preview

Inside Teaching : How Classroom Life Undermines Reform

Better Essays

Inside Teaching: How Classroom Life Undermines Reform Inside Teaching provides an up close and personal look into the realities of classroom life revealing the challenges teachers face daily in the pursuit of educating the nation’s children. It examines the efforts, expectations and failures of education reform. The book begins from the premise that while we seem to know (or think we know) what teaching looks like, we do not know why it looks this way. “Reforms typically fail, forcing us to acknowledge that although we know a lot about what teaching looks like, we know almost nothing about why it looks like this” (Kennedy, 2005 p. 1) In an effort to explore the why Kennedy hypothesizes that the failures are a result of a gap in understanding between reformers and teachers. She further asserts that this gap in understanding is predominately on the reformers side, although highly educated and committed teachers are held responsible for the failures. The inequality in assigning the responsibility or blame on teachers inspired Kennedy to write the book asking two fundamental questions: “Why, when American teachers are well educated, motivated, and provided with numerous resources professional development opportunities, are both they and reformers so often dissatisfied with their teaching practices? And why, when reformers have been laboring for decades to improve practice, have they been largely unsuccessful”? (p. 225) To lay the groundwork for the conceptual framework

Get Access