Teachable Moments and the Science of Education

Greg Seals

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367587673
• eBook ISBN: 9781351064248
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book develops a general theory of autonomous teaching by examining a mysterious educational idea: the teachable moment. By formulating an understanding of the teachable moment as predicated upon 'educational energy, ' this book takes up John Dewey's view of teaching to articulate a law-like, scientifically oriented pedagogical theory. By offering a testable hypothesis about effective teaching through an innovative reading of Dewey's law, this book also provides insights into changes in school practice and schooling policy consonant with an understanding of teaching as a science.

1
Developing a Winning Strategy for the Battle at the Ampersand

Curriculum vs. Instruction

“Let teachers teach!” That is a battle cry of sorts sometimes raised by teachers when in conversation about the circumstances of their work. Standardized testing, corporatized management of schools, increasingly scripted and routinized (AKA drill and kill) teaching are among the enemies that surround and hound teachers who are trying their best to make lessons meaningful for diverse student bodies. Alan Trent aptly describes the battle in which teachers are persistently engaged as “The Battle at the Ampersand.”¹ The ampersand at issue is the “&” found between Curriculum & Instruction, between the two very different matters of what students learn and how students learn it. According to Trent, the outcome of this battle will decide the fate of teaching as a profession; will decide, that is, whether the word “professional” appropriately describes the occupational category “teacher” and whether or not teacher voice fades into curriculum mimicry.

The victory condition for teachers in the Battle at the Ampersand is instructional autonomy. Instructional autonomy will be achieved when teachers are understood to be entrusted, as an inherent part of their professional lives, with the responsibility of determining and deploying, under their own auspices, instructional methods that facilitate learning among the students in their classes. Instructional autonomy for teachers correlates with world class status for schools. In addition, elevated levels of instructional autonomy perpetuate superior results for teachers in those teacher-autonomous, world class schools. Teachers who enjoy instructional autonomy also enjoy increased job satisfaction, greater self-efficacy, lower levels of stress and improved opportunities to capitalize on teachable moments.² With advantages such as these to be gained, developing an effective strategy for achieving victory on the instructional side of the Battle at the Ampersand becomes a matter of immense importance. However, as curriculum constantly threatens to swallow instruction whole, the outcome of the battle does not look promising for teachers.

If teachers are to win the Battle at the Ampersand, we must be clear about what teacher autonomy entails. That way we will know both what teachers are fighting to win and when they have won it. Lorin Anderson makes a compelling case that instructional autonomy involves at least four elements, all of which must be in place for teachers genuinely to claim to be autonomous in their workplaces. First, teacher autonomy must create a common language for teachers and school administrators to speak when discussing obstacles to and facilitators of effective instruction. Second, teacher autonomy must enhance the professional status of teachers. Third, we must be able to talk about teacher autonomy as something teachers earn. Fourth, teacher autonomy must contribute to improved understanding of the instructional decisions teachers make as they daily determine best instructional practice regarding their students.³

Adapters vs. Subscribers

Heidi Stevenson discusses the divisive dilemma facing teachers when they make instructional decisions in the absence of a general strategy to guide their instructional decision making. She calls it the decision to adapt or subscribe.⁴ Adapters regularly modify district mandated curriculum in ways that meet the needs of their students. These modifications include supplementing the curriculum provided by the school district. Subscribers strictly adhere to or make only rare and minor modifications to district mandated curriculum. Stevenson describes these differences in practice between adapters and subscribers as at heart differences in the values they hold. Adapters value creativity and exploration as essential elements of the educational enterprise. It is tough for them to understand the strictness of adherence practiced by subscribers. Subscribers, for their part, value stated academic standards above all else and have grave concerns that adapters are leaving out important lessons, especially at the level of the basics, when they explore curricular material rather than promote recitation of it.

Stevenson further conceptualizes this value difference between adapters and subscribers as a difference in practical theory. Practical theory is defined by Stevenson as beliefs teachers hold that guide their instructional practice. The two stances towards the curriculum described by the labels “Adapter” and “Subscriber” form part of the practical theories of teachers. Stevenson points out that both adapters and subscribers among the teachers she studied held high academic expectations for their students. However, subscribers showed a strong inclination towards voluntary collaboration on lesson development only with other subscribers, just as adapters strongly preferred working only with other adapters. Thus, shared practical theory promotes informal collaboration while disagreements about practical theory erode informal collaboration.

This bedrock fact of value difference between adapters and subscribers is what makes the choice to adapt or subscribe both dilemmatic and divisive. When the rationale for a decision begins with a value statement ideology dangerously precedes theory formation. That is, the reason for proceeding as an adapter or a subscriber is how a teacher feels about adapting or subscribing rather than what a teacher thinks about the usefulness of adapting or subscribing as a teaching technique appropriate to some cases or other. The ideological stalemate of adapting or subscribing is made all the worse by the fact that value statements may be neither true nor false. They may simply make a claim about how someone believes or feels things should be. It is as if adapters are shouting, “Hooray for adapting!” and “Boo on subscribing!” while subscribers shout back at them just as loudly and just as earnestly, “Boo on adapting!” and “Hooray for subscribing!” This leaves little opportunity for meaningful dialog between the two opposing sides.

Some stories known to me of adapters and subscribers may make clearer the difficulties that the distinction between adapting and subscribing creates for teacher autonomy. Consider two clear cases of adapters at work taken from my son’s experience as a student in public school: 1) On a warm, humid day in mid-May New Orleans my son and his classmates returned from recess to their fourth grade classroom, which had no air conditioning, to find that their teacher had arranged a few desks in the corner of the room so that a small area was cordoned off. The teacher said that they were not doing spelling today after recess like usual but were going to do their Social Studies lesson instead. Moving one of the desks to permit students to enter the cordoned off area, the teacher asked all the students to stand together in the small space. Already hot and sticky from playing outside, the students began to complain about the proximity of their classmates and expressed their desire to cool off by taking their regular seats. That’s when the teacher began the lesson on the Middle Passage, the brutal, sometimes fatal trip from Africa to the Americas that slaves were forced to take by their captors. The rearrangement of the classroom and the schedule, both adaptations to the curriculum, permitted the students in some small measure to feel the conditions aboard the slave ships in a way that no amount of discussion or lecture or reading about those conditions could have provided them. 2) Similarly, one day my son’s seventh grade Earth Science teacher met students at the classroom door and told them that the regular seating arrangement was off for the day and students could sit where they liked. When students entered the room, they found the desks arranged in roughly concentric circles with large piles of candy on desks at the center of the room and smaller and smaller piles of candy on desks farther and farther from the center. When everyone was seated the teacher entered the room and asked how students had chosen their seats. The desks filled up from the center outward. When asked to move from the center to the periphery, but to leave their candy on the desks they were vacating, students in the center-most seats vigorously objected. That’s when the teacher launched into the lesson on the structure of the atom as a set of countervailing, subatomic forces and explained that the students had to some extent emulated the interplay of the particles the lesson concerned.

These stories of two adapters stand in stark contrast to two stories of subscribers, one more from my son’s experience as a student in public school and one from my experience as a teacher of teachers: 1) By the time my son was in eighth grade we had moved to Georgia. Eighth graders in Georgia took a course in Georgia History. A lesson on the meaning of the nickname “cracker” as applied to Georgians was part of the curriculum. Students in this majority Black school were fully aware of and interested in discussing pejorative meanings of the term as well as its historically appropriate and curriculum approved reference to Georgian cowboys in early America. However, the teacher, by the way, a person of African-American descent, cut off all discussion of possible meanings of the term other than the one stated in the textbook by telling the class that there would be a question about the term “cracker” on the test and if anyone answered any way other than the way described in the book, they would get that question wrong. 2) Another story, perhaps of the ultimate subscriber, comes from my experience teaching in-service teachers. While teaching a lesson in part devoted to discerning the limits of adapting and subscribing among my graduate students I introduced a set of radical ideas for class discussion to see how the students might wish to deal with them. Among those radical ideas we were discussing was, perhaps per impossible, a district mandated curriculum that directly challenged heterosexual privilege. On the model under discussion schools were now required to enact policy and teach lessons with a preference for homosexuality rather than, as things are now, a preference for heterosexuality. Students were hemming and hawing. They wanted to keep their jobs but were uncertain about taking on such a contested topic in their classes. A very opinionated student arrived a little late, listened to the discussion for a while, and then went into a lengthy rant about how there are some things you just can’t ask teachers to teach, how uncomfortable teaching such things would make everyone feel, the controversies that would arise, and …, etc. When the rant ended, I mentioned that the student, because she had arrived a bit late, had missed out on one of the conditions of the discussion which stated that the homosexuality curriculum had been mandated by the school district. Without blinking an eye, without skipping a beat, and to the merriment of both classmates and me the student responded, “Oh! Well. OK. No problem then.”

The Need for a General Theory of Teaching

Now these stories are not designed to put adapters in a good light and subscribers in a bad one (or vice versa). Rather, the stories are designed to point out that without a general strategy to guide their decision making the decision to adapt or subscribe seems to be made prior to considerations about intelligent practice. In discussion of the best way to proceed in class, both sides leave possibly helpful considerations off the table. That is the consequence of adapters choosing to work only with other adapters and subscribers choosing to work only with other subscribers. Issues of how to proceed most usefully when teaching, are entirely encapsulated in the positions adopted by individual teachers or groups of like-minded teachers, rather than in deliberations informed by considerations broader or deeper than personal or interpersonal preference.

What we need to know is what educationally relevant reasons (beyond the mere preference for adapting or subscribing) teachers can bring to bear when actually deciding rather than merely choosing to adapt or subscribe. A potentially useful way to explore a set of reasons for making decisions about adapting or subscribing to the demands of the curriculum is to develop a general theory of teaching. As John Dewey has pointed out, theories connect isolated facts into

a system, a science. The practitioner who knows the system and its laws is evidently in possession of a powerful instrument for observing and interpreting what goes on before him. This intellectual tool affects his attitudes and modes of response in what he does. Because the range of understanding is deepened and widened he can take into account remote consequences which were originally hidden from view and hence ignored in his actions. Greater continuity is introduced; he does not isolate situations and deal with them in separation as he was compelled to do when ignorant of connecting principles. At the same time, his practical dealings become more flexible. Seeing more relations he sees more possibilities, more opportunities. He is emancipated from the need of following tradition and special precedents. His ability to judge being enriched, he has a wider range of alternatives to select from in dealing with individual situations.⁵

Certainly, teachers who share a general theory of teaching can claim to have met the conditions for autonomy laid down by Anderson. That is, they may be said to have 1) a shared language with which to discuss issues of instruction, 2) a knowledge base essential to their status as professionals, 3) an autonomy earned as they develop expertise in use of the theory to improve instruction for their students, and 4) access to an explanatory account of the instructional decisions they make as educators. The main goal of this book is to develop a general theory of teaching that provides an account of teacher autonomy that meets Anderson’s four conditions.

Anderson’s conditions for useful teacher autonomy connect to a set of questions raised by Stevenson as she considers the deep, seemingly irreconcilable differences between adapters and subscribers. Stevenson wonders 1) if there is a preferred curriculum stance for teachers to take, 2) if a teacher’s stance towards the curriculum ought to influence hiring and firing decisions, 3) if teacher education programs should seek to influence curriculum stance, and 4) if professional development needs to prescribe curriculum stance.⁶ As you may have already guessed, in due course I will answer all of these questions in the affirmative by making the case that teacher autonomy necessarily involves teachers in exercising a certain kind of adaptive thinking about curriculum.

Development of the theory begins at a possibly surprising place. It begins with examination of a most revered and mysterious educational idea: the teachable moment. I will argue, contrary to received wisdom, that it is possible to create teachable moments. Once it is established that it is possible to create teachable moments, I can then argue that adept adaptation of curriculum to create teachable moments is the hallmark of the great teacher. Once there is a hallmark of the great teacher, I will be able to revisit a variety of seemingly intractable issues that haunt educational thinking—such as teacher professionalism, accountability, academic freedom, and tenure—and work my way through them resolving each in terms of a general theory of teaching. A general theory of teaching aids in resolution of these issues because the theory puts ideology in second place to what ought to come first in the professional lives of teachers: the development of intelligent teaching practice. However, the first step in developing a winning strategy for teachers in the Battle at the Ampersand is rethinking our concept of teachable moments. The next chapter offers that reconsideration.

Notes

1. Allen Trent, “The Battle at the Ampersand: Instructional Autonomy and the Teaching Profession,” Democracy and Education 18, no. 2 (April 2009): 26–32.

2. Trent, “The Battle at the Ampersand” cites the following studies: L. Carolyn Pearson and William Moomaw, “The Relationship between Teacher Autonomy and Stress, Work Satisfaction, Empowerment, and Professionalism,” Educational Research Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2005): 37–53 and Andreas Schleicher and Vivien Stewart, “Learning from World Class Schools,” Educational Leadership 6, no. 2 (2008): 44–51. See also, James Nehring, “Cure for Teacher Shortage: Let Teachers Teach,” Education Week 18, no. 18 (January 13, 1999): 38.

3. Lorin W. Anderson, “The Decline of Teacher Autonomy: Tears or Cheers?,” International Review of Education 33 (1987): 357–373.

4. Heidi Stevenson, “To Adapt or Subscribe,” Issues in Teacher Education 17, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 75–95.

5. Dewey, The Sources of a Science of Education, 10.

6. Stevenson, “To Adapt or Subscribe,” 91.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Educational Scarcity
• 1 Developing a Winning Strategy for the Battle at the Ampersand
• 2 Expanding the Idea of “Teachable Moments”
• 3 Focusing on Planned Teachable Moments
• 4 Creating Educational Energy
• 5 Interpreting Dewey’s Law
• 6 Humanizing Dewey’s Law
• 7 Making Sense of a Science of Teaching
• 8 Teachers Win!
• 9 A Well-Functioning Ethnographic Infrastructure
• 10 Teacher Professionalism and Teacher Accountability
• 11 Love, Intimacy, and Tenure
• 12 Teachers’ Mythography
• Conclusion: Educational Abundance
• References
• Index