Scaling Up “Evidence-Based” Practices for Teachers Is a Profitable but Discredited Paradigm

Most teachers and teacher educators would agree that good teachers have deep content knowledge, a strong repertoire of pedagogical skills, and an understanding—both developmental and anecdotal—of their students. One of the goals of developing professional learning communities (PLCs) in schools is to strengthen these forms of professional knowledge. In a recent Educational Researcher article, Jennifer Merriman Bausmith and Carol Barry (2011) suggest, however, that PLCs currently are insufficiently focused on “teacher expertise,” and they recommend “scaling up professional development in which pedagogical content knowledge is a primary focus through online videos of lessons taught by expert teachers that are indexed to the Common Core State Standards” (p. 176).

The claim that PLCs should pay more attention than they currently do to issues of content and pedagogical skills, or what Bausmith and Barry call teacher expertise, may have some merit. However, we believe that their recommended solution reproduces an outside-in, top-down, teacher-deficit model that decades of research have shown to fail (Biesta, 2007; McLaughlin, 1976; Sabatier, 1986). Bausmith and Barry can be applauded for their sense of urgency about improving teaching and learning so that all students can be college ready, but urgency must be balanced with an understanding of the complexity of schools and the longer timelines often needed to create deep change (Payne, 2008). And, although they interrogate PLCs, Bausmith and Barry leave unexamined key elements of the approach that they recommend, such as the movements supporting the Common Core State Standards and “college for all.” This despite a growing critique questioning the underlying assumptions propelling these movements (see for example, Glass & Nygreen, 2011; Stotsky & Wurman, 2010).

According to Bausmith and Barry, the task is one of effectively aligning the work of PLCs with implementation of the standards, casting teachers once again in the role of unquestioningly implementing the latest in standardized, scaled-up reform efforts. Transforming PLCs into tools for implementation, rather than spaces of inquiry and critical questioning, short-circuits the potential contributions of teachers to educational reform. Large-scale movements such as that for the Common Core standards could benefit greatly from refinement through collective questioning by professionals in the nation’s classrooms.

It is one thing to provide videos indexed to the Common Core State Standards as one among many professional resources for PLCs to access, but quite another to make them a “primary focus” of PLCs. Although PLCs can be variously defined, Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) argue that authentic inquiry is central to their work. Bausmith and Barry have not taken into consideration the rich literature on collaborative action research (Feldman & Weiss, 2010; Somekh, 2010), teacher study groups (Thibodeau, 2008; Wilson, 2008), critical friends groups (Bambino, 2002; Curry, 2008), lesson study (Fernandez & Yoshida, 2004), reflective practice (Osterman & Kottkamp, 2004) and many other traditions of teacher inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). Most of these approaches do focus on standards and on teachers’ content and pedagogical skills but do so in an inquiry-based, inductive fashion. For instance, the Japanese-inspired lesson study approach focuses directly on instruction, as teachers observe each other in classrooms, critique lesson plans, and discuss curriculum content (Fernandez & Yoshida, 2004).

Authentic inquiry implies that we do not know all of the answers ahead of time. It also implies “re-culturing” a school, including classrooms, into a broad notion of learning as a form of inquiry and inquiry as a form of learning. If a school is struggling with low student achievement, the problem might be a lack of “teacher expertise,” but it might be any number of other things or, more probably, a combination. Cultivation of teacher expertise or even a laser-like focus on instruction may seem like obvious answers to student underachievement, but there are seldom universal solutions that can be scaled up for all contexts.

The notion that teaching and learning occur in context is crucial. Many PLCs need to address nonacademic constraints before they zero in on issues of pedagogical content. Johnson and Avelar La Salle (2010) describe schools that chose to focus exclusively on classroom instruction and found that achievement did not improve until they addressed nonacademic obstacles. The school-level constraints these authors describe include the ways that time is allocated and often wasted in schools; school discipline policies, such as those that determine which students are suspended and how much time they spend in detention rooms; how often students are absent and for which periods; student participation (or nonparticipation) in extracurricular activities; excessive referrals to special education; and the nature of peer groups, student networks, and levels of social trust.

It is also necessary to understand community context, which may require data from community walk-throughs or other data on community assets—not to mention the national social and fiscal policies that have increased social inequality (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009) and decreased the social supports that low-income, college-ready students would need to gain access to our increasingly stratified and expensive system of higher education (Anderson, 2009; Glass & Nygreen, 2011).

Evidence-based practices are antithetical to a culture of inquiry, because the inquiry has already been done by others—mainly though quasi-experiments—and the practices must be replicated with fidelity rather than through the processes of “mutual adaptation” that program-implementation scholars described decades ago (McLaughlin, 1976). In a process of mutual adaptation, successful outside-in innovations are creatively appropriated and “owned” over time at the local level by teachers, who also alter some of their prior practices in the process. This process attempts to honor the professional and contextual knowledge of teachers as well as the integrity of the innovation. However, Bausmith and Barry (2011) seem to miss this nuance, instead offering “externally developed, research-based, and standards-aligned examples of instruction” (p. 176) because “local knowledge is immediate and concrete but almost always incomplete and sometimes blind and insular” (Hiebert et al., quoted in Bausmith & Barry, 2011, p. 176).

If “local knowledge” means the tendency of many teachers to act on the basis of mere intuition, unquestioned prejudice, or low expectations, then the use of teacher inquiry supported by multiple data sources—including test data—through PLCs would seem to be an effective safeguard. For instance, we have described a PLC in which teachers were convinced that the school’s dismal test scores were the fault of the students who missed the most classes (Herr & Anderson, 2008). But once the teachers disaggregated scores based on attendance, they discovered, to their surprise, that attendance rates did not correlate much with the scores. The data forced them to ask a new set of questions about why even those who attended school regularly were scoring low, which, in turn led the teachers to take a closer look at their school structures and pedagogy. If, through continued inquiry, the teachers determined their problem to be lack of teacher expertise in a particular area, then inquiry focused on that area, perhaps with the aid of the videos that Bausmith and Barry recommend, would be indicated. But the videos would not drive the process; rather, their potential use would be a result of the process.

But even the notion, inherent to PLCs and action research, that data can be used to make better decisions through inquiry, has been appropriated by a testing and data management industry that has commodified and fetishized data (Burch, 2009). Instead of data-supported inquiry, we have data-driven inquiry, in which testing data are used largely as indicators of which subskills to reteach, resulting in a mechanistic process of test- remediate-test-remediate pedagogy. By data-supported inquiry, we mean a process whereby the participants use data to open up and support their inquiry, not one where the data drive participants to predetermined answers or predetermined instructional techniques. In the growing academic literature on data use and data literacy (Means, Chen, Debarger, & Padilla, 2011; Wayman & Springfield, 2006), there is little evidence of familiarity with decades of scholarship on action research or with the collaborative inquiry traditions cited above. Our concern is that, despite the potential usefulness of teaching videos, PLCs may succumb to their fetishization and commodification, like that of costly test databases. In other words, standards-aligned videos of instruction, viewed as the scaled-up answer or remedy, are likely to be marketed to school districts, potentially obscuring more authentic pathways to professional learning through inquiry.

Finally, in this era when a growing education industry seeks to influence our policy choices (Burch, 2009), we need to be especially vigilant about where our information is coming from. The Gates Foundation and the Pearson Publishing Company recently announced a partnership to develop new technology-based instructional approaches aligned with the Common Core. This is seen as giving “Pearson a considerable advantage as textbook and learning technology companies position themselves in an education marketplace upended by the creation of the common standards” (Dillon, 2011).

The College Board, as it diversifies beyond its origins as a testing company, likely also wants a piece of this action. According to Americans for Educational Testing Reform (2011), the College Board spent $794,417 in 2007 (the latest data available) for lobbyists to influence “legislators and government officials to adopt, and even require, College Board tests for various educational and professional purposes” (“AETR Report Card: College Board”). Although it is listed as a nonprofit, the College Board reported $55 million in profits in 2007 (“AETR Report Card: College Board”).

Although Bausmith and Barry are not responsible for their employer’s policies (both are employed by the College Board), it is sometimes hard to distinguish whether they have written an academic article or an infomercial. They state, “Finally, we provide a recommendation to scale up professional development in which pedagogical content knowledge is a primary focus through online videos of expert instruction that are aligned with the Common Core” (2011, p. 175). If this sounds like a solution in search of a problem, it may well be. For $99.00, the College Board offers “a program, including more than 20 filmed sessions from the College Board Regional Forums, [that] delivers professional development content via online video” (College Board, n.d.). One can only imagine the resulting contracts to produce professional development videos for the common standards if the notion of using such videos is pitched effectively. We don’t doubt that Bausmith and Barry are sincere and well-intended, but in an age of nonprofit and for-profit corporations and their lobbyists vying for the public dollar, we all need to be careful about what we are selling and being sold.