Differentiated Learning Opportunities for Teachers

• In Event: The New Lives of Teachers

Abstract

Margolis began his career as a high school English teacher in New York City (1993-1999), helping to build a new school that sought to provide a focused and personalized education for city children. Frustrated with lack of opportunities for his own growth, and by a disconnect between the school’s mission for students and its environment for teachers, Margolis left to pursue doctoral studies with an eye on contributing to what we know about teachers’ lives, and how to help sustain them in their work.

At the University of Michigan (1999-2003), Margolis became interested in processes that helped teachers reflect on their teaching experiences to promote growth and development. His dissertation research took place in a Detroit charter school which, like the school in which he began his career, was also seeking to provide a fundamentally different type of education. His initial intent was to spend a year as a participant-observer, providing professional development to the teachers that was in the same spirit as the school’s educational philosophy for students. However, within weeks it became clear to Margolis that his efforts were just a small slice of the staff’s teaching lives. Questions about the impact of specific professional development activities became subsumed by much larger ones that sought to investigate the relationship between school policies, administrative actions, staff mood, and individual teacher dispositions.

The interactive relationship between teachers’ lived experiences and educational reform policies has remained at the core of Margolis’ research, and is the lens through which he will comment on Day and Gu’s book. Just as Day and Gu have creatively reinterpreted and updated Huberman’s (1993) pioneering research on the professional life cycle of teachers, so Margolis (see, for example, 2008) has undertaken a related project examining the lives of teachers with 4-6 years of teaching experience. Margolis notes Day and Gu’s close attention to what has changed in society and education over the past 20 years – changes that have made maintaining a professional balance significantly more challenging for teachers. In light of how Day and Gu emphasize variation in teachers’ lives and work places, Margolis will comment on how their research findings can be generalized beyond the United Kingdom and the particular sample of 300 teachers with whom they interacted.

The focus in The New Lives of Teachers on differentiating learning opportunities for teachers, in turn bound up with their current professional identities, also has implications for educational leadership. In particular, as Margolis argues in a recent commentary in Teachers College Record (2010) on “teacher quality” and “Race to the Top,” Day and Gu highlight the importance of locally in-tune educational leaders to help teachers remain motivated and able to manage work-life tensions. Margolis will comment on the specific conditions that need to be in place for principals and head teachers to take on such an “ethnographic” stance, as well as the systemic changes that will need to occur to actualize such a dramatic shift in approaching educational leadership.

Author

• Jason M. Margolis, Duquesne University