Abstract
David Cohen is a prodigious scholar and writer. His latest book, Teaching and Its Predicaments, joins an impressive set of other volumes on education, policy, interventions, and the general arc of education efforts at improvement (for examples, see Learning Policy by Cohen and Hill [2001] and The Ordeal of Equality by Cohen and Moffitt [2009]). Cohen’s books always manage to broaden the vision surrounding a particular issue or educational problem. His books often are the outcome of a series of investigations on a particular policy—both of the volumes mentioned above work in this way. In producing integrative summaries there is always a risk that the assembled collection can be simply a repackaging of disparate work that adds little beyond the convenience of having all the material in one place. Cohen routinely avoids this pitfall.
Teaching and Its Predicaments is a slim, eight-chapter volume that is the outcome of decades of thinking, talking, and researching, but it is not a simple recapitulation; rather, it is an extended essay. Just as the writing evolved from engaged discussions with colleagues, the reading is likely to provoke discussion and mulling rather than specific actions or policies. The book is especially timely in light of the “Finnish Finding” (Sahlberg, 2011), namely, that a small country with few formal educational standards, no intermediate exam system, no word for accountability let alone a policy for it, and the shortest school year and day compared to other nations reviewed is once again successfully competing educationally for first place with Singapore, Korea, and Japan, the Eastern winners. The current attribution of the success is the extremely coherent and rigorous education of teachers, coupled with the high pay and status of all teachers from elementary through high school. In the context of these unexpected and counterintuitive results, Cohen’s book is most timely.
The book comprises eight chapters, most of which fit extremely well together, slowly expanding upon initial assertions. The reader never feels lost in a listlike structure but, rather, enmeshed in an increasingly clearly specified set of assumptions and definitions. That said, there are several places where one might take issue with the assumptions.
The first two chapters, “Improve Teach-ing?” and “Human Improvement,” lay out the context in which teaching takes place. Cohen argues that the recent past (15 years or so) has seen the greatest press historically for improvement in teaching, which in turn raises all sorts of questions about what improvement would look like and how would we know if we got there. Although I agree that as the federal government began to introduce large-scale reforms and commit large quantities of funding the press on school performance went up, I tend to place the origins a little further back, to the conclusion of World War II. It was then, as social scientists searched for an answer to the origins of the Holocaust in the failures of the educational system, that Chicago scholars (in and out of education) such as Bales, Bloom, Strodbeck, and Schwab, to name only a few, looked to authoritarian approaches to learning and thinking as probable causes. By the mid-1950s intense work was being done to improve education; this culminated in the Woods Hole conferences that targeted mathematics and science as in need of critical reform. From the early set of discussions we tended to see the issue of school improvement as a “race,” one that we needed to “win.” This means that almost all educators working today have grown up under a policy of continuous striving for reform or improvement. Even though Cohen starts the growth of the press for improvement at a different point in time, his main concern, and one well placed, is that the press for improvement has been inconsistent with respect to what should be improved, how such improvement should take place, and how we would recognize it if it happened.
The second of the first two chapters argues that what Cohen refers to as the “human improvement” professions are different from other kinds of work for several core reasons. First and foremost, the human improvement occupations (teaching, psychotherapy, organization consulting, pastoral care) require a unique collaboration and cooperation between client and professional. The teacher cannot succeed unless the students learn—but the students have to agree to learn. The teacher is thus faced with the first of many predicaments: The learners must be mobilized to join a common and coherent effort to learn because the teacher’s expertise alone is not enough to guarantee success. Furthermore it presses teachers to compromise—lower standards for more improvement across the board as contrasted to higher standards that fewer might attain. This is a powerful and important point—a point that I believe is diluted by the continuing alignment of teaching with psychotherapy and in contrast to carpentry. Teaching is a socially mandated, politically debated, parentally guarded occupation; it is far more public and impinged upon than psychotherapy. Teaching as an activity and occupation predates and will most assuredly postdate psychotherapy—it is simply the wrong companion for the discussion, and because the comparison is pervasive throughout the book, it does detract from what is otherwise a thoughtful and compelling set of discussions.
It is the third chapter, “Teaching,” that forms the logical and intellectual heart of the essay. The remainder of the book expands upon the ideas laid out in this central chapter. Cohen paints a landscape with three fundamentally distinct terrains: knowledge of content and pedagogy, discourse, and knowledge of students. The practice of teaching requires the mindful negotiation of all three. These three terrains place real demands on teachers such that they often try to limit the expenditure of their resources by restricting those demands at least in one or another arena. The powerful Shulman idea of pedagogical content knowledge forms the first landscape (Shulman, 1987). In this arena teachers need to know the content extensively because it is this knowledge that forms the path markers of purpose. Why should one topic be expanded in the discussion over another? Where might a series of questions end up? It is the domain knowledge that provides helpful landmarks. But as Shulman and so many others have pointed out, it is not domain knowledge alone but the knowledge of how to bring it to students that is critical. Throughout this chapter and the remaining four, Cohen points out the strong temptation to restrict, simplify, and linearize the landscape. Thus, the frugal teacher has a desire to limit the possible content directions and outcomes by restricting the meanderings, but at the same time the teacher with lofty goals for ambitious teaching needs to explore just those possible paths.
The second terrain that teaching stands on is the terrain of discourse. The exchange of ideas through talk, work, and inquiry. What Cohen does especially well is to discuss this topic in terms of kinds of choices and trade-offs rather than artificial caricatures of the rigid search for the right answer. He works carefully through the issues of general organization (e.g., students working alone vs. in groups) and shows how the discourse needs to change to accommodate these various arrangements. Table 6.3 presents the interactions between various kinds of classroom organization and various conceptions of knowledge, showing that a single belief system (knowledge in a domain is knowledge of the kinds of inquiry and tools of evidence) interacts with and is not defined by the manner of discourse. Thus, the most dedicated supporter of inquiry as a goal may teach at the university level in a lecture mode. Presenting these nuanced distinctions without directions as to how to resolve the predicaments they pose is the gift of the volume.
The third landscape the teacher must traverse is knowledge about students’ knowledge. Here again Cohen lends a sympathetic stance toward the teacher. The teacher who has a lot of content knowledge and has a rich variety of instructional strategies may simply not have the room to build instruction around the unique understandings of individual students, let alone have the capacity to gather such information. This is perhaps the most judgmental of the chapters. It is clear that although Cohen is sympathetic, he feels intensely that teachers should actively seek out and act upon knowledge about students’ knowledge and understanding in a manner that increases students’ comprehension and engagement. The nuance of the chapter consists of the distinctions between knowledge gained by performance acts such as tests or homework and knowledge gained by in-depth engagement with the minds of the students being taught.
Here is a book, then, that lays out predicaments but in general does little to resolve them. The bloggers chatting about the book have been quite distressed, even irritated, about this aspect. But having yet another list of solutions without thoughtfully considering the issues and the goals is probably not what we need right now. I can imagine both teacher educators and teachers reading and studying Chapter 3 with a combination of interest and bewilderment. Here are landscapes with unfamiliar landmarks, predicaments with no clear solutions, important and recognizable goals but unmarked paths. This is how you start a discussion, an investigation, an inquiry. Inviting our future teachers and our current teacher educators to engage in such a conversation might just help to head us in a better direction.