Teaching or Testing in Urban Schools: Learning to Manage Curriculum Dilemmas

• In Event: “Knowing It All”: Conceptualizing the Curriculum for the Preparation and Practice of Elementary Teachers

Abstract

This paper explores the challenges of learning to teach in urban schools and develop a curriculum that reflects the lives of students while at the same time meeting the requirements of the standardized curriculum and testing regime. In recent years the teachers’ role in determining the curriculum has diminished given external mandates that constrain their choices. Schools that serve poor communities often score low on the academic performance index (API). Labeled “low performing” they bear the burden of high levels of external regulation including standardized curricular and instructional choices and standardized tests. These standardizing strategies are meant to promote equity and ensure that all students receive comparable opportunities to learn. Many argue the strategy yields opposite results (Popham, 2001; Ravitch, 2010). Teachers in urban schools face students with a wide range of prior experiences including academic skills. As student diversity grows, less rather than more standardization is needed. The restrictions placed on teachers predictably raise dilemmas when they are required to teach a standard curriculum and measure standard outcomes when their students are anything but “standard.” Managing this as a novice teacher is challenging, indeed.
The study reported on in this paper is part of a larger project looking at predictable urban school teaching dilemmas. Drawing on the work of Cuban (2001) and Lampert (1985) the study examines dilemmas of practice written by new teachers enrolled in a professional preparation program designed to prepare teachers for urban settings. Cuban (2001) distinguishes between problems and dilemmas of practice. He argues teaching problems are “tame;” and can be solved. He contrasts those with dilemmas, which he describes as “wicked” because they are “…ill-defined, ambiguous, complicated, interconnected situations packed with potential conflict” (p. 10).
The data for the study consisted of 158 dilemma narratives from three cohorts of preservice teachers. I used a qualitative methodology to analyze the data in several phases. First, I sorted the dilemmas selecting those caused by conditions of the urban setting in particular and identified the factors of the setting that contributed to the dilemma. Working with that group I did a content analysis to determine dilemma themes by asking, “What are these dilemmas about?” Finally, I analyzed each theme area to understand the nature of the dilemmas and how they reflected the challenges of learning to teach in urban schools. This paper reports on the subset of the dilemma narratives that focused on curriculum.
The analysis of the curriculum dilemmas yielded two characteristics of the urban context that alone and in interaction challenge new teachers: the diversity of the student population and the standardization of both the mandated curriculum and testing that predominates in urban schools. A close analysis of five representative cases reported on in this paper provides a rich picture of how new teachers frame these dilemmas and work to resolve them. Given that these dilemmas are predictable, the study offers implications for both teachers and teacher educators preparing and supporting new teachers who have chosen to teach in urban schools.

Author

• Anna E. Richert, Mills College