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Where
do Lesson Designs come from? The assumption that teachers know something valuable about how to teach was, of course, at the heart of the Bay Area and National Writing Projects. In fact, the first published article about the Bay Area Writing Project highlighted the importance of the RAND study by Paul Berman and Milbrey McLaughlin (Gray and Myers, 1976), a study that concluded “that lasting and effective school reform could only take place if the participants themselves designed and carried out their own innovations” (Slavin, 19998:2). In recent years, the conclusions of the RAND study have come under attack ----challenging some of the very assumptions of the writing projects. For instance, Robert Slavin has announced that the widespread dissemination of pre-packaged, delivered programs and lessons have “discredited once and for all the influential Rand ‘change agent’ study of the 1970s” (1998:2). In other words, as an extension of Slavin’s argument, you do not need a writing project----instead, you need packaged, published, delivered, one-size-fits all dissemination of instructional programs. Of course, Robert Slavin backs away from these claims when he takes one of his Success-for-All packages to school sites: He insists that 80% of the faculty must approve his program in an actual secret ballot vote before he will begin implementation. Thus, when it comes to implementation, Slavin wants the local faculty to reinvent the wheel by doing its own study and making its own decision about whether Success-for-All will be tried. How
is this different from the Berman-McLaughlin claim that lasting and
effective school reform
could only take place if the participants themselves designed and carried
out their own innovations? Berman and McLaughlin never said that teachers
could not use the ideas of others. Why, then, does Slavin want to discredit
McLaughlin? The answer to
this question is not clear. But
it is clear that publishing interests are trying to get control of staff
development, and one way to get control of staff development (and its
funding) is to legitimize the pre-packaged, delivered Lesson (prepared
by publishers) and denigrate on-site Lesson planning
(prepared by teachers not using published materials often enough).
The ambiguity of educational researchers in their assessment of teacher knowledge is evident again and again in the research literature in the United States. For example, in Catherine E. Snow’s AERA presidential speech last year, she seems torn between her support for a “moderately prescriptive curriculum of predesigned activities” for novice teachers and her support for using the wealth of knowledge that experienced teachers have about teaching (Snow, 2001:6-9). She argues that the personal knowledge of teachers “is largely untapped because we have no procedures for systematizing it” (Snow, 2001:9). In other words, teacher presentations in a writing project are not enough. Why not? They are not systematic enough. Why are these presentations not systematic enough? Snow says, “If we had agreed-upon procedures for transforming knowledge based on personal experiences of practice into public knowledge, analogous to the way a researcher’s private knowledge is made public through peer review and publication, the advantages would be great” (Snow, Educational Researcher, October 2001). Who
is the “we” here? K-12 teachers
themselves? Or educational researchers deciding what is
systematic. And what is that
systematic way, involving peer review (collaboration), publication (a
knowledge base), and Lesson features making teaching visible (public
knowledge)? Let’s assume, for the sake of keeping this
conference focused on its task, that one systematic way is an elaborated
understanding of Lesson Design (the features and public knowledge) and
Lesson Study (collaborative
analysis and publication). The
first issue raised at the conference is whether pre-packaged Lessons
are ever justified. The general response at the Conference was that
the issue is not whether a Lesson is delivered to us, pre-packaged,
but whether we, as teaching professionals, have a systematic way for
critiquing and, if necessary, revising Lessons. The teaching profession is probably justifiably
suspicious about how a pre-packaged lesson could fit every student in
a classroom; the teaching profession is also justifiably suspicious
of claims that teachers never change their Lesson Designs in the middle
of a lesson. If teachers have
a way of critiquing and judging Lessons, then there should be no prohibition
against teachers themselves designing Lessons and submitting those Lessons
for review and critique. The
issue is not whether teachers are the only authors of every Lesson they
use but whether they are the owners of the Lessons they use, ownership
gained through teacher-community-based critique, review, analysis of
features, revisions based on context, and, yes, even a vote of the teaching
faculty when that is appropriate. The assumption here is a key foundation
for any discussion of Lesson Design. A delivered, pre-packaged
Model Lesson is only a piece of Information,
and Information can only be turned into Knowledge through the sustained
discussion and analysis of practice that goes on in a teacher community
in a particular context. (The works of Milbery McLaughlin, John Seely
Brown, Paul Duguid, and Jean Lave have outlined some of the details of these working communities.)
Features of Lesson Design are one of the Tool Kits for Knowledge
construction, and Lesson Study is one of the processes used for Knowledge
construction. Despite the problems, Millie Gonzalez-Balsam reminded
everyone that there are many sites where forward-looking school site
administrators were supporting teachers in their efforts to undertake
some serious work in Lesson Design and school restructuring. This
distinction between Information (what is transferred from one place
to another) and Knowledge (what is constructed for use in a given classroom)
raised the question of whether or not the terms “Replication” and “Best
Practice” were often misleading terms, maybe not even useful. Vivian
Boyd, among others, raised the interesting variable of the teacher’s
development as a variable in Lesson Design.
She noted that at the beginning of a teaching career Madeline
Hunter’s five or seven step plan appears to work wonderfully as a scaffold,
allowing the teacher to get going, try something out without having
to worry about what happens next. But later in a career, the same teacher
may find the Madeline Hunter plan too restrictive, too simple.
The same is true of students. For some students at some ages,
a simple, self evident, predictable plan is helpful, offering a clear
guide through the events of the day. The Madeline Hunter plan was, for
example, developed at the ULCA lab school for pre-school and early grade
children, and pre-schools, often with the highest turnover and the least-professionalized
staff, may find the Hunter a suitable guide for Lesson collaboration.
Ruth Nathan made the following observation: “When I don’t know
a subject very well, I like to use the scaffold until I get inside of
it. I don¹t want anyone to touch me with another idea until I
get going. I need to be able to choose when I have the scaffold
I want.” Ruth
Nathan’s observations raised the very interesting idea that one way
to turn Information into Knowledge is start by pretending one believes
the Information, by using it as if it were working, trying it out---slowly
taking it over and turning it in to Knowledge, either by modifying the
Information or internalizing the Information as is. Thus, the Madeline
Hunter Lesson Design (the five or seven step Lesson, from Anticipatory
Set to Application) has intellectual respectability in Lesson Design.
It is not the purpose of this Lesson Design conference to engage
in Method Reductionism----to create a list of certified Best Lesson
Practices.
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