A Day in the Life - How Things Have Changed

By Professor and Associate Dean James Marshall

When Iowa's state leaders created the nation's first college-level Department of Education in 1872, they made two important assumptions: first, that the state had a vested interest in preparing teachers and in improving the practice of teaching, and second, that the study of education would fit comfortably in a university curriculum still largely dominated by the humanities, ancient languages, and the still developing scientific disciplines. Needless to say, a lot has changed.

In 1872, classroom teaching was still largely a rural and somewhat lonely enterprise where teachers started the fire and mended the roof when they weren't teaching children of multiple ages, present for unpredictable stretches of time. Though often closely watched for their moral qualities and personal habits, such teachers were pedagogically independent: they had no choice but to develop curricula, classroom protocols, and modes of assessment pretty much on their own; few if any other resources were available.

The professors of education in 1872 were likely to share scholarly space with professors of philosophy, history, or a bit later, psychology. Their interest in actual classroom practice was arms length at best, and often examined through the lens of moral philosophy or social theory, seldom with an eye toward the complex human endeavor teaching has always been, then as now.

A great deal has changed. Today public schools alone employ over two million teachers working in highly bureaucratized environments where funding, curricula, and student population are shaped both by local economies and national agendas. Teachers must respond to increasingly complicated demands and to increasingly vocal expectations for exceptional performance. And they must do so in a physical and conceptual space-the public school-that was invented almost 200 years ago for a very different purpose and a very different group of students.

As Tyack and Cuban pointed out several years ago, what they call "the grammar of schooling" has changed very little in the time since Horace Mann began his reforms. In spite of technological innovation, increased funding, shifting responsibilities, and growing student bodies, school is still largely conducted in an enclosed room by one teacher with about 25 students who are expected to listen, read, write, and do what they are told.

As teaching has changed, so has the work of faculty in education. Like their colleagues across campus, educational scholars at Iowa and elsewhere have embraced the research mission, and for the last 100 years have produced the kinds of grant-supported studies, monographs, refereed articles, and blue-ribbon reports that are the established currency of university life and faculty careers. With nationally and internationally recognized graduate programs in testing and measurement, science education, gifted education, higher education, rehabilitation counseling, and literacy studies, The University of Iowa's College of Education has made a place for itself in our Research One university. One way of addressing issues of funding and evaluation of our programs might be to demonstrate how they do the kinds of things that other programs do. We write grants, we make knowledge, we train doctoral students, we inch our way up the U.S News and World Report rankings.

But to do that, and only that, is to lose sight of the other part of our core mission: to prepare teachers and to improve the practice of teaching. And this is where things get slightly more complicated.

In her insightful and sobering history of educational research, Ellen Lagemann portrays that research as an "elusive science" where the perspectives and experience of teachers is too often absent. In fact, she argues, the location of scholars within universities provides them with a powerful shield that protects them from what she calls "the diurnal problems of practice." Educational research, while successful in developing a body of declarative knowledge about teaching and learning has too often failed to translate that declarative knowledge into the procedural knowledge teachers must draw upon to do their work successfully.

While producing a scholarship that closely resembles the other kinds of scholarship conducted in universities-in its procedures, its assumptions, its conventions, its rewards-educational research has not often taken the next, critical step-the step into ordinary, complicated classroom life. Dewey saw the problem more than a hundred years ago when he observed that the work of a scholar and the work of a teacher, while related, are in fact quite different. The scholar is in the business of finding things out about her subject, but the teacher, he argues, is in the business of instilling in her students what he calls in a lovely phrase that still works for me "a vital and personal experiencing of that subject."

So, what do we do? How do we move from the generalizations of research to the particulars of classroom life? How can we fulfill our dual mission of making scholarly knowledge while serving the increasingly pressing needs of public education?

I want to provide you with examples of three initiatives that our College of Education has undertaken-initiatives that represent a space where the insights of educational research are elaborated and embodied in educational practice.

Since the first edition of the Iowa Tests of Educational Development appeared in 1942, under the leadership of E.F. Lindquist, the Iowa Testing Programs have been a model of psychometric integrity, subject specific assessment, and longitudinal power. The tests have informed students, parents, teachers, and communities about what children know and are able to do, and the test makers have interpreted the result with consistent care and consistent caution. In an environment where the public is all too ready to make complicated curricular and funding decisions on the basis of uncontextualized test scores, the faculty in Iowa Testing Programs have always been on the road, working with school administrators, school boards, state agencies, and the state legislature to make the deeply informed case for what testing can do and what it cannot do.

The last decade has seen a land rush of quickly constructed and too-often shoddy state tests of student achievement-tests whose reliability and validity are questionable at best and whose effect is to further narrow the kinds of curricula made available to our students. Born of the naïve if not cynical assumptions of the No Child Left Behind legislation, such tests are costing our sister states enormous financial and human resources, and are undermining the serious effort to provide quality instruction to an extraordinarily broad array of students.

But not in Iowa. Because we already have a home-grown battery of tests that are informed by research in student development, curricular structures, and subject-specific knowledge, and because ITP has continued its tradition of service to educational practice, Iowa students and their parents can know that the federal mandate to test will be managed, here at least, with integrity and with theoretically grounded, psychometrically sound measures of achievement.

Through much of last year, Steve Dunbar, director of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills worked closely with then State School Director Ted Stilwill and his staff to configure some batteries of the Iowa Tests so that they met the federal guidelines. By doing so, he saved the state literally millions of dollars, but just as important, he demonstrated how research-based, university-sponsored programs can provide essential service to educational practice.

Since its founding in 1988, the Connie Belin and Jacqueline N. Blank International Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development has been an internationally recognized home of cutting-edge research on exceptional children. Under the leadership of Professor Nicholas Colangelo, the Center has established leadership institutes for talented and gifted teachers, has sponsored international research symposia focusing on new developments in gifted education, and has conducted talent searches for students around the country whose giftedness might otherwise remain invisible and thus unchallenged.

But just as important, Colangelo and his colleagues have made special efforts to identify and nurture the talented students in our most under-funded schools. Through outreach programs such as Project Achieve, which provides advanced-level summer coursework in mathematics and writing to selected students from inner-city Chicago, and the Iowa Talent Program which provides a two-week summer residential opportunity for economically disadvantaged minority students in Des Moines, the Belin-Blank Center is making specific, informed, and valuable use of its scholarship.

The Center is constructing an array of spaces where declarative understandings about gifted children are translated into the practical business of helping them learn. Like the Iowa Testing Programs, the Belin-Blank Center has generated enormous funding revenue, much of which has shared the form of research fellowships and apprenticeships for doctoral students.

Like the Iowa Testing Programs, the Belin-Blank Center offers a model of how graduate programs in a college of education might be evaluated and why they should be funded. It is not just the proliferation of research findings that matter for us, not just the making of knowledge. It is the active demonstration of how that knowledge can work in educational settings. It is the risk of testing and reshaping scholarship in the crucible of real schools with real students inside of them.

A more recent example of how the College provides service to our educational communities is through the ePortfolioT project. Developed eight years ago by drawing on research in performance assessment and instructional design, the electronic portfolio, or ePortfolioT, is a web-based platform where students preparing to teach store their professional work for reflection, revision, and evaluation. These portfolios will provide the basis for program assessment and national accreditation in the College, and they already provide students with a powerful demonstration of their professional and technical skill when they enter the job market.

But just as important, as students compose their web sites, the act of composition itself encourages new kinds of thinking. Rather than moving from one point to another in a strictly linear path, the collection of professional work in hyperspace makes possible multiple points of connection, multiple paths of relationship. As in so many instances, the substance of what students learn is reshaped and enhanced by the tools with which they are provided to learn.

When the Iowa legislature mandated that full-time, early-career teachers themselves develop professional portfolios that would demonstrate their competence, the College of Education proposed to the Carver Foundation that we make the ePortfolioT freely available to the teachers of Iowa through a series of workshops, scholarships, and training materials. Through a generous grant from the Carver Trust, the Carver Teacher Project was born, and under its sponsorship, hundreds of teachers across the state will learn the skills of web design and standards-based performance assessment-skills that will indirectly but powerfully then influence their own teaching and assessment practices.

The ePortfolioT project has generated its own funding and its own trail of articles, conference presentations, and scholarly discussion. And like Iowa Testing and Belin-Blank, it is most valuable for its contribution to the unique mission of research-based colleges of education: to understand, support, and renew the reflective craft of teaching.

Dean Sandra Damico has championed all of these projects, and others like them, and we will continue to foster structures that combine educational research and the professional preparation of teachers, administrators, and other practitioners. I offer these examples, not merely as success stories-though I'll plead guilty to a little of that-but as models of how the core mission of colleges of education can be realized and as one perspective on how colleges such as ours should be funded and evaluated.

In the end, it is not only what we say, but what we do that matters. And what we do, what teachers do, has never been more vital, never been more central, to the communities and to the public culture in which we live.

Dr. James Marshall serves as associate dean for Teacher Education and Student Services at The University of Iowa College of Education.