Teaching in Context
The Social Side of Education Reform
Edited by Esther Quintero, Foreword by Andy Hargreaves
Cloth, 272 Pages
Pub. Date: April 2017
ISBN-13: 978-1-68253-038-2
Price: 62.00
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Paper, 272 Pages
Pub. Date: April 2017
ISBN-13: 978-1-68253-037-5
Price: 31.00
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Teaching in Context provides new evidence from a range of leading scholars showing that teachers become more effective when they work in organizations that support them in comprehensive and coordinated ways. The studies featured in the book suggest an alternative approach to enhancing teacher quality: creating conditions and school structures that facilitate the transmission and sharing of knowledge among teachers, allowing teachers to work together effectively, and capitalizing on what we know about how educators learn and improve. The studies also show how social dynamics influence the speed, depth, and success with which any new idea is implemented, and how policies enacted without adequate consideration of their impact on the social fabric of schools can produce unintended negative consequences.
Policies aimed at improving teaching should focus on strengthening the organization as a whole so that all teachers are likely to improve. The chapters in this book point to the need to reevaluate current policies for assessing and ensuring teacher effectiveness, and establish the foundation for a more thoughtful, research-informed approach.
Praise
What a wonderful collection of diverse voices in this book, all sounding a similar message. Successful schools encourage and support purposeful collaboration among adults and they focus on students. In these schools, teachers feel more rewarded for their efforts and students learn more. Practitioners and researchers understand these findings. Now, let’s build education policies that enable them.
— John Q. Easton, vice president of programs, Spencer Foundation
Teaching in Context is a call to action—one to which Esther Quintero and her colleagues invite us to imagine, build, nurture, and protect a profession and culture fueled by supportive networks that produce more trust and less churn.
— Ralph R. Smith, managing director, Campaign for Grade-Level Reading
This is an important book for researchers and academics as it covers a broad range of topics and studies focused on educational reform within the context of school environments.
— Lydia Ross, Teachers College Record
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About the Editor
Esther Quintero is a senior fellow at the Albert Shanker Institute, where she conducts and synthesizes research that can inform education issues such as equity, systemwide reform, and improving the teaching profession. Specifically, she focuses on understanding schools as organizations, social capital as a lever for educational improvement, and the sociology of the classroom. In July 2014 Quintero launched the Social Side of Education, a research campaign and blog series focusing on the social and relational aspects of improving teaching where established and emerging scholars (and, increasingly, practitioners) share their research and expertise in accessible ways. She is also coinvestigator in an Institute of Education Sciences–funded project that will develop an instrument to capture rich evidence of teachers’ professional activity and the contexts in which it occurs. Other areas of interest to Quintero include social inequality, the sociology of gender and race, and group processes. She holds a BA from the University of Seville (Spain) and a PhD in sociology from Cornell University.