Research Concerns For Reforming Instructional Practice

The first of these concerns the study of practice at the classroom level. Teaching practice, the most proximal cause of student achievement, has received considerable attention from scholars in a number of fields including teacher education and mathematics education. Learning practices have also been the focus of extensive inquiry, particularly by cognitive scientists and researchers in mathematics education. However, while some scholars manage to bridge the world of learning and teaching, these two areas of research are largely disjoint. Most problematic, research on teaching practice has typically treated teachers development of their instructional practices as occurring in an institutional vacuum. In focusing on day-to-day or minute-by-minute interactions in particular classrooms, these scholars have typically ignored the broader school and school system contexts critical to understanding instructional practice and its improvement. The institutional context is instead seen as the purview of sociologists, organizational theorists, policy analysts, and leadership scholars. As a consequence, the research on teacher change consists of two largely independent bodies of scholarship (Engestrom 1998; Franke et al., 2001). One focuses on the role of professional development in supporting teachers reorganization of their instructional practices whereas the second is concerned with the structural or organizational features of schools and with how changes in these conditions can result in changes in classroom instructional practices. This is problematic because teaching and learning practices cannot really be fully understood independently of the context of the school and broader education system. Conversely, studying reform implementation and leadership is difficult absent a rich understanding of teaching and learning practices. This first core challenge immediately gives rise to a second, that of bringing together interdisciplinary teams of scholars who have traditionally worked at different levels of the school system. It is essential to address this challenge if we are to develop a coherent understanding of school improvement.

A third challenge is that scholars who have studied the institutional context in an effort to understand the instructional change process have tended to ignore practice, be it leadership practice, staff development practice, or implementation practice. Instead, they have focused on understanding those institutional structures, roles, functions, and norms that enable and constrain instructional change. While there is an expansive literature about what school and system-wide structures, programs, roles, and processes are necessary for instructional change, we know less about how these changes are enacted by policymakers, district administrators, and school leaders. These other practices essential to school improvement have received only limited attention fr om scholars as practices. We know relatively little about the how of school leadership or reform implementation; that is, knowledge of the ways in which school leaders or school reformers develop and sustain those conditions and processes believed necessa ry for innovation. For example, a recent review of the literature identified many 'blank spots' (i.e. shortcomings of the research) and 'blind spots' (i.e. areas that have been overlooked because of theoretical and epistemological biases) in our understan ding of leadership (Hallinger and Heck 1996).

Inattention to work practices is commonplace in social science scholarship, as Wellman observed when he noted that how people work is one of the best kept secrets in America. He went on to argue that, the way in which people work is not always apparent. Too often, assumptions are made as to how tasks are performed rather than unearthing the underlying work practices (Wellman 1995; cited in Suchman, 1995). For example, the importance of monitoring instruction in order to support the successful enactment of instructional innovations has been documented (Firestone & Corbett 1988), but this research tells us relatively little about the how of monitoring, that is monitoring as a leadership practice.

Without a rich understanding of practices, from the classroom to the level of state and national educational policy, educational research is unlikely to have a substantial and sustained impact on students opportunities to learn. Unless we can enable school reformers, staff developers, and school leaders practices in ways that support teacher learning, systemic reforms that have been proposed in a number of countries are likely to meet with a fate similar to that of previous waves of reform. Although reforms are adopted by a small proportion of schools and teachers in special circumstances, they typically have a marginal effect on systems of schooling as a whole. We argue that if education scholarship is to make a substantial contribution to improving the learning opportunities of students, practices both within and beyond the classroom essential to improving schools have to be better understood. Moreover, they have to be understood in more complex and integrated ways. Only a small group of scholars are wo rking on these issues in education. We believe that bringing these scholars together at this juncture in order to develop a community of scholars is critical in enabling this work to develop and have a major impact on educational research and practice.

A fourth challenge concerns the marginalization of research on classroom, leadership, and implementation practices that focuses specifically on issues of equity (Lubienski, 2002; Nasir & Cobb, 2002; Secada, 1995). At the classroom level, there is a substa ntial and growing body of scholarship that takes equity in students access to significant disciplinary ideas as its primary focus. However, this research is rarely cited by mainstream researchers and has had a limited impact on investigations of learning and teaching practices. This is unfortunate in that mainstream research can benefit from the broader definitions of learning developed by equity researchers. In addition to conceptualizing learning in terms of concepts and reasoning, these researchers als o demonstrate the importance of attending to the identities that students develop as they participate in the practices of schooling. In doing so, they subsume a range of concerns that are traditionally treated as affective factors (e.g., motivations, atti tudes) within their definition of learning.

Research on issues of equity as they relate to leadership and implementation practices is far more limited. This is in part because scholars who address equity beyond the level of the classroom have tended to focus on formal policy initiatives but without investigating how these initiatives are realized in schools and play out in concrete leadership and implementation practices. The fourth challenge is therefore to develop a research agenda in which a focus on issues of equity will be integral to studies of both classroom practices and the broader institutional context of the classrooms.

A fifth challenge that follows from the first four outlined above concerns the conceptual framing of research on practice. It is insufficient to simply observe and generate thick descriptions of various types of practice. We need to observe from within a conceptual framework. Scholars have started to marshal more sophisticated conceptual tools to study practice, especially teaching and learning practice. In doing so, they have increasingly found prevailing frameworks that portray practice chiefly as a fun ction of individual knowledge, skill, and expertise as unsatisfactory. Instead, some have started to draw from work in a variety of fields including distributed cognition, situated cognition, and socio-cultural theory to frame their work in more sophistic ated ways. This development is important for at least three reasons. First, it illuminates how practice is constituted in the interaction of practitioners with others in a particular situation. Second, it underscores the critical role of situation or cont ext not simply as a backdrop for practice but as a defining element of practice. Hence, urban schools that enroll mostly poor children are not simply a context for a particular teaching strategy or a new school improvement approach. Instead, this situation is a core element shaping the practices of teaching and school improvement as they are typically realized in such settings. Third, it makes issues of equity tractable by framing students (as well as teachers and administrators) as cultural beings, there by bringing to the fore the relation between the practices established in the classroom and those of students home communities and the broader discourse groups of which they are members. Still, while these developments are promising, there is a need for f urther clarity with respect to both the conceptual tools that scholars are drawing on and whether and how they might travel across different levels of the school system.