Transforming Education Through 'Communities of Practice'

© Copyright Tony Wagner, 2004 (first published in Education Week, October 27, 2004)

Imagine, for a moment, that you wanted to learn how to play a sport or a musical instrument, but you had never seen the sport or heard the instrument played well, and there were no coaches available. You could only practice in a room all by yourself, day in and day out. How good would you be?

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Of course athletes and musicians, even amateurs, have ample access to coaches and to examples of best practices, and they are constantly subjecting their performances to the judgment of others. But most of us who are educators have none of the benefits of even those who are serious amateurs in other fields. Good coaches for teaching and leadership, or even videotapes of excellent teaching, are virtually nonexistent in most places, and our “performances” are rarely critiqued by others. In many ways, teaching and leadership in schools and districts are still more like 19th-century “handicrafts”—skills that you learn on your own and practice all alone for most of your career—than a real profession. And as with other handicrafts, like weaving or pottery, how skillful you become may be more a matter of having an innate “gift” than learning how to improve. Some craftsmen are, indeed, artists, but many are not. Most of us in education are mediocre at what we do, despite our talents and good intentions, because we have all too few opportunities to observe and be observed, to discuss “problems of practice” with colleagues—in a word, to be a part of what Etienne Wenger calls “communities of practice.”

I speak from personal experience. In my Master of Arts in Teaching degree program at a name-brand school of education, most of my time was spent studying subject content, education theory, and curriculum, but there was almost no discussion of the craft of teaching. There were no videos of teachers to analyze. I was required to spend a certain number of hours observing “master teachers” who, in retrospect, were not especially effective. Finally, I was observed and “coached” a few times by a university “supervisor,” but he had no training or supervision for this role and so could offer very little helpful advice.

Many veteran teachers chose the profession because they wanted security and autonomy, and so most schools and districts are organized to maintain the status quo.When I finished the program and was officially certified, I went to work in a high school English classroom where I was observed once in my first year of teaching by the principal, who stayed for perhaps 10 minutes. Later, we talked for a couple of minutes, and he gave me a copy of a checklist to sign. I was proficient at everything, it seemed. The same thing happened in my second and third years of teaching. And then I became tenured. For the next nine years, teaching in both public and independent schools, I was never observed. If I improved at all, it was mainly through an often lonely and painful process of trial and error. Later, when I became a school principal, the experience was essentially the same. I ran into trouble because I was too young and inexperienced for the job, and there was no one to whom I could turn for coaching.

A unique experience? Hardly. Many veteran teachers chose the profession because they wanted security and autonomy, and so most schools and districts are organized to maintain this status quo. We are the last bastion of the would-be self-employed, having really only moved our 19th-century one-room schoolhouses into larger buildings. Many of us try to improve, as best we can, without taking real risks or giving up even a shred of our independence. And for those who do seek help from others, it is often not available. I recently talked to a former businessman who has “retired” to teach middle school math in an inner-city school. Accustomed to giving and receiving feedback, he has begged his principal and department chair to come into his classroom, but no one has come. Many principals with whom I’ve worked complain that the classroom visits they’re required by the central office to do every year feel like a bureaucratic formality, because they have neither the time nor the training nor the “permission” to do real supervision. It’s become a numbers game for them—whether they have observed their quota of teachers and turned in the requisite number of evaluation forms for the month. And meetings with their colleagues are primarily a time for announcements, rather than substantive discussion of their real work as building leaders.