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Students should learn  to reason competently, think constructively and understand key ideas in mathematics and science. They need to comprehend and manage new information, technologies, and ever more complex problems as these emerge throughout their lifetimes. Successful teachers help students do this by “teaching for understanding” — focusing on student thinking, examining powerful scientific and mathematical ideas, and providing equitable opportunities for learning.

UW-Madison education professor Adam Gamoran says that schools must provide better resources to classroom teachers; align purposes, perceptions, and commitments; and sustain change. Gamoran says that supporting teaching for understanding calls on schools to increase their capacity for change. “That requires developing new material resources and human and social resources as well, and allocating resources in ways that support teachers’ efforts.”

Self-sustaining change

Schools and districts enhance their capacity for change when they promote leadership among teachers, recast administrative roles as facilitators rather than managers, change the allocation of time during the school day, and provide materials and resources suitable to new teaching endeavors.

When schools and districts allow new roles to emerge, they foster growth of new human and social resources. Schools and districts that force new initiatives to conform to existing arrays of resources, however, risk stifling potential change or marginalizing change agents.

Gamoran and colleagues have found many examples of new leadership emerging in the context of professional development among design collaboratives. A design collaborative  involves collaboration between two complementary aspects of design and research. Researchers craft and implement the design of a learning environment, then conduct systematic research on the student learning that results from the environment. Design collaboratives aim to design instruction and professional development so that all students (and their teachers) learn with understanding.

Gamoran uses the definition of “professional community” developed by Fred Newmann and associates at WCER’s Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools. Professional communities

• exhibit a shared sense of purpose in their attention to student thinking.
• emphasize student learning, as opposed to teachers’ more common emphasis on administrative details and managing student behavior.
• collaborate on ways to improve their student’s understanding of mathematics, in contrast to teachers’ usual practice of working in isolation.
• talk thoughtfully about the nature and practice of teaching, and
• make their own teaching practices public instead of keeping their practice private and confined to the classroom.

A contrasting case occurred at another research site, a Wisconsin urban high school. There, professional development time was not added on, but taken out of the regularly scheduled meeting time. This meant that common planning times could not be used to diffuse ideas from the design collaborative to other teachers in the school, as occurred elsewhere. Moreover, the school was organized into “families” that cut across subject areas, which made professional collaboration within subject areas difficult to pursue. Finally, teachers in this linguistically diverse school were divided among bilingual and monolingual teachers, a split that was not overcome by the design collaborative.

Educators across the nation are striving to improve teaching and learning, often with the help of outside experts such as comprehensive reformers, leaders of change movements, and university-school partnerships. How can schools and districts best support these efforts to improve? For teachers attempting to “teach for understanding,” what supports and barriers are presented by their schools and districts? How can the supports be enhanced and the barriers overcome?

Gamoran and team are producing a book to be published by Teachers College Press in 2002. Its working title is “Capacity for Change: How Districts and Schools Can Support Teaching for Understanding in Mathematics and Science.”

For more information contact Gamoran at gamoran@ssc.edu.