a review and response to
The Teaching Gap
Best Ideas from the World's teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom
by James W. Stigler and James Hiebert
June 24, 2000 (edited August 2012)
Quick intro
This is an essay that I wrote twelve years ago when I was still teaching in American public elementary schools. I'm posting it here because a year ago (or so) I mentioned the concept of Japanese lesson study in a comment, and somebody asked for more information about it. Subsequently I actually did write about it, in a mostly unread and also misread diary whose brevity merely served to provoke disagreements. As Chomsky might say, concision leads to misunderstandings of anything but conventional platitudes.
Anyway, I recently came across this old essay of mine while reorganizing my computer, and figured that its fuller presentation might make the concept more clear. However, I still expect that some readers (if in fact, anybody does care to read it) will still not see what I'm getting at.
As far as the idea of "cultures of teaching" is concerned, we can argue all day about how independent or dependent they may be from the larger national or corporate cultures that enclose them, but the concept certainly does capture the complexity of education as a system, as well as its method of transmission, and its pervasive and immutable character.
Of course, every person with whom I've ever shared these ideas has one invariable response -- nobody with power in America would ever allow a system like the one that supports Japanese lesson study. I don't disagree. But it's not an all-or-nothing choice. The real point is the general principals involved. They can be used to set up a support system quite different, but quite as effective for our own purposes, as the Japanese one.
In fact, true reform must come from within the educational community, not because they are the only ones with good ideas, and not because their ideas are even the best, but because that's the way it works. When you think of it as a culture, it becomes more intuitive why this is so. And in fact, the slow, steady and lasting improvements we've seen so far have mainly come from within, though political leadership often co-opts the credit.
And by the way, I truly believe that public schools today are much stronger than they were in any mythical era from the past century, particularly during the time when most students never attended past eighth grade, anyway. What's more, schools continue to improve, despite the obstacles of various educational fads, and despite the continual tarring from powerful entities whose main purposes are to destroy unions and capture public monies for themselves. Kevin Drum's blog today had a good presentation and links to evidence for this idea of continual improvement.
As for the continual tarring, probably everybody has read A Nation at Risk. But try following up the footnotes sometime and you'll get a feeling for what a work of propaganda it was. Unfortunately, it has been admirably effective, and "both sides of the aisle" have bought into its distortions.
To recognize that true reform comes from within the community is not meant to denigrate the work of those outside of it. Indeed, many researchers outside of public education have come up with valuable insights and understandings, and it's my hope that such research not only continue but expand. But how can those findings impact the system? There's the rub.
Finally, my own understanding of educational issues and the true political state of education in America has deepened considerably in the twelve years since I wrote this. That new understanding is one reason I no longer believe public education is the unmitigated disaster that people like to claim, particularly when it's compared to the past. But to add all that in would just make this exposition unfocused. As it is, it may not be that effective, anyway. But I hope that it gets people thinking. Everybody knows that improvement of the educational system is a big task. But what sort of "big" are we talking about?
You know, there are a lot of teachers on this blog, as well as other members of the education community who have expertise. My essay hints of some pedagogical principles that remain unexplained. But they should be explained. Or maybe others could be explained. It would be so nice if teachers would start discussions here about "what works" in the classroom (or whatever other setting you find yourself in).
Of course, this is a political blog, and at first blush, it might seem the wrong forum for such details. After all, people are just as passionate about health care, yet we don't discuss the different ways various drugs might affect the alpha and beta parts of the sympathetic nervous system. We don't discuss the best ways to use physician's assistants compared to nurses or additional doctors. We don't even mention the advantages of various types of knots and thread materials in surgical procedures.
But most of us hesitate to get between doctors and their patients. On the other hand, just about everybody seems prepared to jump in between teachers and students. And as long as that's true, then public debate of educational methodologies is warranted, especially since people with political power can do more than most to help grow the system, or at least get out of the way if they realize that they themselves don't know enough to address the situation.
Ok, back to 12 years ago . . . . .
The issue of School Improvement
Don't you just love it when a book comes along that validates everything you've been thinking about your job for the previous twenty years?
That's exactly how I felt when I read The Teaching Gap by Stigler and Hiebert.
It's well known that a gap exists between students' math and science test scores in Germany and (especially) Japan, on the one hand, and in America, on the other. (The gap doesn't exist in language scores, by the way). Stigler and Hiebert sought to discover if a gap in teaching methods might help explain the gap in student test scores.
Specifically, they studied teaching methods in eighth grade math classes in Japan, Germany, and the USA and did indeed discover a "gap" in teaching methods.
In fact, it's more than a gap in methods - it's also a gap in the way schools are structured to develop and support those methods. That's the reason, I think, that this book is aimed at a general audience, rather than a bunch of pedagogues - it will take a lot of people in many walks of life working together to effect any change in such a complex system.
In fact, instead of looking at it as a system, perhaps it's better to view it as a culture, a culture of education that involves a large and varied population - many millions of students, teachers, parents, and other interested parties. Such a complex organization is not amenable to quick or predictable changes. However, teachers occupy a nexus in at the heart of it, and so find themselves in a better position to effect reform than most other parties.
It's the authors' acknowledgment of the cultural nature of teaching that makes this book so interesting.
Teaching is, by nature, a cultural activity
Let's be clear about "culture," a term which has evolved a lot over the years. Originally it meant the process of helping things grow - of cultivating them. Like a culture in a petri dish or cultured pearls.
Later, it described the complex and subtle forms of expression cultivated by artists and other creative types. High Art, in other words.
About a hundred years ago, the first anthropologists (such Franz Boas, A. Kroeber, Margaret Mead, etc.) borrowed the word to describe the complex and subtle systems of expression that characterize various national groups. The word "culture," implies that such systems of behavior are learned, acquired bit by bit, the same way "high culture" and "the arts" are. For Boaz and his colleagues, then, the differences between ethnic cultural groups were due to the complexities of upbringing, and not because its members were simply different "races" or something.
Ethnic cultures, because they usually involve large coordinated numbers of people, are stable and cohesive over time. The various parts of the system all support and reinforce each other. It's like a web. If you pull bits out, the rest stretches in to fill the gaps or to pull back the parts that are out of place. This is why, for example, America remains a multiculture, a salad bowl more than a melting pot, even after various national groups have lived here for generations, and even after their cultures in North America have all changed from those in "the old country."
If the education system operates in a similar manner, then, it should also exhibit these properties.
In contrast to explicitly learning "high art," large parts of ethnic (and other) cultures are transmitted subconsciously, through the injection of meaning into practical situations. For example, how does anybody learn how close to stand to another in a conversation? What about the detailed ceremonies for saying hello and goodbye in different situations? What about the metaphorical meanings of colors such as red, green, blue or black? How about when to offer to pay the bill at the restaurant? It's a myriad of such small details and decisions that constitute the quotidian bulk of culture.
Again, though schools are not the same as ethnic groups, they transmit a myriad of small details and decisions in a similar manner from one generation to the next.
And such non-standard uses of the word "culture" are hardly unprecedented. People talk about corporate cultures, a culture of the deaf, and even a "kid's culture" where particular attitudes and skills, as if they were playground games, get handed down from one half-generation to the next without any adult mediation. Some might call these "subcultures," since they may exist within a national culture. But to call them that misses the essential independent and self-controlled nature of their development.
The first such "foreign" culture that I encountered was that of my fellow jazz musicians. Musicians in general seem to inhabit a world subtly different from "mainstream," and jazz musicians in particular have an even more idiosyncratic way at looking at things, which is perhaps shaped by the improvisatory nature of the music, its status (or lack of it) in popular society, and the particular way members of a group interact with one another to accomplish musical goals.
So it was no shock to find that in each of the three countries studied by Stigler and Hiebert, teachers and students together have constructed educational cultures; that is, cohesive systems of behaviors and values comprised of myriad bits of experience and judgments, which transfer down through the generations in ways that are not always obvious nor straightforward, because they are not always consciously mediated.
Stigler and Hiebert were surprised, though, by how strong and independent an education culture could be.
The Teaching Gap
Stigler and Hiebert studied classroom teaching practices as an adjunct to the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS). The TIMSS examined students' achievement in math and science on standardized tests in several countries across the globe. Stigler and Hiebert focused on three of these countries - Germany, the USA and Japan. They videotaped real eighth grade math classrooms in all three countries - 100 in Germany, 50 in Japan, and 81 in the United States.
The classes had been chosen randomly from schools which were themselves also chosen randomly. Their book explains the steps they took to minimize the effect of differing languages and societal cultures on their analyses of the teaching act.
They also worked with a mixed group of scientists from the three countries involved to develop a system of written codes to classify and analyze the various behaviors they observed in the videos. These codes formed the basis of their statistical analyses.
They were not surprised to find that German teachers tended to teach like each other, and that Japanese teachers also tended to teach like each other. After all, these two countries have national curricula - specific goals and expected outcomes prescribed by the state, which apply equally to all schools.
But teachers in the United States also tended to teach like each other, even without a national curriculum nor national standards, while enjoying much greater local control and greater academic freedom. Why were American teachers failing to capitalize on their relative freedom? Their classrooms were different from those in Germany and Japan, but every bit as uniform when compared to each other.
It was at this point that Stigler and Hiebert realized that it's a question of education as a culture, distinct from the larger culture in which it may exist. Not only does cultural inertia determine the classroom experience in America, it's probably the real reason that Japanese and German classrooms also seem uniform. It's not because they have national curricula.
Cultural Stereotypes
These classroom cultures are immensely complex, just like the larger cultures of which they are a part, but that didn't stop the authors from proposing a simplistic characterization for each one. That is:
Germany: "Developing Advanced Procedures"
Japan: "Structured problem solving"
United States: "Learning terms and practicing procedures"
The simplicity of these characterizations compelled the authors to apologize for them in one breath while justifying them with the next. However, they performed statistical analyses on the written codes (mentioned above) to make their case.
For example, they discovered that teachers in American classrooms perform more of the actual mathematical work than their students do. That is, teachers tend to develop proofs and theorems, and demonstrate mathematical justifications for problem solutions. In Germany or Japan, students do more of this active thinking on their own, though the teacher monitors their progress.
German and Japanese lessons were also more "coherent" - that is, they focused on a single mathematical process or idea, whereas American lessons switched from topic to topic more often. Only 42% of American lessons fit the authors' criteria of a "coherent lesson," whereas 76 percent of German lessons 92% of Japanese lessons did. Furthermore, 96% of Japanese teachers reinforced this coherence by drawing specific verbal connections between different parts of a lesson, whereas only 40 percent of German and American lessons included such explicit connections.
As an interesting aside, external interruptions (such as public address system announcements, classroom visitors requesting the lunch count, etc.) occurred in 31% of the American lessons, only 13% of the German lessons, and none of the Japanese lessons. It really made me want to teach in Japan when I heard that.
Finally, Stigler and Hiebert studied the quality of the mathematics being taught, with regard to how much it helped students understand important mathematical concepts. 39% of the Japanese lessons were described as having "high quality" mathematical content. For Germany, it was 28%, and for the United States, it was none.
For most of the remaining sections of the book, Stigler and Hiebert focused on the contrast between the American and Japanese systems, not only because the difference in student achievement was greatest there, but also because Japan, perhaps alone among modern cultures, has completely revolutionized its teaching methods over the last 50 years, and thus can serve as an example of what it takes to accomplish reform.
The Teaching Cultures of Japan and America
The authors briefly focused on one detail of classroom practice as a gateway to understanding the differences between Japanese and American teaching cultures. When the teacher teaches, what does he write for his students to see? What does he write it on?
In one of the most hi-tech dominated countries on earth, Japanese teachers almost universally prefer to use a chalkboard, whereas teachers in America tend to prefer the overhead projector. What does this demonstrate about the fundamental differences in Japanese and American instruction?
Japan
Well, Japanese teachers believe a lesson should challenge the students to work together to synthesize new knowledge from the tools their teacher provides, but using strategies that they develop themselves. Such a system can only function if everyone can follow and remember the logical unfolding of concepts, and relate each step to previous ones.
A chalkboard (or perhaps a whiteboard) works best for this because it retains and displays all the examples and the steps taken. Thus, it's easy to demonstrate relationships between different parts of the whole lesson, which is a single unit, an integral whole. In fact, the entire lesson may focus on a single problem, or a very small set of related problems.
So, much like a novel, a church service, or a symphony, a lesson has a definite beginning and end, a development in the middle, and supporting details, with disparate plot elements. The good lesson is a good story.
This concept that lessons should be integral wholes also indicates why classroom interruptions aren't tolerated in Japan, any more than loud talkers in the audience for a play or symphony or movie.
Japanese teachers usually don't explain new concepts at the beginning of class, because they have concluded that students must perform much of the mathematical work themselves. They may ask the students to memorize a few key terms (by "chanting" some definitions - which perpetuates the false stereotype among Westerners that Japanese teaching is rote learning), but other than that, they don't explain much, and they especially don't explain methods - at least, not at the beginning of the lesson.
Instead, they challenge students with an interesting problem to solve, which the students address in small groups within the classroom. Japanese students, of course, expect to be frustrated when dealing with such challenges. After all, no one has explained how it all works! Struggle doesn't automatically result in "math anxiety," because it's normal for everybody. Rather than depending on the teacher for help, students usually turn to fellow students in the same small group.
The terms and definitions that the students previously memorized are often applicable to the solutions they find, though not necessarily. It is a game, after all. There have to be some red herrings. And teachers encourage novel and various solutions, which may end up determining the rest of the lesson.
And while the students work, the teacher observes them, in part to consider which groups should share their solutions with the entire class. (And since classes in Japan are so big, it's pretty much a given that somebody will come up with whatever response the teacher was hoping for). These groups will be called upon in the sharing session/class discussion and final explanation that inevitably concludes the lesson. Again, multiple "correct methods" are always supported.
Thus, the lesson is a learning process that encompasses both teacher and students. The task for the teacher is not so much to "instruct," as we in America would understand that term. Rather, the teacher's task is to set the challenge and provide the students with the conceptual tools they'll need to reach new understandings, as well as to provide direction to the culminating discussion, and perhaps a hint or two along the way.
America
In America, by contrast, teachers tend to introduce new material to students more-or-less predigested. Students should practice it to mastery so that they can then "apply" it. Compared to Japan, it's like a plot unfolding backwards from its conclusion.
Why do American teachers prefer an overhead projector? Because it's more effective for focusing the students' attention during the teacher's exposition of predigested skills. These skills are usually narrowly targeted, requiring but a few minutes to lay out. This explains why interruptions are tolerated more in America - if lessons are fractured into narrow skills, then interruptions can only upset small points, and not an entire class period.
Teachers in America don't allow their students to feel frustrated very often because they assume that students may personalize such feelings and end up thinking of themselves as stupid or untalented. Students aren't used to the idea that struggle and frustration are normal (and even desirable) experiences.
In fact, the student who feels frustrated and anxious by math is often stigmatized with the label "math anxiety." Actually, that emotional state should be honored and not disparaged, because it demonstrates that the student recognizes at some level that real struggle is necessary. In America, the frustrated student despairs of a lack of ability, whereas the Japanese student expects to somehow muddle through to master something that, in the beginning (and maybe throughout the middle), makes little sense.
Most classroom interaction in America occurs between the student and the teacher (instead of among the students themselves). In fact, interaction between student and teacher so completely dominated American lessons that one of the Stigler's non-American colleagues remarked that in America, student-teacher interaction crowded out everything else - even the actual mathematics!
My reaction to all this
Now, as an elementary school teacher with university ties to current research, my reactions were strong- in brief, a strong "Amen!" to the way the Japanese teachers organized their instruction and conducted their classrooms. They were doing all the right things that current theory said they should be doing (1). So had they also all studied educational psychology?
After all, they were teaching math by encouraging active conceptual thinking. Of course, Americans also want to do that. That's what the New Math was supposed to do back in the sixties. But it failed because it did not fit the teaching culture, and thus was distorted by that culture into something unworkable, and now it's a byword for clueless "expert" educators. Ditto with most of the reforms that have occurred since. The strength and cohesiveness of culture stymies change and transforms it into a "pendulum swinging back and forth" within accepted cultural norms. Or, in the language of public relations, within accepted frames.
Yes, tough and resilient education cultures can be changed. Japanese education was not always like it is today. Its methods don't exist because they simply derive from Japanese culture, but because the education culture transformed itself over the past half century through research. They achieved genuine reform at a time when Americans were "spinning their wheels" and "swinging pendulums back and forth."
Barriers to Reform in America
Americans do not acknowledge the cultural nature of the teaching process, and thus, they fail to reckon with what it would take to reform it.
Actually, sometimes it seems like Americans don't think there's much process at all, much less a culture that embodies it. Anyone who learns something ought to be able to explain it. So there's no special skill to teaching, because explaining things is a normal human ability. A teacher's only special skills involve classroom management, the cultivation of "patience," and perhaps the ability to project an enthusiastic and caring attitude. actually, though, good teaching is just as specialized a skill set as good doctoring and good lawyering. Those who don't learn it, drop out after a few years.
I never fully realized how completely blind people can be to "teaching" as a professional skill set until several years ago when our school district wrote a "mission statement." The committee which composed it wanted to be inclusive and recognize that every person in a school affects the education of the students, even people not normally thought to be teachers, like bus drivers. Well, fair enough. Hard to argue with that. So they listed such people in the document - janitors, cafeteria workers, playground supervisors, nurses, other kids, classroom aides, office managers, counselors and bus drivers, etc. In the end, they acknowledged every sort of teacher in the district, including the "specialists," but not the classroom teachers themselves.
And yet, the practices that bind classroom teachers and students together into a sort-of binary culture are so entrenched that they are almost "too close to see." As culture, they are often transmitted subconsciously. In fact, teachers who have acquired and mastered them may yet feel insecure about their own genuine achievements, since they lack the language to conceptualize them or explicitly share them with others, let alone track down exactly where they came from.
And the culture traps them from making changes on their own. Imagine what would happen if an American suddenly began to teach math problems like a typical Japanese teacher.
Students would feel resentful because a fundamental cultural contract had been broken- nobody demonstrated how such problems are solved. They (and just as likely, their parents) might feel the teacher was abdicating his responsibility to instruct. The resulting stress might even affect their relations with others - peers, parents, - teachers.
In addition, there would be a load of logistics problems to solve, involving classroom materials and their storage and distribution. How would assessments change to accommodate greater emphasis on groups? These factors and a myriad others are addressable, of course, but it would take a lot of time to sort it all out.
An interruption digression
And perhaps most significantly, how could one deal with the constant stream of classroom interruptions that make it impossible to maintain the integrity, the complexity, and the plot of the lesson?
Such interruptions are also a part of the culture, and are particularly onerous in elementary schools. I first became aware of how special this primary hell was many years ago when our school district closed all the middle schools in order to save money. The seventh grade teachers and their students moved to elementary schools. Many of those teachers all but suffered nervous breakdowns from the constant stream of interruptions. When the middle schools later reopened, they ran screaming back to their junior high positions, despite the option most had for staying put. They cited classroom interruptions as their principal reason for moving out.
So when I read in Stigler and Hiebert's book about a Japanese educator who was shocked when the American eighth grade math lesson was briefly interrupted by a single simple announcement, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
What sorts of interruptions am I talking about? Well, in my school, between half and three quarters of all lessons are randomly interrupted by messages of some kind. Messages from the office may relay last-minute instructions to students from their parents. Kids are summoned to the office because their parent is waiting to take them to the dentist. Sometimes it's simply a matter of determining which sibling has the family's lunch money. Often, the loudspeaker blares school-wide messages, ranging from announcements for student activities, to seeking the location of a teacher or janitor, to requests that parents move their cars.
Sometimes kids themselves travel from class to class searching for lost playground balls or sweaters, or asking teachers to sign get-well cards, or announcing student body activities, or borrowing teaching materials for their own teacher. Sometimes parents pop in with balloons on their kid's birthday.
And not only all this, but kids are pulled out of class for music lessons, to work in the cafeteria, to relieve the office manager who would otherwise never get a break, etc. etc. All of this mitigates against the team-oriented, active-learning, lesson-presented-as-a-narrative approach which works so well in Japan and in graduate seminars in America, and which has also been actively espoused by elementary education leaders for decades.
My own experience in all this
It was my own good fortune to have studied learning theory at the graduate student level at the University of California at Berkeley after I had been teaching for several years, so I could appreciate, at a very intuitive level, exactly what the theory meant to address, and how its recommendations could be implemented.
This graduate program, called "Developmental Teacher Education," not only taught theory, it also espoused a vision that teachers in classrooms should be researchers, since practicing teachers occupy the best position to implement new pedagogical knowledge, or target research based on what's practical in (their own) real-world classrooms.
I was energized by newly-acquired understandings and a renewed appreciation of the human mind. It took two years of work (2), including lots of "lab work" with my poor long-suffering students serving as guinea pigs. And the experiments with real students were the key. If you just read about a theory in a book, particularly theories as odd-sounding as educational theory can be, you wonder about their relevance. Even if such outlandish ideas were true, how could they work themselves out in a classroom? It's a whole new ball game, though, if the teacher performs experiments himself within the context of a normal classroom setting and normal classroom activities.
I wished all my colleagues could have this experience, and I wished I could more fully implement the methodology and point of view that I had begun to acquire. But actually, I, too, encountered resistance to change. It was the entrenched education culture. Not only would the disparate actors in this culture pull me back, but I myself was part it. It existed within me and limited my own vision. And its complexity meant that even simple changes had complex ramifications.
However, I was extremely fortunate in my teaching position at that time. I had, essentially, a single class that lasted many years. How is that possible? It was mixed grade, fifth and sixth grades, where each year half the class carried over from the previous year, as the sixth graders moved out and fifth graders moved up to replace them. Not only that, I frequently had several siblings from individual families over the years. Because of this continuity, changes could be incremental and build up over time.
Thus, some small change might be introduced. Through time, it found a way to fit in. It established itself and persisted without active maintenance, because of the inertia of the classroom's culture. At that point, another change could be introduced. And each subsequent change would require active cultivation for a time, but later would persist unattended, freeing up time and energy to implement further changes.
Only once, in the middle of my tenure at that school, did I experience a completely new class - no students carried over from the previous year. What a shock. It was the most difficult class of all those years. Its high stress levels can be attributed at least in part to culture shock, as students tried to suddenly adapt to a situation that had developed over the years, but of which I was the sole representative. It just wasn't what they expected.
In my small corner of the world, I had effected some real change, incrementally, over many years. My classroom had developed a unique culture, compared to those around it. What a contrast to the normal catch-as-catch-can process of "teacher training," when, by the time you've even figured out how to modify what you've heard to fit your situation, the year's half over. And what you hear one year doesn't necessarily fit with what you hear the next year, anyway.
The Key to Japanese Educational Reform
Again, the Japanese did in fact reform their schools, and did so on a gigantic scale - an entire nation. They made change work, despite the complexity of the problem. This is what struck Stigler and Hiebert so strongly that they altered the whole thrust of their book from a simple comparative study to a plea for the USA to somehow emulate what they had come across in Japan. But emulate does not mean imitate. American schools should not try to simply imitate what's found in another country.
So what was the key, the essential element in Japanese reform? It was this: They set up a system that encouraged teachers to actively and formally research their own students in the context of normal classrooms. Any discoveries made were thus immediately applicable - no additional training necessary. It was a culture transforming itself from within. Furthermore, they set up a mechanism for teachers to support each other and disseminate their findings.
When I read this, I immediately identified with it, since that's what I had been doing already on my own, albeit on a much smaller scale. This was an entire nation validating my own experience.
And change in Japan did come slowly and incrementally, similar to what I had experienced. Stigler and Hiebert point out that it has taken fifty years to produce the results seen today. That's two generations at least. And maybe the first generation didn't accrue most of the benefits. But what was lacking in speed, was made up for in effectiveness.
In the meantime, American education tried out one fad after another and few of them resulted in long-term change. New Math. Whole Language. Back to Basics. Invented spellings So who's slow, really? These fads, by the way, did not become fads because the ideas behind them were necessarily faulty. They became fads because none of them offer a complete solution (which is not necessarily a criticism) and thus they had to integrate into existing culture, which often distorted their original intents, rendering them, as it were, impotent.
Again, this focus on teachers doing research may seem redundant. After all, good research is performed all the time in universities all over the world. Why not just harness that? Actually, I'm very much in favor of university research. However, we also need to understand the many factors that hinder it from impacting the classroom, of which culture shock is merely one. Teachers, on the other hand, occupy a natural nexus of the educational system, a far better position from which to effect change.
Actually, some long-term changes have occurred and are occurring in American education - slow, incremental changes, mostly from teacher to teacher, independent of political leadership (which has a different set of priorities) and school administrations (also with a different set of priorities), though with some input from universities. I'm thinking of writer's workshop, cooperative groups (as opposed to simply working in groups), TPRS (and similar) foreign language methods, etc. In fact, it's hard to label most of them, because they have no labels. It's merely one teacher or group of teachers sharing what works, like a less formalized version of the research process outlined above.
Yet even with these rather mainstream ideas, the cultural inertia against change has been intense. And by the way, how much more would it resist ideas imposed on it from the outside, particularly with teachers who are jaded from the passing of one fad after another?
The solution for Japan rested on one basic assumption - that teachers are intelligent, motivated people. (This was not such a stretch for them, since the status of "teacher" is considerably higher in Asia than in America.) They set up a system of research and collaboration much more far-reaching than anything ever envisioned in America, with its dependence on direction from experts. And after it was planted, they cultivated it. And, over the long haul it produced its own kind of fruit.
The heart of the system for change is the teacher as researcher. This appeals to me, due to my own somewhat similar experience. But I think it would appeal to most teachers. Even though most American teachers tend to be independent sorts who don't like others telling them what to do, almost every elementary school teacher I've known has longed for greater opportunities to collaborate with peers, if only there was time and space to do so.
Adventures in Time and Space
It's a safe bet that most elementary school teachers, at least those in California with multilingual classes of 33 or more students, spend 50 to 60 hours (or more) a week on school work as it is. When could they possibly plan and conduct a study? And if they did have the time, where could they find a place to reflect and consider the results? They have no personal office space, and in fact, may not even have room in the classroom for their own desk.
When I did my UC Berkeley program, I had some pretty big breaks - class sizes below 30, classroom routines established over several years, student teachers to help shoulder the teaching load, and assertively helpful parents who, among other things, took over the interminable fund-raising. Not every teacher can enjoy such advantages.
Now, it's well known that the Japanese student's day is considerably longer than his American counterpart's (3). What's not so well known is that the Japanese teacher's teaching day is considerably shorter than his American counterpart's. According to Harold Stevenson, in The Learning Gap (something of a companion volume to The Teaching Gap), Japanese teachers generally teach three 45-minute periods a day, and sometimes four, if they're lead teachers. And usually all of their teaching addresses a single subject, so preparation for one course may overlap with preparation for others. What do they do with all their extra time? Well, they have time on the job every day for themselves, to prepare lessons. And they have more time every day to collaborate with their colleagues.
And in Japan, teachers all have office space outside the classrooms that they share with other departmental members, so even the seating arrangements promote collaboration.
Lesson Study
But there's more. There's "Lesson Study," which is the research focus of all this collaboration.
During their daily meetings, departmental groups of 5 to 7 teachers develop model lessons. A single lesson may take weeks to create. Every detail is planned - what exactly to write on the chalkboard (or even where on the board to write it), which specific examples to use, etc.
And after it's all hashed out, one of them volunteers to teach it. On that day, all the other teachers in the group show up to the class, mainly to observe the students' reactions (since they already know what the teacher's going to do). There may be pre and post testing. At subsequent collaboration meetings they all pick apart the results. And since they all helped construct the lesson, they are not picking apart the teacher who happened to teach it that time.
Next, they revise the lesson in light of their initial experiences and a different teacher teaches it to a different class. Eventually they invite the entire faculty of the department to view it being taught. The whole process can take an entire year for a single lesson.
Stigler and Hiebert detail the process in their book, and anyone interested in this idea really should read it to get a proper feel for it. One can imagine that much profit comes from the meticulous analysis, the collegial atmosphere, and the authentic observations of actual students. But there's more!
After they've analyzed the lesson every which way but loose, they publish it as a research paper, as if they were actually some sort of professionals or something. Other teachers in the district, or even other teachers throughout the county, or even, in some cases, other teachers all across the nation, can access and read such papers, and thus observe the lesson second-hand. All these teachers can refine it to fit their own local situations, build upon it with model lessons of their own, or if they disagree with its methodology, come up with something better. It's all elegant and common-sense.
Fifty years ago Japanese teachers were not privileged with the theoretical knowledge that I learned in graduate school and experimented with in my classroom. It hadn't been written yet. And yet, their classroom practice gradually moved in a similar direction to mine. Why? Because they both were based on the same scientific method. So the Japanese teachers reached classroom conclusions similar to the Western researchers, without necessarily accessing the same exact theory and vocabulary.
Thus, the education culture developed from within. My own experience with the difficulty of making fundamental changes in just one classroom makes me appreciate the magnitude of their accomplishment. And in the process, they made a true profession out of teaching, one that cultivates its own knowledge, publishes professional papers, and takes charge of its membership, just like doctors or lawyers.
I suppose that one area where I personally would differ with the Japanese is in what they chose to study. For me, it's even more effective to study the learner than study the lessons. Studying only the lessons, but not the learner, is like a doctor studying courses of disease and treatment without studying anatomy and physiology. On the other hand, the history of medicine begins with such study, and much progress was made before the inner workings of the body were understood. So may it be with education.
What about America?
In a move somewhat unusual for a scientific book, Stigler and Hiebert formulated specific policy recommendations for educational reform in this country.
Unsurprisingly, they advocate a system of "lesson study" that draws its inspiration, if not its exact mechanisms, from the Japanese model. To this end, they state the following six principals:
1.Expect Improvement to be continual, gradual and incremental
2.Maintain a constant focus on student learning goals.
3.Focus on teaching, not teachers.
4.Implement improvements in the context of our own local classrooms.
5.Make improvement the work of teachers, not administrators or experts.
6.Build a system that can learn from its own experience.
All of these are pretty self-explanatory, but I think number three deserves some extra comment. At first, I assumed that the focus on teaching instead of teachers simply meant to help teachers develop their skills in a non-threatening manner, coached by peers instead of evaluated by authorities.
I have no reason to think Stigler and Hiebert would oppose such an interpretation, but they actually had a different factor in mind. You study teaching instead of teachers because "teaching" is the culture you're trying to change, and the culture is bigger and more long-lived than any of the individuals that make it up. Therefore, it's not productive to over-magnify the differences in talent or skill between individuals. (Tell this to those people who advocate "merit pay" for teachers, though!)
In the concluding two chapters, Stigler and Hiebert lay out their plan. It's only at this point that I reached some additional points of disagreement with them.
For example, they state: "Establishing the program we envision is a monumental task, not so much because it is costly or requires new resources, but because it involves a change in school culture." And again, "school culture" does not simply mean the culture in public schools, but it means the entire way that everybody involved in teaching/learning (which includes students, parents, private, religious and charter schools, the random "man on the street," etc.) conceives of the enterprise.
I agree with them that cultural change is an arduous process, but I don't think they realize how costly it will be. It will be plenty costly, mainly in time. If teachers already work 50-60 hours at school and do further schoolwork at home, where will they find sufficient the time to collaborate on research, even if it is immediately relevant, even if there are no nice offices?
I know this time constraint exists at the elementary school level, for sure. I began this essay just after New Years, and here it is already Memorial Day. Had I been on summer vacation, I could have knocked it out in a two or three days. As it is, I'm lucky to complete even a first draft without falling hopelessly behind in my schoolwork. And indeed, the first draft was only completed after summer vacation began.
One ray of hope in this otherwise bleak picture is the new push for smaller class sizes in the lower grades in California. With only twenty students in a class and fewer, shorter papers and projects to evaluate, more time's left over.
And smaller classes make no difference unless there's a concomitant change in teaching methods. The kind of lesson study used by Japanese schools and proposed by Stigler and Hiebert would fit this situation well. Teachers with small classes would have the time to experiment and collaborate on lessons which specifically take advantage of a small class size.
Stigler and Hiebert have proposed three phases for implementing a program of lesson study:
1.Build consensus for continuous improvement.
2.Set clear learning goals for students and align assessments with these goals.
3.Restructure schools as places where teachers can learn.
Probably most school districts like to think that they are already doing phases one and two. Indeed, number one may be superfluous, since most teachers I know are already self-motivated to improve. Phase two is done and overdone, but it's never effective because it seldom takes the nature of the learner into account. It also doesn't take the nature of the school culture or the wider culture of the community into account. I will never forget, for example, the political backlash in the nineties against assessing student progress with tests that actually fit the educational goals, such as writing essays to test writing ability and performing experiments to test scientific thinking.
Still, schools do attempt to address phase two. How could they not?
But hardly anyone seriously reckons with phase three, even though it's the lynchpin to the entire process. Partly, it's because the difficulty is not appreciated. But mainly, it's because it's by far the most costly of the three phases. And thirdly, it's a cultural change, and not a simple matter of introducing specific skills or fostering a stimulating atmosphere.
Imagine how much money it would cost to reduce most teachers' daily classroom time down to three or four 45-minute periods, as they are in Japan. Even if class sizes shot up to 50, it would still cost a lot. These days, it's hard to find the money to send a teacher even to a two-day local conference.
However, I totally agree with their statement that
"Improving teaching is not something that can be left to refresher courses in the evenings or during the summer in university classrooms. Improving teaching must be done at school, in classrooms, and it must be seen by teachers, parents and administrators as a substantial and important part of the teacher's workweek. Schools must be places where teachers, as well as students, can learn."
Crunch Time
This factor of time deserves further emphasis, particularly because sometimes people who are not involved in teaching imagine that teachers only work from 9 to 3 o'clock and only five days a week.
When I think of time, I often think of Robert Thornton, the best teacher I ever had as an undergraduate in college. He taught Biology I to several hundred students at once.
Before each lecture, he would hold all calls and isolate himself in his office for two hours, to meditate on what he'd say and to try to anticipate what questions might be asked, and map out what he was going to write on the blackboard. Mind you, this is for the most elementary course in his field, a lecture that someone with his expertise could just improvise if he wanted to. And his students were the elite learners who had entered one of the most prestigious institutions in the state.
It was no surprise that he earned a Distinguished Teaching Award from the Academic Senate. And he continues to chair the University's Committee on Education Policy to this day [in the year 2000].
But what a luxury of time! A typical elementary school work week includes maybe 25-35 hours of classroom time. A teacher working a typical 50 to 60 hour week, then, would have about 45 minutes to an hour for each hour of class to not only plan, but also gather and/or manufacture the materials, write out tests, evaluate (grade) papers, tutor students outside of class time, deal with behavior problems, contact parents for various reasons, conduct fund raisers, perform typical required "extra duties" such as study hall or after-school clubs, sit on committees, attend staff meetings, assist in evening activities such as open house or musical concerts, etc. etc.
If a teacher stuck to a 40 hour week, as they sometimes do in lieu of striking, they'd only have 20 minutes per class hour to accomplish all that. Needless to say, not much gets done under those circumstances.
And often, teachers are asked to teach things they've never studied. For example, the State of California changed its sixth grade social studies curriculum from Latin America to Ancient History (including China and India, which most of us had never studied). Our district once adopted a truly excellent math series (put out by TERC - formerly the "Technical Education Research Centers" - at Cambridge, Massachusetts) which many teachers totally ignored because its teaching methods, though excellent, were totally foreign to the way they themselves learned math or had ever seen it taught. It would simply take too much time to read and understand the sense of them, time they didn't have. And if they had tried to implement it without a deep understanding of what it's trying to accomplish, then it would come across no better than the New Math had, back in the sixties. And indeed, that's exactly what happened with TERC math in many cases.
So I think that Stigler and Hiebert have a much bigger fish to slay than they yet realize. For example, they are scandalized when a teacher involved in a restructuring committee says "Let's just go home early and use the time at home to prepare for tomorrow's lessons." They imply that the teacher didn't see the sense in all the collaboration. Well, maybe not, but more probably, the teacher truly had no other time to prepare the next day's lesson and therefore, because of the committee meeting, would have to "wing it" without preparation, something all elementary school teachers have had to do at one time or another, and it's not fun. What will it really take to fry this dragon, I wonder?
I'm beginning to think, too, that in order to gain the time needed to effect this change, upper elementary grades may need to departmentalize (unless they are also given the benefit of class size limited to 20), so that teachers can specialize and therefore reuse resources for more than one section or class.
Final Comment
The reason most teachers went into teaching and stay in it is because they find the job is its own reward, and their greatest joy is to do the best they can, and affect young lives in a positive way. I've known many people who left or retired early from lucrative business careers to pursue teaching, so you know it's not the high pay. Those who know anything at all about the life of a teacher know that they didn't stick with it because they have more time off or a shorter day than other workers (though a heck of a lot of the public thinks they do). Given those facts, then, it always mystifies me why some people seem to feel that teachers "need to be held accountable" or should only be paid better if their students happen to perform better on standardized tests, etc. The truth is that most teachers, once they have the opportunities (particularly the time) to participate in researching their own students, and given the resources to do so, will plunge right in. This sort of research is utterly fascinating and rewarding on its own.
To sum up, then, I think that Stigler and Hiebert are dead-on correct in defining the major task facing America's teachers if they wish to professionalize and revolutionize their profession, and to reach all students. The only question is how to acquire the resources to make such change possible.
[editor's comment]
As I finish editing this document in August 2012, I can see that not much has changed since I wrote the original in 2000, except that the quality of my writing is not as atrocious as it once was. Still, I do apologize for the wanderings and redundancies that yet remain.
As part of my attempt to edit for clarity, I Googled lists of educational fads to obtain examples to accompany my comment on fads above. I was a bit surprised to find that "constructivist" often appeared in such lists.
Constructivism, despite it's "ism" suffix is no philosophy, no religion, and in particular no teaching method. It's a description of the mind's workings as it learns. It has particular meaning for me, because it is to teaching methods like anatomy is to medical treatments, and this "anatomy " has been a major part of my study.
And yet, as I peruse the diatribes against it, reminiscent of those against "New Math," (and against TERC, for that matter) I found that, if the complainers were to be believed, teachers had taken this concept, treated it as if it were a teaching method, and cooked up something totally unworkable. And indeed, I found myself on the side of the complainers but for one thing - was it the teachers who distorted the meaning of constructivism, or was it the complainers? Probably it's both.
And once again, we have an example of the "common sense" culture of teaching distorting both the intent and the concepts of a new idea, rendering it fully unworkable through a failure to assimilate what it actually was. Which is too bad. Constructivism has a lot that can inform practice, as long as you don't distort it into a teaching methodology.
In fact, the apparently successful Japanese math lessons cited above are good examples of a methodology that takes full advantage of constructivist principles, although the teachers using it may or may not have heard the term "constructivist." They arrived at their methodology the same way scientists arrived at constructivist concepts - by experiment with real human beings. Again, if all teachers could perform such experiments, and not just assume that something means what they think it means, what a (slow motion but effective) reform would take place in the culture of education.
footnotes
1. And by the way, there is an institution in America that already uses methods similar to the Japanese, and those are schools of graduate education in universities, which are generally acknowledged as among the best in the world, and much of the rest of the world is still trying to catch up to us.
2. plus a few more years to write the thesis, of course ;)
3. Although a lot of this longer day is devoted to activities akin to what sports leagues and scouting might offer in America.
