My classroom doesn’t work the way I want it to. In the Age of Accountability, I focus on process, and see product as a secondary concern. I’m an ill-fitting peg, uneasy about participating in what, for me, amounts to a charade - emulating archaic practices designed for kids from bygone eras.

Looking at the group I’m with now, thinking about them, and not the generic, bloodless beings called Students, statistical incarnations of demographically catalogued learners, I feel more strongly than ever that I owe each of them more than mere delivery of the curriculum, and concern for where they stand relative to a standard that I don’t endorse.

Being a teacher means too many things for me to say that I know how to do it well. I surely don’t know how to move a group of kids to universal competence when their needs span the curricula for 4 different grade levels, and when they come with varying interests, talents, and beliefs about themselves and about school. But I do know how to connect with students through conversation. I am a noticer of insight, and I am a celebrant of the very good question. I know how to encourage kids to make strides on their own, working for things that I could never teach them directly.

Christopher Sessums put together a great article about teacher knowldege:

Knowledge for practice brings us to the idea of best practice – generalizable behaviors and techniques that are verified and acknowledged as effective. The problem with such a conception of practice is that best practices are not necessarily presented as situated in a specific context.

I remember when I first heard the term, best practice. A new principal used the term in a staff meeting, and it felt like ice on the back of my neck. Who says? I wondered. That term has rankled me for almost 20 years. The phrase resurfaced in a meme that bloomed on David Warlick’s blog. Miguel Guhlin and Will Richardson have taken a swing at it in recent months, also.

I found Christopher Sessums’ article refreshing because it offers a perspective outside the either/or, best-practices-trap which looks at teacher knowledge as a received commodity rather than a dynamic process of discovery and analyis.

Sessums used Cochran-Smith’s & Lytle’s (1999) analytic frame for understanding teacher stance toward practical and professional knowledge:

  • knowledge for practice: knowledge as received;
  • knowledge in practice: knowledge acquired through experience;
  • knowledge of practice: knowledge derived from adopting a critical stance through inquiry

From the Knowledge of Practice perspective, Sessums tells us that Cochran-Smith and Lytle pose this as a stance in which

teaching is seen as a political act and cannot be separated from what is being taught, how it’s being taught, and what becomes of the results…teacher inquiry provides the social and intellectual context in which teachers, at all points along their professional lifespan, adopt critical perspectives of their own assumptions as well as the theory and research of others….Part of the goal of this conception is to professionalize teaching and bring about social/educational change by enlarging the teacher’s role as a decision maker, consultant, curriculum developer, analyst, activist, and school leader.

Discussions about teaching and professionalism on both The Education Wonks’ and Jenny D’s recent posts illustrate the difficulty we have in making headway on the question of what we Should be doing, because a critical perspective is altogether overlooked in discussions about How we should measure teacher effectiveness.

Absent from discussions of teacher effectiveness and best practice is the acknowledgment that fact can not be separated from value. Standards, and the curricula they spawn are socially derived, and are not handed down on stone tablets. They encapsulate value orientations toward knowledge and the purpose of public education, ultimately defining what are desirable and necessary qualities for a human being.

I applaud Will Richardson’s effort to articulate a definition for emergent knowledge and the consequent change in professional attitude that must accompany it. His article in Edutopia, The New Face of Learning, addresses the need for new standards, without specifically calling them that.

…it feels more and more hollow to ask students to “hand in” their homework to an audience of one. When we’re faced with a flattening world where collaboration is becoming the norm, forcing students to work alone seems to miss the point…it’s not hard to understand why rows of desks and time-constrained schedules and standardized tests are feeling more and more limiting and ineffective.

Will is way out in front with this discussion, though. Teachers as a profession need to resolve our differences about the teacher’s role, or risk enshrining alternate methods for doing what we’ve always done, calling them ‘best practices’. If, as Chris Sessums points out, administrators have a hard time admitting the legitimacy of teachers as inquirers and challengers of the status quo, waiting for their encouragement will stall us out right where we are, mired in arguments about measurement and control.

We all are empowered. We each are responsible.

Cochran-Smith, M. and S. L. Lytle (1999). “Relationships of knowledge and practice: Teacher learning in communities.” Review of Educational Research in Education 24: 249-305.