Keeping Teaching Complex: Policy, Research and Practice

Abstract

Teaching is a complex--rather than a technical or complicated—activity. Unless policy, research and practice designed to improve teacher quality “keep teaching complex,” they are unlikely to lead to changes that genuinely enhance students’ learning and enrich their life chances.

Complexity. Photo by Eric Gjerde / CC BY-NC-SA.

There is now unprecedented emphasis on teacher quality in the United States and in many nations around the world, with extremely high expectations for teacher performance. Based on the assumption that a nation’s economy is inextricably linked to the quality of its education system, it is now assumed that teachers can – and should – teach all students to world-class standards, serve as the linchpins in educational reforms of all kinds, and produce a well-qualified labor force to preserve the nation’s position in the global economy.

In keeping with this emphasis, in many nations, there are now new policies, research studies, and initial teacher education/professional development programs intended to improve teacher quality. Although these initiatives sometimes share the same stated purposes, under the surface, they work from very different ideas about the nature of teaching and what it would take to improve it.

This essay argues that teaching is a complex – rather than a technical or even a complicated – activity, and that unless policy, research and practice designed to improve teacher quality “keep teaching complex,” they are unlikely to lead to the kinds of changes that genuinely enhance students’ learning and enrich their life chances.

Is Teaching a Profession?

Given the assumed importance of teachers and teaching, one could justifiably assume that we need teachers who are prepared to work as trusted and competent professionals.  But there have been many debates over the last decades about whether teaching is or is not a profession and about whether teachers and other practitioners can or cannot legitimately be considered professionals. It is relatively easy to get a sense of the overall tone of these debates. One can simply search out some of the phrases and prefixes that are often connected to the term, “profession,” when used to describe teaching—“quasi-,” “not quite,” “minor,” and “pseudo.”

Many current debates about teaching as a profession revolve around issues related to autonomy, expertise, accountability, responsibility, sense of purpose, and shared norms for professional behavior. Of course, there is more than one definition for  “profession.”

A few years ago, for instance, literacy scholar and critic, Carole Edelsky (2006), pointed out that enhanced responsibility was one of the common features of many definitions for “professional.” She also noted that many teachers and other practitioners had enormous (and increasing) clerical and management responsibilities for their students’ test outcomes and for providing instruction that was tightly aligned with national or other standards that would presumably boost students’ achievement test scores or their schools’ and nations’ performance on international comparisons.

At the same time, however, as Edelsky noted, these same practitioners often had decreased autonomy regarding decisions about curriculum, content, and the social organization of schools and classrooms. Currently this kind of situation is true not only in the U.S. and England where it is well-known that there is a very heavy emphasis on state achievement test scores and/or on publication in league tables of national exam scores (Furlong, Cochran-Smith & Brennan, 2009).

The phenomenon of increasing accountability coupled with decreasing autonomy is also true in other diverse nations, such as high-performing Singapore, where teaching is increasingly competitive and teachers are expected to zero in on activities that ensure that their students excel in cross-school and national competitions (Loh & Hu, 2014) as well as in countries like Ireland and Sweden, where there are mounting concerns about the countries’ performance on PISA and other international comparisons, which has prompted calls for closer control of the curriculum and of teachers’ work (Conway, 2013; The Local, 2013).

This cross-national phenomenon makes it clear that whether or not teachers are considered professionals is not just a matter of the extent of their responsibilities and the degree to which they are held accountable for particular outcomes. Rather this also depends on what kinds of outcomes they are responsible for, to whom and how they are held accountable, and the relationships of these to teachers’ empowerment as collaborative goal-setters, decision-makers, curriculum constructors, and knowledge generators, rather than simply the implementers of others’ mandates and goals.

At the heart of many debates about whether teaching is a genuine profession are competing underlying views about the nature of teaching. Currently there are at least two very broadly construed, co-existing views. Although they overlap in a few important ways, in many other ways, they are inconsistent, even contradictory.

In this brief essay, I refer to these two as the technical view and the complex view of teaching. Both views agree that good teaching is important and that good teaching is learned rather than some kind of “natural born” inherent ability, a widespread sentiment reflected in the expression that teachers are “born, not made.” But beyond rejecting the idea that good teachers are born, these two co-existing views of teaching--as technical or as complex--diverge in important ways.

Teaching as Technical

The technical view of teaching assumes that good teaching depends on specific management techniques, understood as explicit, highly uniform, predictable sequences of teacher behaviors. This view of teaching is central to a series of books that is wildly popular in the United States. The best-known of these is Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lamov (2010, who has an MBA from the Harvard Business School and is Managing Director of the Taxonomy Project for “Uncommon Schools,” a charter school network.

Lamov’s books and the videos and workbooks that go with them are intended to make teachers more effective, particularly teachers in charter and other schools that serve primarily low-income, poor students, and/or minority students in urban areas. The subtitle of Teach like a Champion is “49 techniques that put students on the path to college.” An example of Lamov’s techniques is what he calls the “100% technique,” which means that teachers should demand 100% student compliance 100% of the time in the classroom.

A few of Lamov’s other techniques include: training students to pass out papers to a whole class in less than ten seconds (because these students have no time to spare to non-learning tasks within the school day); no “baiting and switching,” which means that a teacher should not change or simplify the question he or she initially asked when repeating it to a class or directing it to a second student after the first one has offered an incorrect response; and, “cold calling,” which is a rapid-fire oral classroom sequence of asking a question, pausing, and only then naming a student as the designated answerer.

The latter technique is intended to ensure that all students in the classroom are paying attention at all times, on their toes, and poised to answer if called upon, rather than relaxing once some other student has been designated to answer at the beginning of a question-asking interaction.

The point I want to make here is not that any one of Lamov’s techniques is necessarily or automatically a bad idea or that any of them is necessarily inappropriate under particular circumstances. My point has more to do with what is missing from the approach Lamov takes to helping teachers who work with low-income, minority and/or urban students “teach like champions.” There is virtually nothing in Lamov’s book about the importance of selecting the content to be taught in the first place or about its cultural relevance to particular groups of students, and there is nothing about ensuring that content and pedagogy are in sync with students’ local histories in ways that build on students’ experiential and linguistic resources. There is also nothing in Lamov’s materials about the relational aspects of teaching or helping students connect to new ideas but also generate their own ideas. 

Most importantly, perhaps, Lamov’s and similar materials take a technical view of teaching, and they reflect the premise that goals for teaching poor and minority students should center on students’ compliance and obedience. Ray Salazar (2011), a veteran Latino English teacher in Chicago said this about Lamov’s book:

Instead of fulfilling the expectations of meek, passive, and low-achieving stereotypes, we need to teach so our low-income black, brown, and even white students create realities that contradict the history of oppression. In Teach Like a Champion, students are being socialized to be passive, mob followers. They are being taught that recall of information is all they can, should, or be expected to do…the priority in these schools is control--not learning.

The technical view of teaching underlying approaches like Lamov’s emphasizes the specific behaviors in which teachers should engage, and it de-emphasizes the intellectual and relational aspects of teaching. Even more problematically, however, because these materials originated in Lamov’s work related to charter schools that serve poor and minority students and are specifically intended to bolster the skills of teachers in schools that serve those populations, they perpetuate the idea that teaching historically marginalized students should focus on literal-level information, rote memorization of facts, and ensuring that students comply with teachers’ instructions. 

This approach de-emphasizes or ignores completely the idea that teaching should be orchestrated in ways that support students’ development as emerging participants in democratic societies wherein they need to know how to raise questions, debate, disagree, change their minds when convinced by evidence, and critique the arrangements and structures of schools and societies that reproduce inequalities.

Teaching as complex

A second overall view of teaching—a complex view--co-exists with the technical view, outlined above. Importantly, as noted above, this second view is consistent with the first in that it regards teaching as a learned—not natural--activity, but the second view is also dramatically different from the first in many important ways. This second view assumes that teaching involves much more than a set of techniques.

The complex view regards teaching as an inherently intellectual and relational activity, which includes engaging in certain “techniques” to be sure, but as importantly, involves making decisions about when, why, under what circumstances, and for whom these techniques might and might not be appropriate. Teaching, conceptualized as a complex activity, also includes selection of content and dealing with what are sometimes referred to as “adaptive” challenges, which require creating the knowledge and the tools to solve problems in the act of working on them.

To do the complex work of teaching, professionals pose as well as solve problems, make deliberative decisions in the crucible of the local, respond to mandates from school and district overseers, and connect curricular knowledge with the knowledge perspectives of students and communities (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009).

Many educators use the term, “complex,” to describe the activity of teaching, often referring to the fact that effective teaching practices have multiple parts that need to be learned by beginners (e.g., Ball & Forzani, 2009; Grossman & McDonald). But the essence of teaching as a complex activity goes well beyond its multiple parts.

Here, it is helpful to turn to the fundamental distinction made by complexity theorists between complicated and complex phenomena (Bryne, 1998; Cilliers, 1998). Complicated things may be highly sophisticated and have many parts, but the parts can be accurately and fully analyzed individually and apart from one another, and the relationships between the parts are highly stable and predictable.  One complexity theorist’s examples of complicated systems include jumbo jets and C-D players, both of which can be given exact descriptions (Cilliers, 1998). With complicated things, the whole is the sum of the parts. In contrast, with complex things, which are also sophisticated and composed of many parts, complexity is manifested at the level of the thing itself.

The whole is not equal to the sum of its parts.  Rather, complexity results from the interactions and non-linear relationships of the parts and from intricate feedback loops in the system. Thus, with complex systems, relationships are not fully predictable. Examples of complex systems include the brain and social systems, neither of which can be reduced to the sum of its parts (Cilliers, 1998).

Some current approaches to improving teaching practice and engaging in research related to teaching and initial teacher education assume that teaching is a complicated activity. From this perspective, the point is to identify the key practices teachers engage in, decompose those practices into their parts, and focus on the parts one at a time, having the teacher (or prospective teacher) demonstrate competence with the parts in a classroom situation or during a simulation.

The assumption is that later—in the rough and tumble of practice—the parts can be recomposed into a whole. This is a complicated view of teaching. With a complex view of teaching, on the other hand, the assumption is that teachers must deal not only with technical and complicated problems that can be solved by knowledge and capacity that already exist. Rather, from a complex view of teaching, teachers’ work also depends on making deliberative decisions about how to understand and act on who their students are and what they bring to school, how to respond to mandates from school and district overseers, and how to construct knowledge with their students by drawing on the knowledge traditions of their communities while also enhancing their knowledge and skills.

These kinds of decisions cannot be fully stipulated ahead of time, and they are not fully predictable or stable.  Context matters in these situations as do the local histories and lives of students.

My argument in this brief essay is that the tasks of teaching (and teacher education and school leadership) are much more akin to social systems than to CD players. My concern is that policy, practice and research intended to improve teacher quality will ultimately reach a dead end if we continue to measure and evaluate teaching and learning as if they were CD players or jumbo jets and if we continue to operate from a technical or complicated approach.

Keeping it complex

My point in this essay is that teaching is complex (not simply technical or even complicated) work and that teachers are professionals not only because they are increasingly held accountable for the outcomes of schooling, but because they engage on a daily basis in work that requires ongoing decision making.

Teachers have to work simultaneously within and against larger accountability systems by taking responsibility for their students’ learning at the same time that they challenge narrow means of measuring that learning.

They have to be astute observers of individual learners with the ability to pose questions that transcend cultural attribution, institutional habit, and the alleged certainty of outside experts while simultaneously building on the linguistic and cultural resources and the knowledge traditions that students and families bring to school. 

They have to see beyond and through the conventional labels and practices that sustain the status quo by raising difficult—sometimes unanswerable—questions about their own assumptions and practices and the assumptions and practices of their colleagues.

They have to wrestle with their own doubts, fend off the fatigue of reform, and depend on the strength of their individual and collective convictions that their work ultimately makes a difference in the fabric of social responsibility (Cochran-Smith, 1991).

Perhaps most importantly, teachers must continuously form and reform the interpretive frameworks that guide their moment to moment actions as well as their deliberate and more considered long-term decisions in the interest of educating for a more just and democratic society (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). 

To move forward with policy, practice and research that has the capacity to improve teacher quality toward the democratic and justice-related ends of teaching, we must keep teaching complex.