IP 88-3 Teaching practice: Plus ca change ...
Abstract
This essay revisits a question that has troubled educators and researchers for decades: Why does teaching seem so resistant to change? The author argues that researchers' answers thus far suffer from defects both in how the question has been framed and in where the answers have been found. The question has been put in a way that assumes that teaching should and could change radically, that teaching could be organized so that learning was eager, spontaneous, engaging, and powerful. The author traces the near origins of this idea to Romantic traditions of thought about learning in American literature, psychology, and pedagogy in the nineteenth century. Researchers, he argues, have accepted this view without scrutiny.
Given the assumption that teaching could and should change dramatically, it probably was inevitable that investigators would search for "barriers" to change in the circumstances of instruction. For if change was to be expected, its absence must be a consequence of some resistance to external teaching. In any event, most explanations on conservatism in teaching do focus on such external conditions: finance, organizations, incentives, and the like. While each of these is a reasonable explanation, the author points out that there are counterexamples for each, in which the barrier is absent but in which teaching is nonetheless reported to be traditional. None of the extant explanations of the poor record of instructional innovation attend to these counterexamples or to their implications for educational theory.
In the last part of the essay, the author locates the fundamental barriers to change in instruction within teaching and learning, rather than outside them. Teaching is a practice of human improvement: Like psychic therapies, social work, organization development, and other such practices, teaching is a practice in which one human being tries to improve the ideas, capacities, emotional states, or organization of others. Work in such practices presents practitioners with problems of great difficulty: They are hard to manage in any case and predispose most practitioners and clients toward conservative strategies. Additionally, the social constitutions of practice (the basic organization and terms of reference of practice), can either ease or exacerbate these problems. Therapists, organization consultants, and other practitioners face the problems with considerable protection from the social constitution of their work. In contrast, most public schoolteachers in the United States face them with little or no such protection. The inherent tendencies toward conservative approaches to practice are thus given even greater force.
Efforts to make teaching more adventurous, spontaneous, and exciting run directly counter to these conservative tendencies in instructional practice. We can adequately explain why so few teachers have embraced such innovations simply with reference to the nature of practice itself and its social constitution. These internal problems are certainly compounded by the various circumstantial factors to which analysts have pointed in the last few decades. But even if these restraining conditions were magically swept away, the nature of practice is such that most teachers and students in U.S. public schools would have great difficulty implementing the instructional reforms discussed here.