Volume XI, Number 4, Winter 2005/2006

Issue Topic: Professional Development

Beyond Basic Training

Thinking Like an Educator: An Integrative Approach to Preparing Educators

Veronica Boix Mansilla and Robert Kegan from the Harvard Graduate School of Education describe a new course that uses an integrative approach to help education students learn to “think like an educator.”

What does it mean to think like a professional educator? How does one go about preparing educators to address the multiple demands of school-ing in informed and effective ways? To address these questions, a group of faculty¹ at the Harvard Graduate School of Education piloted a course entitled “Thinking Like an Educator.” A guiding premise of the course, first offered in the fall of 2004, is that education presents complex challenges that warrant the integration of multiple perspectives to address them: (a) the expert perspectives of disciplines such as psychology, economics, pedagogy; and (b) the enacted perspectives of those involved with children's education in a variety of roles (i.e., parents, teachers, administrators).

Below, we describe this evolving course and its promise for teaching education students to think in new and complex ways. These observations are drawn from the process of planning and teaching the course and from an evaluation of the course conducted in its first year, which involved a survey of all students, numerous student and faculty interviews, an analysis of student work, and classroom observations.²

An intentional planning process. A full year prior to piloting the course, key faculty charged with designing the course began to meet regularly. Many had never before talked with each other at length about their work and its links to schooling. Such long-term planning allowed faculty to place substance at the center of the course and to avoid the typical smorgasbord-type survey of faculty expertise. The planning process also enabled faculty to distill their knowledge into the most essential message for educators, to understand each other's specialties, and to find promising points of interaction and complementarity. Although the project was not undertaken as a “stealth” faculty development initiative, it became obvious that, in designing the course, faculty were simultaneously fostering a more substantive form of collaboration with one another. One faculty member said that the planning process was her best professional development experience since she had been at Harvard.

Pedagogies and curricular materials reflecting a cross-perspectival approach. A central feature of this course is a multipart teaching case and related activities that allow students to analyze and problem-solve dilemmas of practice from multiple perspectives. The case features a fictional school principal nested in a real school district in Massachusetts and is supplemented by district-level data. Participating faculty members have written different parts of the case focused on key issues in education, such as school reform, students' social relationships, instructional challenges, and organizational leadership.

The case unfolds as the semester proceeds. At one point in the course, students assess the fit of various literacy programs, while at other points they consider a professional development plan to improve instruction. Later in the course students are called on to seek richer analyses by bringing two or more perspectives together—e.g., how does adult developmental theory help us understand the differing challenges teachers may experience delivering a given instructional approach to literacy? In their final projects, students typically receive a problem to address as informed consulting teams for the fictional school. Their mandate is to bring multiple perspectives together to frame the issue productively and to propose a well-supported action plan for the school.

Growth in students' integrative understanding. Overall, our evaluation revealed that students in the first year's class showed progress in their capacity to integrate perspectives. Specifically, students showed evidence of:

• Enlarging their repertoire of analytic perspectives on which they drew to address matters of education. Students borrowed concepts and modes of reasoning associated with new disciplinary perspectives. They also developed criteria for selecting various perspectives. They valued, for instance, how a discipline like psychology can offer empirical evidence to inform a decision and how one like economics may provide actionable tools. However, students also struggled to define “perspective” clearly, to translate theory into action, and to understand and use perspectives deeply.
• Advancing their understanding through integrative approaches. Students articulated the advantages of integrative thinking. Some used graphic models, rich grounding examples, and multicausal explanations to capture and make use of integrative thinking. However, students sometimes erred on the side of including too many perspectives and/or avoiding perspectives perceived as more insular (such as cultural anthropology or literacy).
• Acquiring mindfulness about the purpose, balance, and limitations of integrative work. Students came to recognize the limits of individual perspectives, as well as the conflict and complementarity between perspectives. Successful students also reflected on the intended goal of a learning situation in monitoring each perspective's contribution and relative dominance.

As the course goes forward, involved faculty members plan to:

• Build on the strengths of the course and address its weaknesses. Early in the course, students may receive a preliminary integrative framework to orient their thinking and a more explicit rationale for integrative thinking to frame their work as a means to an end worthy of their genuine effort. An assessment schema also may be developed to more thoroughly document students' integrative thinking.
• Consider the challenges and opportunities of taking such a course to scale. The course will soon be required in several of our master's programs. This will enable faculty to explore whether and how the course works with a large group that includes many students who, at least initially, may be less enthusiastic about its agenda.
• Repeat the entire process in the development of a second core course. A new group of faculty members is currently engaged in the planning phase of “CoreCourse II: Thinking Like an Educational Reformer.” This course will continue many of the features of the first but will move the focus from elementary to secondary education, include more macro perspectives (i.e., politics, economics), and explicitly address the work of educational reform.

We believe that students and faculty together are refining an approach that offers future educators a thicker engagement in a number of different disciplines and ultimately promises to further professionalize the field.

¹ Faculty who participated in the planning process and cotaught the course in its first year include Chris Dede, Richard Elmore, Wendy Luttrell, Susan Moore Johnson, Robert Kegan, Kay Merseth, Robert Selman, and Catherine Snow.
² Boix Mansilla, V. (2004). Thinking like an educator: Documenting growth in students' integrative understanding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Veronica Boix Mansilla
Research Associate
Project Zero
Harvard Graduate School of Education
124 Mount Auburn Street, 5th floor
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617-496-6949
Email: veronica@pz.harvard.edu

Robert Kegan
The William and Miriam Meehan Professor in Adult Learning and Professional Development
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Longfellow 205
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617-495-1963
Email: robert_kegan@gse.harvard.edu