Notes on Designing a Supportive Context for Teaching for Understanding: Comment on Cobb and Smith

1. Notes on Designing a Supportive Context for Teaching for Understanding: Comment on Cobb and Smith Adam Gamoran University of Wisconsin-Madison

2. Strengths of Cobb and Smith’s Approach • Focus on scaling up reform • Attention to organizational context • Collaboration between mathematics educator and sociologist • Grounded in deep understanding of mathematics content • Emphasis on professional learning • Connection to the Institute for Learning

3. Adjustments That Might Improve the Approach • Focus less on structure and more on resources • Attend to contingent nature of organizational effects • Distinguish between establishing and sustaining a supportive context for teacher improvement in mathematics

4. Focus More on Structure and Less on Resources • “School restructuring” • A prominent strategy of the 1990s to elevate the quality of teaching and learning • School structures serve as “levers” to bring about change • Team teaching, block scheduling, detracking, cooperative learning, school-site budgets, school choice, etc.

5. Focus More on Structure and Less on Resources • Findings of restructuring research • Structure was loosely related to what occurred in classrooms • Restructuring mattered when combined with: • A focus on the intellectual quality of students’ work • A professional community of educators

6. Focus More on Structure and Less on Resources • Findings of restructuring research • Restructuring by itself did not change what occurred in classrooms • Classroom change reflects teacher learning

7. Focus More on Structure and Less on Resources • “Changing practice is primarily a problem of [teacher] learning, not a problem of organization….School structures can provide opportunities for the learning of new teaching practices and new strategies for student learning, but structures, by themselves, do not cause learning to occur….School structure follows from good practice not vice versa” • Peterson, Elmore, and McCarthey, 1996

8. Focus More on Structure and Less on Resources • Professional development as the engine of change – as Cobb and Smith argue • Supporting teacher improvement is less about structural change and more about providing resources for professional development • To facilitate professional development • To help teachers implement what they learning in their classrooms

9. Focus More on Structure and Less on Resources • Types of resources • Material • Human • Social

10. Focus More on Structure and Less on Resources • Cobb and Smith’s examples of resources • Time (a material resource) • Outside experts (a human resource) • Shared instructional discourse (a social resource)

11. Focus More on Structure and Less on Resources • Benefits of resources • Investments generate new resources

12. Recognize the Contingent Nature of School Resources • Past research shows weak and inconsistent effects of school resources on student outcomes • Effects may depend on the approach to teaching (Rowan, 1990) • Routine teaching: Bureaucratic management • Non-routine teaching: Organic management

13. Recognize the Contingent Nature of School Resources • Similarly, organizational resources serve as contingencies for effects of professional development on teaching and learning • Professional development contributes to teacher knowledge, but resources are needed to put what teachers have learned into practice

14. Recognize the Contingent Nature of School Resources • Examples from Gamoran et al., 2003:

15. Recognize the Contingent Nature of School Resources • Material resources needed to activate new ideas • Lack of materials prevented teachers from implementing what they learned • “I asked the…upper grade science teacher if we could borrow a bank of lights…for the fast plants. She said she’d been asking for a bank of lights for years and had never got one.” --Urban middle school bilingual science teacher

16. Recognize the Contingent Nature of School Resources • Human resources provide advice on implementation • Outside experts needed for consultation beyond the professional development workshops • Growth of the professional development group presents challenges

17. Recognize the Contingent Nature of School Resources • Use professional development to create a wider base of new human resources Teacher: Would it be possible to work together without researchers? [My colleague] and I observing each other would in some ways be more valuable. Researcher: I agree wholeheartedly.

18. Recognize the Contingent Nature of School Resources • Social resources can support implementation of new ideas • Teaching is an uncertain practice • Typically, teachers avoid uncertainty by using predictable routines • Teaching for understanding forces teachers to abandon routines • Uncertainty must be managed another way

19. Recognize the Contingent Nature of School Resources • Professional community can help manage uncertainty • Shared sense of purpose • Collective focus on student learning • Collaboration • Reflective conversation about teaching • Making teaching practices public

20. Recognize the Contingent Nature of School Resources • Teachers can discuss lesson plans and results with colleagues • Address uncertainties • Share student work and consider student thinking “Working on a team in collaboration is without comparison.” --Urban high school science teacher

21. Establishing versus Sustaining Support for Teaching Reform • Our discussion so far has focused on providing a supportive context for teaching reform at scale • What about sustaining reform over time? • Our research suggests four conditions for sustainability

22. Establishing versus Sustaining Support for Teaching Reform • What do we mean by sustainability? • Maintaining generative practice (Franke et al., 2001) • A focus on teaching for understanding creates continued growth in knowledge and continued adaptation to student thinking • As teachers become more experienced, and as a lore of knowledge about student thinking accumulates, teachers become better able to respond to student reasoning • Thus, teaching for understanding is sustained

23. Establishing versus Sustaining Support for Teaching Reform • Four conditions for sustainability (Woolcock, 1997) • Integration (bonding social capital) • Linkage (bridging social capital) • Organizational integrity • Synergy

24. Conclusions • Cobb and Smith are onto something important • Addressing teacher change at scale is the central challenge of the reform movement • Large-scale change requires an infusion of resources

25. Conclusions • Resources are not just material, but human and social • Resource effects are contingent • They depend on the type of instruction attempted • They enhance the impact of professional development • Keep conditions for sustainability in mind