When Teachers Inhabit School Reform: Encountering Instructional Change in Three Cases

Abstract

This dissertation uses historical and qualitative research methods to understand teachers’ complex relationships with school reform and instructional change. It presents three discrete cases of classroom change over history and probes what these changes mean to the individuals charged with carrying them out: teachers. Paper I, “From Teacher Improvement to Teacher Turnover: Unintended Consequences of School Reform in Quincy, Massachusetts, 1872-1893,” reconsiders the “Quincy Method,” widely considered a successful nineteenth-century school reform. Pioneered by Francis Parker in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1875, it fostered broad pedagogic change to an ordinary school system and transformed it into a renowned hub of child-centered instruction. In this article, I revisit the reform and explore its interaction with the Massachusetts teacher labor market. In a market characterized by low wages and a teacher oversupply but few experienced, well-trained ones, teachers used Quincy’s reform to obtain higher-paying, higher status positions while municipalities used it to recruit competent applicants. Both practices jeopardized Quincy’s cohesive system. Though the ensuing turnover may have brought progressive pedagogies to the mainstream, departing teachers frequently assumed positions outside public schools or in systems ill-structured to maintain their expertise. Accordingly, the article probes a celebrated reform’s unintended consequences and contributes to scholarship on nineteenth-century progressive school reforms and women teachers. Paper II, titled “‘But Aren’t We Extinct?’: Inhabited Reform and Instructional Visibility in an Open Space School Forty Years Later,” reconsiders 1960s open space school, a reform which removed partitions between classrooms in part to alleviate teacher isolation. This model was long ago deemed a failure. Years later, teachers in surviving open space facilities continue to navigate the reform. Despite wide dismissal of the model, components of teachers’ work that open space schools sought to normalize (collaboration, informality, proximity) are increasingly valued for improving teachers’ professional communities. In addition, “open” designs are resurfacing in new school models. Picking up where earlier scholars left off, this article elevates perspectives of teachers working in a surviving open space school today using a conceptual framework of situated cognition. In so doing, it seeks to extend literature on teacher collaboration and teachers’ social sense-making in implementation. Findings illustrate a schooling environment in which teachers are enormously impacted by one another’s classrooms, prompting an array of coping strategies. While participants underscore frustrations with the design, they also highlight regular exchanges of teaching practices and professional camaraderie, both of which participants largely attribute to the instructional visibility normalized by open spaces. As a result, these teachers are decidedly conflicted about their district’s plans for a new facility of self-contained classrooms. This research complicates the popular narrative of teachers as impediments to school reform, as Hilltop teachers remain notably sympathetic to open space despite its challenges. The work additionally extends literature on situated cognition as it relates to teachers’ implementation of policy, highlighting the impact of social context on individual teachers’ sense-making. Further, to capture the uniqueness of participants’ situation, occupying past reformers’ ideas, I advance a theory of inhabited reform to describe teachers’ ongoing, evolving negotiation of particularly durable reforms. While these findings do not encourage a renewal of open space schools, they do suggest that schools offer teachers regular time and space for informal collaboration and interaction in addition to more formalized approaches. Paper III, “‘I Need to Sit Beside Them’: Teachers’ Relational Work with Students in Changing COVID-19 Contexts,” examines pandemic teaching across four secondary schools in a single city. Through in-depth interviews with forty-one teachers and three instructional coaches, the paper traces teachers’ evolving relational work with students over three school years shaped by COVID-19. Its analysis illuminates complex interactions between teachers’ changing contexts and their relational work. Though conceived with equity and safety in mind, fluctuating, technology-driven instructional arrangements and their associated policies radically limited teachers’ relational opportunities with students. Individual school practices occasionally moderated these constraints. At times, individual teachers creatively adapted teaching’s relational demands amid uncertainty. Many, however, experienced a profound sense of loss and diminished commitment as their work became increasingly unrecognizable and their interactions with students grew complicated. Though the contexts I examine were particular to COVID-19 and unusual, my analysis of teachers’ responses to them underscores the primacy of teacher-student relationships and interactions in teachers’ work in ordinary times. A close examination of pandemic teaching reveals how fragile teachers’ relational work is when the circumstances of teaching and learning are upset so intensely.