Teaching Transformed

Achieving Excellence, Fairness, Inclusion, And Harmony

Roland Tharp, Peggy Estrada, Stephanie Dalton, Lois Yamauchi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429976575
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The social organization of teaching and learning, particularly in classrooms, has not yet been recognized as a foundational element of education. However, social constructionist views of human development, cognition, and schooling, as well as the increasing challenges of cultural and linguistic diversity, make it a vital concern for teachers, researchers, and policymakers. This book introduces the concept of educational social organization, assembles the pertinent theory and evidence, and suggests future directions for training and policy. }The four goals of school reform--academic excellence, fairness, inclusion and harmony--can be achieved simultaneously, by transforming the final common pathway of all school reform--instructional activity. Teaching Transformed is a new vision for classrooms, based on consensus research findings and unified practice prescriptions, explained and justified by new developments in sociocultural theory,  and clarified by an explicit five-phase developmental guide  for achieving that transformation. Teaching Transformed is both visionary and practical, both theoretical and data-driven, and determined to create effective education for all students. Professional educators, parents, and any reader concerned with saving our schools will find this book necessary to understand our current plight, and to envision a realistic means of transformation.

1 Introduction and Overview

The Goals of Activity and Teaching

All school reform has one final common pathway: instructional activity. Whether reforms concentrate on school finance, class size limitations, preservice teacher education, national standards and goals, teacher induction, community partnerships, or any other piece of education, nothing will have any effect on student learning except as it operates through the teaching-and-learning activities at the classroom level. It is ironic that so much reform agitation occurs at other levels while so little attention is given to that common pathway toward learning. Approaching reform at other levels is like moving granite blocks around the construction site, at great expense and effort, with no clear image of what the building should be. If we had a vision of the ideal classroom, perhaps we could begin to move policies toward its construction.

This book's purpose is to convey a vision of the ideal classroom for today's students and academic standards. That vision is attainable now. Its elements are virtually consensual across educational research and development professionals, the national standards movement, and the principal theorists of education and social science. But because its elements are most often argued separately, few have seen the vision and its implications: that if we would just do what we all know to be best, the American classroom would be utterly transformed.

We attempt here to assemble these elements, articulate the vision, illustrate it by examples, expose its dynamics, elucidate its effects, present its supporting evidence, and explore its potential for transforming teaching in the school of the future. Our work is at the "classroom" level; not restricted to the physical classroom box, but "classroom" in the sense of the organized instructional activities that may extend outside the school building and even into the community The activities engaged in by teacher and students make up the common pathway that leads to educational success or failure. Our purpose is to present a system by which the pattern of activities can be designed to achieve simultaneously all the major goals of all branches of the school reform movement: academic Excellence, Fairness, Inclusion, and Harmony.

The Goals of Educational Reform: Excellence, Fairness, Inclusion, and Harmony

All school reformers are trying to get to better schooling, but we are a huge body, and it is not clear that we are marching to the same drum. Four goals—Excellence, Fairness, Inclusion, and Harmony—all shared at the abstract level, are emphasized by different groups, and it has not been clear that we have enough patience with each other even to find a shared rhythm. Often we are less a parade than a crowd in a square, swaying this way and that in response to rumor, fad, and big noises. Do our different goals actually constitute competing interests, even competing ideas of the good, so that national political debates must result in prioritizing, in winners and losers? This book proposes that schools made of the classrooms we will describe can achieve all four goals, simultaneously and maximally. Excellence, Fairness, Inclusion, and Harmony can make a music for marching and can play together to celebrate our shared arrival.

In retrospect, we can see that our current impetus for school reform began with the Civil Rights movement of thirty years ago and accelerated ten years later due to exploding immigration to the United States, which can also be seen as a part of the (post-World War II and still ongoing) migrations of world peoples in proportions not seen since the times of the movements of the Mongols and Huns. With the civil rights reforms, the United States accepted the legal and moral challenge of providing Fairness in education for all children; with the influx of so many more children of diverse cultures and languages, the challenge to teach effectively in harmonious schools became a crisis.

Fairness

Fairness began as the piercing fife-call to conscience of the Civil Rights movement; it became the rallying cry of the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The first effort to reform schools to serve minority students better was the movement to secure "equality." Making schools equal meant making them the same for all. Through busing, redistricting, or parental choice, schools were re-created in the image of the mainstream common tradition, a model never intended for a diverse student body. In the process, the traditional African-American school, a model with many merits and achievements, was virtually obliterated rather than drawn into the mix needed for true equity and Excellence. It is now generally agreed that "equality," in the sense of just-like-the-majority, was not Fair, did not adequately promote the value of Excellence in student academic learning, arid has not produced Inclusion or Harmony. Fairness has since been sought through "equity," which accepts equivalence, understood in more complex ways than merely as sameness, and which recognizes that in shared schools, equity means that changes must occur for everyone, if everyone is to learn.

Parallel to the movements for Fairness and equity was the "cultural compatibility" movement that attempted to improve academic Excellence by specific tailoring of schools for particular cultural populations. This effort collapses in the complexity of the urban multicultural, multilingual classroom. Those classrooms are microcosms of the nation, and their small societies of twenty or thirty students illustrate one point the nation must accept: Some solution must be found that works for everyone. Thus Fairness is interwoven with Excellence, and we see now that Fairness in redistributing the limited benefits of unreformed schooling is not going to produce Excellence for anyone. Although that might be Fair across groups, it is not "fair" to any of our children.

Excellence

The competitions of the Cold War, global marketing, and exploding technological advances have driven American policy to insist on more able school graduates. There has been little or no resistance to that bugle call; Excellence in academic attainment as a national goal is embraced widely, as is its operational definition: U.S. test scores superior to those of other nations. As policy rhetoric that definition may suffice, but a more inclusive and detailed goal of Excellence is required for classroom reform. The national standards movement is steadily defining the elements of Excellence in each major subject matter at each grade level. In this book, and in the design of activities we propose, Excellence means the achievement of each student's full potential. Few students achieve their full potential in classrooms that are part of the common tradition. Reform for Excellence should mean a tide on which all boats rise, whether they are gifted, challenged, or average.

How does the goal of Excellence relate to the goal of Inclusion? Fairness has been extended to a broad diversity of previously excluded students; they now "count," both morally and statistically, even though school reform has not yet embraced pedagogies that will provide them with excellent academic attainment. To achieve national Excellence, shall schools race on, accelerating attainment for those who can grasp it, in our classrooms of the common tradition? Would prioritizing Fairness delay Excellence, while everyone "catches up?" As this book illustrates, there are ways to achieve both goals, but at the present time it is not uncommon to suppose that Fairness and Excellence are in conflict.

Inclusion

Another part of school reform has focused on including all students in the school's social and instructional opportunities. In schools of the common tradition, access to instructional opportunities has been by no means equally distributed across all students. Those who were "tracked" into "trade," "industrial," or "commercial" curricula were not offered higher-level academic subjects; special education students were excluded from contact with (or even observation of) their mainstream peers; children who were speakers of languages other than English were immersed in a new language where they could swim or drown. Many reform movements have beaten the drum of Inclusion: untracking, mainstreaming, bilingual instruction. Inclusion seems a natural ally of Fairness, and their advocates have often made common cause. Inclusion as a reform theme extends beyond the school building. Including families, community organizations, and industry in school programs and policy is a broader manifestation of this overarching value—that everyone has a stake in schooling, and everyone should have access and a voice.

As we demonstrate, a reliable program for Excellence means that Excellence will be best achieved by the broadest possible Inclusion because the base of Excellence will be broadened. In the absence of such a program, many frustrated teachers, parents, and citizens—who may truly endorse both Excellence and Inclusion—nevertheless see those goals as in conflict, believing that the broader the sweep of Inclusion, the more the "able" are dragged down, and that is hardly Fair. How do we resolve this conflict? Which way do we turn?

Harmony

Harmony is our label for the one overall value shared by school reformers, although it is not a common term and is not necessarily recognized as a common value even by its many advocates. If schools are to be fair to all, highly educate all, and include all in educational opportunities and discussions, then the achievement of some form of shared values and rules of relationships and process, some reconciled community of common understanding, become the more indispensable as they become more elusive. In this sense, the pleaders for multiculturalism and the preachers of English-only instruction agree: Harmony is paramount. They see very different routes to its attainment, the one emphasizing a shared language to build a shared national community, the other emphasizing a primary value of broad and generous tolerance of multiple perspectives. But these two disputants (and virtually all other social philosophers) agree that the Harmony allowed by some agreed-upon foundation of common values is indispensable to a civil society. We argue below that a Harmony of values is necessary and achievable at the classroom level and thus at the school level, and through those experiences, at the level of the next generation of adult citizens. Even if that Harmony can be achieved, where does it stand in the order of Excellence, Fairness, and Inclusion? Can all four goals together even make music, much less a march?

Can Schools Actually Provide Excellence, Fairness, Inclusion, and Harmony?

School reformers throughout the second half of the twentieth century have been concerned with issues of Fairness and Inclusion and have been frustrated with the apparently meshed gears of schools and social class. Two decades ago the social critic Michael Apple observed:

Schools exist through their relations to other more powerful institutions ... combined in such a way as to generate structural inequalities of power and access to resources. Second, these inequalities are reinforced and reproduced by schools ... Through their curricular, pedagogical, and evaluative activities in day-to-day life in classrooms, schools play a significant role in preserving if not generating these inequalities. Along with other mechanisms for cultural preservation and distribution, schools contribute to what has elsewhere been called the cultural reproduction of class relations in advanced industrial societies (Apple 1979, p. 64).

Apple specifically negates the conspiracy assumptions implicit in some reaches of critical theory:

This is not to imply that all school people are racist (though some may in fact be) or that they are part of a conscious conspiracy to "keep the lower classes in their place." In fact, many of the arguments for "community" and about curriculum put forth by some of the early educators, curriculum workers, and intellectuals ... were based on the best liberal intentions of "helping people."... [My argument] is that "naturally" generated out of many educators' commonsense assumptions and practices about teaching and learning, normal and abnormal behavior, important and unimportant knowledge, and so forth are conditions and forms of interactions that have latent functions (Apple 1979, pp. 64-65).

To these arguments, twenty years later, we continue to subscribe. Indeed, our purpose could be described as explicating those "educators' commonsense assumptions and practices" and—extending past the usual concerns of critical theory—proposing practical ways of transforming them, available to every educator from policy maker to classroom teacher, so that the unintended, latent functions are replaced by an educational outcome corresponding to our highest goals.

Analytically, the groundwork has been laid in the work of preceding decades. Structural social inequalities are reinforced in schools in a variety of ways. Social class differences in schooling opportunities and outcomes can be identified in features of selection, tracking, curriculum, ideology, and values and in exposure to and acquisition of "cultural capital"—the knowledge, skills, and discourse routines that operate the societal and economic levers of power. The daily lives of students "at risk of educational failure" are markedly different from those of the middle classes. Schooling of the common tradition is not fair. Its opportunities and activities do not include the needful. Excellence is differentiated. Under such conditions, how could Harmony be expected?

Critical theorists blame educational inequities on economic and political systems; discouraged and ill-supported educators blame it on families. Liberal social theorists, in eternal Utopian tinkering, seek the ever elusive perfect policy.

Simultaneously alive and potent, sometimes within the same person or groups, is an utterly opposed ideology that holds education to be the creator and sustainer of social change, the escape hatch from historical class and familial fate, the proving ground in which every girl and boy—of whatever means and whatever history—can prove and improve their gifts of character and intellect, thus realizing their potential and enriching the national future. It is this ideology that moves most educators to choose the life. Many of us from the lower and lower-middle classes are living proofs of this belief (certainly in the universities there are far more of us than is generally understood), living proofs that education does vault many into influence and comfort. But it must also be acknowledged that the optimism of many youthful educators declines during the course of their careers. The rock chafes on Sisyphus's shoulder.

We propose a resolution of this paradox. A signal gain in Excellence, Fairness, Inclusion, and Harmony can be achieved by an improved understanding of how human society operates in social relations, teaching and learning, and the design of classroom activities. In this book we describe the ways that "educators' commonsense assumptions and practices" can be transformed to achieve the highest potential of schooling. From the point of view of policy makers, there is a goal, a desired end state that can guide their constructions. For burning-out educators, there is a way to replace unintended "latent functions" with the opportunities for students that we all want to provide. And for critical theorists, there is available a liberation pedagogy. These solutions all turn on a few points of theory. The action consequences are available to every classroom.

Unified Reform

Can proponents of the four goals march together? When we answer "yes," the themes together can make a melody, our optimism rests in large part on the great progress made within these (sometimes non-communicating) camps. An extraordinary convergence of findings has emerged among the four fields: Fairness (the research fields of equity, cultural and linguistic diversity, and students placed at risk); Excellence (cognitive science and "sociocultural development"); Inclusion ("unpacking," "mainstreaming," and "social organization"); and Harmony (multiculturalism, conflict resolution, moral and values development, and service learning). The congruence of their recommendations is extraordinary and allows a new design of the organization of activity and a reformed pedagogy.

This book is too brief to contain a thorough review of all evidence pertinent to all branches of school reform. We do attempt to review some of the crucial research and ideas that speak to the ways that classrooms can achieve Excellence, Fairness, Inclusion, and Harmony, all together and all successfully. If, as we claim, this can be achieved in the classroom, then we will all be in a position to create a school that enables such classrooms, and to create school systems, communities, and policy environments that allow such schools to prosper.

Our scope is the classroom, because the classroom contains the final common pathway through which all school structures and policy finally have their effect. That pathway is the instructional activity of teachers and students. The design and organization of that activity affords or restricts opportunities for learning and social development. Through that activity, school succeeds or fails, lives are opened, or lives are closed. All other aspects of education—policy, resources, administration, and leadership; laws and social values; programs and professional development; curriculum and evaluation—funnel through the activity of teachers and students, organized in the units we call "classrooms." We therefore focus also on the theory that can rationalize and guide the classroom's functions and design. Theory can reveal the regularities in psychocultural processes and sociocultural conditions that determine the working of classrooms. The same theory will reveal how classrooms contribute to duplicating current society, perpetuating the next generation in the image of our own, with its flawed Fairness, insufficient Excellence, systematic exclusions, and disharmonious consternations. Studying this theory can reveal the way these processes work and can guide us to make the changes we choose. Our calipers are delicate—one point on the classroom and the other on theory. But our drawings are proposals for the marching route for the entire endeavor. If education can come to agreement on a vision, a standard, for the patterns of activity in classrooms, then all other aspects of educational decision making, policy, and preparation could be guided by and evaluated on the basis of whether they bring us closer to that ideal envisioned condition.

Plan of the Book

The study of the design and organization of classroom activity is not yet recognized as the foundational element of education, although it is tantamount to the study of teaching and learning itself. In the theory of human development that organizes this book, activity is the basi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction and Overview
• 2 Transformed Classrooms: Description, Principles, and Criteria
• 3 Activity in Theory and Classroom
• 4 Patterns of Instructional Activity and Relationships
• 5 Culture and Instructional Activity
• 6 Designing the Organization of Instructional Activity
• 7 Classrooms of Phase 5: Evidence, Vision, and Future
• Appendices
• References
• Index