare to introduce and use new instructional strategies or, even, to be coached as they try to implement new techniques into their repertoire. In case after case, Wasley's teachers express a genuine willingness to work harder and, in fact, do work harder than many of their colleagues. These teachers also derive particular enjoyment from collaborating with their colleagues, especially as they endeavor "to create something new" (1994, p. 137). This important finding supports Vaill's (1986) assertion that the increased time devoted to achieving one's goal does not lead to burnout; instead, when time and feeling and focus work together in concert, people find themselves more energized than ever to achieve extraordinary and meaningful outcomes. Instructional leaders need to remove these and any other obstacles to professional growth and to replace them with more collaborative decision-making structures by forging a culture characterized by honest communication, shared leadership, and teaming (Wasley, 1994, pp. 138-139). This culture will provide teachers the time they need and engender the trust that is necessary if teachers are to engage in the type of discourse that will foster honest, critical inquiry into teaching and learning and, over the course of several years, that will manifest itself in teacher professional development, school change, meaningful student engagement in learning, and improved student learning outcomes. Wasley's (1994) metaphor of "stirring the chalk dust" and supportive case studies suggest that instructional leaders must discard those supervisory metaphors borrowed from industry and imposed upon teaching and learning. In almost every instance where teachers became responsible for directing their professional development, it was the principal in the role of instructional leader who broached the topic and initiated the idea of change. But, it was the individual teacher's desire to change and the instructional leader's practice that led to the formation of a community of teachers who were engaged in change that enabled them to do the "heavy lifting" associated with professional development Because teachers learn to teach---its practice is more phenomenological than scientific (Sarason in Wasley, 1994, p. ix)---it is incumbent upon instructional leaders to consider how they might facilitate those conditions that will enable teachers who desire to grow professionally to do so and to "stir the chalk dust" so that those who are less desirous might become more so. To this end, Wasley's (1994) cases suggest that:
All of these instructional leadership activities are directed at engendering a culture of self-change in teachers so that their students will be more capable of learning. To effect this outcome, instructional leaders need to recognize that, like their teachers, they too will have to change. Instructional leaders will have to overcome the fear of change and be personally committed to it. This will require changing one's beliefs and one's role as well as changing the structures that support schooling as it currently is practiced. Instructional leaders will also have to defend change and confront resistances posed by faculty, student, and parents. Most importantly, instructional leaders will have to overcome the temptation to despair by engendering hope and clarifying a vision of what is possible if they and their teachers are to become willing to engage in the self-change that is the necessary precursor of professional growth and development. Aristotle. (1958). Nicomachean ethics (W. D. Ross, Trans.) In J. D. Kaplan (Ed.), The pocket Aristotle (pp. 158-274). New York: Washington Square Press. Berliner, D. C. (1986). In pursuit of the expert pedagogue. Educational Researcher, 15(7), 5-13. Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (1997). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership (2nd ed.) San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Burlingame, M., & Sergiovanni, T. J. (1993). Some questions about school leadership and communication theory. Journal of Management Systems, 5(2), 51-61 Carter, K. (1990). Teachers’ knowledge and learning to teach. In W. R. Houston (Ed.), Handbook of research on teacher education (pp. 291-310). New York: Macmillan. DeCharms, P. (1968). Personal causation. New York: Academic Press. Freìre, P. (1998). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York: Continuum Publishing Company. Kagan, D. M. (1992). Professional growth among preservice and beginning teachers. Review of Educational Research, 62(2), 129-169. Lortie, D. C. (1977). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McDonald, J. P. (1992). Teaching: Making sense of an uncertain craft. New York: Teachers College Press. McGregor, D. M. (1960). The human side of enterprise. New York: McGraw-Hill. Sarason, S. E. (1999). Teaching as a performing art. New York: Teachers College Press. Sergiovanni, T. J. (1994, May). Organizations or communities? Changing the metaphor changes the theory. Educational Administration Quarterly, 30(2), 214-226. Simon, Y. R. (1951/1993). Philosophy of democratic government. Notre Dame, IN: The University of Notre Dame Press. Taylor, F. W. (1967). The principles of scientific management. New York: W. W. Norton. Tyler, R. W. (1949). Principles of curriculum and instruction. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Vaill, P. B. (1986). The purposing of high-performing systems. In T. J. Sergiovanni & J. E. Corbally (Eds.), Leadership and organizational culture (pp. 89-104). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Wasley, P. A. (1994). Stirring the chalkdust: Tales of teachers changing classroom practice. New York: Teachers College Press. |
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