They further suggested the value of curricular devices
As had happened at the other teaching site, a culture formed that valued a particular teaching approach that was peripheral to my repertoire, even if I did experiment with some of its methods. Once again, this pedagogy produced results in this context that were sufficiently impressive that I was in no position to point to the results of a meta-analysis of experimental research to dispute them and say that a better practice was available, if only they would learn it.
The university program and the English departments in which I taught served as important cultural institutions, but hardly the only ones that influenced my thinking about teaching. In the affluent community in which I taught, for instance, one of my students’ parents ran for the school board. He was a real estate Womens Shoes developer and ran on the platform that the district needed to maintain the appearance of high educational standards to keep real estate values high. He won in a landslide. Tied to his campaign was the belief that high standardized test scores provide the best and most visible way of maintaining the appearance of educational quality, thus requiring increased dedication of instructional time to test preparation and mitigating the urgency for processorienred instruction. In this instance, the local culture of the English department was at odds with the broader culture of the community and of other academic departments, resulting in mixed missions and instructs us interrupt us when testing materials were dropped in our laps on short notice.
At the more traditional school, the district had established grading periods of six weeks, rather than the nine weeks used in most U.S. districts, resulting in three grading periods in each of the year’s two semesters. The rationale was that students would be “on their toes” more if final grades were assigned more frequently. This rationale fit well with the school’s traditional orientation because it emphasized the delivery of content and products, rather than attention to the learning processes that facilitated content knowledge and provided students with the means through which they might achieve these ends. Here, the deeply entrenched values of a staid community Designer Shoes produced teaching methods with a good four millennia of established practice for a photograph of a teacher-centered Sumerian classroom circa 2,000 B.C.E.). They further suggested the value of curricular devices (e.g., six-week marking periods) that presumed the validity of traditional teaching methods and structured teachers’ and students’ deadlines so that they were supported and encouraged.
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