How Much Is Too Much? Struggle, Scaffolding, and the Common Core

• In Event: 52.058 - Teaching for Equity in Complex Times: Negotiating the Common Core State Standards in a High-Performing Bilingual School

Abstract

This paper focuses on how teachers make sense of policy and how that sense-making influences their literacy practices, as well as their interpretations of and responses to student language and literacy learning. Guided by Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), the paper’s analysis draws upon data from a two-year qualitative study of ten teachers working to implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) at a high-performing, bilingual K-8 school serving mostly Latino, Emergent Bilinguals.

Although it engages a topic—standards implementation—that has received significant attention in post-1990s educational research (e.g., Ravitch, 1990; Porter, 2007; Spillane, 2002) and more recently in heated popular debate (e.g., Strauss, 2014), this paper breaks from traditional research accounts of standards-based reform and stands apart from the polarizing political discourse that tends to frame reform in simplistic ‘good/bad’ dichotomous terms. For example, instead of assuming standards’ achievement-generating power and/or attempting to assess the fidelity with which teachers implement standards, this paper’s analysis takes as its subject those tensions and contradictions that arise as teachers negotiate the potentially competing demands of policy implementation and equity-minded teaching (i.e., teaching guided by tenets of multicultural, bilingual, and critical education).

Findings speak to the tensions and contradictions that CCSS implementation raised for teachers concerning the nature of student learning, specifically, and the role of teaching in relation to it. In this case, for example, teachers’ aversion to “banking” (Freire, 1970) and “hypermediating” (i.e., over-scaffolding) (Gutierréz & Stone, 2002) already primed them to minimize direct instruction, modeling, and/or other forms of explicit instructional support. This tendency was then exacerbated by the assumption—championed by CCSS authors and advocates (e.g., Coleman & Pimentel, 2012; Fisher, Frey, & Lapp, 2012)—that the most meaningful learning occurs when students are left to struggle and “figure things out” on their own, and also by the connection between that assumption and popular discourse concerning the importance of cultivating “grit” in students from outside the dominant group especially (e.g., Duckworth, 2013; Tough, 2012). As a result, teachers felt both that they were making good on their commitment to CCSS-aligned rigorous instruction (e.g., instruction that pressed students to engage in close readings of complex informational texts akin to those they would encounter on standardized tests) and that they were often witnessing students struggle more than they as teachers deemed productive. Among other things, the paper unpacks how different teachers made sense of these seemingly contradictory sentiments, and with what implications for them and for their students.

Ultimately, this paper’s central contributions rest in its attention to a topic—the implications of the CCSS for classroom practice—that receives a good deal of sensational, superficial, or speculative coverage in popular discourse. It extends the slim research base in various ways, and concludes with important questions about what it means and might look like to cultivate a healthy balance between struggle and scaffolding so that teaching and learning are generative and humanizing, rather than defeating or discouraging, for teachers and EB students alike.

Author

• Kathryn Struthers, Hunter College