Teacher Education as Teaching for Understanding with New Technologies M S Wiske and D E Spicer, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA, USA ã 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary Activity theory – A developmental conception of ways that technologies, practical action in the world, individuals, and communities shape and are shaped by the process of learning. Collaborative curriculum design tool – An online environment that supports collaboration on the design of curriculum structured by the Teaching for Understanding framework. It includes examples, supportive prompts and resources, an integrated message board to facilitate communication with colleagues whom the designer adds to a design team, tools for supporting alignment of goals with instruction and assessment, and means for attaching related files and websites, and publishing the final design. Teaching for Understanding (Tf U) – An educational model, based on collaborative research conducted at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, including five elements: generative topics, understanding goals, performances of understanding, ongoing assessment, and collaborative reflective communities. Understanding as performance – A concept of understanding as a capability to think with what one knows and apply it flexibly in varied situations. WIDE World (Wide-scale Interactive Development for Educators) – An innovative professional development program developed and based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Its mission is to engage and support large numbers of educators across multiple levels of school systems in aligning their efforts to form professional networks that promote excellent instruction and improved performance by students, teachers, coaches, and leaders. It supports the application of research-based frameworks, such as Teaching for Understanding, by providing interactive online professional development courses and face-to-face support services to K-12 educators in the US and around the world.
Introduction The proliferation of knowledge with new information and communication technologies, coupled with a clear
consensus from recent research on learning, dictate that education goes beyond simply transmitting information and procedures to focus on cultivating continuing learners. This requirement is certainly true for teacher education. A recent AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education (2005) emphasized that teacher education must be an ongoing process of inquiry that does not end with certification but continues throughout the professional career, and across diverse educational settings. In this article, we examine the synergistic contributions of an explicit educational framework, called Teaching for Understanding (Tf U), and networked technologies in helping teachers support the active learning that they and their students require in the twenty-first century. We use activity theory to conceptualize the roles of the Tf U framework, networked technologies, and professional communities in continuous teacher education. Three examples illustrate how this approach can be applied to varied, interconnected stages and contexts of teachers’ learning.
Mastery Teaching to Promote Understanding Before analyzing the process of teacher education, we must consider the kind of learning that teachers need to promote. Public schools spread throughout industrializing democracies during the nineteenth century partly to prepare a broad range of citizens as contributors in increasingly hierarchical and mechanized workplaces and pluralistic societies. Teachers aimed to transmit basic skills through drill and rote recitation to groups of pupils who varied widely in age and experience. By the turn of the twentieth century, progressive educators criticized such rote learning and advocated more inquiry-based approaches that took account of students’ varied interests. Despite a century of efforts, didactic instruction that Goodlad (1984) calls ‘‘frontal teaching,’’ still prevails in most public schools around the world. Recently, progressive reforms have gained new allies among some policymakers seeking to foster students’ capability to think creatively, analyze and critique knowledge, reason systematically, apply knowledge flexibly, formulate and solve new problems, collaborate effectively in teams, and develop skills and habits of mind that promote continuous learning. While the dominant political discourse remains one of accountability, some leaders 635
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in business and government have embraced an expanded conception of accountability that no longer views mastery teaching as primarily transmitting a canon of facts, theories, and accepted procedures. Enlightened leaders have come to view teaching as a process of helping students construct their own understanding and apply their knowledge through interaction using varied means, among diverse people, and within authentic contexts. In many countries, an emerging collective goal for education emphasizes deep and flexible student understanding. What do we mean by understanding? The Tf U project, a 6-year collaborative action research study convened at the Harvard Graduate School of Education during the 1990s, began with this same question. University-based researchers working with teacher researchers in schools came to define understanding as a flexible performance capability – being able to think with one’s knowledge and apply it creatively and appropriately in a range of circumstances. They conceived dimensions of understanding that encompass not only conceptual knowledge in one or more domains, but also methods of inquiry and reasoning, forms for presenting one’s ideas effectively with multiple symbol systems in varied situations, and appreciation of the purposes and limitations of learning in various disciplines. Developing a flexible performance capability is as important for educators as it is for their students. Conceptual knowledge and familiarity with techniques are of limited use to a professional who also is not able to retrieve, synthesize, generate, and apply such knowledge effectively in practice and in interaction with others. Eraut (1994) whose research focuses on the nature and development of professional knowledge writes, ‘‘. . .learning knowledge and using knowledge are not separate processes but the same process.’’ Therefore, teaching for understanding is both a goal and an appropriate means for educating teachers.
Tf U as Goal and Means Harvard’s Tf U project identified features of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment that were common across examples of lessons that successfully developed learners’ understanding. As described by Blythe (1998) and Wiske (1998) researchers and teachers distilled these features into a coherent framework that crystallizes responses to core educational questions that are explained below. What Topics Are Worth Teaching for Understanding? (Generative Topics) Topics relate to important ideas in subjects, domains, or disciplines that are central to the required curriculum, connect both to learners’ experience and the teacher’s passions, can be approached through multiple entry points and/or media, and generate continuous inquiry.
What Should Learners Come to Understand? (Understanding Goals) Goals focus on understanding key concepts, methods of inquiry and reasoning, purposes for learning, and disciplined forms of expressing understanding. Understanding goals aim beyond remembering information or practicing routine skills to target creative applications of knowledge. Effective teachers publicize explicit understanding goals that define the purpose of learning and serve as a basis for assessing progress. How do Learners Develop and Demonstrate Understanding? (Performances of Understanding) Effective teachers require students to stretch their minds as they develop and demonstrate understanding of target goals. Teachers sequence accessible yet challenging learning activities that engage students’ initial ideas and interests. Through guided inquiry, teachers progressively coach students toward more sophisticated, synthetic, and independent levels of performance. A rich range of learning activities allows students to work with varied media, through multiple intelligences, and in different participation structures so that all students are engaged and appropriately challenged. How can the Students and Teachers Assess Achievements in Ways that Promote Further Learning? (Ongoing Assessment) Teachers and others frequently analyze student performances in relation to public criteria that align precisely with understanding goals. Students may even help define the criteria for high-quality work. Frequent assessments include generating pertinent suggestions for improving both students’ work and the teacher’s planning. Multiple authentic audiences, including students themselves, parents, subject matter experts, and interested community members, may participate in assessment and feedback. How can We Work Together Most Effectively within and beyond the Classroom? (Collaborative, Reflective Communities) Teachers who promote understanding develop a culture of respect, reciprocity, and reflection with learners. Students build capacity to learn from and with one another by identifying common goals, developing a shared language and routines for reflective dialogue, and celebrating diversity and shared accomplishments. The Tf U framework shares many features with various formulations of twenty-first century learning, other syntheses of educational research, and characteristics
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that most teachers recognize in their own good ideas and practices. These similarities underscore the generic applicability of this framework as a common, comprehensive language and structure for designing, conducting, and explicitly modeling effective pedagogy. In the examples presented later, we highlight the elements of Tf U as mediators of teacher education activities whose goal is mastery of teaching that promotes students’ deep and flexible understanding.
Networked Technology as a Mediator of Teacher Education Education of preservice teachers often occurs far away from classrooms where teachers work, which hampers learning through authentic performances. Academic institutions, where most teacher preparation is based, are usually distant from the schools and other authentic settings where novice teachers might practice teaching. Skilled teacher mentors are scarce and travel is expensive, which limits opportunities for teachers to benefit from expert coaching. Learning through reflective performance is equally difficult for in-service teachers. Finding time to analyze their work with colleagues and coaches is difficult. In hurried meetings, teachers are hard-pressed to reflect deliberately about lesson plans, teaching, and assessment. Corridor conversations and disorganized bits of paper are not easily captured in a form that promotes ongoing assessments or sustained collegial collaboration among teachers. Networked digital technologies provide numerous advantages for overcoming these difficulties of teacher education and promoting the elements of effective Tf U. Potential contributions of new technologies include: Providing accessible templates and tools that structure work around common concepts, for example, interactive online environments for developing lesson plans. Enabling teacher learners and mentors to capture, store, and revise documents, videos, audio files, and images digitally in forms that can easily be shared, annotated, reviewed, analyzed, and co-constructed. Rapidly transmitting written, as well as spoken, communication across distance and time, thereby encouraging more deliberative dialog and easing the limitations of synchronous meetings. Making the work of students, teachers, and coaches visible to many so that individual insights benefit large groups. Facilitating ongoing assessment with feedback from multiple sources. For example, teachers post work in the online environment where it can be reviewed, in relation to criteria, by teachers themselves as well as peers/coaches, and then easily revised.
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In these ways, online technologies provide support for the use of a shared framework, collaborative exchange of materials and ideas, and sustained coaching, and enable ladders of professional development that stimulate educators to stay in the profession as they seek ways of contributing to and benefiting from contact with a professional community without abandoning direct work with students.
Teacher Education Viewed with Activity Theory Activity theory offers a developmental view of the ways that conceptual frameworks and technologies, practical actions in the world, individuals, and social institutions shape and are shaped by one another in the learning process. This makes it particularly suitable for analyzing the roles of the Tf U framework, networked technologies, and professional communities in teacher learning. Building on the ideas of Vygotsky (1981) activity theory portrays activities such as teacher preparation and inservice professional development as continually changing, complex, self-organizing systems. It regards activity as a potential generator of both individual and organizational learning. Engestro¨m (1987) and more recently Roth and Lee (2007) used activity theory to describe how several distinct elements play crucial parts in mediating – literally being in the middle of – individual and group learning processes, as diagramed in the paradigmatic triangle of cultural–historical activity theory shown in Figure 1. The activity of developing expertise as a teacher is mediated by the division of labor and social rules that structure interaction within a particular community, such as the institutional setting of a school. The division of labor and rules are established and shift over long periods of time, serving collective motives that constitute the object or goal of activity. Of particular importance to our discussion of teacher learning are the mediating instruments in use within such communities. These instruments may encompass concepts (e.g., the components of a specific educational framework) as well as material tools (e.g., interactive digital tools and websites). Instruments and elements of community shape how the subject(s) or learner(s) orient, think, and perform in and for a particular activity. Activity systems are in continual flux as participants negotiate tensions among different elements. Learning can be viewed as the resolution of contradictions among elements allowing the subject to take advantage of an expanded range of actions, including access to a wider repertoire of mediational means, taking on new roles, and forging robust ways of working within existing constraints.
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Instruments
Subject
Rules
Object
Community
Outcome
Division of labour
Figure 1 Engestro¨m’s model of the socially distributed activity system. Reproduced from Engestro¨m, Y. (1987). Learning by Expanding: An Activity-Theory Approach to Developmental Research, p. 78. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit.
Consequently, as Engestro¨m (1987) emphasizes, new objects or goals come into view and the system of activity as a whole is capable of evolving. We use activity theory to examine teacher education within various systems of activity that orient subjects toward a goal or object, broadly characterized as mastery of teaching or pedagogical expertise. We highlight ways that two kinds of instruments – networked digital technologies and the Tf U framework – expand the range of possible action for those pursuing mastery of teaching that promotes students’ deep and flexible understanding. Activity theory illuminates the influence of these instruments in three different settings of teacher education: a graduate-level university course, an online course for practicing educators, and a school district.
Teacher Education in Varied Contexts Teacher education involves continuous learning throughout an educator’s career, including preservice teacher preparation, in-service professional development, and ongoing learning through inquiry and interaction within and among multiple levels of educational practice (e.g., relationships with administrators, researchers, and professional networks). Consequently, we chose examples that illustrate how Tf U and new technologies promote mastery teaching aimed toward students’ understanding in various phases and situations of teacher education. Formal Teacher Education Course One of the authors uses Tf U as an implicit and progressively explicit mediating instrument in her course at the
Harvard Graduate School of Education called Designing Curriculum for Deep Learning. This one-semester course is for graduate students whose prior teaching experience varies considerably. Some are veteran teachers, some are professionals in other fields without prior teaching experience, and some are completing a teacher preparation program. The course applies and models the elements of Tf U and the instructor emphasizes these parallels as the course progresses. The generative topic of the course is designing curriculum that applies research-based principles to promote teaching and learning for understanding. Understanding goals for the course include understanding how to: (1) apply principles of effective teaching, learning, and curriculum design; (2) use technology to improve teaching and learning; and (3) participate effectively in a collaborative, reflective professional community. The core performance of understanding in this course is the design of a small unit of curriculum (1–3 weeks of lessons), developed in collaboration with a practicing educator, which explicitly exemplifies principles learned in the course. Students in the course are helped to identify a teacher partner whose setting, subject matter, and learners align with the student’s own interests. Prior graduates of the course often volunteer to serve as a teacher partner, thereby enriching and extending the professional community of course participants. Designing a unit with and for the teacher partner adds to the generativity of the topic by anchoring the project in an authentic context of each student’s choice and by enabling students to make a significant contribution in the world while benefiting from the consultation of an experienced teacher. Students use an online collaborative curriculum design tool which is structured with elements of the Tf U
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framework to scaffold the design and refinement of a curriculum plan in collaboration with their teacher and other members of the class. This online tool includes specific support for designing each element of the framework and a message board where students exchange ideas with their collaborators. The teaching staff use the message board to provide ongoing assessment and feedback. As members of the class become more familiar with design criteria based on the theories from their reading, including Tf U, and more skilled in contributing to a collaborative, reflective community, they are taught how to become effective self- and peer-evaluators. The course is an activity system in which the concepts of Tf U and the online curriculum design tool are mediating instruments that orient subjects (the students) toward the object of expertise in the design of curricula that promote understanding. This system includes a community that encompasses course members and collaborating teachers and the broader institutional setting of a graduate, professional school. The rules in this community include active application of theories to practice through design, reflection, and revision. The division of labor encourages a collaborative, reflective community whose members, including the instructor, contribute knowledge and provide feedback on colleagues’ curriculum designs to improve learning.
Online Professional Development Program: Overlapping Systems of Activity WIDE World at the Harvard Graduate School of Education offers online professional development courses that both model and teach participants how to apply researchbased pedagogies. Several of the courses support designing and teaching with the Tf U framework; some use the online collaborative curriculum design tool. During six biweekly sessions, participants learn to apply each of the four core elements of the Tf U framework while engaging in participation structures that build the fifth element, a reflective learning community, both within the course and in onsite teams. Teachers may enroll in the online courses with two to three colleagues who work on the course assignments together. On-site teams in WIDE World courses are clustered into online study groups organized by subject area with approximately ten other teams or individuals who interact regularly with an online coach. WIDE World online courses use the Tf U language and networked technology to mediate in-service professional education for teachers: 1. The design of the courses models the same educational principles (Tf U) that teachers are taught to use in their classrooms with their students. 2. Course assignments focus on trying out Tf U ideas with students while the course is underway, thereby
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building participants’ capacity to think flexibly with what they learn and apply it in a range of contexts. 3. Experienced study group coaches offer tailored support and suggestions to help participants actively apply what they are learning in their own situation. Coaches also promote systematic exchanges and dialog among participants using the language of Tf U to encourage development of a collaborative, reflective professional community within and across the online study groups. 4. By recruiting online coaches from graduates of its courses and by offering online courses for school leaders, WIDE World seeks to develop local capacity to sustain and extend the work initiated by participants in WIDE World courses. In this setting of teacher education, activity in the online course occurs at the overlap of two other activity systems that exist on a longer time horizon – the institutional setting of the course participants’ schools, on the one hand, and the institutional setting of the WIDE World project and the graduate school of education that serves as its home, on the other. The transient activity setting of the online course can be viewed as what Senge (1994) terms a practice field where participants work toward the object of mastery teaching. Networked technology provides ways of supporting experimentation with new mediational means (e.g., concepts of Tf U and novel participation structures in both online and on-site teams) in ways that expand the possibilities for action within the participants’ own classrooms. In this way, the activity setting of the course attempts to bring into view the object of mastery teaching for understanding within participants’ schools.
Learning at Work through Continuous Inquiry: Embedded Systems of Activity Researchers including Guskey (2002) and Little (1999) have shown that instantiating teachers’ learning in new teaching practice hinges not just on individual learning but, most important, also on organizational learning. WIDE World’s programs aim to stimulate continuous inquiry to strengthen practice in educational systems by providing related online courses for teachers, coaches, and leaders. In terms of activity theory, the subjects of this more-encompassing activity system includes people at all levels of educational practice that constitute schooling. In this example, the object on which we have focused in earlier examples – mastery teaching for student understanding – expands to encompass the practice and learning of all involved in promoting this goal. Such an object might be labeled mastery educational practice for students’ deep and flexible understanding as the collective motive encompassing students, teachers, and leaders as subjects.
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WIDE World uses Tf U as a consistent model and common language across programs for educators working at all levels. Networked technologies provide flexible environments to support reflective, collaborative professional communities within and across role groups and innovating school systems. In this way, the activity system of a particular classroom can be viewed as part of the larger activity system of an entire school, which is in turn part of the more encompassing activity system of a larger organization – a school district or educational authority. The Binghamton, New York, public schools have participated in a range of WIDE World programs over 3 years to promote ongoing learning for teachers, coaches, and leaders. District-level instructional leaders in Binghamton initially took WIDE World’s Tf U course. As they experienced learning with and applying the framework principles, they envisioned using online courses as a means of developing a shared language of teaching across the district. They focused especially on the comprehensive high school, which was under pressure to improve student performance. The administrators recruited teacher teams to enroll in WIDE World’s online courses. Some teachers took additional online courses and were trained as WIDE World coaches. Administrators worked with two teams in the high school – a Math team and a team of English teachers – to develop a reference cohort that is expected to encourage other teachers to experiment with the framework and move toward greater coherence across the district. During the past year, the Binghamton administrators have participated in an online action research seminar that WIDE World hosts. The seminar aims to develop local capacity in school systems to assess the impact of professional development as part of evidence-based continuous improvement in teaching and learning. Participants in the seminar collaborate on refining research questions, developing instruments and methods, analyzing the work of leaders, teachers, and students, and sharing results of this research. As the administrators collaborate with teachers to support and assess the impact of online professional development, they strengthen a local community whose language, roles, and interactions are shaped by the Tf U framework.
Implications and Future Directions The importance of schools as learning organizations and the ascendance of distributed professional networks as a mediator of professional learning is a consequence of shifts in work practices accelerated by information and communication technologies. New technologies serve as both stimulants of and means for restructuring schools
as complex, data-rich environments and making increasing demands professional teachers, new entrants, and established veterans alike, for higher quality and greater equity in their practices. The examples we have presented suggest an expansive view of possible settings for teacher education, ones that promote continuous learning aimed toward mastery teaching for students’ deep and flexible understanding. The examples include the a traditional classroom in a graduate school of education linked to various school settings, the overlapping activity systems of school and university connected by networked technologies, and the embedded activity systems of organizational learning within a school system supported by online professional development. One cross-cutting theme throughout this discussion is the importance of viewing professional learning as extending across the professional life span. Another theme is the use of the Tf U framework as a specific, yet flexible, mediating instrument that conveys research on effective teaching in a usable form. It also provides a common language for educators as they continue to study, share, and improve practice. Our experience with WIDE World, since its inception in 1999, suggests several trajectories of development in teacher education in the near future: Global: Professional networks will become more global, enabling educators to learn from a wider range of colleagues as they develop, debate, and apply conceptual frameworks, technologies, and examples of practice across geographic and cultural distances. Personal: Educators will be able to blend and extend opportunities for teaching and learning across their professional life span, connecting formal and informal learning through onsite experiences at university, conferences, and the workplace with online learning opportunities. Networked technologies will enable educators to play multiple roles in varied professional communities throughout their careers. Organizational: Interweaving work across different settings of educational praxis will support more fluid collaboration among teacher educators in universities, schools, research organizations, policymaking agencies, and other places. Technological: Continued developments in multimedia and online technologies will enable participants in teacher education to capture and share a wider range of artifacts both synchronously and asynchronously across distances, thereby evolving methods and resources for ongoing inquiry and improvement.
Conclusion We analyzed how the Tf U framework, networked technologies, and multiple layers of professional communities
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can support connected, continuous teacher education in varied contexts. Activity theory gave us a lens to discern elements in an array of activity systems aiming toward a common goal of mastery teaching and learning to foster students’ deep and flexible understanding. We portrayed three settings in which the Tf U framework and networked technologies serve as mediating instruments to support this goal for educators. The examples of a graduate-level university course, an online course bridging school and university, and a district-wide initiative aimed at increasing educators’ opportunities for learning illustrate ways in which teaching for understanding and new technologies support coherent, sustained teacher education at multiple levels across overlapping systems of activity. Such a panorama requires teacher education to be viewed in an expansive frame, one that entails organizational as well as individual learning, extends across the professional life span, and encompasses the wide variety of settings where the activity of learning occurs.
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Further Reading Chaiklin, S., Hedegaard, M., and Jensen, U. J. (eds.) (1999). Activity Theory and Social Practice: Cultural–Historical Approaches. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.
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Cohen, D. K., McLaughlin, M. W., and Talbert, J. E. (eds.) (1993). Teaching for Understanding: Challenges for Policy and Practice. San Francisco, CA: Josey-Bass. Cole, M. (1996). Cultural Psychology: A once and Future Discipline. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Eddy Spicer, D. Learning by Contradiction: Two Developmental Perspectives on Learning in the Midst of Work. Unpublished Qualifying Paper, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Engestro¨m, Y., Miettinen, R., and Punamaki-Gitai, R. L. (1999). Perspectives on Activity Theory. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Huberman, M. (2001). Networks that alter teaching: Conceptualisations, exchanges and experiments. In Craft, A., Burgess, H., and Soler, J. (eds.) Teacher Development : Exploring Our Own Practice, pp 141– 159. London: Paul Chapman Publishing in association with The Open University. Leont’ev, A. N. (1978). Activity, Consciousness, and Personality. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. National Research Council (2000). How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. OECD (2001). Schooling for Tomorrow: What Schools for the Future? Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. OECD (2003). School leaders: Changing roles and impact on teacher and school effectiveness. Commissioned paper by the Education and Training Policy Division, OECD, for the activity attracting, developing and retaining effective teachers. Paris, France: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/61/61/2635399.pdf (accessed December 2008). Partnership for 21st Century Skills. (2003). Learning for the 21st century: A report and mile guide for 21st century skills. Washington, DC. http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/downloads/P21_Report.pdf (accessed December 2008). Wells, G. and Claxton, G. (2002). Learning for Life in the 21st century: Sociocultural Perspectives on the Future of Education. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers. Wertsch, J. V. (1981). The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology. Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe. Wiggins, G. and McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by Design, Expanded 2nd edn. Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Wiske, M. S., Rennebohm Franz, K., and Breit, L. (2005). Teaching for Understanding with New Technologies. San Francisco, CA: Josey-Bass.
Relevant Websites http://learnweb.harvard.edu – The Collaborative Curriculum Design Tool at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. http://wideworld.harvard.edu – WIDE World (Wide-scale Interactive Development for Educators) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.