Hard Questions About Practice

Educators need to look closely at the organizational and instructional practices that affect the learning of students and adults in their schools, stresses Richard Elmore in his May 2002 Educational Leadership article, "Hard Questions About Practice." Failing to question the structures of schools' instructional practices, including the latest reforms, too often results in educators' work being undermined.

Rather than dealing with knowledge and work in divided and incoherent bits, educators and students should experience their learning as a cumulative process over time and demonstrate steadily higher levels of expertise and responsibility for their own learning. This learning grows out of concrete tasks that require shared expertise and allow people to develop their own skills and contribute to the development of others' knowledge and skills. Leaders emerge and assume different responsibilities on the basis of their knowledge and competence.

Effective leaders make their own questioning—hence their own ignorance—visible to others by asking hard questions about why and how instructional practices do or don't work. These leaders model for others what it means to exercise control over the conditions of one's own learning and make that learning powerful in the lives of others.

Read the full article. 

ASCD Express, Vol. 5, No. 17. Copyright 2010 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.