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EDU 8672 |
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| Bookmarks: The organizational and cultural reality instructional leaders face... Curriculum meaning and school change... Thinking about instructional leadership...
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Soon after Schön detailed his conception of reflective practice in Educating the Reflective Practitioner (1991), many professors of educational leadership popularized the concept and some advocated that instructional leaders use reflective practice as a mechanism to improve classroom teaching and learning. As this argument has been framed in the ensuing decade, it is believed that as instructional leaders engage teachers in reflective practice, teachers will become better equipped not only to identify their personal practical knowledge and to clarify their philosophy of education but also to improve classroom teaching and student learning outcomes (Beyer, 1991; Brubacher, Case, & Reagan, 1994). Arguably, reflective practice may provide a useful¾if not powerful¾tool to improve how educators think about classroom teaching and improving student learning outcomes, as Dewey (1911) first asserted early in the 20th century. However, when reflective practice is extended beyond individual teachers in their classrooms to include also the larger community of teachers in professional discourse with one another, instructional leaders will have to confront some rather vexing challenges, not the least of which is changing a persistent school culture which isolates and insulates teachers from their colleagues (Lortie, 1975). Furthermore, silence about professional practice reigns supreme in this culture and stymies even the best efforts of those teachers who might otherwise be generally willing to engage in experimenting with new pedagogical methods (McDonald, 1999). Lastly, as Book (1994) notes, teacher learning involves unlearning as well as new learning. If teachers are to learn new ways of teaching, then they will make sense of it only as they are able to connect their new knowledge with what they already know and do in their classrooms and courageously discard what may have proven itself useful in the past but has outlasted its usefulness in the present. The organizational and cultural reality instructional leaders face... Much of the structure of schooling has been and continues to be organized in a way that obstructs the type of collegial interaction and sustained professional discourse characteristic of a profession. This is the structure McDonald calls the "grand coalition of prevailing ideology" (1999, p. 60), evidenced in an organizational structure that might well impress as "scientific" the likes of Frederick Taylor (1911) and his devotees but one that has transformed the interpersonal relationship which characterizes teaching into an impersonal, mechanistic process of knowledge transmission. Further, schools have been transformed into knowledge factories where instructors make rote, immediate decisions rather than those authentic, deliberative decisions that are the hallmark of good educators (Burlingame & Sergiovanni, 1993). In light of this all-pervasive structure, instructional leaders will find it very difficult to change the culture spawned by this structure over the decades, a culture in which teachers "do not seek to invite others into the classroom to be observed, advised, or criticized" (Sarason, 1999, p. 54). In short, instructional leaders will have to confront and deal with both organizational structure and a school culture where teachers prefer to be left alone with their students and remain unchallenged about their professional judgments. Moreover, if having teachers learn to be more comfortable in inviting others into their classroom presents a challenge to instructional leaders, then getting teachers to leave their classrooms and, furthermore, to narrate their experiences to others (some of whom they may not know at all) may well present a fundamental impediment to any instructional leader who is actually interested in changing this culture. Confronting this reality, the individual charged with improving curriculum, teaching, and learning might well wonder: How will I ever get this group of teachers individually and collectively to reflect not only upon their experience and to narrate it to others but also to evaluate their professional efficacy as colleagues? As McDonald notes, overcoming this impediment "requires finding ways [for teachers] to put aside...pretensions and fears" (1992, p.12). Sarason's metaphor of "the teacher as a performing artist" offers one means to expand how instructional leaders might puzzle through and resolve these vexing challenges. Whereas many¾if not most¾teachers tend not to value engaging others in critically evaluating their work and their world (Lieberman & Miller, 1991), artists on the other hand actively "seek coaches who serve as supportive critics and teachers....[a]nd in all instances performing artists...carefully and eagerly observe and learn from more experienced performers" (1999, p. 63). By expanding conceptions about teaching to be shaped by the performing arts, Sarason offers instructional leaders a metaphor to frame how they might proceed toward achieving the goal of improving classroom teaching and student learning outcomes by re-envisioning how they enact their organizational role. Curriculum meaning and school change... Fundamental to this argument is the notion that professional growth and development is a consequence neither of pre-service teacher education programs nor of cleverly designed district-wide or school in-service training programs but rather of teachers who reconstruct "curriculum meaning" (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988). Similar to Sergiovanni's (1986) notion of reflective practice where practitioners examine the antecedents and theories of practice impacting actual classroom practice episodes, reconstructing curriculum meaning focuses teachers directly upon their classroom experience. The purpose for engaging in this reflective activity is not only to recall experience and to criticize it in the privacy of one's reflective moments, but also to provide teachers content for narratives that identify what they are learning about teaching. Through activities like "reading teaching" (McDonald, 1992), keeping and sharing journals, and letter writing, teachers can explicate the content for rich narrative accounts that identify what they have learned that teaching truly is, what teaching truly involves, and what it really means to learn about teaching. Thus, as teachers grasp the meanings that classroom phenomenon present them, "the past shapes the future through the medium of the situation, and the future shapes the past through the stories [teachers] will tell to account for and explain [their situation]. Where [teachers] have been and where [teachers] are going interact to make meaning of the situations in which [teachers] find [themselves]" (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988, p. 9). At the same time, the performing artist metaphor expands conceptions about professional growth and development beyond this self-sealing, private activity because performing artists do not perform in isolation from others. Rather, they interact with a variety of other people (for example, other performing artists, the audience, critics) to evaluate and adjust their performance as is necessary. In light of this dialogue involving the performing artist and a variety of audiences, the challenge instructional leaders confront involves engendering in teachers a keen interest not only to hear but also to value the feedback that others¾including the audience of their students¾can provide so that, as teachers reflect upon the feedback provided and evaluate their experience, teachers will devise and experiment with new pedagogical methods in order to improve their performance. However, all of this requires instructional leaders who are capable of fostering school cultures wherein teachers trust others enough so as to disclose their narratives, especially through storytelling (Wasley, 1994) that does not devolve into the sharing of "war stories" from "the trenches". Then, as the community of teachers engage more deeply in professional discourse, they can develop an experientially-based curriculum rationale that ultimately will serve as the foundation for their further professional growth and development. Or, so the argument goes. Book (1994) suggests that instructional leaders consider teacher learning from a constructivist perspective, thinking about staff development as a means for linking schoolwide curriculum development with teacher learning. Through symmetrical transactional communication experiences¾which are aimed at negotiating and overcoming differences that potentially can interfere with and obscure communication¾instructional leaders can forge common understandings about curriculum and instruction with teachers. According to Book, staff development "should help teachers to examine what knowledge, beliefs, values, and experiences they bring with them, as well as how their previous understanding can promote learning the new ideas or practices offered to them" (p. 33). Viewing teachers as "students of teaching," instructional leaders "should engage teachers in instructional discussions about their current views, and should adapt to the preconceptions held by the teachers" (p. 33) so that new learning can occur more quickly than the original learning was acquired. The process of reconstructing curriculum meaning (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988) and engaging in symmetrical transactional communication with teachers (Book, 1994) provides a means for instructional leaders to attack the recalcitrant organizational structure and pervasive culture associated with schooling. Rather than imposing rules, maxims, and principles upon teachers to direct classroom practice, instructional leaders can engage teachers in the recovery and reconstruction of curriculum meaning and, as they do so, instructional leaders can offer teachers multiple opportunities to unlock their individual and collective potential (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988).Viewing professional growth and development from this perspective, learning to teach is driven not so much by extrinsic professional development programs (e.g., in-service training) aimed at improving defective teachers. No, teacher growth and development¾where teachers actually learn to teach at levels appropriate to each teacher's interest, talent, and creativity (Berliner, 1988)¾is driven more by each teacher's intrinsic desire to engage in a careful and sustained study of one's experience in classrooms and to share one's professional learning with one's colleagues. Critical to professional growth and development, then, is not the formal and informal curriculum per se but the teacher's experience of curriculum, evidenced in the telling and retelling of the stories of teaching which narrate what teachers have learned about teaching, what these matters imply for professional practice, as well as how these discoveries can serve to bind teachers together as members of an educational community, one that exudes a "shared purpose" (Barnard, 1968) animating all of its activities. In this sense, instructional leadership is prescriptive but not in the structural sense where instructional leaders identify the "one best way to teach" and, then, "clone" master teachers. Instead, instructional leaders are most interested in identifying and understanding the decisions that teachers are making about how to implement curriculum in their classrooms, whether and to what degree these decisions effect psychological change in their students (Tyler, 1949), and what teachers are learning about teaching as they teach (Berliner, 1986; Carter, 1990; Kagan, 1992). For this form of professional learning to transpire, however, it is incumbent upon instructional leaders to provide teachers the time¾the truly valuable and scarce resource¾they need for personal reflection upon their experience so that each teacher becomes capable of reconstructing those experiences that have led to one's learning. Only then will each teacher be capable of reconfiguring the past and creating purpose in the future through discourse with one's colleagues (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988, p. 24). As noted earlier, this is only one dimension of the instructional leadership agenda, the dimension that focuses on changing¾where necessary¾what transpires within classrooms. Instructional leadership is also concerned with a second agenda, one that focuses upon opening the closed doors of classrooms (Lieberman & Miller, 1991; Lortie, 1975) in the overall effort to form a community of educators who genuinely seek to understand and to expand what they know about teaching. Although many educators may be somewhat embarrassed to admit it, learning about teaching is not a matter of quantum physics. Instead, learning about teaching is more of a process of "muddling through" (Lindblom, 1979) one's questions, intuitions, experiments in practice, and feedback from students wherein a teacher achieves some stasis of curricular and instructional coherence in one's classroom. These are the significant matters that teachers must reconstruct, that is, if teaching and learning are be perfected. Indeed, it would be much easier for teachers if instructional leaders were to leave classroom doors closed and to allow teachers to have little or nothing to do with one another. However, discourse not silence and interaction among citizens not isolation is what characterizes a vibrant democracy (Simon, 1993). Thinking about instructional leadership... As instructional leaders survey the recalcitrant organizational structure and persistent culture present in their schools, they need to consider how they will motivate their teachers to move beyond the comfortable confines of their classrooms and to plumb the depths of their experience. Connelly and Clandinin suggest that "storytelling"¾sharing one's professional learnings by relating the plot, setting, theme, character, and conflict associated with classroom practice¾can function as a means to foster more substantive discourse and greater consensus among teachers as they identify the "commonplaces" associated with teaching (1988, p. 84). But, it must be remembered, the purpose for which schools exist is not simply to communicate the content associated with a static curriculum. Rather, schools exist for an important social purpose, namely, to open students to a broad array of human experiences (Foshay, 2000) so that each student will be capable of assuming the responsibilities associated with responsible adult citizenship in a pluralistic democracy. The notion of engaging teachers in storytelling, then, is not to have teachers share war stories from the "trenches" and "foxholes." Rather, storytelling provides a means for instructional leaders only to forge a majoritarian consensus about curricular commonplaces but also, and more substantively, to foster a less totalitarian and more democratic school community. This school community may not be structured quite as "scientifically" as Taylor's (1911) devotees would prefer but one which¾through its graduates¾makes a mighty contribution to the perfection of a democratic society. All of this suggests that instructional leadership is not so much a matter of specialized, technical expertise, especially in curriculum, instruction, and learning. No, instructional leadership seems to be concerned more so with the instructional leader's character. Since changing an organizational structure and culture, at least insofar as this endeavor involves changing how people view reality (McWhinney, Webber, Smith, & Novokowsky, 1997), instructional leadership requires the ability to persuade others to consider alternative conceptions and adapt as necessary, a character that others trust especially in situations that are indeterminate, and an ego that experiences immense personal gratification as others exhibit leadership. To this end:
Connelly and Clandinin (1988) ground their approach to school reform in experience, in particular, the experience that teachers have in their classrooms as they implement and reform curriculum. This change in focus about what the word "curriculum" denotes¾away from viewing curriculum as a static document and toward viewing curriculum as a dynamic series of experiences¾not only provides a means for instructional leaders to begin opening the closed doors of classrooms. In addition, and perhaps unwittingly, the authors also provide instructional leaders a process through which to envision organizational and cultural change. Rather than supervising and evaluating teachers in an impersonal and mechanistic sort of way, instructional leaders might envision directing their energies toward forming and shaping a community of educators. In these schools where women and men are genuinely interested in and intrinsically motivated to understand what they experience as they teach, they not only recover and reconstruct curriculum meaning but also plan new curricula that better meet their students' learning needs. As these instructional leaders engage their teachers in more authentic and deliberate decision making (Burlingame & Sergiovanni, 1993), they stimulate the design of an organizational structure and school culture wherein teachers function more perfectly as members of a democratic school community and the school better fulfills its broad social purpose. Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1974). Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Aristotle. (1958). The Nicomachean ethics (W. D. Ross, Trans.). In J. D. Kaplan (Ed.), The pocket Aristotle (pp. 158-274). New York: Simon & Schuster. Barnard, C. I. (1968). The functions of the executive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Berliner, D. C. (1986). In pursuit of the expert pedagogue. Educational Researcher, 15(7), 5-13. Beyer, L. E. (1991). Teacher education, reflective inquiry and moral action. In B. R. Tabachnich & K. M. Zeichner (Eds.), Issues and practices in inquiry-oriented teacher education (pp. 113-29). Bristol, PA: The Falmer Press. Book, C. L. (1994). Implications of transactional communication and the constructivist view of learning for teaching and staff development. Journal of Management Systems, 6(1), 26-36. Brubacher, J. W., Case, C. W., & Reagan, T. G. (1994). Becoming a reflective educator: How to build a culture of inquiry in the schools. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. 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. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1988). Teachers as curriculum planners: Narratives of experience. New York: Teachers College Press. Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. Boston: D.C. Heath & Company. Fisher, R., & Ury, W. (1981). Getting to yes. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Foshay, A. W. (2000). The curriculum: Purpose, substance, practice. New York: Teachers College Press. Kagan, D. M. (1992). Professional growth among preservice and beginning teachers. Review of Educational Research, 62(2), 129-169. Lieberman, A., & Miller, A. (1991). Teachers—their work and their world: Implications for school improvement. New York: Teachers College Press. Lindblom, C. E. (1979). Still muddling, not yet through. Public Administration Review, 39, 517-526. McDonald, J. P. (1992). Teaching: Making sense of an uncertain craft. New York: Teachers College Press. McWhinney, W., Webber, J. B., Smith, D. M., & Novokowsky, B. J. (1997). Creating paths of change: Managing issues and resolving problems in organizations (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publication, Inc. Schön, D. A. (1991). Educating the reflective practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Sergiovanni, T. J., & Starratt, R. J. (1988). Supervision: Human perspectives (4th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. Simon, Y. R. (1951/1993). Philosophy of democratic government. Notre Dame, IN: The University of Notre Dame Press. Taylor, F. W. (1911/1967). 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. Wasley, P. A. (1994). Stirring the chalkdust: Tales of teachers changing classroom practice. New York: Teachers College Press. |
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