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Research
That Matters
A Matter of Fact: How Field Data Shape Program Renewal
The first-year teacher arranged the chairs in her urban classroom in a circle, just as she had learned in her University of Washington methods class.
Once the chairs were filled, she restated the purpose of the day’s seminar for her secondary social studies students, just as she’d been taught. Finally, she posed the first of her Socratic questions, the ones she’d so carefully crafted to spark a meaty discussion.
In this classroom, the day’s discussion didn’t have a chance.
Many of the students were literally unable to read the text she’d assigned, let alone comprehend it, recalls UW professor Walter Parker, the first-year teacher’s social studies methods instructor. “The Socratic seminar is a classic method to help students discuss challenging texts like the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg address, Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’ ” says Parker. “But these seminars are extremely hard to facilitate, especially when students are having tremendous difficulty with reading.”
That classroom breakdown was one of many systematically documented and analyzed by College of Education researchers in a series of revelatory studies that followed UW graduates from campus into the field and on to their first few years as full-time teachers. The research project was funded in part by a Teachers for a New Era grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (in collaboration with the Annenberg Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation), a program that asked already high-quality programs to re-imagine what was possible in teacher education.
A ‘Syllabus-Shredding Moment’
In 2002, when the project began, few faculty members had seen their graduates downstream. 
They didn’t know that
some bright, eager beginning teachers fresh out of university would abandon concept-focused teaching methods rather than adapt them to high-needs students in diverse classrooms.
They didn’t see the graduates who were having trouble managing the flow of classroom activity or struggling to make sense of student work. They couldn’t imagine that a graduate they’d meticulously instructed to supervise independent small-group work would — once on his own — address students one-on-one, rushing from individual to individual to put out potential fires, micro-managing students even as they sat in their small groups.
“Many of our students were not understanding or were misinterpreting the things they saw and did in their fieldwork. And there were no faculty members there to help them,” says Charles “Cap” Peck, director of teacher education during much of the project.
When researchers made their first presentation of field data to faculty in 2005, a collective breath was drawn. Parker, who would subsequently rework his social-studies methods class to incorporate evaluations of students’ reading skills, called it a “syllabus-shredding moment.”
“I thought that I was teaching better than that — that it wouldn’t happen with me,” says Ilana Horn, associate professor of mathematics education.
This was not research that could be discounted. It was concrete, well-contextualized. It gave a rich, real-world description of what was going on in classrooms. And it was generated in-house. “It shook up the faculty,” says Peck. “It revealed the gap between what we talk about up here and what is going down out there.”
Many syllabi would be shredded over the next four years as the program turned a cold lens on itself and got down to the tough business of reinventing itself, fed by an ongoing stream of data coming out of the research.
“Our faculty took the program outside, made new relationships with schools, got uncomfortable, challenged themselves, generated and analyzed critical data, and found new ways to do their work,” says Peck. “If you show them data that suggest the need to change something, you don’t have to whip anybody into action. People jump right to it.”
Like fighter pilots in post-combat briefing sessions, instructors analyzed their documented successes and failures, reshaping their practices in line with incoming evidence. Everything
was screened through the filter of equity in the classroom. Were teaching practices effective — and were they effective
for all students?
Although program renewal is common in colleges of education — mandated by state and national accreditation — too often such renewals have not been based on systematic data or on meaningful feedback from schools. Historically, there has not been a sustained investment in research on teacher education sufficient to enable such sustained data collection and school partnerships.
As a graduate program staffed largely by a research faculty, and with funding from the Carnegie Corporation and the Ackerley Foundation, UW’s teacher education program is in a unique position to help fill in those research gaps, says Peck. “We’re in a position to analyze effects of public policy, to create new partnerships of practice, and to prepare leaders who are well informed about contemporary research and practice in the field.”
“This is an important time to prepare teachers to think critically, to prepare them to be effective as learners so that they can invent solutions to problems we don’t even understand yet,” says Peck. “One thing we know is that the way we did it in the past is just not adequate to deal with the problems coming at us quite fast right now.”
Ongoing formal and informal presentations of field research continue to fuel discussion, dissection and directional shifts on campus. The teacher education faculty, says Peck, has made a strong commitment to continuous investigation of program effectiveness. The challenge, as the initial Carnegie Corporation grant comes to an end, will be to continue streaming in the kind of rich, high-quality data that can disturb assumptions about practice and guide meaningful change. “We want to sustain and deepen this way of doing the work,” says Peck.
That work, he adds, has just begun.
“This is a 26,000-foot-high mountain and we’re 5,000 feet into the foothills. We’re not where we could be, but we’re not where we were.”
