Frederick Erickson, “What Makes School Ethnography Ethnographic”
William Chandler Bagley. Craftsmanship in Teaching (Kindle Locations 117-124).
Benjamin Franklin, quoted in Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education, p. 4
After everything else has been done and provided – the money raised; the schools erected; the curricula developed; the administrators, supervisors, and teachers trained; the parents and other citizens consulted – we come to teaching…
The literature of the behavioral and social sciences is full of conceptions and research on learning and memory. Teaching is comparatively a stepchild, neglected by those who have built a formidable body of conceptions of learning and memory. The uses of learning conceptions for teaching constitute a tool-kit that has been left to rust. It is as if the theoretical work of, say, Faraday, had never given birth to the tremendous applications of electrical energy so that when Einstein turned on his lamp, he could read his notes. … Teaching is where learning and memory conceptions should pay off.
Finally, teaching is worth studying simply because of the intrinsic interest of the phenomena to which teaching gives rise. Even if such research had no practical value, it would be worthwhile for the same reasons that astronomy and archaeology are worthwhile. As part of our universe and our human condition, teaching cries out to be studied and understood.
"Nathaniel Gage, A Conception of Teaching
We must stop letting wishes color our judgments about the educational effectiveness of many special compensatory programs, when—despite some dramatic and encouraging exceptions—there is growing evidence that most of them are not yet measurably improving the success of poor children in school.
We must stop pretending that we understand the mystery of the learning process, or that we are significantly applying science and technology to the techniques of teaching—when we spend less than one half of one percent of our educational budget on research, compared with 5% of our health budget and 10% of defense.
We must stop congratulating ourselves for spending nearly as much money on education as does the entire rest of the world—$65 billion a year on all levels-when we are not getting as much as we should out of the dollars we spend.
…
Unfortunately, it is simply not possible to make any confident deduction from school characteristics as to what will be happening to the children in any particular school. Fine new buildings alone do not predict high achievement. Pupil-teacher ratios may not make as much difference as we used to think. Expensive equipment may not make as much difference as its salesmen would have us believe.
And yet we know that something does make a difference.
The outcome of schooling—what children learn—is profoundly different for different groups of children and different parts of the country. Although we do not seem to understand just what it is in one school or school system that produces a different outcome from another, one conclusion is inescapable: We do not yet have equal educational opportunity in America.
The purpose of the National Institute of Education would be to begin the serious, systematic search for new knowledge needed to make educational opportunity truly equal.
"Richard Nixon, Special Message to the Congress on Education Reform. March 3, 1970
Background on why I went to Japan is here.
Before I visited Japan, another journalist I know who had just traveled there issued me a warning. Be skeptical, he said. The Japanese make a lot of promises, but dig just a little bit, and you’ll find that most claims don’t hold up.
I had this in mind on my first school visit, to the University of Tokyo’s attached secondary school. I had heard about attached schools, fuzokukou in Japanese. They were like the old “practice” or “laboratory” schools in the U.S., I was told, where those studying to become teachers learned from master teachers who used their classrooms, in turn, to hone ever-better teaching practice. (I described one such school in this article; search for “Cook County Normal School.”)
Fuzok teachers were supposed to be true masters, so talented that some became famous, attracting hundreds of admiring teachers to the public lessons that are common in Japan. Maybe most intriguing, fuzokukou schools’ close ties to university teacher training programs suggested an interest in teaching that persisted even in the ivory tower.
I did ultimately find evidence that schools like this exist in Japan. But the University of Tokyo’s attached secondary school was not one.
As it turns out, the country’s most prestigious national university — the Harvard of Japan, as several people described it to me, with a front gate made famous by how difficult it is to enter — does not train teachers at all. And while it does act as a site for research about how to improve teaching, the school’s vice principal was just as proud of another feature of the school, which he highlighted in an introductory presentation to me and other attendees of the World Association of Lesson Study’s annual conference.
The school, whose admission is based on an application process, collects twins! “I do not think that there is another school that collects twins,” the vice principal said with a smile.
The photo above, from his presentation, shows all the twins that attend the school. Identical twins are on the right and fraternal twins are on the left. At least twice, when an attendee asked a question about lesson study, the vice principal offered an answer about twins instead.
Twins, he explained, are rare in Japan, occurring in 1 in only 170 births, and they often do not like the attention that comes with being unusual. This school allows the twins to feel normal. “It’s like X Men!” said a man sitting behind me. As a rule, twins are kept in separate classes. Meanwhile, the parents of the twins form a Twin Parents Association.
What exactly the research on these twins has yielded I have not yet figured out. A cursory search of research journals turned up very little, and the vice principal said that the data set is actually too small to conclude much.
Next, I’ll talk about what we saw in classrooms at the school, where the focus was different: on encouraging less teacher and more student talk via small-group instruction.
John Dewey, The Sources of a Science of Education
I just got back from spending 20 days in Japan, which I visited under the influence of two powerful works: “Big Bird Goes to Japan” and “The Teaching Gap,” the 1999 book by James Hiebert and James Stigler that elevates a relatively obscure professional development practice native to Japan — “lesson study” — as a major solution to the American educational dilemma.
I wanted to see if Stigler and Hiebert were right.
In the next few days, I’m going to post what I found out. But first, some introductory cultural notes.
Some things were familiar, like a baseball team that is the Yankees of Japan.
English proficiency was not too widespread.
At recess, boys walked on impossibly tall stilts.
And girls rode unicycles with total ease.
My trip was made possible by the Abe Fellowship for Journalists, which is operated by the Social Science Research Council and funded by the Japan Foundation.
As a few busy-body friends and colleagues have discovered, to what I imagine was perhaps some discomfort, until very recently, and over the span of at least a year, this photo was the background image on my laptop screen. I am not related to the woman in the photo, Magdalene Lampert, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Education and the author of the book “Teaching Problems and the Problems of Teaching,” nor to the children she is pictured teaching. I do like her and I am currently writing about her and therefore by definition obsessed with her. But not in some weird way!
I like the photo because, like Lampert’s work, it illuminates the work of teaching, which is too often otherwise invisible. Not tutoring, not inspiring, not passively letting the children talk, not lecturing — teaching a group of kids a concrete set of content. Or, as Lampert writes in “Teaching Problems,” “tak[ing] action to make studying happen.”
I just got back from a trip to Japan, where I was excited to find several living examples of math teaching that reminded me of Lampert’s. As a result, I often mentioned her name to educators I met, offering extra explanation (“of the University of Michigan”) on the assumption that, 6,000 miles away and 14 hours ahead by time zone, people might not know her.
Wrong. Most of the people I spoke to — teacher-educators, mainly, which incidentally seems to be a different kind of cultural category in Japan — laughed at my over-explanation. “Of course!” one woman said. “The triangle!” She referred to the basic model Lampert uses to describe teaching, which has three points:
This should be an obvious idea. Yet way too often, especially in popular accounts of teaching, one or two of the points mysteriously drops off. When in a heroic teacher film have you ever watched a teacher and more than one student discussing content? Or been told what the kids were learning? Reciting poetry to a room that lurches from apathy to enlightenment does not count, though the very end of that scene gets tantalizingly close (“Well, I kind of agree with it, but…”). I also personally don’t count group chanting, but some people might.
The picture of Lampert is a reminder of what teaching work actually consists of. I love “Dangerous Minds” and “Stand and Deliver,” but I find the plot of Lampert’s work — how to get a group of diverse minds to understand a concrete set of things in a limited period of time — just as interesting.
More on the science of the gluten problem is here.
