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Recommended Reading
Teaching with Power: Shared Decision-Making and Classroom Practice
by Carol J. Reed
Teachers College Press, 2000
ISBN: 0807739405Teaching With Power explains the everyday political interactions among teachers charged with implementing specific reform initiatives, that is, the conflict they experience in the implementation process. The book shows how the choices teachers make as they deal with that conflict affects the fate of reform efforts, in this case, teachers' response to an administratively imposed, school-based, shared decision-making project. The focus on what teachers do and why they do it, sheds revealing light on the disappointing fate of many school reform initiatives and also shows what needs to be done to move initiatives forward.
The book spotlights four elementary school faculties charged with working collaboratively. Initially it appeared that shared decision-making enjoyed widespread support in all four schools. It was grounded in both policy and understanding. Teachers clearly defined the initiative's meaning and purpose. It was funded by the state legislature and sanctioned in labor/management contracts and school board policy. Two of the four schools had peer-elected teacher leaders charged with helping principals move the initiative forward. Three of the four schools had site councils that included, teachers, parents and interested community members. Each school held regular meetings for the specific purpose of sharing decisions, the decisions themselves usually implemented by teams of teachers. Regular meeting time was supplemented by serendipitous meetings over lunch and in hallways. Even further, each school enjoyed decision-making resources that included time, information, staff development, space, and funding.
Decision-making was real in each school. Teachers used the structure to resolve competing interests. They made substantive decisions about staffing, curriculum, organization, materials and supplies. But this was not the complete story.
A deeper analysis showed that an organized decision-making structure does not, necessarily, guarantee an open process. Rather, the analysis showed how bias and values built into a system can affect the way power is used to control the decision-making agenda. In spite of the opportunity provided by the structure, some issues were not introduced, and others did not survive the decision-making process, usually for three separate reasons. Sometimes, teachers exercised self-censorship, deciding beforehand that their issue had no support. Sometimes, a raised issue was avoided by the group, assigned to a committee that never met, or changed so much the originator did not recognize it. Sometimes, the opponents of an issue mobilized bias against it so successfully that consensus could not be reached when the issue's supporters put it up for consideration.
Digging even deeper surfaced what could be called teachers' latent issues. Latent issues, revealed largely through body language and general complaints, were never clearly articulated in any decision-making forum as specific issues. For example, teachers complained about needing more time and smaller class size, but they did not put these issues forth for a solution. In fact, they did not even show that they saw themselves as able to bring about a successful solution.
Clearly, shared decision-making, on the face of it, a democratic opportunity for resolving competing interests was, in actuality, a highly charged political process in which some win while others lose. Understanding the affect that has on teachers requires a closer look at who they are and what they value.
These predominately female teachers shared a deep concern for other people's feelings. They valued consensus and egalitarianism. They wanted to take as much time as they needed to work through any conflict. If common ground could not be found teachers retreated to their individual classrooms or, if an unwelcome decision was forced in some way, those on the losing side dealt with it handily through lack of enthusiasm, incomplete implementation, or by obstructing forward progress. Sometimes teachers just ignored whatever it was they did not want to do.
This book provides a deepened understanding of the inexorable, overlapping linkage between the structure of the organization in which teachers work and the motivations that guide the choices teachers make as they work within that structure. Even more the book delineates the conditions necessary for successful shared decision-making experiences, and, by implication, other reform initiatives.
Copyright © July 2000 New Horizons for Learning, all rights reserved.
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