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TEACHERS LEARNING FROM POLICY:
CASES FROM THE MICHIGAN READING REFORM

By

Nancy Eileen Jennings

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Teacher Education

1992

ABSTRACT

TEACHERS LEARNING FROM POLICY:
CASES FROM THE MICHIGAN READING REFORM

By

Nancy Eileen Jennings

This study focuses on the stories of three teachers learning from
and about a state-level reading policy and the ways in which their
learning influences their practices in teaching reading. It explores
the relationships among these teachers’ learning, their interpretation
of the policy, and changes in their classrooms. These issues are
examined in the context of a state-initiated reform in elementary
reading in Michigan.

The study suggests that teachers, like all learners, bring their
own experiences and beliefs to their learning which influences the sense
they make of the policy. In turn, the sense they make of the policy
shapes how and what they learn. Thus, learning and interpretation
mutually shape each other in an iterative process.

The study also explores the nature of the learning opportunities
connected to the policy that these teachers experience, such as
inservice workshops and preservice education courses. It suggests that
although certain kinds of learning opportunities may help a teacher
understand the new kind of pedagogy the policy advocates, the teachers’
perceptions of the learning opportunities are as significant as the
nature of the opportunities themselves, in terms of what they actually
learn.

Finally, the study raises questions about how researchers and

policymakers understand the relationship between policy and practice.

It suggests that change in practice may need to be measured not just by
how close a teacher’s practice is to a standard vision of the policy,
but also by how far a teacher has travelled in his or her thinking and
practices in light of a policy. It also suggests that policies need to
be looked at in the larger context of ideas that exist in educational
circles to understand their impact, or lack of impact, on teachers’

thinking and actions.

Copyright by
NANCY EILEEN JENNINGS
1992

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledgements for a dissertation have always seemed tricky to
me. Although a dissertation represents a great deal of effort and
endurance on the part of the author, as a scholarly product it is
commonplace. So acknowledging people for their support to produce
something as ordinary as a dissertation seems a bit strange. I know I
have been very lucky as a graduate student to have received the
intellectual and emotional support I have from my teachers, my
colleagues, my friends, and my family. I would like to thank some of
them here, but only in the hope that someday the end product of my
intellectual efforts will reflect the very uncommon gifts they have
given me.

First, I would like to acknowledge the larger research project of
which my study is a part. The project has been supported in part by
grants from the Pew Charitable Trust; Carnegie Corporation of New York;
the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, which is funded by a
grant from the 0.5. Department of Education, Office of Educational
Research and Improvement (Grant No. OERI—G-OOBGQOOII); and by Michigan
State University. Principal investigators for the project are Deborah
Loewenberg Ball, David K. Cohen, Penelope Peterson, and Suzanne Nilson.
Other researchers on the project are Peggy Aiken, Carol Barnes, Jennifer

Bormann, Daniel Chazan, 8.6. Grant, Ruth Heaton, Nancy Knapp, Susan

Luks, Steve Mattson, Sue Poppink, Richard Prawat, Jeremy Price, Ralph
Putnam, Christopher Reimann, Janine Remillard, Angela Shojgreen-Downer,
James Spillane, and Karl Hheatley. All of these people have helped me
greatly. They have listened to long discussions of my field notes, read
interviews, and engaged in many conversations about ideas related to
policy and practice. Secretaries for the project--Cindy Casey, Lisa
Roy, Jan Knight, and Stephanie Grant-~have also been a great help to me
in keeping track of the data. I am particularly indebted to David
Cohen, S.G. Grant, and Jimmy Spillane for their help in thinking about
these issues. The four of us have been working for the last few years
analyzing the Michigan reading policy. My thinking about reading policy -
and classroom practices has grown greatly because of our work together.
The views expressed in this dissertation, though, are my own and not
necessarily shared by the Grantors nor other researchers on the project.
Next, I would like to acknowledge the help of my committee:
Deborah Ball, David Cohen, Helen Featherstone, and G. Williamson
McDiarmid. I simply can not imagine a more challenging yet supportive
group of people to have helped me in this process. David Cohen, as
director and dissertation adviser, always created time for me in a life
which is always devoid of time. I have learned a great deal about
reading, thinking, writing, and grace from him. His mixture of pressure
and support was exactly what I needed to finish this work. Bill
McDiarmid, as chair of my committee and adviser throughout graduate
school, has put up with me in many different ways. He has always given
me benefit of his fine thinking. He also has paid attention to both

institutional and grammatical details. Without him, the myriad of

vi

graduate school forms would not have been filled out and this
dissertation would contain many more misplaced commas. Helen
Featherstone shared her knowledge, varied experiences, and deep
commitment to teachers. She raised questions about my analysis which,
because they were different from others, pushed my thinking in ways that
it would not have been pushed without her. She also provided a great
sense of balance and humor--always knowing when it was more important to
talk about daughters than work. Deborah Ball is not only a wonderful
mentor with many great ideas and comments, she is a good friend. Her
insight as well as her unflagging enthusiasm dished out in early morning
runs and innumerable meetings contributed more than she will ever know.
I’d like to thank my family. My parents who, even if they did not
always understand, never questioned what I was doing with my life these
last few years. They have never failed to be supportive of me and
delighted by my accomplishments. I thank them for being the same
through this. My daughters, Emily and Alice were wonderful. Alice
created the verb "dissertate" to explain to her friends (perhaps to
herself) what I always was doing. Her sense that "dissertating" was
important pulled me through on days when it seemed anything but. Emily
managed many times to step outside her high school world to help me out
with babysitting and other household chores. Her late night
conversations about analysis class and swimming brought normalcy to the
ends of many days which was exactly what I needed. My husband, who is
my best friend and biggest supporter, has been helpful in too many ways

to list. He have been together for over twenty years and lived through

vii

many things--two children, two dissertations, a few houses, too many

pets. I cherish our life together.

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page
1. LEARNING T0 TEACH READING ................... I
The Reading Policy: A Shift in Focus ........... 2

The Perspective of the State Department of Education . . 6
Teachers Learning from Policy .............. 10

2. THE CASE OF CATHERINE PRICE .................. 19
Background ........................ 21

Ms. Price’s Existing Beliefs and Practices ........ 23

Beliefs about Teaching and Learning ......... 23

Her Practice .................... 27

Teaching Literature .............. 27

Language Arts Skills .............. 33

Ms. Price’s Learning About and From the Policy ...... 37
Learning to Write: Experiencing Policy as Learner . . 38

Acquiring Language ................. 43

Connecting Ideas .................. 44

Tensions in Practice ................... 47
Tensions Ms. Price Identifies ............ 47

Tensions I Observed ................. 48

Ms. Price, a Case of . . . ............... 52

3. THE CASE OF TOM FIELDER .................... 57
I Just Call It Reading. . .............. 57

Mr. Fielder’ s Sense Making of the Policy ......... 58

How Mr. Fielder Learned About the Policy ......... 60

Hhat Has Changed? .................... 64

Hhat Does This Change Look Like? ............ 67

Use of Informational Text .............. 67

Questioning Students ................ 69

What Has Not Changed? .................. 71

Reading as Separate Skill Lessons .......... 71

Recall of Text ................... 75
Understanding Change and Resistance to Change ...... 78

Mr. Fielder, a Case of . . . .............. B3

ix

Chapter Page
4. THE CASE OF LUCY SALVUCCI ................... 88
Ms. Salvucci as an Innovative Teacher .......... 88
Learning to Teach .................... 92
Learning from Formal Opportunities ............ 97

From Policy ..................... 97

From District Inservices .............. 97

Her Classroom as an Opportunity to Learn ......... 99
Possible Explanations ................. 104

Why Would They Do It, and She Not? .......... 105

Ms. Salvucci, a Case of. . . ............. 107

5. COMPARING THE CASES ..................... 113
Reading Practices-~Fitting Policy ........... 114

Tom Fielder .................... 114

Catherine Price .................. 116

Lucy Salvucci ................... 118

Teachers’ Learning Experiences ............. 121

What They Were Taught ............... 121

What They Said They Learned ............ 123

Learning as Learner or Teacher ........ 123

Learning New Language ............ 127

What They Brought to their Learning Experiences . . . . 130

6. CONCLUSIONS ......................... 141

They Learned Different Things Depending on Who They

Here and What They Knew ............... 142
What They Know Changed and So Did Their Learning . . . . 145
They Constructed Different Learning Experiences Depending

on Who They Were and What They Knew ......... 147
From Whose Perspective Should We Come to

Understand Learning? ................ 150

What Can We Do With Understanding Learning from
These Two Perspectives? ............... 152
APPENDIX: METHODOLOGY AND RESEARCH PROCEDURES .......... 155
Site Selection ..................... 157
Teacher Selection ................... 158
State and District Level Data ............. 161
Data Collection .................... 162
Data Analysis ..................... 166
Analysis of Interview Data ............ 167
Analysis of Observation Data ........... 168
LIST OF REFERENCES ........................ 170

CHAPTER 1
LEARNING T0 TEACH READING

It was very frightening when it first came out because, you

know, they would go over the new definition and show us all

of those graphs and charts. And I went, "Oh no! I’ve been

doing it wrong all these years." I think all teachers 90

through this when they are given new information to learn.

(T. Fielder, interview, February 20, 1991)

When we met, Tom Fielder had been teaching second graders to read
for several years. He had always taught reading in what would be
considered "traditional" ways. Students learned to read by first
learning phonics and sight words. They read from basal readers and
answered questions about the text in workbooks that accompany the
basals. Mr. Fielder said he felt successful teaching that way. His
students did well on standardized tests for reading and the third grade
teachers in his building were pleased to get Mr. Fielder’s students.
They knew his students came well—prepared in the basics.

In the mid-19805 Mr. Fielder heard that the state of Michigan was
revising its definition for reading and was setting new goals and
objectives for reading instruction. He later reported that rumors of
the change made him quite anxious. He felt successful in teaching
children to read and liked the way he did it. He knew his practices were
similar to many teachers in the state, but he also knew that there were

more innovative ideas on teaching reading that some teachers, in his

building and elsewhere, were following. When the new definition was

2
officially announced in 1985, it represented a shift away from the modal
practices and thinking with which Mr. Fielder identified. The
definition stated: "Reading is the process of constructing meaning
through dynamic interaction among the reader, the text, and the context
of the reading situation." (Michigan Reading Association [MRA], 1987).
Mr. Fielder, like many educators across the state, said he was not sure
what the definition meant and what its implications were to reading
practices. The definition focused on constructing meaning of text and
called reading a dynamic process. It brought to the fore the reader’s
role in the reading process and the context or purposes for reading.
But what did these ideas mean for how students learn to read in
classrooms? What different things would Mr. Fielder have to do to teach
in a way compatible with this definition? Mr. Fielder did not know the
answers to these questions. Given how he thought about reading
instruction and the way he taught reading, though, he said he knew he

would have a lot to learn.

The Reading Policy: A Shift in Focus

From the very beginning state policymakers also knew that teachers
would need to learn new things in order to implement changes in reading
practice envisioned by the policy. Charles Peters, one of the key
policymakers for the reading policy who was a language arts coordinator
for a large intermediate school district in the state, remarked:

I think it is one of the issues that became very clear about

this whole process is that change was occurring because of

this knowledge and I think in the past knowledge has not been

a primary factor. . . . It’s not gimmicks. It’s not things

that are going to be kind of glitzy. It’s knowledge.
(interview, October 25, 1989).

3

Prior to the policy, reading instruction in most classrooms in the
state looked a lot like Mr. Fielder’s. Students spent much of their
instructional time being drilled on isolated skills or answering literal
questions in reading workbooks. What reading students did was primarily
short passages in basal readers. Little time was devoted to
comprehension of text (Durkin, 1978-79; MRA, 1987). These practices
were consistent with state policy at the time. Reading was defined by
the state as a series of discrete, hierarchically ordered skills that
needed to be learned before readers could comprehend text. The state
reading test, the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP),
measured how well students mastered the isolated skills.

The new focus in reading was very different. State policymakers,
in the new reading definition, highlighted for the first time that
readers bring things to their reading (their prior knowledge) which
influence the meaning they construct of text. The definition also
stated that readers have different purposes for reading (the context of
reading) which shape readers’ interpretations of text. These ideas
suggested that different readers might construct different meanings of
text. And this shift in focus implied radically different ways of
thinking about reading instruction. First, reading comprehension rather
than acquisition of skills was the main focus for reading. Second,
student ideas, experiences, and purposes for reading became factors in
how readers read and interpret text. Teachers would have to learn how
to help students make sense of text rather than merely recognize words
and would need greater insight into who their students were and what

they were thinking.

4

Policy documents which accompanied the new definition also
included the idea of readers’ using strategies to read more effectively.
These strategies were of two sorts. The first were cognitive strategies
that good readers use to make sense of text, including such things as
predicting events in a story, summarizing information, and monitoring
their comprehension. These strategies help readers think about their
own thinking and regulate it as they are reading. The second kind of
strategies involved understanding the organization of narrative text.
These strategies help readers understand how stories unfold and how
different parts of stories (setting, character, theme,) relate.

The strategies are useful in helping readers recall story events
and concepts more readily. Although good readers know and use these
strategies intuitively, the policy suggested that they can also be
taught to help ”non-strategic" readers read more effectively (MRA,
1987). As did ideas about prior knowledge and multiple interpretations,
the idea of teaching reading strategies implied great changes in reading
instruction. Teachers would need to learn how to teach the strategies
and how to help students use them effectively as they read.

Elaine Weber, the state reading consultant, talked about teachers
needing to “reprogram their radar” because of the policy so that they
would see reading as a process of making sense of text rather than a
process of collecting skills. She said she knew the new ideas in
reading were unfamiliar to most teachers and, therefore, the reform
meant that they had things to learn (E. Weber, interview, August 27,
1990). For Dr. Weber, the ideas were quite familiar. She had just
completed her doctorate in reading at Michigan State University and at

5
least part of her motivation in initiating the reform was to align
classroom practices with what she thought current reading research was
saying about reading instruction. To carry out the mission, she
elicited the help of many educators, both researchers and teachers, to
review reading curriculum and instruction. She particularly relied on
Charles Peters and Karen Wixson, a new faculty member in reading
education at the University of Michigan. Together, Drs. Weber, Wixson,
and Peters orchestrated the state reform.

These three policymakers concentrated their work in four areas:
they wrote the new definition for reading; developed new goals and
objectives; organized several state-sponsored reading conferences to
introduce their ideas to teachers; and finally, developed a new state
assessment for reading (the MEAP test). These four efforts and the
documents surrounding them made up the state policy for reading. It was
codified when the State Board of Education adopted the new definition in
1985 and when the revised MEAP test in reading was administered
state-wide for the first time in the fall of 1989.

As Dr. Peters’s and Dr. Weber’s earlier comments indicate, state
policymakers thought that teachers needed to learn things to change
their practices in light of the policy. Yet it is difficult to know from
their comments what and how they thought teachers might need to learn.
To carry out the policy’s ideas in practice, teachers would need to
learn about the ideas, but they would also need to learn from them.
Whereas the first kind of ”learning" is largely a matter of raising
teachers’ awareness of the policy by giving them information about it,

the latter implies, to traditional teachers at least, acquiring new ways

6
of thinking about reading. The two kinds of learning are not
necessarily distinct. Sproull (1981) makes an argument, in fact, that
how practitioners are made aware of policies shapes how they implement
them. Nor are they unusual. Cohen and Barnes (1992) suggest that by
definition, new policies contain new ideas or new configuration of old
ideas (there would be little reason for them otherwise) and therefore
imply some acquisition of new ways of thinking. But although neither
unusual nor distinct, the two kinds of learning raise different
pedagogical problems for policymakers. Making practitioners aware of a
policy seems essentially a problem of giving information. The way in
which information is given may shape what sense practitioners do with
it, but the learning necessary for teachers to be aware of a policy is
what Jackson (1986) might label as reproductive learning. Helping
practitioners make sense of new ideas and acquire new understandings is
not a matter of practitioners reproducing knowledge about policy given
to them, but of transforming knowledge into ideas that make sense.

For the reading policy, then, teacher learning was a complex
issue. Teachers needed to be made aware of the changes in the policy
and learn new conceptions of reading and new ideas about reading from
the policy. What did policymakers do to help teachers learn? Did their

actions appear to take into account both kinds of learning?

The Perspective of the State Department of Education
Weber planned a series of reading conferences across the state.
These conferences were two or three days events in which participants
were introduced to the ideas of the policy in large group orientation

meetings and then taught practical applications of the policy--that is,

7
new classroom activities and reading strategies to use with students--in
small group sessions. Each of these small group sessions were called
modules and were designed to demonstrate one reading strategy and/or
activity that could be used in classrooms. The conferences were held
around the state and generated a great deal of interest among state
educators. Attendance at these conferences was significantly larger
than Weber and others expected. Karen Wixson estimated that 1,300 people
attended one conference. Another reformer commented that Weber had been
surprised by the large numbers at all three of the major conferences (S.
Standerford, personal communication, June 18, 1990).

But despite the larger numbers of participants at the state
conferences their effort reached only a small percentage of teachers.
Other teachers in the state needed to learn about the policy as well.

To spread policy awareness beyond those who attended the conferences,
Weber provided participants with scripts of each of the conference
sessions, so that participants could deliver the same lessons about the
policy to teachers in their own districts. These conferences, in fact,
were dubbed ”The Training of Trainers" conferences because the goal from
the very beginning was to train people to spread the word of the policy
to others. For example, Mr. Fielder attended a week-long reading
inservice program on the policy in his district. The organizers used
scripts and materials from the state conferences to tell teachers in
their district about the new ideas from the state initiative.

Along with the state conferences and their local replications,
policymakers saw the new MEAP test as a vehicle for teacher learning.

Some policymakers talked about the test “driving" instruction in that it

8

would make teachers aware of new questions to ask students and new ideas
about text. On the test, students read longer passages of "authentic"
pieces of text (rather than ones contrived solely for the test) to
assess their comprehension. They were given expository as well as
narrative text to read, and they were asked about their interests and
familiarity with topics about which they read. Although the main
purpose for revising the test was to assess more appropriately students’
reading abilities, some policymakers saw additional benefits in that the
test would encourage teachers to use new instructional practices; e.g.,
reading longer pieces of text, reading different kinds of text, and
questioning students on their prior knowledge and reading interests.
The MEAP was a vehicle for learning in that it was an incentive (or
perhaps a stick, depending on one’s perspective) for teachers to think
about the policy.1

State policymakers faced a daunting task in teaching teachers
about the policy. They had many teachers across the state to teach and
for most of them, the ideas policymakers were teaching were quite
foreign. Like many teachers faced with uncertain and enormous teaching
tasks, policymakers taught the way they knew how. The conference
sessions were conducted using very traditional pedagogy. Participants
sat in chairs and listened to presenters tell them new ideas. Spin-off
workshops and conferences in districts often followed the same format.
Teachers had few, if any, opportunities to learn new ideas about reading
or reading pedagogy in new pedagogical ways or to reconstruct what they
were learning. Learning from the MEAP test as well gave teachers few

opportunities to construct their own meaning of the policy. Teachers

9
were to learn the "correct" lessons on how to teach reading in new ways
or be indicted by low student test scores.

If policymakers’ actions can be seen to represent their views of
how and what teachers needed to learn, then learning for policymakers
seems to have been a matter of teachers gaining information in didactic
ways about the policy and the new activities connected to it. Teachers
were to learn by reproducing in their classrooms the knowledge that was
given to them in the inservice and by administering the MEAP. There was
little, if any, indication that policymakers thought teachers would
construct their own meaning of the ideas they were being taught, and
certainly few, if any, opportunities given to teachers to play around
with the ideas they were hearing.

That policymakers would employ traditional pedagogy to teach
teachers about their efforts may not be unusual, but it is in this case
ironic. The policy itself is based on the idea that learners construct
meaning of new information in different ways because of their different
prior experiences, yet policymakers acted as if all teachers, once made
aware of the policy, would make the same sense of it and would implement
the new ideas and activities intact in their classrooms.

Policymakers not only seemed unaware that teachers might need
different kinds of learning opportunities to learn from the reading
policy, they also seemed unclear about what it was they wanted teachers
to learn. Policymakers would say different things about it and all
seemed to construct different images of appropriate practice as they
went along (5. Standerford, personal comunication, June 18, 1990).

iSome policymakers saw the policy as advocating “whole language"--

10
children socially constructing meaning of text in their classrooms,
whereas others viewed it as based in cognitive psychology with
individual reader’s constructing their own meaning (E. Weber, interview,
August 27, 1990; C. Peters, interview, August 13, 1991). One reading
teacher who attended the state conferences, worked with Weber on other
staff development programs, and was familiar with the MEAP said she had
a hard time putting together the big picture of the policy. The reading
teacher could derive no clear images of practice from her learning. For
instance, how did the idea of longer text passages which practitioners
saw in the MEAP fit with teaching metacognitive strategies that they
were exposed to in the inservice? How did any of these ideas make
reading a dynamic, interactive process? What were teachers supposed to
do with more than one ”right" interpretation of text? What should
reading practice look like if it followed the policy’s vision?

Policymakers gave few answers to these questions.

Teachers Learning from Policy

Researchers also do not put teachers learning from policy in clear
perspective. Rather they consider it from different perspectives, with
the central questions of how teachers might learn from policies and what
they might need to learn to implement policies often not directly
addressed. For instance, much of the policy implementation literature
focuses on external factors in teachers’ environments that shape their
reSponses to policy. These include such things as the structure of
schooling (Weick, 1982; Meyer & Rowan, 1978); the relationship between
policymakers and practitioners (Firestone, 1989; McLaughlin, 1990); the
nature of policymaker’s and practitioner’s work (Lipsky, 1980); and the

11
conditions and circumstances in which practitioners operate (Lieberman,
1982; Schwille, et al., 1983; Johnson & O’Connor, 1979).

This literature is helpful in that it suggests that policies and
practice are not tightly linked and that "policy as implemented often
seems different from policy adopted” (Baier, March, & Saeten, 1988, p.
150). Mr. Fielder may make changes in his reading practice because of
the new reading policy that are quite distinct from another teacher
because circumstances and resources in their work are different. But
the literature does not help us get clearer about the role learning
plays in implementing policy ideas. Even the few studies that mention
learning as a factor in implementing policy reforms do not often
consider how and what the learning might look like. Nor do they
consider the relationship between what and how teachers learn and how
they enact policy in their classrooms. The lgarning process that
teachers undertake is still a mystery.2

The implementation literature as well looks at teachers as members
of a group; that is, people whose work has a similar nature or who
experience the same working conditions. The assumption is that
similarities in environments will result in similarities in responses to
policies. But, considering group characteristics may not be a
particularly useful lens through which to look at teachers learning from
policy. Current ideas about learning coming from cognitive psychology
focus on the role a learner’s personal orientations play in learning.
This body of research portrays learners taking in new information by
assimilating it to what they already know and how they already perceive
the world (Anderson, et al., 1977; Anderson, 1984; Rumelhart, 1980).

12
Who the learner is (what experiences, ideas, and beliefs they have) will
shape how they make sense of new information they receive. And in the
process of assimilating new ideas, both old and new ideas may change to
“fit“ together. Learning is a process of harmonizing new and old ideas
to each other. New ideas are interpreted in unique ways by learners
because of what they already know and believe.

These ideas about learning suggest that the issue of teachers
learning from policy may need to be looked at with a finer grain. How
teachers learn from policy and how they play it out in their classrooms
may have less to do with external factors in their environment than with .
characteristics of individual learners.

A few policy researchers have looked at the policy/practice
relationship as one which individual practitioners construct. These
studies consider how individual practitioner’s perceptions of policies
shape the ways in which policies play out (Cohen, March, & Olsen, 1972;
Kingdon, 1984; Keisler & Sproull, 1982; Weiss & Cohen, 1991, McLaughlin,
1987). They suggest that how policies get attended to and how they are
perceived is shaped by practitioners’ existing beliefs and capacities.
McLaughlin (1987) writes:

Change is ultimately the problem of the smallest unit. At

each point in the policy process, a policy is transformed as

individuals interpret and respond to it. What actually is

delivered or provided under the aegis of a policy depends

finally on the individual at the end of the line (p. 174).

This literature is helpful in that it suggests that the
individual’s interpretation of policy actually influences practice.

Poflicy therefore is largely what practitioners perceive it to be rather

than some external documents or legislation. Mr. Fielder may change his

13

reading practice in a way that is quite distinct from other teachers not
solely because his environment differs, but because he interprets the
policy to mean different things.

The 'policy-as-perceived" literature helps us understand
individual responses to policy and puts into the conversation on policy
implementation the notion that what gets implemented is not a reflex of
what gets adopted because implementation is mediated through individual
practitioner’s beliefs and experiences. This research, though, stops at
the point of suggesting that practitioners uniquely perceive policies.
It says little about the how practitioners come to perceive policies.
What beliefs, capacities, experiences influence practitioners’
perceptions? If practitioners’ perceptions shape policies, what shapes
practitioners’ perceptions? Where, if at all, does learning fit?

The final body of literature that bears on the issue of teachers
learning from policy is that which looks at teacher learning itself.
But even this does not provide a great deal of information about
experienced teachers’ learning. Carter (1990) in fact, in a recent
review of teacher education literature, claims that there are very few
studies which actually consider the learning processes of teachers.
Instead, much of the recent teacher education literature (particularly
studies which consider educating teachers to teach in the new ways
reforms such as the Michigan reading policy advocate) focuses on what a
teacher needs to know. The emphasis of many of these studies is how
much and what kind of subject matter knowledge might be necessary for
teachers (Shulman, 1987; Wilson, Shulman, & Richert, 1987). But as with

the policy implementation literature, although learning and knowledge

14
are seen as important components in helping teachers teach in new ways,
the nature of the learning process is still underdeveloped.

A few studies do look at how teachers acquire knowledge which they
use to teach. Among experienced teachers, the importance of personal
beliefs, ideas, and experiences is suggested in a series of research
articles on teachers’ personal, practical knowledge (Clandinnin, 1985;
Johnson, 1989). Experienced teachers understand teaching through a
special knowledge that they develop from theories about learning and
teaching and from their practical experiences. This knowledge is
”blended by the personal background and characteristics of the teacher
and expressed by her in particular situations“ (Clandinnin, 1985, p.
362.) Learning to teach in this literature has much to do with the
personal nature of the teacher/learner—-who they are and what they bring
to their learning--as well as the context in which they work.

Hollingsworth’s (1987) study of 14 preservice teachers learning to
teach reading suggests similar influences on learning. In the study,
preservice teachers’ beliefs about teaching, learning, and reading
"served as filters“ for processing ideas they encountered both in their
coursework and in their field experiences. Kagan (1992), in a recent
review of teacher education literature, summarized twenty-seven studies
on beginning teachers’ learning which support that what preservice and
beginning teachers learn is shaped by the ideas, beliefs, and
experiences with teaching and learning that they bring to their
professional education.

These studies of both experienced and preservice teachers fit well

vvith the cognitive psychology perspective outlined previously. What

15
teachers bring to their learning shapes how they process new
information. This suggests that what teachers bring to their encounters
with policies influences how they perceive policies, and the learning
they may do surrounding the policy as well.

But policies, in general, do not become policies merely to affect
the learning of practitioners. They seek to change things that
practitioners do. So how, if at all, does this view of learning affect
what teachers ”do" with policies? What is the relationship among
teachers learning from policy, their perceptions of it, and changes in
their classrooms?

Again borrowing from cognitive psychology, change in beliefs and
ideas occurs when new ideas can no longer be assimilated to existing
frameworks because discrepancies between new and old ideas become too
numerous or too great. When this happens, new ideas help create new
frameworks that become the frameworks with which succeeding information
is processed (Posner, Strike, Hewson, & Gertzog, 1983; Bruner, 1983).
Kennedy (1991) applies this idea of dissonance and learning directly to
change in teaching practices when she suggests that for teachers to
learn new ideas, they must first be made aware of differences between
their existing practices and the new ideas. One way in which teachers
can be made aware is through vivid images of new practices. For change
to occur, new ideas about teaching must be startling enough to provoke a
sense of dissonance so that teachers can not easily assimilate the new
ideas into their existing practices. In the Hollingsworth study cited
earlier (1989) preservice teachers were seen to change their beliefs

about teaching and learning when they faced some dissonance between

16
their own beliefs and their cooperating teachers’. In working out the
dissonance these preservice teachers gained richer understandings about
teaching reading than those preservice teachers who did not encounter
any challenges. So this view of learning suggests that to undertake
change, teachers need to perceive dissonance between their current
practices and the policy’s ideas. They then need to be willing to learn
new ideas and to enact them to lessen the dissonance that they
themselves have created. But, this suggestion puts us into a
bewildering loop—-if policies are only what teachers perceive them to
be, what would be necessary for them to perceive dissonance? Change and
learning are difficult tasks for most people. What would a policy have
to do to start the process of perceiving dissonance, learning, and then
change?

How and what teachers learn from policy and what changes in
practice play out is a bit confusing. Looking at the state efforts to
help teachers learn gives us an image of new ideas taught with old
pedagogies and pieces of changed reading practices not put together into
a coherent picture. State policymakers wanted teachers to teach reading
in new ways, and they thought the opportunities to learn about the
policy might do the trick. Research literature offers us a few
different ideas about teacher learning and about policy playing out in
practice that raise questions about the efficacy of the state effort.
But the ideas from research themselves seem fragmented and leave many
questions about the relationships among learning, interpretation, and
implementation. How do teachers interpret learning opportunities

related to a policy? What and how did teachers make sense of learning

17
opportunities surrounding policy? What did teachers perceive themselves
needing to learn? And how does what teachers interpret policies to be
and the learning they do affect changes they make in practice?

It is these kinds of questions that this study explores.
Specifically, it looks at the relationships among teachers’ perceptions
of the Michigan reading policy, their learning surrounding it, and
changes in their reading practices. These relationships are
interconnected and complex. To explore them requires looking carefully
at individuals, listening to what they say about their learning, their
understanding of policy, and their reading practices. It also requires
looking at what individuals do in their classrooms and than attempting
to link in some way what they say about their learning and understanding
of the reading policy and how they teach reading.

What follows are cases of three teachers who learned, interpreted,
and implemented the reading policy in unique ways. By looking at the
relationships among interpretation, learning, and implementation through
stories of these teachers’ thinking and practices, I h0pe to keep intact
as much as possible the complexities that they faced as they attempted
to interpret, learn, and implement policy. Coles (1989) writes, "We owe
it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them" (p. 30).
Through stories of these teachers’ efforts in the often messy context in
which they occurred, 1 hope to learn more about what it means for
teachers to learn from policies and how that plays out in their lives as

teachers.

Notes to Chapter 1

I. MEAP scores are very important in the state. They are
publicly reported and often used by various people as measures of the
worth of school districts. Until these changes in the MEAP, many
schools scored quite high on the tests--particularly middle-class
districts. After the revisions, scores plummeted. The new tests sent
many district administrators scrambling to figure out how to change
instruction so that students in their districts would regain their high
scores.

2. Elmore & McLaughlin (1988) state that for teachers to carry
out new educational reforms, they need to acquire conceptual
understandings of the reform and to do so, they would need more than
traditional staff development opportunities. McDonnell & Elmore (1987)
also suggest that practitioners may need to learn to build their
capacities to carry out policies. These studies are notable in that they
are among the few that even consider learning as a factor in teachers’
making sense of policies, but they, too, touch only lightly on the
actual learning process of teachers.

18

CHAPTER 2
THE CASE OF CATHERINE PRICE

Kingdon (1984) writes that public policy is not the brainchild of
any single actor, but that instead it is the outgrowth of ideas that
already exist in a community. The ideas precede the actual formation of
a policy, and therefore, most often, someone is "doing" the policy long
before it is such.

Ms. Price is a teacher who has been "doing" the reading policy for
some time. Since the 19505 when she began teaching, Ms. Price has
believed that comprehension of text should be the focus of reading
instruction and that children’s prior knowledge and experiences shape
the sense they make of text. She has had a literature-based reading
program for many years and has included expository text in her
instruction as well. So ideas such as the emphasis on comprehension,
expository text, and readers’ prior knowledge that are associated with
the policy are not new ideas to Ms. Price.

But even so, Ms. Price speaks of learning new things from the
policy. She says she learned about writing from a workshop on the
policy that she attended. She says she learned a new language. And
finally, she says she learned from and about the policy through other

ideas which she could connect to it. Each of these experiences shaped

19

20
Ms. Price’s thinking about the policy and ultimately, shaped the effect
the policy had on her teaching practice.

Ms. Price’s past beliefs and practices, and her new learning from
the policy, distinguish her as a teacher attempting ambitious
instructional practices. Ms. Price describes herself as an innovator who
continually tries new ideas to find better ways to teach her students.
But her ambitious practices are not always easy to pull off. Ms. Price
speaks of tensions she experiences in her teaching between her desire to
have a child-centered classroom in which student interest and choice set
the curriculum and her belief that children need to learn certain ideas
and information in school.

In Ms. Price’s case, this tension is most apparent in her literacy
instruction. She places a high value in students deciding what and when
they read and write, and how they interpret the text they read. But at
the same time, she thinks students need to develop a repertoire of
reading and language skills and abilities. Ms. Price can often work
toward both of these goals with little conflict, but sometimes these
goals demand different kinds of instruction and responses to student
thinking. In these times, Ms. Price struggles over which way to go.

The new ideas she associates with the policy seem to her to suggest even
greater student control over their learning, and therefore the policy
contributes to the tensions that Ms. Price already experiences.

How has Ms. Price’s learning from the policy played out in her
practices? Does her new learning contribute the tensions she already

faces?

21
Background

Ms. Price has taught for over 30 years. She began teaching at age
18 when she entered a teaching order of nuns immediately after high
school. While teaching, she graduated from college, received a master’s
degree in education, and, very recently, completed an educational
specialist certificate. A few years ago, Ms. Price left the convent and
taught in a private alternative school run by friends. Although she
loved teaching in this school, which she described as being in harmony
with her beliefs about how children learn, she felt her own professional
growth called her to teach in public schools. For the last five years,
she has been teaching a fifth/sixth grade classroom of underachieving-
gifted students at Lewis School.

Students in Ms. Price’s class have been identified from a variety
of tests as highly able but working below their abilities. These
students are distinct from other students in the district who are
identified as gifted and working at their ability level. The latter
group is placed in another program which focuses on advancing students
through curriculum at an accelerated pace. The program in which Ms.
Price teaches focuses on helping students work up to their learning
potential. During both years I observed, Ms. Price’s class had many more
boys than girls. Ms. Price said that boys and girls get identified
equally for the program but boys tend to choose it more often. The
reverse is true for the other gifted program.

Ms. Price commented that many of her students are referred to the
program because they are trouble-makers in "normal” classrooms. She

admits that she sees little difference between the students she now has

22
and those she has always taught. She claims that her teaching hasn’t
changed because she is working in a "gifted" program, for she would do
what she does-~and has done what she does--for all kinds of students.
She said, ”I don’t see myself as being in an irregular classroom. I
think I’ve always taught this way. If I were in a regular classroom I’d
do the same things I’m doing" (interview, February 11, 1991).

All the attention to gifted education is a bit surprising in the
district. Drummond is a district with little money for extra programs
and limited administrative staff to direct them. The gifted program is
funded in a joint effort with the neighboring school district. Children
from both districts can attend either the underachieving or the
straight-line gifted classes.

Drummond school district is comprised of three small towns--
Drummond, Lewis and Blakely. It is near a major rust belt city which
has been facing a bleak economic future for some years. Predominantly
working-class, inhabitants of the area have been, in the past, skilled
workers at a nearby auto plant, workers for the railroad, or farmers.
Unemployment lately has been high. The population is stable, with
little in or out migration and homogeneous with fewer than .5%
minorities. Many of the people trace their roots to Eastern Europe.
The superintendent said that most residents support the schools but
generally have low academic expectations for their children.

Lewis, the town in the district in which Ms. Price teaches,
consists of a video-store, a few bars, a grain elevator, and a vinyl
siding company. Even on sunny days, the town looks tired. The school

is one of the better kept buildings in town. It is one of four

23
elementary schools in the district. It draws students from families in
the middle range of economic status in the district, although that
status may soon change as more of Lewis’s population gets laid-off from
their work in the automobile plants. Likewise, Lewis consistently
scores on standardized tests in the district’s middle range. Most of
the staff at Lewis have taught together for many years. Although there
is a friendly atmosphere in the school among the staff, there is a clear
division between teachers who see themselves as innovators and those who

do not. Ms. Price falls into the former group.

Ms. Price’s Existing Beliefs and Practices

eli n n rnin

Ms. Price is an eager learner who for her entire adult life has
been engaged with ideas about teaching and learning. She attends many
conferences and classes on new instructional approaches. She reads
voraciously, both professional books and fiction. She has been involved
with numerous district and county committees in charge of redesigning
curriculum. At times, Ms. Price almost seems to take in ideas
indiscriminately. In talking about her views of teaching and learning,
she mentions John Dewey and a new book on brain patterns put out by the
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development in the same
sentence, and each seems to have the same degree of influence on her
beliefs about experiential learning. 50 Ms. Price’s beliefs stem from
both well-established, educational philosophy and less well-established,
educational 'fads' that strike her fancy for shorter periods of time.

Ms. Price describes her teaching as child-centered in that she

thinks the crucial factor in any learning experience is what students

24

are interested in and what their abilities are. She sees her role as
teacher to keep a sense of a curriculum that she wants to teach, but
mediating that curriculum with her understanding of what and where her
students are intellectually. When I asked her if there was a district
curriculum that she followed, she responded that there was, but that it
was not the only piece she considered when constructing her practices:

I have my basic curriculum and we go with it . . . but is

there a curriculum beyond it? Definitely. The child--where

the child takes the curriculum. So that the curriculum is

what it is, but basically students are going to help direct

that curriculum by who they are (interview, February 11,

1991).
To find out where they are, Ms. Price talks about dancing with her
students. She discovered this metaphor in a book she recently read
called lb: flagging Wu Lj Masters (Zukav, 1980) which is about a martial
arts instructor who teaches his students by finding their centers and
dancing with them until they are interested in dancing alone. The
dancing that Ms. Price sees herself needing to do involves finding her
students’ abilities and interests and mixing that with her sense of a
curriculum--topics, objectives, subject matter knowledge and resources.
The goal of the dance is for students to be their own teachers--to
follow their own interests without a master. But Ms. Price sees the
dance as tricky because it not only means finding students’ "centers"
but convincing them to incorporate new ideas into their dance.

In her classroom, Ms. Price’s beliefs in child-centered
instruction manifest themselves in a great deal of student choice and
individualized instruction. During large chunks of the day, students

are free to work on their own projects. They can choose where they wish

to work and with whom they wish to collaborate, as well as what work

25
they do at any given time. Ms. Price spends hours after school writing
up individual instructional plans for students so that everyone is
working at an appropriate level and on topics that hold some interest to
them. There is a great deal of time devoted to reading during the day.
On some days I saw as much as an hour of silent reading time in which
students read a variety of materials, from wrestling magazines to
Charles Dickens.

Another important belief of Ms. Price’s is that people learn best
when they can connect ideas and experiences. Connections need to occur
between what they already know and new ideas. Connections also need to
occur among the new ideas and information students are learning. Ms.
Price says she sees learners not taking in new ideas unless they can_see
cgnnggtigns. She said, ”If I don’t see connections, I will not take
things in. I won’t have anything to do with them. I use the term
connections a lot because I see in it very much a basis for learning"
(interview, November 23, 1991).

One way Ms. Price helps students see connections is by integrating
her instruction. When I first asked her if I could observe her teach
reading, she replied that I would have to watch her all day. Although
she puts a schedule on the board each morning that delineates a time for
each subject, she says she is teaching all of them all the time. The
schedule is only to keep students who need order happy. Ms. Price
chooses books to read in language arts that deal with topics studied in
social studies or science. She has students write during mathematics so
that they can see how an algebraic expression relates to a sentence with

various components that make up a complete idea. She thinks of over—

26
arching themes for her instruction such as balance or interdependence
and then works the themes into her instruction across the day and year.
When I asked her if she teaches the various subject matters differently
she said she didn’t think so because she was ”trying very hard to
integrate" and she really thought ”it is happening" (interview, February
11, 1991).

The other way Ms. Price helps students connect is through "hands-
on' activities. She sees these as useful in connecting what happens in
school with out-of—school interests. Students were engaged in at least
one activity—based lesson on each day that I observed. One day they
worked on a social studies simulation in which they needed to act as
pioneers moving west in covered wagons. Another day, they "discovered"
properties of weights and balances by designing race cars and running
them on homemade tracks. Ms. Price talked about these activities as
”hooks to reel students in“ by making what they learning in school have
relevance to the outside world. In the social studies simulation, for
instance, one of her goals was for students to connect what they
experienced—-making decisions as part of a wagon train--with what
pioneers might actually have experienced and thereby become aware of how
difficult and frightening pioneers’ lives were.

So many of Ms. Price’s beliefs about teaching and learning
foreshadowed some of the ideas of the reading policy--integrating
reading throughout the day, connecting what children experience and
already know to what they learn in school, asserting the importance of
children’s prior knowledge and understanding in the learning process.

But observing Ms. Price teach also revealed some beliefs about which the

27
policy is silent. There are skills that Ms. Price thinks are essential
for students to learn regardless of their individual interests or prior
experiences. These include such things as grammar skills, punctuation,
and use of literary devices. Ms. Price also demands careful reading of
text and taught students how to use text to support interpretations. So
that, interwoven with an open, child-centered pedagogy that would look
very pleasing to many state reformers, was some teacher-controlled,
didactic pedagogy aimed at transmitting a fixed set of ideas to
students. The latter practices may or may not look pleasing to many of
the reformers, but given the absence of comments on such things as
teaching grammar and warrants for textual interpretation, this is
difficult to ascertain. Some examples from Ms. Price’s reading and

language arts practice seem helpful here.

mum
Iggghjng Literature

All the literature that’s out will tell you to get a book

started with something that will hook them right away.

Sometimes you don’t have to work very hard at it, sometimes

you do and sometimes it is just painful. But I think if it

doesn’t happen then you shouldn’t go on with it (interview,

February 11, 1991).

Ms. Price’s main goal in reading a book in class is that it is
something that students will find meaningful in their lives. An avid
reader, Ms. Price sees reading as an important part of her own life and
she often shares her enthusiasm about books with her students. She
reads on a wide range of topics and will hunt up books on a subject that
she knows interests one of her students. Ms. Price said she has found

one of the truly successful things she does to motivate reluctant

28
readers is to read a book with them and discuss it. This means she is
frequently reading children’s books on topics not to her personal taste,
but ones she knows make a difference to students. As she commented
about her reading instruction:

I dwell on the small ways to let them succeed in reading and

I have to just watch to see what those are. I have to dance

with them. I really do. I have to feel where they are

(interview, February 11, 1991).

Ms. Price’s passion and knowledge about literature is obvious in
her instruction. As I learned in our first interview, she only uses
tradebooks with her class, declining the district’s offer of a
"literature-based" reading text which she sees as much less engaging for
students. Students do a lot of individual reading. They can choose
whatever they want to read during this time and Ms. Price has a wide
range of books in her class for them. When she chooses texts for the
whole class to read, she attempts to find ones that relate in some way
to topics they are discussing in other subject areas, but primarily she
is concerned with finding a book that builds on students’ interests and
prior experiences. In the two years I observed her, she read The tall
et_the_fl11d because she had a large group of boys in her class who were
interested in hunting and outdoor life, and because she loves the book
herself.

I watched Ms. Price teach [he tell ef the fljlg on a few different
occasions. She introduced the book by asking students if they had read
anything else by London. Many hands went up and various titles were
shouted out. Some students said how cool they thought his stories were.
One boy said he stayed up all night finishing White Eang. Ms. Price

passed around a map of the Northwest Territories and the Yukon to show

29
where most of the book takes place. She then delivered a knowledgeable
and inspiring account of the author:

If you remember, those of you who have read "To Build a

Fire,“ when Jack London wrote about needing to build a fire,

you really felt like you needed a fire. Jack London wrote

that story for a good reason. He was out making a living,

trying to support his family in strange ways. He would

deliver newspapers and do other odd jobs. He really

struggled to provide food and a home. He liked adventure.

He got into trouble because he took so many risks, but he

never blamed others for his troubles. Some people compare

trouble to a mountain. Some people walk around the mountain

and they never have any trouble. Some people stop and turn

away from it. Others go over it and have no trouble. But

others willingly go through it, and feel it, feel what

trouble is like, and come out stronger. That’s what Jack

London did (observation, February 4, 1991).

She went on to tell students that even though some might have read the
book before, they were going to read it very differently this time:
"London does something in his writing to get the reader involved and I
want you to think about that when you read . . . . We are going to look
at the many levels of change that happen in the book. We’re going to
take a look at what it means to the dog, to the people in the story, and
to ourselves." By this time, all students seemed very engaged and
attentively listened as Ms. Price read the first chapter.

Often in the lessons I observed, Ms. Price took care to point out
what she considered beautiful or meaningful passages of text; e.g., "He
felt oppressed by the vague sense of impending calamity’ That’s a heavy
sentence. . . . Have any of you been outside on a hot day working hard
with no water? You feel pressed by the heat and the dryness. Well, the
dog felt this. Pressed down by the sense that something terrible would
happen.“ During another lesson, she asked, ''What do you think the

phrase, ‘Far more potent were the memories of his heredity that made

30
things he had never seen seem familiar’ means?" Students responded to
these questions of Ms. Price’s with comments that reflected much more
than literal comprehension of the words. For example, in response to
her question above about heredity, one student said that he thought the
phrase referred to the dog’s instinct which meant he knew how to be wild
like his ancestors and wanted to be wild in his heart. She asked
students to tell the class what phrases or parts of the story they
thought were beautiful, and students frequently did. In all the lessons
I observed there was a great deal of discussion of the book with
students responding to each other as well as to Ms. Price.

Throughout her teaching of this novel, Ms. Price insisted that
students stick very closely to the text when constructing their ideas
about the book. Students had much room to respond to the book in
individual ways and to direct the flow of the discussion of the book,
but Ms. Price kept pushing them to look at the text to form their ideas.
For students to recall details and events was important not as a way to
check whether they had read the text but to help them understand what
London was attempting to communicate in the book. The following is an
example from a class discussion in which the relationships between the
men and the dogs were the focus:

Ms. Price: What happened to Francois and Perrault? Look

back in the paragraph.

Joe: They were dying?

Ms. Price: Did the book say that? Where does it say

that?

Joe: I don’t know.

Ms. Price: You can’t just make things up. It has to be

in the book.

Tony: I can say why Francois and Perrault put their arms

around Buck.

Ms. Price: Okay, why?
Tony: Because they loved him.

31
Ms. Price: But where were they going?
Josh: It says they received official orders, so they
must have been ordered to go elsewhere.
Ms. Price: Good. It’s just one little sentence. It
would be easy to miss. But, we don’t want to miss
things in the text (observation, February 11,
1991).
This discussion continued for a time with Ms. Price asking students to
go back to the text to recall what was really happening. She did so, it
seemed, so that students would form interpretations that they could
support with text. Students couldn’t just make things up in Ms. Price.
Even though her classroom is child-centered, it is not ruleless nor
without standards.

I found this 'close-to-the-text' reading at first perplexing. The
state reform says very little about text and offers no help for teachers
in deciding how to use text in reading instruction. Most elementary
classes I have seen either focus on students’ emotional responses to
text with little consideration of the text itself (J. Camp, observation,
February 13, 1991) or focus on literal recall of text details and events
with little consideration of the meaningfulness of the text (B.
Robinson, observation, March 19, 1992). Ms. Price’s instruction falls
somewhere in between. She stresses respect for the text and a need to
use it to construct meaning, yet the importance of a close reading is to
help students plumb the text to get the most out of it. Her goal in
reading is to help students understand what authors are trying to
communicate and, therein, find reading a meaningful experience.

Reading literature in Ms. Price’s classroom centers on students’

interests, thinking, and past experiences. This is very important to Ms.

Price. She wants her students to see reading as vital to their lives as

32
it is to hers. Yet her child-centered literature instruction does not
mean that students can read and interpret text any way they wish. Ms.
Price also teaches students the skill of using text to construct meaning
and insists that their interpretations are warranted by examples from
text. Another example of this was a discussion on The Call of the Wild
in which Ms. Price asked students whether they thought Buck had changed
after his kidnapping. Most students responded that he had because he
had gotten stronger or more wild. Ms. Price asked them to read
sentences in the book that supported their statements. One boy thought
that Buck had remained the same and Ms. Price asked what in the text led.
him to that conclusion. The boy said he couldn’t find any egeet
sentences that made him feel that way, he just did. As the class
shouted that he was wrong, Ms. Price said that everyone has a right to
interpret stories they way they thought best, but that he needed some
evidence to back up his thinking. She suggested he go back and reread
the chapter to find what might have made him think about Buck not
changing and then report back to the class later.

For Ms. Price there are rules for interpreting text to which she
expects her students to adhere. "Feelings" are not in themselves enough
of a warrant to justify constructing meaning of text. 50 Ms. Price’s
literature instruction covers two goals: one, to get students interested
in reading by using their thinking and interests as starting points for
instruction; and second, to help them learn how to read text and
construct valid interpretations.

~Whether Ms. Price’s teaching of literature jives with visions in

the policy is difficult to know. The issues of what literature to teach

33
and how to teach it are not mentioned in the policy documents.
Furthermore, although debates in literary criticism over textual
interpretation are quite heated, the reading policy says nothing of
them. Readers interpret text, according to the policy, but how they
should do so is not specified.

Languege Arts Skills

In addition to reading literature, Ms. Price also teaches language

 

arts skills--such things as punctuation, capitalization, literacy
devices like cause and effect, and vocabulary. Although Ms. Price
occasionally teaches skills through text the class is reading, most
often she teaches separate lessons using worksheets which she has
gathered from different language arts instructional activity books. Ms.
Price said that she teaches language arts skills to the whole class in
separate lessons because she thinks all kids need to know these things
to read and write well and this is an efficient way of teaching them.

In a lesson I observed on punctuation and capitalization, students
proof read a piece of text which had deliberately been written with many
errors. Ms. Price introduced this work by asking students if they could
share some strategies they used to know when to capitalize words:

Ricky: Whenever I see a dot, I know to capitalize the

first letter in the next word.
Ms. Price: Ah . . . so when you see a period, you know
the next letter is a capital. Another?
Katie: When you write I or the name of someone
important.
Ms. Price: Does it have to be an important person?
Katie: No, just anyone’s name (observation, November 22,
1991).
The class went through a few more strategies together and then worked on

their papers individually. Ms. Price walked around helping students.

34

After about twenty minutes, students were directed to hand in the
worksheet and go onto the next subject.

A lesson on using cause and effect in text had a similar format.
Ms. Price passed out a worksheet labelled "Cause and Effect: Using cause
and effect to explain a historical event.” It consisted of two
passages, one about the Wright Brothers and one on the Mayflower, and
questions on causes and effects explicated in the text--e.g., for the
Wright Brothers, "What caused the glider to nose-dive into a sand dune?"
Ms. Price wrote the words cause and effect on the board and then had
students read the passage about the Mayflower. She asked students to
pick out three examples of cause and effect in the passage.

Ms. Price: This is a hard one. Anyone have any?

Steven: However . . . .

Ms. Price: [interrupting him] No. A cause and effect
sentence would not likely start with however. 00
you know what I mean by cause and effect? [Steven
nods yes.] Anyone?

Tony: [reading from the passage] 'He didn’t like lubbers
much."

Ms. Price: Is there someone who could help Tony?

Josh: They didn’t get along.

Ms. Price: Okay. Where does it say that, Nick?

Nick: [reading] "There was friction."

Ms. Price: Okay. Nick, read the sentence that talks
about there being friction.

Nick: ”The average seaman of 1620 was an illiterate
brawler who disliked ‘lubbers."

Ms. Price: Good. So the cause is that seaman dislike
lubbers and the effect is that there is friction

(observation, February 11, 1991).

The class worked through all examples and questions on the worksheet in
similar fashion: students reading a sentence that they think showed
cause and effect, Ms. Price confirming or disconfirming their ideas with
little explanatory discourse, and finally, Ms. Price’s rephrasing or

summarizing student ideas into coherent, “correct" answers.

35

Ms. Price teaches language skills separately from books students
are reading as well as from their writing. This contrasts with Lucy
Salvucci’s practice, for instance, in which skills are almost always
taught in context--through questions students have in their efforts to
make sense of text--and certainly would not jive with some
interpretations of the policy which suggests that skills never be taught
as end goals in themselves. Ms. Price said she teaches skills this way
because she thinks of them as tools all students need. And often
students need to learn tools in contrived settings. She gave an example
from a science project lesson:

For instance, the other day I wanted them to summarize what

it was that they had done in "Our World in Motion" program.

What we did was go over how to do a summary and then we

learned how to do a summary, but we did it with other

material that we understood. And so once we did that, then I

gave them the task of summarizing the program (interview,

December 17, 1991).
Students needed to learn how to summarize text to help them learn. This
was a skill and, in the above example at least, it appeared more
beneficial to Ms. Price to learn the skill in a decontextualized way
egtetde of the text students ultimately had to summarize. In Ms.
Price’s view language arts skills are knowledge that needs to be
transmitted to students for them to be able to comprehend text at all.
Teaching skills to the whole class using teacher-directed pedagogy, out
of the context of their reading and writing, thus makes the most sense.

There are then two pieces that make up Ms. Price’s
reading/language arts practices--teaching literature and teaching

language arts skills. These are sometimes related--e.g., Ms. Price will

teach a vocabulary lesson using words from the book the class is

36
reading--but other times separate. And within both of these pieces, Ms.
Price uses different pedagogies. Some lessons appear open—ended going
in the direction student interest takes them and others appear very
didactic-~lessons in which Ms. Price is transmitting knowledge to
students for them to take in.

Some of Ms. Price’s beliefs and practices fit well with other
visions of the policy. Dr. Weber said that she thought model policy
classrooms would be ones in which “instruction is driven by children"
(interview, August 29, 1990). Dr. Peters commented that he hoped that
teachers would be encouraged by the policy to use more literature to
teach reading and would integrate reading with social studies and
science (interview, October 25, 1989). Dr. Wixson talked about the
importance of students reading long passages of text instead of short,
basal entries (interview, October 25, 1989). For other beliefs and
practices of Ms. Price it is difficult to know whether the policy would
support them or not. There is little advice in policy documents on how
teachers should teach such things as literary devices or skills like
punctuation and vocabulary. So although in many ways Ms. Price’s
classroom might look like a model one for reformers, in other ways it is
unclear what they might think of how Ms. Price teaches.

Ms. Price herself saw the policy as very congruent with what she
believes and does. Like many teachers, she said her first reaction to
the policy was that she already did it. She said much of what she
learned about the policy legitimated her existing ideas rather than

introducing new ones. But even though she saw herself as basically

37
consistent with the policy’s vision, she commented that she learned new

things from it.

Ms. Price’s Learning About and From the Policy

Ms. Price’s introduction to the reading policy was a week-long
inservice program called Reading Update which was conducted by the
district’s two reading consultants. Both consultants were members of
the state department’s Curriculum Review Committee which designed and
presented workshops on the new reading definition throughout Michigan.
Reading Update was taken directly from the state workshops, using most
of the same materials. So that although Ms. Price did not attend an
official state inservice, she did hear about the reform from people who
were directly involved in designing inservice programs on the reform.

Ms. Price described the workshop as ”almost overwhelming".
Teachers were given an enormous amount of materials and information
about activities they could use in their classrooms. Ms. Price said
that most of this stuff, she put in her classroom cupboard because "it
was too much, too fast, too whatever“ and she needed time to sort it out
before she could use it. Each of the five days of the workshop focused
on different reading strategies--what they were intended to do and how
to use them with students. For example, one day a presenter talked
about the importance of accessing students’ prior knowledge about a
topic before reading a story. Reading research supporting the claim and
showing the difference it makes in student comprehension was cited and
then participants learned how to do an activity (a KWL chart) which
would help them get at students’ prior knowledge.

38

In general, the workshop left Ms. Price bewildered. The amount of
information she received was too much for her and left her puzzled
rather than informed. She said, ”I mean I got a lot of good
information, but what could I do with it? I could give you little facts
they said, but it wasn’t a part of me” (interview, February 11, 1991).
Ms. Price did talk, though, of three experiences stemming from Reading
Update which were meaningful to her.

r W 't : x eriencin Poli s rner

During our first interview, I asked Ms. Price a general question
about her experiences at Reading Update. She started describing in very.
bland tones how each day they tackled new strategies to teach reading,
listening, speaking and writing. But then she stopped and said:

[One morning] we were asked to write something. We were told

there was a cracked window and we were to picture it. I

wrote it and then I volunteered to read it. I don’t think I

even reread it before I read it and I surprised myself. I

loved it. I was thrilled. That has influenced me..how I

want to go about teaching my kids (interview, February 11,

1991).
Ms. Price said that she had never written much before the workshop, but
after this experience she started writing often and now highly values
her time writing. She has started keeping a daily writing journal and
has recently purchased a sketch book so she can both draw and write. She
said she is thrilled with her writing and that she unravels what she is
thinking and feeling in her writing.

The writing experience in Reading Update encouraged her to write
so that new writing is an important part of Ms. Price’s life. She

writes daily and she speaks of writing as a way in which she makes sense

of the world. Her own writing experiences have led to major changes in

39

how she teaches writing. She learned that as a writer she needs time
and quiet to write and that she writes more when she has choice over
what she writes. She began to think that her students as writers might
need these conditions as well. She commented:

I’ve always felt as though writing was important, but I never

gave it the attention before and the quiet that it needed. I

never trusted this whole process of giving time for it. I

was worried that the kids would be bored (interview, December

17, 1991).
Ms. Price said that she has made writing in her classroom less
structured because of her own writing experiences. She no longer gives
students subjects to write about or story starters. She makes sure they,
have ideas about characters, places, and situations which they wish to
write about and then gives them time to write. As an example of the
changes in her practice, Ms. Price described a book-making project the
class had been working on all year. Students had to write, edit, type,
and illustrate a story and then make a hard cover for it. In the past
Ms. Price said she would have set aside so many weeks for this project
and insisted students finish in that time period. This year she has
allowed students as much time as they need (so that some students had
still not finished by mid-April when I last observed Ms. Price) and
allowed them a much wider range of topics on which to write. She now is
convinced that both time and choice over ideas are crucial elements in
good writing experiences for students.

Ms. Price’s writing experience at Reading Update had a powerful
effect on her as a learner and a direct effect on her teaching of

writing. At Reading Update, Ms. Price wrote. She experienced as a

learner new ideas about writing and was able to transfer this experience

40
to her own students’ learning. If she needed quiet, time, and choice
when she wrote, it made sense that her students would need those things
also. Whereas the other inservice sessions on reading strategies
presented new ideas connected with the policy from the teachers’
perspective-~how they might be used with their students in their
classrooms--the writing session made teachers learners in new
situations. It allowed teachers to understand what their students might
experience if they were to change their classrooms as the policy
suggested.

The power of this experience for Ms. Price supports research that
suggests that teachers may need to experience as learners a different
kind of teaching in order to enact it (Duckworth, ??). Inservice
sessions which give teachers activities to do in their classrooms as
ways of changing practice or offer images of what changed practice might
look like in classrooms (Kennedy, 1991) may not be sufficiently potent
to affect teachers’ work with their own students.

It is in her creative writing work with students that Ms. Price’s
learning from the reform is most evident.‘ Because writing is a
meaningful experience in her own life in which she learns about herself
and thinks about her relationships with others, she wants to give her
students similar opportunities. She talks about creative writing as
helping students learn to "read the world around them,” to better
understand themselves, and to ”center themselves.”

Ms. Price has students work on creative writing pieces frequently.

Often she asks the district reading consultant to plan a writing lesson

41
for her class. She described one writing task in which she and the
reading consultant took her class outside to stare at trees:

I said I think they need to know they can read many things in

this world. And so we went out and we read a tree for

fifteen minutes. We chose whatever tree we wanted and we sat

down. Here were all these boys sitting down looking at trees.

I was in tears, I was back here with my eyes straining. I

couldn’t even look. All these boys and they were just--they

took a little piece of twig from their trees and took some

paint and they sat there. They sat there for fifteen minutes

with their twigs dipped in paint and studied the tree, became

intimate with the tree to the degree that they could, and

then they did a sketch of the tree and came in and wrote,

just wrote for fifteen minutes . . . . And Steven came the

next day and he said ‘Wow, did that come out of me!’

(interview, February 11, 1991).

Ms. Price talked about many of her writing lessons with the same degree
of passion. They are experiences meaningful to her as a teacher and
meaningful to her students. She doesn’t always plan writing. Instead
she spontaneously decides to ask students to write when circumstances in
the classroom make it seem fruitful: ”So that when I’m working with
students and there’s a situation that comes up where there’s that
special moment, I grab it. Whether I’ve planned writing or not, I grab
it and go with it' (interview, February 11, 1991).

Ms. Price teaches separate lessons on expository writing and these
look very different from her creative writing teaching. Many of these
lessons are part of her social studies and science teaching for which
students write reports on assigned topics that connect with their
subject area units. For instance, one day I observed students were
working on reports for social studies on people who were famous during
westward expansion in the United States. This assignment was very
regulated. First, students were given an outline of areas in which they

should find information about their biographee--early life, education,

42
places they’ve lived, contributions, and so forth. Then they were given
help in transforming their notes into sentences. Finally, Ms. Price
gave another outline with which to organize their sentences into a
complete report. Other than choosing the person whom they wished to
write about, students were given little choice over how, what, and when
to write.

The lesson was typical of how students write when it is not
creative writing. This project was very teacher-directed and Ms.
Price’s goal in teaching it this way was so that students would learn
how to gather information from non—fiction books, synthesize and
organize it, and then write a report. Ms. Price talked about this being
a writing skill that she sees as important for students to develop.

Ms. Price’s experience writing a creative piece about a cracked
window and the writing Ms. Price now does because of the experience have
clearly led Ms. Price to teach creative writing differently. Students
have more choice over what and when they write. But Ms. Price’s
teaching of expository text seems unchanged by her writing experience.
Students have little choice over what they write, what format they use,
and when they write. Students follow guidelines and do so in a timely
manner. This division of creative writing and expository writing is
similar to the division of teaching literature and teaching language
arts skills. Ms. Price seemingly doesn’t feel tension in approaching
writing in two ways (as she didn’t mention tension between her
literature and language skills instruction) because the two types of
writing lessons have different objectives. The goal for expository

writing is to help students develop their abilities to use information

43
to write reports--an academic skill valued in school. The goal for
creative writing is to help students reflect on and learn about the
world around them. Whatever epistemological tensions that might exist—-
such as what is writing? how does one learn to write?--do not arise for
Ms. Price because the two serve different purposes.
i n e

Another new learning that Ms. Price associated with the policy,
was acquiring new language to talk about reading instruction. Although
many of the ideas she heard about at Reading Update seemed familiar,
they were often couched in terms unfamiliar to her.Ms. Price commented:

I think I’ve really always taught this way, even when I was

teaching in the 505 . . . but I could not put words on what I

was doing before and now I can put words to it (interview,

February 11, 1991).

Some new terms that Ms. Price mentioned were "reading as an interactive
process“ and “accessing prior knowledge.” Learning these terms gave her
language to talk about what she does with other teachers. She said it
had been difficult in the past to describe to other teachers how she
taught and what she thought but now she knew that these words meant
something to her colleagues and they served as good descriptors of how
she thought about her own practices.

When I asked Ms. Price about what she might have learned from
Reading Update, she reported both learning about writing and learning
new language in our first interview. These she identified as direct
consequences of her having heard about the policy at this inservice.
But the third learning that Ms. Price reported from the policy happened
over time and she did not talk about it until I interviewed her the

second year.

44

Conn ‘ dea

When I returned to talk to Ms. Price the second year and asked her
again about Reading Update, she answered differently from how she had in
the first year. Ms. Price talked about two new experiences she had that
had helped her understand the ideas she first heard at Reading Update.

One experience was working with a science educator on designing a
science curriculum using a conceptual change model. This experience
gave her more help in thinking about how to teach using children’s
thinking as the starting point for instruction. In this case, Ms. Price
said she learned the importance of knowing what children already think
about the topics they are going to learn and then planning instruction
that builds on, or in the conceptual change model, changes student
thinking about the topic. The other experience was a book she read
called "Brain-Based Learning”. Ms. Price said this book helped her
understand that the brain was patterned by prior experiences and
understandings to accept new information in particular ways. To teach
so that children would learn, teachers had to be aware of their
students’ brain patterns and plan their instructions to fit with them.

Ms. Price connected these experiences to Reading Update by seeing
them all advocating I'the need to provide an opportunity for listening to
the child to see what’s in there and the need to check-out prior
knowledge.“ Ms. Price went on to describe how all of these experiences
were about "making connections in learning“ and “working with prior
knowledge to find the value of the child.“ Although Ms. Price mentioned
these ideas about prior knowledge and instruction starting with the

child the first time I asked her about Reading Update, it was as though

45
they did not really make sense to her until they were reinforced by
these two new experiences. Ms. Price commented:

”It’s [Reading Update] really just been a part of me now.

And it’s helped the other things [conceptual change and

brain-based learning] become a part of me too. I love it

now. I’ve done my reading differently . . . I mean if I am

reading something I will talk to myself about it in front of

the kids because that’s what is in me and I want to do it

more because I know something is happening in their minds.

. . .I’m checking in on them more . . . what’s going on in

their minds" (interview, December 17, 1991).

What is interesting in Ms. Price’s talk about her learning from
the policy is the change that occurred as she connected the reading
reform with other ideas to which she was being exposed. Policy
researchers write of practitioners’ interpreting policy because of
conditions or ideas that already exist in the practitioner’s world. They
interpret policy through their existing beliefs and experiences with
other policies (McLaughlin, 1987). They interpret and enact policy
because of existing conditions (Lieberman, 1982; Lipsky, 1980). Or they
interpret policy because of how they found out about it (Sproull, 1981).
Each of these presents an image of policy entering into practitioners’
worlds and being interpreted in the context of existing ideological or
practical conditions. But Ms. Price’s story is one of policies and
ideas mutually shaping each other. New policies such as the reading
reform make sense when they connect with other ideas, such as conceptual
change or ”brain-based learning," which in turn get made sense of
because of how they connect to the reading reform. Whereas at first Ms.
Price claimed that many of the ideas at Reading Update were bewildering

and the experience was overwhelming, when she connected them with other

46
ideas, they became an important piece in her thinking about teaching and
learning reading.

Ms. Price spoke of her learning about and from the policy in three
ways: first, she learned about writing both as a learner and a writer
and then as a teacher of writing; secondly, she learned a language with
which she could better talk about her teaching; and finally, she
connected over time policy ideas with other ideas about teaching and
learning and in the process constructed an interpretation of the policy
that was meaningful to her. Some of the learning occurred immediately--
the language, the writing. Other learning occurred over time—-the
connecting of ideas. Some of Ms. Price’s learning can be directly
traced to the workshop and some is more diffuse—--an individual sense—
making process that took place because of who Ms. Price is. The main
impact, though, of all of the experiences on Ms. Price seemed to be a
increasingly strong commitment to seeing students’ prior knowledge,
interests, and experience at the heart of instruction and the place to
start in teaching.

Yet, as seen in the description of her practices, this commitment
co-exists with a commitment to students also learning a fixed collection
of skills which Ms. Price frequently sees best taught through
traditional pedagogy---i.e., worksheets, teaching-as-telling. Most
often Ms. Price can fit these two commitments into her literacy practice
easily because she sees them as two separate things--two kinds of
instruction designed to achieve two kinds of learning objectives. But

sometimes the two conflict in her practice. Talking to Ms. Price and

47
watching her teach made clear some tensions that she sees and some that

perhaps she does not see but seemed apparent to me as an observer.

Tensions in Practice

iegsiens Ms, Price Identifies

During one creative writing lesson I observed, two boys did no
work at all in the time Ms. Price gave them. This writing assignment
was based on an idea about writing from different perspective which Ms.
Price wanted students to learn how to do. The assignment was to think
about a scene in a painting or one that they conjured up in their
imaginations and then to write a short piece describing that scene from
one of the object’s in the scene perspective. For instance, if the
scene was the classroom, they could describe the classroom from a
pencil’s perspective. Ms. Price told students they could move around
and discuss their scenes and objects with each other, but then she
wanted them to begin writing. These two boys wandered around the room
talking with others as other students did, but then as other students
began to settle down, they continued wandering and finally sat in their
seats daydreaming. Ms. Price noticed the two boys and frequently asked
them about their thinking and asked if she could help them in any way.
The boys said they did not need her help. After about twenty minutes of
watching them not work, Ms. Price came back to where I was sitting and
said, 'I’ve got to let them do that and not try to take control. But it
is so hard for me.” After a few more minutes, the class had to leave to
go to music, and the boys had done no work. At this point, Ms. Price

suggested that the boys come in after lunch to write their pieces ”to

48
see if they would be more inspired then" (observation, November 22,
1991).

Ms. Price said at lunch that this experience, and others like it,
are very frustrating for her. On the one hand she wants students to
have control over their writing and choice in writing, but on the other
hand, she thinks it is valuable for students to try to write from
different perspectives. So although Ms. Price firmly believes in what
she calls ”child-centered” approaches to writing, she struggles with
what that means in her classroom when students choose not to write.

What is her role if not to intervene when students don’t do assignments?
How can she tell what is just not working and what is not working
because as a writer one is thinking about writing and needs more time to
actually write? Her own experiences in writing pointed out the value of
things like choice and control over time and space, but those things
assume that the writer gegte to write and will eventually write. But
what do those things mean when one applies them to students who may not
ever want to write? These are difficult questions for Ms. Price and
even though her beliefs about writing and learning--as well as her
learning about writing from the policy--point her in one direction, she
is not always comfortable with it. Her beliefs put her in the middle of
a tension between a goal of student control over their own learning and
a teacher’s sense of what students should be learning in school.
W

Not all tensions I noted in Ms. Price’s practice were ones she
identified. Another example of her facing two competing goals occurred

in a lesson on note-taking that 1 observed. This lesson was one of many

49
that Ms. Price had been teaching about note-taking. The class was
learning how to write reports and Ms. Price told me prior to this lesson
that her purpose was to help students develop the skill of taking notes
on text that would be useful for writing reports. She said she thought
her students had a hard time deciding what information in a piece of
text was important.
The lesson began with Ms. Price asking students to read acts from
a play on Geronimo and to highlight what they thought would be important
information if they were to use the play to write about Geronimo’s life.
After students had finished, Ms. Price asked them to read to the class
what they had highlighted. The first few students offered text that Ms.
Price and the rest of the class seemed to agree was important. No one
offered other suggestions or questioned the choices. But in the last
act of the play, John suggested the entire act be highlighted.
Ms. Price: So did Anthony. Would you read the whole
thing?
John: Yes.
Ms. Price: Okay. I guess the first paragraph would help
us pinpoint the setting. So that’s valuable. It’s
not essential, but it adds to things . . . . Some
of you might have left it out. You’ll make your
own choices, but those sentences don’t help me a
whole lot.
The class went to the next act. Jenny suggested the idea that Mexican
soldiers had scalped Indian women and children was important.
Ms. Price: Why did you think this was important?
Jenny: Because it provided a reason for Geronimo to hate
them so much.
Ms. Price: It gets motivation, I guess. How many left it
out?
Brianne: I don’t know. It didn’t seem very important to
me.
Ms. Price: Okay. We’re all going to have different

reasons for taking notes. I know people who
highlight the whole thing and that’s not helpful to

50
me because it seems like then they have to
summarize. I can’t highlight anything. I need to
jot down words that are important. But that’s just
me. Hopefully today you will find something that
is useful to you in remembering information
(observation, March 22, 1991).

The lesson continued with students deciding what they thought was
important information in the play, but seldom was there agreement on
what that was. Throughout it, Ms. Price seemed really caught.
Believing in students constructing individual meaning of text, which is
what they were doing, she also wants them to learn how to differentiate
essential from unessential information in text. Should Ms. Price have
contradicted students’ suggestions on what was important in the play and
therein violate her belief in individual construction of meaning? If
she chose not to contradict them, would they learn the skill of
discerning important information from text? If she chose to contradict
them, how would she decide whose conception of main idea and important
details is correct? After the lesson, Ms. Price commented that she had
really struggled in teaching it. She hadn’t thought that students would
come up with different ideas about what was important, although in the
middle of teaching, she understood why that was happening. Her final
comment to me was that she would have to think about this lesson more.

Figuring out which goal to work for and which pedagogy to use in
any one lesson creates a tension. In this lesson, is the individual
construction of meaning of the Geronimo text more valuable than the
skill of taking notes on essential information? In the previous
example, does the value of students having control over their writing

outweigh the possible learning they might do by writing a story from

another object’s perspective? Rather than solving this tension by

51
always choosing one side or the other, Ms. Price seems to manage the
tension (Lampert, 1985) in that she deals with the problem in a specific
context and uses the problem as a way of reflecting on her own thinking
and practices. She attempts both to use child-centered approaches and
teach more directedly. But in watching Ms. Price do this difficult
managing, I not only wondered about the tension Ms. Price felt but
wondered how that tension affected students. Did they learn about
essential ideas in text or did they feel validated in their meaning-
making of the Geronimo play? Or were they just confused? Did the two
boys feel like they had control of their writing and were they really
struggling to think of things to write? Or were they just goofing off
and hoping to get away with it?

Tensions such as the ones just described are perhaps inherent in
teaching, especially when teachers attempt more ambitious practices.
All teachers have a variety of instructional goals and objectives that
lend themselves to different ways of teaching and thinking about
teaching. Throwing into the picture ideas such as child-centered
instruction and student control over learning only complicate the
picture more. Ms. Price has multiple agendas in her teaching and the
multiple agendas are not always easy for her to pull off in practice.
But what role does the policy play in this tension? Does it offer her
any help? If indeed teachers such as Ms. Price interpret the policy to
be advocating a child-centered vision of literacy instruction, then how
should it look in their classrooms? Are there fixed language skills to

learn and important learning experiences for students to have, and if

52
so, how should they be taught? There is no guidance in the policy that

would help teachers answer those questions.

Ms. Price, a Case of . . .

Ms. Price’s case of learning from and about the policy raises some
interesting issues in policy implementation. The first issue is the kind
of learning experiences teachers might need to pull off the policy in
their practices. Ms. Price’s most powerful experience connected to the
policy was one in which she became a learner in the new way of learning
that the policy advocated. The experience of being asked to write led
Ms. Price to become a writer and understand what it meant to write. It
helped her see what conditions might be necessary for her students to
write well--things such as choice over topics and time--and, therefore,
what she might need to do as a teacher to set up good writing
experience. This perspective seems often lacking from most staff
development programs. Nothing in the state inservice workshops allowed
teachers to experience learning in new ways. Instead, activities were
presented from the teachers’ perspective--they were modelled for
teachers so that they could see what they needed to do differently. Ms.
Price found these types of sessions in her own inservice experience not
particularly helpful, because she could not see herself using the
activities intact in her classroom. Without some understanding that
teachers may need a different kind of learning experience to be able to
carry out the kinds of reforms policies outline--rather than just
carrying out activities associated with policies-- it is unclear how
effective staff development will be in helping teachers adopt new policy

ideas in their practices.

53

The second issue has to do with Ms. Price’s learning over time as
she connected the policy with other ideas. If this study had been
finished in a year, my story of Ms. Price’s learning would have been
quite different. At first, she talked of little learning from the
policy. As she said in the first interview, it was something she put
in the cupboard—~both the inservice materials that physically got put in
the cupboard and the ideas she put in her mental cupboard. But, this
changed as she associated what she remembered from the policy with other
new ideas that she was learning. Elmore & McLaughlin (1988) write that
policy implementation takes place over time. Ms. Price seems an example
of this, as well as an example that learning from policy takes place
over time. The way Ms. Price made sense of the reading policy evolved as
it connected with new ideas she was encountering. These ideas were
mutually shaped by each other and, it seems, it was in the mutually
shaping process that the ideas gained importance in Ms. Price’s
thinking. This seems a variation on Kingdon’s comments I referred to at
the beginning of this chapter. Even though Ms. Price was already
'doing' many of the ideas and practices associated with a view of this
policy, the policy enabled her to make different sense of those
practices and ideas. In the process, her understanding of the ideas and
of the policy changed. So her learning from the policy changed and
increased in the time period I observed and talked to her. Given Ms.
Price’s reflective nature and her interest in new ideas, it seems that
this process of making sense of the reading policy is not over.

The third issue is that policy may help teachers attempting to

implement its vision in their practices. This policy reform included

54

some ideas about what reading is and the purpose of reading. But it
contained little about what that would mean in a classroom. When asked,
reformers could offer little help in constructing what a classroom would
look like that would be aligned to the policy. Moreover, it did not
address at all, either in the documentation connected to the policy nor
in the inservice work, how the policy ideas would fit with other ideas
about reading instruction that teachers held. How were teachers such as
Ms. Price to teach punctuation, literary devices such as cause and
effect, or language tools such as note-taking? The policy’s silence on
these issues means that teachers such as Ms. Price are left on their own
to figure out what to do. For teachers to understand how to pull off
the vision of literacy instruction the state is advocating they need
reformers to recognize the complexities of practices and to offer
guidance to teachers in making ”good" pedagogical decisions given those
complexities.

Ms. Price is clearly a teacher who thinks very hard about
teaching. She has taught for a number of years, and in listening to her
talk about her teaching, her 'hard thinking" is not a new habit. Ideas
about teaching and learning are serious business for Ms. Price. Ms.
Price took the ideas connected to the reading policy to heart and
attempted, over the last two years, to make sense of them and use them
in her practice. Observing and interviewing her made me wonder whether
policymakers take their own work as seriously. Ms. Price deserved more
than new activities and quick overviews of research which were the
primary learning opportunities she was given. That she was left to make

sense of the policy ideas on her own by fitting them in with other ideas

55
seems evidence that something more would have been helpful to Ms. Price.
Her learning might have been facilitated, perhaps strengthened, by more
thoughtful inservice work at the state and district level., The final
issue, then, that Ms. Price’s case raises is that even though the modal
teacher response to inservice work may be a desire for more classroom
activities, policymakers need to recognize that teachers such as Ms.
Price may offer their greatest chance for successfully implementing
their ideas into practice, but that these teachers need better ways to

learn about it.

Notes to Chapter 2

1. Although Reading Update had a session on writing and Ms. Price
thinks of writing as a big piece of the state reform because of that, it
was really not part of the reform, nor was writing any part of the state
inservice work as far as I can tell.

56

CHAPTER 3
THE CASE OF TOM FIELDER

I Just Call It Reading. . . .

One of the difficulties of doing this study has been not knowing
what to call the subject of the policy. State officials called their
work a “new definition of reading,” yet surrounded the definition with
goals and objectives for reading, writing, speaking, and listening.
Some teachers use the terms language arts or literacy to denote their
teaching of the four areas in a connected fashion. When I asked Mr.
Fielder what he calls this subject area, he responded somewhat wryly: "I
just call it reading" (interview, February 20, 1991).

Mr. Fielder’s comment is indicative of his general disregard for
change in teaching practice. By anyone’s standards Mr. Fielder’s
reading practice would be considered very traditional. He teaches
phonics with worksheets, uses basal readers with his ability- tracked
reading groups, and drills students on sight words. He has always
taught something called reading and he still does, regardless of the
popularity of new language or ideas. Mr. Fielder’s traditionalism acts
almost like a badge--something that announces to which ideological camp
of teaching Mr. Fielder sees himself belonging. Mr. Fielder calls
himself a “dinosaur“ and said, 'I know there aren’t many of us left any

more“ (interview, December 10, 1991).

57

58

Yet despite his commitments to traditional ways of teaching, Mr.
Fielder speaks of changes he has made in his reading practice as a
direct result of the state initiative. Mr. Fielder teaches in the same
school as Ms. Price and attended the same week-long inservice program.
As a result of what he learned at the inservice, Mr. Fielder reads
different kinds of text with students and uses different pedagogical
practices to help students relate what they read to their own
experiences.

Of the three teachers in this study Mr. Fielder is the most
forthright about the effects the state policy has had on his teaching.
He speaks quite eloquently about how he felt learning about the new
reading definition, what it means to him, and how it has altered what he
does when he teaches students to read. Yet of these teachers, Mr.
Fielder’s practice looks the most familiar and traditional and his
interpretation of the policy is the most conservative. So how does one
measure learning and change from policy? Why does Mr. Fielder construct

his reading practice as he does?

Mr. Fielder’s Sense Making of the Policy

Mr. Fielder believes the new definition for reading is about
reading as an interactive process: ”I sound like a Johnny-One-Note. I
guess to me it sounds like reading is interactive. You have to bring to
reading things that you know to be able to read the information and
interpret it" (interview, February 20, 1991). Reading as an interactive
process means to Mr. Fielder that a reader’s interpretation of text is
based not just on meaning embedded in the text but on the experiences,

beliefs, knowledge--'things that you know'--that the reader brings to

59
the act of reading. A reader’s prior understandings help him or her
comprehend text and construct meaning of what is being read.

Although Mr. Fielder said he always thought of his own reading as
interactive—-i.e., that he made sense of what he read through his prior
knowledge and experiences--he didn’t use this view of reading when he
taught his students to read. The definition made him rethink what was
necessary in his instruction: ”I’m much more aware of the need to access
prior knowledge, because I actually never did that. . . . So I’m more
aware of the need to get them involved" (interview, February 20, 1991).

This new insight into how children might best learn to read seemed
to Mr. Fielder to have large consequences to his instruction and, as a
result, caused him much anxiety. His first reaction to the state policy
was, ”Oh not I’ve been doing it wrong all these years!” When I asked
him what caused his anxiety, he said:

You just want to do a good job. I picked this profession

because it was something I want to do . . . I really love to

teach . . . I really like helping these little guys learn to

do something. I enjoy seeing the spark and that is why I

chose this. . . . So the anxiety was built by the fact that

there seemed to be a better way to do the job than I was

doing it“ (interview, February 20, 1991).

Mr. Fielder’s interpretation of the policy was it presented a better way
to think about reading instruction. Although the main idea Mr. Fielder
associated with the policy resonated with his beliefs about his own

reading, it seemed new when applied to how his students should learn to

read. Like Ms. Price for whom some of the policy’s ideas seemed

familiar, Mr. Fielder saw the policy as offering both new and old ideas.

60
How Mr. Fielder Learned About the Policy

Mr. Fielder reported learning about the policy from four sources:
a week-long district inservice called Reading Update, building staff
meetings, a new reading textbook series, and the MEAP test. The
district inservice and the staff meetings were specifically designed to
introduce teachers to the new reading policy and to give them
suggestions of new classroom practices. Mr. Fielder’s concern that the
state had a better vision of reading instruction led him to attend the
district inservice which was conducted by the two district reading
coordinators, both of whom had been involved at the state level in
designing reading conferences for teachers which were connected to the
new definition. Much of Reading Update was taken directly from
materials the reading coordinators helped produce for the state reading
conferences.

Mr. Fielder went to Reading Update to learn "things that I could
use to help me implement the new [definition].' To Mr. Fielder, the
reading definition portrayed reading as an interactive process, and the
strategies were the activities that teachers could use in their
instruction to help students interact with text. These strategies
included such things as helping students learn how to summarize
information when they read, or predict story events, or follow story
structure.

Mr. Fielder said he learned many strategies at Reading Update, but
he was particularly taken with new ideas on how to question students

about text so as to access their prior knowledge. Accessing prior

61
knowledge was the primary way Mr. Fielder saw reading becoming an
interactive process. He said:

I think what the new definition basically said to me is that

the child has to be a part of the reading process. And I can

honestly say I didn’t exclude children before, but I didn’t

include them as much as I do now. And by including them, I’m

talking about accessing prior knowledge when we start a story

(interview, December 10, 1991).

Students are included in the reading process--i.e., reading becomes
interactive--when students can connect what they already know with text
they read.

After Reading Update, Mr. Fielder continued to learn about new
reading strategies during staff meetings in his building. One of the
district reading coordinators was given time once a month at building
meetings to talk about a new activity that teachers could use. Mr.
Fielder said he found these monthly sessions a good reinforcement for
what he had learned at Reading Update. He said of both Reading Update
and the staff meetings, ”It was just interesting seeing all those
techniques. There were a ton of handouts which I carried all home. I
pull them out every once in a while and read over some of the stuff when
I need to." Although Mr. Fielder said he does not use all or even most
of the activities he learned, learning them helped him think about what
it means for students to be involved in their reading and gave him ideas
of things to do in his classroom to achieve student involvement.

Mr. Fielder learned new approaches in reading instruction as well
by piloting a new basal series (Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich’s 1988
basal series) and serving on the district curriculum committee which

adopted a new reading series in 1989. A major criterion for the

committee’s choice of a text was its alignment to the view of reading

62

put forth in the new definition. Although some committee members saw
adoption of any basal text as antithetical to the state initiative, Mr.
Fielder and others fought to get a basal series that would help
teachers, such as themselves, adopt new practices yet continue using a
basal. He said, 'So finally the committee came around with some pushing
from the administration that we needed a reading series that was updated
so that those who don’t use whole language would have some updated
tools" (interview, February 20, 1991). Mr. Fielder cited different
questioning strategies and a greater emphasis on comprehension skills as
the major changes in the new text. Both of these changes he saw as
supportive of changes advocated in the new state vision and helpful to
him in his own efforts to get students more involved.

Finally, Mr. Fielder talked about learning from the new MEAP test.
He saw the MEAP as demanding greater comprehension abilities from his
students and a more developed understanding of reading informational
texts. He commented that with the new MEAP he feels more pressure to
I'make sure I do a lot of comprehension type things, making sure students '
are able to attack an article in such a way that they can get
information" (interview, February 20, 1991). When I asked him why he
felt more pressure, he replied, "I never used to feel pressure because I
honestly disassociated myself from it. It was a fourth grade test and I
said who cares about that? But, districts are using the MEAP test now
as a measure for school improvement. When that happens, all of a sudden
everyone is held accountable for what they teach.” (interview, February
20, 1991). When I asked him what he meant by ”comprehension type

things" he said, "More drawing-conclusions type thing, more putting two

63
and two together to get an answer, rather than just reading the article
and saying, ‘The dog is black.’" (interview, February 20, 1991).

Mr. Fielder also mentioned that because the new MEAP test has an
informational reading selection for which students receive a separate
score, he has emphasized informational texts more than he previously
did. Primary grade students in particular have scored low on this part
of the new test, largely because of their lack of exposure to expository
text. To give them more practice in "getting information from what they
read,” Mr. Fielder said he uses the Weekly Reader series more frequently
than he has in the past and questions them about material in it more
thoroughly. He also treats science and social studies text more like
the stories in the basal reader; i.e., that he thinks about accessing
students’ prior knowledge about topics and using reading strategies to
help them comprehend the information they are reading (interview,
February 20, 1991).

Mr. Fielder learned then about the state initiative from a variety
of experiences. He received quite formal ”training" in the new
definition from the week-long Reading Update program, with more informal
reminders of new ideas and strategies in monthly staff meetings. He
piloted a new basal text and served on the curriculum committee which
attempted to compare texts with the new definition. He attended to the
informational reading selection on the new MEAP test. The sense Mr.
Fielder has made of all these experiences seems to be that the state is
asking him two things: first, to emphasize informational text; and

secondly, to teach reading as an interactive process in which what

64
students bring to reading--their prior knowledge-~plays a critical role
in how they comprehend text.

Both of these changes were tied to how and what to teach in
reading. Unlike Ms. Price, Mr. Fielder did not interpret the policy to
be a broad philosophical platform on teaching and learning. His focus
was more narrow. He spoke of going to Reading Update to find thing; to
at with his students to teach reading better, such things as new
questioning strategies. The instructional strategies that he learned
were helpful tools for Mr. Fielder in changing his teaching to
accommodate the new state vision for reading. So even though Mr.
Fielder knew that some of his colleagues had broader ambitions of
learning new ways to think about reading and learning from their
experiences connected to the policy, he felt satisfied picking up "new
strategies that I’m comfortable working with" to teach reading.

Given that state officials talk about teachers needing to
"reprogram their radar" about reading (Weber) to understand the state
policy or needing to 'reconceptualize reading” (Wixson), it is difficult
to know if Mr. Fielder’s interpretation of their work is what they had
in mind. Is doing different things during reading time
reconceptualizing a subject or reprogramming one’s thinking about it?
In other words, is the message Mr. Fielder constructed the one state
officials thought they sent and how would they view the changes Mr.
Fielder has adopted because of their work?

What Has Changed?
Mr. Fielder has been teaching in Lewis for over ten years. He

teaches in the same rural/suburban school that Ms. Price does, although

65
unlike Ms. Price, this is the only school in which Mr. Fielder has ever
taught. Mr. Fielder grew up in a nearby town and still lives with his
parents. His mother, a retired school librarian, often helps Mr.
Fielder with school work such as designing bulletin boards or editing
students’ stories. Mr. Fielder talks about himself as a very
traditional person who does not buy into “fads” easily either in
teaching or his personal life. Whatever changes Mr. Fielder adopts,
they are carefully considered before they appear in Mr. Fielder’s
practice. He said about himself and other teachers in his building,

I don’t think you’ll find anybody in this building who will

throw out their whole program and adopt another program

overnight. . . . You see if it works, see if you are

comfortable with it, see if it helps your students and if it

doesn’t, then you will adopt it or abandon it. . . . So you

know, the drastic swings that you see in education from

extreme to extreme, really don’t seem to be in effect a lot

here (interview, December 10, 1991).

But Mr. Fielder has changed because of the new state reading
definition. The major changes Mr. Fielder mentioned have been increased
reading of informational text and questioning of students as a
pre-reading activity. Mr. Fielder has found the new reading series a
great help to him in carrying out these changes. The new basal series
(Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich Laureate Edition, 1990 edition) has
informational reading selections in each unit, a list of pre-reading
questions for each selection, and a series of comprehension building
questions not only for each selection but across selections within
units. Although Mr. Fielder said he learned the new ideas at Reading
Update, the basal series 'got him on the right track" in using these

ideas in his practice.

66

This was a pleasing situation for Mr. Fielder because he could
change in the direction of the state policy and at the same time
continue to use his basal reading text as the foundation of his
instruction. The most helpful session Mr. Fielder attended at Reading
Update was one in which the presenter demonstrated how to use a basal
reading text and still teach according to the new state policy--i.e.,
using reading strategies. Mr. Fielder said:

They had one guy come in and say "I use a textbook and this

is how I implement it [the policy] using these strategies.”

I got a lot out of him in the fact that he seemed to be doing

some of the things I do. (interview, February 20, 1991).

Mr. Fielder told me about this session on two separate occasions. He
knew many of his fellow teachers were abandoning textbooks in favor of
tradebooks. This was something Mr. Fielder did not want to do. After
this session, he felt he could make some changes in reading to align
himself with the new policy but still keep an important piece of his
reading instruction which was the textbook. By having this presenter
come to Reading Update and show teachers how to use their basal readers
in new ways, Mr. Fielder felt the district was sanctioning his continued
use of a text. His feelings were only further confirmed when the
district finally adopted a new textbook series for teachers to use.

So the areas of change that Mr. Fielder connected to the state
policy were greater use of informational text as part of his reading
instruction and more, as well as different, pre-reading instructional
strategies. Using informational text in reading was to help students

better learn to comprehend different kinds of text and instructional

strategies were to help them access their prior knowledge before reading

67

to comprehend all text better. Both of these changes seemed substantial

to Mr. Fielder.

What Does This Change Look Like?
5 rm t' T x
Mr. Fielder has changed his reading practices since the state
reform to include not only more reading of informational text but use of
reading strategies to help students read this text. He said:

I try to approach them [informational texts] the way I do in
reading group--to access any prior knowledge they have so
that they are thinking along the lines that they need to be
thinking so that they can pull out information. . . . I’m
happy to report that there are a half a dozen students in
here who can read an informational article and pull out
information. . . . I admit it has not been one of my stronger
areas, nor was it a concern of mine until the state MEAP test
decided it was something we should worry about . . . but it’s
okay.“ (interview, February 20, 1991).

On all days I observed, Mr. Fielder had students read some
expository text selection and used "strategies" in his instruction.
During one lesson, for example, Mr. Fielder passed out Weekly Readers
that had on the cover a big picture of a tooth holding an umbrella to
protect itself from the sweets and fried foods that were raining down
upon it. The title of the article was ‘Tooth-Friendly Snacks’. Mr.
Fielder started the discussion about the article:

Mr. Fielder: Who can predict what the article on the
front page is going to be about?

Class: [shouts] TEETH!

Mr. Fielder: Good. Who can tell me why it is important
to brush your teeth?

Raymond: Because they could rot. My grandfather’s teeth
started to rot. . . .

Mr. Fielder: [interrupting Raymond] Okay. What do you
think this picture means?

Lisa: Junk food is bad for him.

Mr. Fielder: Yes.

68

Derek: He doesn’t want to get cavities from the food.
Mr. Fielder: Good.

After receiving a few more comments about food and teeth, the class had
a discussion about what they could do to protect their own teeth and why
they thought certain foods caused more problems than others. After this
discussion, Mr. Fielder directed students to read the article to find
out if their ideas were correct. After doing so he asked them questions
suggested at the end of the article--"Which of these snacks is best for
your teeth? ' 'How can you tell which snacks are good for teeth?” ”Did
you learn something new by reading it?" (observation, February 20,
1991). A

Mr. Fielder said that prior to the reading definition and MEAP
test he did not think of [he Weekly Reader as part of his reading
instruction, yet now he does. Consequently, he uses similar
instructional strategies reading it as he does with the basal text.
This includes such things as predicting events from context clues and
accessing prior knowledge, as he did in the previous example. He does
this because he wants students to be better at “getting information from
what they read" (int. 2/91) whether it be expository or narrative text.
So the state policy expanded Mr. Fielder’s notions of what counted as
reading instruction. Prior to his learning from and about the policy,
Mr. Fielder thought of the basal reader as the only text he used in his
formal reading instruction. Now he includes other text-—The Weekly
Reader, the book he reads aloud to the class, the social studies text—-
as vehicles to teach reading. And because they are so, for the first
time Mr. Fielder uses strategies to help students read and comprehend

them better.

69
o in den 5
The other change that Mr. Fielder spoke most about was a
difference in the way he questions students about what they read. As
mentioned earlier, Mr. Fielder said that prior to the new definition, he
mostly asked literal questions of students after they read a story;
things such as What color was Dan’s bicycle? or What was Ruth’s dog’s
name? He commented, "When I think of the way I did reading four or five
years ago, I would say, ‘This is a story about so and so and such and
such. Which page can you find it on? What can you find on this page?
Oh, doesn’t this sound like an interesting thing.’. . . and then we
would read.“ (interview, February 20, 1991). But, now Mr. Fielder says
he questions students about their ideas prior to reading a piece of
text---'But now it’s, ‘Ooesn’t this sound interesting? And what do you
think?’ ' (interview, February 20, 1991).
An example of Mr. Fielder’s new style of questioning occurred with
one group which was reading a story about a boy’s house. A skill lesson
on using pictures to predict a story topic accompanied the story. Mr.
Fielder drew a house on the board that looked similar to the drawing of
the house in the beginning of the story.
Mr. Fielder: What have I drawn on the board?
Corey: A house.
Mr. Fielder: Is that all?
Corey: A tree.
Mr. Fielder: Right. There are lots of things in this
picture. I am going to write 3 sentences on the
board. I want you to read them to yourself and
decide how they go with the picture, if they go
with the picture. [The three sentences were: This
is a school. This is a house. This is a 200.]
Which of these goes with this picture?

Sean: This is a house.

Mr. Fielder: How do you know that?
Sean: Because of the house.

70
Mr. Fielder: Good. Why is it not a zoo or a school?
Bill: Because there would be animals.
Mr. Fielder: How do you know it is not a school?
Sean: Because there are no kids around.
Mr. Fielder: Good thinking. I like that you read and
looked and thought about what you read. And you
could tell me why things worked and why things
didn’t work. What is this story that we are going
to read about, do you think?
Group: Someone’s house. (observation, November 26,
1991).
In this example, Mr. Fielder created some discussion about the story
prior to reading it and asked students to predict the story setting by
looking at the picture. More importantly, perhaps, he asked them why
they thought certain things, such as why it was a house and not a
school. This kind of questioning seemed very different from asking
students to recall facts about what they just read--what was Ruth’s
dog’s name-~because it was asking for them to relate what they already
knew to what they were about to read. The "answers" were not to be
found in the text, but generated, to some degree at least, from
students’ putting ideas together. With another reading group, prior to
reading a expository selection on pioneers, Mr. Fielder asked students
how they thought the pioneers felt when they first saw the giant sequoia
trees and then asked them how they would feel? (observation, February 1,
1991). Again, these questions were very different from the literal
questions Mr. Fielder described himself asking in the past. Mr. Fielder
calls them "non-traditional questions" which are "questions about prior
knowledge.‘I The purpose is to "get students involved."
Reading more informational text, using instructional strategies
with different kinds of text, and questioning students to access prior

knowledge are all changes in Mr. Fielder’s reading instruction that he

71
directly attributes to the state initiative. These changes have made
his teaching look different. Mr. Fielder said there is more discussion
around text and students feel more excited about reading than they have
in the past. Mr. Fielder adopted these changes in some part because he
felt accountable to do so- -he felt some pressure from the MEAP if
nothing else-~but also because he saw his students better comprehending
what they read and becoming more involved with their reading. This last
point is the most important to Mr. Fielder. He mentioned often when we
talked that his goal for reading instruction is to help kids become
engaged, life-long readers, "to create a positive attitude toward
reading among the students.“ Because the changes he has made appear to
be helping him achieve his reading goal, he is sticking with them.

But to write a case of Mr. Fielder as a "changed" teacher would
only be telling half of his story. There is much in Mr. Fielder’s
reading instruction that seems resistant to changes often associated
with the state policy (use of tradebooks, connections of reading and

writing, integrated teaching).

What Has Not Changed?

MW

Although he knows that many teachers in the district have
abandoned basal texts in favor of tradebooks and have adopted a whole
language approach (which, in Mr. Fielder’s view, is one in which reading
and writing are connected and skills are not taught separately), Mr.
Fielder continued to teach reading as a series of smaller instructional
pieces that cumulate in students learning how to read. Mr. Fielder

describes the parts of his reading instruction in the following way:

72

I have my formalized instructional strand, my vocabulary
strand which is basically phonics--at least part of it. I do
sight words separately so that is part of my vocabulary
strand . . . .Then I have the formalized reading instruction
which is using the textbook and working on comprehension
skills. And then I have my Sustained Silent Reading which is
part of my reading instruction. Then we have the typical go
to the library and check out books they can read (interview,
February 20, 1991).

These different parts--phonics, sight words, comprehension work,
sustained silent reading--are all listed on the daily schedule as
separate lessons and Mr. Fielder does little to connect the work done in
one area with the work in another.

Mr. Fielder talked about some of these elements--phonics and sight
words particularly--as ”tools" that students need to learn to read. He
teaches these reading tools to the whole class in a very didactic
fashion. The teaching is mostly telling with student talk limited to
short responses to questions Mr. Fielder poses. A lesson in phonics I
observed seemed a typical example. The class was reviewing the "bossy
r'l sound. Mr. Fielder started the lesson by saying "Today we are going
to review the vowel families that go with ‘bossy r’s’. We call it the
‘bossy r’ because the ‘r’ goes up to the poor vowel families and makes
them make a special sound.“ He wrote IR, UR, ER on the board and asked
Lindsey what sound they all made, to which she replied "ER."

Mr. Fielder: How many agree? [The whole class raises

their hands.] Let’s see with some words. [Mr.
Fielder writes STIR on the board.] What is this
word?

A girl: Stir.

Mr. Fielder: What is this word, Josh? [Mr. Fielder

writes BURN on the board.]

Josh: [hesitates]

Mr. Fielder: Use your decoding skills.

Josh: Burn

Mr. Fielder: This word? [writes CLERK on the board.]
A boy: Clerk.

73
Mr. Fielder: Good, so we have just proved what Lindsey

said. Look at the words, focus on the words,

because if you see them and hear them it goes into

your brain. What is the word? [points to STIR--one

student shouts ”STIR"]. This word? [points to

BURN, class shouts "BURN"]. This word? [points to

CLERK. Class shouts ”CLERK".]
Mr. Fielder then passed out a worksheet that asked students to circle
the 'bossy r" words that matched pictures and, on the flip-side, one
that required them to fill in the sentences with the correct 'bossy r"
word. Mr. Fielder recited the words on the worksheet first, and then
the class repeated them. One student read the directions for each side
of the worksheet, and Mr. Fielder reminded them to ”use your decoding
skills. We’ve practiced and practiced them, so I expect you to use
them.“ With that the students went to work (observation, February 1,
1991).

Another time, I observed a sight word drill-and-practice lesson in
which Mr. Fielder passed out to students two copies of the sight-word
list for the week. One copy was on green paper and students cut the
words into squares to make flash cards to bring home to study. The other
list was on white paper and students used this to study in class. Mr.
Fielder asked a girl to read the words in the first column from top to
bottom. Before she started Mr. Fielder said, "Remember, these are sight
words. We do not sound them out. We just need to know them.“ The girl
then read the words (better, bring, clean, cut, done, always, about)
correctly. Stephanie read the words in the second list, stumbling over
the word ”could.“ Mr. Fielder responded, "The third word makes the ‘u’

sound,“ at which time Stephanie shouted out ”Could!” Mr. Fielder

replied, "A little work gets you a long way." Mr. Fielder then

74
instructed students to "CUT!" At that command, students cut up the
green copy of the list and placed their words in little bags to take
home for practice. A few who were fast cutters studied the words when
they finished. Mr. Fielder congratulated them on their good use of
time.

After cutting, Mr. Fielder wrote ten words on the board. After
writing each word, Mr. Fielder held up a flash card with the word
printed on it and asked students to read it. He asked them to read each
word four times, moving the card slightly each time so that students had
to move their eyes and head to follow the flash card. During one of the
flash card routines Mr. Fielder said: "You have to follow the card. You
need to use your voice and eyes to get it in your memory." Mr. Fielder
did this for each of the ten words, with students shouting the words
more loudly with each repeat.

In phonics and sight word lessons, student spent a great deal of
time filling out worksheets and doing other written seat work. Every
morning, Mr. Fielder puts a packet of worksheets and assignments on
student desks. One day these included a worksheet on words that have
the u-vowel sound, a letter form students were to use to write Mr.
Fielder a letter about something important to them, a fill-in the blanks
worksheet on cause and effect, and three drill-and-practice addition
papers. Students worked on these assignments through much of the
morning while Mr. Fielder taught the individual reading groups.

Mr. Fielder said that he emphasizes phonics and sight words in the
beginning of the year before he goes “heavy-duty into comprehension

skills“ in the second semester. At first he wants students to gain

75

confidence in their ability to actually identify words so that they can
begin to enjoy reading (interview, November 26, 1991). Mr. Fielder said
he has always taught separate lessons on phonics and sight words as part
of his reading instruction and he believes they are an important
component. He is even more concerned about teaching them now because he
doesn’t think the new reading series gives students enough practice in
either of these areas for them to acquire them as tools. He commented:

I think a child needs a tool that they can have control over.

It [phonics] is something that they can use to figure out

words by themselves. Another tool would be sight words. This

gives them immediate control over what they are doing

(interview, February 1, 1991).

Mr. Fielder’s teaching of phonics and sight words then hardly
seemed changed. He still teaches these as separate skills to learn, out
of the context of text students are reading. Moreover, he teaches them
as drill-and-practice lessons to the whole class. Mr. Fielder teaches
spelling, penmanship, and grammar in similar fashion: all as separate
lessons, all in a predetermined order. These skills are tools that Mr.
Fielder thinks students need to acquire in order to read. He said he
teaches them as separate lessons so that he can make sure he covers all
the skills that are necessary and so that he can present them in the
order in which he think they need to be taught. Although Mr. Fielder
knows that there are more-integrated, less-skill bound reading practices
which other teachers have adopted, his approach is the one that makes
the most sense to him.

BecaflJLTsn

As mentioned earlier, Mr. Fielder has changed some of the ways

that he questions students about text. He asks more open-ended

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questions before reading to help students connect what they already know
to what they read. But Mr. Fielder also spoke of retaining some of what
he calls “traditional questioning”--that is, asking direct questions
that have fixed answers. He does so to help him assess whether students
have read text carefully. One lesson in which Mr. Fielder worked with
the higher ability group had examples of both kinds of questioning. The
group was reading a story called "Jenny and the Tennis Nut.” It was
about a girl, Jenny, whose father loves tennis and wants her to be a
tennis player. Jenny loves gymnastics but does not want to disappoint
her father by not liking tennis. The problem in the story is Jenny’s
figuring out a way to talk to her dad about her likes and dislikes. Mr.
Fielder started his work with the group by asking them who remembered
the parts of a story. The group responded, "Character, setting,
problem.“ Mr. Fielder then directed students to read specific
paragraphs in the story to find clues about characters, setting, and
problem.
Mr. Fielder: Now read the first paragraph on page 169.
Look for clue words that the setting is outside.
Who can tell us clues to the fact that the setting
is outside?
Girl: The word fence.
Mr. Fielder: Good. Adam?
Adam: Yard.
Mr. Fielder: Good job on setting.
(observation, February 1, 1991).
The group, under Mr. Fielder’s direction, went through the entire story
reading specific paragraphs and being asked to find words that 'gave
clues“ as to the details of setting and character. Student responses
were all short-answer with little, if any, discussion surrounding them.

The point of the questioning seemed to be to twofold: first, to get

77
students to read text carefully (i.e., correctly) so as to pick up clues
on the story’s context; and secondly, to help Mr. Fielder see if
students could recognize words such as fence, outside, and yard on the
page. The questioning did not seem to be about students making sense or
interpreting text.

But after Mr. Fielder and his students marched through the text
finding clue words his questioning switched from this directed, “right
answer” approach to one focusing on interpretation of text. He began to
ask questions that were open-ended and designed to help students think
about how the story related to their own lives. For instance, Mr.
Fielder asked his students how Jenny and her dad started to solve their
communication problem.

Mr. Fielder: What do they do?

Chris: They talk to each other.

Mr. Fielder: Yeah, very good. So they did something

that we can do when we have a problem with our
parents or teachers. We’ve picked up some ideas
for our own life through reading this story. What
do you think Jenny’s dad is like?
Ron: A tennis nut.
Mr. Fielder: Well, we know he is a tennis nut, but once
he listens to Jenny we know that her dad is what
else? [no one responds] I know this is pretty
broad, but what do you think? Has her father given
up teaching tennis to Jenny?
Derek: No.
Angela: No, but he is going to watch her at gymnastics
too.
Mr. Fielder: Right. I think he’s a father who listens
(observation, February I, 1991).
Mr. Fielder asked these questions with a different tone of voice and
style. He paused between questions and responses as if he were thinking
hard about how he might respond. He allowed some chatter among students
so that they could share what they were thinking. At the end, when Mr.

Fielder said he thought Jenny now had a father who listened, Mr. Fielder

78
and the group seemed satisfied, as if they had figured out what the
story was about after all and they found it pleasant.

Mr. Fielder’s questioning, like the rest of his reading
instruction, is a mixture of old and new practices. There are new
elements--informational reading, instructional strategies-- that he has
adopted because of what he learned from the state initiative. But there
are also old practices--isolated skill lessons, ability groups, basal
readers that he has not changed because of what her heard from the state
effort. Given that Mr. Fielder talks about other teachers adopting more
innovative practices than he--whole language, integrated literacy
instruction--because of the reading policy, it seems impossible to
conclude that he is unaware of alternative portraits of teaching. He
knows that some teachers in his building who received the same
instruction at Reading Update have responded very differently to the
ideas presented. However he interprets the state’s new reading
definition and its implications for practice, it is not out of ignorance
of other interpretations but deliberate choices of what is best in his

professional judgment. Why?

Understanding Change and Resistance to Change
Mr. Fielder quite frequently talked about the changes he has made
in his reading practice as having to 'fit' with his more longstanding
ideas and practices in reading. He said:
I teach in a way that is comfortable for me and then I try to
accommodate new ideas. I’m not comfortable, for instance,

with whole language. I like things in nice little cubicles.
I work well with them (interview, February 20, 1991).

79

In looking at the changes Mr. Fielder has adopted in response to
the state policy, it seems clear that he has been able to fit these new
practices--questioning, informational text, and so forth--into his
existing framework for reading instruction. He can still use the basal
text, divide reading up into "little cubicles," and ability group his
students. 50 although the changes he has made in the last few years
seem large to Mr. Fielder and caused him anxiety, he has moved swiftly
from the uneasiness he initially felt to construct a practice in which
new ideas about how to teach students to read coexist with many of his
old beliefs about reading instruction. Although to an outsider this
melange of practices may seem an uneasy one, to Mr. Fielder the
different pieces fit well together. Each piece (e.g., phonics,
accessing prior knowledge, sight words, textual interpretation) has its
own function and can be taught using a pedagogy that best matches that
function. Each piece contributes to children learning to read.

Fitting the new and old together to construct a practice that is
both changed yet remains the same, Tom’s practice raises the question of
whether the learning opportunities he had surrounding the policy were
strong enough to initiate fundamental change in teaching. Cognitive
psychologists write that learners normally respond to new ideas by
assimilating them to their existing schemata, unless the new ideas so
dramatically challenge the premise of the existing schemata that they
change it. Kennedy (1991) relates this theory to teacher education by
writing that teachers need to be given vivid portraits of changed
practices that challenge their existing beliefs about teaching so as to
shed those beliefs and think about change. Although Mr. Fielder had

80
numerous learning opportunities surrounding the policy, none of them may
have been vivid enough to undermine his beliefs and cause him to
question how he fundamentally thinks about reading.

What kind of learning opportunity could challenge Mr. Fielder’s
beliefs? Mr. Fielder perceived the state policy to be about reading
instruction in the abstract. He saw it giving him new messages about
how students learn to read and what kind of reading students need to do.
But Mr. Fielder constructs his reading practices by drawing on a much
wider array of beliefs and ideas than those connected to reading
instruction. Particularly, he draws upon his ideas on how hie students
in hie school learn. It is within the particular context of his
classroom that Mr. Fielder makes decisions about how to teach. Ideas
about reading instruction make up only a part of that context and Mr.
Fielder has many strong feelings about other parts of the context as
well.

On every occasion we talked, Mr. Fielder expressed concern about
the kinds of lives his children led outside of his classroom. Lewis’s
economy, tied to farming and the nearby automobile plants, has been hard
hit lately and many of Mr. Fielder’s students live in families facing
serious economic difficulties. Mr. Fielder talks about his students’
families being in disarray, parents lacking both time and energy to
provide order--which Mr. Fielder sees as vital for children. I'I know
that my students are on their own a great deal. That this may be the
only place they have any decent stimulation. We’re working with kids
who are very concrete. And they are going to be even more so because

we’re starting to deal with children who are, for lack of a better word,

81
brain dead because they sit in front of television all the time so there
is not an awful lot going on." (interview, February 20, 1991).

Because Mr. Fielder sees little order and adult guidance in his
students’ lives, he is very committed to providing these qualities in
his classroom--and he does so very well. I observed one day when Mr.
Fielder’s students were finishing a Thanksgiving art project that
involved them dyeing handkerchiefs with natural dyes they had made the
previous day. All during the day, Mr. Fielder called three students at
a time to soak their handkerchiefs in the dye pots. He set a timer and
when the timer went off the students and Mr. Fielder went over to the
pots, rung out their handkerchiefs and hung them on hangers on the light
fixtures in the room. This whole procedure, which in many classrooms
would have resulted in lost instruction time if not total chaos, was
handled very smoothly. Students quietly did what they had to do and
patiently waited their turn. Mr. Fielder never missed a beat and
continued to teach while he set a timer, rung out cloth, and hung up
hangers (observation, November 26, 1991). This example is indicative of
the kind of controlled orderly classroom that Mr. Fielder maintains.
During all the times I was in the classroom, students always seemed to
know what was expected of them, what was going to happen next, and what
their responsibilities were.

One reason that Mr. Fielder does not like many of the new images
of literacy instruction is that they appear disorderly to him.
Tradebooks and whole language don’t offer a sequential, planned approach
to learning how to read. Mr. Fielder said he sticks with basal readers

and separate skill lessons because they do present concepts in an

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orderly manner, one lesson building on another: "I think that a nice
methodical progression is very beneficial to students, especially the
kind of student we have from many disarrayed households. They don’t get
any order at home and so they need order in school" (interview, November
26, 1991). Mr. Fielder talks about students needing order, needing to
learn responsibility for their own actions, and needing to understand
commitment to their community.

The learning opportunities connected to the policy that Mr.

Fielder had offered him alternative images of reading instruction but
did not consider other issues, such as social context. Mr. Fielder
makes decisions about how he teaches reading using beliefs and ideas
about much more than reading instruction. He considers his beliefs
about the lives of his particular children and what they might need from
him beyond the skills or information they need to acquire. His theories
on how they should learn in general seem to frame which ideas about
reading instruction he finds useful.

His argument is similar to that of Delpit (1988) who suggests that
although new approaches to literacy may be appropriate for some
children, they may not be appropriate for all children. And although
Mr. Fielder’s thinking about what is appropriate and why is different
from Delpit’s (if for no other reason than Mr. Fielder is not making an
argument about minority children and their relationship to the dominant
culture), both seem to share a sense that even though they may see value
in the new literacy approaches, their broader commitment to their
students suggests other approaches. Mr. Fielder said that if he were to

teach in another community, such as one of the more affluent suburbs, he

83
would probably teach reading differently because his students would have
different needs. Unless the learning opportunities associated with
policy address these broader concerns that influence how teachers teach
reading-—for instance an opportunity for Mr. Fielder to question his
belief that children from economically depressed homes need order in
school--than it seems unlikely that they will adopt more wholesale
changes.

Is he right? This reform policy is touted as appropriate for all
learners in all contexts but does not address what it might mean to
teach reading according to the new vision to children of various
cultural backgrounds, economic conditions, or social experiences.
Should reading in suburban Detroit look the same as it does inner city
Flint? Can children from families experiencing severe economic
circumstances learn to read using a whole language approach as well as
children from affluent households? Do children with little adult
intervention in their outside lives prosper in classrooms where order
and control are less overtly demonstrated? Again, because the policy

does not address these questions, Mr. Fielder’s answers go unchallenged.

Mr. Fielder, a Case of . . .
Mr. Fielder is an interesting case of what it takes for teachers
to change and how that change is measured. Mr. Fielder did have various
learning opportunities connected to the new policy from which he learned
and changed his practices. He went to a reading inservice connected to
the policy, he used a new basal reader, he became familiar with the MEAP
test. These opportunities were fairly extensive compared to those of

many teachers in the state. But these opportunities seemed to challenge

84

only a few of the ideas and beliefs that Mr. Fielder draws upon to
construct his reading practice. They did not address Mr. Fielder’s
concerns about the social context in which he teaches and the presumed
experiences with reading his particular students need. One possible
conclusion then from Mr. Fielder’s story is that changes in reading
instruction involve far more than alternative views of reading or
reading pedagogy. Unless learning opportunities offer help to teachers
in reevaluating their own thinking about the role reading and the role
school plays in their students’ lives and unless they address the
particular issue of whether these policies are equally apprOpriate for
all students, then it seems likely that teachers like Mr. Fielder will
continue to pick and choose pieces of the policy that they see best
suiting their own context and resisting any more wholesale change.

Another possible conclusion, though, is that it is not the policy
nor the learning opportunities that are solely responsible for Mr.
Fielder’s lack of big changes. Another factor in Mr. Fielder’s learning
surrounding the policy is his gereegtieh of the learning opportunities--
what he thought he needed to learn and what he thought the policy was
teaching. Mr. Fielder perceived the policy to be about reading
instruction and he sought out from the learning opportunities available
only messages about reading instruction. This was different from Ms.
Price who interpreted the policy as addressing how it is students learn
in general and used the same learning opportunities as Mr. Fielder to
rethink her ideas about learning. So Mr. Fielder’s restricted view of
the policy seems as much a product of how he perceived the policy’s

messages as the messages themselves.

85

And this raises the question of why learners learn what they do.
What role do Mr. Fielder’s personal dispositions--his resistance to
change, his anxiety over new ideas--play in how he learns from policy?1
Challenging teachers’ personal dispositions seems a much more difficult
task than changing their ideas about reading or pedagogy and is normally
viewed as something beyond the purview of staff development. But it may
be necessary to do so to bring about changes in practice policymakers
envision. What kind of learning opportunities would overcome Mr.
Fielder’s resistance to change? What experiences might break through
his anxiety? What kind of support would Mr. Fielder need to break
through his personal resistance to take the risks associated with
wholesale change? Thinking about teachers as learners from policy who
bring to their learning personal dispositions and habits that shape the
learning they do seems important for policymakers. Just as Mr. Fielder
considers the psycho-social baggage his students bring to their
learning, policymakers involved in staff development need to consider
the needs of their learners as well.

This story also points out the difficulty of determining the
impact of the policy on Mr. Fielder’s reading practices. To Mr.
Fielder, the state policy has had far reaching effects on his practice.
He was anxious when he first heard about it and anxious when he first
attempted change. Of all the teachers I’ve observed, Mr. Fielder talks
the most about learning and change directly related to the state reform.
And the changes he made are important to him in that he thinks he is

doing a better job of teaching reading now then he was before. Because

86
Mr. Fielder is so traditional and suspicious of change, his efforts in
changing his reading practices should not be devalued.

Yet, to an outsider Mr. Fielder’s practice might seem largely
untouched by the policy. He still teaches from basals and does separate
skill lessons unconnected to the text students are reading. He still
sees reading as a series of skills that need to be mastered before
comprehension can be achieved.

From whose perspective do we measure change? This questions is
important in that Mr. Fielder’s learning and change need to neither be
devalued for not being sufficient (if measured against a standard vision
they probably would be) nor overinflated for being greater than they are
(Mr. Fielder’s perspective on how far he has come may lead to this).
Valuing how hard it is for teachers such as Mr. Fielder to change helps
researchers and policymakers respect teachers’ efforts and understand
that change is not an easy nor fast process. But seeing how much change
there might be left to accomplish allows researchers and policymakers to

think about what they might do to help teachers change more.

Notes to Chapter 3

I. I do not want to suggest here that Mr. Fielder is an example
of Buchmann’s (I986) dichotomy of personal and professional roles. In
fact, Mr. Fielder is a good example of why Buchmann’s argument has some
flaws. In saying that Mr. Fielder’s personal dispositions play a part in
the professional choices he makes is not to say that he is deciding what
and how to teach based on personal convenience or whim. Instead, it is
saying that Mr. Fielder, like all of us, constructs his understandings
and enactment of professional standards and commitments through his
personality. To think he could do otherwise seems somewhat ridiculous.

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CHAPTER 4
THE CASE OF LUCY SALVUCCI

Ms. Salvucci is a teacher whose practice would probably please
many of the policy’s reformers. Like Ms. Price, Ms. Salvucci provides
many opportunities for students to read and write text. Sense-making of
text, rather than skill acquisition, is central in Ms. Salvucci’s view
of reading and writing instruction. And many of the "new" literacy
hallmarks such as writer’s workshop, author’s chairs, and reading
companions are part of Ms. Salvucci’s day.

But when I asked Ms. Salvucci about her awareness of the state
policy, she spoke of no learning from or about it. Neither did she talk
of any direct attention to it. This was surprising. Ms. Price and Mr.
Fielder talked about learning from the policy, how could Ms. Salvucci
not? Ms. Salvucci works in a district which appears attuned to reform
efforts and is known for its innovative literacy instruction, certainly
more so than Ms. Price and Mr. Fielder’s district. Administrators in
Ms. Salvucci’s district spoke a great deal about the state policy and
their relationship to it. How could a teacher who worked there and who

seemed to follow many of the policy’s ideas not know about it?

Ms. Salvucci as an Innovative Teacher
Of all three teachers’ rooms, Ms. Salvucci’s that; the least like
a traditional classroom. It is one-third of a large pod in a building

88

89
designed to be an open classroom. So although blocked off from the
other pods by high bookcases and cupboards, there is much open space and
a sense of potential to use space in unique ways. Bookcases overflow
with books, and more books are stacked in various bins around the room.
Student writing is displayed throughout the room on bulletin boards. A
computer with a word processing program is set up in a corner for
children to use for writing. There is a large cart shoved in the corner
with numerous mathematics manipulative and games. Although not large,
the room has two good-sized open spaces for groups of students to meet.
Room for these spaces is created by pushing student desks together in a
tight clump. Because students sit at their desks infrequently (whereas
they spend a great deal of time in the open spaces) this arrangements
works well.

Children throughout the day read, discuss, and produce text. For
instance, on the first day I observed in Ms. Salvucci’s class, students
started out the day writing about their weekend events. They continued
writing their “Weekend News“ and working on other writing projects for
almost an hour. During this time students asked each other to read
their stories for comments. After writing time, Ms. Salvucci read a
book to the class on dinosaurs. They discussed such things as how
people know about dinosaurs, what paleontologist do, and what fossils
are. Next, students read books by themselves or with reading partners.
During this time, Ms. Salvucci worked with small groups of students
reading and discussing a poem. After this reading period, Ms. Salvucci
and students read a picture book on dinosaurs together and discussed the

difference between the picture book and the informational book they had

90
read on the topic. They ended their day by reciting together a poem on
the joys of reading. The only “non-literacy “ event was a 45-minute
mathematics lesson in which students worked on place value using beans
and cups.

Students read trade books and stories on a variety of topics in
which they are interested, instead of working their way through basal
readers. They frequently run to the media center right outside Ms.
Salvucci’s room for more and different books to read. The abundance of
reading materials, as well as student choice over their reading, seems
very much in-line with the policy’s goal of increasing student
motivation to read and the suggested way to achieve this goal.
Reformers cite providing “texts for students that are well-written and
have worth or value to the reader“ as an important component of reading
instruction (Michigan State Department of Education, 1987, p.6). Ms.
Salvucci does this. She attempts to nurture student interest and
pleasure in reading throughout the day.

Students keep reading logs to record the stories and books they
read and writing folders to keep track of their writing throughout the
year. Writing in Ms. Salvucci’s class is done in stages---prewriting,
draft writing, conferencing, editing, and finally publishing--as
delineated in various writing process curricula, as well as the state’s
guidelines for writing instruction.

Ms. Salvucci embeds her skill instruction in texts students read,
moving always from “the whole to the part.“ By this she means that
skills such as vocabulary, spelling, grammar, phonics, and sight words

are taught as they are necessary for students to make sense of what they

91

are reading. Ms. Salvucci gave an example of skill instruction embedded
in text with the book Amelia Bedelia. The humor in this book is that
Amelia, the children’s new nanny, does not understand American idioms--
painting the town red, stealing a base--and so interprets them literally
which gets her into a great deal of trouble. Ms. Salvucci said students
generally love this book because it pokes fun at adults and are
motivated to read it even though the vocabulary is difficult. Students
themselves aren’t always sure what the idioms mean nor what idioms are,
so Ms. Salvucci uses their desire to understand the humor in the book to
teach vocabulary and idioms. She sees this as a much more effective
approach to teaching these skills than any separate lesson on vocabulary
words or idioms she might otherwise teach. Often when students are
reading or writing, Ms. Salvucci points out phonemes to help students
decode or spell words. Or while reading a book to the class, she will
point out how she used phonics to figure out the pronunciation of a
word. Normally she constructs individual spelling lessons for students
using words they have misspelled in their own writing. Although Ms.
Salvucci does teach some literacy skills as separate pieces disconnected
from text, most of her skill instruction either is planned with or grows
out of text students read because, she says, “research has shown that
when doing words in isolation, kids don’t retain them as long as they
retain them in context“ (interview, March 4, 1991).

So Ms. Salvucci is an innovative teacher with ambitious reading
practices if she is viewed in light of past modal practices. Her
literacy instruction shares many features with some views of the state

policy. In that sense, she is a success for the policy--a teacher whose

92
classroom reformers could point to as offering a new way of teaching
reading.

How did she get there?

Learning to Teach

The first answer to that question is: Ms. Salvucci learned but not
from the policy. When I asked Ms. Salvucci about the state policy, she
said she was unfamiliar with it. Ms. Salvucci had a dim recollection of
seeing the reading definition at a staff meeting once and remembered
seeing a copy of the new MEAP test, but she did not pay much attention
to them. Ms. Salvucci read the reading definition for the first time
during one of our interviews. She commented, "It’s what I try to do in
my classroom. Getting the children involved, getting them connected to
the book" (interview, March 4, 1991). She noted that the policy even
seemed to use the same language to talk about reading as she--reading as
interactive, students bringing their prior knowledge to reading. Ms.
Salvucci expressed no great interest in learning more about the
definition. Because she perceived the policy to be suggesting ways of
thinking similar to her own, she perceived there to be no new ideas to
learn from it.

Her talk about the policy was similar to other comments she made
about learning and changing since becoming a teacher--i.e., that there
has been little need to do either. In our first interview, when I asked
Ms. Salvucci if her current practices represented a shift in her
teaching. She replied, “No, I’ve always taught this way.“ Later on in
the interview, I asked if she had learned from any district initiatives,

she again said they had not affected her much because they seemed

93

similar to her existing practices. In the second year of interviewing, I
asked Ms. Salvucci more general questions about change and learning.
Had her practices changed at all and had she learned anything new about
teaching literacy? She said she has changed her practices only in minor
ways--new books to read with children, new games to make-- because what
she has been exposed to since becoming a teacher has always seemed
repetitive of what she already knew. Finally, I asked her if she could
think of opportunities that would be helpful to her to learn new ways to
teach reading and she said, “You mean if I weren’t already teaching this
way?“ (interview, March 4, 1991). So Ms. Salvucci’s practices do not
stem from “new“ learning as a teacher. Neither the state policy nor
district initiatives have had much direct affect on her reading
practices or her thinking about reading.

But Ms. Salvucci did learn many of the same ideas of the policy.
The second answer to the question how did Ms. Salvucci get there is that
she did not learn from the policy, but in close connection to it. Ms.
Salvucci is a relatively new teacher who entered a teacher education
program at a nearby state university around the same time as the state
became interested in changing reading instruction. Ms. Salvucci viewed
herself as fortunate that she came into teaching "when the transition
was being made from traditional teaching to more developmental, hands-on
approach“ (interview, March 4, 1991). Her preservice education,
particularly her special education course, presented an innovative,
child-centered approach to teaching and Ms. Salvucci saw herself

following that vision.

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In her teacher education courses, Ms. Salvucci said she learned
such things as how to teach reading using literature, how to connect
reading and writing, and how to integrate subject matter learning around
large themes. She called these practices a whole-language approach to
literacy. Accompanying this view of reading, she also said she learned
how to give reading and writing tasks that children could accomplish at
a variety of levels, from children drawing pictures of a story to text
with well-developed sentence structure, and how to evaluate student work
so that it measured individual progress rather than attainment of a
fixed set of skills (interview, March 4, 1991). This focus served her
well in securing a student teaching assignment at Parkwood School(and
later an elementary teaching job there). She student taught twice at
Parkwood, first in a hearing-impaired class and again in a “regular“
classroom. She commented that these teaching experiences solidified her
commitment to different approaches to literacy instruction:

My major in hearing impaired talked a lot about language and

especially a whole language approach to reading and writing.

So I was kind of directed in that way through my special ED

training. . . . And when I did my student teaching [at

Parkwood] I did it in the hearing impaired program and that

is the way they do all of their teaching. And I felt that if

it was working with those kids, why wouldn’t it work for the

regular population? (interview, March 25, 1992).
When Ms. Salvucci student taught the second time, she continued to teach
reading using a whole language approach. Because she found this
approach successful with her students in both her student-teaching
experiences, she followed it when she began teaching in her own
classroom and still continues to do so.

One reason Ms. Salvucci may have been so receptive to the new

ideas about reading practice that she encountered in her preservice

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education was that, unlike many people who become teachers, Ms. Salvucci
had difficulty as a child learning to read from “traditional" methods.
She was in the lowest reading group through most of elementary school
and felt, as a child, that she was not a very good learner. When she
thought of herself teaching children to read, her own bad experiences
led her to seek out alternative methods. She said:

When I was reading in school, it was very, very difficult for

me to learn how to read. I think it was because they were

taking me about it the wrong way. So worksheets? Yeah, I

was worksheeted to death because I wasn’t a good reader. So

when I was young, I never got a lot of reading practice in

school. I was always in the last group to be seen and by

that time I was so busy doing my pile of worksheets that I

was brain dead“ (interview, March 25, 1992).

Ms. Salvucci’s own learning as a child and her teacher education
courses stirred her interest to teach reading differently—-without
reading groups, basal readers, and so forth. Her experiences student
teaching at Parkwood continued to support her thinking. She was primed
to reject the traditional view of reading as a set of skills to be
learned and her first teaching experiences only increased her
commitments. This was more than serendipity. Many of the same people
who taught at Ms. Salvucci’s college of education were involved in
various ways with Ms. Salvucci’s district. In turn, many district
people influenced the direction of the education courses. And both sets
of people, district and college of education, played roles in designing
the state policy. Not only, then, were Ms. Salvucci’s preservice
education, district initiatives, and state policy all brainchildren of
the same intellectual parents--the ferment that reading instruction

needed to be different from what it had been in the past--but

brainchildren of the same physical parents as well. From this

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perspective, Ms. Salvucci’s sense that the policy’s ideas were what she
“already did“ makes some sense.

So Ms. Salvucci learned to be an “innovative" teacher in respect
to past practices, but not innovative in her approach to teaching in the
sense of seeing new opportunities to learn and change as a teacher. This
is very different from Ms. Price and Mr. Fielder. Both of them spoke of
learning about teaching reading from both formal learning opportunities-
-the policy, district workshops, the MEAP test--and from the informal
opportunity to learn in their classrooms from their students. They both
spoke of changes in their practices as well. Ms. Price, whose practices
are similar to Ms. Salvucci, said she learns a great deal about her
students by listening to their comments on books they read and talking
to them about their writing. She sees the learning she does in her
practice as essential in helping her figure out what to teach and how to
teach it. Mr. Fielder’s talk about who his particular students are and
what they might need from school also reflects a kind of learning from
his classroom experiences. How he teaches is based on how he perceives
his students and their needs, rather than a wholesale following of
practices learned in the past.

But change and continued learning from either the formal or
informal opportunities that were available to Ms. Salvucci do not appear
to figure in to her view of teaching. This is an interesting situation.

Having learned, has Ms. Salvucci learned no more?

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Learning from Formal Opportunities

F ic

When I asked Ms. Salvucci why the policy did not seem like
something she needed to attend to, she said:

In this district and in this building we’ve been doing the

reading and writing and so forth for so long, before it was

mandated. So the district may feel that we’ve been, you

know, that we’re okay and we don’t need more (interview,

March 4, 1991).
Ms. Salvucci perceived herself and her district as being far ahead of
the state policy and, therefore, did not see it as something from which
she could learn more. But, other teachers in her district whose
practices were very similar to Ms. Salvucci’s, were familiar with the
policy and talked of learning from it (K. Ensor, interview, March 4,
1991). Like Ms. Price, the innovations in these teachers’ practices did
not prevent them from seeing new ideas in the policy or new
opportunities in the policy to think about their existing practices.
Ms. Salvucci’s construction of the policy as something old hat was not
shared by her colleagues even though many were also “innovative“
teachers.
MW

Ms. Salvucci talked about ideas put forth in the district in much
the same way. At the time Ms. Salvucci started teaching, Parkwood was
just getting rid of basal readers and moving toward use of tradebooks to
teach reading. Parkwood has always had a reputation of being trend-
setting. In the early 19705, they built many schools with removable

walls to facilitate open-classroom ideas. One administrator during this

time became particularly excited about British infant schools and her

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excitement later became the impetus for Parkwood’s developmental
learning focus. Around the mid-19805 Parkwood adopted both a whole
language perspective on reading and something they called
“developmentally appropriate curriculum.“ The latter was based in a
philosophy of learning that centered on the idea that children should be
allowed to learn at their own pace and should not be expected to master
concepts at artificially contrived times. To get district teachers to
move in the direction of these initiatives, administrators banned basal
readers and workbooks from schools and required teachers to attend
numerous inservice opportunities to learn the “new instructional
practices in reading and writing.

In the summer after Ms. Salvucci’s first year of teaching, the
district required all elementary teachers to attend a week-long workshop
which focused on whole language instruction. Ms. Salvucci said for the
most part she felt well ahead of her colleagues in thinking about
reading instruction and she viewed this summer inservice as nothing more
than a review of her teacher education courses. What she primarily
gained from this experience, and in general from all the district staff
development programs Ms. Salvucci said she has attended in her five
years teaching, has been suggestion for new books to use in her
classroom and some new activities to do with students. She did not talk
about being exposed to any new ideas about reading or writing nor any
challenges to her way of thinking.

So Ms. Salvucci’s talk about learning from the kinds of formal
opportunities that Mr. Fielder and Ms. Price found helpful reflects
little, if any, new learning. She did not find the policy nor district

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inservices to be good sources of new ideas about reading instruction nor
did she view them as opportunities to reflect on her current practices.
Over the two years that I talked to Ms. Salvucci, she mentioned books
she has read and her master’s courses as sources from which she has
gotten new ideas, but again, like her talk about district inservices,
these ideas are limited to titles of books that her students might like
to read, games that are helpful in teaching specific concepts, or ways
of setting up her classroom to minimize confusion when students move
around. These opportunities as well do not seem to have brought into
Ms. Salvucci’s life many openings to think about her teaching. Instead,
they have brought new materials or practices to augment what she already
does. Because she sees herself “doing“ what is being suggested, she

perceives these formal opportunities as holding few riches for her.

Her Classroom as an Opportunity to Learn

Ms. Salvucci’s classroom is filled with student talk about reading
and writing text. Students read books together and they share their
writing with one another. They read to Ms. Salvucci, and talk to her
about what they are reading and writing. This kind of classroom
environment seems full of opportunities to learn about student thinking
and learning. But in talking to Ms. Salvucci about her teaching and in
watching her teach, it was hard to see if M§r_§a1ygee1 saw her classroom
as an opportunity to learn. Two examples seem useful here.

On frequent occasions, I observed student authors sharing their
work with the class. Ms. Salvucci had learned about using “author’s
chair“ for students who wished to share their writing with their

classmates in her language arts method class. The routine of author’s

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chair started with the student author sitting in a designated chair and
asking the class a specific question that they should keep in mind when
they listened to the student’s story. Ms. Salvucci said that this
routine was to help students listen more attentively and offer more
constructive help to their peers. Some of the author’s questions asked.
for help with their stories--“After listening to my story, what do you
think I should name the penguin?“--and others were factual questions for
students to answer-~“Can you tell if penguins fly after listening to my
story?“

In the times I observed these sharing sessions I never heard
students answer the questions authors asked. Most frequently authors
would read their writing, stop and stare at their audience after they
finished, and then sit down when the audience clapped--which they always
did. If there were comments after the stories, they bore little if any
relationship to the questions asked. Almost all of them were generic --
“I really liked your story,“ or “Did you write the story yourself?“
Often Ms. Salvucci would use the author chair time to set up other
activities she was going to use during the day, and rarely did she
comment on students’ questions or answers. Frequently, Ms. Salvucci’s
only intervention was to ask who was the next to sit in the chair.

When I asked Ms. Salvucci what she thought about these sharing
times, she said she thought they were very successful because students
get advice from their peers about their writing. When I specifically
probed her after one such session yhat advice she thought students
received, she said advice about how to continue with their stories. I

did not press her further (although I now wished I had) but it made me

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question what Ms. Salvucci was hearing that I wasn’t. Did the comments
students make which appeared generic to me appear as something else to
her? Or was she perhaps not attending to comments because she was
attending to other things? Some teachers assign students seatwork to
free up their time to work with small groups or prepare for the rest of
the day or just to give themselves some quiet. Does authors’ chair
serve a similar function for Ms. Salvucci? How much was Ms. Salvucci
learning about her students’ writing or other students’ thinking about
writing on these occasions?

A second example that puzzled me at the time was a writing
conference Ms. Salvucci had with a boy who had written a story about
going to his grandmother’s house. This was the first time I observed
Ms. Salvucci and before school that day I had asked her to tell me about
the writing conferences she would have that day. She said that most of
the students with whom she was going to conference were in the middle of
writing stories and she hoped to find out what problems they might be
having and help them find their own solutions to the problems. Ms.
Salvucci started off her conference with Ryan by commenting on his
opening sentence.

Ms. Salvucci: I was reading your book over the weekend

and I wanted to talk to you about it. You start
off, “Sunday we went to Grandma’s house.“ Normally
we want to start off a story with something
interesting or exciting to grab the reader. Can
you think of something?

Ryan: No. -

Ms. Salvucci: Well, we need a different way to start the

story because it wasn’t last Sunday, was it?

Ryan: [Shakes his head].

Ms. Salvucci: It was one Sunday, wasn’t it?

Ryan: It was Super Bowl Sunday.

Ms. Salvucci: So you could write “Super Bowl Sunday was
fun at Grandma’s.“

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Ryan: [Doesn’t respond].
Ms. Salvucci: Okay? I don’t want to rewrite your story.
We just needed a grabbing first sentence
(observation, March 4,1991).

Without saying anything, Ryan took his paper and sat down. When I looked
at Ryan’s paper after the conference, I saw that he had crossed off his
original opening sentence and written “Super Bowl Sunday was fun at
Grandma’s.“ He made no other changes. Given what Ms. Salvucci had said
she wanted to do in these conferences, her responses to Ryan were
puzzling. What did Ms. Salvucci learn about problems Byah felt in
writing? The conference centered on a problem Ms. Salvucci saw in the
writing for which she provided a solution. How else might this
conference have been handled so that Ms. Salvucci would have learned
more about Ryan’s thinking and writing?

These examples were representative of kind of interactions between
Ms. Salvucci and her students that I observed. Although it is
impossible to say anything definitive about how Ms. Salvucci teaches
and, especially, how she thinks about her teaching, watching her
interactions and talking to her about her teaching, made me question
whether what students said about their writing and reading altered in
any way how she thought about her practices. It made me question
whether she perceived her classroom to be a place to continue to learn
about teaching. For instance, after watching students in the author’s
chair many times and seeing little if any helpful feedback being given
to authors from their classmates, 1 wondered if an author’s chair, at
least as it was configured in Ms. Salvucci’s classroom, really was a

useful addition to students learning to write. But Ms. Salvucci did not

mention any doubts about its usefulness nor did she change how she used

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it in the two years that I observed her.1 Does Ms. Salvucci use what
her students say in the rich opportunities she provides them as a way to
learn about and change her teaching?

Coupled with her talk of limited learning from formal
opportunities such as district inservices, and state and district
policies, these questions seemed particularly important. Although
innovative when considered in light of modal practice, Ms. Salvucci does
not talk of continued learning after she became a teacher. Although
child-centered, she does not appear to learn from opportunities in her
classroom. Ms. Salvucci’s and Ms. Price’s teaching share some common
characteristics--lots of student talk and choice over what they read for
instance--but they may be that way for different reasons. Innovations
for Ms. Price stem from her own reflection and thinking about practice
which are fostered by new ideas she encounters. For Ms. Price, change
and learning are longstanding and important features in her practice.
But Ms. Salvucci’s innovative practices are a product of how she learned
to teach and not of her continued learning and reflection. Although her
classroom may look very different from Mr. Fielder’s, she may share his
resistance to change.

Ms. Salvucci’s teaching seems a paradox. She is an innovative
teacher who hasn’t changed. She is a “traditional“ teacher in the sense
of not changing in her teaching, yet she teaches in innovative ways.

How might one explain the contradiction of innovations without change?

104
Possible Explanations

One large explanation may be in the opportunities. Parkwood
administrators mandated innovations rather than encourage teachers to
reexamine their teaching and discuss teaching with each other. The
innovations were not generated from teacher reflection but from district
directives. And because Ms. Salvucci already complied with the
directives, she may have had little reason to see the district as
offering her opportunities to learn about her practices.

State policymakers had clearer ideas about what kinds of practices
they did not want to see in classrooms than the kinds practices or
thinking about teaching they did want. The main thrust of state
policymakers’ work was to change teacher behavior away from skill-bound,
fragmented reading instruction toward the kinds of practices Ms.
Salvucci already employed. Again, because the focus of state
policymakers was on getting teachers to “do“ practices that Ms. Salvucci
did and not reflect on their current practices to see possible
differences between what they do and the new ideas, Ms. Salvucci saw the
policy as nothing new. There was little in the formal opportunities
that would have created a sense of dissonance in Ms. Salvucci and,
therefore, little to create a need to learn and change.

Although it seems fair to say that the formal opportunities for
Ms. Salvucci to learn about reading may not have been very useful to
her, it does not seem to explain totally Ms. Salvucci’s response to
them. For again, the opportunities that Mr. Fielder and Ms. Price had
available to them seem no more full of opportunity to learn than those

Ms. Salvucci experienced, yet they learned from them.

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Why Would They Do It, and She Not?

Seeing potential in learning opportunities is a mixed blessing for
teachers. Reflecting on practice, learning from students and adapting
practice to better fit their needs, engaging in new ideas about teaching
and learning may be very beneficial to their teaching and certainly they
are qualities that the educational community values, but they are hard
things to do and are not often supported except in the abstract.
Opportunities to learn may be given to teachers, but time and resources
to learn seldom are. As Mr. Fielder’s and Ms. Price’s cases attest,
learning and changing from this policy took time and created anxiety.

Unlike Ms. Price and Mr. Fielder, Ms. Salvucci is a relatively new
teacher. She is also a young woman with many personal and professional
demands. She has a two-year old daughter and during the last year I
observed, she was pregnant and having a difficult time. Over
Thanksgiving, Ms. Salvucci had surgery to help continue the pregnancy.
She was told at that time that the fetus had been put under stress and
that she needed to be very careful about getting plenty of rest and
watching her diet--things that she found not easy to do as a teacher and
mother of a young child. During the last two years, Ms. Salvucci was
also attempting to finish a master’s degree in special education. She
was pursuing the degree not only because she was interested in teaching
students for whom she would need special education certification, but
because, with recent budget cuts in the district and rumors of large
teacher lay-offs, Ms. Salvucci wanted to have multiple options in the

kind of teaching positions she would be eligible to take.

106

In our conversations Ms. Salvucci would talk about her struggle to
spend time with her daughter and still have time to plan for the kind of
teaching she wants to do. She would talk about how much time she had to
spend on her master’s coursework--getting papers done that seemed
somewhat nonsensical to her, finding time to work on group projects--and
how that too interfered with the time she spent with her family and on
her teaching preparation. She would mention, as many teachers do, her
husband’s frustration with the amount of time and money she does devote
to her teaching. The demands that Ms. Salvucci faces are not unique to
her. In many ways, Ms. Salvucci reminded me of myself as a beginning
teacher with small children and a husband starting off his career with
all the difficulties and ambiguities that that presents. Certainly many
woman who teach, like Ms. Salvucci, are starting off their personal and
professional lives and bring those experiences and constraints into the
classroom with them when they teach.

And Ms. Salvucci has set for herself a difficult agenda. The kind
of teaching Ms. Salvucci does requires a great deal of time and energy
at a time in her life when time and energy are hard to find. She spends
many more hours planning lessons and gathering resources than
traditional teachers who rely more heavily on textbooks and prepared
lessons to structure their instruction and curriculum. She spends more
hours looking at students’ writing than most elementary teachers. As
Cohen (1989) comments, the kind of ambitious teaching that teachers like
Ms. Salvucci attempt is difficult and uncertain. So, putting these two
pieces together—-that Ms. Salvucci has many demands on her life and that

the task she asks herself to do is already filled with difficulty and

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uncertainty-~offers the possibility that Ms. Salvucci’s perception of
nothing to learn from state policy (or district initiatives) is in part
a safety value in her life. Learning new ideas and challenging her
beliefs would only bring more uncertainty and difficulty into her
teaching that would require more time and energy to sort out. Her
practice is going well and her life is full already. She may approach
her teaching the way she does because there is little in her world that
would encourage her to do otherwise. But again, Ms. Salvucci’s response
is one of many possible ones. Teachers in similar circumstances and
with similar practices as Ms. Salvucci have made different choices--to
dig deeper into issues of literacy instruction and to continue to learn

and change.

Ms. Salvucci, a Case of. . .

Ms. Salvucci’s case raises two different kinds of thoughts and
questions for me: one kind has to with researching change and learning
from policy, while the other has to do with change and learning from
policy.

The first set of thoughts and questions has to do with researching
issues of change and learning connected to policy. When I first observed
Ms. Salvucci it surprised me that she knew little about the state
policy. How could her classroom look so like a model of the state
reform without her knowing about it? After discovering how Ms. Salvucci
learned to teach, it seemed less surprising, but her story highlighted
the messiness of tracing the sources of a teacher’s learning. It may
indeed be very misleading to cast Ms. Salvucci as learning from her

preservice experiences but not from district or state policies. Neither

108
Parkwood’s initiatives nor the state reform, were invented whole cloth
out of the heads of the respective policymakers. Nor were ideas Ms.
Salvucci encountered in her teacher education classes unique to that
program. All these sources pulled, albeit in somewhat different
combinations, from ideas about reading extant in the field--cognitive
psychology, social constructivism, strategy instruction, and whole
language. Moreover, many of Ms. Salvucci’s teacher educators, Parkwood
educators, and state reformers formed their ideas about literacy
instruction from the same sources, i.e., they attended the same graduate
schools of education, were members of the same state associations, and
attended the same reading conferences. Many of Parkwood’s teachers and
Ms. Salvucci’s teacher educators became instrumental in the state
efforts. In turn, state reformers helped legitimate Parkwood
administrators’ fervor for change in literacy instruction (S. Spaniel,
interview, September, 1992).

In other words, although Ms. Salvucci may not have associated her
teacher education, district efforts, and state reform, the three were
connected as different parts of the same conversation about literacy
that was taking place among teachers, state policy makers, district
educators, and reading researchers at the time. So to say that Ms.
Salvucci was not influenced by state policy or district efforts may be
only telling the story from her perspective--what she saw as influencing
her. The ideas and learning opportunities that influenced Ms. Salvucci
were shaped by broader ideas about literacy which encompassed both

district and state reforms.

109

The connectedness of ideas embedded in reforms points out the
problem of researchers assuming causal relationships between what they
observe in teaching practice and the ideas in a policy or in a teacher
education program. In some policy-and-practice studies that look at
classroom practices without interviewing teachers, Ms. Salvucci might be
counted as responding to state policy because her practices would
contain some of the characteristics connected to the policy. In other
policy-and-practice studies that relied on surveys asking teachers if
they had heard of policies or for their sources of learning to teach,
Ms. Salvucci might be counted as not affected by policy. Both of these
types of studies would probably get it wrong. The sources of teacher
learning may not be that distinct and to trace teacher learning to one
source without recognizing the context in which that source developed
would be misleading.

But regardless of the source of ideas that Ms. Salvucci originally
drew on to learn to teach, her continued learning seems in question. So
another set of questions has to do with what it would take for teachers
such as Ms. Salvucci to respond to state policy, to learn more from it.
If teachers, like all learners, subjectively construct learning
opportunities to hold potential for them or not, what can state
policymakers do to help teachers see potential? Because many of the
learning opportunities districts and the state offer are based on
changing traditional teachers’ classroom practices, a teacher such as
Ms. Salvucci might hear the reform message as mostly arguing against
something she doesn’t do, and therefore ignore it. There are many

teachers in Michigan such as Ms. Salvucci whose preservice education and

110
schools support innovative practices. Many of these practices, like Ms.
Salvucci’s, would fit at least some reformers’ visions of what this

policy was all about. Many of these practices may in fact be better than

 

state visions. What would it mean for these teachers to be affected by
the reform when changing their teaching practices may not be the issue?
What would it take for these teachers to be affected by the reform if,

like Ms. Salvucci, their personal and professional plates were already

overflowing?

Learning opportunities given to teachers which only focus on new
activities or focus on changing a traditional practice to the new vision
are not enough for these teachers. Part of the agenda of the reform has
to be helping all teachers reflect on their practices--what are their
ideas about how children learn to read and do their practices support
their ideas? Policy can serve as a beacon not only of a set of
particular ideas and practices but also as a beacon of reflection and
inquiry into practice. To do so, policymakers need to figure out how it
is that teachers can be helped to develop a sense of inquiry about their
practice. Part of the reason most district and state inservice focus on
classroom activities is that it is familiar ground, both for the
inservice provider and the participants. Helping teachers look at their
own practice, giving them opportunities and support to do so, and then
helping them make sense of what they might discover is much less
familiar.

But to help teachers like Ms. Salvucci to develop a sense of
inquiry and a need to continue to learn more may be a tall order for

policymakers. Innovative practices may mask recalcitrant attitudes

111

toward learning and change. What might it take for teachers such as Ms.
Salvucci to undertake these activities? How could Ms. Salvucci be given
more time and more space given the financial and political constraints
most districts and states have? And would time and space to consider
her teaching be enough or does Ms. Salvucci need something more for her
to see learning and reflection as resources rather than threats? As
with the questions that Mr. Fielder’s and Ms. Price’s cases raise, these
seem crucial for policymakers to confront if they are to work with and

influence teachers such as Ms. Salvucci.

Notes to Chapter 4

1. In the last observation I made in March 1992 Ms. Salvucci did
change the form of author’s chair. Many students wanted to share their
stories and author’s chair was beginning to take up a great deal of
time. So Ms. Salvucci set two author’s chairs to run concurrently.
Otherwise, the routine remained the same. This, of course, meant that
she had even less of an opportunity to attend to the questions and
comments of students.

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CHAPTER 5
COMPARING THE CASES

The obvious starting point in comparing these cases is to look
across the three to see how the reading policy seems to have played out
in the classrooms. Do Ms. Price’s, Mr. Fielder’s, and Ms. Salvucci’s
practices seem affected by the policy? What did their practices look
like before the policy and what do they look like now?

These cases portray images of the teachers’ reading practices
before the policy that were quite diverse. Mr. Fielder’s practices had
many features of traditional reading instruction--basal readers,
ability-groups, and isolated skill lessons. Ms. Salvucci’s had many
innovative features--writer’s workshop, literature-based reading
instruction, and skill lessons embedded in literature. Ms. Price’s
practices had both innovative and traditional features--literature-based
reading, integrated writing and reading instruction and isolated skill
lessons. What is curious about these three teachers is that none of
them saw the policy as a radical call to change their reading practices,
even though their practices were quite different from each other. Ms.
Salvucci felt completely supported by it and saw no need to change. Ms.
Price and Mr. Fielder (Mr. Fielder to a greater degree) recognized some
dissonance between what they did and the policy, and so changed eehe of

their practices, but they did not see the policy as requiring a major

113

114
overthrow. Mr. Fielder for instance did not read the policy to be about
whole language, as Ms. Salvucci did, and therefore did not feel a need
to embrace whole language practices. Ms. Price had some concern that
the policy may not support her separate skill lessons, but because the
policy said little directly about skills, she felt no need to change how
she taught them. So even though Mr. Fielder’s, Ms. Price’s, and Ms.
Salvucci’s existing practices and beliefs were very distinct, the policy
made its way into all of their classrooms without fundamentally
disrupting them.

These cases present images of practice that were equally diverse
after the policy. Because the policy was not perceived as a fundamental
shake-up for any of the teachers, it worked its way into their practices
to different degrees and in different ways. New questioning strategies
were merged with existing ways of using basal readers. New writing
approaches was merged with old skill instruction. So what and how did
these teachers learn in the vicinity of the policy? How did they fit it
into their practices?

Reading Practices-—Fitting Policy
mama:

For Mr. Fielder, reading continues to be a series of separate
lessons—~phonics, sight words, silent reading, group reading, and so
forth. Reading is first a technical activity for which students need to
acquire certain skills--he calls them tools--and then an intellectual
one in which students comprehend text. Mr. Fielder said that he spends
the first half of the year focusing on reading skills and only after he

feels students have some firm understanding of them does he go “heavy

115
into comprehension.“ The policy did not change Mr. Fielder’s basic
orientation toward reading. It did not convince him, for instance, that
reading was the act of constructing meaning of text rather than the:
acquisition of a set of skills nor that skill instruction could be
taught in conjunction with text students read. It did make him think
differently about how students can best do the intellectual activity of
comprehension, which he saw the policy emphasizing. Mr. Fielder said
the policy helped him see that students “bring to reading things that
they know“ and that it is through the things that they know that they
construct meaning of text.

This new awareness has resulted in him asking more questions of
students. This is the biggest visible change in his practice
attributable to the policy. As he said, in many ways the policy is just
remembering to ask students “What do you think?“ What do you feel?“ He
particularly asks more questions before reading a text so that he is
aware of students’ prior understandings and can use them to aid their
comprehension. Additionally, because the MEAP test focused on students
comprehending expository text as well as narrative, Mr. Fielder has
begun questioning students when they read text in social studies and
science along with his questioning tied to their basal readers.

The policy then affected how Mr. Fielder talks to students about
text and expanded his notion of what texts are legitimate to use to
teach reading. Whereas prior to the policy Mr. Fielder thought of
reading instruction only in terms of the basal reader, he now uses
reading activities (e.g., pre-reading questions) with many text that
students read during the day. These changes in practice that Mr.

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Fielder attributes the policy though have not disturb Mr. Fielder’s
sense that learning to read is fundamentally the acquisition of a series
of skills which are essential prior to comprehension. Mr. Fielder “fit“
the policy into his practice by isolating it to one area of his reading
instruction--comprehension. And changes in this area, for Mr. Fielder,
seem to have few ramifications to other parts of his instruction.
mm

For Ms. Price, reading is not a series of separate lessons, but
something that is integrated throughout the day. It 1; the intellectual
activity that children do in school--they read to learn in all subject
areas--and so her reading instruction occurs while she is teaching every '
subject. She said: “Anytime of the day, every time of the day, I’m
teaching language arts. I’m teaching listening. I’m teaching speaking.
I’m teaching writing and I’m teaching reading“ (interview, February 11,
1991). Ms. Price reads literature with her class because she thinks
that reading good literature is how students get hooked on reading.
Through literature, children see the relevance of reading to their own
lives. She commented, “If kids are not going to interact with whatever
it is [we’re reading], if they’re not connecting with it somehow, then
there is no point in it for them“ Ms. Price saw the policy reinforcing
her views. She said the policy made it even clearer to her that “you
have to hook“ students by “integrating reading with their lives somehow“
(interview, February 11, 1991). It also helped her learn how to make
writing an engaging activity for her students. She said that before the
policy she never “gave it [writing] the attention and the quiet“

(interview, December 17, 1991) which she now sees as important if

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students are to write in meaningful ways. Because of the policy, Ms.
Price has changed her writing instruction to allow for more student
choice and control. These were always elements of her reading practice,
but the policy helped her incorporate them into writing as well.

But for Ms. Price reading and writing also have technical aspects
which need to be taught. Ms. Price thinks students need to learn some
“tools“ such as vocabulary, punctuation, and spelling to "feel good
about themselves, what they read and write.“ And so she teaches skills
in separate lessons, not through the literature they are reading,
because this is the most efficient way for all students to acquire what
they need. Unlike Mr. Fielder, teaching tools of reading and writing
makes up a small portion of Ms. Price’s day and even though Ms. Price
does not teach skills threugh literature, she often uses other, shorter
pieces of text in her instruction. Like Mr. Fielder though, Ms. Price
does not see the policy addressing this part of her reading and writing
instruction. She said she thought some “whole language gurus“ would not
like the way she teaches skills and that she wasn’t sure the policy
would either, but she was not sure how else to teach them.

Ms. Price fit the policy into her practice by seeing it as
legitimating most of her existing views of reading and helping her
expand those views into writing. She saw the policy promoting
integrated, literature-based reading practices that help students see
reading as meaningful and help them connect what they read to their real
lives. Unlike Mr. Fielder, she did not see the policy as being only
about reading comprehension. She thought its message of making reading

meaningful to students applied to all instruction during the day. Yet,

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she was unclear what this meant for her skill instruction. She wasn’t
sure how to teach effectively the technical aspects of reading that she
sees as important in ways which the policy might approve. She saw the
policy as offering her little help in figuring out new ways and so
continued with her existing skill instruction.
LOW

Like Ms. Price, Ms. Salvucci’s reading instruction is integrated
throughout the day. It is the intellectual activity of students making
meaning of text they read and write. In many ways Ms. Price’s and Ms.
Salvucci’s practices look similar. In both, students read and write
throughout the day, using a variety of different kinds of text. Ms.
Salvucci differs from Ms. Price in that she sees even the technical
aspects of reading--skills--as being taught through the text students
read or write. Ms. Salvucci said she always teaches skills going “from
the whole to the part,“ meaning that she teaches skills when students
have problems in their reading and writing (these are the “wholes“) so
that the skills (these are the “parts“) help them solve their problems.
Ms. Salvucci calls her instruction “whole-language“ and probably the
whole-language gurus who Ms. Price saw as being displeased with her
practice, would like Ms. Salvucci’s, or at least like the routines and
procedures Ms. Salvucci uses. Much of Ms. Salvucci’s practice seems to
follow the forms of the “innovative“ practices without necessarily
embodying the spirit behind them.

Ms. Salvucci made little use of the policy. She was not concerned
with it and so paid little attention to it. When she did read a copy of

the new reading definition, she saw it as completely reinforcing her own

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view of reading. She said, “It’s what I try to do in my classroom.
Getting the children involved, getting them connected to the book“
(interview, March 4, 1991). So the policy did not directly change Ms.
Salvucci’s thinking about reading practices at all: first because she
was unaware of it; and secondly, because, when aware, she thought it was
asking her to do what she already did.

Ms. Salvucci then fit policy into her practice, much as Ms. Price
did by seeing it as legitimating her existing practices. Unlike Ms.
Price though, Ms. Salvucci saw the policy as offering her nothing new.
She perceived the policy to be advocating a whole language approach to
reading that was identical to her own.

One question that these diverse responses to the policy playing
out practice raise is whether they all fit with visions of practice the
policy might support? But a difficulty in answering that question is
that there is very little guidance in the policy itself as to what one
might look for in classrooms to see evidence of the policy in action.
As was mentioned various times in the cases, neither the policymakers
nor the policy documents present clear images of what teachers who are
“doing“ the policy might be doing. One document that does give some
indicators of model classroom practices suggests that in such classrooms
teachers would use “questions and student responses to guide the
structure of cognitive processing in constructing meaning“ and would
promote “a literate environment by modeling the behaviors of a literate
person.“ (MRA, 1987). These statements are hardly helpful. What are
the behaviors of a literate person and are they same for all? What

things would a teacher do to guide the structure of cognitive

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processing? What does it mean anyway? Asking the policymakers
themselves what they hoped to see in classrooms resulted in no clearer
images. Elaine Weber said she hoped that teachers would orient their
practices toward meeting children’s reading needs. Karen Wixson said
she would be satisfied if she saw teachers using longer passages of text
in reading instruction. Charles Peters commented that in some way
reading should be taught throughout the day. Like many people seeking
to change practices, the policymakers were much clearer about what they
no longer wanted to see--skill-based instruction--than what they did
want to see.

The absence of any vivid models of how the reading policy should
play out in practice left teachers on their own to construct their ideas
of what the policy might look like. And that is what Mr. Fielder, Ms.
Price and Ms. Salvucci did.

That practitioners would construct different interpretations of
the policy and that policy would play out differently in classrooms is
not startling news. Researchers suggest that local variation in policy
implementation is, in fact, a sign of good policy in that it is
adaptable to meet diverse needs (Johnson & O’Connor, 1979; McLaughlin,
1990). Additionally, researchers give a variety of reasons yhy
practitioners might interpret and implement policies differently. These
include such reason as, their beliefs about schooling, learning and
teaching (Sarason, 1982; Weiss G Cohen, 1991); their attention to
policies (Sproull, 1981); and conditions in which they work (Elmore &
McLaughlin, 1988; Schwille, et al., 1983). But these cases point to
another factor that has not been frequently explored in the policy

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literature and that is the learning teachers do connected to policies.
As one of the policymakers said, this policy required teachers to learn
about reading and reading practice (C. Peters, interview, August 13,
1991). And Mr. Fielder, Ms. Price, and Ms. Salvucci did learn. But the
nature of their learning experiences, what they brought to those

experiences, and how they perceived the experiences varied.

Teachers’ Learning Experiences

These three teachers learned how to teach reading from roughly the
same set of ideas.1 Mr. Fielder and Ms. Price from ideas directly
associated with the policy, and Ms. Salvucci from ideas she viewed as
closely connected to it. But they all teach differently. What can we
learn from what they were taught that might account for their
differences?
Wright

The major source of information about the reading policy for both
Ms. Price and Mr. Fielder was the district workshop, Reading Update.
This was organized and taught by the district reading coordinators both
of whom were involved in designing the state conferences to introduce
the policy. The format and information of Reading Update was largely
taken from the state materials. The inservice was a series of sessions
each devoted to teaching a new reading strategy that would help teachers
“do“ the policy. These strategies were taken from cognitive psychology
as processes that good readers did intuitively, but as ones that could
be taught to all students to make them better readers. They included
such things as teaching students how to predict story events or how to

summarize what they read. At the workshop, teachers were taught the

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strategies through traditional pedagogy. Presenters told teachers the
policy’s new ideas about reading and then modelled the strategies that
teachers could use to enact these ideas in their classrooms. A few of
the sessions, specifically those that dealt with writing and using
literature as reading text, veered from this traditional form. At least
in the writing sessions, teachers were taught new ideas about writing
by writing themselves. But except for these sessions, teachers were
taught about the policy thrgggh the classroom strategies that were
connected to the policy.

One of the coordinators of the inservice program, Terry Junger,
said she hoped teachers would take away from Reading Update one activity
that they would try out in their classrooms, and by doing this she hoped
they would start the process of rethinking their reading practices. She
commented:

I have a number of friends who went to our Reading Update who

have said to me, “We are going to have fun this year. . . .

And they understand what fun means and they understand how to

implement some of the stuff. . . . I think people will latch

on to one of the strategies and try it and that is fine.

Hopefully, someone will show them how to fit that into the

big picture. We told people at Reading Update to try one

thing, one thing and give yourself five years to feel

comfortable with it (T. Junger, interview, September 7,

1990).

What was taught then, from the coordinator’s perspective, were ideas and
activities. At one level, this story fits with the stories Mr. Fielder
and Ms. Price told about their learning at the workshop. Ms. Price
commented that she got so much new information that she could not
process it all and instead, put many of the materials away, both
physically and intellectually. Mr. Fielder said he that he picked up

many new ideas of things to try out in his classroom, some of which

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appealed to him and others which did not. They both talked about
Reading Update as giving them things-new stuff to do and think about
connected to reading.

But at another level, Ms. Price’s and Mr. Fielder’s talk about
their experiences in Reading Update reveals differences between what the
coordinators say they taught and what they as learners say they learned.
Their talk reveals differences as well between the two of them. So even
though learning is often seen as a reflex of teaching (Cohen, 1989), Mr.
Fielder and Ms. Price are good examples of two learners who were taught
the same things yet learned quite differently.

id e rned

W

Ms. Price said the most meaningful learning she did at Reading
Update was learning how to write. Although Ms. Price had been teaching
writing in a "new“ way--using the writing process--for a few years, she
never felt as comfortable teaching writing as she did reading. She said
she never “trusted her instincts“ when she taught writing (interview,
December 17, 1991) and was always worried about keeping writing
assignments moving along. Before her experience at Reading Update she
said that she “never trusted this whole process of giving time for it
[writing]. . . . [She] was worried that kids would be bored“ (interview,
December 17, 1991). In the inservice writing session, Ms. Price learned
about writing by actually writing. She was asked to write about a
broken window in any way she wanted and then to share what she wrote
with her group. She found that experience very moving--she had never

thought of herself being able to write before nor had she ever received

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peer feedback on her writing. The experience led her to write more in
her own life. Writing became for Ms. Price an important way to
experience the world and she wanted her students to understand this as
well. Because Ms. Price was asked to be a learner in the writing
session--was asked to write herself-—and because of what that experience
generated in her own life, Ms. Price learned what might be necessary in
her classroom if she were to give her students the same kind of
experiences with writing she had. She learned such things as how where
she wrote, what she wrote about, and how much time she had to write
contributed to the quality of her writing. In her inservice experience
Ms. Price learned about writing not by watching a teacher demonstrate
how to teach "according to the policy“ but by experiencing the policy as
a learner. She translated her experience into her teaching practices so
that she could help her children learn how to write better.

In contrast, Ms. Salvucci did not learn about writing from any
inservice connected with the policy. In fact, she never mentioned
writing as a part of the state policy. She said she learned how to
teach writing in her preservice education courses in which she was
taught how to set up a writer’s workshop in her class. She learned
about writing in stages, about peer feedback, and about evaluating
students’ writing in diverse ways. But she was taught these things from
the teacher’s perspective--i.e., the practices a teacher engages in when
teaching a writing workshop. Ms. Salvucci was not given opportunities to
experience what it meant to be the kind of writer she was teaching her
students to be. When I asked Ms. Salvucci if she ever wrote she said

that the only writing she does, outside of letters, is writing her

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church bulletin. This is largely a matter of compiling notes that
various people give her and writing them up in time to meet a deadline.
In other words, it is largely a technical activity in which things such
as pre-reading activities, choice over topics, time, and environment for
writing would make little difference. Ms. Salvucci does not think of
herself as a writer and does not write, as Ms. Price does, on any
routine basis.

So Ms. Salvucci’s and Ms. Price’s learning experiences with
writing are very different. Ms. Price learned how to be a writer and,
because of that, developed some understanding of what it is her students
might experience when they write in her classroom. And Ms. Salvucci
learned how to teach writing. .

Mr. Fielder learned new ideas as a teacher as well. He said, “I
went to Reading Update . . . looking for things that I could use to help
me implement the new strategies. . . . Like today, when I was reading
from [he Berear thildreh . . . that was a think-aloud strategy. And
let’s see, Read React. I’ve done that this year“ (interview, February
20, 1991). Mr. Fielder said he learned the most in sessions that told
him classroom strategies that he could use to teach in the new way and
then modelled them for him. The most meaningful learning Mr. Fielder
did was in a session on how to change the way he questioned students
about their reading so as to access their prior knowledge and therein
improve their comprehension. The workshop was important to him because
it gave him new activities that he could use with his basal reader to

help him teach the way he now thought was valuable.

126

Given that some researchers suggests it is difficult for teachers
to teach in ways they themselves have never learned (Cohen, 1989; Brown,
1991), the difference in learning experiences surrounding the policy
that Ms. Salvucci and Mr. Fielder had compared to Ms. Price seems
important. Mr. Fielder did not learn new reading strategies as a reader
and Ms. Salvucci did learn how to write as a writer. Both learned
different ways to teach students how to read and write without learning
how their teaching might be experienced by their students. What does it
mean to a learner to have “prior knowledge accessed" before reading a
story? How does conferencing about written text affect what one writes?
Ms. Salvucci and Mr. Fielder could not answer these questions from the
learner’s perspective.

Ms. Price too was taught how to teach reading strategies, but said
she did not learn them. Unlike Mr. Fielder and Ms. Salvucci, she found
learning about new ways to teach from a teacher’s perspective
“bewildering.“ Instead, she learned new ways to teach writing by
experiencing those new ways as a learner. This was unusual. Most
learning opportunities connected to the policy did not play out so as to
encourage teachers to become students of the new instruction it
envisioned. And even those that did encourage teachers to become
students, such as this writing inservice, were not construed by all
teachers as opportunities to learn in new ways. Mr. Fielder had the
same opportunity to learn as Ms. Price--he attended the same inservice--
but he perceived it quite differently. The opportunity to experience
“new ideas“ as a learner then is in part given to teachers by making

available to them learning experiences that encourage them to become

127

learners. But it is also in part taken by teachers who construe these
opportunities to learn in new ways as valuable and important.

WW

Ms. Price also talked about acquiring new language from Reading
Update which gave her a way to talk about what she already believed.
“Reading as an interactive process“ helped her articulate her belief
that reading was made meaningful for students by connecting what they
read with experiences in their lives. “Activating students’ prior
knowledge“ helped her communicate her beliefs that instruction needed to
start with students’ existing understandings. Ms. Price said that she
had always believed in these ideas, but the policy gave her “words [for]
what I was doing . . . now I can put words to it“ (interview, February
11, 1991). She found these words helpful in communicating her thoughts
to other teachers--something that in the past had been difficult for
her. Although this language at first just seemed to give her labels for
her existing thinking and beliefs, later she said that the language she
learned at Reading Update helped her to connect the policy’s ideas with
other new ideas she was encountering because all used the same words.
She said “everything I’m learning is about prior knowledge“ so that when
she heard that phrase in her reading inservice, her science curriculum
work, and in books about children’s learning she put all of these
experiences together. In doing so, she understood them better. She
commented, “I didn’t own the phrase before, but now I do“ (personal
communication, August, 1992).

Ms. Price’s talk about the language of the policy seems important

because it is through the similarities in language in various

128
initiatives that she was able to connect ideas. And it is by connecting
ideas from various sources that Ms. Price made sense of them. This
sense that language not only identifies thoughts, but shapes them is not
a new idea. Mead (1934) wrote: “Language does not simply symbolize a
situation or object which is already there in advance; it makes possible
the existence or the appearance of the situation or object“ (p.78).
Bruner (1990) summarizes Vygotsky’s view of language not just as
“narrative or label but as a system of cutting up the world into
categories and relations“ (p. 158). For Ms. Price, the language shaped
a category of learning in which she could then fit many of the new ideas
she was encountering. So the language seems to have played a greater
role in her thinking about the reading policy than her talk about it
might indicate. Ms. Price’s learning from the language is also
interesting in comparison to Ms. Salvucci’s talk about the policy’s
language. Whereas the language was new for Ms. Price, it was familiar
to Ms. Salvucci. She said that she had learned all about “prior
knowledge“ and “reading as interactive“ and “integrated instruction“ in
her preservice education courses. Ms. Salvucci’s comments suggest that
the familiarity of the policy’s language contributed to her sense that
there was nothing new to learn from it.

If indeed some other language had been used to communicate the
same ideas, it is possible that Ms. Salvucci would have interpreted the
policy as offering an opportunity to learn something new. If so, this
is something of a conundrum for policymakers for, on the one hand, the
commonness of language (i.e., the fact that it was not unique to the

policy but used in the broader community) helped Ms. Price learn and

129

connect ideas so that she made greater sense of them. But, on the other
hand, it may have masked for Ms. Salvucci differences that actually
existed between her thinking and the policymakers’. If language is seen
not just as attaching labels to ideas but as shaping the ideas then the
language used to communicate ideas in a policy will influence how
teachers learn from policy and what sense they make of it. But because
teachers attach different meanings to the same words, exactly how
language shapes their thinking will vary with the individual teacher.

Mr. Fielder mentioned the same language as Ms. Price and Ms.
Salvucci in connection to the policy--reading as an interactive process,
student’s prior knowledge--yet his use of these words seems quite
different from the others’. Whereas Ms. Price connected these words in
some big picture about learning, Mr. Fielder restricted them to a
picture of reading instruction. How it is, for instance, that he can
help children understand text better if they access their prior
knowledge. To Mr. Fielder, interaction, prior knowledge are tools to do
better this thing called reading comprehension. Mr. Fielder related a
story about the policy’s language:

I think we talked last time that the one thing that stuck

with me from the state’s thing [policy] is that reading is

interactive. So I try to make it interactive, not passive.

My brother and I were driving to Detroit to take my mom

shopping. He is not an educator and he was talking about how

you have to get people interested in what they are reading

and blah, blah, blah. We’re going 65 miles per hour down the

highway and I just said ‘It’s called accessing prior

knowledge and we’re now doing it so leave me alone’

(interview, February 20, 1991).

So the language that Mr. Fielder associated with the policy may
also have shaped his thinking and allowed him to cut up the world in new

categories, but the world he cuts up is quite different from Ms.

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Price’s. The domain that Mr. Fielder sees the policy dealing with is
reading instruction, even more narrowly reading comprehension, not
learning and teaching at large.

Mr. Fielder and Ms. Price talk differently about what they learned
at Reading Update. Ms. Price learned about writing and Mr. Fielder
learned about using basal readers in new ways. Through the policy’s
language, Ms. Price connected her learning from Reading Update with
other ideas about how children learn and in the process honed her ideas
about learning and teaching generally, not just learning how to read.
Mr. Fielder saw the policy as about teaching reading and therefore
learned about reading instruction. When we think about children
learning in schools, it seems obvious that as learners they take away
different messages from what they are taught. One explanation for this
is that they bring different resources to their learning (Heath, 1982;
Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Giroux, 1983) The reading policy itself is based
on a view of learning in which who the learner is--his or her
experiences, beliefs, ideas---affects the meaning he or she constructs.
Although learners may be taught the same ideas and information, who they
are will affect what sense they make of it-—i.e., what they learn. One
possible way then to understand differences in Mr. Fielder’s, Ms.
Price’s, and Ms. Salvucci’s learning is to look at who they are and what
understandings and experiences with reading they bring to their learning

of the policy.

What They Brought to their Learning Experiences
Mr. Fielder thinks of himself as a person who has not ventured far

from things that are familiar to him, both professionally and

131
personally. He went to a nearby college, has only taught in one school,
and lives with his parents in his family home. Mr. Fielder talked
poignantly about his choice to be the care-taker of his parents and how
that, on the one hand, gives him the stability and consistency in life
that he seeks but, on the other, limits what he sees himself able to do.
Mr. Fielder told me a revealing story when a group in his class read a
story about playing dominoes. Mr. Fielder told the group a great deal
about the game that was not in the story and played a number of games
with them. I commented later that he seemed to be quite expert on
dominoes and he said that every summer evening for most of his life he
has played the game with his father on the porch, even though he said he
hates dominoes. As a kid he tried to hid them from his father so they
would do something else, but he added “what can you do“ (interview,
March 26, 1992). For Mr. Fielder, past experiences and relationships
have great meaning. Although he may feel ambivalent toward them, the
sense of coherence and stability that they provide seems valuable to
him.

He chooses to teach in many of the same ways that he remembers his
teachers teaching. Mr. Fielder talked a great deal of needing to be
comfortable in the way he teaches, needing things to feel familiar, and
needing any new ideas about teaching to fit with his existing practices
and beliefs. He said about Reading Update, for instance, that he was
looking for new ideas that fit “within the framework that I’m
comfortable working in“ (interview, February 20, 1991). This does not
seem to mean that he avoids new ideas. Mr. Fielder attends numerous

staff development programs on a wide variety of topics, but he carefully

132
considers any new idea he encounters. Because of this, when he first
heard about the reading policy it made him anxious. He thought the
state was telling him that there was a better way to teach reading and
something in the messages he heard surrounding the policy led him to
think they might be right. (This seems the case because, as he said, the
way reading was described in Reading Update--as an interactive process
where the reader constructs meaning of text based on his prior
experiences and understanding—- resonated with how he thinks about his
own reading, even though he never applied it to how children learn to
read).

His anxiety pushed him to attend the district’s reading inservice
and some of what he heard there made sense. He learned that he should
question students differently so that he could access their prior
knowledge to help them comprehend new text more effectively. This
change in practice seemed dramatic to Mr. Fielder, but it also seemed
one that he could adopt without having to upset his whole way of
thinking about reading instruction. He did not view what he learned
connected to the policy as asking him to give up separate phonics
instruction, for instance, or ability grouping in reading. In other
words, although the change in questioning was a big change, it did not
challenge Mr. Fielder’s fundamental beliefs about how to teach reading.
He made sense of what he learned and used it in his classroom by fitting
it with existing practices, not overthrowing them.

As a learner what Mr. Fielder seems to have brought to his
learning experiences with the policy is a desire to know more about it

and an openness to think about new practices but a counterbalancing

133
desire to have the new ideas fit with existing practices. And his
existing practices are quite traditional, according to Mr. Fielder as
well as to me as an observer. To fit these threes things together-~need
for familiarity, traditional practice, and the policy--it makes sense
that Mr. Fielder would see the policy as an opportunity to learn about
changes in reading instruction rather than a wholesale change in
thinking about learning or teaching. His personal disposition not to
engage in large changes, nor any changes very easily, would seem to
disallow a larger, more radical reading of the policy.

Ms. Salvucci’s not seeing opportunities to learn in the policy may
equally be tied to who she is as a learner. Like Mr. Fielder, Ms.
Salvucci may have brought things to her learning that worked against her
seeing the policy as anything but congruent with what she currently did.
As was described in her case, Ms. Salvucci already has many “new ideas“
in her practice which make her practice ambitious. She does not use a
basal reader but finds tradebooks for students to read that she thinks
will interest them more. She teaches skills through their reading when
students need the skill to figure out a problem in their reading or
writing. She allows students to develop at their own pace, rather than
pushing them all to master concepts in a predetermined time period. All
of these practices require Ms. Salvucci to deal with greater uncertainty
over what and how her students are learning than if she followed more
traditional practices.

For Ms. Salvucci to see the policy as another learning opportunity
would open her up to the possibility of more uncertainty and challenges.

And Ms. Salvucci may not want that. Her life is already complex with a

134
young daughter, a difficult pregnancy, a master’s degree program.
Because her practices seem to work for her and because she receives
little pressure to change from her district, there is little reason for
Ms. Salvucci to think of herself as needing to learn more. Interpreting
the policy as nothing new allows Ms. Salvucci not to have to learn from
it.

This contrasts with Ms. Price who both professionally and
personally has engaged in great changes. Ms. Price left home at 18 to
become a nun and later left her religious order and got married. She
speaks of making these changes in her life because she learned new
things and wanted new experiences. For example, Ms. Price talked about
her decision to teach in public schools instead of continuing in private
ones as important “for her own growth“ to help her experience teaching
in a different, less homogenous environment. Unlike Mr. Fielder who
appears to need familiarity, Ms. Price seems to seek change because it
contributes to new understandings about herself.

Since she began teaching in the 19505 Ms. Price has experimented
with what she calls various forms of child—centered teaching. Although
always having child-centeredness as a guiding principle, Ms. Price talks
of changing her practice continually to incorporate new ideas she
encounters and to meet the needs of new children. She saw the reading
policy as similar to what she already believed and did, yet she still
viewed it as an opportunity to learn more. And she did learn. She
learned about herself as a writer which led her to think about different
ways to teach writing. Initially she found much of what else she

learned in the reading inservice useless because it only offered her

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activities. But as she continued thinking about what she learned and
connecting it to various other experiences she was having, she found the
experiences she had at Reading Update more meaningful. What the reading
policy ultimately gave to her was a new way to think about her beliefs
and a deeper understanding of how her beliefs, as well as other ideas
she was encountering, fit into a broad picture of learning and teaching.

As a learner then, Ms. Price loves to engage big ideas. What she
learns becomes meaningful to her when she can see how it relates to
other things she is thinking about and when she can paint a coherent
picture of all the new information and ideas she encounters. So her
disposition is one that seeks new ideas and engages in change. Her
seeing the policy as an opportunity to examine her own thinking and to
connect it to other ideas fits into his picture.

Writing about personal dispositions and characteristics of Mr.
Fielder, Ms. Price, and Ms. Salvucci is tricky. What I know about their
lives is limited and my ability to make sense of what they tell me is
even more limited. That is not the intent here. But thinking about who
these teachers are as people seems inescapable because what they bring
to their learning plays a part in if and how they perceive the policy as
an opportunity to learn. Regardless of what they were taught
surrounding the policy, the way these teachers perceived the opportunity
was what shaped their learning. And their differing perceptions of the
policy offer possible explanations for why they make sense of the policy
in their practices differently, even though in Mr. Fielder and Ms.

Price’s cases in particular, many of the factors cited by researchers as

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influencing teachers’ interpretations (e.g., working conditions,
exposure to the policy) were the same.

Bruner (1990) when writing about how people’s perceptions of the
world are related to their desires and beliefs, uses the examples of
some people perceiving the Sahara as something to cross on foot or the
Atlantic as something to cross in a small boat (Acts of Meaning, p. 40).
It is not that these people have stronger feet or that they are more
adaptable to living in water that produces these different perceptions,
but something in the people that creates a sense of deserts and oceans
being opportunities rather than barriers. It is not just what learning
opportunities are available to teachers that affects their learning from
policy and ultimately their interpretations of policy. Teachers
subjectively construct the opportunities to see them as either full of
potential or barren. And the sense they make of the learning
opportunities relates to the sense they make of the policy and how the
policy plays out in their practices.

This becomes something of a chicken and egg story because what
seems to influence their subjective construction of the learning
opportunities is in part how they interpret the policy while at the same
time how they interpret the policy influences the learning they perceive
themselves needing to do and the affect of that learning on their
practices. For example, in the inservice did Mr. Fielder focus on
learning classroom strategies because he thought that was what the
policy was about or did he think the policy was about new classroom
strategies and therefore focused on learning them in his inservice work?

Did Ms. Price learn about writing and, therefore, connect it to the

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policy, or did she think the policy was about writing and because she
felt uneasy about her writing instruction actively seek out an
opportunity to learn about writing? Ms. Salvucci perceived there to be
no learning opportunities available to her connected to the policy. She
talked about only briefly hearing about the policy in her district
meetings and not at all through other sources, yet other teachers in her
school and district were very familiar with it and spoke of discussions
with principals and district administrators about the state policy (K.
Ensor, interview, March 4, 1991). Did Ms. Salvucci interpret the policy
to be what she already did and so ignore any mention of it? Or because
there was little mention of it, did Ms. Salvucci assume it advocated a
view of reading which she already held and therefore was beside the
point?

These are obviously rhetorical questions whose aim is not to
ferret out truth. Lively (1984) through one of her characters muses
about truth:

He remembered as a small boy, being exhorted to tell the

truth; at that point one had been given the impression that

this was a perfectly simple matter-—you did not say that

things had happened which had not, neither did you say that

things which had not happened had. What was not explained

gas the wealth of complexity surrounding this basic maxim (p.

Certainly the complexity in these cases is rich. It is made even
richer by the fact that the policy itself is vague--the “truth“ of it
constructed differently by different policymakers at different times in
the policy history. Establishing the “truth“ seems neither possible nor

the point in this case. The importance is that learning connected to

policy, has two facets that need to be understood--one is an external

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analysis or understanding of what might have been available to teachers
to learn surrounding the policy and how the nature of it might affect
what it is that teachers learn about and from the policy. But the other
is how teachers perceive these opportunities, and it is the latter that
most seems to interplay with teachers’ interpretations and sense of
change.

Yet this way of thinking about teachers learning from policies is
not often mentioned. For example, McDonnell & Elmore (1987) write about
learning as capacity-building which in its worst characterization
presents learning as a reflex of what is taught and as an uniform event
in which all learners learn the same thing. Policymakers or their
ambassadors teach information to build teachers’ intellectual capacities
to enact policies and all teachers learn and use the information in the
same way. The learning surrounding policy is to create more uniform
practices. This policy did not create more uniform practices nor did Mr.
Fielder, Ms. Salvucci and Ms. Price learn the same things from it. The
teachers as learners, like all learners, constructed their own meaning
of what they were taught. They acted, in fact, as the policy said they
would act “reading“ the policy in a dynamic interaction among their
prior understandings, the policy’s messages, and the context in which
they taught.

If teachers are learners from policy, then policymakers become
teachers. And in this role they face the same tensions that all teachers
do who alternate between a desire to transmit certain information and
ideas to their students, and the recognition that their students will

construct their own meaning of whatever information and ideas are

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taught. In our educational culture, both sides of the tension are
valued. Learners are expected to acquire some set of fixed ideas and
information. Policymakers in this case sought to change reading
instruction in a particular direction by giving teachers new information
and ideas about reading. But at the same time, learners are encouraged
to make of the ideas what they will so that a plurality of ideas and
opinions exist. Even the most naive of policymakers in this case knew
that teachers would take what they learned connected to the policy and
play it out in their classrooms in different ways (E. Weber, interview,
August 27, 1990). By casting the policy into the educational waters
policymakers introduced another set of ideas which would be construed to
mean many different things. And so in an attempt to refocus reading
instruction around a certain set of ideas, they may have actually opened
up the possibility for greater diversity in what happens in classrooms

during reading time.

Notes to Chapter 5

1. In this section, I will write about Ms. Price’s and Mr.
Fielder’s learning from policy more than Ms. Salvucci’s experiences for
two reasons. First, because Mr. Fielder and Ms. Price talked about
their learning from the policy and Ms. Salvucci did not. Secondly, Mr.
Fielder and Ms. Price shared a common learning experience at Reading
Update for which I have both their accounts of what they learned and the
presenters’ account of what she taught. This allows me to look more
closely at the issue of how learners perceive experiences differently
from each other as well as how learners perceive experiences differently
from the teachers.

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CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSIONS

It is interesting looking at the issue of teacher learning from a
policy that is itself about learning. One reading of the policy is that
it assumes a constructivist view of learning: readers construct their
own meaning of text based on their prior knowledge (what they bring to
their reading), the context in which they are reading, and the text
itself. This reading of the policy suggests that readers--learners--
will learn various things from text because they will construct
different meanings of it. This reading of the policy suggests that
learners ef the policy will construct various meanings of it.

Countering this view of learning though is the view of learning
assumed by policymakers in their efforts to teach teachers about the
policy. Inservice sessions on the policy were taught with traditional
pedagogy--presenters telling teachers new ideas and activities which
they expected teachers to “learn“ and incorporate intact into their
classrooms. The MEAP test was designed to “drive“ instruction in that
teachers would hear “the message“ and change their instruction
accordingly (K. Wixson & C. Peters, interview, October 25, 1989). The
view of teaching and learning that fell out from what policymakers did

surrounding the policy seems classic “knowledge reproduction.“ Learners

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were viewed as empty vessels which policymakers, as teachers, could fill
with new, “correct" ideas (Jackson, 1986).

Viewing their policy as text which readers would interpret in
various ways and then implement in various ways would have been quite
troublesome for policymakers. They thought they finally knew the right
way to teach reading and they wanted teachers in the state to learn it.
So what do these teachers’ stories say about how and what they learned
from and about the policy? Did they do what policymakers said they
would do as learners, or what policymakers wanted them to do?

They Learned Different Things Depending on
Who They Were and What They Knew

At one level this sounds like a fairly simplistic statement in
line with the constructivist reading of the policy. Ms. Price, Mr.
Fielder, and Ms. Salvucci knew different things about reading and
reading instruction and they did different things in their reading
practices. Mr. Fielder viewed reading as a series of skills which
students needed to learn prior to being able to comprehend text. He
thought the best way to teach these skills was in a methodical,
organized way with separate lessons for phonics, vocabulary, and sight
words. His views led him to reject much of what he heard about new ways
of teaching reading, particularly whole language approaches. Ms.
Salvucci and Ms. Price, on the other hand, embraced many of the new
ideas. They both said they taught reading throughout the day as part of
their instruction in different subject areas. They read literature with
their students and orchestrated many opportunities during the day for

students to read and write. The major difference between Ms. Salvucci

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and Ms. Price was their teaching of skills. Ms. Salvucci believed
skills should and could be taught when students needed them to make
sense of text. She described her skill instruction as going from “the
whole to the part“, meaning from the text to the individual skill. Ms.
Price taught lessons on specific grammar skills and literary devices.
She often used text to teach these skills, but did not, like Ms.
Salvucci, teach them when students encountered difficulties with text.
Rather, she taught them as separate lessons for all students. This
difference between the two teachers was not as much ideological--Ms.
Price believed that skills probably should be taught through text
students read--as practical. Ms. Price was unsure how she could carry
off teaching all the skills she felt her students needed to learn if she
attempted to do it primarily through their reading and writing.

The differences among the teachers meant that they brought
different ideas and practices to their learning from the policy--
different “prior knowledge“-- which influenced how and what they learned
from it. So that even though Ms. Price and Mr. Fielder were taught the
same things about the policy in their district inservice program they
learned different things and made different sense of the policy.

But their stories point out that saying learners learn differently
depending on their prior knowledge and experiences is actually saying
something that is very complex, because figuring out what a learner’s
prior knowledge is, as well as how it shapes his or her learning, is
difficult. Ms. Salvucci and Ms. Price brought similar ideas about
reading and reading practices to their learning about the policy, yet
they learned very different things from it. This seemed to be so

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because in addition to their beliefs about reading and reading
practices, they brought different dispositions toward learning. Ms.
Price brought an eagerness to see the policy as something else from
which to learn and she did learn new ideas from it-—about writing, about
language, about students’ prior knowledge. Ms. Salvucci brought a
reluctance to see the policy as something from which she could learn and
so did not. She continued to see it as duplication of what she already
knew. Here are two teachers who started from similar places in thinking
about reading and reading practices when they encountered the policy,
yet who ended up learning different things from it.

Mr. Fielder brought a traditional view of reading to his learning
from the policy, and anxiety over learning new ideas about reading.
Yet, he also brought his sense of the policy resonating with some
familiar thoughts about his own reading processes. He knew when he
read, for instance, that if he already knew something about a topic it
was easier for him to comprehend what he was reading. He also knew that
what he knew influenced how he interpreted text. But before learning
from the policy, Mr. Fielder never applied this understanding of his own
reading to teaching children how to read. What he learned from the
policy helped him do so. Even though Mr. Fielder brought traditional
ideas about teaching and some fear of learning and change, he also
brought a sense that the views of the policy were reasonable and helpful
to him in teaching reading better.

Looking at what and how these teachers learned, points out that
they brought multi-faceted and variegated baggage to their learning from
the policy. “Prior knowledge“ is not just what they “know“, but who

 

145
they are as learners, and what they believe. And across the three
teachers, different ideas, beliefs, and dispositions took precedence
over others in shaping the learning these teachers did. That is, even
though these teachers shared some ideas, beliefs and experiences (Ms.
Salvucci’s and Ms. Price’s ideas about reading; Mr. Fielder’s and Ms.
Salvucci’s reluctance to learn), the ideas did not all play the same
role in shaping what and how the teachers learned. Ms. Price’s and Ms.
Salvucci’s similarities in practices did not result in the same learning
from the policy. Nor did Mr. Fielder’s and Ms. Salvucci’s resistance to
change.

Much of what these stories point out is in line with cognitive
views of learning. Learning is a process in which learners’ schemata--
their prior knowledge--affect what and how they learn. And when
learning occurs, most often, new ideas are assimilated to fit into the
learners’ existing schemata (Posner, Strike, Hewson, & Gertzog, 1983;
Bruner, 1983) Yet, these stories add flesh to this very bony and linear
description of learning. And, it seems, the flesh is what helps us
understand how and what these teachers learned from this policy. These
stories suggest that “prior knowledge“ is actually an array of
experiences, ideas, beliefs, and dispositions that form in unique ways
when learners learn and therefore change, in unique ways, how and what

they learn.

What They Know Changed and 50 Did Their Learning
Ms. Price’s case also points out that this array of experiences,
ideas, beliefs, and so forth does not remain the same. It changes and

therefore the learning learners do changes. Ms. Price continued to

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learn different ideas from the policy as she learned other new ideas and
connected them to the policy. For instance, in connecting the ideas
about student learning that she learned in the policy with ideas from
conceptual change instruction in science and "brain-based“ learning she
made different sense than she originally did of what the reading policy
was all about. Particularly, she said she developed a new understanding
of how students’ prior knowledge influenced their reading comprehension.
Her rethinking of the reading policy, in turn, helped her make different
sense of the new ideas she encountered. The reading policy, when she
“relearned“ it, changed what she learned about conceptual change in
science. So her story suggests that prior knowledge is not a one way
filter of new learning, it is shaped as well by new ideas that are
learned. What Ms. Price “knew" changed as she learned and in turn
changed what learning she did.

The teachers’ stories suggest that their learning was a messy
process in which hhat they learned varied because of this array of
experiences, ideas, and beliefs called “prior knowledge.“ This fits
with the first view of learning in the beginning of the chapter--a
reading of the policy as supporting a constructivist view of learning.
These teachers seemed to do what policymakers thought they would do as
learners--construct their own meaning of the policy.

But these stories suggest an additional way in which prior
knowledge may shape learning experiences. These teachers constructed
different kinds of learning opportunities for themselves. So not only

was what they learned different, but the way in which they learned.

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They Constructed Different Learning Experiences
Depending on Who They Were and What They Knew

Ms. Price and Mr. Fielder both attended the same inservice session
on writing in which they were asked to write in a different way than
they had in the past--a way which the policy might support. The
inservice presenter modelled a new kind of writing instruction in the
session and allowed the participants to become learners of this new kind
of instruction. Ms. Price learned a great deal from this experience.

It spurred her to write more in her own life and think about teaching
writing differently in her classroom. Through this inservice experience
and through her own writing, Ms. Price gained insight into what might be
helpful to writers and what might hinder them. She used this insight to
change how she taught writing to her students.

For Mr. Fielder, this experience meant very little. He never
mentioned writing as a part of the policy, nor did he mention any
changes in his writing instruction or his own writing because of what he
learned. Mr. Fielder said he learned most from inservice sessions in
which he could watch presenters model new activities, where he could see
how he as a teacher should act in new ways. He did not use whatever he
learned from the policy as a way to change his own reading or writing
practices. For instance, Mr. Fielder did not talk about questioning
himself more before he read a book, even though he now thought this was
a useful thing to ask students to do before they read.

Like Mr. Fielder, Ms. Salvucci learned new ideas about reading and
writing from a teacher’s perspective--what teacher thinking and behavior
the new ideas implied. She learned in her teacher education course such

things as how she should set up a writer’s workshop or how she should

148

create a literate environment in her classroom. She did not relate what
she learned about teaching reading and writing to her own reading and
writing. For instance, she did not talk about using process writing to
write her church bulletin, even though she thought process writing was
important for her students to learn to write. So that although she
learned new ideas about how to teach reading and writing, she had no
experiences learning with these new ideas.

Ms. Price became a learner in these new ways, and Ms. Salvucci and
Mr. Fielder did not. This difference in how they learned seems to have
contributed to how these teachers made sense of the policy. Ms.
Salvucci and Mr. Fielder talked about the policy (in Ms. Salvucci’s case
ideas associated with the policy) more in terms of how it changed what
they did as teachers--new activities and strategies to use with their
students, whereas Ms. Price talked about the policy as a changed
approach to learning. The assumption that Ms. Salvucci’s and Mr.
Fielder’s sense making of the policy rested on was that if their
teaching changed, so would their students’ learning-learning as a reflex
of teaching. Mr. Fielder and Ms. Price, though, are good examples of
why this may be a questionable assumption. They learned quite different
things from what they were taught. But because Mr. Fielder and Ms.
Salvucci did not experience the new ways of teaching as learners, it
would have been difficult for them to understand how what they did as
teachers played out for their learners and thus difficult to understand
what might be necessary and important for their learners to learn in new

ways.

149

There are examples of staff development efforts in which teachers
have opportunities to become learners of new kinds of instruction (the
Bay Area Writer’s Project, Marilyn Burn’s mathematics workshops, Summer
Math are a few). The district inservice program that Ms. Price and Mr.
Fielder attended had a few opportunities to do so. But Mr. Fielder’s
story points out that even when these opportunities are given, some
teachers may not construct them as such. As teachers’ arrays of
experiences, ideas, and beliefs influence what they learn, they may also
influence how they construct their opportunities to learn. And this
raises additional problems for those interested in helping teachers
learn from policies. Even if state policymakers in this case could have
figured out ways to help teachers in the state become learners in the
new instructional ways of the policy, would all teachers have become
learners? What would state policymakers have had to do to help teachers
like Mr. Fielder see that understanding the policy from the learners’
perspective may help him understand how to teach in new ways?

Additionally, how could state policymakers help teachers learn to
transfer the understandings they gained as learners to their teaching
practices?. Ms. Price, as a learner and teacher, was able to do this,
but could all teachers? Lortie (1975) suggests that going to the other
side of the desk (changing from learners to teachers) is a longstanding
problem that beginning teachers face in learning to teach, so do
experienced teachers learning to teach in new ways face the same
problem?1

If policymakers wanted teachers to learn about new ways of

teaching reading from this policy, then they would have to figure out

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some answers to these kinds of questions. This study has been focusing
on teachers learning from policy and has only briefly mentioned that if
teachers are learners from policy, then policymakers become teachers and
as such face many of the same problems all teachers face. The irony of
this story is that if the policy is to be believed, then the job of
teacher becomes more difficult. If learners’ prior knowledge shapes
what and how they learn, how can teachers come know the learners’ prior
knowledge and plan their teaching in light of it? Ms. Price struggles
with this problem in her classroom where she has ready access to her
students and comes to know them well, but how could policymakers come to
know their learners’ prior knowledge when they teach them at a distance?
How could policymakers as teachers come to understand the learning and

change that their students have done?

From Whose Perspective Should We Come to Understand Learning?

This study raises many questions about how we come to understand
teachers learning. If their learning is shaped by who they are and what
they bring to learning then teachers will learn different things from
what they are taught and they will learn in different ways. So how do
we think about what teachers have learned? Should their learning be
measured as change or an outcome?

If we are to understand learning from the learner’s perspective
then we need to understand where the learner started--this array of
experiences, ideas, knowledge and beliefs--and where they ended up after
they learned. Learning from the learner’s perspective is the distance
they have travelled between what they knew, were, and believed and what

they now know, are, and believe. From this perspective, Mr. Fielder has

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learned a great deal. As a result of what he learned from the policy,
he has changed how he questions students and what texts he uses to teach
reading Ms. Price has also travelled some distance because of the
policy. She has changed her writing practices and her thinking about
reading. But Ms. Salvucci speaks of no changes directly related to the
policy.

If, though, we are to understand “learning“ from the policymakers’
perspective, we need to see learning as an outcome--something that is
manifested in reading practices that resemble images of practice
envisioned in their policy. Policymakers, like many teachers, measure
learning by gauging how close learners seem to be to what they, as
teachers, thought they taught. From this perspective, Ms. Salvucci has
learned a great deal because her practices look similar to at least some
readings of the policy. Mr. Fielder has learned little because his
practices are still traditional, far away from most images of practices
associated with the policy. That policymakers might understand learning
from this perspective makes sense in that they believe they know the
right way to teach reading and they want teachers to “know“ it as well.
Like many teachers, policymakers may want learning to be a reflex of
their teaching--they want their learners to learn what as teachers they
already know.

Mr. Fielder, Ms. Price, and Ms. Salvucci’s stories can either be
viewed as successes or failures for the reading policy depending on
which perspective one chooses. Ms. Salvucci is a success to those
looking for certain kinds of practices in classrooms, but a failure if

looking for continued change and learning. Mr. Fielder is a successful

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learner, but policymakers may still question his practices. The purpose
of outlining the two perspectives is not to decide which is right.
Rather it is to raise the possibility that we may be able to get smarter
about teacher learning from policies by looking at both perspectives.
What Can We Do With Understanding Learning
from These Two Perspectives?

The learners’ perspective is critical to our understanding of how
it is that the policy has played out for these teachers and why. It
helps us understand which parts of their arrays of experiences, beliefs,
ideas, and knowledge interact with the learning opportunities so as to
help them learn and change. It helps us understand what makes the
learning difficult and what other kind of learning opportunities may
need to be offered to make it less difficult. It helps us see where the
policy may be weak, or just wrong--where is it that teachers resist
possible messages of the policy for good reasons. This perspective
helps us see the genuine efforts to learn and change that teachers have
made because of this policy. It also gives us an opportunity to learn
from those genuine efforts so that we can understand how to affect
continued change and learning.

The policymaker’s, or teacher’s, perspective on learning is a
little more difficult to see value in, not because it is valueless but
because its value seems to be changing. In traditional policy studies,
the policymaker’s perspective was helpful in assessing which teachers
were doing better and how much farther everyone had to go. It assumed
that there was a clear image of what teachers and students should be

doing because of the policy, and therefore some way to measure how much

153
farther teachers had to go to get it right. But as has been mentioned a
number of times in this study, for the reading policy there were few
clear signals given to teachers about what enacting the policy would
look like. Furthermore, as the policy itself implies, policymakers all
constructed different meanings of their efforts and so even if one
policymaker put forth an image of exemplary practice, it is unlikely
that others involved would agree. What reading should look like because
of the policy seems to continue to change and be constructed differently
by different policymakers. So what does this perspective have to offer
if not a sense of how much farther teachers have to change?

What this perspective offers is a reminder that the ultimate goal
of the policy was not to affect teacher learning, but to change how
students learn to read in classrooms. Regardless of the lack of clarity
and changeable nature of what exactly the policy should look like in
practice, it seems important to have a perspective on learning that
looks beyond where teachers currently are. The value of this
perspective is that it holds out a sense that there is a goal, albeit
not a fixed one, to which teachers, as well as policymakers, need to

orient their continued change and learning.

Notes to Chapter 6

1. Brown (1991) gives an example of teachers who learned new ways
of holding discussions by becoming discussion participants but who had
difficulties transferring their own experiences to their teaching
practices, even though they found them valuable.

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APPENDIX

APPENDIX
METHODOLOGY AND RESEARCH PROCEDURES

I based this study on interviews with teachers and observations in
their classrooms, both focused on teachers’ learning from and about
policy. I was concerned with how teachers understood the reading
policy, how and where they learned about the policy, and how, if at all,
their learning played out in their classrooms. Not much is known about
how experienced teachers learn, especially how they learn from policy,
so the intent of the study was to explore the terrain to find out which
issues and concerns about teacher learning might be most salient. Given
the nature of these questions a method was required which captured data
on both what teachers perceived their learning to be and what went on in
their classrooms. This suggested a field methods approach using both
interviews with the teachers and extensive classroom observations.

Looking at learning is difficult because learning is a very
complex and personal event that occurs within an individual in a
particular context and time. Even the learners themselves cannot often
articulate exactly what it is they are thinking, what has influenced
their thinking, and when they actually can say they have “learned“
something. This study attempted to do something that may be even more
complex in that I asked teachers to reconstruct learning that occurred

in the past--learning which may in some ways have shaped their current

155

 

156

thinking and practices. This means that I had to ask teachers to step
outside their current context and time to remember what they might have
been thinking and doing at the time they first learned from and about
the policy. A few times in the interviews, it was clear that stepping
outside was hard for the teachers to do--to separate themselves from
what they now know/think/believe to remember what they knew/thought/and
believed at the time they first heard about the reading policy and then
think forward from that time to their current context.

The interviews I did with these teachers provided me opportunities
to listen to their reconstructions of their own learning, as well as
listen to many other thoughts about teaching, reading, their students,
and schools. Observations helped me put in context much of what they
told me. These three teachers’ learning was shaped by the contexts in
which it played out, their classrooms, their districts, communities, as
well as by who they were and what they brought to their learning
experiences. Bruner (1990) suggests that what one does “reveals what
one thinks, feels, or believes“ because “saying and doing represent a
functionally inseparable unit.“ (p. 19). In this study, what teachers
did in their classrooms helped me understand the meaning they gave to
terms they used--e.g., “whole language“, “literature-based instruction“,
“integrated instruction“. In this way, the interviews and observations
informed one another and helped me better understand how these teachers
thought and acted about the policy and about their reading practices.

My ability to figure out what the issues were--in other words,
what I should look for in observing these teachers and what I should ask

them--improved as I got to know them better and understood more about

157

the environments in which they worked. Ethnographers write about the
importance of placing oneself in the words of the people one is studying
to understand their frames of reference (Blumer, 1976; Bogdan & Biklen,
1982). Observing these teachers work with their students in their
classrooms, talking to others in their schools, hanging out in the
teachers’ lounges, talking to administrators in their districts, and
exploring the communities in which their schools were located helped me
develop a better sense of their frames of references and of the
experience and opportunities that might be important to them.

In his justification of field methods Cusick (1983) writes:

A field study after all, is only an individual’s attempt to

unravel and explain a human event giving particular attention

to the collective understandings of those who created the

event. If the event is significant, and the account is

intelligible and plausible, then the result can be of value

to those interested and involved in similar events. (p. 135).
This study is my attempt to unravel three teachers’ stories about their
learning surrounding the reading policy, their learning to teach
reading, and their reading practices, in the hopes that their stories
may be of value to those trying to understand the relationship between

policy and practice, to develop reading policies, or to design learning

Opportunities for teachers.

Site Selection
This study is part of a larger research project which has been
looking at the relationship between state-level instructional policies
and mathematics and reading instruction. In this project, researchers
selected school districts to provide contrasting socio-economic and

demographic characteristics-~SES, type of community (rural, suburban,

158
urban), reputation of district, size--where district personnel were
willing to participate in the study. The rationale for diversity among
sites was that policies are likely to be attended to and played out
differently in districts with varying economic, geographic, social and

political conditions (McLaughlin, 1987; Sproull, 1981).

Teacher Selection

Within the schools selected for the larger project, I selected
two teachers from the same site and one from another site. Choosing two
teachers who shared the same teaching context and who experienced the
same district policies and one teacher who differed allowed me to raise
questions about impact of context and district input on these three
teachers’ stories. For the larger project, researchers chose to look at
second and fifth grade teachers so that they could explore differences
that might exist between policy implementation in primary and
intermediate grade levels. This seemed particularly important for a
reading policy because primary grades have traditionally focused in
reading instruction on teaching reading skills whereas intermediate
grades have been concerned with improving comprehension and fluency.

Within the selected sites and grade levels, I chose three teachers
to study. My principal concern was finding teachers who were willing to
be interviewed and observed for a two-year period. Teacher learning and
change rarely occur quickly (Feiman—Nemser, 1983; Richardson, 1990).
Thus, it was important to find teachers who were interested in
participating for at least two school years.

I deliberately did not seek to select teachers who might be

considered exemplary. I wanted to study teachers who, although not

159

statistically representative, would not seem like outliers in the
teaching population in the state. But figuring out the dimensions on
which the teachers I studied should be similar to other teachers was
difficult because little is known about what really influences teachers’
learning. Does type of students, colleagues, years of experience, and so
forth, shape how and what teachers learn? Because the dimensions of
teacher learning were unclear, instead, I looked for teachers who
represented a range on dimensions important in teaching reading. These
included such things as whether the teachers were considered
“innovative“ or “traditional“ in their practices; whether they taught
primary or intermediate level; what kind of students they had (SES,
rural or urban, ability grouped or not, and so forth), and what, if any,
their exposure to the policy had been. The three teachers I selected
varied on these dimensions in the following ways: (1) Ms. Salvucci and
Ms. Price were considered innovative by their principals, Mr. Fielder
was considered a more traditional teacher; (2) Mr. Fielder and Ms.
Salvucci taught second grade, Ms. Price taught fifth grade; (3) Mr.
Fielder and Ms. Price had attended a workshop dedicated to the policy,
Ms. Salvucci had not; (4) Mr. Fielder and Ms. Price worked in the same
rural school with lower SES students, Ms. Salvucci worked in an affluent
suburban school; (5) Ms. Salvucci and Mr. Fielder taught
heterogeneously grouped students, Ms. Price taught students labelled
“gifted under-achievers.“

In addition to varying on the above dimensions, these teachers
also varied along other dimensions commonly considered important--age,

years of teaching experience, kinds of teaching experiences, kinds of

160
preservice education, and gender. Not all of these dimensions ended up
being important in the study, but some did (such as preservice education
and age) and so became useful areas in which to have contrasts. Second,
for each dimension, there tended to be two teachers who were similar and
one who was not. This meant that I could explore more subtle differences
between two teachers who were similar along the dimension as well as
differences between the pair more similar and the third teacher.

Having the teachers I selected vary along different dimensions
seemed important not only for the opportunities it allowed me to
investigate, but also for the appeal of these teachers’ stories to a
wider audience. Having teachers who have different types of reading
practices, learning experiences, life circumstances, kinds of students
and so forth may allow more policymakers, educational researchers, and
teachers to see these three teachers’ stories as familiar--ones which
resonate with stories of teachers they know and with whom they work.

As an exploratory study, the sample of teachers I chose was not
intended to offer generalizable findings about how Michigan teachers
learned from the reading policy and, therefore, the sample is not
representative of teachers in the state. However, heeagee it was an
exploratory study, the sample of teachers should vary to “facilitate the
expansion of the developing theory“ (Bogdan & Biklen, 1982, p. 67) of
teacher learning from policy. Choosing three teachers rather than one
teacher gave me the variance that seemed necessary. And, although more
than three teachers would have introduced even greater variance, a
larger number of teachers in the study would not have allowed me to

interview and observe them as extensively as I did the three teachers.

161
The trade—offs in this kind of work are always between breadth and depth
and, although choosing two, four, five or six teachers would be in any
case arbitrary, the choice of three was consistent with the goals of the
study and the limitations of research conducted by me as an individual

investigator.

State and District Level Data

As part of the larger research project, researchers collected data
from state-level informants, from district personnel, and from school
principals about their own work in relationship to the policy, and state
and district procedures, policies, and practices in general. We used
this information to gain an understanding of the context of the teachers
as well as the learning opportunities related to the policy that may
have been available to them. Along with one or two other project
researchers, I interviewed state policymakers, Karen Wixson, Charlie
Peters, and Elaine Weber. Additionally, we interviewed teachers and
district educators involved in designing state conferences on the policy
and the MEAP tests. District reading coordinators for both school
districts represented were interviewed, as were both building
principals. Finally, I read interviews of other teachers in both
schools to check for additional perceptions of school policies and
procedures.

In addition to interviewing state and district people, I attended
one state and one district inservice program on literacy instruction to
understand better the kinds of experiences that were available to the

teachers. I wrote field notes for both inservices.

162
Data Collection

I collected data from the three teachers for a two year period,
during the 1990/91 and 1991/92 school years. For both the classroom
observations and teacher interviews, I used a series of structured
observation guidelines and interview protocols that I helped design for
the larger research project. These instruments were designed to help
focus data collection on what was assumed to be critical features of
reading practice--use of text, discourse patterns, teaching of reading
skills, grouping of students; features of teacher learning-- learning
experiences connected to the policy, formal teacher education, informal
learning opportunities; and finally, features of knowledge of the
policy--familiarity with policy and interpretation of policy. Many of
the questions and focal areas in these instruments were drawn from
interviews used in the Teacher Education and Learning to Teach study
conducted by the National Center for Research on Teacher Education (MSU,
1986-1990) in which many of the researchers had been involved. These
instruments were modified over the two year period by project
researchers when new areas of interest arose. Furthermore, I modified
the interview protocols to allow me to probe more deeply into teachers’
experiences with learning about the policy, learning to teach, and with
changes in their practices related to what they learned. For instance,
during the second year of interviewing, I asked many additional
questions about the teachers’ own lives; such questions as, where they
lived, what their families were like, what they did in their spare time,
where they went school, what they were like in elementary school, how

they learned to read, and what, if at all, they read now as adults.

163
These questions were important for me to gain a fuller picture of their
lives as learners and how the context of their lives outside of school
might influence their lives as teachers.

For each day of classroom observation, I took extensive field
notes of the events of the day. What I chose to observe in the
teachers’ classroom and what I chose to write about in my field notes
were shaped by the analytic questions in the observation guide, as well
as, what appeared most salient to the teacher and students during the
day I observed. Below is a sample of questions from the observation
guide on discourse patterns in the literacy instruction:

Reflect on the discourse patterns that you observed during

the day. How did students participate? What kinds of things

did students say, how much did they participate, what were

they encouraged to do and not to do? Who talked? To whom?

How were student ideas treated? What counted as legitimate

talk? Was there press for convergence? Was there

conversation in which no one right answer was guiding the

discussion?

These analytic questions served as reminders of classroom occurrences
for me to look for and note and therefore helped me approach the
different classroom observations I did over a two year period with some
consistency.

After taking field notes in the classrooms, I “wrote up“ each of
my observations using the observation guide as a structure for my notes.
These notes included narrative descriptions of the day’s observation
which ranged from 8-15 single-spaced pages in length. They also
included answers to the analytic questions about reading practices in
the guide. Again, these questions were on discourse during the lesson,

special terminology used, student responses, student engagement, teacher

assessment of students, and classroom atmosphere. I also taped and

164

transcribed parts of the day so that I could verify the exact discourse
of the class in my notes. These second-level notes on my daily
observations of teachers were most valuable in writing cases of the
teachers. It was the first stage of analysis of the field notes I wrote
in the classrooms and helped me reflect at_the_tthe on what I observed.
The reflection helped me raise questions to explore in future
observations and interviews with the teachers. Using the structured
observation guide helped me to write similar notes across the different
observations for all three teachers.

For the interviews, I used three different interview protocols.
The pre-observation and post-observation protocols, each of which
focused on the observation, and a long interview on the teachers’ ideas,
practices, and learning. The pre-observation interview focused on the
teachers’ planning and their expectation of what might occur during the
day. The post-observation interview was extensive, focusing on what and
how the teachers were trying to teach, what they thought had been
accomplished, what they thought students might have learned, and how, if
at all, they planned on following-up the lesson. Additionally, I asked
teachers where in their curriculum this lesson fit and whether the day
was typical of their teaching.

The long interview, centered on the following three areas:

1. MW. The interview

format included questions on teachers’ awareness of the state

efforts, their thinking about the new reading definition, their

experiences with the policy (inservice work, conversation with

165

peers, etc.), and the effects, if any, of the policy on their

practices.

2. leaehers’ reading practices. This section of the interview

included questions on their reading practices in general—-the

purposes of reading instruction, what they see as important to
teach, the pedagogy they see as appropriate, how they see reading
relating to other subjects they teach. Additionally, it included
questions about changes in their reading practices, both
individual changes, but also changes at the school or district
level such as new textbooks, new assessment measures, staff
development programs, and so forth.

3. l r in . The interview protocol included questions

on where and how they learned to teach reading, both preservice

and staff development. It also included questions about the
teachers’ informal learning experiences which may have contributed
to their understanding of reading, as well as their personal
reading habits.

The post-observation interviews lasted from thirty to sixty
minutes. The long interview lasted from 90 minutes to two hours. I
taped both of these interviews and transcribed the tapes. I did
pre-observation interviews by telephone the night before or in person
before the school day began and took notes of these interviews.

In addition to the formal interviews, I would converse with
teachers during non-teaching times of the day--on the playground during
recess duty, walking students to and from lunch or special area classes,

at assemblies, or during class time when they were not teaching. I

 

 

166
noted these conversations in my field notes and incorporated them into
my notes of the day.

The nature of this kind of research is that it involves judgments
on what data to collect and how to interpret it. As the researcher, my
thinking about reading instruction, about teaching, and about the policy
obviously influenced what I saw and heard and how I made sense of it.

So to check in some way my judgments about the data, throughout the two
year period of data collection, I asked other researchers to read my
field notes and interviews. Other researchers’ perspectives on my field
notes and interviews helped to develop my thinking about these teachers’
classroom practices and their talk about their own learning. And
because other researchers read the data while I was still observing and
interviewing these teachers, their comments helped me think about new
features to look for in the teachers’ reading practices and new
questions to ask about their learning. Although obviously sharing my
data with other researchers did not eliminate my biases entirely, it
helped me see how others made sense of my data and I gained the benefit

of others’ perspectives on what I was collecting.

Data Analysis
Data collection and data analysis in this study were interactive
over the two-year period. As mentioned earlier, the first step in
analyzing the data was done during the time I observed the teachers as I
wrote up notes of the observations. Writing up notes, reading
transcribed interviews, and receiving other researchers’ comments on my

data prior to returning to observe and interview the teachers, again,

167
helped refine what I looked for in practice next, so that the
instruments did not remain static throughout the two years.
n l ' Int rview Data

The interview data included my notes of the pre-observation
interviews and informal conversations, and transcriptions of taped post-
observation and long teacher interviews. Because I talked to these
teachers numerous times over the two year period, the data comprised a
large data set. I organized the data both by person and by themes so
that I could construct both individual cases of teachers and comparisons
among the teachers.

As I read notes and the transcriptions of individual teacher
interviews, I tagged the data around categories that were pertinent to
my questions: what do the teachers say about their views of the policy;
what are the teachers’ reports about their learning; what changes in
their reading practices do the teachers report? I then reconstructed
the individual interview data into these categories and formulated
possible answers to these questions. These answers helped me refine
questions to ask the teachers in future interviews which in turn helped
me develop new categories around which to reconstruct my data. Thus I
developed categories of analysis in an iterative process. For instance,
for the first few teacher interviews, I created a category “view of
reading and reading instruction.“ After looking over comments from a
few teacher interviews that pertained to this category, it became clear
that the teachers said quite different things about what they thought
reading was and what they thought reading instruction was. This became

an interesting area to ask the teachers more questions about and it

168
became imperative that I set up two categories--view of reading and view
of reading instruction-—rather than one. After setting up new
categories, I went back to previous interviews and pulled out additional
comments which pertained to them.

I engaged in a similar process for all the teacher interviews and
informal conversations and then combined the reconstructed interviews
for each teacher. These combined reconstructed interviews served as the
main body of interview data for the individual teacher case studies.

The reconstructed interviews also made it easier for me to compare
across teachers because the data for all three teachers was grouped in
the same categories.

Ahalyeie pf Qpeervation Data

The observation data primarily informed the interview data in that
it provided a context in which to see the enactment of the teachers’
statements. For instance, Ms. Salvucci described her reading practice
as whole language. She said that she integrates subject area
instruction around themes and always teaches skills going from the
“whole to the part.“ Although these terms are commonplace in teaching
circles, they mean very different things to different teachers. So my
observation data collected in Ms. Salvucci’s classroom helped me
construct an image of what she meant by whole language, moving from the
whole to the part, and integrated subject area instruction. Putting
together her actions with her statements while I was still collecting
data, again allowed me to check my current hypotheses of what I was

seeing and hearing and so refine my thinking about the teachers.

169
I separated the observation data into categories similar to the
interview data. From the reconstructed versions of the interviews and
observation data, I constructed the three case studies of these teachers

and the chapter focused on comparisons of the teachers.

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