"Shhhh! We Need to Do Our Oral Language": Questioning Best Practices in the Primary Grades

• In Event: 52.040 - Reconsidering Context: An Examination of the Role of Context in Research and Practice in Early Childhood

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to examine instructional moments where teachers’ instincts about what they needed to do to support the social and academic achievement of the children in their classrooms came up against particular recommendations for best practices. The study was located at a school where nearly all of the student population qualified for free and reduced-lunch. As such, it was the target of many federal- and state-funded efforts to improve its test scores. Erickson (2014, p. 1) critiques the current dominant research paradigm for its adherence to the belief that improving children’s school experiences requires the “exact copying of ‘best practices’ that are easily exportable on a large scale.” In contrast, Erickson recommends celebrating local adaptations, and conceptualizing research on “pretty good” practices as sources of inspiration for educators in other places. This study is situated in a broader interpretive project (Erickson, 1986), which took place over six years in a rural school that serves predominately African American students. The data includes video of classroom lessons from preschool, kindergarten and first grades as well as audio of interviews with teachers. For the current study, episodes identified as problematic by the teachers were analyzed using open and then more focused coding. This proposal presents a single condensed transcript from one of the preschool years, although the full data set includes transcripts across three years. The conversation took place during a lesson using a scripted curriculum, which adopted as part of the Reading First initiative. The discussion was prompted by a picture of a snake on the flipchart.
Tyronne: Snake bite you. He bite your arm. (He gripped his arm to show how it would happen.)
Mrs.Stanley: Mmm-hm. That’s why we tell you not to play with snakes.
Helena: Cause they’ll bite you up.
Mrs.Stanley: Are some snakes poisonous?
Children: Yes! Yes!
Tyronne: If you put him in a doghouse, he still might get out.
Cedric: A snake can bite a dog and turn it into a snake.
Tameka: They will bite you on the leg…
Mrs.Stanley: Okay, okay (glancing at the clock). Shhhh! We need to do our oral language. Touch your nose.
In this episode, Mrs. Stanley prompted the children to stop talking so they could do their oral language activities. In doing so, she was responding to district mandates to follow the curriculum as well as negative “write ups” from supervisors in cases where she had failed to do so. Promoting Erickson’s notion of “low fidelity” implementations would allow teachers like Ms. Stanley more room to maneuver in situations like this one.
The instructional episodes presented in this study provide empirical evidence of times that “best practices” advocated by both traditional and reform-oriented researchers interfered with teachers’ abilities to be responsive to the children in their rooms in ways that were most likely to promote productive engagements with academic content.

Author

• Amy Noelle Parks, Michigan State University