How We Learn About TeachingMary Kennedy

Michigan State University

The phrase, “learning about teaching” refers to two things: First, gaining an understanding about what teachers actually do that causes students to learn; and second, gaining an understanding about what kind of things would enable teachers to do those things. Answers to these two questions provide the foundation for virtually all arguments and debates about teaching. The first question leads to discussions about how teachers represent subject matter or manage classrooms or nurture students or evaluate them, while the second leads to discussions about a very broad range of potential enablers, including their own knowledge and personal character, the curriculum and other resources available to them, the quality of their preservice teacher education or professional development, the stability of their school, and so forth, all of which might enable teachers to do a their job.

Many people believe they have learned a lot about these two questions and many have clear ideas about the answers to these two questions. Yet our answers to these questions often differ. In this paper, I distinguish four groups who have learned different things about teaching. One group, which I will call Regular People (RP) consists of people who have learned about teaching through their everyday experiences, either as children attending school, as parents of children attending school, or as adults whose neighbors are teachers. Another group consists of Teachers Themselves (TTs), who began life as RPs but who eventually become teachers and who learned about teaching through teacher education programs and through direct experience teaching. Then there is a group of people whose job is to actively influence teaching. In this group are state and federal bureaucrats who write regulations governing schools and teachers, entrepreneurs who create and sell textbooks, educational videos and professional development programs for teachers, local school boards and administrators who govern teachers, and legislators who write laws that influence teachers. I refer to this group as REALs, an abbreviation for Regulators, Entrepreneurs, Administrators and Legislators. Finally, there is a group that includes university professors and educational researchers who conduct formal research on teaching, may teach college courses to prospective teachers or professional development courses to practicing teachers, and are generally expected to have some specialized knowledge about these issues. I refer to these people as Ostensible Authorities (OAs) about teaching. I add the adjective “ostensible” because their knowledge is frequently contested by members of other groups.

Members of all of these groups believe they know something about teaching, even though they may have different answers to the two questions posed above. That so many people believe they have answers to these questions has implications for TTs –the teachers themselves—because their own learning is affected by all the other groups. TTs begin their lives as RPs. They attend school for 13 years as RPs, watching teachers and drawing conclusions about teaching from their vantage point as students. Their decisions to enter the profession result from what they have learned as RPs. That is, they may decide to become teachers because they think teachers are important or powerful, because people in the community look up to teachers, or because the work looks easy or interesting or fun. These perceptions are based on what they learned as Regular People. When they go to college to study teaching, they are taught by OAs, so what they learn about teaching while in college depends on what OAs have concluded about teaching. Then, when they take jobs in schools, their work is structured and overseen by REALs, who use what they have learned about teaching to design the education oversight systems. REALs determine which textbooks teachers will use, when and how often students will be tested, how the teaching day will be scheduled, and what kinds of

professional development will be offered. Ultimately, teachers’ understanding of their practice reflects the sum of their experiences as RPs, their interactions with OAs, and how REALs have designed and structured their jobs.

Notice that all these groups, regardless of their roles, began learning about teaching as RPs, for all began their learning as children in school. Everyday experiences and everyday thinking, therefore, provide a foundation of everyone’s understandings about teaching, regardless of whether they eventually become OAs, REALs, or TTs.

This paper examines the complex set of relationships among these different groups. It asks what each group learns and how the full system of interactions affects Teachers Themselves. Sections are arranged according to their net effect on teachers. The first section addresses one of the foundational questions raised here, of what teachers actually do. The second section examines literature on how Regular People interpret their everyday experiences and, in particular, what they conclude about teaching. Since all four groups begin their lives as Regular People, this section provides a foundation for everyone’s initial, albeit naïve, understandings about teaching. The third and fourth sections address what might be added to our understandings through higher education in general, or through teacher education, in particular. So far, all of these influences may have similar effects on all four of the groups I have identified. The fifth section then returns to Teachers Themselves, examining what they learn from their direct experience teaching, and the last section examines the role of REALs, people whose adult jobs entail governing or regulating teachers or teaching. In this section I consider how their understanding of teaching influences the organization and governance of teaching.

1. Four Essential Tasks of TeachingThe practice of teaching is so commonplace that it is difficult to examine it in an analytic way. We all have seen dozens of teachers throughout our experience as students, so we all have plenty of images of teachers speaking, writing on the board, showing overheads, pacing about the room, scolding students and so forth. The practice of teaching is so widespread and visible that its underlying mechanisms may not be noticed.

Even though we have all seen a lot of teaching, we have not seen all of teaching. We don’t see teachers’ planning, nor do we see what they are thinking throughout their lessons. In fact, we really don’t even see everything they do, because we aren’t always aware that they are doing something. In fact, teachers are actually doing multiple things simultaneously, and all of them are essential to teaching. But even though all of these tasks are essential, they are not complimentary, and strategies for achieving one task can interfere with their ability to achieve another task, so that classroom teaching entails a difficult balance among these four essential tasks.

Enacting the CurriculumSchool curricula reside in textbooks, curriculum frameworks, and “scope and sequence” manuals. If students could (and would) learn content simply by reading these documents, there would be no need for teachers. The teachers’ task is to convert the lists, words, and outlines, concepts and so forth into a set of live classroom activities that will help students grasp this content. To teach a given body of knowledge, teachers first figure out how to divide the content into discrete daily segments, then figure out how each day’s segment can be represented in real time—what events will occur, what materials that will be needed, where students will sit, and so forth. Then they must actually enact these lessons so that they conclude according to plan and on schedule.

Two important principles of learning are relevant to how teachers enact the curriculum. One is that students can’t learn simply by being told about it or by memorizing sentences about it. They need to understand it. In its report on human learning, the National Research Council {Bransford, 2000 #5021} argued that instruction needed focus on underlying relationships so that students develop their own internal mental representations of the ideas. It is these internal representations that are remembered. Willingham {, 2009 #8579} adds to this by pointing out that memory is the residue of thought. Thus teachers must engage their students in some way with the content. Teachers may stimulate thinking, and the development of mental representations, in many different ways. They may “walk through” problems on the board, leading students step by step to ensure that they understand the entire process. They may ask students to predict what will happen next, or why something just happened, pushing them to see and understand causal relationships. They may ask students to engage in their own explorations or experiments. These questions and prods are intended to help students to think about the underlying relationships and concepts that the teacher is addressing and increase the chances that students will see and understand those relationships.

The second principle of learning is that knowledge is tends to be “anchored” {Bransford, 1990 #2131} to the particular contexts in which it is learned, so that students often have difficulty see its relevance to other situations. Thus, if a youngster learns geometry in a classroom, he might not see its relevance when he takes a job as an apprentice carpenter. He might face carpentry problems that could be solved with geometry, yet be unable to solve them because his geometry knowledge is in a separate compartment of his mind. At the same time, if a youngster learns geometry in the context of building structures, she might not see its relevance to drawing such a structure, so that drawing tasks would continue to be difficult or even un-solvable.

These features of learning mean that the a critical factor in teaching is developing representations of the content that help students “see” underlying relationships and help them “see” how this content relates to a variety of different types of problems or situations. Imagine trying to teach students what a piano is, or how it works, if students never actually see or touch a real piano. A lecture about pianos could never be as powerful as the physical experience of seeing the mechanism, pressing its keys and hearing the effect of that touch. This is not to say that teachers need to bring everything that exists in the world into their classrooms, but rather that they need to think hard about their representations, for these can be very consequential.

There are many different ways in which any given bit of knowledge could be represented, each stimulating different thoughts from students and each “situating” the content in a different context. If we observed multiple teachers teaching the same curriculum—say, third grade mathematics, or 10th grade biology—we would find tremendous variation in how that bit of knowledge was represented for students. One teacher might use a physical example and show how it works, another might engage students in a thought experiment, another might put a diagram on the board, and ask students to label parts or speculate about how different parts work, still another might ask students to engage in a group activity, and yet another might show a video or simply write on the board. Even if teachers chose the same representation, they are likely to pose different questions or hypothetical problems as they engage student thought.

Representations help students “see” abstract ideas, but they are difficult for teachers because they must be enacted in real time and space, often with materials and with student activities. Studies of teacher planning suggest that teachers begin their planning with a general idea and then progressively develop and elaborate on it. Further, these plans are not developed around topics, but around activities {Shavelson, 1983 #7931}. Each activity is defined in terms of its content, materials, goals, activities and duration. Kennedy {Kennedy, 2006 #6616} describes teachers’ plans as visions: They envision particular students and what might be interesting or boring for them or what would be difficult for them to grasp. They also envision the physical space, who will sit where, what materials need to be accessible, and whether everyone will be able to see a particular demonstration. When teachers enter their classrooms, they have in mind a specific sequence of events that will unfold in a specific way. Clark and Peterson {, 1986 #5295} refer to these plans as “activity flows.” Lesson plans represent their way of enacting the curriculum, or converting a passive textbook into a live activity.

Contain the Crowd The second essential task is to contain student movements. This is necessary because classrooms contain from 20 – 40 students in a relatively confined space. Further, these students are young, energetic, restless, and more interested in one another than in the lesson. An early portrait of life in classrooms {Jackson, 1968/1990 #6463} pointed to crowdedness as a central feature that governed life in classrooms. Crowdedness means that students are continuously disrupting each other. Most teachers contain their crowds by creating a system of standardized rules and routines which define where things are kept, when students may be out of their seats to sharpen pencils or use the restrooms, when and how materials can be accessed, how desks and students are arranged, how materials will be distributed and retrieved, where to go with lost or found items, how homework can be made up following absences, and so forth. This underlying organizational system is typically introduced at the beginning of the year and persists throughout the year. It enables students to coordinate their actions without having to ask the teacher for permission for every move they want to make.

Along with this general system of rules and routines, however, there is also a process of continual oversight and reminders. Teachers remind their students not to poke their neighbors or pull out

their cell phones, and they try to intercept potential disruptions before they become real disruptions. One early researcher {Kounin, 1970 #6713} set out to study what he called “desists,” meaning teacher actions intended to stop misbehaviors. But on observing teachers in action, he discovered that much of their classroom management consisted of prevention of misbehaviors rather than stopping misbehaviors once they had begun. He noticed that teachers continuously demonstrated to students that they were aware of, and paying attention to, what everyone was doing. These communications themselves often discouraged misbehavior. A teacher might say, “So you can see that the area of this triangle, Christina, is . . .” The teacher is speaking to the entire class, but simply by mentioning one student’s name, she warns the named student to settle down and she reminds all the other students that she is alert to their individual actions.

Enlist Student ParticipationWhile most observers are aware that teachers are enacting a curriculum, and are aware that they occasionally discipline students, they may be less aware of the importance of enlisting student participation. But this third task is just as essential as the first two, for the simple reason that education is mandatory but learning is not. Students may respond to their situation in one of three ways: They may actively resist; they may actively engage; or they may cooperate, in the sense of that they remain quiet and polite, but do not really engage with it. I use the verb “enlist” rather than, say, “motivate” or “entice” to describe this essential teaching task because teachers are rarely able to motivate or entice all of students, and many teachers settle for the more achievable goal of gaining their cooperation. If students are willing to at least cooperate, they don’t disrupt the learning of those who are actively engaged.

This simple fact that education is mandatory but learning is not places teachers in an untenable position for, as Cohen {, 1988 #5341;, 2011 #9007} points out, teachers cannot themselves succeed unless their students are willing to participate. Teachers, Cohen reminds us, belong in a class of “human improvement” professions, like psychotherapy and fitness training, in which the professional’s success depends on the clients’ willingness to improve themselves. If clients do not wish to learn, to lose weight, to improve their golf swing, or to save for retirement, then professional help is likely to fail. Teachers, like other helping professionals, cannot succeed unless their clients choose to engage.

Insert cite to Willingham here, about how the human mind is not designed for hard thought and no one really wants to do it.

This third essential task also complicates the first one: It reminds us that the task of enacting the curriculum cannot refer to merely informing students about particular content. Instead, it must refer to an activity that also interests students and motivates them to engage in learning. Some teachers motivate students by trying to intrigue them, while others create social communities in their classrooms that motivate students to conform. All of these strategies, ultimately, must necessarily be concurrent with and part of “enacting the curriculum.”

Read Students’ MindsThe fourth essential task of teaching is even less obvious to naïve observers. Each day’s lessons follow from the lessons taught the day before, so that students need to grasp essential points from each lesson if they are to make sense of later lessons. Teachers cannot wait until the end-of-unit test to ascertain what students have learned, for by that time the unit is finished. Instead, we see teachers asking students questions, asking students to work on problems and share their findings, asking them respond to one another’s ideas, asking them to read aloud, asking them to show their work, or asking them to turn in assigned projects for review. Sometimes they orchestrate more complex projects such as debates or experiments that allow them to watch students as they try to

articulate their ideas. These interrogations are especially visible in elementary classrooms, where teachers use a constant question-and-answer format both to maintain students’ attention and to assess their understanding.

This task to reading students’ minds becomes more challenging as the social distance between the teacher and students increases. Jackson {, 1986 #6464} makes this point by comparing classroom teachers with a television “teacher,” such as the host of a cooking show. The cooking show host can assume that his audience is similar to himself: Both host and audience are adults, both own their own kitchens and cooking gear, both are interested in cooking and both are motivated to learn. With this audience, the TV host can simply present his content without need to manage a crowd or enlist participation or read minds. But as the distance between the teacher and the student grows larger, teachers must make a more concerted effort to ferret out the unique interests, perceptions, and interpretations of their audiences. Social distance grows as students become younger, come from different social classes or cultural groups, speak different languages, live in different family structures, or have learning disabilities that the teacher has not experienced. In all of these cases, teachers must make a greater effort to understand how their students are making sense of their lessons.

This task of reading students’ minds is also made more difficult by the sheer variation in how students make sense of new ideas. Generally speaking, we all learn by make sense of new ideas by connecting them to things we already know. So students who enter with different prior experiences are likely interpret the content in different ways as they each struggle to make sense of it and to connect it to their own prior knowledge and experiences. A roomful of highly-engaged students is actually a roomful of different ideas, conceptions, confusions, questions, and insights, so that the teachers’ task calls to mind the popular analogy, herding cats. In such a situation, reading minds is an essential task.

An integrated Portrait of What Teachers Do The portrait above suggests that the activity of teaching is actually a multidimensional process in which each lesson represents a unique solution to balancing among these simultaneous tasks. It is designed to enact the curriculum, contain the crowd, enlist student participation, and create opportunities to read students’ minds. The particular lesson that is planned for is not the only possible solution; it is one of many possible solutions. But once teachers commit to a plan, they rarely change it, for even if the plan is not working, it still represents the best idea the teacher had for that particular lesson.

A complete definition of what teachers do, then, might look like this:

They translate the curriculum into classroom events that will foster learning

To large groups of energetic, restless and easily-distractible young people

Who are not necessarily interested or able to learn

And whose grasp of the content is not readily visible to the teacher.

No solution is entirely optimal because the four essential tasks compete with each other. For instance, if efforts to contain the crowd become overly restrictive they may reduce students’ motivation to participate. On the other side, if students become excessively enthusiastic, they are likely to become more energetic and rowdy, thereby exacerbating the teacher’s need to contain the crowd. In her qualitative study of teaching practices, Kennedy {, 2005 #6615} noticed that, even though teachers claimed they wanted enthusiastic student participation, there was a limit to how much enthusiasm they really wanted, for enthusiastic youngsters are also boisterous and noisy.

Thus teachers sought a modicum of engagement, just enough to maintain student attention but not enough to energize them too much.

Teachers’ enactments also vary from day to day, in part to accommodate changes in the content, available materials, the available unit of time, but also in order to retain student interest. If teachers found a lesson pattern that perfectly balanced among their four essential tasks, and they used that pattern every day, it would eventually cease to function well because students would become bored by it.

It is also the case that, despite how well teachers design their lessons, they still need to make continual adjustments within each lesson as they see students’ attention wander, see that they have misunderstood a concept, see that they are restless. An early review of literature on their interactive decision making {Clark, 1986 #5295} found that teachers make ad hoc decisions roughly every two or three minutes throughout their lessons. They rarely weigh alternative courses of action, but rather respond spontaneously to events as they are unfolding. Kennedy’s {, 2005 #6615} examination suggests that these decisions are usually responses to something that is perceived to be amiss. She found that teachers were generally monitoring several aspects of the lesson simultaneously—classroom orderliness, students’ attention, what students appear to understand or to mis-understand, and so forth, and whenever something raises a red flag about any one of these issues, teachers immediately adjust their behavior to respond to that concern.

A great many of these spontaneous adjustments succeed in correcting the course of the lesson, but there are also many times when teachers’ regret their hasty responses when they have the benefit of hindsight. To illustrate this problem I present here some sample teaching episodes in which tradeoffs among these different essential tasks become more apparent.

Ms. Katlaski

The first episode regards Ms. Katlaski, a third grade teacher whose mathematics lesson for the day was to introduce a strategy for multiplying whole numbers by fractions. She opened the lesson by posing this problem: We’ve learned how to multiply two fractions together and we’ve learned how to multiply two whole numbers, but what if we have a whole number and a fraction? For instance, how could we multiply 9 × 2/3? She posed this question in a somewhat rhetorical way, as a way to get students thinking about the content she was about to teach, but a student unexpectedly responded and proposed multiplying 9 by 4/4. Katlaski then responded to the student by saying, “No, that won’t work.”

Why did she say that this student’s idea would not work? Any observer would know that this would indeed work. But Katlaski already had another idea in mind and she was unable to quickly alter her lesson when this idea came up. Her plan for enacting the curriculum, which she took directly from the textbook, was to convert the 9 to a fraction by dividing it by 1, thus creating the fraction 9/1. The computations involved in this formulation are relatively simple, and Katlaski anticipated working the problem on the board just as the textbook had worked it out, like this:

9/1 × 2/3 = 18/3 = 6.

The student’s proposal created a mathematical problem that was far more computationally difficult than Katlaski wanted it to be. She realized that students would not be able to compute these numbers in their heads and there was a risk that they would become so bogged down in the computation that they would lose the logic of it. It would have required Katlaski to work through the following steps with her students:

36/4 × 2/3 = 72/12 = 6.

So when Katlaski said that multiplying by 4/4 would not work, she was not thinking mathematically,

but pedagogically. She was thinking that 4/4 would not work as a way to enact this content and simultaneously keep students engaged.

Ms Defoe

In the second episode, Ms. Defoe was teaching a fifth-grade science curriculum, in which each unit taught both science content and something about the nature of science. In this unit, the content had to do with physical fitness and the role of physical activity in fostering fitness. The “nature of science” message had to do with using existing scientific knowledge to evaluate new claims, something the textbook called “believability.” To help students grasp the idea of evaluating claims for their believability, the text pointed to advertisements for energy drinks which claimed that the drinks would make people stronger and more physically fit. The goal for the unit as a whole was for students to realize that fitness could come only from physical activity, not from drinking any potions, and that these advertisements were therefore not believable. On the last day of the unit, Ms. Defoe spent quite a bit of time summarizing all the things they had done in this unit and summarizing the main ideas about what causes physical fitness and about why claims about energy drinks were not believable. She then asked students to write an advertisement for a product that really could make people more physically fit, and to make sure that their advertisements were believable; that is, based on scientific evidence about how fitness is improved. She closed by saying, “Don’t make up a product like “SlimDown” and say that you can drink this every morning and you don’t need to exercise, because that is not a believable ad. I want you to take something that is a believable fitness product and write an ad for it.”

Then a student, Andy, raised his hand and said that he had just seen an ad for a drink that gave you energy and it seemed believable to him. Defoe asked, “But if you see an ad like that, would you believe it automatically and without doubt? . . . You wouldn’t be a skeptical scientist if you saw that ad?” Andy shook his head “no,” he was not be a skeptical scientist. Ms. Defoe then says, “Ok, well we’ll talk about that later, OK? William, can you tell us what product you will write about for your fitness ad?”

Questions such as Andy’s are normally important guides for teachers, helping them gauge students’ grasp of the lesson. In this case, Andy’s question suggests that he had missed the point of the entire unit on physical fitness. So why would she brush it off and turn her attention to someone else? In this case, Andy’s question was not her only concern, for at the same time Andy raised his question, Ms. Defoe also noticed that William was beginning to fidget and she knew that when William got restless, he would soon poke a neighbor and begin a skirmish that would ultimately distract the entire class. Defoe was eager to intervene with William before that happened. So when Andy presented a difficult instructional problem, Defoe responded to both students simultaneously saying, “Ok, we’ll talk about that later, OK? William, can you tell us what product you will write about for your fitness ad?” Here, the conflict between enacting the lesson, reading students’ minds, and crowd control is painful as Ms Defoe appears to sacrifice Andy’s learning to maintain her original plan and control William’s behavior.

Ms. Smith

The third episode regards Ms. Smith, a secondary science teacher, who was introducing Newton’s third law to her physics class. Newton’s Third law is often expresses as “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,” a sentence that erroneously implies that one object does the “acting” and the other does the “reacting.” Thus, when we see a book resting on a table, we are inclined to think that the book is acting on the table, while the table is entirely passive, rather than perceiving the table as holding the book up.

Smith decided to demonstrate this law with ordinary bathroom scales. She held up one scale and asked a student to hold up the second scale and push it against hers. Picture Ms. Smith and the student facing each other, each holding up a bathroom scale and pressing it against the other’s. Then she asked her collaborating student to read his scale. The student announced that his scale read “four pounds.” Smith’s own scale actually read 3 ½ pounds, but Smith announced to the class that her scale also read four pounds, and proceeded with the lesson.

Why did she lie about the weight shown in her scale? As a matter of intellectual honesty, shouldn’t she tell her student that the scale was off? After all, learning about measurement error is also valuable for students. Further, if she thought accuracy was important, why didn’t she check the scales before class?

An important factor in her thinking was what she had learned from reading her students’ minds in the past. She was aware that many students, as well as many adults, think of objects as either “acting” or “reacting,” rather than opposing with equal and opposite force. Further, she knew that many of them perceive the “acting” object to be the one that was heavier, stronger, or moving faster {Smith, 2007 #8076}, while the smaller or lighter object is doing the “reacting.” In a collision, for instance, we perceive the larger car as pushing the smaller car and are often unaware of the extent to which the smaller car has slowed the larger one down. The Third Law refers to interactions between different bodies and is meant to convey the notion that forces are always complimentary. It is a difficult concept for students to grasp and Smith came up with the idea of the two bathroom scales in part because the scales enabled students to see that the two actions were simultaneous and equal. Further, she purposely selected a male student collaborator who was much larger than herself so that the class would see that, despite differences in the two people’s size and strength, the two scales still measured equal and opposite forces.

When her student partner read his scale at 4 pounds, she realized that the whole purpose of the lesson, to demonstrate that the two forces were two equal and opposite in spite of the differences in size between the two people, would be lost if she acknowledged the difference between the two scales. It would become a lesson on measurement error. In this case, pursuing her original plan was more important to her than intellectual honesty.

These episodes each illustrate how difficult it is to make spur-of-the-moment decisions when different challenges present themselves. Notice, too, that in each case there was something the teacher wanted to avoid, as well as something she wanted to achieve. Ms Katlaski wanted to avoid working through a complicated computation on the board, Ms. Defoe wanted to avoid losing William’s attention, and Ms. Smith wanted to avoid having her main point derailed by a faulty bathroom scale.

But decisions such as these lead to quick criticisms from outsiders who may be unaware of the multiple and competing tasks that teachers must achieve. If any of these lessons had been observed by an OA, a REAL, or RP, that observer could justifiably criticize Ms. Katlaski for mis-informing her student about the validity of multiplying 9 by 4/4, criticize Ms. Defoe for failing to respond to Andy, who had clearly missed the point of the lesson, and criticize Ms. Smith for intellectual dishonesty when she lied to her student about the number on her scale. For observers, who are unaware of the continuing balance among these multiple essential tasks, it is easy to find fault.

Let’s now turn to how all these critics learn about teaching.

2. How We First Learn about Teaching All of us, regardless of our adult roles, began our lives as Regular People attending school and observing teachers. We used our everyday experiences, and our everyday thinking, to form our ideas about what teachers do. Everyday thinking is an important factor in determining not only how students and parents understand teaching, but also how REALs and OAs interpret the teaching practices they observe.

I focus here on three aspects of everyday thinking that have been the subject of research. All of these lead to an understanding of teaching that is essentially naïve, and that is unaware of the complications outlined above. First, through our daily experiences, we acquire a variety of “cultural scripts,” or expectations about how people will (and how we should) behave in different types of situations. Second, in our everyday thinking, we have a tendency to judge other people according to what we see them do, without knowledge of their own thinking or intentions, a phenomenon social psychologists call attribution error {Ross, 1991 #7718}. Third, in our everyday thinking we rely on a set of heuristics and biases that enable us to make spur-of-the-moment assessments of situations. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman {, 2011 #8958} calls these strategies fast thinking, to distinguish them from the kind of thinking we do when we analyze problems more systematically and carefully. These heuristics and biases give us high degree of confidence our interpretations, even though these interpretations are formed spontaneously and can change over time.

Cultural ScriptsThroughout all of our social experiences, we make inferences about how we are expected to behave and what constitutes good or bad behavior in different types of settings. The term cultural scripts refers to these conclusions. Cultural scripts tell us what to expect at church, in classrooms, and in shopping malls and they tell us how to behave in restaurants, football stadiums and family dinners.

The lengthy period of time we spend as students in schools also enables us to form cultural scripts about classroom life. We have a good sense for what students are supposed to do as well as what teachers are supposed to do. In fact, these scripts differ from one country to another, as was found by the video component of Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study (TIMMS). The initial aim of that study was to quantify differences in practice across nations and eventually perhaps correlate those differences with differences in student achievement. For instance, perhaps teachers in some countries spend more time on homework review, while those in other countries spend more time working practice problems. But instead of seeing differences in degree, the researchers found differences in the entire character of the lessons they saw. The authors instead characterized each country’s approach to teaching as a particular cultural script {Stigler, 1996 #8202;Stigler, 1998 #8206}. Their work has prompted others {e.g.`, \Andrews, 2009 #4694;Givven, 2005 #6015} to pursue and define country differences in classroom practices.

The sociologist Dan Lortie {Lortie, 1975 #6929} first introduced the provocative hypothesis that much of what Teachers Themselves learn about teaching was learned when they were students in school. When he interviewed teachers about where they got their ideas about teaching, many of them referred not to colleagues, but to the teachers they had had when they were students. Lortie realized the power of these early role models and developed his now-famous hypothesis that teachers undergo an apprenticeship of observation—that is, they learned about the job not from practicing it under a master, but from observing numerous practitioners over time. The idea gained popularity and by the 1990s it had been reduced to the widely repeated aphorism “teachers teach as they were taught.”

Cultural scripts are revealed not just in our daily experiences but also in books and movies. In his biography, the teacher Frank McCourt describes how cultural images of teaching influenced his early thoughts about what he would be like as a teacher. Here he recalls his first job as a substitute teacher:

. . . even though I have a college degree I don’t know what I’m going to say to Miss Mudd’s classes. Should I be Robert Donat in Good-bye, Mr. Chips or Glenn Ford in The Blackboard Jungle? Should I swagger into the classroom like James Cagney or march in like an Irish schoolmaster with a stick, a strap, and a roar? If a student sends a paper airplane zooming at me should I shove my face into his and tell him try that one more time, kid, and you’re in trouble? What am I to do with the ones looking out the window calling to their friends across the yard? If they’re like some of the students in The Blackboard Jungle they’ll be tough and they’ll ignore me and the rest of the class will despise me.

Frank McCourt, Tis

Later, he recalls the ideal teaching situation he had envisioned when he decided to become a teacher:

I wanted to work at one of their suburban schools, Long Island, Westchester, where boys and girls were bright, cheerful, smiling, attentive, their pens poised as I discoursed on Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, the Cavalier poets, the Metaphysicals. I’d be admired and once the boys and girls had passed my classes their parents would surely invite me to dinner at the finest houses.

Frank McCourt, Tis

An important feature of cultural scripts is that they need not be complete or accurate. In fact, Lortie himself pointed out several drawbacks to this form of learning. He reminded us, for instance, that students do not view teachers analytically. They are unaware of teachers’ lesson plans, unaware of why teachers do the things they do, unaware that anything is problematic or difficult about teaching, unaware that teachers ever actually think about what to do next. This lack of awareness of any strategic intention leads to three important assumptions that form our naïve conceptions about teaching. One is that we think teaching is intuitive, or that it comes naturally, a conception Murray {, 1996 #7219; , 2008 #7220} and Green {, 2014 #9111} call “Natural Teaching.” Another is that, because teaching comes naturally, the central defining feature of a given teacher’s practice is his or her personality, not learned skills, informed strategies, or the time invested in designing lessons. Movies represent such teachers as succeeding because of their personal commitment or will to succeed. Yet another is that, as Lortie pointed out, the criteria we use to judge teaching practice are childish criteria, such as being “nice” or “mean.

Following up on these ideas later, Britzman {, 1991 #5047} added the observation that these assumptions can prevent aspiring teachers from learning. For instance, they considered teaching practices to be entirely self-made, a belief that essentially denied novices the possibility of learning from anyone else. My first foray into research on teachers was in the late 1980s, at a time when many researchers were interested in how teachers’ beliefs might influence their practice. In our research on aspiring teachers, we often saw evidence of their naïve understandings of teaching. For instance, one question we frequently asked in our interviews was how they would respond to a student who complained that their class was boring. These were college students who had not yet actually been in a classroom as a teacher, so the question about the bored student required them to envision their own future selves responding to their own students. Not surprisingly, they came up with a variety of proposals, but some also said they didn’t know how they might respond. These responses proved to be most interesting, many of them believed that, even though they didn’t know

now how they would respond, they would know when it actually happened to them {Kennedy, 1998 #6607}! Such a response illustrates the salience of the cultural script of teachers who always know what to do.

Another important feature of cultural scripts of teaching is that, in the cultural script, students grasp content exactly as it is given to them. There are no confusions, misunderstandings, or off-kilter interpretations. In the cultural scripts, teachers do not need to make an explicit effort to read students’ minds because once they present content, students get it.

Attribution ErrorAnother aspect of everyday thinking that is relevant to learning about teaching has to do with how we interpret other people’s actions, especially those whom we observe only briefly. The term attribution error refers to a tendency to attribute people’s behavior to enduring personal qualities, rather than seeing it as motivated by their situations. Thus, when we see another person do something that we believe to be kind, we think that the person himself must be an inherently kind person, rather than inspired by circumstances. If we see someone do something we think is wasteful, we think the person is inherently wasteful, again assuming that behaviors always reflect enduring personal qualities.

One interesting aspect of attribution error is that we don’t use it when accounting for our own behavior. When people account for their own behavior, they place more weight on the situation than on their own personal qualities. So if I get angry and yell at a check-out clerk, I blame the clerk for my outburst, or blame the confusing pricing system or some other feature of the situation, but when I see someone else get angry and yell at the check-out clerk, I conclude that that person must be inherently short-tempered.

This tendency to attribute specific behaviors to enduring personal qualities, rather than to the situations people are in, is so widespread that it has been called the fundamental attribution error (Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Humphrey, 1985; Ross, 1977). In an early literature review on attribution theory, Ross (1977) suggested that the fundamental attribution error was not merely the province of the man on the street but that it plagued psychology researchers as well. In other words, researchers were just as likely as lay people to attribute behaviors to personal qualities rather than to situational influences. Kennedy {, 2010 #8777} reiterated that observation in an article directed toward educational researchers (aka OAs). She suggested that researchers were overly inclined to perceive specific teaching behaviors, including their overall effectiveness, as arising from enduring personal characteristics, rather than as arising in response to specific demands of their classroom situations.

It is likely that many of us continue to carry assumptions about teaching that we originally formed when we ourselves were children in school. Adult observers of teachers, whether they are RPs, OAs, or REALs, are inclined to attribute teachers’ actions to personal character traits. As observers, we are unaware of the complications involved and unaware of the risks that teachers seek to avoid. Observers of Ms. Katlaski, for instance, are not aware of the pedagogical difficulties that the 4/4 idea presented to Ms. Katlaski and would likely conclude that her sentence reflected mathematical ignorance. Observers of Ms. Defoe, unaware that William was fidgeting even as Andy expressed confusion, and would likely conclude that Defoe was an uncaring teacher, lacking concern about Andy’s confusion. Observers of Ms. Smith, unaware of the nuances involved in getting students to understand Newton’s Third Law and might conclude that she was inherently dishonest because she lied about the reading on her scale.

Attribution error is also evident in literary portraits of teachers, where the teachers’ behaviors are routinely described as evidence of character traits. One of the most famous teachers in American

literature is Ichabod Crane and this scene portrays his stern personality in the classroom.

On a fine autumnal afternoon, Ichabod, in a pensive mood sat enthroned on the lofty stool whence he usually watched all the concerns of his little literary realm. In his hand he swayed a ferule, that scepter of despotic power; the birch of justice reposed on three nails, behind the throne, a constant terror to evildoers, while on the desk before him might be seen sundry contraband articles and prohibited weapons, detected upon the persons of idle urchins, such as half-mulched apples, popguns, whirligigs, fly cages, and whole legions of rampant little paper gamecocks. Apparently there had been some appalling act of justice recently inflicted, for his scholars were all busily intent upon their books, or slyly whispering behind them with one eye kept upon the master; a kind of buzzing stillness reigned throughout the schoolroom.

Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Similarly, Charles Dickens’ portrait of a knowledgeable teacher suggests that even the teachers’ professional knowledge ultimately reflected his character:

[Mr. McChoakumchild] and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs. He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and leveling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way into Her Magesty's most Honourable Privy Council's Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin and Greek. He knew all about the watersheds of all the world (whatever they are) and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two-and-thirty points of the compass. Ah, rather overdone, McChoakumchild. If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught so much more!

Charles Dickens, Hard Times

Like cultural scripts, attribution errors influence all of us, not just RPs. We all tend to attribute teachers’ behaviors to enduring character traits or personalities rather than to the materials at their disposal, the time they have available to plan and develop lessons, the willingness of their students, the orderliness of the school as a whole, or other situational factors. At the same time, teachers themselves are often guilty of attribution error when they draw hasty conclusions about their students, assuming that student behaviors reflect inherent stubbornness, hostility, or laziness, rather than to lack of sleep, disharmonies at home, or the teachers’ own boring lessons.

Attribution error assumes full, unconstrained personal agency. It is an assumption that enables us to quickly make sense of other people’s actions when we can’t see their thoughts, can’t know what they are trying to achieve or what they are trying to avoid. It is a feature of many of our cultural scripts and it is reinforced in literature and movies. In the case of teachers, our assumption of personal agency is reinforced by the fact that we generated our impressions of teaching early in life and at that time, teachers appeared to be people who were always in charge and always know what to do.

Fast ThinkingFast thinking is the third aspect of everyday thinking relevant to our naïve understandings about teaching. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman {, 2011 #8958} has devoted his career to studying the way that people evaluate everyday situations and solve everyday problems. Although a

psychologist, he won a Nobel Prize in Economics because his news about how people make judgments was so important to economic theory. He uncovered a collection of heuristics, or spur-of-the-moment inferences people use to quickly judge situations and make decisions. Fast thinking contrasts with the kind of slow thinking that we use when we engage in more systematic and effortful analysis. To understand the difference between fast thinking and slow thinking, Kahneman offers this simple example. Imagine you are walking with a friend and chatting about something. You can easily manage both walking and talking simultaneously. But if your friend asks you to add up 743 and 258, you would have to stop walking in order to concentrate on your addition. The addition problem requires slow thinking.

Some psychologists refer to these two systems of thought as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is fast, spontaneous, and impressionistic whereas System 2 is more careful and self-conscious. Still other psychologists distinguish intuition and analysis {Hammond, 2000 #6209} or heuristic and systematic {Chen, #5265;Giner-Sorolla, 1997 #6010}. The main point is that fast thinking is automatic and is not the kind of thinking we learn in graduate school.

Kahneman and others have discovered a variety of heuristics people use to make in-the-moment decision. Here I present four heuristics that are especially relevant to how we make sense of teaching practice. All four are also relevant to how teachers interpret their students’ behaviors. To the extent that teachers use these heuristics to interpret their students, their practices are likely to be flawed. But to the extent that OAs, and REALs use these heuristics to govern teachers, their policies and practices are also likely to be flawed.

Stereotyping. One common heuristic involves the use of stereotypes to sort and label people. Lacking full knowledge of other people, we can make assumptions about them if we can classify them into a stereotype. We ascribe different personalities to the man with a beard and coveralls that we give to the clean-shaven man in a suit. Kahneman and Tversky {, 1973 #9061} tested this idea by asking their research subjects, who were graduate students in psychology, to guess whether other hypothetical graduate students were enrolled in one field of study or another. The hypothetical students were described in ways that fit different stereotypes. In another study, they told subjects that a given group of people consisted of 70 lawyers and 30 engineers, and then ask them to judge whether one particular person was a lawyer or an engineer. Again, the specific people were described in ways that reflected stereotypical attributes of engineers or lawyers. In yet another they asked subjects to predict whether a hypothetical character was a bank teller or feminist or both. In all these studies, their research subjects used the stereotypes to make their judgments, even when they were given probabilities that contradicted those judgments. So even if they knew that 70% of the people in the pool were lawyers, they would guess that the person was an engineer if he fit the stereotype of an engineer. The authors call this a representativeness heuristic, meaning we evaluate people for how well they represent a given stereotype rather than according to the actual probability that they would a member of a group.

Availability is a heuristic that also distorts our estimates about what is likely to happen. In this case, we overestimate the likelihood of events we can easily envision and under-estimate those we are less familiar with. For instance, we are likely to exaggerate the likelihood of dying from hurricanes or other natural disasters because we see these events in the news. On the other side, we might under-estimate the number of people who die from, say, heart attacks, because these happen individually and privately, so most of us have never had personal experience with them. Without that personal experience, the idea itself is less available to us in our thinking and hence seems less likely.

Self-Preservation is a heuristic that governs our decisions when we are fearful. This can be important in a “fight or flight” situation, where we need to make fast decisions about what to do.

Kahneman {, 2011 #8958} describes our response to threats this way: When we are walking about on a nice day, we enjoy the setting as a whole, but if a dangerous snake suddenly appears, our attention focuses entirely on that snake and we no longer notice the rest of the situation. The threat captures our entire attention. But this is an emotional responses and it can make us over-estimate the real risk {Slovic, 2004 #9059}.

Self-preservation is a widely used heuristic in teaching. In her qualitative study of teaching practice Kennedy {, 2005 #6615} found numerous instances in which teachers became anxious when the tranquility of classroom life was disrupted. For teachers, a tranquil classroom is one in which students adhere to norms of civility, lessons moved along on schedule, with no distractions or disruptions, and students all “get” whatever the content is. When any of these aspects of classroom life are threatened, teachers experience a high degree of anxiety and they direct their efforts toward stopping the threat and moving events back on track.

Such perceptions of “emergencies” may be beneficial in that they help teachers to keep their lessons on track, but the attendant anxiety can also lead teachers to make bad decisions. All three of the teaching episodes described above reflect some degree of anxiety associated with a disruption to the stable system. When Katlaski’s student first proposed multiplying 9 by 4/4, Katlaski became anxious because she had not anticipated this idea. She wished the idea would go away, became anxious, and in her anxiety, she told the student her idea would not work. In retrospect, Katlaski was sorry she said that, but in the moment, the response enabled her to remove this disruption and turn the conversation back in the direction she had originally intended.

Similarly, Ms. Defoe dismissed Andy’s mis-understanding of the lesson, turning her attention instead to William. Her fear that William would provoke a neighboring student and ultimately disrupt the entire lesson overshadowed any acknowledgement that Andy might need more help. She wished the situation would go away, became anxious, and abandoned Andy.

Finally, when Ms. Smith lied about the weight showing on her bathroom scale, she was preventing the scale itself from disrupting her planned lesson. She had thought a lot about how to enact Newton’s Third for her students in a way that would prevent the commonplace “action-reaction” mis-conception. She feared that, if she had been honest with her students about the weight on her scale, the entire point of the lesson would have been lost.

WYSIATI. The acronym, WYSIATI, refers to an assumption that “What you see is all there is.” That is, in hindsight, events could not have been any different than they were, so the early events led inexorably to later events. Once events have run their course, we generate coherent, plausible, and internally consistent post-hoc explanations that make us believe no other outcome could have occurred. We feel that we could see this coming all along and wonder why others didn’t. Using hindsight, we can easily blame Ms. Smith because she failed to check the accuracy of her scales before beginning her lesson. It should have been obvious to her that this problem might arise. We can also blame Ms. Katlaski for not realizing that a student might come up with the idea of multiplying 9 by 4/4. In hindsight, the idea seems obvious, and Katlaski should have foreseen it. We forget that Katlaski had hall duty before mathematics class and had no time to prepare for the class. And we forget that Smith had purchased the scales on her way to work in the morning, that she had other duties to attend to once she arrived at school, and that prior to the exercise, she had no reason to think that the scales would not agree.

Our use of WYSIATI also enables us to draw different conclusions in different situations without noticing the inconsistencies. We explain one situation by saying, “Out of sight, out of mind,” and it seems obviously true. We explain another by saying, “absence makes the heart grow fonder,” and that also seems obviously true. We interpret one project by saying “many hands make light work,” and another by saying, “too many cooks spoil the broth.” We don’t notice these inconsistencies, yet

in each case we feel confident in our understanding about why things have worked out as they have.

Closely associated with the assumption of WYSIATI is reliance on a heuristic called confirmation bias, which refers to a tendency to notice only those events that confirm our own views while overlooking experiences that might challenge them. We notice and emphasize examples that are consistent with our views, while those that are inconsistent are either not noticed at all, or are accounted for in some other way.

The net result of all of these heuristics is that we become very confident in our conclusions. This confidence affects everyone who thinks about teaching, whether they are RPs, TTs, OAs, or REALs. Watching teachers, we are unaware of the planning that occurred prior to our lessons, unaware of the multiple simultaneous tasks they are trying to achieve, and unaware of the conflicts among those tasks that drive their spontaneous decision-making throughout their lessons. Teachers appear to always know what to do, as if it comes naturally. Like all everyday thinkers, we are very confident in the universal correctness of our understandings. They are common sense.

I opened this essay by identifying two “baseline” questions that we need to learn about teaching. One has to do with what teachers actually do that causes students to learn; the other with things that enable teachers to do those things. Because we all share vast childhood experiences of living in classrooms and observing teacher through our naïve everyday perspectives, we are also likely to share a common set of naïve answers to these two questions. With respect to what teachers do, we mostly are aware of what we see, not what they think or intend or plan. Further, we do not see as much as teachers see. We can criticize Ms. Katlaski because we do not foresee the task of working out the problem on the board. We can criticize Ms. Defoe because we don’t see William; we see only Andy. And we can criticize Ms. Smith because we don’t see ahead to the problem she will face trying to re-teach Newton’s Third after this lesson gets converted into a lesson on measurement error. Our naïve understanding of teaching does not enable us to see that teachers are working on four essential tasks simultaneously, nor to see that they are ever distressed, worried, or strategizing. When asked the second foundational question, what would enable people to teach, we typically focus on teachers’ personal character. Some of us will see the need to be caring, others the need to be knowledgeable, and still others the need to be a strict disciplinarian. People who aspire to teach often believe that they have the personal qualities that will enable them to be good teachers, and they often envision themselves doing this job brilliantly.

Our everyday experiences, then, lead us to adopt naïve conceptions of teaching. From these experiences, teachers appear to always know what to do. It appears that the quality of their practice depends entirely on their own will and their own personal character. We also have naïve conceptions of how people learn. We tend to think that if teachers present content correctly, students will understand it correctly. These naïve understandings derived from a combination of cultural scripts, widespread tendencies to attribute behaviors to personal qualities, and widespread reliance on fast thinking. So the next question we must address is whether or how well our college educations improve or alter these original naïve ideas.

3. How Higher Education Adds to Naive ThinkingThe preceding section suggests that our everyday thinking leads to naïve ideas about teaching. We hold naïve ideas about what teachers do because we are unaware of the multiple tasks teachers do, unaware that they are doing them simultaneously manage, and unaware of the variety of complications that can arise. As a result we also have naïve ideas about the things that enable people to teach. We often believe that teaching comes naturally, and we look to teachers enduring personal character to enable teaching and to account for both good and bad examples of teaching. These perceptions are especially important for people who later become REALs, for they will decide what credentials to require of teachers, how teachers will be evaluated, the resources that should be provided to teachers, the professional development to provide, and so forth. If everyday thinking affected only RPs, it might be harmless, but because it also affects REALs and even OAs, it can have a pernicious influence on these policies, which in turn can have a pernicious effect on Teachers Themselves.

There is an alternative to everyday thinking that is more deliberate, purposeful, and analytic, but this approach to thinking is also more effortful. It does not come easily and is typically learned in school, especially in higher education. I call this second form of thinking disciplined to emphasize its two most important features. First, it is a form of thinking that is disciplined, in the sense that it is self-conscious, deliberate and careful, but second, it is also a form of thinking that is generally associated with a particular discipline, or content domain, and is learned in the context of learning that discipline. An important role for higher education is to help us learn to engage in disciplined thinking, so the question before us now is whether or how higher education, which provides us disciplined thinking, affects our thinking about teaching.

An important feature of disciplined thinking, however, is that it is connected to a particular body of knowledge. This means that there are many different kinds of disciplined thinking, each associated with a particular discipline. In mathematics, for instance, disciplined thinking entails the use and manipulation of mathematical symbols. We learn rules about what these symbols represent, how they can interact with one another and we learn strategies for manipulating them to solve problems. This is quite different from thinking about history, where we learn a lot of historical facts and learn how to unearth other historical artifacts, test the authenticity of artifacts, and use these artifacts to generate arguments. Both of these forms of thinking are different still from, say, zoology, where we learn about different species, learn classification systems, and arguments about criteria for discriminating among them. Each discipline has a community of scholars who judge each other’s work, so that, as people learn to engage in disciplined thinking within a specific discipline, they also learn to anticipate how their colleagues will criticize their work. The presence of peer review and critique further motivates participants to ensure that their arguments will withstand criticisms.

Across the various disciplines, there are common features that distinguish it from everyday thinking. It is more focused, self-conscious and intentional than everyday thinking. It is also more difficult to learn and requires effort. It generally includes methods for testing one’s own conclusions, and is therefore less prone to error than is everyday thinking.

These differences between disciplined thinking and everyday thinking have implications for when and how each is used. Disciplined thinking is most useful within the specific discipline for which it was designed. We use historical thinking when reading or thinking about historical events, but not to help us solve chemistry problems. We use mathematical thinking when solving mathematical problems but not to solve horticultural problems. In contrast, everyday thinking, despite its many flaws, has very broad applicability. We draw on it in to help us manage a wide range of everyday

activities—from pleasant exchanges with friends to shopping to quickly swerving our car to miss an object in the road. It is our fallback approach to thinking whenever we lack the motivation or capability to engage in disciplined thinking.

What this means, though, is that the kind of effortful, self-conscious thinking we learn in college replaces everyday thinking only when we are thinking about a specific domain of content. Even people who become respected scholars in a particular field will still engage in everyday thinking when they are outside of their field. This fact is important in regard to learning about teaching because all of us originally learn about teaching through their everyday experience. No matter how good we become as disciplined thinkers in a given field, we won’t necessarily use disciplined thinking to think about teaching. It is quite possible to retain our naïve ideas about teaching even as we become more facile as disciplined thinkers in other domains.

Notice that the limited applicability of disciplined thinking also affects OAs and REALs. Even though these latter two groups have entered a profession that requires them to influence teachers, their own disciplined thinking is still be limited to the particular disciplines they have studied, so that it might not affect the way that they talk to teachers, evaluate teachers, observe teachers, or try to influence teachers. Thus, when they witness the three episodes I described earlier, they are likely to succumb to attribution error and conclude that Ms. Katlaski lacks sufficient subject matter knowledge; that Ms. Defoe does not care about her students because she ignores the needs of Andy; and that Ms. Smith is intellectually dishonest.

But what about Teachers Themselves? Certainly they would benefit from greater knowledge and ability within the disciplines they are actually teaching. Indeed, a common theme among OAs and REALs who seek to improve teaching quality is that teachers need more disciplinary knowledge. But these proposals often stem from a naïve understanding of teaching in which the task is simply to tell students what you know. Under this version of teaching, more content knowledge enables more teaching. Therefore, many REALs seek to improve teaching by requiring teachers to take more disciplinary courses in college and/or pass more difficult content tests. And OAs, in their capacity as researchers, have sought to document the relationship between how much teachers know about a subject and how much their students learn from them. In the early 2000’s, I myself engaged in a large project designed to synthesize all of these studies. My team gathered and analyzing studies in every subject and every grade level. At that time, we found 465 citations from studies published between 1960 and 2005 {Kennedy, 2007 #9052}. But the rate of publication on this topic has increased even more rapidly since then, as school districts have developed more powerful information systems that link data on teachers to data on students.

This multitude of studies has not, however, yielded clear and strong evidence regarding the role of disciplinary knowledge in teaching. Though most state-level REALs require aspiring teachers to pass a licensure test, they have had a difficult time settling on what test score would represent adequate knowledge in any given domain. The problem was demonstrated recently in a study by Goldhaber {, 2010 #8959}. At the time of his study, the state of North Carolina was considering a new policy that would raise the minimum mathematics test score that would be required for teachers. Their hope was that, by raising the test score requirement, they would eliminate the relatively less effective teachers from their schools. To see what impact this proposed requirement might have, Goldhaber produced a scatterplot showing the relationship between teachers’ licensure test scores and their students’ achievement gains. Presumably, on such a chart, we would see students’ test scores go up as their teachers’ scores went up. Goldhaber also marked off the two cut scores of interest, showing both the more restrictive score or the less restrictive score. Teachers between these two scores represent the group that would be eliminated under the proposed new rule. Goldhaber’s chart showed that if the state adopted this new requirement, it would eliminate more effective teachers than ineffective teachers.

Insert figure 4a here

There are many reasons why this pattern might exist. One is that licensure tests may be measuring college-level content rather than measuring the specific content that is actually being taught by teachers. Years ago, another researcher {Begle, 1972 #2793} thought the teacher test needed to be a closer match to student tests. He designing a test for teachers that covered the exact same content as the test he used for students. Yet he still failed to find a strong relationship between his measure of teachers’ knowledge and how much of that content the students learned.

Another explanation for this inability of licensure tests to separate good teachers from bad is that teachers in the United States are universally more well-educated and may have all surpassed whatever threshold level is needed to ensure better teaching. If this is the case, then the role of content knowledge would be more apparent in countries where there is greater variation among teachers. This was the case, for instance, in a study carried out in Belize {Mullens, 1996 #1386}. In that study, only 32% of sampled teachers had completed a post-high teachers college program and only 58% had even completed high school. In this setting, tests of teachers mathematical knowledge had a stronger relationship to student learning than is often found in U.S. studies.

Yet another explanation is that these tests do not measure the unique form of content knowledge that teachers need. This hypothesis was examined closely in a team at the University of Michigan {Ball, 2008 #4796;Hill, 2005 #3063;Hill, 2004 #6342}, where researchers defined a form of mathematical knowledge called “mathematical knowledge for teaching,” or MKT, to distinguish it from mathematical knowledge more generally. The idea was to identify nuances of mathematics that were particularly relevant to the practice of teaching, and to devise a test that would measure this form of knowledge. The project was extensive, but its results were still disappointing. In a review of research on teacher knowledge, the National Research Council said:

However, the level of correlation between teacher knowledge and student learning has been low. In the largest study examining the relation between MKT and student learning, a 1 standard deviation increase in MKT was associated with only .06 standard deviations of gain in student learning (Hill et al., 2005).1 One possible explanation for the low correlation is what Bransford has referred to as the problem of inert knowledge. The concept of inert knowledge is used to describe at least some of the knowledge that one learns in school. Someone might “know” something in the sense that he or she can produce it on a paper-and-pencil test but still not be able to access and use the knowledge in a problem-solving situation. Thus, for example, the MKT is measuring what teachers know in one context (a multiple-choice test) but not whether they are able to activate and apply that knowledge in a real teaching situation.

National Research Council [NRC], 2000.

Perhaps the most important reason why greater disciplinary knowledge does not enable more effective teaching is that Teachers Themselves cannot rely solely on disciplined thinking to make teaching decisions. They may have learned, when in college, to think more rigorously about the subjects they teach—language, history, mathematics, science and so forth—but the decisions they make as they interact with their students require them to consider many issues other than the content itself. Further, to the extent that they must make decisions spontaneously, they will necessarily rely more on their everyday thinking because of its accessibility and automaticity. Thus, when Ms. Katlaski tells a student that multiplying 9 by 4/4 would not work, she was not referring to her mathematical knowledge but to her pedagogical plan to walk through the problem on the board. And when Ms. Defoe dismisses Andy’s confusion and turns her attention to William,

she is not necessarily ignorant of Andy’s confusion, but is, at the moment, more worried about William’s fidgeting. In the midst of teaching, as teacher balance among their numerous tasks they need to achieve, disciplined thinking, with its narrow range of applicability, is rarely useful.

Teachers, as well as OAs and REALs, learn disciplined thinking while in college, but all three groups, once turning their attention to teaching, are likely to abandon their disciplined thinking in favor of everyday thinking. Disciplinary knowledge and disciplined thinking cannot, alone, enable teaching. Because teachers’ day-to-day decisions require them to think in terms of multiple simultaneous problems, they continue to rely on everyday thinking to solve the problems of teaching.

But colleges also offer programs designed to prepare people for professional roles—as engineers, nurses, or teachers, among other things. How, then, does teacher education enable aspiring teachers to teach?

4. How Teacher Education Adds to Naive ThinkingTeacher education programs reside in the midst of numerous curriculum offerings within institutions of higher education. Students may take courses from teacher educators at the same time they are taking courses in art, music, mathematics or biology. But the courses in teacher education are presumed to offer more than disciplinary knowledge. They are expected to offer something that will enable teachers to teach once they leave college.

Faculty in these programs are the Ostensible Authorities about teaching. But when they teach their students, they confront the same problem that Teachers Themselves face, in that they must find a way to represent their ideas that will push students think about them, understand them, and retain them. But they face numerous additional problems, for they hope that the ideas they share will actually govern their students’ future teaching practices. This is a tall order for three reasons. First, whatever they teach their students will have to remain in the students’ heads, unused, for one or two years until they finish college and begin teaching in their own classrooms. Second, these students already have well-developed, albeit naïve, conceptions about what good teaching is, including the belief that it comes naturally, and including the belief that they themselves already what it takes. There is a good chance, therefore, that they will fail to grasp the nuances of the messages they hear in teacher education courses. Third, they face the task that Bransford {, 1990 #2131} called anchoring: They must represent their ideas in a way that enables students to connect them to their own future, unseen and unexperienced, real teaching situations.

Viewed in this way, the notion that teacher educators could achieve such an outcome seems unrealistic, and it should not be a surprise that they have failed to demonstrate visible influences on their alumni. But teacher educators are also hindered by their own everyday thinking about teaching and about teacher learning. Many of them are more interested in the disciplinary thinking associated with their original disciplines of sociology, psychology, history, etc. than they are with the kind of applied thinking their students need to learn. Consequently, even though they take on roles as Ostensible Authorities, they may retain naïve conceptions of teaching itself.

Over the years, Ostensible Authorities have relied on three main approaches to the education of aspiring teachers, none of which addresses the problems of learning laid out above. The oldest idea is to engage in a form of character development, altering their students’ commitments to particular ideals. The assumption here is that, years later, their students will have a stronger moral compass to guide their practice and will base their practices on their commitments to particular ideals. The second approach, with an equally long history, is to provide formal bodies of knowledge about teaching, along with their associated forms of disciplined thinking—that is, teach aspiring teachers they way that all students in higher education are taught. The assumption here is that, years later,

their students will be able to draw on these ideas in the same way they would draw on their knowledge of mathematics or history. The third approach is to train teachers in the use of a set of specific teaching techniques or behaviors. The assumption here is that, years later, their students will apply these techniques in their own K-12 classrooms.

Character DevelopmentThe first prominent idea guiding teacher educators is that of character development. This idea is tied closely to traditional conceptions of liberal education. In this view, the role of teacher education (or liberal education) is to encourage self-reflection and to provoke thought, especially about moral values. These experiences develop the individual character of the students, so that they become more caring, more just, more sympathetic to others, or more committed to particular teaching ideals. This is one of the earliest notions of teacher education but it continues as a dominant theme in teacher education today.

Over time, though, the particular character traits deemed most worthy of development have changed. Consider, for instance, a very early study designed to identify the characters traits that would make the best possible teachers {Charters, 1929 #5259}. The authors surveyed a number of audiences about important teacher qualities and used their results to derive a list of 25 character traits that were important for teachers. Their list included such things as adaptability, considerateness, honesty, neatness, open mindedness, originality, promptness, and scholarship. In addition to these character traits, the authors generated a list of what they called “trait actions;” that is, behaviors that would indicate the presence of one or another trait. One of the actions deemed important for teachers was “Shows a willingness to put up with a poor school system, and unfriendly community!”

In the 1940s and 50’s, personality traits became popular. Many studies were carried out using the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, an instrument first published in 1943 and presumed to measure personality traits such as introversion vs. extroversion, masculinity vs. femininity, and so forth. After World War II, American psychologists also became interested in authoritarian personalities as potential threats to democracy {Adorno, 1950 #4611}, and educational researchers looked for evidence of authoritarianism in teachers. Thus we find studies such as McGee’s {, 1955 #7052} which borrowed Adorno’s “fascism” scale and used it to study the relationship between teachers’ authoritarian personalities and their teaching practices. Eventually, an extensive review of literature on personality traits {Getzels, 1963 #5993} showed that none of the widely studied personality traits demonstrated any significant relation to other indicators of successful teaching.

But a new wave of interest in teachers’ personal character arose in the 1980s, this time focusing on teachers’ beliefs, values and dispositions. Interest in beliefs and values was so widespread that a research center at Michigan State University was devoted entirely to studying how teacher candidates’ beliefs and dispositions changed during their participation in teacher education programs (I was hired by Michigan State to direct that center and my work there provided my first introduction to research on teacher learning). Throughout the country, OAs took an interest in teachers’ beliefs about students, school subjects and related matters. As an example, consider an article by Clemens {, 1991 #4590}, written for a book our center published. We asked each author to address the question, “What do teachers need to know or be able to do [emphasis added] to teach a specific subject?” For his response, Clemens wrote a paper entitled “What do math teachers need to be?” [emphasis added], a paper which emphasized the role of personal character more than knowledge per se.

In addition to beliefs and values, OAs have also been interested in what they called dispositions. One popular disposition during this period caring, defined by Noddings {, 1984 #7286} as putting

concerns for others above concerns for self, and making an effort to understand the others’ point of view. Another disposition, still popular today, had to do with social justice {Villegas, 2007 #8439}. Numerous colleges and universities have mentioned social justice in their mission statements and have committed themselves to making their teaching candidates more committed to social justice as an instructional aim.

One problem with personal character as a goal for teacher education is that teacher educators have no recognized pedagogy—other than hortatory—for altering their candidates’ beliefs or values. A recent review of research on the ability of teacher education programs to influence student-teachers’ practices {Anderson, 2013 #9068} suggested that many programs sought to increase students’ commitment to social justice simply by exposing their teaching candidates to different populations of children. These authors argued that researchers held overly naïve learning theories, assuming that mere exposure would alter novice-teachers’ beliefs and dispositions.

As an approach to teacher education, character development may also suffer from the everyday naïve perception that people’s actions are driven by their personal character traits rather than by the situations they face. In the naïve view of teaching, born from everyday thinking, good teaching comes from people who are dedicated and committed, rather than from people who have learned good ideas from their teacher education programs.

Professional KnowledgeThe second prominent idea guiding teacher educations is the concept of professional knowledge. Knowledge is the easiest thing for teacher educators to provide, given that they reside in institutions that specialize in teaching people bodies of knowledge. The entire structure of higher education is organized into courses and levels that enable faculty to segment knowledge into discrete courses and ultimately convey large bodies of it to their students. Typically, teachers do not obtain knowledge about the content they will teach within their teacher education programs per se, but instead get this knowledge from other departments in the larger university. Within their teacher education programs, though, students typically take courses on subjects such as classroom management, student motivation, learning theory, special education, sociology of education and so forth.

In the 1980s and 90s, the field of teacher education experienced a surge of interest in the domains of knowledge that were relevant to teaching. Much of this was stimulated by the writings of Lee Shulman {Shulman, 1986 #7968; Shulman, 1987 #7970; Shulman, 1986 #7967}. As teacher educators began to think about the knowledge needed for teaching, more and more bodies of knowledge were identified. Whole books were published outlining relevant bodies of knowledge, typically with a chapter devoted to each domain ( I participated in this trend as well, editing one of these books). As time went on, the number of chapters in these books continually increased, going from 13 chapters {Smith, 1983 #8057} to 15 {Kennedy, 1989 #6597} to 24 {Reynolds, 1990 #7609} to 28 {Murray, 1996 #7219}.

The target audience for these compendia was not Teachers Themselves, but usually Ostensible Authorities. That is, these volumes identified bodies of knowledge that teacher educators should be providing for their students. The earliest {Smith, 1983 #8057} was published by the AACTE. Though the book was entitled Essential Knowledge for Beginning Educators, it was more of a survey of research on teaching than a handbook for Teachers Themselves. Later, that same organization published a more ambitious volume {Reynolds, 1995 #7606} with 23 chapters examining research literature on different bodies of knowledge teachers should know. This volume was designed to be something of a handbook for teacher educators: the chapters were largely summaries of bodies of research, absent any of the sense of purposefulness that teachers need to make knowledge

meaningful. Another volume {Dill, 1990 #5559} presented imperatives, with most of its chapters titled, “What teachers need to know about . . . .” My own contribution {Kennedy, 1991 #6603} acknowledged that there might be different views about what was important within each of the disciplines, and provided point/counter-point pairs of chapters addressing knowledge debates within science, mathematics, social studies and language arts, as well as about students.

One problem with professional knowledge has to do with how it is represented in an academic setting such as a university. The cultural expectation in higher education is that professors lecture and students take notes. With this approach to teaching, the knowledge teacher educators impart can be just as self-contained and unrelated to practice as the knowledge offered in other departments in the university. Teacher education faculty represent a variety of disciplines and often offer courses that reflect those disciplines: the sociology of education, educational psychology, the history of education, the politics, governance or organizational structures of education, educational finance, or the role of culture, poverty, race or language in school learning. Faculty care about these disciplines and their academic rewards come from their scholarly and disciplined thinking and writing, not from their teaching or from the practical value of their knowledge.

Because of their disciplinary affiliations, the knowledge they provide can be just as self-contained and unrelated to practice as the knowledge offered in other departments in the university. Concepts can be taught in relationship to each other, in relationship to empirical studies, or in relationship to theories, but rarely in relationship to situations such as those faced by Ms. Katlaski, Ms. Defoe or Ms. Smith. Missing from discussions of professional knowledge is the question of how professional knowledge rises above its status as inert, stand-alone, self-referencing knowledge to become the kind of knowledge that helps teachers understand the resistant student in front of them. Knowing about motivation theory may not help teachers recognize ennui on the faces of their own students nor give them guidance about how to respond to it.

This is not to say that these bodies of knowledge are not relevant to teachers, but that they can be represented in such a way that students do not see the relevance. It is entirely possible for faculty in college courses talk about teaching in the abstract, so that their students don’t make the links to their own future practices. Missing from discourse on teacher education is the question of how to or represent knowledge about teaching in way that simulates or represents teaching practice itself. There is no obvious way to illustrate motivation theory, to illustrate strategies for managing a crowd of restless youngsters, to illustrate methods for intellectually engaging 14-year-olds with the American revolution, or to illustrate techniques for calming an emotionally-charged argument between two students. Without being able to demonstrate their knowledge in situ, teacher educators can only talk about it.

Further, university knowledge is intentionally compartmentalizing into discrete units that can be taught in discrete courses. One professor teaches about student motivation, another teaches about classroom management, a third about cultural differences and a fourth about subject-specific pedagogy. Yet the practice of teaching requires teachers to integrate ideas from across these different domains in order to devise instructional strategies that simultaneously address multiple essential tasks. Even if teachers were able to frequently see situations in which their professional knowledge would apply, they may not be prepared for the conflict among their essential tasks or for the need to compromise among competing ideals.

Teaching TechniquesThe third prominent idea guiding teacher educators is to provide teachers with specific teaching techniques that they can take with them to their own classrooms. This hypothesis focuses more on what teachers do, rather than what they are, or what they know, and it also has relatively a long

history. In fact, the study referred to above that sought to identify relevant aspects of personal character {Charters, 1929 #5259} also sought to ascertain the specific tasks that teachers actually did. Their plan was to use this analysis to create an optimal teacher education curriculum. Through interviews and surveys, these researchers identified and catalogued over 938 discrete tasks, and they were tremendously various. For instance, items numbered 123 to 290, over 100 discrete items, all had to do with “recording and reporting.” This is a very fine-grained look at recording and reporting. Yet other items described large and complex tasks: “selecting types of instruction adapted to needs of class;” and “Teaching pupils to develop useful interests, worthy motives, and sincere appreciations.” One wonders what would make the teacher educators qualified to teach such difficult situation-dependent tasks when they have not figured how to do these things in their own programs.

In the 1960s, researchers tried a different approach for defining teaching techniques. Discouraged by their earlier efforts to identify personality traits, they began to observe and document what they saw teachers actually do. Dozens of observation protocols were developed, each focusing on different aspects of classroom life. One researcher, for instance examined aspects of teacher-student interactions {Flanders, 1960 #5826;Flanders, 1964 #5827;Flanders, 1965 #5828;Flanders, 1970 #5829;Flanders, 1969 #5830} while another sought to parse episodes of teaching according to the logic of the lesson {Smith, 1974 #8052;Smith, 1967 #8053;Smith, 1962/1970 #8054} and yet another examined cycles of events {Bellack, 1966 #4877}. Some of these studies were quite large. One {Ryans, 1960 #7767} involved some 6000 teachers.

At first, it was possible to maintain a directory of all the observation instruments, but as their number this became more difficult. Researchers catalogued 26 systems in 1967 {Simon, 1967 #7999} 79 systems two years later {Simon, 1969 #8004} and 99 five years after that {Simon, 1974 #8006}. Eventually the catalogue consisted of multiple volumes and became unwieldy.

Despite the number and variety of approaches, this work did enable researchers, for the first time, to engage in detailed and nuanced examinations of what actually occurred inside classrooms. Prior to these studies, discussions of teaching were based largely on vague impressions, with many allusions to character traits. Further, as researchers got better at documenting classroom events, they were also able to examine the relationships between observed practices and student learning. This body of literature began in the 1960s and reached productive fruition in the 1980s. It yielded numerous summaries that sought to characterize features of good teaching {e.g.,/ Brophy, 1986 #5078; Brophy, 1982 #5058; Gage, 1989 #5928; Medley, 1983 #7092}}.

These results had a substantial impact on teacher education and motivated a new movement called Competency-Based Teacher Education (CBTE). The idea was to define a new behaviorally-oriented curriculum of teacher education. A related movement, called microteaching, provided a pedagogy for teaching these skills. This pedagogy enabled candidates to actually rehearse specific teaching moves. Gage {, 1977 #5924} described microteaching as a form of “scaled-down teaching,” in which student teachers would teach for only five or ten minutes at a time, practicing one discrete activity. Professors would videotape the novice’s practice and then review the videotape with the novice. The idea originated and was developed at Stanford University, whose program taught specific skills such as reinforcement, use of illustrations and examples, skill-closure, and presentation aids {Haberman, 1973 #1586}.

This movement was not problem-free, however. As different teacher educators engaged with this idea, the number and variety of competencies grew and researchers began trying to sort them according to their popularity and validity {Hall, 1976 #6184; Pigge, 1982 #7474}. Eventually, they had generated too many competencies to form a coherent curriculum; another was that they lacked any empirical evidence regarding the role or importance of any of them {Sykes, 1984 #1509}.

Programs produced hundreds of competencies—one had 1350, including how to thread film in a 16mm projector {Arends, 2006 #3728}. These lists remind us of the original list generated by Charters and Waples {, #5259} fifty years earlier Further, there was very little attention to the role these tasks played in fostering student learning, nor to how they contributed to effective teaching. There were no underlying theories about student learning, or about the purpose of teaching, or about why one skill might be more central than another {Grossman, 2005 #6135}.

Further, teacher educators still lacked evidence that novices actually used the skills they had been taught after they left their teacher education programs and moved into their own classrooms. With respect to microteaching, for instance, research indicated that novices learned the skills, and could implement them in their teacher education courses, but did not retain and use these skills later on, when they entered practice as teachers {MacLeod, 1987 #6957;MacLeod, 1987 #1534}.

The presence of a defined set of skills led to new efforts to improve teaching through inservice professional development, but programs offering teachers standardized lesson structures failed to yield the expected benefits to student learning {Good, 1981 #6054; Good, 1983 #6055; Stallings, 1985 #8136; Stallings, 1986 #8137} that had been observed when experienced teachers used these practices. In a recent review of programs that prepare teachers to engage in “scripted teaching,” Beatty {, 2011 #9051} compared teachers who voluntarily enrolled in lengthy and intensive training to learn Froebelian kindergarten methods and Montessori methods, with teachers who had been assigned by their schools to learn two other scripted approaches, Direct Instruction and Success for All. She found that, whether teachers volunteered or were assigned, they were able to learn all these systems, but that they also always modified them once they were in their own classrooms.

No pre-defined skills can enable teachers make the kind of spontaneous decisions that teachers need to make. But we now see that this is also true of character traits and professional knowledge. None of these gifts—character traits, professional knowledge or professional skills—can enable teachers to figure out what to do unpredictable and uncertain classroom situations. Missing from the teacher education rhetoric has been attention how teachers learn to think strategically, to weigh the benefits of taking one course of action over another. Missing too is the recognition that these decisions depend heavily on the teachers’ goal, on what seems most important at this moment in this classroom.

The Role of Everyday Thinking in Teacher EducationThe discussion above focuses on three main ideas about how to prepare teachers to teach. Each rests on a tacit hypothesis about how a set of ideas learned in college can affect future behavior in practice. All three overlook some important features of teaching practice itself. First, they overlook the fact that teaching is a strategic activity in which teachers strive to achieve four different essential tasks simultaneously. All three also overlook the fact that teachers’ actions at any given moment are responses to the teacher’s assessment of the content, the students, the time of year, and the collection of set of competing things that need to be accomplished. None of the things normally provided by teacher educators—personal commits, professional knowledge or professional skills—can help teachers make strategic decisions or adjust their actions to the specifics of the moment.

Add here that TE is further complicated by a steady stream of criticisms from REALs, who use EDT to decide what TE should be doing. Cite studies like NCTQ that start by stipulating what TE Should do, then does research to show that it is not doing that, and no one ever questions whether their list of “shoulds” is the right list in the first place, but everyone concludes that TE isn’t doing a good job, whatever that would be.

Further, none of these approaches addresses central requirements for learning, namely that ideas must be represented in a form that prods learners to think about patterns, underlying relationships, and deeper meanings, and that ideas must be represented in a way that helps students understand them in the context where they are to be applied, namely real-life classrooms with all their complexity. Each of these approaches to teacher education fails to link to live teaching practice.

The idea that teaching practices depend on character traits and personal commitments derives in part from the everyday tendency to attribute all observed behavior to personal qualities rather than to situational affordances or constraints, and in part from the cultural scripts for teaching which we all learn as children. It leads Ostensible Authorities to try to improve teaching practice by providing hortatory, in the hope of they will alter the future commitments of their students.

Bodies of knowledge, on the other hand, can inform teachers about motivation theory, learning theory, child development or the sociology of education, but they do not come with recommendations about what to do at any given moment. Further, without anchoring this knowledge in the context of real teaching situations, it is possible for teachers to hold their “college knowledge” in completely separate compartments from their understanding of teaching itself. Even knowledge about school subjects does not come with recommendations about what to say at any given moment, given a particular audience and situation.

The third idea, that specific behaviors and skills are important, follows from the everyday assumption that What You See Is All There Is. That is, the behaviors we observe in classrooms are free-standing events rather than intentional actions, actions designed to achieve specific purposes. Thus, teacher educators have sought to improve teaching by outlining the procedures they see other teachers doing, rather than trying to understand and convey the purposes underlying these actions.

Everyday thinking about teaching has led to miss important aspects of what teachers do, and consequently to miss-judge what they could provide that would enable teachers to teach. They have failed to understand the strategic character of teaching practice itself, to understand the variety of conflicting intentions that govern teachers’ actions, and to understand how specific behaviors respond to unique situations. They have also failed to develop a pedagogy that anchors their ideas in the context of real, complex and uncertain teaching situations, so that their students would learn how to interpret such situations. They have not created programs that help teachers learn to successfully manage the dilemmas inherent in teaching.

Once college students complete their teacher education programs and enter the thick of practice itself, they are likely to forget many of and to begin anew, to learn about teaching, and to do so by relying mainly on their everyday thinking.

5. What Teachers Learn from ExperienceBecause teacher educators lack a coherent conception of teaching, and of what enables teaching, and because they must prepare people who hold naïve conceptions themselves, novices frequently enter practice with their own naïve conceptions still intact and their everyday thinking still dominating their understanding of teaching.

Schools are not good places in which to learn different conceptions of teaching. They are crowded and noisy and teachers are not given much time to plan out their lessons. This situation, combined with the weaknesses in their preparation, increases the likelihood that they will rely heavily on their everyday thinking to solve the problems they face. Everyday thinking is essential when we face situations that are fast-moving, complex, or ambiguous, and schools are all of these things. What, then, do they learn about teaching when they enter it with these everyday tools? Here are

some answers to that question.

A “Teacherly” PersonaPerhaps the first and most difficult thing teachers learn when they begin teaching is that their previous images of themselves as natural teachers with compelling teaching personas were incorrect. They may discover that they are unable to enact the persona they had envisioned, or that that students do not respond to them as they had envisioned. They also learn what kind of people they really are. Perhaps they are less tolerant than they thought, more anxious than they thought, less playful or more disorganized. They find that their personal qualities are actually hindering them rather than helping them, and they begin to adapt their personalities accordingly. One of the earliest people to study teachers at work was Willard Waller {Waller, #8467}, who was interested in how the practice of teaching affected Teachers Themselves. Waller thought the work of teaching had a serious effect on teachers themselves. Because they had to maintain dignity and social distance, while at the same time talking seriously about childish matters such as rewards or demerits, they developed artificial personalities. Further, because students continually tested the limits of the rules, teachers had to work continually to prevent the crowd from becoming a mob. The task of teaching forced teachers to develop unnatural personalities.

The irony here is obvious: While novices enter their work expecting their natural personalities to carry them through the day, they discover the reverse: The practice of teaching shapes their personalities more than their personalities shape their practices. In the 1980s and 90s there was a plethora of case studies looking at what teachers learned and how they adapted to their situations when they first began teaching. A common theme in these studies had to do with finding a personal identity that would enable them to manage the work. This process is made more difficult by the unrealistic expectations that novices set for themselves. Unaware of the multiple and conflicting essential tasks of teaching, novices hold expectations for themselves that cannot be met, a problem that creates many anxieties as they strive to take hold of their work. For example, Wagner {, 1987 #8455} described “knots” in novice teachers’ thinking. A novice may think, “I should be a dynamic speaker” but find that dynamism doesn’t come easily to her. So her thinking loops back and forth: “I must be more dynamic. But I can’t. But I must. But I can’t.” Or the novice may experience two conflicting imperatives. “I must be a nice teacher,” and simultaneously, “I must be a strict disciplinarian.” Wagner describes these knots as never-ending circular loops. Because they can’t be resolved, a great deal of frustration and emotion is spent on these loops.

Another author {Featherstone, 1993 #5757} became convinced that the main thing novices were learning was how to control their own emotions. She concludes:

I now think somewhat differently about the lessons of early teaching experience: I have come to feel that self-knowledge [emphasis added] is a major fruit--perhaps the major fruit--of early teaching experience, that the loudest of the voices urging strict discipline may come from inside the novice's head, and that the struggle to manage the behavior of young people is intimately bound up with the struggle to understand and change the self (pg 2).

An important aspect of learning from experience, then, is learning about one’s own self. Teachers learn what they can tolerate, what they can muster, and how to create a practice that is a reasonable compromise between their ideals, their students, and their own temperaments.

Interpreting Classroom EventsTeachers also learn through practice to “see” meaningful patterns in classroom events.

Expertise

All three examples of T actions are based on their ability to see what would happen next and a need to prevent it. Note al

Layers of Practice Researchers who have studied teachers’ planning and decision-making processes have found that teachers plan at three different levels. The first level consists of standardized operating systems that govern daily work. Operating systems include routines, rules and habits that remain roughly consistent over time. These systems might include not just crowd-control mechanisms but also techniques for motivating students and enlisting their participation, habitual questions or learning activities that help them see what their students are thinking, and even customary ways of enacting specific segments of the curriculum. These systems are not created all at once, but rather are developed incrementally as teachers continuously tinker and refine their systems {Huberman, 1994 #6421}. Teachers also make small modifications from year to year to accommodate unique events. For instance, in one year, there may be a student who is physically disabled, in another, a new textbook, and in a third a new cellphone policy. The overall system represents the teachers’ best effort to simultaneously solve the four essential tasks while also accommodating unique circumstances. The process of continuous tinkering enables teachers to make small improvements toward one problem area without risking new problems in another area.

Layered over their long-term operating systems are plans for specific units of instruction and for daily lessons within those units. The unit includes a series of lessons that move through a specified body of content, but the lessons themselves tend to be organized around activities more than substantive concepts {Shavelson, 1983 #7931}. These activities constitute their enactment of the curriculum. Activities take into account the physical arrangement of the room, the distribution of materials, how one activity segues into the next, where individual students will sit, and even how specific students might respond to particular events. Unit and lesson plans enable teachers to consider all the problems they expect to encounter—the persistently bored student on the left, the efficient distribution materials before anyone’s attention can wander, the location of the demonstration so that everyone can see it, and so forth. Lesson plans work out the logistics of enactment so that teachers can ensure that the lesson address all the persistent problems of teaching.

Two points are important about teachers’ lesson plans. One is that they vary from day to day not only because the content varies, and different content requires different forms of enactment, but also because different students are motivated by different kinds of activities so lesson variety helps teachers sustain student interest. Teachers seek day-to-day variety to solve the problem of unwilling or unmotivated students as well as to accommodate changes in curricular content. The second point is that teachers tend not to alter their lesson plans once they begin enactment, even if the plan is not working as intended {Shavelson, 1983 #7931;Clark, 1986 #5295;Clark, 1977 #5296}. One hypothesis for why teachers don’t engage in in-the-moment design changes is that the lessons were designed to simultaneously solve four very different, yet essential, tasks, so that even if the teacher discovers that their lesson is failing on one of the tasks, it may not be possible to spontaneously alter a lesson plan in a way that still ensures that the remaining tasks will bel addressed.

The third level of decision-making consists of the micro-level interactive decisions that occur within lessons as teachers decide whom to call upon, how to respond to things students say, and so forth. Even though the lesson structure as a whole tends remain fixed, these numerous small interactions are continuously adjusted in response to students. What teachers say or do at any given moment depends on their perception of the situation at that moment. Teachers respond to student confusions, pose new questions to ascertain students’ understanding at that moment, correct

behaviors of students who move off task, and so forth. They continuously scan the crowd for evidence of misunderstandings, attention lapses, or behavior lapses which could segue into behavior incidents. In her study of teaching, Kennedy {, #6615} identified five different “areas of concern” that teachers routinely monitored during teaching. These areas of concern were: students’ willingness to participate, student learning, community norms, lesson momentum, and the teachers’ own personal needs for such things as quiet or order or engagement. Kennedy found that whenever something occurred in the classroom that threatened any of these areas of concern, teachers would take some sort of corrective or preventative action. Often these actions are not visible to observers. For instance if a teacher is aware that a student looks a bit bored, s/he may ask the student a question just to bring him back into the lesson. To the observer, this question may seem like a routine question, but to the teacher, the question also serves to re-engage a student who appears to be drifting away.

Narrower Goals The experience of teaching can also teach teachers to abandon their loftier ideals in favor of narrower goals. This observation was originally made by Dan Lortie (1977), a sociologist who was interested in how the organization of teaching as a profession influenced the way that teachers practiced it. Lortie never sat in schools or observed teachers at work, so his analysis is based entirely on interviews with teachers. From these, he characterized teachers’ orientation toward their work with three adjectives: conservatism, individualism, and presentism.

By conservatism, he meant that teachers tended to narrow their goals to things that were easily achieved, rather than taking on expansive goals, and that they tended to rely on traditional, tried-and-true solutions rather than to experiment with alternatives. He saw this conservatism as a response to the fact that teaching was an easy job to enter and to leave; consequently many people entered the profession with very little commitment to the work. This hypothesis is particularly interesting to consider in light of contemporary policy initiatives such as Teach for America which aim to encourage short-term commitments to teaching. But remember that Lortie’s evidence came entirely from interviews with teachers, not from any direct observation of their practice. Nor did he make an effort to contrast teachers who had more or less commitment to the profession.

David Cohen {, 2005 #1432;, 1988 #5341} has visited much of this same territory but offers slightly different hypotheses to account for the practices of teachers: He argues that any effort to change other human beings will necessarily be fraught with ambiguity and uncertainty, since we can’t see inside our clients’ heads or decipher their inner motives. This ambiguity itself can motivate practitioners to adopt more conservative goals, to aim for things they are likely to actually achieve.

By individualism, Lortie meant that teachers seemed to lack a shared knowledge base and that, instead, they tended to develop their own criteria for success. This he attributed in part to the fact that they work in relative isolation from other adults, though he also observed that they tended to prefer working alone and to stick to themselves.

By presentism, Lortie meant that teachers tend not to think in terms of long-term goals, and that they focus instead on short intervals and immediate result. He attributes this characteristic in part to the fact that teachers don’t have a very good understanding of the relationships between their own teaching and what or how much students learn.

This literary excerpt describing Mr. Guthry’s response to his students illustrates the dreary posture of a teacher whose experiences have diminished his enthusiasm for the work.

At the front of the room at his desk, Guthrie made a note and consulted the list of names before him. He called the next one. A big boy in black cowboy boots rose up and stomped forward from the back of the room. Once he started he talked haltingly for

something less than a minute.

That's it? Guthrie said. You think that just about covers it?

Yeah.

That was pretty short.

I couldn't find anything, the boy said.

You couldn't find anything about Thomas Jefferson?

No.

The Declaration of Independence.

No.

The presidency. His life at Monticello.

No.

Where did you look?

Everywhere I could think of.

You must not have thought very long, Guthrie said. Let me see your notes.

Kent Haruf, Plainsong

Bargaining with StudentsMuch of what teachers learn from their experience has to do with how to manage students. Because teachers cannot be successful without student cooperation and participation, some aspect of teaching always and necessarily involves forms of persuasion or manipulation. Less often recognized, though, is that students can also engage in persuasion and manipulation. Several researchers have described ways in which students try to “bargain” with teachers to reduce the intellectual demands in their assignments (see, e.g., {Cusick, 1983 #5468;Doyle, 1979 #5586;Doyle, 1983 #5587;Metz, 1993 #7128;Sedlak, 1986 #7897;Steinberg, 1996 #8168}. This literature suggests that students themselves have a prominent influence on teaching practices and often motivate teachers to simplify assignments in order to maintain peace with their students. In the interest of gaining cooperation, teachers may yield to these proposals, so that the bargaining process persuades students to participate by reducing level of intellectual work.

A Continuing Reliance on Everyday ThinkingTeachers’ daily work does not inherently call on teachers to use more analytic approaches to teaching. They are granted little time for planning, and they learn from experience that it is difficult to anticipate all the things that could happen. The unpredictability of classroom life, coupled with a lack of time to plan, motivates teachers to rely on their everyday thinking more than on any form of disciplined thinking. While Waller’s interest was more in the teacher as a social persona, later investigations focused more on the teacher as a practitioner. The first of these was Philip Jackson {Jackson, #6463}. As part of his investigation of teachers, Jackson interviewed 50 teachers who were reputed to be above average. He noticed in these interviews that teachers tended to be oriented toward the “here-and-now” and that they were more intuitive than reflective. Jackson characterized teachers' language and thought as “conceptually simple” and lacking in technical vocabulary. He thought they had a simple view of causality, that they were opinionated about classroom practices and had narrow working definitions of abstract terms like motivation or intellectual development. Jackson was disappointed by their lack of analytic thought and criticized their impulsivity, their myopia, and their technical naivete.

Less than a decade later, Daniel Lortie {, 1975 #6929} interviewed teachers noted that teachers gained no sense of professionalism from their teacher education programs, and instead perceived their learning to be a private, sink-or-swim event. He also pointed out that there are multiple and conflicting criteria for teaching, so that it is difficult to determine what any given teacher has contributed to any given student’s learning. These are features of the work would encourage everyday thinking rather than more disciplined thinking, and Lortie saw some evidence of this. He thought their focus on narrow goals and tried-and-true methods derived from the situation itself. Further, when asked about teachers they admired, they generally nominated teachers they had had when they themselves were students, rather than present-day colleagues, further evidence that their thinking was still based largely on everyday thinking.

These observations were reinforced again by Michael Huberman {, 1983 #6409}, whose goal was to learn more about how teachers respond to new knowledge, especially to new research. He, too, commented on teachers’ attention to short-term outcomes and immediate indicators of success. In addition, he argued that they believed in a lack of underlying order and consequently preferred intuitive judgments to analysis. When they share ideas with colleagues about teaching practices, they do not focus on principles or concepts, but instead exchange recipes. Again, these patterns of thought and of exchange are indicators of everyday thinking more than of disciplined thought.

6. Is there Such a Thing as Disciplined Thinking about Teaching?

An important problem we have in this field is that we have no way of distinguishing teaching that is based on everyday thinking from teaching that is based on strategic pedagogical thinking. We can’t even define what those differences might be, let alone define visible indicators of each approach. Teaching always entails judgments, though they can be made using different kinds of reasoning. And there are always judgments that we may disagree with when we observe teachers, so disagreement per se is not a basis for evaluating the quality of reasoning that went into them.

Probably the most difficult thing to learn in teaching is how to think strategically and to manage the tradeoffs among multiple goods and evils that need to be navigated. Ms Smith’s tradeoff is an example. We can argue with the decision she made, but we have to recognize that it is a tradeoff and that she made a conscious decision that, in this case, it was more important to pursue the meaning of Newton’s 3rd than it was to be honest about students or to veer off into a discussion of error in laboratory research.

Nor is it is obvious that the ability to reason about other things will necessarily help teachers learn this skill. Many years ago, {Diesing, 1962 #5556} sorted out a number of different approaches to reasoning, and illustrated that each has its own rules and criteria. The one that is most commonly assumed in discussions of reasoning is what Diesing called technical rationality, which involves selecting the most efficient means for achieving a particular goal. But another form of reasoning, which he called economic rationality, is involved when we made decisions about allocating resources to maximize benefit across a group. Yet a third form, which Diesing called social rationality, involves effort to achieve harmony within a group. Diesing also articulated other approaches, such as legal rationality and political rationality. His point was that each of these forms of rationality has its own methods. Technical rationality requires us to weigh the benefits of two alternatives against a single scale. Economic rationality requires us to trade-off benefits for one person against benefits for another. Political rationality requires us to create procedures and rules of engagement, such as Roberts Rules of Order.

Strategic thinking is a form of divergent thinking, envisioning alternative ways to get there from here, and weighing the tradeoffs among them. It is more like the kind of thinking that goes into designing a house. Even though we would love to have the sun coming in the windows, we cannot have all four sides of the house face south. So we have to decide which rooms will face south, which east, west and north. Even if we find a satisfactory solution to this dilemma, we then discover that the rooms themselves are awkwardly arranged. The bedroom leads to the kitchen and the dining room is at the opposite end from the kitchen. Further adjustments are needed. The kind of reasoning involved in the design of things, whether they are lessons or houses, involves envisioning multiple alternatives, modifying them, and weighing multiple values against each other. In the case of teaching, teachers may want students to gain a deeper understanding of a particular issue, but to achieve that, they also need to ensure that students are interested enough to pay attention, that none are distracting others, that she has a representation to use that is accurate and clear, etc. The design she finally arrives at will achieve all of these to some extent, but probably none of them perfectly.

Schon offer a version of reasoning that might be closer to what teachers do, which he calls reflection in action, meaning that the actor is in a process of continuous revision. In fact, one of the cases he examines is of an architect. Herbst and Chazan call it practical rationality. The Spielraum author describes it in a way that sounds like you just need a broader repertoire of methods for responding

instantaneously to unexpected events.

At the same time, other researchers have demonstrated that teachers’ espoused values are often not consistent with their practices. In one very early study, for instance, {Oliver, 1953 #7328} created an inventory of beliefs that reflected what he called “research-based principles of learning” and he created an observation scale that was intended to measure these same principles in action. He found that, although teachers generally agreed with the paper-and-pencil versions of these principles, their practices did not. Over the years many other researchers have noticed a discrepancy between teachers’ espoused beliefs and their observed practices (e.g., \ {Bussis, 1976 #5155;Cohen, 1990 #5343;Applebee, 1991 #4720;Duffy, 1986 #5619}, and the incompatibility is always in this same direction: Teachers claim to agree with a set of reform ideas, either in an interview or on a written questionnaire, but their practices are not consistent with those beliefs or that reform. One author {Pearson, 1985 #7402} concluded that teachers held different beliefs in different contexts. Other researchers {e.g.`, \Berlak, 1981 #4901;Lampert, 1985 #6770;Wagner, 1987 #8455;Martens, 1992 #6996;Kennedy, 2004 #6613} have pointed out that the practice of teaching entails multiple contradictory ideals, so that teachers are always balancing among these. In his 2007 review of research on beliefs in mathematics teachers, {Philipp, 2007 #7463} concludes that decontextualized measures of beliefs are more likely to contradict practice, but that situated assessments are more consistent.

Ball and Cohen 1999 in the D-H Sykes volume talk about what PD would need to do to alter Ts practice. My notes say

PD Any defensible ed requires a sense of purpose, a map of the terrain, and a conception of what is involved in learning to operate in that terrain.

1. To learn anything relevant to practice, Ts need experience with the tasks and ways of thinking that ar fundamental to that practice. These experiences have to be immediate enough to be compellling but remote enough to enable scrutiny.

2. TE and PD needs to be centered in the critical activities of the profession ( but not necessarily in classrooms. Could be via videotapes, case studies, etc.

3. It needs to entail investigations of practice. E.g., examining Ss thinking is a core activity, but just looking at Ss work won't insure improvements

4. It needs a professional discourse and engagement in a community of practice. So a big part of finding a good approach to PD is finding a way to situate it so that learning is centered in practice.

TE would improve if its curriculum could be grounded better in core tasks, questions, and problems of practice. And as Ts talk with each other about what they are examining, they will uncover disagreements that can be explored and examined. We think using records of practice is a good approach: videos, examples of Ss work, texts and other material resources can be used to plan lessons, evaluate Ss learning, etc.

To get there from here we need a six-point program:

--PDers need to think hard about what it means to center learning in practice vs having Ts learn on their own from practice

--A small number of such opps should be designed and used as eg's of PD

--Alternative curricula for grounding PD in practice should be explored

--[I can't find the other three]

7. How REALs Affect Teacher’s WorkThe story of how we learn about teaching has so far focused largely on the role of everyday thinking and the limitations of formal teacher education programs. But teaching practice is not shaped solely by teachers’ own everyday thinking. It is also shaped by the educational infrastructure—schools buildings, daily schedules, physical classrooms, testing programs, attendance policies, and a governance system that includes federal, state and local sets of rules and administrators.

These systems are created by REALs. In the very early days of teaching in the United States, there were no REALs. Local communities of RPs hired teachers, evaluated them, and decided whether to fire them. Later on, OAs appeared, first in normal colleges and then in multipurpose colleges and universities. Later still, in the past half-century REALs came into being and their population has grown steadily ever since. In the past half-century, the once small and unassuming United States Office of Education has become a large and influential Department of Education. With this growth came an ever-increasing population of lobbyists and education-oriented advocacy groups. The number of interest groups residing in Washington has grown from a handful to well over a hundred, with different groups advocating for different kinds of changes in the education system. Similar changes have occurred in state governments, and local school districts have also increase the size and complexity of their administrative offices,

A central problem confronting teachers today is that the REALs who govern them—the school board members, state and federal legislators, textbook publishers, professional developers and lobbyists— often rely heavily on their own everyday experiences. Like everyone else, they have spent over 2400 days, well over 100,000 hours, of their childhood sitting in classrooms watching teachers. From these experiences, REALs have drawn conclusions about what teachers should do, and hypotheses about what is wrong with contemporary practice. Some of them evaluate teachers for their ability to handle one particular task—say, managing the crowd, or enlisting students to participate, unaware that their favored task is only one of the tasks teachers must attend to. Many of them are guilty of attribution error {Kennedy, 2010 #8777}: They assume that the behaviors they see are generated by the teacher’s personal qualities (e.g., aggressiveness, laziness, ignorance) rather than by the situation in which teachers find themselves.

An important theme in the thinking of REALs as well as OAs is that teachers are not living up to our ideals. For decades, OAs and REALs have written disparagingly about the quality of teaching practice in the U.S., and have advocated new approaches to teaching that they believe would be better than the practices they see in schools. Viewing education over the past century, we have seen reformers have tried to persuade teachers to adopt the project method {Kilpatrick, 1918 #6640}, discovery learning {Bruner, 1966 #5106}, competency-based teaching {Hall, 1976 #6184}, mastery learning {Bloom, 1984 #8906;Bloom, 1980 #8905}, direct instruction {Becker, 1977 #8903;Gersten, 1987 #8904}, active teaching {Good, 1983 #6055}, authentic instruction {Newmann, 1996 #7269} and culturally relevant pedagogy {Ladson-Billings, 1995 #6759;Ladson-Billings, 1995 #6758}. Many of these ideas enjoy years of popularity among OAs and REALs, even though they influence only a handful of teachers. This history of repeated and varied reform in

education has itself been the subject of research, {Cuban, 1990 #587;Cuban, 2008 #2740;Tyack, 1987 #337;Tyack, 1995 #1794}.

Recently the innovations have moved away from teaching practice itself. Many new innovations address the education system as a whole. In the past decade or two, we have seen advocacy for block scheduling, zero-tolerance policies, performance assessments, Response to Intervention programs, accountability systems, data systems, uses of technology and so forth, all in the quality of education.

This parade of new ideas can distract teachers’ attention to their most essential tasks, and interfere with the coherent systems of practice that they strive to maintain. Further, these new innovations often take up teachers’ free time, for this time must be used to learn about the new policies or programs. Hence, teachers have less time to do their normal lesson planning.

Earlier I described four essential tasks of teaching. The volume of reform initiatives being impressed upon teachers is so great today that they create a fifth task to the list. Thus contemporary teachers must simultaneously do the following five tasks:

Enact the curriculum by translating it into classroom events that will foster learning

Contain a crowd of energetic, restless and easily-distractible young people

Enlist student participation

Read students’ minds, and

Adjust all of the above to accommodate the latest reform proposals.

8. How Professional Development Helps TeachersBoth OAs and REALs provide professional development, or PD, for teachers. The benefits of these programs for teachers are quite various. Some programs, according to teachers, are life changing, while others are just annoying. Some programs are founded on a close analysis of the dilemmas teachers face, while other programs are based on naïve understandings about what is entailed in teaching, or about what would enable teachers to improve their practice.

I have argued that pedagogical thinking is a form of strategic thinking, and that we do understand much about how one learns to engage in this form of thinking. As a result, our educational offerings, whether at the preservice or the inservice level, tend to focus less on reasoning and more on bodies of knowledge, technical skills, or hortatory designed to build personal character.

The question is further complicated by the fact that not all teachers do engage in strategic thinking. It is entirely possible for someone to teach for years and never develop any understanding of their work that is more analytic than what they glean from everyday thinking. They may attribute their students’ misbehavior to personality traits, overlooking their own contributions to that behavior. They may base all of their plans on a fear of losing control, overlooking any other relevant goals. They may also base their practice entirely on disciplinary thinking, thinking only about presenting content and not at all about whether students understand it or care about it.

How, then, can professional development help teachers improve their practice? I recently examined research studies of PD and found differences among them that are relevant to this question. For this review I classified PD programs according to the way they represented ideas to teachers. I identified four methods for representing new ideas to teachers.

One form of representation consists of procedures. That is, programs can outline for teachers a collection of specific techniques that they should use when they teach. The presumption underlying this approach is that there is a single best way of doing things and teachers should learn to do them in that way. Procedures have a great deal of appeal to teachers, OAs, and REALs because they strip away the ambiguities of teaching and offer a simple way of defining practice. Procedures also remove all judgment from the teaching process.

Another form of representation is to present new ideas as formal bodies of knowledge, the kind that disciplinary thinking is tied to. This form of representation also has a great appeal because formal bodies of knowledge garners more respect than procedures, insights, or other kinds of representation. But notice how different this is from procedural knowledge. Though both seem to have credibility, the former is highly prescriptive while the latter is essentially silent on the question of what to actually DO at any given moment.

Another way to represent new ideas is through strategies. I use this term to refer to representations that include both a general idea and specific practices that are associated with it. For example, to teach teachers how to motivate their students, PD program might teach both the concept of motivation and a collection of techniques that can be used to achieve that goal. For example, one PD program wanted kindergarten teachers to incorporate books into more of their classroom activities even though children could not yet read them. The broader concept was to make books salient and important to students and the specific techniques the PD presented included book displays, reading books to children, discussing their contents based on their pictures and so forth. Strategies strive to combine concepts that are normally contained in bodies of knowledge with techniques that represent those concepts when they are translated

into practice. But PD that focuses on strategies is not as prescriptive as programs teaching procedures are. These PD programs provide a framework that gives teachers the flexibility to make their own judgments about when, how, and why to use the techniques.

Finally, the fourth way of representing new ideas was as insights. The term insight refers to things people come to realize on their own. They cannot be directly taught, so programs that aim to provide insights must instead provide a set of experiences that would enable them to gain new insights. Programs offering insights relied heavily on videotapes of students or of classroom events, combined with questions and discussions about the meaning of these events. If the insight had to do with, say, how children understand certain scientific ideas, the teachers would grasp that insight by actually watching children struggling to understand something and listening to their speculations and observations about it.

My review examined research findings on all four of these types of programs. Figure 2 displays the findings from this review. The overall graph shows a collection of circles each of which represents a particular study. Larger circles represent studies with larger populations of participating teachers, and darker circles represent programs that spent more contact hours with teachers. The circles are arranged to show their effect on student learning. Circles that are higher up in the chart are more effective, those lower down were less effective.

Insert Figure 2 here

This comparison among professional development programs tells us that some ways of representing ideas have more impact than others, and that, in particular, ideas that help teachers make their own strategic choices have greater impacts than do representations that prescribe specific procedures for teachers to use, or that provide bodies of knowledge that reside outside of active practice.