This Just Isn’t Something Public Teachers Do — Part 2

Peter Anderson
Jul 27, 2017 · 6 min read

Continued from Part 1

Against the Community

Teachers follow a set of stated and unstated assumptions about teaching, learning, and assessment. Variation in pedagogy is allowed as long as it fits within a certain set of restrictions.

I came up against the assumptions of the teaching community when I returned to school last August for the 2015/16 in-service training. I had spent the summer working with my local site for the National Writing Project, an organization whose mission includes fighting instructional and curricular standardization in the English Language Arts and composition classroom (Goering, 2016, p. 157). My school, like every other school in the district, was pushing a building-wide PLC initiative. A PLC, or professional learning community, is a popular model for organizing and conceptualizing how a school should function. I was told I would be meeting with my PLC (small teams arranged by content and grade) twice a week to create common formative assessments, analyze data, and create teaching action plans. Although formative assessments do not have to be multiple-choice, the expectation of standardization essentially requires them to be.

The PLC model relies on four guiding questions: What will students learn? How will we know they learned it? How will we respond when they don’t learn? And how will we respond when they already know it (DuFour, 2010, p. 8)? The power of these questions lies in their ability to cloak a technocratic and instrumentalist view of education within the common sense discourse of teaching. Administration explained that while I would need to use the same common formative assessments as the rest of my team, I still had a certain level of autonomy in what I taught. On a superficial level this seemed fair enough. But giving the same common formative assessments necessitates teaching the same things. Otherwise why would I assess students on something we haven’t worked on as a class? The entire enterprise rests on the validity of multiple-choice assessments as proxies of student learning, a key tenet of the rational teaching community.

In earlier drafts of this essay I spent a considerable amount of time critiquing the PLC model. Feedback from a colleague helped me understand that, in a sense, I was replicating the same either/or relationship that this essay looks to escape. Speaking to this empty binary, Julie Gorlewski and David Gorlewski comment that “Absent critical consciousness, the false dichotomy of compliance/resistance is perpetuated” (2016, p. 81). Many of my colleagues find value in the collaborative component of a professional learning community; while the PLC model has its flaws, any system that helps teachers work together to prepare meaningful learning experiences for children should not be uniformly dismissed. Yet without a valid space to discuss theories and develop counter-narratives, producing a nuanced argument feels nearly impossible.

I left the staff meeting exasperated, not so much from hearing something I disagreed with but in the knowledge that I had no recourse. Any issues I raised with coworkers or supervisors were met with sympathetic nods and the impotent logic of “Well, what can you do?” I don’t blame them. Teachers and administrators alike remain tethered to the monoculture of student growth and societal amelioration. When evaluations, job security, and professional reputation rest upon such a narrow set of assumptions about education, everyone loses (Cody, 2016, p. 54). Frustrated by my lack of options, I chose to simply close my classroom door and ignore any mandates I didn’t agree with. I removed grades, quizzes, and tests from my class. Instead, my students created portfolios to reflect on and demonstrate their growth.

This worked as long as I focused only on what happened inside my room. Meanwhile the rest of the building turned ideologically hostile. Glossy posters in the hallways championed meritocracy and individual competition. Morning announcements spoke of school as a job and grades as a paycheck. Staff meetings involved top-down transmissions of the latest data-based initiatives from central office. I joined the leadership team in an attempt to gain traction within the system. Yet all we did was bicker over hallway procedures and pour over corporate action plans. I felt intellectually and emotionally unwelcome, stuck between begrudging compliance and/or insular resistance. I didn’t know how to push for change in a system that delegitimized any voice that spoke out against the key assumptions of the community.

Confronting the Critical Ceiling

The set of assumptions informing the rational teaching community are neither static nor inevitable. Modern communities are not overly deterministic; the history of education is full of individual and organized moments of dissent. Yet pockets of resistance are not enough to change the shape and direction of our teaching community. Our assumptions produce and are produced by what education sociologist Dan Lortie describes as the “apprenticeship-of-observation,” the 13,000 hours we spend behind a desk learning by explicit instruction and indirect modelling what it means to be a teacher (2002, p. 62). Paul Thomas refers to the phenomenon of the “hyper-student,” teachers who mastered the game of school during their own schooling (2016, para 2).

Additionally, the assumptions over what it means to be a teacher draw from outside our community. The lay public’s experiences with education also play a role. Education scholar Sherman Dorn explains how at this moment almost every adult in in the United States has gone to school (2007, p. 13). Most adults therefore carry with them an implicit notion of what “real school” is. Although we have individual memories of specific teachers and assignments, and the quality of each adult’s experience is obviously different, we all remember what it means to be a student. And for most of us, to be a student means pretty much the same thing: quizzes, tests, traditional essays, and grades.

If, as Gorlewski and Gorlewski suggest, public teachers must play dual roles as agents of the state and agents of change, how can teachers confront the problematic assumptions of contemporary education without resorting to counterproductive polemics (2016, p. 81)? I would like to see the community of teaching expand to value and pursue dissenting voices. This means encouraging teachers to see themselves as intellectuals, scholars working to expand the community’s knowledge beyond the technical confines of “maximizing student outcomes.” My suggestion is not unique; critical pedagogues such as Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Ira Shor, Henry Giroux, and Edward Said have connected non-conformist intellectual pursuit with the development of critical consciousness. This means carving out a discursive space within our rational community to question, analyze, and push back against much of what has become common sense. In many senses what I want for teachers is what we want for our students. Our engagement with the struggle to constantly remake and redefine our profession has the power to provide students with a more expansive model of what it means to be educated.

In “The Critical Ceiling Part 2: Confronting My Critical Identity in Social Media,” Paul Thomas describes the moment in his career when who he was as a professional did not match the expectations of his academic environment (2016). It is clear to me that I have hit my own critical ceiling. Now I’m presented with the invigorating but challenging work to reshape the norms of my rational community of educators from the inside. This is what public school teachers can do.

References

Apple, M. (2004). Ideology and curriculum (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Cody, A. (2016). Technocratic groupthink inflates the testing bubble. In J. Bower & P.L. Thomas (Eds.), De-testing and de-grading schools: Authentic alternatives to accountability and standardization (pp. 51–59). New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.

Dorn, S. (2007). Accountability Frankenstein: Understanding and taming the monster. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

DuFour, R., DuFour, R., Eaker, R., & Karhanek, G. Raising the bar and closing the gap: Whatever it takes. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Goering, C. (2016). “How long does this have to be?” Confronting the standardization of writing instruction with teachers in National Writing Project invitational summer institutes. In J. Bower & P.L. Thomas (Eds.), De-testing and de-grading schools: Authentic alternatives to accountability and standardization (pp. 153–163). New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.

Lortie, D. (2002). Schoolteacher: A sociological study (2nd Ed.). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Thomas, P. L. (2016, Jan). The critical ceiling: Confronting my critical identity in education. Medium [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://medium.com/identity-education-and-power/the-critical-ceiling-confronting-my-critical-identity-in-education-76e891a2bb2c#.ypsgimaor

Thomas, P.L. (2016, June). Readers, writers, teachers, and students: “The pointlessness of so much of it.” The Becoming Radical [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2016/07/18/readers-writers-teachers-and-students-the-pointlessness-of-so-much-of-it/

Identity, Education and Power

Pathways and Intersections of Understanding

Peter Anderson

Written by

Middle School Teacher / NWP Teacher Consultant / Writer & Reader

Identity, Education and Power

Pathways and Intersections of Understanding

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