- Email: [email protected]
Better than best practice: Developing teaching and learning through dialogue. An Interview with Author, Dr. Adam Lefstein
Teaching and Teacher Education 37 (2014) 165e168
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Teaching and Teacher Education journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tate
Book Review
Better than best practice: Developing teaching and learning through dialogue. An Interview with Author, Dr. Adam Lefsteinq M. Shaun Murphy* Department of Educational Foundations, College of Education, University of Saskatchewan, 28 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK S7N 0X1, Canada
a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Accepted 24 September 2013
In the following interview and book review, I talk with author Adam Lefstein about his new book, co-authored with Julia Snell, Better Than Best Practice: Developing Teaching and Learning Through Dialogue. Their work inquires into the dialogic practices of children and teachers in a UK primary school. The book contains a description of dialogic practices and contextualizes their research. They begin with an overview of their approach to dialogic pedagogy, which they contend is 1) informed by practice and grounded in classroom conditions, 2) multi dimensional, and 3) views dialog as a problem rather than a solution. They then describe various forms of dialog. These descriptions consist of dialog as interactional form, interplay of voices, critique, thinking together, relationship and empowerment. These explanations position the reader to consider the eight episodes, which appear in seven chapter, and are comprised of eight videos of diverse classrooms (the videos will be posted on a companion website), transcripts of video segments, focus questions, synopsis of the videos, detailed analyses, follow up questions, and commentaries by educational researchers and practitioners from around the world. Please note that you are able to view the video of this interview via the following link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2013.09.005 I began: I’m talking today with Adam Lefstein who has coauthored a book called Better Than Best Practice: Developing Teaching and Learning Through Dialogue, with Julia Snell who’s unable to be part of our conversation today. I wanted to recognize that this is a coauthored venture and that Julia wasn’t able to contribute to the conversation. Adam, how are you? Dr. Lefstein responded, I’m doing very well, thank you. I continued noting that We’re going to go through a series of questions, so I’ll just jump right in. You talk about the context of q The video of this interview is available to view alongside the commentary (Supplementary material). * Tel.: þ1 306 966 7586; fax: þ1 306 966 7658. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0742-051X/$ e see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2013.09.005
reform. How do you see these reform movements shaping the field of teacher education, in the context of your research? Setting the stage he replied, First of all the context of the research is the UK, where there’s quite a lot of upheaval around teacher education practices where the government, starting about, well about 15 years ago now, decided that it knew what good practice looked like and knew better than practitioners themselves, and knew better than the teacher educators. And the government began to mandate its vision of good practice, or even “best practice”, from the center, and everyone had to come on board. mandating the curriculum in schools, mandating the teaching methods, especially in literacy and mathematics, and mandating teacher education practices. Teacher education became in many ways the site through which government mandates became distilled into practices that teachers needed to learn how to do. I’m talking about pre-service teacher education, and also in-service teacher education, in which a cascade model is used according to which a group of central government consultants train a group of regional consultants who train school-based literacy coordinators, who then train the teachers. In the end you get a very watered down vision of practice, something which may be better than what some teachers are capable of but certainly isn’t the “best practice” as I would see it. Implications for mandated teaching practices are pervasive across countries. They range from scripted teaching (MacGillivray, Ardell, Curwen, & Palma, 2004; Schmidt & Datnow, 2005), concerns about the narrowed curriculum in schools (Milner, 2013), teacher education programming (Cochran-Smith, 2004), standardized testing (Ricci, 2004), and professional development practices for inservice teachers (Sachs, 2001, 2003). Often these practices ignore teacher and teaching contexts and require teachers to take on practices that interrupt their ways of knowing in the situated lives they live within particular classrooms. So-called “best practices” do not attend to the individual but consider teaching to be a generalizable act. I wondered about classrooms and reform. One of the things you write in the book is about classrooms being resistant to reform. In your research did you see kinds of things that would make classrooms resistant? His response was that there are a lot of reasons why classrooms are resistant to reforms. I did a study of the national literacy strategy in my Ph.D. research and the way in which it was enacted.
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M. Shaun Murphy / Teaching and Teacher Education 37 (2014) 165e168
What I found was that you needed not only the teachers to change their practice, you needed the pupils to change their practices as well. So you might have a teacher who is doing everything he’s been told to do and in the best way possible as far as he’s concerned, but the pupils just aren’t playing ball, they’re not cooperating with him and they’re waiting him out till he reverts back to his old practice that they are more comfortable with. Another reason is that some of the practices should be resisted. A lot of policies for reform are bad ideas and teachers recognize that and resist them, and rightfully so. Another reason is how policy is interpreted. Jim Spillane (2004) has a book, Standards Deviation: How schools misunderstand education policy. In it he likens policy to the game of telephone in which one person whispers the policy to another person who then whispers the policy to the next person and by the time you get to the end of the line where you get to the classroom it’s a completely different policy from what was originally intended. I see that all the time: people recontextualize the policy into their own settings, into their own ideas, into their own practices, habits and beliefs. Often they’d be better off doing their own thing. Now that’s not a celebration of current practice e current practice isn’t always good. Not all practitioners are artists and highly capable. However, many schools are amazing. I think we’ve gone too far away from respecting practitioners’ professional judgment. We need to work with their professional judgment and their existing practices to improve them and yet professional development has gone in the direction of trying to change things, top down, with very little respect for teachers’ own ways of working and their own ideas. This made me wonder. That’s an interesting statement. It makes me wonder about the experiences of all teachers at all different levels, pre-service teachers, in-service teachers, teachers who are pursuing graduate work, in relation to your work, and how might those teachers interpret the videos and the book. He replied that we’ve shown these videos to many different people at many different levels, non-teachers, people who don’t intend to even become teachers, to supervisors, inspectors, principals, teachers and academics, and one striking thing is just how different people’s responses are. The extent of which tells us less about what’s in the video and more about what people’s prejudices are. Prejudice not in the sense of something bad, but in the sense of the kind of presumptions we have about what practice should look like. And we very often read those into the video. You can tell a lot about people’s ideas by showing them some video of practice and asking them what they think. The commentaries are one of the strengths of the book. In this section, of each chapter, diverse individuals are invited to comment on the videos. These individuals include teachers, consultants, academics from various disciplines, a poet, administrators, and graduate students. These different people offer their thoughts in relation to a specific video in a chapter. Their ideas and thoughts open up possibilities for different interpretations, challenging the reader to consider the complexity of these teaching moments. As I considered the connections between their ideas regarding professional development and teacher education programs, I noted that in the book you have a professional development model in terms of talking with teachers and then with the different people. I’m wondering about how you see this being taken up in teacher education programs. Do you see a specific place for it? Dr. Lefstein immediately saw how this could be. Absolutely, I think one of the big challenges in teacher education is having a common object to look at and to discuss. Teaching often happens as a private affair behind closed doors to which others don’t have access. There’s a famous article by Charles Goodwin (1994), called Professional Vision, where he talks about how archaeologists, master archaeologists, professors of archeology, teach budding novice archaeologists. They go out to a dig and the archaeologist shows
them things in the sand, in the dirt, and says “this is what you’re seeing” and thereby teaches them how to look. You can’t do that very easily in teacher education. You can’t just stop the classroom and say “OK, you pupils all hold it for a minute and now I’m going to have an hour and 15 minute discussion of what’s going on”. The pupils have things to say. By the way, I think we could probably do that a bit more than we do, but still we need a common object. And the video and the transcripts and the associated discussion of content give you that common object, which I think is really important. It’s not the only set of videos that you can find, but it’s a particularly interesting set of videos because they’re so real. They’re not doctored up. We spent a lot of time in the classrooms and we didn’t look for the very best practice that we could find and orchestrate it and choreograph it like so many other videos you can find. They’re interesting episodes and we put a lot of time into analyzing them. We go into a lot of depth. I agreed. He continued. I think that’s very useful. It’s a bit like that archaeologist. We’re not able to stop the actual event, but we are able to invite you in and show you all sorts of things that you might not see if you’re just passing through. As a public school teacher I was pleased to note the reality of the videos. I was a classroom teacher for about 20 years and what I liked about the videos is, in your words, they felt real, they weren’t cleaned up, they weren’t “this is how you should do it”. Kids weren’t paying attention, kids were talking to each other, and some very much contributed to the conversation that was going on. Everybody wasn’t attentive . it was very much a real classroom. Can you talk about the use of video? The other thing that I appreciated in your book was the use of diverse voices in your commentary section. What did that provide you with in terms of the work of analyzing the videos? In viewing the videos what became evident was not just the content focus, but the complex living alongside others in classrooms, as the children and teacher interacted with each other. This nested way of being in relationship (Lyons, 1990) with everyone in the classroom was evident in the videos. Bullough (2012) contended, “In education, most of the important issues come in the form of dilemmas to be managed, not problems to be solved” (p. 346). This certainly was a central aspect to the work of the teachers appearing in the book. While directing content dialog they were also managing, adroitly, and not managing, the interactions occurring in the classroom. Dr. Lefstein acknowledged the different perspectives on teaching he and Dr. Snell brought to this research and the diverse voices in the commentaries. Julie and I both come from, we come from different perspectives, and I appreciate, by the way, you acknowledging Julia’s role in the book, it’s completely a joint effort. We come from very different perspectives, but both of us are coming from the academy to the classrooms. We both spent the last years of our lives being trained as anthropologists and sociolinguists, and, while we think people have a lot to gain from our linguistic ethnographic perspective, we don’t think we have all the truth. It’s important to get other people’s perspectives. So the perspectives include, for example, the poet, Pie Corbett, whose poem is being analyzed in the lesson in chapter eight, the teacher whose lesson we’re looking at, the head teacher of the school, the local authority advisor, and eventually people from around the world. It doesn’t give you all the perspectives that are possible but it rounds it out a lot more, and we hope the readers will engage also, and send us their perspectives, and we’ll put them online (www. dialogicpedagogy.com). So the book will keep growing in terms of commentary. I commented on their hope for an ongoing conversation regarding the book. It is an interesting aspect of the book, inviting reader response in an online kind of forum so that the book itself
M. Shaun Murphy / Teaching and Teacher Education 37 (2014) 165e168
becomes dialogic in terms of the practice of research and inquiry into teacher professional development. He expanded on that thought. That’s the idea and we hope that people pick up the challenge that we’re offering them. And we hope people will disagree with us as well. One of the most interesting responses we received in the commentaries was when the commentators said, “Well you call this dialog, we don’t think it’s dialog.” We thought that some of those commentaries were wrong and we told them that, and they argued with us. And we opened up the conversation in the book, but it wasn’t about our ideas, it was about their ideas and we hope we’ll get the same thing from others. I wondered about teachers making and analyzing their own videos. Continuing along that theme, you have a section in your book where you talk about the use of video, teachers using video and communities of teachers coming together to analyze video. I wonder if you want to talk a bit about that section of the book and the continued life of the book. He explained that the vision ultimately is that you’ll have schools where teachers are routinely videotaping themselves and bringing in those lessons or parts of lessons and problems that arise to discuss with their colleagues. Sort of like the clinical practice in medicine where doctors will bring in other doctors to come to the bedside and talk to them about the case to try to help them solve the problem. We can’t do that very well in teaching because you know everyone’s got their classroom they need to attend to, but video can help us capture things and discuss them with colleagues, and learn from them. That’s easier said than done, it takes quite a lot of confidence and quite a bit of time as well. We see the book as a step in that process. So here you have eight episodes you could start with. You can get your feet wet, you can get used to it, you can gain experience in a little less threatening environment, get your gaze refined, and then ultimately we hope people will move on and begin to videotape their own classrooms and discuss those videos. They can send us those as well, we’ll put them up. I commented on the creation of teacher videos. You were saying when you’re videotaping your own classroom, make it a bounded experience, don’t sit down and analyze an hour’s lesson of your video in your group. Make it a short time so it’s a doable kind of moment. He responded, We found about 6 to 7 minutes is about the maximum people can take unless it’s a really interesting segment. I reiterated that 6 or 7 minutes in the life of a classroom is pretty intense, if you’re going to attend to many things, there’s a lot to attend to in 6 to 7 minutes. Given the focus of the book on professional development I made the connection to ongoing teacher education. One of the things you wrote in your book is, and I quote, “Professional learning should be based upon a balanced dialogic relationship between external and internal sources of expertise, and between external consultation, and internal leadership.” This statement, I think is interesting in relation to teacher education. Can you say something about that in relation to ongoing teacher education, professional development kinds of activities? He tied this to external support for teacher professional development. I’d say it’s interesting you picked up on that, you picked up on a bit of neurosis about what we’d written. I mean I don’t think the be all and end all of teacher professional development is refining professional judgment through video. I think that people need external support, it’s not all about discovering what we already know. There’s a limited capacity within an organization without external intervention and you can learn a lot from people coming from outside your organization. However, this book is an antidote to the overemphasis on external expertise you find, for instance in current English ongoing in-service teacher education and professional development, but to go to the other extreme and say “all we’re going to do is refine our professional judgment by
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talking to each other within school, within the grade group, within our disciplinary area,” I think that would be a mistake as well. So what we’re trying to say is the book we’ve written is about refining professional judgment through reflection on video, but it’s not enough. Ultimately I think we need external expertise as well. We’ll watch a video with you and give you some other perspectives. Bring some perspective from another school. Much like what we’ve done in the book with the commentaries. Bullough (2012) considered the same idea, “where the aim is a progressively more intelligent and responsive practice directed towards achieving ever evolving but valued ends within specific work contexts: better not best practice” (p. 350). Better practice is a goal of education. It is an act of refining, reflecting, and knowing what works for you, in your place, with particular children/youth and over time. I was interested, given the title, that you considered the complexity of best practice rhetoric. It’s interesting because what you’ve just alluded to is the fact that best practice isn’t a terrible thing. You say that in your title, Better than Best Practice, you don’t say the alternative to best practice. You encourage a response that includes best practice dogma as opposed to it being the only thing that we do. You say teacher education has become so focused on the external validation and the external input, but it’s a balance, it’s not a pendulum swing, it’s a balanced approach. He saw the implications and agreed that we need to try to get the pendulum to stop swinging. I agreed. He continued noting that The truth is that neither extreme, in my mind, on so many issues in education is helpful. We talk about sensitivity, interpretation, repertoire, and judgment. Up until now in this conversation I’m talking about judgment because that’s kind of the focus of the book, but it’s also about repertoire. A teacher who has a broad repertoire of tools practices some of them best, some of them good, some of them .. The best is kind of assuming to say I have the best practice. The best practice for all time and all contexts, for all practitioners is silly, but I think good practice is having a set of skills e we can’t think about everything all the time. Bullough (2012) considering John Dewey wrote, For Dewey, certainty in a perplexing, contradictory and dangerous world is the worst sort of illusion, ultimately requiring disengagement from the world and encouraging a passive acceptance of life’s offerings. In contrast, he calls for courage in the face of uncertainty, engagement, openness, responsibility, moral action and, perhaps ironically, for humility, a recognition that there is much in life we cannot control, some things we should not even seek to control, and many questions that strongly and perhaps always will resist resolution. p. 346 Curriculum making (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988) in the moment is a complex act. Both Dewey and Lefstein and Snell attend to that in their work. He finished this conversation thread with We don’t expect doctors to make it up as they go along when they go into surgery, they have techniques they use and they spend a lot of time refining those techniques. Teachers as well, so I’m not opposed to practices, good practices even things that currently are called “best practices”, let’s just call them “really good things that work a lot of the time”, and we need to learn them. Changing the subject I focused on their research methodology. I’d like to finish our conversation talking about your methodology, linguistic ethnography. I’m interested in your reasons for why you use this methodology, and what makes it suited in terms of your practice as a researcher for the study of the lives of teachers, children, and youth. He explained. First of all a few words about linguistic ethnography and where it came from. it’s a school of academic research in
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the UK, which is combining the openness of ethnography, looking at the context and experience of a culture with the very rigorous, systematic approach of linguistics. Therefore, using the tools of linguistics but the sensitivity and openness of ethnography. One of the people who originated the idea is Professor Ben Rampton from King’s College London, who talked about ethnography opening up linguistics and linguistics tying down ethnography, and I like that tension. I think it’s a really productive tension. We draw on a lot of tools from conversation analysis, from sociolinguistics, from linguistic anthropology, and so forth. What linguistic ethnography is good at is getting into the really minute details of the things we do when we come into contact with each other and in face-to-face interaction. He expanded on the issues examined in linguistic ethnographic analysis, the way we build up our identities, the way we identify other people, power relations and social dynamics, the minute details of turn taking and when is it appropriate to speak. How do we respond to people while they’re speaking to us to encourage them to say more? Or take like you’re doing right now, how to encourage or to stop them. All of these things I tend to think can really sensitize us to getting into the details of what’s going on in our classrooms. They do not tell you what is a good teaching technique. Which is probably why I said, you know, I’ve some uneasiness about it, I don’t think linguist ethnography gives you enough, I think it gives you a lot, it helps you understand better what’s going on in the classroom because a lot of what’s going on in the classroom has nothing to do with teaching and learning. But it has at least something to do with teaching and learning and a lot to do with other things. It helps to tune us to those other things and then, of course, you need some pedagogic principles as
well. You need to marry those two together and that’s something we’re still trying to work out how to do. Pie Corbett, the poet whose work is considered in chapter eight, wrote in his commentary, “A poem is an experience.” I would contend that Lefstein and Snell invite us to consider that teaching is an experience. References Bullough, R. V., Jr. (2012). Against best practice: uncertainty, outliers and local studies in educational research. Journal of Education for Teaching, 38(3), 343e357. Cochran-Smith, M. (2004). Taking stock in 2004 teacher education in dangerous times. Journal of Teacher Education, 55(1), 3e7. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1988). Teachers as curriculum planners. Narratives of experience. 1234 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY 10027: Teachers College Press. Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96(3), 606e633. Lyons, N. (1990). Dilemmas of knowing: ethical and epistemological dimensions of teachers’ work and development. Harvard Educational Review, 60(2), 159e181. MacGillivray, L., Ardell, A. L., Curwen, M. S., & Palma, J. (2004). Colonized teachers: examining the implementation of a scripted reading program. Teaching Education, 15(2), 131e144. Milner, H. R. (2013). Scripted and narrowed curriculum reform in urban schools. Urban Education, 48(2), 163e170. Ricci, C. (2004). The case against standardized testing and the call for a revitalization of democracy. The Review of Education, Pedagogy, 26(4), 339e361. Sachs, J. (2001). Teacher professional identity: competing discourses, competing outcomes. Journal of Education Policy, 16(2). Sach, J. (2003). Teacher professional standards: controlling or developing teaching? Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 9(2). Schmidt, M., & Datnow, A. (2005). Teachers’ sense-making about comprehensive school reform: the influence of emotions. Teaching and Teacher Education, 21(8), 949e965. Spillane, J. P. (2004). Standards deviation: How schools misunderstand education policy. Harvard University Press.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Teaching and Teacher Education journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tate
Book Review
Better than best practice: Developing teaching and learning through dialogue. An Interview with Author, Dr. Adam Lefsteinq M. Shaun Murphy* Department of Educational Foundations, College of Education, University of Saskatchewan, 28 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK S7N 0X1, Canada
a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Accepted 24 September 2013
In the following interview and book review, I talk with author Adam Lefstein about his new book, co-authored with Julia Snell, Better Than Best Practice: Developing Teaching and Learning Through Dialogue. Their work inquires into the dialogic practices of children and teachers in a UK primary school. The book contains a description of dialogic practices and contextualizes their research. They begin with an overview of their approach to dialogic pedagogy, which they contend is 1) informed by practice and grounded in classroom conditions, 2) multi dimensional, and 3) views dialog as a problem rather than a solution. They then describe various forms of dialog. These descriptions consist of dialog as interactional form, interplay of voices, critique, thinking together, relationship and empowerment. These explanations position the reader to consider the eight episodes, which appear in seven chapter, and are comprised of eight videos of diverse classrooms (the videos will be posted on a companion website), transcripts of video segments, focus questions, synopsis of the videos, detailed analyses, follow up questions, and commentaries by educational researchers and practitioners from around the world. Please note that you are able to view the video of this interview via the following link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2013.09.005 I began: I’m talking today with Adam Lefstein who has coauthored a book called Better Than Best Practice: Developing Teaching and Learning Through Dialogue, with Julia Snell who’s unable to be part of our conversation today. I wanted to recognize that this is a coauthored venture and that Julia wasn’t able to contribute to the conversation. Adam, how are you? Dr. Lefstein responded, I’m doing very well, thank you. I continued noting that We’re going to go through a series of questions, so I’ll just jump right in. You talk about the context of q The video of this interview is available to view alongside the commentary (Supplementary material). * Tel.: þ1 306 966 7586; fax: þ1 306 966 7658. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0742-051X/$ e see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2013.09.005
reform. How do you see these reform movements shaping the field of teacher education, in the context of your research? Setting the stage he replied, First of all the context of the research is the UK, where there’s quite a lot of upheaval around teacher education practices where the government, starting about, well about 15 years ago now, decided that it knew what good practice looked like and knew better than practitioners themselves, and knew better than the teacher educators. And the government began to mandate its vision of good practice, or even “best practice”, from the center, and everyone had to come on board. mandating the curriculum in schools, mandating the teaching methods, especially in literacy and mathematics, and mandating teacher education practices. Teacher education became in many ways the site through which government mandates became distilled into practices that teachers needed to learn how to do. I’m talking about pre-service teacher education, and also in-service teacher education, in which a cascade model is used according to which a group of central government consultants train a group of regional consultants who train school-based literacy coordinators, who then train the teachers. In the end you get a very watered down vision of practice, something which may be better than what some teachers are capable of but certainly isn’t the “best practice” as I would see it. Implications for mandated teaching practices are pervasive across countries. They range from scripted teaching (MacGillivray, Ardell, Curwen, & Palma, 2004; Schmidt & Datnow, 2005), concerns about the narrowed curriculum in schools (Milner, 2013), teacher education programming (Cochran-Smith, 2004), standardized testing (Ricci, 2004), and professional development practices for inservice teachers (Sachs, 2001, 2003). Often these practices ignore teacher and teaching contexts and require teachers to take on practices that interrupt their ways of knowing in the situated lives they live within particular classrooms. So-called “best practices” do not attend to the individual but consider teaching to be a generalizable act. I wondered about classrooms and reform. One of the things you write in the book is about classrooms being resistant to reform. In your research did you see kinds of things that would make classrooms resistant? His response was that there are a lot of reasons why classrooms are resistant to reforms. I did a study of the national literacy strategy in my Ph.D. research and the way in which it was enacted.
166
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What I found was that you needed not only the teachers to change their practice, you needed the pupils to change their practices as well. So you might have a teacher who is doing everything he’s been told to do and in the best way possible as far as he’s concerned, but the pupils just aren’t playing ball, they’re not cooperating with him and they’re waiting him out till he reverts back to his old practice that they are more comfortable with. Another reason is that some of the practices should be resisted. A lot of policies for reform are bad ideas and teachers recognize that and resist them, and rightfully so. Another reason is how policy is interpreted. Jim Spillane (2004) has a book, Standards Deviation: How schools misunderstand education policy. In it he likens policy to the game of telephone in which one person whispers the policy to another person who then whispers the policy to the next person and by the time you get to the end of the line where you get to the classroom it’s a completely different policy from what was originally intended. I see that all the time: people recontextualize the policy into their own settings, into their own ideas, into their own practices, habits and beliefs. Often they’d be better off doing their own thing. Now that’s not a celebration of current practice e current practice isn’t always good. Not all practitioners are artists and highly capable. However, many schools are amazing. I think we’ve gone too far away from respecting practitioners’ professional judgment. We need to work with their professional judgment and their existing practices to improve them and yet professional development has gone in the direction of trying to change things, top down, with very little respect for teachers’ own ways of working and their own ideas. This made me wonder. That’s an interesting statement. It makes me wonder about the experiences of all teachers at all different levels, pre-service teachers, in-service teachers, teachers who are pursuing graduate work, in relation to your work, and how might those teachers interpret the videos and the book. He replied that we’ve shown these videos to many different people at many different levels, non-teachers, people who don’t intend to even become teachers, to supervisors, inspectors, principals, teachers and academics, and one striking thing is just how different people’s responses are. The extent of which tells us less about what’s in the video and more about what people’s prejudices are. Prejudice not in the sense of something bad, but in the sense of the kind of presumptions we have about what practice should look like. And we very often read those into the video. You can tell a lot about people’s ideas by showing them some video of practice and asking them what they think. The commentaries are one of the strengths of the book. In this section, of each chapter, diverse individuals are invited to comment on the videos. These individuals include teachers, consultants, academics from various disciplines, a poet, administrators, and graduate students. These different people offer their thoughts in relation to a specific video in a chapter. Their ideas and thoughts open up possibilities for different interpretations, challenging the reader to consider the complexity of these teaching moments. As I considered the connections between their ideas regarding professional development and teacher education programs, I noted that in the book you have a professional development model in terms of talking with teachers and then with the different people. I’m wondering about how you see this being taken up in teacher education programs. Do you see a specific place for it? Dr. Lefstein immediately saw how this could be. Absolutely, I think one of the big challenges in teacher education is having a common object to look at and to discuss. Teaching often happens as a private affair behind closed doors to which others don’t have access. There’s a famous article by Charles Goodwin (1994), called Professional Vision, where he talks about how archaeologists, master archaeologists, professors of archeology, teach budding novice archaeologists. They go out to a dig and the archaeologist shows
them things in the sand, in the dirt, and says “this is what you’re seeing” and thereby teaches them how to look. You can’t do that very easily in teacher education. You can’t just stop the classroom and say “OK, you pupils all hold it for a minute and now I’m going to have an hour and 15 minute discussion of what’s going on”. The pupils have things to say. By the way, I think we could probably do that a bit more than we do, but still we need a common object. And the video and the transcripts and the associated discussion of content give you that common object, which I think is really important. It’s not the only set of videos that you can find, but it’s a particularly interesting set of videos because they’re so real. They’re not doctored up. We spent a lot of time in the classrooms and we didn’t look for the very best practice that we could find and orchestrate it and choreograph it like so many other videos you can find. They’re interesting episodes and we put a lot of time into analyzing them. We go into a lot of depth. I agreed. He continued. I think that’s very useful. It’s a bit like that archaeologist. We’re not able to stop the actual event, but we are able to invite you in and show you all sorts of things that you might not see if you’re just passing through. As a public school teacher I was pleased to note the reality of the videos. I was a classroom teacher for about 20 years and what I liked about the videos is, in your words, they felt real, they weren’t cleaned up, they weren’t “this is how you should do it”. Kids weren’t paying attention, kids were talking to each other, and some very much contributed to the conversation that was going on. Everybody wasn’t attentive . it was very much a real classroom. Can you talk about the use of video? The other thing that I appreciated in your book was the use of diverse voices in your commentary section. What did that provide you with in terms of the work of analyzing the videos? In viewing the videos what became evident was not just the content focus, but the complex living alongside others in classrooms, as the children and teacher interacted with each other. This nested way of being in relationship (Lyons, 1990) with everyone in the classroom was evident in the videos. Bullough (2012) contended, “In education, most of the important issues come in the form of dilemmas to be managed, not problems to be solved” (p. 346). This certainly was a central aspect to the work of the teachers appearing in the book. While directing content dialog they were also managing, adroitly, and not managing, the interactions occurring in the classroom. Dr. Lefstein acknowledged the different perspectives on teaching he and Dr. Snell brought to this research and the diverse voices in the commentaries. Julie and I both come from, we come from different perspectives, and I appreciate, by the way, you acknowledging Julia’s role in the book, it’s completely a joint effort. We come from very different perspectives, but both of us are coming from the academy to the classrooms. We both spent the last years of our lives being trained as anthropologists and sociolinguists, and, while we think people have a lot to gain from our linguistic ethnographic perspective, we don’t think we have all the truth. It’s important to get other people’s perspectives. So the perspectives include, for example, the poet, Pie Corbett, whose poem is being analyzed in the lesson in chapter eight, the teacher whose lesson we’re looking at, the head teacher of the school, the local authority advisor, and eventually people from around the world. It doesn’t give you all the perspectives that are possible but it rounds it out a lot more, and we hope the readers will engage also, and send us their perspectives, and we’ll put them online (www. dialogicpedagogy.com). So the book will keep growing in terms of commentary. I commented on their hope for an ongoing conversation regarding the book. It is an interesting aspect of the book, inviting reader response in an online kind of forum so that the book itself
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becomes dialogic in terms of the practice of research and inquiry into teacher professional development. He expanded on that thought. That’s the idea and we hope that people pick up the challenge that we’re offering them. And we hope people will disagree with us as well. One of the most interesting responses we received in the commentaries was when the commentators said, “Well you call this dialog, we don’t think it’s dialog.” We thought that some of those commentaries were wrong and we told them that, and they argued with us. And we opened up the conversation in the book, but it wasn’t about our ideas, it was about their ideas and we hope we’ll get the same thing from others. I wondered about teachers making and analyzing their own videos. Continuing along that theme, you have a section in your book where you talk about the use of video, teachers using video and communities of teachers coming together to analyze video. I wonder if you want to talk a bit about that section of the book and the continued life of the book. He explained that the vision ultimately is that you’ll have schools where teachers are routinely videotaping themselves and bringing in those lessons or parts of lessons and problems that arise to discuss with their colleagues. Sort of like the clinical practice in medicine where doctors will bring in other doctors to come to the bedside and talk to them about the case to try to help them solve the problem. We can’t do that very well in teaching because you know everyone’s got their classroom they need to attend to, but video can help us capture things and discuss them with colleagues, and learn from them. That’s easier said than done, it takes quite a lot of confidence and quite a bit of time as well. We see the book as a step in that process. So here you have eight episodes you could start with. You can get your feet wet, you can get used to it, you can gain experience in a little less threatening environment, get your gaze refined, and then ultimately we hope people will move on and begin to videotape their own classrooms and discuss those videos. They can send us those as well, we’ll put them up. I commented on the creation of teacher videos. You were saying when you’re videotaping your own classroom, make it a bounded experience, don’t sit down and analyze an hour’s lesson of your video in your group. Make it a short time so it’s a doable kind of moment. He responded, We found about 6 to 7 minutes is about the maximum people can take unless it’s a really interesting segment. I reiterated that 6 or 7 minutes in the life of a classroom is pretty intense, if you’re going to attend to many things, there’s a lot to attend to in 6 to 7 minutes. Given the focus of the book on professional development I made the connection to ongoing teacher education. One of the things you wrote in your book is, and I quote, “Professional learning should be based upon a balanced dialogic relationship between external and internal sources of expertise, and between external consultation, and internal leadership.” This statement, I think is interesting in relation to teacher education. Can you say something about that in relation to ongoing teacher education, professional development kinds of activities? He tied this to external support for teacher professional development. I’d say it’s interesting you picked up on that, you picked up on a bit of neurosis about what we’d written. I mean I don’t think the be all and end all of teacher professional development is refining professional judgment through video. I think that people need external support, it’s not all about discovering what we already know. There’s a limited capacity within an organization without external intervention and you can learn a lot from people coming from outside your organization. However, this book is an antidote to the overemphasis on external expertise you find, for instance in current English ongoing in-service teacher education and professional development, but to go to the other extreme and say “all we’re going to do is refine our professional judgment by
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talking to each other within school, within the grade group, within our disciplinary area,” I think that would be a mistake as well. So what we’re trying to say is the book we’ve written is about refining professional judgment through reflection on video, but it’s not enough. Ultimately I think we need external expertise as well. We’ll watch a video with you and give you some other perspectives. Bring some perspective from another school. Much like what we’ve done in the book with the commentaries. Bullough (2012) considered the same idea, “where the aim is a progressively more intelligent and responsive practice directed towards achieving ever evolving but valued ends within specific work contexts: better not best practice” (p. 350). Better practice is a goal of education. It is an act of refining, reflecting, and knowing what works for you, in your place, with particular children/youth and over time. I was interested, given the title, that you considered the complexity of best practice rhetoric. It’s interesting because what you’ve just alluded to is the fact that best practice isn’t a terrible thing. You say that in your title, Better than Best Practice, you don’t say the alternative to best practice. You encourage a response that includes best practice dogma as opposed to it being the only thing that we do. You say teacher education has become so focused on the external validation and the external input, but it’s a balance, it’s not a pendulum swing, it’s a balanced approach. He saw the implications and agreed that we need to try to get the pendulum to stop swinging. I agreed. He continued noting that The truth is that neither extreme, in my mind, on so many issues in education is helpful. We talk about sensitivity, interpretation, repertoire, and judgment. Up until now in this conversation I’m talking about judgment because that’s kind of the focus of the book, but it’s also about repertoire. A teacher who has a broad repertoire of tools practices some of them best, some of them good, some of them .. The best is kind of assuming to say I have the best practice. The best practice for all time and all contexts, for all practitioners is silly, but I think good practice is having a set of skills e we can’t think about everything all the time. Bullough (2012) considering John Dewey wrote, For Dewey, certainty in a perplexing, contradictory and dangerous world is the worst sort of illusion, ultimately requiring disengagement from the world and encouraging a passive acceptance of life’s offerings. In contrast, he calls for courage in the face of uncertainty, engagement, openness, responsibility, moral action and, perhaps ironically, for humility, a recognition that there is much in life we cannot control, some things we should not even seek to control, and many questions that strongly and perhaps always will resist resolution. p. 346 Curriculum making (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988) in the moment is a complex act. Both Dewey and Lefstein and Snell attend to that in their work. He finished this conversation thread with We don’t expect doctors to make it up as they go along when they go into surgery, they have techniques they use and they spend a lot of time refining those techniques. Teachers as well, so I’m not opposed to practices, good practices even things that currently are called “best practices”, let’s just call them “really good things that work a lot of the time”, and we need to learn them. Changing the subject I focused on their research methodology. I’d like to finish our conversation talking about your methodology, linguistic ethnography. I’m interested in your reasons for why you use this methodology, and what makes it suited in terms of your practice as a researcher for the study of the lives of teachers, children, and youth. He explained. First of all a few words about linguistic ethnography and where it came from. it’s a school of academic research in
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the UK, which is combining the openness of ethnography, looking at the context and experience of a culture with the very rigorous, systematic approach of linguistics. Therefore, using the tools of linguistics but the sensitivity and openness of ethnography. One of the people who originated the idea is Professor Ben Rampton from King’s College London, who talked about ethnography opening up linguistics and linguistics tying down ethnography, and I like that tension. I think it’s a really productive tension. We draw on a lot of tools from conversation analysis, from sociolinguistics, from linguistic anthropology, and so forth. What linguistic ethnography is good at is getting into the really minute details of the things we do when we come into contact with each other and in face-to-face interaction. He expanded on the issues examined in linguistic ethnographic analysis, the way we build up our identities, the way we identify other people, power relations and social dynamics, the minute details of turn taking and when is it appropriate to speak. How do we respond to people while they’re speaking to us to encourage them to say more? Or take like you’re doing right now, how to encourage or to stop them. All of these things I tend to think can really sensitize us to getting into the details of what’s going on in our classrooms. They do not tell you what is a good teaching technique. Which is probably why I said, you know, I’ve some uneasiness about it, I don’t think linguist ethnography gives you enough, I think it gives you a lot, it helps you understand better what’s going on in the classroom because a lot of what’s going on in the classroom has nothing to do with teaching and learning. But it has at least something to do with teaching and learning and a lot to do with other things. It helps to tune us to those other things and then, of course, you need some pedagogic principles as
well. You need to marry those two together and that’s something we’re still trying to work out how to do. Pie Corbett, the poet whose work is considered in chapter eight, wrote in his commentary, “A poem is an experience.” I would contend that Lefstein and Snell invite us to consider that teaching is an experience. References Bullough, R. V., Jr. (2012). Against best practice: uncertainty, outliers and local studies in educational research. Journal of Education for Teaching, 38(3), 343e357. Cochran-Smith, M. (2004). Taking stock in 2004 teacher education in dangerous times. Journal of Teacher Education, 55(1), 3e7. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1988). Teachers as curriculum planners. Narratives of experience. 1234 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY 10027: Teachers College Press. Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96(3), 606e633. Lyons, N. (1990). Dilemmas of knowing: ethical and epistemological dimensions of teachers’ work and development. Harvard Educational Review, 60(2), 159e181. MacGillivray, L., Ardell, A. L., Curwen, M. S., & Palma, J. (2004). Colonized teachers: examining the implementation of a scripted reading program. Teaching Education, 15(2), 131e144. Milner, H. R. (2013). Scripted and narrowed curriculum reform in urban schools. Urban Education, 48(2), 163e170. Ricci, C. (2004). The case against standardized testing and the call for a revitalization of democracy. The Review of Education, Pedagogy, 26(4), 339e361. Sachs, J. (2001). Teacher professional identity: competing discourses, competing outcomes. Journal of Education Policy, 16(2). Sach, J. (2003). Teacher professional standards: controlling or developing teaching? Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 9(2). Schmidt, M., & Datnow, A. (2005). Teachers’ sense-making about comprehensive school reform: the influence of emotions. Teaching and Teacher Education, 21(8), 949e965. Spillane, J. P. (2004). Standards deviation: How schools misunderstand education policy. Harvard University Press.