Teaching and Evaluation When Dewey Meets Feyerabend: "More Dancing, Less Marching" in Doll's Nonlinear Mode

• In Event: Education for Diverse Democracy: A Deweyan Complexity-Based Vision of Schools

Abstract

I begin my discussion of a complex approach to teaching and its evaluation by rejecting the scientism of any algorithmic formulation of teaching method a la Ralph Tyler. Rather, I embrace here Bill Doll’s (2013b) non-linear mode, detailed in “Complexity in the Classroom.” At the classroom level, we see a complex living system, replete with characteristics including nested structures, capacity for self-organization, and emergent qualities that transcend simple additive characteristics, including the ability for the overall structure to adapt and evolve. I explore the ways in which teaching method must be understood in this context, with a particular focus upon the need for innovation and improvisation on the part of the teacher, as a complement to deep content knowledge and careful planning. Extending from this, I consider the ways in which such characteristics are incompatible with current models of teacher evaluation, particularly the use of edTPA for the assessment of new teachers’ readiness to teach, as well as the systems in many states used for experienced teachers.

The act of teaching in a complex setting draws from two relatively discrete processes—only one of which involves planning that takes place in a relatively static environment. As characterized by John Dewey in The Child and the Curriculum, teaching begins with the creation of the “map” that will comprise the curriculum, with its mix of vital “landmarks” comprised of disciplinary content. Inherent in this structure is the opportunity for flexible exploration among the landmarks as students’ own interests and understanding develop. The active component of teaching—the facilitation involved in guiding and mentoring the “conjoint” exploration Dewey advocated—necessarily involves a great deal of experimentation and improvisation. While these aspects of teaching were not specifically addressed by Dewey in his discussions of the classroom, key components are apparent in his understanding of human thought and decision-making, most notably in one of his early works on intuition contained in his Psychology. The addition of Feyerabend’s work in methodological anarchism, as outlined in his landmark work, Against Method, provides us with the blend of freedom and humanitarianism that are so vital to the visions of Doll, Dewey and Feyerabend alike.

Significantly, given the current explosion in teacher evaluation systems, the characteristics associated with complexity are precisely those that resist and often entirely escape the narrow and atomized standardized measures in use. As Doll (2013b) observed of the teaching and learning that unfolded in his own classroom, “While the process seemed disorderly from a segmented view, it had a unity found only by looking at the whole class during the entire period” (p. 201). Clearly, while a degree of simplification and compression of data is needed to make retrospective judgments that will help to evaluate teaching and improve it, to attempt to compress the processes at the classroom level is, as Feyerabend asserted (echoing John Stuart Mill), akin to the Chinese practice of foot-binding: it deforms natural and individual development.

Author

• Deborah Seltzer-Kelly, Wabash College