In a piece for the Albert Shanker Institute, researcher John Lane contends that in teachers’ typical learning opportunities, reforms are reduced to a set of strategies that “work” across settings, and in which the contexts of teaching become an unwanted entanglement. He argues that teachers would benefit from opportunities to learn about the social dynamics of classrooms — it is those dynamics, after all, that affect their own reform efforts and teacher practice more broadly.
Following is an excerpt from the article:
Reforms and the learning opportunities that accompany them have virtually ignored local, situated knowledge of social contexts, or treated the social dynamics of the classroom as a personal matter that must be worked out by individual teachers. Perhaps this is in deference to the superior knowledge of the local practitioner, or maybe presenting conditions on proven “research-based” strategies introduces a complication that cannot easily be resolved. In either case, teachers are left without a critical understanding of the social dynamics, common to many classrooms, that often stand in the way of reforms.
As Cusick (1973) once pointed out, teachers are paid to provide instruction and not to perform sociological experiments, but, as a consequence, teachers are often confused when their instructional plans go awry. I am not suggesting that providing teachers opportunities to connect with the considerable sociological literature about life in classrooms would solve all their problems, or that all teachers need to moonlight as sociologists. I am merely suggesting that access to and consideration of this knowledge might help some teachers in the difficult work of adapting reforms to their local contexts, and the particulars of their students, classrooms, and schools.
So, what can be done to address these challenges and make sure that teacher learning also focuses on social contexts rather exclusively on explicit skill acquisition? Convincing professional development providers to move away from isolated teaching strategies and toward developing a better understanding of the context of teaching is likely to be an uphill battle, particularly since teachers are not clamoring for this sort of content. I think researchers could help with these challenges. First, researchers could act locally by sharing their research with schools and helping teachers, principals, and district administrators see a productive link between professional development focusing on social contexts and improved teaching and learning in their classrooms. Researchers could also establish a website discussing and sharing resources and tools that teachers could use to understand and address the social complexities of their classrooms and of schooling. Such a site could, for example, allow teachers to select from a variety of topics like “Teachers’ Dependence of Their Students” or “Understanding Student Groups.” It is not difficult to imagine a “social context website” that teachers might use in ways similar to how they currently get a wide variety of ideas from Pinterest.
To read the full article, see:
