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Warren Professor and Harvard Graduate School of Education dean Ellen Condliffe Lagemann spoke recently with Viewpoints, a professional development publication for school superintendents. The following is an excerpt from that conversation:
Q: When you speak about "usable knowledge," you speak about the new science of education. Explain that and give us a sense of what the old science was, or is. A: The new science of education involves two things: credibility and usability. By credibility, I mean that we will follow the methods of science applied to education. You have to ask significant questions, use rigorous research methods, analyze your data carefully, be able to replicate what you've found. This creates warrants for knowledge, so you know that the knowledge you have is right. It moves away from the ideological, from the subjective. The second is usability. Teachers, and even learners themselves, can't use the findings of research. They need to have the findings of research translated into usable knowledge—that is, the toys, tools, textbooks, tests, and other learning materials that people actually can use to promote learning. Q: You talk about professional knowledge, and of course teachers want to be thought of as professionals. Tell us what a new kind of professional knowledge would be. A: Teachers are professionals, but I think education as a profession needs to become stronger. I think that will happen as we begin to get sufficient research on instruction, so that in a sense we can codify what it is that effective teachers do, and by codifying it we can therefore make it available to other people. We also need to work with the tacit knowledge that teachers have: the knowledge you have that you don't think about very much. We all know how to walk, and if we thought about how we walked, we'd fall down. So there's tacit knowledge there. If we take the tacit knowledge that teachers have and translate it into explicit knowledge, then you can discuss it, share it with others, raise questions about it, build on it...and begin to develop a body of knowledge about education that will provide a professional base that we don't have now.
Q: Could you give us some examples of how that tacit knowledge will be used in conjunction with more experimental knowledge? A: Here at Harvard we're beginning to consider developing a core curriculum using the case method of instruction. The curriculum would serve everybody who comes to HGSE—new teachers, principals, school leaders, people who work on technology in schools, all practitioners—because we believe that there are things that all educators need to know and be able to do regardless of their specialization. You need to understand something about human development, because education is an intervention in human development. We also think that you need to understand that educational problems always need to be looked at from multiple perspectives. Educational problems are never simple black-and-white kinds of problems. If you're talking about a problem in the school, let's say Johnny in the first grade can't read, you need to look at that from Johnny's point of view, from his parents' point of view, from the principal's perspective, the teacher's perspective; and also from multiple disciplines: psychology, instruction. That's a core understanding that people in education need to have. Q: And then how does one translate understanding into practice? A: In addition to coursework, where you learn about various things you need to know about education, you have practice work. It's in the practice where you are supervised, where you are working with teams of educators together commenting on each other's practice, that you can say, "Hey, remember we read about this? You're not doing that." Q: If you are a principal in a school, how would you get science into your practice, into the teacher's practice, so that it really changed instruction? A: I don't think that's the stage at which you do it. What education researchers need to do is to take the research process one step further than it has been. You need to have the good research, and then you need to translate it into usable knowledge. Once it's in the form of usable knowledge, then the principals can buy it and give it to the teachers. And they will have to do a lot of professional development to help the teachers know how to use it well. Q: What will these look like, these kinds of tools and curricula that are more scientific? Will they require more than just a rote application on the teacher's part? A: They'll be all sorts of things. They will be handhelds on which teachers can keep track of what kids are doing and then sync it to their home computer at night and puzzle about what's going on with a student. They will range from that to textbooks to tests to very imaginative, inquiry-based materials. Just because materials are based on scientific work doesn't mean scripted curricula. Q: A lot of people are saying we're going to make teaching or education more like medicine. Do you like that analogy?
A: I do and I don't. I think schools of education should become more like teaching hospitals. We need to have research faculties and clinical faculties. Currently we have a little bit of both, but the distinctions are not clear. We need to be partnered with practice sites that will be laboratories for our research and laboratories for our clinical work. We need to do much more of that than we do. That said, we can also learn from the pharmaceutical industry, which knows how to take a smart idea and develop it to scale, so you get enough penicillin or antibiotics and you can make them available pretty universally. We don't know how to scale up innovations in education, and we need to learn how to do that. Q: I can hear many teachers saying, "Yes, but learning to read isn't like taking Prilosec. It's a much more extensive, long-term kind of intervention." A: I don't disagree with that. But for example, we understand the different stages of how children learn to count. And those seem to be fairly invariant when children learn to count well. We need to develop techniques and tools that will enable a teacher to be able to quickly diagnose where children are in terms of their ability to count. It's that kind of thing that needs to be scaled up. Q: What should education schools be doing to produce teachers who are much more professional as you're describing? A: Graduate schools of education...need to provide repeated cycles of professional education. The notion that you come to an ed school and you get a master's degree and you're certified to teach, and then you go out to the schools and you teach for 10, 20, 30 years is just silly. That's not the way professions work these days. Everybody has increasing professional development, and also shifting between and among roles. The notion that one will stay in a classroom without having some shift in responsibilities doesn't seem very sensible to me. We have to think of teachers entering practice and then several years into practice coming back to an ed school for a master's degree. Then they go back out to the field for five years. Then they might come back and add on some specialization. Then they go out and practice the specialization for five years, and then they come back. They might become a teacher leader. They come back and they might be a principal. There needs to be movement between educational roles. Q: Do you think that educators are ready to abandon their own personal beliefs about things to be a little more objective?
A: You don't have to abandon your personal beliefs in order to acknowledge the value of science. It has got to be a combination of the two. Teaching is both an art and a science. If you try to make it all science and forget the art, that's not going to work either. Q: If I named you superintendent of my moderate-sized school district today, and you were going to have your job for five or six years, what would you do to move your offerings in your classrooms and schools towards this usable scientific evidence based? A: What needs to happen is the tools and teaching materials need to be developed within research universities in partnership with schools, and then they need to be given to teachers along with professional development. They're not going to be developed in the schools alone. Maybe they'll be tested there, but the responsibility for developing usable knowledge is not primarily one for people at the school site. The notion that we need to produce both credible and usable knowledge in education is a relatively new one. People up until now have thought you could do traditional social-science research and that was it—this would improve education. Well, it doesn't. It doesn't make enough of a difference. About the Interview For More Information
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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