Karin Chenoweth on the importance of curriculum in high-quality classrooms

For anyone who likes kids and wants them to learn a lot, Robert Pianta’s findings ("Neither Art nor Accident: New research helps define and develop quality preK and elementary teaching," HEL, January/February 2008) are good news: Students achieve more when they are in warm, sympathetic, caring classrooms that are well supported instructionally and organizationally.

This sounds so commonsensical that it almost qualifies as “well, duh” research. Certainly it confirms the intuitive sense that parents have about the kind of classrooms they want for their children.

Some of Pianta’s team’s other findings are equally important—for example, that poor children and children who are headed for academic trouble are highly unlikely to be consistently assigned to such well supported classrooms. Building on the work of others in both Tennessee and Texas, it is a short hop to say that if poor children and children at risk of failure were consistently assigned to the kinds of highly effective classrooms Pianta has identified, they would learn at much higher levels than they currently do.

In It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2007), I tried to get at the same question from the other end. I began by finding high-performing and rapidly improving schools where most of the children are either children of color or children of poverty or both, and then looked at the schools and classrooms. What I found were warm, sympathetic, caring classrooms where the teachers organize the learning environment well and where they provide a lot of instructional support. I would love to see how they stack up against Pianta’s analytic framework; at first blush it seems that my reportage and his scholarship overlap.

The importance of his work lies in his systematically identifying and codifying the behaviors and characteristics of teachers who provide emotional, organizational, and instructional support of students. By so doing, he is helping make transparent and explicit what teachers need to know and be able to do in order to help their students learn.

My greatest concern is that this work operates in a vacuum in terms of the question of what it is teachers are supposed to teach. That is, Pianta’s framework is designed to be applicable no matter what standards and curriculum are in place. But it seems obvious that teachers will be able to be more supportive instructionally if they have a good curriculum to teach. Teaching skill can only take you so far when the content is flawed, as is the case in too many districts and states. The lack of strong standards and curricula in many places may, in fact, account for his finding that few elementary school classrooms have strong instructional support even when they have strong emotional and organizational support.

Still, even with that caveat, Pianta’s work seems like the beginning of very important work that could help teachers improve their instruction and prepare for the classroom. In that way, the coaching his center offers represents great promise, not only for individual teachers but for the teaching profession as a whole.

Such work can only be good for the many students across the country—particularly low-income children and children at risk of failure—who desperately need to be in warm, sympathetic, caring classrooms that are well-supported organizationally and instructionally.

Karin Chenoweth is a longtime education writer who currently writes for The Achievement Alliance. Her most recent book is It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2007).