Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

A–55 They learn by working side-by-side with an expert. But beginners can also scaffold one another by sharing a difficult task that neither might be able to do alone. Within our professional development design, we will need to provide scaffolding for our teachers’ early efforts in new forms of teaching, either from expert teachers or from others going through the same skill development process. • Coaching. Success also depends on the availability of coaching by a supportive expert who observes and comments on the learner’s efforts. Coaching is not a one-time affair, but continuous, spread out over the many months or years that it takes to become a full-fledged expert. We will have to provide for extended coaching for our teachers, both in the sites in which they are interning, which we call master sites, and in their own schools. • Guided Reflection. We will need to provide for reflection by those developing their skills. Just practicing the new forms of teaching, just doing it, even well, will not pre pare teachers for the flexibility that will be necessary as they continue working over the years with new groups of students, with new aspects of curriculum. Successful teaching must be a reflective practice, one in which individuals are continually con sidering, evaluating and improving on their own work. This capacity and disposition needs to be cultivated during the development period, and supported indefinitely. It is not just a matter of time for reflection—although that is crucial—but also a com munity of others to engage with in a reflective process. (page 22–23) Our design problem is to build a development program that will contain each of the above elements within the constraints of a situation in which the teachers engaging in this development process remain part of a team responsible for educating children at their home school. Furthermore, we must find a way to quickly scale up the number of schools and teachers participating. What are our resources? Fundamentally, people, school practice environments, informa tion and educational materials, time and communication resources. People: We need master practitioners, teachers already teaching well in the new ways we are hoping will spread through our system. We need expert consultants who can connect our teachers to the best research and other knowledge about instruction and learning. We need people who can function as on-site coaches—who are master practitioners of teaching, but who have enough freedom from daily teaching responsibility that they can travel to the schools in which our teacher-apprentices are working to observe, support and critique. At the outset, we are, by definition, short on master practitioners. But there are teach ers, both within our Partner sites and elsewhere, who are doing superb work on some part of the curriculum. Our plan draws in some of these people as master practitioners. Working through Learning Research Development Center [Pittsburgh, ed.], we will be able to put our school professionals in touch with the best research knowledge in the world on questions of curriculum and instruction. In our projected cascade design, described below, teachers and other practitioners who become experts will serve in subsequent years as master practitioners. A system of certifica tion for master practitioners will be designed to insure against the loss of fidelity that char acteristically plagues cascade designs. It will also serve as an incentive (through recognition and, possibly, additional pay) for the extra work that teachers will need to become master practitioners. We will work with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards on designing this certification process. (pp. 21–24) Appendix XII

How We Plan to Do It ...Getting there will require more than new policies and different practices. It will require a