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The technical dimension. Having the needed teaching knowledge and skills to bring about the reform is an issue in all of the cases, although not explicitly identified as such in all the case reports. In every case, some steps were taken to help teachers acquire the needed competencies, but the means of doing so was varied.
Limited ability to teach constructively. Even in the case of individual teachers who had a commitment to teaching for understanding and the development of critical thinking, there generally was a lack of full understanding of how to do it. For such teachers their dilemma was valuing teaching for understanding but not knowing how to organize and conduct their instruction in a manner that would produce the desired results. The specifics of the tensions experienced by the teachers varied, but the root problem was that they did not know how to achieve the results they desired. Furthermore, the steps taken to assist them in this regard fell short.
One case illustrates a phenomenon found in all of the cases--teachers did not find it easy to change their role.
Probably the hardest role for teachers to abandon as part of the reform was that of teacher as transmitter of knowledge ... Teachers may have valued student questioning, exploration, thinking, and explanation, but may still have engaged in large amounts of teacher talk, explanation, and lecture ... It appears, though, that some teachers took on the roles of the cooperative team members--communicator, manager, tracker, and team member--in their classrooms, and that they seemed to get in the way of students taking on that responsibility. The less students assumed these roles, the less they become responsible for their own learning and the responsibility for student learning then seemed to reside with the teacher.
This inability of teachers to shift their role obviously was a barrier to students taking on the role expected of them.
There were times, though, when teachers did not permit or provide space for students to pursue the answers to their questions. Teachers may have perceived student questioning, decision-making, and/or actions as making a mistake and they may have stopped students in this type of questioning process.
Prior commitments. In other instances, the desired end product was not only unclear, but there was a commitment to a specific traditional instructional practice that stood in the way of moving on to new forms of instruction. Such a common barrier was a commitment to the textbook as a primary mode of instruction. Sometimes this commitment was rooted in a belief that it was important for students to learn in this manner.
In other cases this commitment to the central role of the textbook was rooted less in a belief in its efficacy and more in a pragmatic persuasion that it was the optimum way to teach given the time they had available or other constraints. This commitment is illustrated in one of the science cases.
One teacher thought the most difficult aspect of the reform was the lack of a textbook. This teacher said, "Well, you know, when you have a class of 30 students come in, and you can say, 'Open your book to page 24' and give an assignment, or we read and have you discuss, you have a focus point ... And that was the hardest thing, is to keep the momentum going one class after the next after the next."
None of the students interviewed said that they missed using a text or wanted to go back to a textbook. Some of the teachers, especially those new to teaching, said that they would like having a textbook as a companion to the project. Their main reasons were that they would have something that the students could take home and that they would also like to have something to fall back on if the class became disruptive.
Indications are that textbooks are a more important part of the learning process from the perspective of teachers than from the perspective of students. Such prior values and beliefs about educational practices are a barrier to the reforms if these values and beliefs would have to change for the reforms to flourish.
The challenges of assessment. Another arena in which teachers faced a steep learning curve was in performance or authentic assessment. The specific skills of assessing in this manner take time to acquire and in many instances are not high enough in priority to earn an adequate place in the competition for space in inservice education programs or on the agenda for collaborative effort in departmental planning.
The challenges of doing classroom authentic assessment took many forms. When done well it enhanced student learning.
Where the students have a strong sense of their "reformed" role, have a solid sense of "quality work," and are skilled in critiquing their own work, their demonstrations and performances exhibit the premises and principles of OBE; success is breeding success and high expectations are being met by all students.
When not done well, the new forms of assessment were a detriment to good education.
The questions they asked were intended to probe the students' insights, although any student response seemed to be acceptable. Even though one of the goals of the assessments, according to Nancy, was to make the students critical thinkers, none of the students were required to offer proof for positions, make predictions based on evidence from the past, or integrate contemporary knowledge with historical events ... Student reasoning was accepted as if an opinion of any sort were better than no opinion ... Generally, grades were based on the surface qualities of the presentation, such as attractive visuals and adequate volume, rather than the depth of thought of the research. What was missing were standards describing the expected levels of performance. What was emphasized, instead of content and depth of knowledge, was the quality of the presentations.
Often the difficulties were embedded in a lack of clarity of purpose for the assessments.
Since the expectations for quality of work were not clear, students interpreted the assessment tasks as reshaping learning from earlier lessons rather than creating tasks which emphasized reasoning and clarifying complex problems.
Thus the Core teams seems to have gotten as far as focusing on certain themes and overall questions for students to address, but they have not clearly articulated the learning goals for students ... The assessment aspect of the Core team studied was a tangled web of confusion of purpose and perspective.
An effort to rethink assessment would have to begin at the core: What is the role of assessment? Is its purpose to impose a grade or is its purpose to engage students in their own learning process as a form of self-evaluation? As teachers struggled with these questions, they brought up the factor of time ...
As with other dilemmas teachers faced, this matter of time as a constraint on improved assessment is a central factor across all of the cases.
The time constraints were such that they were able to do only superficial evaluation of the success of the activities each time.
Interwoven with this constraint of time is a lack of understanding of how to conduct this new form of assessment and the initiative for acquiring this understanding.
It may also have been that they did not have clarity about how to evaluate the success of a given activity. For example, they expressed to one another their disappointment with the debate, but they did not engage in a thorough analysis of why the debate was not very successful.
In addition, teachers are constrained by the continuing presence of the traditional grading system with the accompanying expectation on the part of both students and parents that grades be "objective" and easily explained.
One problem is that teachers still must wrestle with the traditional grading system of the district.Teachers are required to give a percentage grade on the report card.
The new grading schemes were described by many students, parents, etc. as "subjective."
They had a need to justify student grades objectively and often felt at a loss when parents confronted them about grades which were assigned subjectively.
Assessment of student learning is a matter of concern for teachers in two quite different ways. One focus--addressed above--pertains to assessment conducted by individual teachers for purposes of diagnosing student learning and assigning grades. Such new assessment approaches as performance or authentic assessment generally demand that teachers acquire new competencies in order to shape their instruction to the reformed agenda.
The second assessment focus is large-scale standardized testing in which student performance can be compared across classrooms, schools, districts, states and even countries. This second assessment focus does not demand significant new competencies from teachers. It does relate, however, to teachers' values and beliefs with regard to testing, a matter to be addressed within the cultural dimension below.
Difficulties of group work. Various new forms of student group work also are part of reformed education. For many teachers, particularly in science and mathematics, these approaches are new and require skills they do not yet have. It is an additional barrier, although one that teachers seem to overcome more readily than the assessment barrier.
Most teachers acknowledge that experience and knowledge of effective cooperative learning strategies are critical to successful implementation of the science curriculum and that training in cooperative learning has been especially important.
It became apparent in observing classes that for many teachers this cooperative approach to learning had become second nature and was reflected in general interactions in the class, whether or not students intentionally had been put into groups.
The challenge of new teacher roles. This use of student group work is but one illustration of the changed role for teachers. Taking on a role that is less presenter of knowledge and more facilitator of learning is not a simple matter. It is a major role change that demands more than the simple technical acquisition of some new knowledge and skills. The acquisition of new teaching roles is a cultural matter as well, in that it is closely related to teachers' beliefs about effective learning. Thus, we will return to the topic again within the cultural dimension.
Acquiring the needed new teaching skills is a formidable and long-term process. Teachers often know what they do not want their classes to be, without being able to translate this conviction into a form of class instruction they do want.
[In the] process of removing himself from the classroom as lecturer, he has not set up an alternative structure. Instead, in the students' minds, he has disappeared.
The challenge, however, seems to be whether they can break through to a truly reformed teaching and learning strategy or whether they will wander about in the desert of many partially developed techniques that do not produce high level thinking and learning among students.
The challenge of new student roles. This new conception of the teaching role is rooted in a new conception of the students' role and the nature of the work they do. Putting this new student role into effect demands new skills and knowledge on the part of the teacher. The new student role depends less on recording information from the teacher, following detailed teacher directions, and memorizing information. It has more of a focus on interpreting and explaining information, and designing one's own activities. Student work is characterized less by completing worksheets and engaging in exactly the same actions as other students under the teacher's explicit directions. It has more of a focus on tasks that vary among students and are designed and directed by the students, either individually or in groups. It is student directed work that emphasizes reasoning, solving problems, and reading and writing for meaning.
A barrier to reform is that students often are not prepared to take on these new roles. To the extent that the new orientation does not run counter to student beliefs about what constitutes good education (e.g., what is needed to prepare for admission to a top-rank college), students generally are ready to assume new roles, if given the help needed to do so. Providing this help is a central requirement of the new teacher role, but one with which many teachers seem to have difficulty. The challenges are great as illustrated in these cases.
Students were not specifically taught how to engage in creative planning, thoughtful evaluation, risk taking, and research strategies that they would need to build and demonstrate during the year. Students tended to focus primarily on completing an assignment rather than developing their ideas or learning particular skills. Students' experiences with evaluation strategies tended to be primarily that of having teachers judge their performance for the purpose of grading. They were not involved in much peer review of practices of performances.
In general, kids were unclear regarding the intentions of the staff in the math department, and the notion that they should be constructing their own knowledge was something that they resisted.
One teacher spoke about how the hardest change that she encountered with the reform curriculum was teaching students the cooperative learning.
While some teachers found it hard to productively engage students in cooperative learning, there were other departments where such forms of learning had become second nature.
It also is clear from my observations of classes that students had learned to work in groups effectively and did it with comfort and ease. Teachers made reference to the fact that students had learned how to work in groups, even though they may not have been particularly skilled at it prior to coming into a Coordinated Science class. These skills which enabled them to work effectively in groups were varied and even included simple social skills.
After they had been in the program for a year, by the time they go to the second year, they are so malleable it is absolutely unbelievable. Groups--I mean they are willing to get into a group; they are willing to do fifty different activities per hour ... They don't question a lot of things that I think that they would have otherwise.
Changing this student role to smoothly incorporate cooperative group learning clearly is possible, but it takes an extended period of time--as indicated above--to bring it about. The challenge of helping students acquire new roles, however, is a much broader challenge than simply teaching students how to work in groups. Changing such student roles requires very explicit help from teachers.
It also appeared that students needed a lot more guidance on how they might become self-motivated learners ... Teachers will need to help students learn and apply the thinking skills in order to move forward to the point where students are focused on a conceptual understanding of the content rather than simply learning facts ... The challenge in continuing to change the teacher role is in how to facilitate the higher level thinking skills. Changing the teacher role goes hand in hand with changing the student role.
Acquiring the necessary broad set of teaching skills is a challenge for many teachers. In none of our cases had the group of teachers acquired all of the skills and knowledge required to fully implement the new form of education in their classrooms. This finding is not surprising when one recognizes the extended time required for teachers to acquire a new teaching strategy and the comparatively limited time devoted to this learning in our cases. Acquiring the needed competencies is a long-term process and the teachers are still "in process."
Inadequate inservice education. The need for new teaching competencies highlights the need for appropriate inservice education offered over a sufficiently extended period of time. In some instances, considerable dependence was placed on formal inservice education. In other instances, the means of acquiring these competencies was more through on-the-job teacher collaboration. In no case was there an indication that a group of teachers had acquired the full set of competencies needed to fully implement the reform.
In several instances an apparently good program of inservice education was terminated or scaled down before participating teachers had reached an adequate level of competence. There was a seeming lack of awareness of the depth of assistance required, the need to relate this assistance to the day-to-day work of the classroom over an extended period of time, or the interaction between acquiring such competencies (the technical dimension) and changes in values and beliefs (the cultural dimension).
Since the technical dimension under discussion here interacts with the political dimension and especially the cultural dimension, it may not always be clear whether a teacher's difficulties with the reform are due to a lack of technical knowledge and skills or due to values and beliefs that are not consistent with the reforms. The technical component of the dilemmas teachers experience clearly is important but it cannot be considered without regard to the other components. Thus, this matter will be revisited in the latter sections on political and cultural dimensions of barriers to reform. They must be addressed systemicly.
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[Barriers to Reforms (continued)]