This post is a brief promo I wrote for Larry Cuban's wonderful book, Confessions of a School Reformer, which was just published in Kappan. Here's a link to the original. They ask Kappan authors to recommend a book in every issue and this was my contribution. You'll love this book! David Labaree recommends Confessions of a … Continue reading Larry Cuban’s Confessions of a School Reformer
Category: Teaching
Nabokov on Student Exam Essays
This post is a piece by Vladimir Nabokov in response to answers that students wrote for the mid-term exam in his 1957 Cornell literature class. It appeared in Times Literary Supplement last month with an introduction by Eric Naiman. Here's a link to the original. It's fun to imaging the great Russian writer grading undergraduate … Continue reading Nabokov on Student Exam Essays
Larry Cuban — Classrooms Around the World
This post is by Larry Cuban, which he posted on his blog last year. Here's a link to the original. It's a lovely illustration -- literally -- of the homogeneity of classroom organization around the world. If you could be dropped in any one of these rooms out of the blue, without understanding anything about … Continue reading Larry Cuban — Classrooms Around the World
Insights from James Scott about the Conflicting Worldviews of Reformers and Teachers
This post is a reflection on the conflicting worldviews that reformers and teachers use in trying to understand teaching and learning in classrooms. It draws on the insights from one of my favorite books, James Scott's Seeing Like a State. The text itself comes from chapter 5 of my book, Someone Has to Fail. The … Continue reading Insights from James Scott about the Conflicting Worldviews of Reformers and Teachers
The Trouble with Ed Schools
I'm posting this as a public service. Read it and you won't need to read -- much less buy -- my 2004 book with the same title. It provides an overview of the book's argument, which was originally published in Educational Foundations in 1996. Here's a link to the original. This is an overview: Everyone … Continue reading The Trouble with Ed Schools
Teacher Persona
This post is a reflection on one particular component of the practice of teaching -- the need for each teacher to construct an authentic and effective teacher persona. In the first part of the post, I draw on a section from chapter five of my book, Someone Has to Fail. In the second part, I … Continue reading Teacher Persona
Rethinking the Movement to Professionalize Teaching: A Story of Status and Control
This post is a chapter from my book, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning. It's a revised version of a paper that was previously published in 1992 as “Power, Knowledge, and the Science of Teaching: A Genealogy of Teacher Professionalization” in Harvard Educational Review. Here's a link to that version. The HER version of … Continue reading Rethinking the Movement to Professionalize Teaching: A Story of Status and Control
Limits on the Impact of Educational Reform
I first presented this paper at the conference on “The Century of the School: Continuity and Innovation During the First Half of the 20th Century,” Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland, September, 2007. A revised version was published in a book edited by Claudia Crotti and Fritz Osterwalder, Das Jahrhundert der Schulreformen: Internationale und Nationale Perspektiven, 1900-1950, … Continue reading Limits on the Impact of Educational Reform
Targeting Teachers
In this piece, I explore a major problem I have with recent educational policy discourse — the way we have turned teachers from the heroes of the public school story to its villains. If students are failing, we now hear, it is the fault of teachers. This targeting of teachers employs a new form of … Continue reading Targeting Teachers
The Dynamic Tension at the Heart of the Grammar of Schooling
This post is a new piece I just published in Kappan. Here's a link to the original, which appears in the October edition of the magazine. In this essay, I explore an issue about the "grammar of schooling" that bothered me over the years as I was teaching about this subject. The concept was originally … Continue reading The Dynamic Tension at the Heart of the Grammar of Schooling