Leading from the Inside Out

Expanded Roles for Teachers in Equitable Schools

David Grubb, Lynda Tredway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594518362
• eBook ISBN: 9781317256823
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book proposes that the collective responsibility of teachers as classroom and school leaders working together to solve their own problems provides the fulcrum of school change. It makes the case that teachers and school leaders do not operate in a vacuum, but rather, they work within the larger context of policy and other social influences. Grubb and Tredway provide the building blocks of history, policy, and social analysis that are necessary if teachers are to be effective in the collective school a place where adults thrive as learners and are able to co-create joyful learning experiences for children and youth. By encouraging teachers to move out of the individual classroom and to think critically and institutionally about the schools they would like to work in, about their own responsibilities for creating such schools, about the range of policies from outside the school and how they can influence those policies rather than being subjected to them this book shows that a teacher s influence is not limited to the classroom and students, but can significantly shape and inform external policies and decisions."

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

The Personal and the Institutional

• Alternative Models of Schools

• The Purposes of Schooling

• Equity and Inequality

• The Issues for This Book

ON ANY GIVEN DAY, over one-quarter of the children and adults in the United States are going to school or working in a school or district. The ways schools and the people in them interact are enormously important to their daily lives, as well as to the futures of children and of the country. The lion’s share of these adults are teachers in classrooms, and the contention of this book is that any lasting change must come from the inside out—from teachers acting together inside their schools and then moving outside the school to other arenas of advocacy and political participation. Even within their schools, teachers can play new roles, working with one another and with leaders to develop equitable schools: schools that prepare all their students for the civic, community, family, occupational, and intellectual roles they will play as adults in the twenty-first century of increasing complexity. We sometimes call these collective or collaborative schools, because we are convinced by the evidence throughout this book that equitable schools cannot be created without the collective actions of teachers as classroom and school leaders, working together and working with other leaders to solve their own problems. Of course, teachers and leaders operate within the larger context of policy and other social influences, and educators need to know how these external influences on schools work if they are to act outside as well as inside schools to support change. This book therefore provides the building blocks of history, policy, and social analysis that are necessary for turning teachers into the teacher-leaders needed for equitable and collective schools—places where adults thrive as learners and are able in turn to create joyful learning experiences for children and youth.

Educators often think of schooling as a question of personal relationships, in which the connection between teacher and student is at the heart of learning; a common phrase is “it’s all about relationships.” A current phrase for a strong teacher is “warm demander,” meaning that the teacher builds supportive relationships with students at the same time he or she maintains high expectations for student learning. Within this perspective, principals and other administrators stress the personal characteristics of the teachers they hire, their energy and charisma, insisting that “good teachers are born, not made.” The search in school reform for “good teaching” focuses on identifying the individual characteristics of effective teachers—whether they have certain credentials or not, or whether years of experience matter. We give out awards to individual good teachers—to district- or state-level Teachers of the Year—as if “good teaching” were the result of individual dedication and ability, rather than rewarding schools that have nurtured larger numbers of effective teachers. And, for those readers who are new teachers, virtually all teacher preparation focuses on the capacities of individuals—on mastery of particular teaching techniques, on ways of relating to students, sometimes on classroom management as the responsibility of the individual teacher rather than the responsibility of a school for creating a certain climate.

Cross-Reference See Book 3, Chapter 2 on the theory and practice of fostering relationships with students.

None of this is wrong, of course: we need skilled teachers who have mastered a range of teaching practices and who have the personal characteristics to empathize with and support students personally as well as intellectually. But it’s incomplete, because teachers work their magic within institutions with certain characteristics. The very fact that we have people called “teachers” who are credentialed based on their learning in teacher preparation programs—rather than hired “off the street,” as instructors in adult education and job training still are, or chosen for their moral character as teachers once were—is an institutional development that has taken place over more than a century. The limited responsibilities that teachers in most schools have for what happens in the classroom—but not for budget and curriculum decisions—are again an institutional condition that developed over time. The description of teachers as “warm demanders” suggests standards that determine the expectations and demands of teachers, and these usually come from outside the classroom—from a math department articulating its common requirements, or state standards embedded in accountability exams, or the standards articulated by disciplinary groups like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) or English (NCTE).

Focus point

Schools include other individuals called “principals”—short for “principal teacher,” the nineteenth-century title—with different roles and responsibilities and their own forms of credentialing. Many policies affecting the classroom—about curricula, class size, the nature of teacher preparation, the length of the typical class, when school starts in the morning and stops in the afternoon, the school year—are either historical decisions or ones that have evolved over time (for example, the school year is based on nineteenth-century agricultural rhythms). Districts and states have imposed their own layers of decisions, covering levels of funding, the distribution of funding among rich and poor districts, curriculum, and high school graduation requirements. Anyone who has taught in a school receiving federal funds knows about burdensome federal mandates: meeting targets for Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and following the rigid procedures required for special education students are but two examples. These institutional constraints and practices are part of what David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) call the “grammar of schooling,” the basic rules and norms by which schools operate—all so familiar that we often fail to think about their particulars.

So schools are about people and relationships, but they are not all about people; they are also about institutions. At least in modern societies, the informal or “natural” places for learning—families, where sons learn from fathers and daughters from their mothers, or apprenticeships, where inexperienced workers learn from masters—don’t work the ways they did previously, and in some cases (such as in abusive families or exploitive firms) they do not work well at all. In many cases, they are inequitable and inconsistent as well. Therefore, as Robert Bellah and his colleagues (1985) remind us in trying to counter the extreme individualism of American thinking, “we live through institutions”: we create institutions within which individuals can exercise their individual capacities. Tool 1-A provides an exercise in which teachers and leaders can confront the role of individuals within institutions, starting from Bellah’s ideas.

Schools are about people and relationships, but they are not all about people; they are also about institutions.

This book discusses the institutional issues that confront teachers, teacher-leaders, and even principals as they wrestle with how best to support their development as teachers and as leaders. The issues we raise are therefore not the classroom-level problems of how to teach, how to motivate students, or how to develop supportive personal relations, although we touch on those. (Such fundamental issues are the focus of other books within this series, as well as of teacher preparation and induction programs.) Instead, our focus is on how teachers can move out of the individual classroom and think collectively about the institution: for example, What schools would they like to work in? What responsibilities do they have for creating such schools? What policies are established outside the school, and how can they influence those policies rather than simply being subjected to them? Our image of a teacher is not someone whose influence is limited to the classroom and students; such an image is an old-fashioned, century-old conception. Rather, we envision schools where teachers vigorously engage in their profession in and out of the classroom, take leadership positions on issues within the school as teacher-leaders, and participate in influencing those external policies (including school reforms) that influence schools. Rather than reinforcing one of the great divides in education—between teachers in their classrooms and individuals outside who may influence classrooms without understanding them well—we prefer to envision roles for teachers that bridge this divide.

“We live through institutions”: we create institutions within which individuals can exercise their individual capacities.

In this chapter we first articulate three different kinds of schools—traditional, entrepreneurial, and collective—partly to clarify how different schools can be, and partly to outline the different roles teachers and leaders can play. We then examine two of the most fundamental issues surrounding all schools: their purposes, or why we create these special institutions; and the equity of schools, or who will be included in and well served by them. Teachers may have their own ideas about these ultimate goals, and these may shape individual practices, or even influence where, how, and whom they teach. One teacher may emphasize social studies and citizenship, another science for a technological society; still others may stress the special needs of immigrant students or African American males. But the ability to modify individual classrooms in these ways is limited by various institutional pressures, ranging from required curricula to state-imposed testing. Recognizing who makes these external decisions is an important step to changing them. In this chapter in particular, then, we raise fundamental questions with which all educators must wrestle. These questions involve the deepest values about our society, and every generation—indeed, every school and every teacher—must come up with its own answers.

ALTERNATIVE MODELS OF SCHOOLS

Even though schools are institutions with particular practices and norms, these institutions take many different forms, and they can certainly change over time. Americans have many different images of schools, some outdated, some more recent. One of the first was the Little Red Schoolhouse, rooted in the local community as the center of town life, with its ability to teach all ages of students in a single classroom but with a teacher only slightly more educated than her students. Moving forward in time, a different image arises—of the urban school with a distinct and imposing architecture, by now with separate classrooms for different ages and grades, with desks bolted to the floor in neat rows designed for students to pay rapt attention to the teacher in the front of the class—the architecture of the teacher-centered classroom. Another image is the well-funded suburban school, often one-story, with different buildings for different purposes (the science labs, the gym, vocational workshops), set on a massive expanse of playing fields and parking, more like a shopping mall than a school (Powell, Farrar, and Cohen 1985). We often face the reality of urban schools, the “blackboard jungles”—dilapidated, overcrowded, with temporary buildings to handle the overflow, opaque windows, and fencing, more like prisons than nurturing places for kids. Occasionally there are beautifully designed schools, reflecting and promoting the instructional activities taking place inside, but these are rare. And various people have proposed schools without buildings, where students are placed in “internships” throughout the community, though these are rarer still.

Although there are almost limitless conceptions of what a school might be, in practice three major approaches to schools help us sort through the possibilities: (1) traditional or conventional, (2) entrepreneurial, and (3) collective or collaborative. We outline these not to suggest that these are the only three that educators might envision but to clarify that the three common approaches make very different assumptions about teachers, their preparation, and the level of teacher responsibility for developing practices.

The traditional or conventional model of schooling is the one most of us are familiar with. Emerging in the nineteenth century, it was reinforced by educational administrators between 1900 and 1920 as the most efficient approach to schooling the young. In this model, a clear hierarchy exists, from the district superintendents at the top, through various district administrators, to the principal as a middle manager, and to teachers subjected to the principal’s authority. Teachers concern themselves with instruction only but have no decision-making authority; they usually teach from curriculum materials adopted by the school board or the district office. There’s little discussion of principals as instructional leaders; instead, teachers carry out instruction in isolated classrooms, in buildings sometimes described as “egg carton” schools, with two rows of independent classes on each floor and each teacher and class within its own protective compartment. Principals concentrate on the school’s administrative tasks; their role in instruction is only to evaluate teachers for promotion and tenure (Cuban 1988). Most instruction is concerned with information transfer and the memorization of procedures, with little attention to conceptual development, independent thought, or what we would now call critical thinking; it is highly behaviorist in its assumptions and practices. (We assume that readers of this book are familiar with the language describing different approaches to instruction. Tool 1-B reviews these approaches, and the different ways they are described.) Observers from the 1890s until today describe these schools as intensely boring for most students, especially in high schools.

Traditional schools have coped with the increasing diversity of the student body—historically, with European immigrant children, working-class children coming to school (especially high school) in greater numbers, black migration from the South, and now many more Latino, Asian American, and other immigrant students as well as those with disabilities—by tracking them into different groups and teaching them differently. Tracking has been based on presumed vocational interests; on evidence of presumed “intelligence,” measured in different ways; or on casual assessments of moral character and dedication (both likely ways for class and racial biases to creep in). Although tracking need not lead to lower levels of resources or a basic skills curriculum, in practice lower-track students have taken most of their classes with other lower-track students, rather than with peers with greater ambition and ability; they have usually faced watered-down curricula and lower demands, particularly in the so-called general track and in vocational coursework; and they have often been assigned inexperienced or poor-quality teachers. Tracking has almost inevitably worked to increase inequality among students as they progress from grade to grade—one of the many mechanisms underlying the dynamic inequality we examine in Chapter 6.

Most of these characteristics are still present in schools, especially urban schools. Many principals operate in hierarchical and authoritarian ways, with teachers playing little role in the decisions that most affect their classrooms. Despite new rhetoric about principals as “instructional leaders,” there are still few consistent efforts to change the nature of instruction. Tracking still takes place, although the mechanisms may have changed; for example, though overtly vocational tracking in high schools has been reduced with the slow disappearance of traditional vocational education, other forms of tracking—like assignment to Advanced Placement, honors or college-bound tracks, and general tracks—accomplish the sam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Foreword
• 1 Introduction: The Personal and the Institutional
• 2 Thinking About Teacher Leadership: New Roles and Responsibilities in Collective Schools
• 3 Thinking About School Resources: Money and Effectiveness
• 4 Government Policy and Its Effects on Classrooms and Schools
• 5 Teacher Participation in Multiple Forms of School Reform
• 6 Achieving Social Justice and Equity
• References and Further Reading
• Index
• About the Authors