“Professional Language” in Research, Teacher Education, and School Settings

• In Event: “Professional Language” in Education: Enhancing Communication Within and Across Research, Teacher Education, and School Settings

Abstract

Objectives

Many scholars (e.g., Author, 2008; Lortie, 1975) lament our lack of common language in education. Dreeben (2005) argues that our nebulous language “for expressing the characteristics of the work” remains one of the “most serious obstacles to establishing a satisfactory level of competence as an occupational property of teaching” (p. 69). Despite these arguments—and the fact that our communication problems are potentially solvable (e.g., McCloskey & Bulechek, 2000)—educators and education researchers have paid little attention to this topic. The current theoretical analysis aims to advance the discussion by offering a working definition of “professional language” in education and a framework of the specific communication challenges faced in research, teacher education, and school settings.

Perspective

Professional language in education, as used here, refers to consistent and precise terminology, used by researchers or educators during professional discourse, for referring to the core participants, activities, and materials of teaching and learning. Following Clark (1996), language is viewed as a tool for coordinating joint activity, for doing things together. By focusing solely on the lexicon of professional communication, this construct is related, yet markedly distinct, from notions of register (Scarcella, 2003), speech community (Gumperz, 2001), discourse community (Swales, 1990), and community of practice (Wenger, 1998). Although scholars continue to debate the core facets of teaching, I follow Cohen, Raudenbush, and Ball (2003) by focusing on relationships between the teacher, students, and content.

Methods, Evidence, and Results

The current conceptual framework combines literature reviews from several fields—the sociology of the professions (e.g., Abbott, 1988), sociology of classification (e.g., Bowker & Star, 1999), and linguistic anthropology (e.g., Goodwin, 1994)—with content analyses of frameworks of teaching (e.g., Charlotte Danielson’s Framework). From these analyses, I have developed the following framework of some of the consequences of inconsistent and imprecise language in research, teacher education, and school settings:

RESEARCH
• Accumulating Knowledge: Researchers are unable to accumulate knowledge around key educational constructs (e.g., “discussion”) when they define those constructs differently within and across fields.

TEACHER EDUCATION
• Guiding Perception: Without a shared set of perceptual categories for important classroom phenomena (e.g., “numerical reasoning”), teacher educators are unable to teach novices what to notice in similar ways within and across programs.
• Guiding Practice: Without shared understandings of the core practices of teaching (e.g., “modeling”), teacher educators are unable to teach those practices with fidelity within and across programs.

SCHOOLS
• Exchanging Information: Without shared language, teachers are unable to communicate efficiently, and with minimal ambiguity, about common or critical classroom events (e.g., students, tasks, teaching practices). As a consequence, knowledge fails to accumulate across classrooms and time.
• Aligning Practice: Teachers may need to develop common assessments, tasks, or practices within and across schools. They waste valuable time and energy when they fail to establish shared understandings of the constructs at the center of their calibration efforts (e.g., “discussion”).

Significance

This framework provides a more nuanced understanding of the problem of professional language in our field and the specific issues requiring additional research.

Author

• Jamie O'Keeffe, Stanford University