What Makes for Powerful Classrooms, and How Can We Support Teachers in Creating Them?

• In Event: AERA Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award (2013) Address: Alan Schoenfeld (#AERAEd)

Abstract

Our sense of powerful classrooms is somewhat like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s sense of pornography: we haven’t defined them, but we think we know them when we see them. Except that we don’t – opinions about “good instruction” differ, although research clearly says certain things are important. My R&D goal has been to do some ground clearing: to lay out a straightforward way of characterizing classrooms that produce students who are powerful thinkers, to test that characterization empirically, and then to fashion forms of professional development that supports teachers’ growth in the things that count. I’ll discuss proigress along those lines.

Author

• Alan H. Schoenfeld, University of California - Berkeley