The Albert Shanker Institute-Teaching Gap Press Release

For Immediate Release
August 24, 1999

For American Students to Measure Up, U.S. Schools Must Close a "Teaching Gap," New Book Challenges

WASHINGTON – August 24, 1999 – What will it take for American students to meet the new standards for excellence states are setting? The answer, which has become a focal point for education reform, has more to do with the how of teaching inside the nation's four million classrooms. "Standards and assessments, though necessary, are not enough," says a new international study on teaching set for publication September 7.

The Teaching Gap, a new book by researchers James W. Stigler and James Hiebert, adds an important piece to the debate over improving schools and increasing student learning.

Based on a sophisticated analysis of an unprecedented set of classroom videotapes showing 8th grade mathematics teachers at work, Stigler and Hiebert offer a new way to look at teaching based on its practice in other, top-performing nations. The achievement gap between U.S. students and those in Japan and Germany can be traced to differences in the instruction they have received – a teaching gap.

"This book is about teaching and how to improve it. It is not another attempt to bash teachers or blame them," write Stigler, a psychology professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, and Hiebert, the Sharp Professor of Education at the University of Delaware. "Although teachers hold the key, they teach in a system that currently works against improvement."

The book draws on videotapes from 231 classrooms amassed as part of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and was supported in part by a grant from the Albert Shanker Institute, a new think tank that explores education, labor, and democracy issues.

The American Way

Stigler and Hiebert found a common American style of teaching despite the nation's diversity of schools and students and well-publicized battles about how best to teach certain subjects.

"When we started, we believed there would be great variability in teaching methods within the United States," they write. "But these differences paled when we looked across countries from a cross-cultural, comparative perspective."

As a result, Stigler and Hiebert conclude that fixating only on teacher competence will not close the teaching gap. While they saw clear differences in competence, "such differences are dwarfed by the differences in teaching methods we see across cultures," they write.

The teaching practices common in the United States result in teaching practices that inhibit American schools, the authors contend.

Practice Isn't Perfect

Japanese 8th grade math teachers, for example, give students opportunities to invent their own procedures for solving problems and master rich course content as a result. American teachers routinely give students a list of concepts and definitions to memorize and a series of routine steps to solve the problems that they practice over and over.

Less than 1 percent of American students' seatwork in mathematics required them to invent and think to solve problems. In Japan, that kind of work takes 44 percent. Even in Germany, inventing and thinking was more than 4 percent of seatwork.

"In American classrooms, the motto is 'learning terms and practicing procedures' " Stigler and Hiebert write. As a result, U.S. students lose an opportunity to think deeply and to engage with rich course content.

Little Chance to Improve; Inadequate Professional Development

These shortcomings in practice are hard to resolve in the current U.S. system, which fails to enable U.S. teachers to hone their craft, the authors say. While teachers from other nations have regular opportunities to work together to prepare lessons from a shared curriculum based on nationally accepted academic standards, American teachers work largely alone with few opportunities to collaborate in ways that raise their level of practice.

"The teaching profession does not have enough knowledge about what constitutes effective teaching, and teachers don't have a means of successfully sharing such knowledge with one another," the authors contend. "Compared with other countries, the United States clearly lacks a system for developing professional knowledge and for giving teachers the opportunity to learn about teaching." Ironically, American math reforms are more present in Japanese classrooms than U.S. ones, they observe.

The Teaching Gap describes in detail the process of "lesson study" through which Japanese teachers research and test better ways to deliver instruction, and offers a vision for transferring the model to the American school. Lesson study makes Japanese teachers part of profession engaged in improvement, and demonstrates that the study of teaching on the job is the study of learning.

"The teaching 'craft' and 'methods' this book is talking about require professional environments where instructional leaders guide schools and teachers have the time and incentives to study best practices together," said Eugenia Kemble, Executive Director of the Albert Shanker Institute.

A U.S. version of lesson study is only part of the prescription Stigler and Hiebert describe. Based on six guiding principles arising from their study, they describe three broad initiatives for closing the teaching gap:

Build consensus for continuous improvement, which includes creating measures of results that are sophisticated enough to detect small changes in student learning;
Set clear learning goals for students and align assessments with these, a reform underway but not completed in many states and school districts, and;
Restructure schools as places where teachers can learn, which requires redeployment of existing resources to allow time for activities such as lesson study.

"For a decade now, we in the United States have looked hard at how other countries deliver good education. We've studied their standards, their curricula, their exams. This book shows us that none of these will make a difference unless teachers have a professional life – the opportunity to develop and teach the good lessons that enable other reforms to have an impact in the typical classrooms with real kids," noted Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

The Albert Shanker Institute was founded in 1998 as a think tank dedicated to themes central to the legacy of its namesake – children's education, unions as advocates for quality, and civic participation in the public life of democracies. The Institute commissions original analysis, organizes seminars, sponsors publications and subsidizes highly selective projects – its mission is to generate ideas, foster unpredictable exchange and promote constructive proposals. Its formative Board is composed of business representatives, labor leaders, academics, educators and public policy analysts. The Institute's bylaws commit it to promoting four fundamental principles – vibrant democracy, quality public education, a voice for working people in decisions affecting their jobs and lives, and free and open debate about all these issues.

Copies of The Teaching Gap are available for $23 from the Free Press, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY, 10020
(212) 632-4992.

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