Paradigms, Crisis and Change
Insights from Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
I’ve been working through Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions this week. Don’t worry—if you think I’m a crazy-fast reader, it’s only because I’m an audiobook fanatic now, tend to play them at an accelerated speed, and have a few hours of commute each day. Whilst listening to Kuhn detail some paradigm shifts in specific cases in the historical trajectory of science, I had a thought inspired by this Kuhn quotation:
This made me reconsider some of the relationships between curricular materials and teacher autonomy:
As I’ve detailed here before, the last five or so years of my work in education has been at the intersection of teaching and curricular materials. I’ve turned around literacy professional learning in the state of Louisiana to many teachers and learners, and more specifically supported lots of educators and leaders in connecting the dots between teacher practice and high-quality instructional materials.
Almost needless to say, there are many obstacles and challenges with implementation of curricular initiatives at a systems-level. The nature of teaching is exceptionally personal and value-laden. Something I’ve come across in the last few weeks regarding folks’ experience as learners in K-12 schools and how this connects to beliefs or perceptions about their expertise with the project of schooling has stuck with me—and Harry Hudson discusses this in this podcast. In simpler terms, most if not all of us have experience in schools which inspires a bit of “armchair quarterbacking” with regard to critiques of what should happen in schooling environments.
Rightfully, many discuss and critique the role of teacher preparation programs, pre-service learning, and field study or internship when examining relationships between teachers and instructional materials. It’s ironic in a way to consider my personal experience in this regard: When I arrived at my third school in my fourth year of teaching, there were curricular materials in use at the school site, yet my leadership actively invited me to “flip the script” and build my own—or at least modify—resources in order to better serve the needs of students in our context.
Now, little to none of that was based on empirical evidence of the efficacy of teacher modification or its affects on student learning. Yet, the implication of my supervisor’s recommendations were that teacher autonomy and teacher creativity with regard to lesson planning and learning materials were indicators of strong teaching or exceptional professionalism in education. At the time, I was riding the fence on whether I’d go all-in with the education thing, so depending upon instructional materials made a lot of sense for me. But, that was not the case for many of my peers and colleagues.
In fact, over the ensuing years, lots of these details have shifted and changed for my professional practice and our district context. And this brings us back to where we started with Kuhn. I’ve been speculating about Kuhn’s explanations of scientific paradigms and paradigm shift. The idea that a “proof” would not resolve the battles between paradigms reminds me of some of the one-to-one and otherwise conversations and debates we’ve had within professional learning about instructional materials. It may seem that making a case—developing a proof—of the soundness of the materials, the evidentiary nature of their construction, and some demonstration of their efficacy connected to student achievement outcomes would be convincing to teachers with the charge of educating children. But any leader who’s managed change recognizes it’s not that simple.
These Kuhn theses have me thinking again about “jobs to be done” and the beliefs and values educators bring to their work every day. As a friend put it on Twitter the other day:
What are the implications of this for educational leadership practice? I’m fascinated by what is revealed in everyday language about underlying beliefs and values. Connecting folks’ sense of purpose to organizational initiatives may produce some “buy in” (not my favorite phrase; I prefer commitment). Once the materials are seen as a vehicle to achieve the teacher’s desired purpose, their “job to be done,” change adoption may be pushed further along. It’s the difficult work of educational leaders and advocates to help us parse out our beliefs, our paradigmatic thinking, with regard to materials, teacher autonomy, and better ways to serve students. Hopefully we can engender a bit of a “paradigm shift” with regard to relations between materials and teachers.