Lesson Plans

Judson G. Everitt

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813588285
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Desarrollo profesional

In Lesson Plans, Judson G. Everitt takes readers into the everyday worlds of teacher training, and reveals the complexities and dilemmas teacher candidates confront as they learn how to perform a job that many people assume anybody can do. Using rich qualitative data, Everitt analyzes how people make sense of their prospective jobs as teachers, and how their introduction to this profession is shaped by the institutionalized rules and practices of higher education, K-12 education, and gender. Trained to constantly adapt to various contingencies that routinely arise in schools and classrooms, teacher candidates learn that they must continually try to reconcile the competing expectations of their jobs to meet students’ needs in an era of accountability. Lesson Plans reveals how institutions shape the ways we produce teachers, and how new teachers make sense of the multiple and complicated demands they face in their efforts to educate students.   

1

Compulsory Education and Constructivist Pedagogy

Research on UBTE has frequently been unflattering of its content and outcomes, and has often served as the basis for various policyholders in education to level a wide range of criticisms at UBTE programs. Chief among these criticisms is that UBTE programs fail to equip new teachers with skill sets in proven instructional techniques. Rather, diversity in instructional practices persists, and new teachers appear to draw upon infinite sources of ideas and approaches to inform their teaching.1 It stands to reason that the diversity of instructional practice among teachers reflects a lack of technical coherence within the profession, and this is driven in large part by formal training and induction processes that are haphazard, inconsistent, and mired in low standards. Indeed, many people—researchers, policymakers, teachers, and teacher candidates alike—have drawn such conclusions about teaching and teacher education.2 Arthur Levine, for example, characterizes UBTE programs as “governed by a philosophy of ‘let 100 flowers bloom.’ Relativism is the rule.”3 However, when examined in the context of the institutional environment within which UBTE has developed, and for which prospective teachers train to enter, we begin to see evidence that promoting diversity in instructional practice in teacher education is the product of a highly rationalized and structured set of responses to concrete occupational realities, not just deficiencies in UBTE effectiveness or professional competence.

Rather, the observable diversity of practice that is actively promoted in UBTE, which can easily be interpreted as incoherence in UBTE curriculum, is nonetheless quite consistent with prevailing philosophies of constructivist pedagogy. While there are many interpretations of this general approach to instruction, it does have clearly identifiable features. First and foremost, it requires active participation among students in the learning process, usually in the form of problem-solving, debate and discussion, or other hands-on activities that draw upon students’ own experiences to facilitate the learning of new knowledge. Second, such approaches to instruction also stress the importance of attention to diversity among students in terms of aptitude, interests, predispositions, skill level, as well as their cognitive, physical, and social development. Instructional practice must be tailored to the unique characteristics each student, or group of students, brings to the classroom in order to actively engage students in a learning process that is relevant to them and empower students to take ownership over their own education, according to this philosophy. Not only is this educational philosophy strongly influential in the teacher education program at State University, it also has a long history that reflects its institutionalization in UBTE more broadly.

From an institutional standpoint, constructivist pedagogy emerged and persists in large part as a programmatic response to the realities of compulsory education. Since the mass education movements that unfolded around the turn of the 20th century, compulsory attendance for all students has been an enduring feature of public education. Today, despite the “school choice” aspect of the accountability era intended to give parents more options for their children’s schooling, it remains a legal mandate that children must be schooled. Of course, compulsory education exists for many very good reasons. Whether contributing to economic prosperity, ensuring a vibrant democracy, or sustaining a shared cultural history, the state has any number of interests in maintaining an educated citizenry. In fact, access to a free, public education is enshrined as one of the most basic of human rights, and public education systems have long been viewed as an irreplaceable component of nation-building.4 As such, the legitimacy of compulsory education is all but unquestioned. Everyone goes to school; that’s just the way it is, and that’s the way it has been for a long time. Therefore, the historical development of constructivist pedagogy unfolded in a context in which teachers and schools were obligated to educate a population of students diverse in their backgrounds, abilities, interests, and aptitudes. This condition of schooling is universal for prospective teachers and teacher education programs broadly. But its local manifestation in the UBTE program at State University finds expression as an “injunction to adapt,” as I call it, and teacher candidates are trained in developing a practical capacity for, and ethical commitment to, ongoing adaptation to student needs, behavior, and abilities.

Teacher Education’s Roots in the Discipline of Psychology

Current understandings of constructivist pedagogy have their roots in the “progressive pedagogy” movement in education of nearly 100 years ago. Progressive pedagogy was perhaps most famously (though certainly not exclusively) developed and championed by John Dewey. In what was a radical departure from educational tradition at the turn of the 20th century, Dewey argued forcefully for “child-centered” instruction rather than conventional top-down direction from teacher to student in the form of rote memorization.5 Himself a philosopher and psychologist,6 Dewey was especially influenced by the work of psychologist William James, who saw a reciprocal relationship between cognitive processes and action, between thinking and doing.7 To foster real learning, instruction has to engage students in active forms of inquiry, discussion, and problem-solving so that students can themselves construct new knowledge and understanding of topics previously unfamiliar to them through ongoing investigation of the world around them. From Dewey’s perspective, such an approach to instruction not only aligned with scientific understandings of social psychology, but, if widely adopted and implemented in public schools, had the potential to serve as the foundation in preparing future generations of citizens for participatory democracy.8 Other key figures were just as significant to the development of constructivist pedagogy. One of Dewey’s colleagues during his time at the University of Chicago, for instance, was Ella Flagg Young. Young was just as incisive in developing child-centered approaches to instruction, and she was profoundly influential in the advancement of such instructional philosophies among practicing teachers as Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, the first woman in the United States to run an urban public school district. In addition, W. E. B. DuBois was likewise informed and influenced by William James’s work in psychology, and developed a comprehensive educational philosophy, one that was rooted in fostering broad capacities for problem-solving and critical thought.

These scholars and reformers, and the philosophies to which they subscribed, played a key role in shaping the form and content of university-based schools of education. As they proliferated over the years, psychology remained the disciplinary cornerstone of this more academic approach to teacher education than the normal-school model. Ongoing developments in the field of psychology had iterative effects on UBTE as higher education played an increasingly prominent role. In particular, the respective works of developmental psychologists Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky became instrumental in the evolution of child-centered instructional techniques. Both scholars theorize that children’s cognitive capacities are shaped by complex combinations of their physiological development (physically and mentally) and firsthand experiences they acquire through social interaction. For Piaget, children develop broad mental frameworks (or “schematas”) of understanding they then refine through encounters with events and ideas that they try to fit into those existing frameworks. Learning, then, is a continuous process of modifying and building upon mental frameworks through ongoing experience (processes Piaget refers to as “assimilation” and “accommodation”), a perspective in developmental psychology known as “constructivism.”9 Vygotsky places slightly more emphasis on social interaction than Piaget, and theorizes that children possess “zones of proximal development,” which represent capacities for understanding new knowledge with the help of “experts.” Through interaction with more knowledgeable others, Vygotsky argues children have optimal ranges for learning that can be maximized when adults use children’s existing knowledge as the conceptual “scaffold” upon which they help children build understanding of new concepts and ideas.10 In the case of both scholars’ work, experiences and interactions are key for cognitive understanding and development. For instruction to maximize children’s cognitive capacities, it must engage them directly as active and thoughtful participants in their own learning.

Based on these scientific accounts of how children learn, “constructivist” models of instruction became, and largely remain, the predominant version of constructivist pedagogy that is taught in UBTE programs. Indeed, the institutionalization of constructivist pedagogy in UBTE, rooted in constructivist frameworks of developmental psychology, is exemplified in the content of popular textbooks for courses in educational psychology which represent required reading in the teacher education program at State University and many other UBTE programs. For example, Educational Psychology: Developing Learners, written by Jeanne Ormrod and published by Pearson, is currently in its 9th edition.11 Much of a foundational chapter in Ormrod’s book deals primarily with Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories. Additional developments in the field of psychology have been incorporated into the formal curriculum. In particular, Howard Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences” has become a hallmark of curriculum in educational psychology. Gardner identifies eight types of intelligence (he later added a ninth), or “modalities,” and argues that each individual exhibits distinct combinations of these qualitatively different types of intellectual capacities.12 The instructional implications of this perspective include viewing child-centered instruction as necessarily accommodating of individual uniqueness, since cognitive diversity among children is hardwired this way according to this perspective in psychology. Finally, accommodation to the cognitive differences of individual children is further institutionalized in instructional practice by federal and state law. The Individuals with Disabilities Educational Act (IDEA) mandates that schools and teachers modify instruction for students with special needs, and these required modifications are documented in “individualized education plans” (IEPs) that must be provided for each student diagnosed with learning or emotional behavioral disorders. Indeed, in addition to coursework in educational psychology, all teacher candidates at State University are required to take a class in teaching students with special needs.

Compulsory education acts as the primary institutional backdrop to constructivist pedagogy that is codified by law. Early developers of constructivist instruction saw it as the philosophical and pragmatic foundation for addressing, equitably, the realities of student heterogeneity that state-mandated mass public education necessarily structures into every classroom in every public school to varying degrees.13 More contemporary contributors to constructivist approaches prioritize responsiveness to diversity in student abilities and aptitudes, as with Gardner’s “multiple intelligences.”14 In addition, an important body of literature on racial, ethnic, and class-based diversity among students has increasingly influenced UBTE curriculum, and often aligns with constructivist pedagogy in that it similarly emphasizes sensitivity and responsiveness to elements of social identities and cultural backgrounds that students bring with them to classrooms.15 In sum, compulsory education’s mandate for all children to have access to formal schooling makes the multiple sources of individual variation in learning a central challenge of the teaching profession, and thereby a central challenge of teacher education. Psychology emerged, and has endured, as the primary scientific basis for prevailing approaches to instruction that have become institutionalized in UBTE curriculum. Indeed, this institutionalization is tied directly to UBTE’s residence in higher education. Rooting the practice of instruction in academic science has been the most common justification for making teacher education the purview of colleges and universities. Efforts to professionalize other occupational groups have made similar justifications by linking professional practice to science, and thus to university training and credentialing. As Tim Hallett and Matt Gougherty explain, training and credentialing processes have become similar across a wide range of professions in the ways they are linked to higher education, and these linkages are sustained by the fact that “‘scientized’ knowledge is upheld as legitimate because of its university home.”16 In other words, universities are widely seen as key sites of expertise, and for professional groups to make legitimate claims to unique forms of expertise, universities must provide the training.

It is within this institutional context that I situate my analysis of UBTE content in this chapter. Teacher candidates are trained to define ongoing adaptation as a fundamental responsibility of teaching, in part because the scientized knowledge of developmental psychology that informs their training calls for constructivist pedagogy. Constructivist approaches prioritize responsiveness to inherent diversity among students in their cognitive and developmental abilities with the goal of engaging students as active agents in their own learning. As such, psychology provides the techno-scientific foundations of the injunction to adapt to student needs, abilities, and interests. In addition, as an instructional program to address the institutional myth of compulsory education, constructivist pedagogy constitutes a key element of teacher candidates’ professional culture of ambivalence, as the notion that different students require different techniques becomes bound up in their definitions of legitimate professional practice.

Priming for Constructivist Pedagogy and a Compulsory System

Many of the formal activities of the instructional methods courses (the “clusters” for teacher candidates in elementary education, or “blocks” for secondary education) constitute what William Corsaro and Luisa Molinari would call “priming events.”17 Education faculty structure these classes to involve collective activities through which “by their very participation,” teacher candidates “attend prospectively to ongoing or anticipated changes in their lives,”18 in this case, their future work with students in classr...