3TEACHERS THINKING

ABOlTT THEIR PRACTICE

MARY M. KENNEDY

Michigan State University

R esearch on reaching practice and how teachersthink about their practice has existed for decades.One pervasive reason for our interest in reachers'

thoughts is that thoughts are intertwined with practice, soif we want to better understand practice, we need to alsounderstand the thoughts that guide practice. Thinking isnot Ihe same as aCling, bUlleachers' thoughts interact wilhtheir actions every day in both large and small ways, influ­encing their ability to grow and improve their practice overtime and influencing their responses to new policies, newcurricula, and new idGas about practice as they arise.

Teacher thinking is certainly relevant to teacher learn­ing. No one can karn if they are not intellectually engagedwith the topic being studied, and many investigators nowbelieVl: that teachers can Jearn a gn.:at deal more from theirown ex pericnces in the classroom if they take time toretlect upon those experiences (Gri mmet & Erickson,1988; Schon, 1983). Indeed, reflection has become widelyvalued and is now encouraged in teacher education classesand included in assessments such as those used by theNational Board of Professional leaching Standards. Theseprograms and assessments reyuire teachers or prospectiveteachers to reflect publ iely, through journal entries oressays, about particular teaching experiences. The belief isthat making these thoughts visible fosters more learning.

Teacher thinking is also relevant to the ability to imple­ment new cun/cu[a, assessments, or other policies. Evenwhen teachers are following heavily scripted programs andcurricula, they make numerous ongoing adjustments to

their lessons based on their own judgments and thoughtsabout how thl:ir lessons are working and what students arelearning. Teachers do not, then, implement curricula orother instructional devices exactly as they have beenprescribed.

At the same time, efforts to int1uence teachers' thinkinghave been relatively unsuccessful. Beginning with the sci­entific movement in education in the early 1900s andextending through the mastery learning movement in theJ960s, education experts have offered prescriptions toteachers about how to plan and design instruction. Theseprescriptions tend to emphasize a rational approach toplanning that begins with cuniculum content, moves togoals and objectives, and continues linearly to resources,materials, instructional' strategies, learning activities, andso forth. Many of these prescriptions are ba:,ed on either nOevidence or very thin evidence. Teacher education pro­grams continue to prescribe specific approaches toplanning, believing that some are better than others, eventhough we now have evidence that experienced teachersrarely use these strategies in their own planning. Findingssuch as these add another reason to care about howteachers think about their practice.

Much of our interest in teacher thinking flows from aperception thal teachers are not thinking abo lit their prac­tice in the way their critics think they should. Critics wantto see different practices, and they assume the reason rheydon't is because teachers either are not thi nking hardenough or are not thinking correctly. So along with articles

21

22 • TEACHERS

about how teachers do think about their practice, we findstudies of how they should think about their practice andsome discussions about why there is a disparity betweentheir thoughts and their critics' thoughts about practice.

Below I describe three specific lines of research onteacher thinking, each taking a slightly different approachto the issue. First, there is a body of largely descriptiveresearch that focuses on how teachers approach specificthought processes such as planning, evaluating, or makingin-the-moment decisions For the most part, these studlesdo not address questions about the quality of reasoning or"rightness" of teachers' thoughts, but instead simplydescribe these thoughts and thought processes. These stud­ies are reviewed in the section entitled "Teachers' ThoughtProcesses." The second group of studies seeks to under­stand how the job of teaching itself influences teachers'thinking, The general focus of these studies is how teach­ers are affected by their chosen occupation, how they adaptto it, and how their thoughts are influenced by it. The sec­tion called "How Practice Shapes Thought" reviews someof this literature. Researchers in the third group of studiesare more interested in the possibility of change. Theseresearchers seek to understand both how teachers' thoughtsarise in response to the work itself and how these thoughtsaffect the qml1ity of teaching practice. For these authors,the question of interest is not merely how do teachersthink, nor merely how do circumstances influence think­ing, but how does teacher thinking affect the quality ofteaching practice. These authors tend to focus on howteachers design practices that can accommodate the reali­ties of classroom life. This line of work is examined in thethird section entitled "How Thought Shapes Practices."

None of these sections presents an exhaustive renderingof the literature, but instead describes a few major contri­butions that give a flavor for the field as a whole.

Teachers' Thought Processes

The first line of research seeks to learn more about howteachers engage in planning and strategic decisionmaking. This work emerged in the I 960s, pea.ked in theJ970s, and is very well summarized in a handful of sub­stantial literature reviews written in the 1980s (Clark,1983; Clark & Peterson, 1986; Shavelson, 1983; Shave­Ison & Stern, 1981). This chapter concentrates largely onthese other reviews.

Interest in teacher thought processes arose, at least inpart, as an antidote to another body of research, frequentlycalled process-product research, that aimed to define effec­tive teaching in terms of discrete ski lis thal could beidentified and taught in teacher education programs. The1960s was a period of great interest in precise descriptionsof teaching and in finding relationships between specificteaching acts and student learning. Much of this workassumed that knowledge of these teaching acts could even­tually be directly taught to teachers (examples of articles

suggesting such an assumption include Rosenshine &Furst, 1971, and Sandefur, 1970). As emphasis on teachingskills increased, a counter-movement surfaced arguing thatteaching could not be reduced to skills alone. Researcherswho pursued questions about teachers' thought processesargued that teaching necessarily required judgment andthought. Their studies aimed to reveal that thought occurredand to reveal the nature of the thought processes and of thethoughts themselves.

The research methods employed in these studies areremarkably diverse, ranging from naturalistic observationsand interviews to laboratory projects in which teachers areasked to think aloud as they work, view films and describewhat they saw or thought, examine artifacts of classroomlessons or student work and to critique them, sort cards andengage with other devices. Shavelson, Webb, and Burstein(1986) provided an excellent review of the various meth­ods that have been used in this body of research and a goodcritique of their strengths and weaknesses. Regardless ofmethod, the goal is nearly always to reveal the contents ofthoughts that are otherwise hidden from view.

This work is typically reviewed according to the type ofthinking involved; that is, there is a body of literature onteacher planning, another on in-the-moment or interactivethinking, another on post hoc evaluations of events, and soforth, Researchers have found that teachers' plans focus onthe sequence of events that will occur more than on thecontent that will be taught or what students should learnas a result of the Jesson (Clark & Yinger, 1987). Thisapproach is quite different from the kind of rational plan­ning that is sometimes advocated. Rather than beginningwith a learning goal, teachers tend to begin with an activityand then envision how that activity might unfold. Theythink about where students will be located and what theywill be able to see, what materials will be available andhow they will be distributed, and how the conversation willbe organized. Lesson plans look more like scripts for aplay than a deduction from goals and objectives. Thesescripts and images of lessons have a great deal of influenceover teachers' actual teaching, and teachers rarely deviatefrom their scripts even when they see explicit evidence thatthe script is not working as they had envisioned it (Clark &Lampert, 1986; Shavelson, 1983).

With respect to interactive decision making, we havetwo seemingly contradictory findings. On one hand, wefmd that teachers rely heavily on routines in their practice.Routines can increase predictability, help students knowwhat to expect and what to do, and reduce the number ofthings teachers need to attend to and the number of interac­tive decisions they need to make (Hargreaves, 1979). Yetdespite teachers' heavy reliance on predictable routines,they still need to make numerous in-the-moment decisions.Clark and Peterson (1986) found five studies that exam­ined the number of interactive decisions teachers made anda]] five concluded that teachers made more than one deci­sion per m.inute. These decisions occur even after teachershave devised plans that layout the script and orchestration

of the lesson and even when they are building lessons on astructure of established operating systems and routines.

These ad hoc decisions are made in response to specificevents such as an unexpected student question or com­ment, a complication during a transition in a lesson,missing or faulty materials, or when teachers see evidencethat the lesson is not going as planned. When making spe­cific decisions, teachers rarely consider alternative coursesof action, and when they do, they don't consider very manyalternatives. Once teachers are engaged in their lessons,roughly 40%-50% of all teachers' thoughts during instruc­tion have to do with students-what they are learning orwhat they are doing. Goals and content comprised only 51;10

or less of all thoughts, and instructional procedures com­prised 20%-30% of their thoughts.

Concurrent with their routines and interactive deci­sions, teachers are also continuously monitoring the entireclass. Even while listening to one student's response to aquestion, a teacher may be simultaneously noticing thatanother student has become distracted hy a fly and that twoothers are beginning to whisper Kounin (1970) used theterm withitness to refer to teachers' ahility to be continu­ously aware of what all studenb are doing. Even verysmall deviations from the plan are likely to trigger correc­tive responses from teachers.

Some researchers have also looked for general princi­ples that guide teachers' actions. For example, teachersfrequently lise a principle of compensation when makingdecisions (Clark & Peterson, 19~6). Using this principle,teachers give extra attention to students who are shy orstudents who are less able. There is also evidence thatteachers subscribe to a principle of suppressing their ownemotions. A great deal of their effort goes into control­ling themselves and their own emotions, so thaI theycan maintain a particular persona and a particular class­room climate.

Most of this research has been essentially descriptive.That is, studies frequently demonstrate that thoughtoccurred but rarely evaluate the quality of that thought. Infact, Berliner (1990) criticized the lack of attention tothoughts or thought processes that had some known value.He suggested thaI the work needed a criterion of effective­ness that would allow researchers to ascertain the value ofdifferent thoughts and thought processes. Without a crite­rion of effectiveness, no recommendations can follow forhow to improve teaching. But I suspect that researchers atthis time had no interest in improving teaching practice butinstead were interested in affirming its complexity andvalue. Many of the practices they found could have beencritiqued on normative grounds, even without a criterion ofeffectiveness, but they were not. For instance, teachers'tendency to huild plans around events and activities ratherthan around learning goals could have been construeu asevidence of flawed planning, hut no such normative j udg­ment was made. Similarly, teachers' inability to deviatefrom their plans when lessons aren't working could havebeen construed as evidence that teachers lack flexibility or

Tecu;hers Thinking About Their Practice • 13

the ability to think in situ, but again no such evaluativejudgments were made. Instead, researchers' interpretationsof thi;, body of work showed us that teachers are thoughtfulprofessionals, not merely skilled laborer~, and that teach­ing is work that requires professional judgment, not merelytraining in skills.

In the 1990s, research on teacher thinking shifted focustoward articulating the knowledge that teachers need tocarry out their work. Again, the shift was motivated by arejection of the notion thal teaching could be definedentirely as a set of behavioral skills and a concomitantdesire to highlight the intellectual demands of teaching.The need to pay more attention to the content of teachingand to the contents of teachers' knowledge was raised byShulman (1986a, I986b, 1987) and was followed by anumber of efforts to identify categories and type;, ofknowledge that would or could be useful in teaching (e.g.,edited volumes by Reynolds, 1990, and Kennedy, 1991).Much of this work was speculative, however, and evidencefor the relevance of particular bodies of knowledge tendedto be limited to case studies of individual teachers. Someparticularly influential studies that examined the role ofknowledge in practice were Carpenter, Fennema, Peter~on,Chiang, and Loef (1989); Leinhardt (1987); Ma (1999);and Stein, Baxter, and Leinhardt (1990).

The first effort to move beyond description toward atheory of teacher thinking did not occur until the late 1990swhen Schoenfeld (1998) began what may be the mostambitious research program regarding how teachers'thoughts and knowledge shape their practice. Schoenfeld'sgoal is to go beyond description and develop models ofteacher reasoning that articulate the beliefs, goals, knowl­edge, images, and so forth that teachers carry with themand that can account for specific interactive decisions thatthey make. A cenlral feature of his model is that paJticuJarthought sequences, beliefs, ideas, and so forth, are broughtinto play by "triggering events" that provoke the teacher'sneed to draw 011 these elements and to generate a new idea.Shoenfeld's work is also unique because the teacherswhose thought processes he models are not ordinaryteachers but instead are extraordinary teachers, peoplewhose practices look more like the kind reformers andvisionaries wish to see more often.

Thi<; body of work has given u:s a great deal of knowl­edge about both the content and character of teachers'thoughts. It is distinctive in its largely descriptive orien­tation and its moral stance toward teachers. Virtually allauthors publishing in this area subscribe tv the positionthat teaching is not a line of work that can be reducedto a ~et of skills or that can be prescribed from afar;instead, it should be viewed as professional work thatrequires thought, judgment, and knowledge. It is thisnormative stance, more than a theoretical stance, that hasgiven this work its distinctive appearance, and it is per­haps also tbe reason the work has not yielded any patternsof causal relationship between teachers' thoughts andtheir actions

24 • TEACHERS

How Practice Shapes Thought

The first line of research has revealed very little abouthow teachers' thoughts influence their practice; this sec­ond line of research has revealed a great deal about howteachers' practices have influenced their thoughts. Thisline of research focuses on the unique nature of teaching asa profession and seeks to understand how the features ofthis work influence teachers' thoughts and actions. Whereasthe fLrst line of work was based in psychoJogy, this one isbased in sociology. And whereas the first consisted of doz­ens of small-scale studies, this line consists of just ahandful of large studies, each of which comes to us inbook-length, rather than journal article-length form.

This line of work is also the oldest of the three reviewedhere; it dates back to 1932, when Willard WaJIer publishedSociology ofTeaching (WaJler, 1932/1961). Waller focusedespecially on the teachers' status, hoth within the class­room and in the broader community, where, he said,teachers stood on such tall pedestals that it was difficult forthem to have normal friendly relations with others adults.Within the school, Waller saw the teacher's authority as thecentral issue of classroom life. He believed that schoolsubject matter was so tedious that teachers had to findways to force students to learn it. He saw students as con­tinually resisting teacher domination. Because studentsnever fuJIy ceded authority to the teacher, authority rela­tionships in the classroom were inherently unstable and thebalance could be upset at any moment. Waller argued thatall leadership is tenuous in this way and that it easilyarouses hostility. In the case of teachers, Waller thoughtthe constant struggle to subordinate students ultimatelytook a toll on teachers. Subordinates-in this case stu­dents--can create problems even when they give only asmall part of their own energy to the encounter. It is easyfor them to challenge the teachers' authority. On the otherhand, domination-in this case the teacher's--can bemaintained only when the dominant personality gives itsentire energy to the relationship. This difference in relativeinvestment of energy means that it is easy for students toexhaust teachers. In classrooms, teachers try to dominateby laying down rules, but students continually diminishteachers' authority by stripping rules of their meaning,either laughjng them off or overconforming to the letter ofthe rules but not to their spirit. Enforcement can be drain­ing when there is a large number of students to control.Waller argued that this continuous pressure was a centralaspect of teachers' work and that contending with it even­tually affected the teachers' entire personality.

Between good reaching and bad there is a great difference wherestudents are concemed, but none in this, that ilS most pro­nounced effect is upon the teacher. Teaching does something tothose who teach. (WaJler, 1932/196L, p. 375, emphasis added)

Waller thought that the constant pressure from studentsforced teachers to become rigid and inflexible. Teachers

are continually confronting the childish ways of theirstudents yet are expected to always and unwaveringlyrepresent adult norms. They must continuously defendtheir own authority and maintain their own dignity againststudent mischief, pranks, and outright challenges to theirauthority. In so doing, teachers forego all tendenciestoward spontaneity, human responsiveness, and adaptabil­ity. Most Significantly, Waller also saw a gradual deadeningof the intellect as teachers grew into their profession.Tasks such as grading, which depends on fixed standardsof performance, can discourage intellectual growth; simi­larly the sense of being continuously evaluated by others,both within and outside the classroom, can discourageinventive thinking. For Waller, then, the experience ofteaching itself had a substantial influence on teachers'approach to their work, discouraging flexible thinkingand intellectual engagement and encouraging rigid nlle­foHowing behavior.

Another influential study, Philip Jackson's Life inClassrooms (Jackson, 1968/1990), aimed mainly todescribe classroom life, not to describe its effects on teach­ers. Yet in doing so, Jackson also showed us a greaL dealabout how teachers think about their work. Jacksondescribed three dominant features of classroom life:crowds, prajse. and power. The presence of a crowd meantthat both students and teachers were constantly beinginterrupted in their work and that students usually had towait to be called on or wait to get help. Praise and powerrefer to teachers being in charge and evaluating studentsconstantly, often out loud so other students are aware of theteacher's selective praise. Teachers also control what hap­pens to students through their grouping and instructionalpractices, their disciplinary practices, and their gradingpractices. In this sense, they have great power.

When Jackson interviewed teachers, he learned thatteachers often had a difficult time discerning whether theirstudents were paying attention or not and whether theywere learning or not. Teachers watched for clues such asraised hands, alert facial expressions, and the like and con­sidered these immediate signals to be far more informativethan formal tests of achievement. These ambiguities ofteaching, combined with problems of crowding and inter­ruptions, made teaching a difficult and complicated process.Jackson speculated that the job of teaching requires thatteacher~ be able to tolerate an "enormous amount of ambi­guity, unpredictability, and occasional chaos" (p. 149).

Yet, while Jackson could see the difficulties of tcachingthrough teachers' eyes, he was nonetheless criticaJ ofteachers' nonanalytic approach to their work. He charac­terized teachers' language and thought as conceptuallysimple and lacking in technical vocabulary, in contrast tothe kind of specialized vocabularies that characterize otherprofessions. He argued that they not only avoided complexideas but actually shunned them. Jackson chastised teach­ers for their reliance on intuition rather than reason wheninterpreting classroom events and for their simple anduncomplicated interpretation of causality, in which discrete

causes yield discrete events. For instance, when seekingthe reason for a complex phenomenon, teachers typicallysought single sources (e.g., the parents didn't care or thestudent was lazy) rather than complex patterns of events.When easy solutions were not available, teachers seemedwilling to accept events without question and without fur­ther probing. And when referring to potentially complexconcepts such as motivation or intellectual development,teachers tended to use narrow working definitions thatglossed over the nuances of these concepts. There was animmediate social and physical reality evident in teachers'language and at the same time an acceptance of classroomlife as inevitable and unalterable. About teachers' habits ofthought, Jackson says,

It is easy, of course, to make fun of such oversimplifications,but the complexity underlying most classroom evems is sogreat that the teacher's search for a quick resolution of thiscomplexity is understandable, perhaps even forgivable.(1968/1990, p. 144)

Shortly after Jackson's examination of classroom lifewas published, another major treatise on teaching, DanielLortie's Schoolteacher, appeared (Lortie, 1975). Lortiewas interested in teaching as a profession, and he wantedto see how the work itself hindered or enhanced the pro­fessionalization of teaching. One centralleature of teachi nghe noticed, for instance, was that it is ·'career-Jess." Thatis, experienced teachers do essentially the same job thatnovices do, and their salaries are not substantially differ­ent. Moreover, standardized salary schedules mean thatextra effort or initiative is rarely rewarded. And novicesare introduced to the work virtually unaided. They entertheir practice just a few months after being students them­selves and are left entirely to their own devices to fashiona practice.

Lortie believed these features of the work led to a par­ticular set of attitudes among teachers. The ease of entryinto teaching means that teachers needed littje commit­ment to the field. The egg crate structure of schools meansthat teachers have very link shared knowledge or experi­ences. Learning to teach is a private, sink-or-swim affair.Teachers' isolation leads them to adopt an attitude of indi­vidualism in which they are reluctant to work with otheradults and trust only their own judgments and experiences.Indeed, most of the negative events in their lives consist ofinterferences from outside the classroom, thus furtheringtheir desire to be autonomous. Moreover, the work itself isambiguous, as Jackson had also noted, and teachers oftendon't understand the relationship between their ownactions and their students' learning. This ambiguity, Lortiebelieved, adds a tendency to focus on the moment.

These circumstances of teachers' work, Lortie argued,leaJ to three important attitudes. One is "presentism," atendency to focus on immediate situations more than onlong-term goals. Another is "conservatism," a tendency tofocus on narrow goals that are easily achievable, and to

Teachers Thinking About Their PractU;e • 25

rely on tried-and-true solutions to their problems, ratherthan to experiment with new ideas. The third is "individu­alism," a tendency to define their own private criteria forsuccess and to prefer to work in isolation.

All three of these authors showed us a variety of waysin which the task of teaching influences teachers them­selves. Teachers must work in isolation and maintaincontrol over a large number of students, who in turn mustlearn to subordinate their own needs to those of the group.Teachers who can't discern how students are responding totheir instruction can't know whether progress is beingmade. Both Waller and Jackson argued that these circum­stances discourage deep analysis and ultimately depleteteachers intellectually. Lortie addded that these circum­stances encourage teach~rs to take on only the most narroweducational goals and the most predictable instructionalroutines. All three authors also suggested that these effectson teachers are inevitable. Though none of them directlyaddressed questions about how we might try to improveteachers' practices or improve their reasoning about theirpractices, all implied that such improvements are unlikelyto be found, for the practices we see are a direct responseto the character of the work itself.

How Thought Shapes Practices

The third line of research combines elements of the firsttwo. It acknowledges that the circumstances of teachinginfluence the way teachers approach their work but seeksto learn more about how teachers reason about their cir­cumstances and devise practices that can accommodate.those circumstances. With an eye toward eventuallyimproving teaching practices, these studies are often inter­ested in understanding why teaching practices are notmore progressive, or not more intellectually rigorous, thanthey are and whether there are strategies we have over­looked that might help teachers raise their practices to anew level. They try to trace a path from the circumstancesof teaching through teachers' thoughts, and ultimately toteachers' practices, in the hope that understanding this pathmay ultimately yield ideas about how to help teachers findways to improve their practices while also accommodatingthe realities of their situations.

One example of this work is Walter Doyle's program ofresearch on classroom ecology and academic tasks. Doylebegan, as others had, by identifying aspects of classroomlife that influenced teachers (Doyle, 1979). He identifiedfive important features of classroom life: multidimen­sionality, simultaneity, immediacy, unpredictability, andhistory. Both teachers and students must accommodatethese realities, and they do so in different ways. Students,for instance, try to reduce unpredictability by negotiatingwith teachers about rules and standards. Teachers also tryto simplify by creating routines and operating procedureswithin which academic work will occur.

These observations are similar to those made by Lortieand Jackson, but Doyle went beyond them to examine the

26 • TEACHERS

effect of the situation on the quality of teaching practiceitself. Determining which academic tasks students willwork on is one importilnt decision that teachers make.Doyle argued that academic tasks provide a bridge betweenthe student and the content. These tasks determine thecontent students will learn and the kind of intellectualwork they will engage in with that content (Doyle, 1983).Academic tasks may require students to memorize some­thing (say, the Gettysburg address), practice a procedure(such as subtraction with borrowing), gain an understand­ing of a concept (such as gravity), or express their ownthoughts through an essay or poem. Academic tasks arecentral to student learning.

Academic tasks are also central to reform, for mostreformers want academic tasks to be more intellectuallydemanding and to draw on more rigorous content. ButDoyle argued that such tasks are not very suitable to class­room life (Doyle, 1986). He pointed out, for instance, thatfamiliar, routine tasks go smoothly whereas novel tasks areslower, require more explanation, and engender moreerrors and more incompletions. To make these complicatedtasks more palatable to students, tcachers tend to breakthem into smaller pieces and to present them as work tasksrather than intellectual tasks. The alteration makes thework flt better into the classroom but also converts the taskinto a procedure that can be devoid of content. Ironically,the tasks that best accommodate classroom life are thosethat render meaning most vulnerable. For Doyle, the secretto improving teaching is to find a way for teachers to man­age their students while also presenting them with morecomplex academic tasks.

Cuban's history of teaching practices, How TeachersTaught (Cuban, 1984), also seeks to learn more about howthe circumstances of teaching influence practice itself.Thc premise for this study is that classroom practices havetended to be relatively uniform, both across time andacross contexts. Cuban argued that the central refoondilemma, which has occupied reformers for many decades,is how to move teaching practices from teacher-centeredto student-centered. He noted that the dominant approachto teaching has always been teacher-centered. But, heargued, it is also clear that some changes have occurred,so any plausible explanation lIf this histury must be abletu account both for the broad resistance to change and forthe occasions when change has occurred. Over time,Cuban believes, there has been a gradual adoption of morechild-centered approaches to teaching and that classroomsin the I 960s were friendlier than they had been a centuryearlier. Cettainly the depictions of teaching that Wallerprovided in ]932 are different from those made decadeslater by other researchers.

So, Cuban asked, If teacher-centered practice is thedefault, when and under what ci.rcumstances are student­centered practices adopted, and whatkindsofstudent-centeredpractices are adopted versus rejected? His study is essen­tially a history of the failures of progressive movements to

change teaching practices. But he used that history to evalu-

ate alternative hypotheses about the conditions of schoolingthat might account for both resistance and occasionalchanges. For instance, the structure of school ing cannot beentirely responsible for the resistance to change because itcannot ex.plain why changes do occasionally occur. Afterconsidering a number of hypotheses, Cuban settled onsomething called "situationaIJy-constrained choice," bywhich he meant that both organizational constraints andteacher culture shape the practices and beliefs of teachers,but not to the point where they are entirely immutable;teachers' beliefs can and do sometimes change.

Another study that emphasized the ways in whichteaching practices accommodate the circumswnces ofteaching is Kennedy's Inside Teaching (Kennedy, 2005).Like Cuban, Kennedy began with the acknowledgementthat reformers have ttied on numerous occasions over thepast decades to alter the character and quality of teachingpractices in American schools but that, for the most part,they have been unable to do so. She was particularly inter­ested in reforms that aim to increase attention to complexsubject maller, increase intellectual engagement in theclassroom, and expand participation to a wider swath ofthe student body. She noted that such reforms have largelybeen unsuccessful. Instead of asking why teachers are notdoing what reformers wished for, Kennedy asked why theyare doing what they are doing. So she began her analysisby examining the concerns that govern teachers' decisionsas they engage in their practice. She identified six over­arching areas of concern: (1) identifying learning outcomes,(2) fostering student learning, (3) increasing student will­ingness to participate, (4) maintaining Jesson momentum,(5) establishing the classroom as a community, and (6) sat­isfying their own personal needs. While teachers thoughtabout most of these issues most of the time, they frequentlyencountered conflicts among them. If, for instance, a stu­dent becomes confused and needs to clarify some arcanepoint, the teacher may find that her interest in fostering thisstudent's learning conflicts with her interest in maintaininglesson momentum. Conversely, if an enthusiastic studentspeaks out continually and interrupts other students, evenif all remarks are substantively relevant to the lesson, theteacher may find that encouraging this student's willing­ness to participate conflicts with establishing a communityin the classroom.

Kennedy found that teachers make decisions thatinvolve more than one of these areas of concern simultane­ously, sometimes trading one against another and sometimeschoosing an action because it simultaneously satisfies mul­tiple areas of concern. As Cuban did, Kennedy evaluated ahandful of competing hypotheses that had been put for­ward to account for teachers' inability to engage in morerigorous and intellectually engaging practices:

• Teachers need more knowledge and instructional

strategies.

• Teachers' personality traits or dispositions impede

reform.

• Teachers' beliefs conflict with those of reformers, andthey base their practices on their beliefs.

• The circumstances of teaching itself hinder reforms.

• Reform goals are not realistic.

Kennedy found some evidence for each of thesehypotheses, but ultimately argued that the most compellingexplanation is that the reforms themselves are too ambi­tious and do not acknowledge the realities of classroomlife. Reformers, she suggested, think about only one or twoof the concerns that teachers think about. They may attendonly to the content being taught or only to students' intel­lectual engagement and do not offer teachers any help inaddressing these concerns while also addressing teachers'other concerns, such as maintaining lesson momentum andmeeting their own personal needs.

This third group of studies offers a more evaluative lookat teachers' thoughts, focusing explicitly on the types ofpractices that result from those thoughts and comparingthose practices to the practices that reformers seek. Theseresearchers examined the relationship between teachers'thinking and their practices, but emphasized the ways inwhich the practices teachers devise are ultimately designedto accommodate the circumstances they encounter.

Discussion

Research on teacher thinking has not only helped usunderstand teachers' thoughts but helped us understand thekinds of events that teachers are trying to control. We seefrom these studies that teachers are trying to simultane­ously establish and maintain classroom norms, respond tounwi lIing students, organize materials and events so thatlearning may occur, and converse with students about sub­stantively abstract ideas while also conversing with themabout rules and procedures. We also find that they have adifficult time ascertaining what their students are thinkingor whether students understand important concepts, Theywork at their task in virtual isolation and have no opportu­nities to step away from their work long enough to recovertheLr composure or gather their thoughts when confronting

a problem.It should not be surprising, then, to learn that teachers'

plans look less like task analyses of content and instruc­tional goals and more like envisioned sequences of events.In their visions, teachers imagine how aJl aspects of thelesson will work together-the discipline, the resources,the social networks, the routines and operating procedures,the needs of the more difficult students, and the needs ofthe more ambitious students. Nor should it be surprising tolearn that teachers rely heavi lyon routines and standardoperating procedures, northat they still, even after studentshave learned all the routines, need to make interactivedecisions more often than once per minute. Nor should itbe surprising that their primary concern is maintaining les­son momentum and not losing any individual students asthe group moves through the day's activities.

Teachers Thinking About Their Practice • 27

The task teachers set out for themselves is not the onereformers set for teachers. Teachers do not begin the daythinking about fascinating new ways to approach partic­ular substantive ideas. Instead, they begin by thinkingabout how to get two dozen restless youngsters to coop­erate on a set of activities that will be roughly educativebut not so engaging that students will become overlyexcited (Kennedy, 2005). The task is to find a paththrough the curriculum that can be taken by a largegroup of people traveling in tandem, many of whom arenot particularly interested in whether they arrive at the

destination or not.Observers who look at the classroom with a cold eye see

problems of domination and subordination, of crowds andpower, and of students testing the limits of nlles, negotiat­ing their workloads, and goading their friends. Those wholook at the classroom with the eyes of idealists are disap­pointed by the difference between reality and their ownvisions of enthusiastic students pursuing rigorous substan­tive ideas-visions that don't address the question of howteachers create such classrooms while accommodating thereal circumstances they face. This dilemma presents thenext set of questions researchers must address.

References and Further Readings

Berliner, D. C. (J 990). The place of process-product research indeveloping the agenda for research on teacher thinking.Educational Psychologist. 24(4), 325-344.

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