What Counts as Quality Teaching? Who Decides? How Data-Centric Reforms Undervalue Teacher Sensemaking

• In Event: 14.032 - Data Use for Improving Teaching and Expanding Opportunities to Learn: Implications for Policy and Practice

Abstract

Purpose
We examine how data-centric reform and new systems for educator evaluation define what counts as quality teaching (Fenstermacher & Richardson, 2005). Because such reform efforts often make claims about building teacher capacity and supporting teacher professional learning, we are especially interested in teachers’ sense-making opportunities and teacher agency.

Theoretical Framework
We use a sociocultural sense-making perspective to examine how meanings were constructed by state, district, and school reform initiatives for conceptions of quality teaching and evidence of student and teacher learning (Coburn, 2004; Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer, 2002). We focus on: relationships between teachers’ efforts to participate in meaning-making about quality teaching and student learning; teacher agency; and the role of tools, norms, and organizational routines in structuring participation (Sherer & Spillane, 2011; Wenger, 1998).

Methods
This paper is derived from a larger ethnographic study examining how data use and accountability systems play a part in the day-to-day practice of educators. We conducted this study from the teachers’ standpoint by becoming embedded research partners shadowing teachers for 2 years. We analyzed how 15 middle school teachers and 3 school leaders engaged in data-centric reform initiatives over 2 years of district-wide strategic improvement planning and a new educator evaluation system.

We conducted 700 hours of classroom teaching and meeting observations, 300 hours of post-teaching interviews, and 80 in-depth teacher interviews. Through multiple, iterative cycles of coding and interpretation, we analyzed data sources to identify: 1) routines, framing, and tools used to define and shape quality teaching, 2) patterns in negotiating meaning of quality teaching, 3) development of norms of classroom practice and participation in organizational routines.

Findings
We found that a vision of quality teaching was externally defined by tools used to evaluate teaching and by instructional templates for lesson planning and enactment. High-quality teaching was defined as teaching that: 1) aligned with particular SIP goals, 2) improved student outcomes on a limited portfolio of measures, and 3) directly matched examples offered in evaluation tools. Teachers consistently made bids for meaning-making by: 1) raising questions about problems of practice, 2) initiating conversations aimed at problematizing complex features of teaching and learning, and 3) expressing a desire to improve on particular dimensions of teaching. However, these bids for meaning-making were not taken up as legitimate forms of participation in organizational routines. Instead, these were ignored or marked as troublemaking. As a result, data-centric reform efforts fostered inauthentic performances – what teachers referred to as “hoop jumping” – and a growing sense of distrust and demoralization among teachers (Santoro, 2011). Erosion of teacher agency and professional identity, particularly one’s own sense of competence and contribution, were also common.

Significance
Our findings serve as a cautionary tale about what can happen when policymakers and leaders undervalue and discourage teacher sense-making as full partners in organizational change. As we make transitions into new policy contexts under ESSA, this study illuminates key problems of practice and signals areas where caution and care are warranted.

Authors

• Chris Bradford, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Melissa Braaten, University of Colorado - Boulder