Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 51, No. 3, May/June 2000Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 51, No. 3, May/June 2000

ON THE NATURE OF TEACHING ANDTEACHER EDUCATIONDIFFICULT PRACTICES THAT LOOK EASY

David F. LabareeMichigan State University

The effort over the past 150 years to create an effective and respected system for preparing teachersin the United States has not been easy. A large body of research on the history of teacher-educationreform is a tale of persistent mediocrity and resistance to change. The author’s aim in this article isnot to revisit this sad story, but to examine an old and enduring problem that has long blocked thepath to a truly professional education for teachers, that teaching is an enormously difficult job thatlooks easy. The author explores the roots of the gap between the reality and the perception of learningto teach by first spelling out some of the characteristics of teaching that make it such a difficult formof professional practice. He then examines key elements in the nature of teaching that make the pro-cess of becoming a teacher seem so uncomplicated.

Consider some of the major factors that maketeaching and teacher education such difficultpractices.

The Problem of Client Cooperation

At the core of the difficulties facing teachers,as David Cohen has put it, is that “teaching is apractice of human improvement” (Cohen, 1988,p. 55). One problem that arises from being insuch a practice is that these “practitionersdepend on their clients to achieve any results”(p. 57). Asurgeon can fix the ailment of a patientwho sleeps through the operation, and a lawyer

can successfully defend a client who remainsmute during the trial, but success for a teacherdepends heavily on the active cooperation of thestudent (Fenstermacher, 1990). The studentmust be willing to learn what the teacher isteaching. Unless this intended learning takesplace, the teacher is understood as havingfailed. It was this reciprocal notion of theteacher-student relationship that Dewey (1933)had in mind when he said, “There is the sameexact equation between teaching and learningthat there is between selling and buying” (asquoted in Jackson, 1986, p. 81). That is, you can’tbe a good salesperson unless someone is buy-ing, and you can’t be a good teacher unlesssomeone is learning.

Consider how terribly difficult this makesthings for teachers and others trying to work aspractitioners of human improvement. Theymust devote enormous amounts of skill andeffort to the task of motivating the client to coop-erate, and still the outcome is far from certain.The client may choose to spurn the practition-er’s offer of improvement out of apathy, habit,

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This is a summary version of a much longer article, “ThePeculiar Problems of Preparing Teachers: Old Hurdles tothe New Professionalism,” which was presented at theProfessional Actions and Cultures of Teaching Conferencein Hong Kong, January 13-14, 1999, and at the Interna-tional Conference on “The New Professionalism in Teach-ing: Teacher Education and Teacher Development in aChanging World,” sponsored by the Chinese University ofHong Kong, January 15-17, 1999. I am grateful to the stu-dents in my fall 1998 doctoral seminar for their helpfulcomments on an earlier version of this article.

principle, spite, inattention, or whim. In such afield, success rates are likely to be low, and theconnection between a practitioner’s action anda client’s outcome is likely to be, at best, indirect.Therefore, the effectiveness of the practitionerbecomes difficult to establish.

The Problem of a Compulsory Clientele

The difficulty of gaining the compliance ofthe student is made even worse for the teacherbecause the student is only present in the class-room under duress. Acentral fact of school life isthat, given the choice, students would be doingsomething other than studying algebra or geog-raphy or literature or biology. Part of the com-pulsion is legal. But students are likely to feel thepressure for attendance more directly from theirparents (who want school to take care of chil-dren during the day, to help them get ahead, andeven to educate them), from the market (whichmakes school credentials mandatory for accessto a good job), and from their own social desires(school is where their friends are).

No one has written about the consequences ofinvoluntary learning on both teacher and stu-dent in more depth or with greater bile thanWaller (1932/1965) did in his classic book, TheSociology of Teaching:

The teacher-pupil relationship is a form of institu-tionalized domination and subordination. . . . Theteacher represents the formal curriculum, and his in-terest is in imposing that curriculum upon the chil-dren in the form of tasks; pupils are much moreinterested in life in their own world than in the desic-cated bits of adult life which teachers have to offer.(pp. 195-196)

According to Waller (1932/1965), control is thecentral problem facing the teacher, and everynovice approaching the classroom for the firsttime would certainly agree with him.

The Problem of Emotion Management

Another characteristic of teaching that makesit difficult is the way it requires teachers toestablish and actively manage an emotionalrelationship with students. This is in strikingcontrast to the norms that govern most profes-

sions, including those that focus on humanimprovement. Consider the characteristics ofthe prototypical professional relationship, andthen consider the implications for teaching thatarise from the sharp differences between thisand the teacher-student relationship. Profes-sional practitioners in general are expected tomaintain a distinct emotional distance betweenthemselves and the client. They focus on theparticular problem for which the client is seek-ing professional help, they are judged on theirperformance in resolving this problem, theyand the client are seen as independent agentspursuing their own ends through the relation-ship, and this relationship is governed by uni-versalistic rules of procedure.

These five characteristics of professional-client relationships are drawn from the “patternvariables” developed by Parsons (1951), whichare five pairs of alternative orientations that canbe used to define distinctive types of role rela-tionships: (a) affective neutrality versus affec-tivity, (b) specificity versus diffuseness, (c)achievement versus ascription, (d) self versuscollective orientation, and (e) universalism ver-sus particularism. As the theory goes, profes-sionals in their interaction with clients are gov-erned by the first orientation in each of thesepairs. In this regard, they fit in a large categoryof limited and utilitarian role relationships thatsociologists term secondary, in contrast to pri-mary relationships, which are broad and emo-tionally involving.

In comparison to the relative clarity of therole defined for the typical professional, teach-ers find themselves in a much more complicatedrole environment. Teachers need to develop abroad relationship with students for the pur-pose of understanding their learning problems(Fenstermacher, 1990). They also need to estab-lish an emotional link to motivate the student toparticipate actively in the learning process.

There are several characteristics of this needto establish an affectionate relationship withstudents that add profoundly to the difficultyinvolved in being a good teacher. First, there isno guidebook for how to accomplish this forany particular teacher in a particular classroom.Like other practitioners in the professions of

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human improvement, teachers have to workthings out on their own, without being able tofall back on standards of acceptable profes-sional practice such as those that guide lawyers,doctors, and accountants. At the start of theircareers, teachers fumble around for a way toestablish an emotional link with students that iseffective and sustainable, for the teaching per-sona that works best for them. This persona isboth natural, in that it draws on characteristicsand strengths of the teacher as a person, andconstructed, in that it is put together to serve theends of promoting learning in the classroom.

Second, the practice of teaching throws theteacher into an extraordinarily complex rolethat in awkward fashion combines characteris-tics of both primary and secondary relation-ships. In Parsons’s (1951) terms, the teacher rolecombines a mandate for emotional closenessand diffuse interaction, both characteristic ofprimary roles, with mandates for achievement(giving students rewards based on perform-ance, not ascribed traits), independence(encouraging students to develop and rely ontheir own skills and knowledge), and universal-istic application of rules (treating all studentsthe same), all of which are characteristic of sec-ondary roles. Teachers are asked to use the lev-erage obtained from their primary relationswith students to support the teaching of a cur-riculum that is external to these primary ties. Tobe really good at teaching requires a remarkablecapacity for preserving a creative tensionbetween these opposites, never losing sight ofeither teaching’s relational means or its curricu-lar goal.

Third, teachers face the strain of trying tomanage the emotional relationship with stu-dents by maintaining the teaching persona thatmakes this relationship work. Maintaining theteaching persona is a case of what Hochschild(1983) refers to as “emotion management.” Inher book, The Managed Heart, she explores avariety of “jobs that call for emotional labor” byrequiring “the worker to produce an emotionalstate in another” (Hochschild, 1983, p. 147). Shenever refers directly to teachers in this study, but

her analysis fits teachers all too well. Thesetypes of jobs, she argues, are particularly diffi-cult and stressful because the only way one canproduce the desired emotional state in anotherperson is by effectively managing one’s ownemotions. The role of the teacher, like the role ofother emotion workers, cannot be taken onsuperficially if one is going to be effective in thisrole. The aim is to have an impact on the emo-tions of the student, and in emotional matters,students have sensitive antennae for detecting afake.

The Problem of Structural Isolation

Exacerbating the teacher’s problem in tryingto motivate the captive learner is the conditionof structural isolation within which the teacherhas to operate. Ever since the invention of age-graded education early in the 19th century,teachers have found themselves plying theirtrade within the four walls of the self-containedclassroom. They normally teach under condi-tions where they are the only professional in theroom, left to their own devices to figure out away to manage a group of 30 students and movethem through the required curriculum.

One consequence of this is to reinforce theteacher’s focus on control issues. Vastly out-numbered by students and cut off from profes-sional support, teachers are left to confront the“two rules governing the hidden tension ofclassroom life: unless the teacher establishescontrol there will be no learning, and, if theteacher does not control the students, the stu-dents will control the teacher” (Britzman, 1986,p. 449). To rise to this challenge, the teacher mustturn the classroom into a personal fiefdom, a lit-tle duchy complete with its own set of rules andits own local customs. A related consequence ofisolation is to create a vision of learning to teachas a private ordeal (Lortie, 1975) and a vision ofthe emergent teacher as self-made (Britzman,1986). This leaves little room for the construc-tion of a shared professional culture for teachersacross classroom domains, and it also sharply

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undercuts the perceived value of teacher prepa-ration programs.

The Problem of Chronic UncertaintyAbout the Effectiveness of Teaching

The technology of teaching is anything butcertain, and teachers must learn to live withchronic uncertainty as an essential componentof their professional practice (Cohen, 1988; Flo-den & Clark, 1988; Jackson, 1986; Lortie, 1975).One reason for this is that teachers have to oper-ate under the kinds of daunting conditions Ihave been outlining in this article, conditionsthat introduce unpredictable elements of willand emotion into the heart of the teaching andlearning processes.

However, even if we focus on the more pre-dictable factors shaping teaching and learning,teaching remains an uncertain enterprise foranother reason: its irreducible complexity. Whatwe know about teaching is always contingenton a vast array of intervening variables thatmediate between a teacher’s action and a stu-dent’s response. As a result, there is always aceteris paribus clause hovering over anyinstructional prescription: this works betterthan that, if everything else is equal.

A third source of uncertainty in the work ofteaching is that we are unable to measure ade-quately the effects that teachers have on stu-dents. A teacher can measure how many of thespelling words introduced this week a child canspell on Friday or how well a student can solveword problems of the type just covered in class.But what does this show about the larger andmore meaningful aims the teacher had in mindwhen teaching these subjects? The most impor-tant outcomes that we want education to makepossible, the preparation of competent, produc-tive, and socially responsible adults, areremoved from any particular classroom interac-tion between teacher and student by manyyears and many other intervening factors.

A fourth source of uncertainty in teaching isthe complex and often contradictory purposesthat societies impose on the whole educational

enterprise. In some ways, we want education topromote democratic equality (preparing com-petent citizens); we also want education to pro-mote social efficiency (preparing productiveworkers); in addition, we want education topromote social mobility (preparing individualswho can compete successfully for social goods).Yet, the kind of teaching and learning that willbe effective varies radically depending onwhether the primary aim is to prepare citizensor workers or social climbers (Labaree, 1997).

A fifth source of uncertainty is that teachersare not even in a position to establish clearly theidentity of their client. At one level, the client isthe student. At another level, the clients are theparents of the student. At a third level, theteacher’s client is the community at large, whichnot only pays for public education but also feelsthe effects of the teacher’s ability to producecompetent citizens and productive workers.Keeping all these clients happy is not an easymatter.

A JOB THAT SEEMS EASY

If teaching is indeed a practice as difficult as Ihave portrayed here, then there is no form ofprofessional practice that is more demanding,except, perhaps, teacher education. We askteacher education programs to provide ordi-nary college students with the imponderable sothat they can teach the irrepressible in a mannerthat pleases the irreconcilable, and all withoutknowing clearly either the purposes or the con-sequences of their actions. Is it any wonder thatthese programs are not seen as smashing suc-cesses? But that is not the end of the problemconfronting teacher educators. In addition, theyface a situation in which the profession of teach-ing is generally seen to be relatively easy. Andthis perception is not simply characteristic ofthe untutored public; it is also endemic amongteacher candidates.

Apprenticeship of Observation

Lortie (1975) makes a convincing case thatprospective teachers spend a long time as stu-

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dents observing the way teachers ply theirtrade, and as a result they feel they know how toteach in some depth before they take their firstcourse in a college of education. “It may be thatthe widespread idea that ’anyone canteach’ . . . originates from this; what child can-not, after all, do a reasonably accurate portrayalof a classroom teacher’s actions?” (Lortie, 1975,p. 62). In comparison with teaching, other occu-pations, particularly other professions, remainlargely a mystery.

However, the mistake in this reasoning byprospective teachers is clear: Their apprentice-ship of observation shows them a lot about whatteachers do but almost nothing about why theydo it. Teaching from this observational andnonanalytical perspective appears to be simpleaction, guided either by custom (this is the wayteaching is done) or by nature (this is the kind ofperson I am). In neither case would teacherpreparation be necessary or even useful. Whatstudents don’t see is the thinking that precededthe teacher’s action, the alternatives she consid-ered, the strategic plan within which she locatedthe action, or the aims she sought to accomplishby means of that action. These are the things thatteacher preparation programs seek to teach, andlegitimately so, but in so doing, they run intoenormous resistance from teacher candidateswho don’t think they need this kind of profes-sional education.

Ordinary Skills and Knowledge

Another impediment facing teacher educa-tion is the general perception that the substan-tive skills and knowledge that teachers possessare thoroughly ordinary. The root of this prob-lem is that elementary and secondary educationis imposed on the entire populace. It is not eliteeducation; it is mass education. If it does its jobwell, the kinds of skills and knowledge that ittransmits to students become generic in thepopulation at large. Therefore, unlike collegeprofessors who are expected to be experts at alevel well beyond the understanding of ordi-nary citizens, schoolteachers are seen as mastersof what most adults already know. What theyteach isn’t rocket science; it’s common knowl-edge. By extension, teacher educators, although

technically college professors, are not involvedin an enterprise that is seen as either awe-inspiring or even particularly necessary.

Subject Matter Expertise ThatBelongs to Others

Worse yet, teacher educators have no legiti-mate claim to special expertise even in the sub-stantive fields where they ply their trade. Theymay be specialists in mathematics education,literacy or English education, social studies orhistory education, or science education, butthey do not have academic credibility as mathe-maticians, linguists, literature specialists, histo-rians, or scientists. Substantive expertise doesnot reside within the education school that pre-pares teachers, but in the disciplinary depart-ments across campus where professors carryout specialized research and run advancedgraduate programs that explore the more eso-teric realms of these disciplines, far beyond thereach of ordinary adults and far beyond themandate or expertise of K-12 teachers. Thissituation puts teacher educators not only at astatus disadvantage within the academic hierar-chy, it also puts them in an untenable position inrelation to the production of teachers. Teachereducation does not have control over providingteachers with the substantive knowledge theywill need to teach, but it takes full blame for anydeficiencies in knowledge that these teachersmay demonstrate in the classroom.

Pedagogical Skill That Is Unobscureand Freely Given Away

Like doctors, lawyers, accountants, andarchitects, teachers have to master their disci-plines to be effective in their professions, butknowing their subject matter is not sufficient.Professionals are not simply holders of knowl-edge; they are people who act on this knowl-edge for the benefit of clients. The differencebetween teachers and other professionals in thisregard, however, is striking. As Fenstermacher(1990) points out, most professionals use theirknowledge to help the client with a problem,but they don’t provide the client with the capac-ity to figure it out for himself or herself the next

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time around. “One of the ways that physicianshave succeeded in garnering the status andincome they presently enjoy is to ’lock up’ ormystify their knowledge” (Fenstermacher,1990, p. 136).

Most professionals rent their expertise with-out disclosing its mysteries, so they can reserveits power to themselves. The next time that cli-ents need help with a medical, legal, or account-ing problem, they have no choice but to return tothe professional for another fix, another inter-vention, another rental of expertise. Teachersare different.

They don’t rent their expertise, they give itaway. A good teacher is in the business of mak-ing himself or herself unnecessary, of empower-ing learners to learn without the teacher’s help.By doing things this way, teachers demystifytheir own expertise and thus willingly abandonthe source of power over the client that otherprofessions guard so jealously.

In the same manner, teacher educators are inthe business of demystifying teaching, givingaway their own expertise to empower the pro-spective teacher to carry on the practice of teach-ing without need for continuous consultationand chronic dependency. In both cases, teacherand teacher educator put themselves in posi-tions that diminish their own status and powerin order to enhance the capacity and independ-ence of their students. This distinctive mode ofprofessional practice helps explain much of thedisdain that both professions must endure, butat the same time this quixotic selflessness alsoendows teachers and teacher educators withjust a hint of frayed nobility.

REFERENCESBritzman, D. P. (1986). Cultural myths in the making of a

teacher: Biography and social structure in teacher edu-cation. Harvard Educational Review, 56(4), 442-456.

Cohen, D. K. (1988). Teaching practice: Plus a change. In P.W. Jackson (Ed.), Contributing to educational change: Per-spectives on research and practice (pp. 27-84). Berkeley,CA: McCutchan.

Dewey, J. (1964). The relation of theory to practice in educa-tion. In R. D. Archambault (Ed.), John Dewey on education(pp. 314-338). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.(Original work published in 1904)

Dewey, J. (1933). How we think. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath.Fenstermacher, G. D. (1990). Some moral considerations

on teaching as a profession. In J. I. Goodlad, R. Soder, &K. A. Sirotnik (Eds.), The moral dimensions of teaching (pp.130-151). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Floden, R. E., & Clark, C. M. (1988). Preparing teachers foruncertainty. Teachers College Record, 89, 505-524.

Freedman, S. G. (1990). Small victories: The real world of ateacher, her students, and their high school. New York:HarperCollins.

Hochschild, A. (1983). The managed heart: Commercializationof human feeling. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Jackson, P. W. (1986). The practice of teaching. New York:Teachers College Press.

Labaree, D. F. (1997). How to succeed in school without reallylearning: The credentials race in American education. NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press.

Lortie, D. C. (1975). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. Chi-cago: University of Chicago.

Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. New York: Free Press.Waller, W. (1965). The sociology of teaching. New York: Wiley.

(Original work published in 1932)

David F. Labaree is a professor of teacher education inthe College of Education at Michigan State University,where he is the coordinator of the doctoral program in Cur-riculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy. He is theauthor of How to Succeed in School Without ReallyLearning: The Credentials Race in American Educa-tion (Yale University Press, 1997) and is currently writ-ing a book for Yale about the peculiar nature of educationschools.

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