Neoliberal Pedagogies: Enacting Doug Lemov in Urban Schools

• In Event: Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Concentric Circles of Teach For America/Teach For All: A Layered Approach to Neoliberal Reform

Abstract

This paper’s authors explore the ways in which neoliberalism expresses itself in the practices and pedagogies of teachers within two different programmatic/school contexts: a No Excuses Charter School and a turnaround school connected to an Urban Teacher Residency. In particular, they examine the ways in which Doug Lemov’s (2010) exceptionally popular book, Teach Like a Champion, instantiates neoliberal approaches to teaching and learning within classrooms where teachers are required to use Lemov as a classroom management and instructional tool. Interrogating how Lemov’s teaching techniques are enacted by teachers (and on students) in urban schools is vital in that it exposes how pedagogies, like those valorized by Lemov, are ideologically freighted. By attending to the ways in which two different teachers contend with and enact Lemov’s techniques, the authors aim to illuminate the deep and often unsaid ways that neoliberalism operates within the lived practices of the classroom.

In the first section, the authors share findings from a year-long, multicase study (Stake, 2013) examining the learning to teach processes of novice teachers enrolled in an Urban Teacher Residency (UTR). The authors focus on the ways in which the UTR’s centralization of Lemov in the classroom-- Lemov was the center of the evaluative framework--ultimately complicated and exacerbated the deep race and class tensions that Jackie, a white resident placed in one of the UTR’s recently turned around schools, experienced with her almost entirely low income and Black student population. Jackie’s lack of cultural or community connection to her students, in combination with Lemov’s emphasis on compliance rather than learning, led to a painful and paralytic learning to teach process. Ultimately, the required use of Lemov undermined Jackie’s ability to build interpersonal relationships with her students and simultaneously translated into an unwitting conclusion that learning is compliance.

In the second section, the authors share findings from a year-long, multicase study (Stake, 2013) that explored the degree to which teachers in No Excuses Charter Schools take up neoliberal ideologies. To do this, the researchers interrogated teachers’ beliefs about the purpose of schooling, observed their daily practices, and identified the gaps and overlaps between their ideologies and pedagogy. Each of the No Excuses schools in this study is staffed at the administrative and teaching level primarily by Teach For America (TFA) corps members and alumni who have received coaching in Lemov both as a part of their TFA training and school-based professional development. In focusing on Sandra, a seventh grade science teacher, the authors elucidates how her reliance on Lemov translated into a test-centric curriculum, objective-driven instruction, and pedagogy of compliance. While Sandra had significant critiques of the Lemov approach, she felt unskilled and unsupported in accessing alternatives. When students refused to comply and failed to perform, Sandra simply attempted to implement Lemov with more fidelity, ultimately challenging her relationship to her students and to teaching itself.

Taken together, these nested case studies elucidate how neoliberal constructions of teaching and learning limit teachers’ relationships to the curriculum, to their students, and to their profession.

Authors

• Lauren Gatti, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Beth Leah Sondel, University of Wisconsin