In this interview, Dr. Mary Kennedy discussed the work behind her article, “Parsing the Practice of Teaching.” The article is published in the January 2016 JTE issue and is currently available online here.
What motivated you to pursue this question?
Actually, I had two different experiences that had a big influence on me. The first was a study of teachers’ in-the-moment decision-making. I was interested in what kinds of things they think about during their lessons and how they respond to their own worries. That study led to my book, Inside Teaching.* From those interviews, I came to see that they were struggling with the competition among different goals—classroom management versus motivation, for instance, or keeping on schedule versus engaging students. I realized then that the practice of teaching is a constant struggle to balance among these different goals.
The second experience came when I was coordinating a multiple-section course that our teaching candidates were required to take concurrent with their field experience. As I taught the course, I realized that many of our interns had pretty naïve ideas about teaching, like they expected their natural winning personalities were all they needed. So I came to see our goal as (a) getting interns to see THAT there were multiple things they needed to achieve and then (b) helping them learn to examine their own practices with these things in mind. But I also discovered that the graduate students we were hiring to teach these sections also had naïve ideas, so I was faced with the problem of how to help them gain better insights into teaching, as well as help them help their students gain better insights.
Were there any specific external events (political, social, economic) that influenced you?
There are always political issues in teacher education! One that came up for me at that time was a debate about whether we even needed the course I oversaw or whether students would be fine without it. This debate is a natural spinoff from the argument that the main thing they need is content knowledge, and that all the rest will fall into place if they have that. My course was hard to justify because it didn’t cover a specific body of knowledge. We had no final exams on topics like “classroom management” or “child psychology” or the like. But I hadn’t taken the time to articulate, for a wider audience, my own view about what that course should be about or what its aims should be or how I expected novices to benefit from it.
What didn’t make it into the article that you want to talk about?
Don’t tempt me! I might pull all of that stuff out of my scrap bin and put it here in this interview!
Well, I could easily have written an entire essay on each one of the challenges I described, rather than settle for a hasty overview of each one. And I wish I could have given more time to the conflicts among these five challenges. My book, Inside Teaching, has a lot of real-life, concrete examples of tradeoffs teachers faced, things that really bring home the tensions among these various challenges.
Actually, one thing I failed to do in the article is to acknowledge a doctoral student, Aaron Zimmerman, who influenced my thinking. He actually disagreed with my idea that we focus on this list of challenges because he felt that an important role of our class was to help novices decide if teaching was really right for them. He saw his role as almost like a counselor, helping teachers understand themselves and figure out if this job was right for them, helping them come to terms with it, so to speak. I argued that they could only do that if they understood the nature of the work. But at that time, my framework had just four challenges, and his interest in their personal adjustment motivated me to add the fifth challenge, that teachers have to find a way to do this job within their own framework of personal needs.
What current areas of research are you pursuing?
Right now I am interested in a distinction between reform and development of teachers. By “reform,” I mean efforts to train teachers to comply with a new ideal, like teaching them to comply with a classroom observation rubric or maybe a Response to Intervention program, or to quarterly assessments or whatever. These reforms all try to prescribe what teachers should be doing. The alternative to these is the idea of development, where, instead of telling teachers what to do, we help them get better at figuring out what to do for themselves—help them understand these primary challenges and help them get better at thinking them through, instead of trying to prescribe what they should do at any given moment.
I started thinking about this recently, after I finished a meta-analysis of professional development programs.** I sorted the programs according to their underlying theories of action. For instance, some programs train teachers to follow prescribed practices while others try to help them “see” more in their classrooms. The first type of program had very little impact on student learning, whereas programs that focused on how to reason about your practice did have an impact. So I am trying to think more about what the difference is between these two approaches and to think about how preservice teacher education can become more developmental and less didactic.
What advice would you give to new scholars in teacher education?
Don’t fall in love with a specific teaching technique. We are often just as guilty as school districts are of trying to find a single solution to all the problems of teaching. One year we embrace Cooperative Grouping, then we embrace Lesson Study. Then we move to RTI. We have to recognize that these pre-packaged solutions can’t address all of the challenges teachers face. We would help them more if we help them grasp these are five fundamental, intrinsic things, and if we help them get better at critiquing their own lessons in terms of these five things. With that kind of understanding of the job, they will be far more able to develop their own practices.
*Kennedy, Mary M. (2005). Inside Teaching: How classroom life undermines reform. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
**Kennedy, Mary M. (In press). How does Professional Development Improve Teaching? Review of Educational Research.
Mary Kennedy is professor emerita at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on teaching, teacher thinking and teacher learning. She has won 5 awards for her work and is a Fellow in the American Educational Research Association.
Contact Mary Kennedy at mkennedy@msu.edu.