Don't you just love it when a book comes along that validates everything you've been thinking about your job for the last twenty years?

That's exactly how I felt when I read The Teaching Gap by Stigler and Hiebert.

These authors set out to discover the difference in teaching methods between eighth grade math classes in Japan, Germany, and the USA. They analyzed hundreds of videotapes of actual classrooms in those countries and discovered something they termed a "gap" in the effectiveness of teaching methods between the USA and the other two countries.

Then, unexpectedly, through researching the background of this gap, they found models for instituting change in educational systems. It's this discovery that most likely led to their publishing a book for a popular audience rather than a simple volume mostly of interest to fellow pedagogues.

I heartily applaud them in this. I don't think I'm the only elementary school teacher (as opposed to politicians, administrators, or anyone else in a position to actually effect change in the school system) who has a good idea of where the solutions to our problems lie, but the problem is in articulating them. That's where this book can come in very very handy. Not only does it express what many of us have known for years, but it's also been written by University people, so those in a position to affect change might actually listen to them.

Along with Stigler and Hiebert, I think it's high time we stop spinning our wheels about education reform and dig in and change things. Of course, there are many different reasons why kids today aren't learning as quickly (and the operative word here is "quickly,") as we want them to. These reasons range from childhood nutrition to class size to TV watching habits, to how many parents live in the home, what the household income is, etc. etc. And while all these factors are important, they are mostly beyond the control of the schools and teachers. Teaching methods, however, are another matter. They lie well within the purview of a teacher's obligations. So, regardless of the other factors, teachers can effect real change by improving them. No matter who or where they are, if teachers teach more effectively, then schools will improve.

The problem, though, is that our society does not seriously support teachers improving their teaching skills. People may care that teachers are enthusiastic, hard workers, who care for their charges. People may want more statistical evidence of student achievement. People even support teachers attending distant conferences and hobnobbing with their "better" counterparts who have "graduated" into consultancy. But they don't so far as to support the kinds of changes that actually would make a difference, mainly because they don't know what changes are needed, and they don't understand the effort it will take to implement them.

I also think that our society pays scant attention to the elementary school years, where all the foundations are laid for a student's later academic progress. It's my firm belief that, by grade six, most kids have either bought into the idea of education, and become life-long learners, or they've bought out of it, and even if they don't physically drop out of junior high and high school, they drop out spiritually, and are not likely to buy back in while they are yet teenagers. In this sense, I would have liked to have seen a "Teaching Gap" study of elementary -grade classrooms, but I do think that what Stigler and Hiebert found out about eighth graders is very relevant to how elementary school classes operate, as well.

Meanwhile, I do think that most teachers do improve their skills somewhat as the years go by. But this improvement comes from teachers' own initiatives or their persistence in just surviving in a classroom environment, and not from any ongoing support from either society or institutions. And when the teacher retires there is no mechanism for passing down the fruits of their experience. This problem is particularly acute in elementary education, where teachers can go for years without seeing another teacher actually teach in a real classroom. I also think that many teachers who are serious about change find their efforts stymied because society and institutions do not support the kinds of change that are needed.

This sad situation, by the way, is not simply a problem peculiar to public education. Privatizing public education will not solve it, since the same problems exist there or may even be worse. Generally speaking, there's not much difference between public and private education, except in the selection process of who gets in, or whether the students share certain religious beliefs, and no appreciable difference in teaching methods. The "Charter School" is not likely to change it either, since the kind of change we're talking about takes time no matter what the setting, and there are too few Charter Schools for any widespread impact to be felt, and most of them are probably trying to innovate in some other area than teaching methods, anyway. Teaching, no matter what the setting, will only change as the people within the culture experience the fruits of the change, as they slowly and steadily move in that direction.  So, only one thing is really necesary and sufficient -- empowering teachers.

Teachers must take charge of their own teaching and change it. There is no other way. But to accomplish that, we must be clear about the direction we're going and the type of support we'll need. And we also have to truly understand where we're starting from. And in all these areas, Stigler and Hiebert have given us some rather important resources to use in our quest.

In order to follow their argument, it's necessary to understand the following truth about the educational process:

The act of classroom teaching is so complex, that it cannot be analyzed into a straightforward set of "skills." No, it's a behavior so complex, that the only English word adequate to describe it is "culture."

What is meant by "culture?"

Well, originally, "culture" meant the "world" cultivated by artists and other creative types, which was obviously learned, but as far beyond simple skills as a Beethoven Sonata is beyond an exercise in counterpoint, or a Van Gogh painting is beyond techniques of shading and perspective.

About a hundred years ago, Franz Boas and several of his associates at Columbia University (such as A. Kroeber, Margaret Mead, etc.) began using the word to refer to the complex systems of behavior and values that various groups use to interact within their group, and to express who they are. Such cultures are very stable over time, because the various parts of the system all support and reinforce each other, and because it is transmitted in large part subconsciously, anyway. Culture is like a web. If you pull bits out, the rest stretches in to fill the gaps or to pull back the parts that are out of place.

By using the word "culture," these scientists expressed their belief that such systems of behavior are learned. In other words, they are acquired bit by bit, the same way "high culture" and "the arts" are. These bits include language (including body language and metaphoric visual language), material culture, stories and myths, and different methods for satisfying basic human needs for food, shelter, companionship etc. For Boaz and his colleagues, then, the differences between ethnic groups are due to upbringing, and not because they're merely a different "race" or something.

Members of a culture don't learn it through conscious study. Instead, it's mainly learned subconsciously in practical situations. Think about it. How did you learn how close to stand to another in a conversation? It was culture that taught it to you. How did you learn the detailed ceremonies for saying hello and goodbye in different situations? How about the metaphorical meanings of colors such as red, green, blue or black? How about when to offer to pay the tab at the restaurant? Culture teaches you those things and much much more, and rarely completely explicitly or consciously.

This idea of culture, of course, need not be restricted to ethnic groups. It can just as easily be applied to any sort of group that holds to cohesive values and complex systems of behaviors. I noticed this as a jazz musician many years ago. Musicians themselves have a culture often subtly different from "mainstream" culture, and jazz musicians in particular have an even more specialized way at looking at things, which is perhaps shaped by the improvisatory nature of the music, its status (or lack of it) in popular society, and the particular way members of a group interact with one another to accomplish musical goals.

Similarly, I've heard of corporate cultures, a culture of the deaf, and even a "kid's culture" where particular values, as if they were playground games, are handed down from one half-generation to the next without any adult intervention.

So it should be no surprise, then, that teachers and students in each of the three countries studied by Stiegler and Hiebert have constructed a culture, a system of behaviors and values comprised of myriad bits of experience and judgments, that they pass on from one generation (or half-generation) to the next, in ways that are not always obvious nor straightforward, because it is not consciously planned.

Stiegler and Hiebert were surprised, though, by how strong that binary student-teacher culture really was.

The videotape study that Stigler and Hiebert describe in The Teaching Gap came about through their work on a more conventional study called the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS). The TIMSS study mainly examined students' achievement in math and science on standardized tests in many countries across the globe. Stigler and Hiebert, who perhaps figured that American nonachievement in math was a foregone conclusion, decided to take the next step, the adjunct video study of teaching methods mentioned above.

And, by the way, they studied teaching and not teachers. This difference may seem subtle, but it's critical if any change is to be implemented based on their results, as we shall see.

They videotaped eighth-grade math classes - 100 in Germany, 50 in Japan, and 81 in the United States, which were chosen randomly. In their book, they explain the steps they took to minimize the effect of differing languages and societal cultures on their analyses. They also worked with a mixed group of scientists from the three countries involved to develop a system of written codes to classify and analyze the various classroom behaviors they observed on the videotapes. These codes formed the basis of any statistical analyses they did.

Not surprisingly, they found that teaching styles differed between the three countries. Of course, they expected to find uniformity in teaching methods within the classrooms from Germany or from Japan. After all, in those two countries goals and curriculum are prescribed by the state. What did surprise them, though, was that, in the United State, where the national government does not mandate standards, and there is considerably more opportunity for local control and teachers have much more freedom to change and innovate than in either Germany or Japan, methods were also quite uniform within the teaching community. And to those who might differ with that opinion, they extend an invitation to compare the teaching from America to that of another country. That broader perspective makes differences between American instructors relatively trivial.

This discovery of uniformity in American instruction is probably what made the authors realize that classroom teaching was culture, as described above, and not a straightforward set of skills that are amenable to change through training.

In a leap of simplification and stereotyping (which they apologize for in one breath and justify in the next) they characterize international eighth grade math teaching as follows:

• Germany: "Developing Advanced Procedures"
• Japan: "Structured problem solving"
• United States: "Learning terms and practicing procedures"

Of course, they back up these slogans with examples of typical lessons in all three countries (which make for quite interesting reading). They completed their understanding of these typical lessons with statistical analyses using the codes mentioned above.

What exactly did they discover?

Among other things, they discovered that teachers in American classrooms do more of the actual mathematical work than their students do. That is, they are more likely to develop proofs and theorems, and to demonstrate mathematical justifications for problem solutions. In Germany or Japan, students do more of this active thinking on their own, under the teacher's guidance. German and Japanese lessons were also more "coherent" - that is, they focused on a single mathematical process or idea, whereas American lessons tending to switch from topic to topic more often. Only 42% of American lessons fit the authors' criteria of a "coherent lesson," whereas 76 percent of German lessons fit them and 92% of Japanese lessons fit them.

Furthermore, 96% of Japanese teachers reinforced this coherence by making specific verbal connections between different parts of a lesson, whereas only 40 percent of German and American lessons had these connections. Additionally, external interruptions (such as public address system announcements, classroom visitors requesting the lunch count, etc.) occurred in 31% of the American lessons, 13% of the German lessons, and none of the Japanese lessons.

Finally, Stigler and Hiebert studied the quality of the mathematics being taught, with regard to how much it helped students understand important mathematical concepts. 39% of the Japanese lessons were described as having "high quality" mathematical content. For Germany, it was 28%, and for the United States, it was none.

For most of the remaining sections of the book, Stigler and Hiebert focused on the contrast between the American and Japanese systems. They maintained this focus, not only because the difference in student achievement was greatest there, but also because Japan, perhaps alone among modern cultures, has completely revolutionized its teaching methods over the last 50 years, and thus can serve as an example of what it takes to accomplish reform.

To illustrate the differences between Japanese and American teaching culture, the authors came up with a marvelous example, which also shows how the cohesiveness of culture means you can study the whole system by starting with one detail. And the detail is this - When the teacher teaches, what does he write for his students to see? What does he write it on?

In one of the most technologically aware countries on earth, Japanese teachers almost universally prefer to use a chalkboard, whereas teachers in America tend to prefer the overhead projector. What does this show about the fundamental differences in Japanese and American instruction?

Well, the choice of tools emerges from what each believes a lesson should be. Japanese teachers believe a lesson should challenge the students to work together to synthesize new knowledge from the tools their teacher provides, but using strategies they develop themselves. Such a system can only function if everyone can follow the logical unfolding of concepts, and relate each step to previous ones. A chalkboard (or perhaps a whiteboard) works best for this because there's room to keep a record of all the examples and steps given. This record is used to help relate different parts of the entire lesson, which is a single unit. This preference for chalk boards, then, shows that in Japan, a lesson is seen as an integral whole, much like a church service or a symphony. It has a definite beginning and end, a development in the middle, and supporting details, with many disparate plot elements, just like a good story.

This belief about lessons as integral wholes also explains, for example, why classroom interruptions are never tolerated in Japan, no more than you'd tolerate people talking out loud while a play is being performed.

Japanese teachers often don't begin their teaching session by explaining things, because they believe that students must do much of the mathematical work themselves,. They may ask the students to memorize a few terms (which they do by "chanting" some definitions - which perpetuates the false stereotype among Westerners that Japanese teaching is all rote learning), but other than that, they don't explain a lot, and they especially don't explain methods - at least, not at the beginning of the lesson. Instead, they challenge groups of students with interesting problems to solve or theorems to prove. Japanese students, of course, expect to be frustrated in dealing with such challenges. After all, no one has explained how to even do the problem! Frustration doesn't automatically result in "math anxiety," because struggle is seen as normal, and not grounds to suspect that you're stupid. Rather than depend on the teacher for help, students usually turn to fellow students on the same "team."

The terms and definitions that the students previously memorized are often instrumental in the solutions they find, but not necessarily. Teachers encourage novel and various solutions to problems. In fact, the course of the rest of the lesson depends in no small part on the discoveries the students make while grappling with the problem.

Of course, the teacher has previously figured out all the most likely responses to a problem (and since classes in Japan are so big, it's pretty much a given that somebody will come up with whatever response the teacher was hoping for). So the teacher simply needs to travel among the groups and keep a good ear, remembering which group of students to call upon for which example in the sharing session/class discussion and final explanation that inevitably concludes the lesson. Still, of course, multiple "right answers" are always supported.

Thus, the lesson is an exercise in total group participation, encompassing both teacher and students. The task for the teacher is not so much to "instruct," as we in America would understand that term. Rather, the teacher's task is to set the goal and provide the students with the conceptual tools they'll need to reach new understandings.

In America, by contrast, teachers tend to believe that they should introduce new material to students more-or-less predigested, and students should practice the new material they've learned so they can master it before they have to "apply" it. This is exactly the opposite order of from methods in Japan.

Why do American teachers prefer an overhead projector? Because it's more effective for focusing students' attention during the explanation. And the explanation is not likely to be a long detailed story, but rather a small targeted "skill" that may take only ten minutes to explain. This explains why interruptions are tolerated more in America - lessons are divided more-or-less into learning small skills and practicing them, and parts of the lessons only relate to each other in that simple way, so interruptions are less harmful to the integrity of the lesson. It's not like listening to a story where you need to coordinate several disparate ideas to reach a conclusion.

Teachers in America don't allow their students to feel frustrated very often because they know that students often personalize such feelings and end up feeling stupid. This is, of course, because students aren't used to the idea that struggle and frustration are normal (and even desirable) experiences. We even stigmatize the student who feels frustrated and anxious by labeling it "math anxiety." Actually, that emotional state should be lauded and not disparaged, because it merely indicates that the student recognizes at some level that some real development needs to happen. In America, the frustrated student despairs of their own ability, whereas the Japanese student expects to somehow master something that, in the beginning, lies beyond what they can even conceive.

Most of the classroom interaction in America is between the student and the teacher (instead of among the students themselves). In fact, interaction between student and teacher so completely dominated American lessons that one of the Stigler's non-American colleagues remarked that in America, student-teacher interaction crowded out everything else - even the actual mathematics!

Now, as an elementary school teacher, I had some strong reactions to reading all this, not the least of which was a strongAmen! for the way the Japanese teachers conducted their classrooms.

After all, leaders in elementary education in this country have espoused this way of teaching for at least the last forty years, and probably most elementary school teachers have been trying to teach that way for most of that time - and not just in mathematics, but in science, the humanities and the arts as well.

This is the type of mathematical thinking that we had all hoped would happen with the introduction of the "new math" in the 1950's and 1960's. In America, the "new math" did not fit the culture of teaching, and so became a dismal failure. In Japan, teaching culture has changed to support that sort of thinking, whether or not anybody over there had actually heard of "new math."

Of course, the irony is that America does have one educational institution that already operates like the Japanese schools, and that is post-graduate education, for M.A. and Ph.D. candidates. This explains, perhaps, why so many Japanese come to America for graduate school, but hardly any come here for seventh grade. American schools of graduate education are internationally acknowledged as among the best in the world. It's the one place in education where much of the rest of the world is still trying to catch up to us. Would that we could derive some lessons from them for the rest of education.

In American elementary schools, meanwhile, we lack the resources to teach that way, as well as the organizational structures to effect a change in teaching methods, once the resources are in place.

In America, there is great ignorance of the cultural nature of the teaching process.

In America, in fact, I think people don't think there is any process at all. They seem to feel that after you've learned a subject then you can naturally explain it, and therefore there's no special skill to teaching, because explaining things is a normal human ability and desire. The only skill you need to learn is how to manage a classroom, since the teaching of the material grows naturally out of the subject itself. (This is one reason, by the way, that elementary school education is not taken seriously in this country - because the skills to be taught are themselves so "basic.")

Of course, just because people don't see a need for something, it doesn't mean it isn't there. Actually, the very fact that people don't see a need to study teaching skills merely demonstrates its cultural nature, just like how you don't think about how far you stand away from someone when you talk to them, yet there is a certain distance that you must learn, and which is specific to different cultures. It shows how some people seem to be "natural teachers," even though how one can be a "natural teacher" is somewhat specific to a particular ethnic culture.

I never really realized how completely people had truly given up on "teaching" as a professional skill worthy of consideration until several years ago when our school district wrote a "mission statement," like everyone else in the late 80's and early 90's was doing. The committee which developed ours felt the need to be inclusive (which, by the way, is a commendable trait). They therefore decided that, actually, every school district employee took part in educating the young. They went further and enumerated exactly who this included: janitors, cafeteria workers, nurses, other kids, classroom aides, secretaries, counselors and bus drivers, etc. Yes, all these people really are teachers in their own ways. When I took a second look, however, I realized that the only group missing from this expanded list of teachers were classroom teachers themselves.

Once upon a time, America had colleges devoted to training teachers, just as Japan does today. Nowadays, most people in America probably don't even know what a "normal school" is.

And yet, classroom teachers and students are bound together in a sort-of binary culture that you challenge only at your own peril. Its stability comes from its cultural nature, mostly functioning beneath conscious manipulation. And because it's a binary culture of students and teachers, teachers can acquire it from their students, and students from their teachers, in addition to each group learning it from their peers. Everything reinforces the system.

The cultural nature of teaching also explains a lot about some teachers' insecurities and defensiveness. They've mainly learned their teaching methods (including classroom management and pacing skills) subconsciously, either from memories of their own childhood, or directly from the students they are trying to teach. Occasionally one might pick up a few tips from a colleague or master teacher, but this has as much impact on actual practice as good punctuation has on the content of an essay. With few exceptions, teachers have no particular theory or vocabulary to explain the "intuitive" knowledge that they have. Therefore, though they may be highly skilled, they may feel a certain ignorance in explaining why they operate the way they do.

And of course, it also explains why the system is so stable and resistant to change - it's not that teachers (or students) are old fuddy-duddies, but that the behaviors are so complex, interrelated, and beneath notice, that you simply can't just decide to change part of it one day and then do it the next day.

Imagine, for example, if the typical American teacher described above suddenly began to teach as like the typical Japanese teacher does.

First of all, the students would feel resentful - they were not instructed in how to solve the problem. They (and just as likely, their parents) would probably see the teacher as abdicating his responsibility to instruct. This hurdle itself might exclude many teachers from trying new teaching strategies.

Second, if it was an elementary school and not a junior high or high school, the skill level of the students would dictate that they use real physical objects as tools to find solutions. This introduces a tremendous logistical element into the scenario. What objects would be appropriate? Counters? Shapes and clay? Rubber bands? Spinners? What? Where would you keep all that stuff when you're not using it? Where would you get all that stuff in the first place? How would you handle its ordinary distribution in the classroom, particularly when you'd have other lessons in other "subjects" coming up later in the day, which would each need their own physical objects to work with?

Third, how do you get the students to work together effectively when, year after year, classes are remixed into different groups, and therefore students need to establish patterns of social dominance and tolerance peculiar to that mix before they can make effective teams?

Fourth, how would you assess student progress and, more importantly, help the students to self-assess their progress within the groups? How would you keep records? Which records are really necessary? And if you don't think the same records are necessary that the students, parents, or administrators think are necessary, how do you deal with having to waste precious time keeping records that you know are not useful?

Fifth, how do you handle the emotional stress among students if you suddenly break their routine in a way that their parents can't help them understand at home? Every experienced teacher (and probably every parent) knows the cost of surprising students out of their routines......

Sixth, how do you deal with the constant stream of classroom interruptions that make it impossible to maintain the integrity and complexity of the lesson?

I don't think most people realize how constantly classrooms in America are interrupted - particularly elementary school classrooms. I'm always reminded of when our school district tried to save money by closing all the junior high schools and putting the seventh graders (and the seventh grade teachers) in elementary schools.

Many seventh grade teachers all but suffered nervous breakdowns from the constant stream of interruptions that occurred in the elementary schools. When, after three years, the school board came to its senses and reopened middle schools (mainly because putting eighth-graders in the high schools had been very problematic, socially), the seventh grade teachers ran screaming back to their junior high positions - many citing classroom interruptions as their principal reasons for doing so.

So when I read in Stigler and Hiebert's book about a Japanese colleague who was shocked when the eighth grade math lesson was interrupted by a simple announcement, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

What sorts of interruptions am I talking about? Well, in my school, between half and three quarters of all lessons are randomly interrupted by messages of some kind. Office messages usually have to do with last-minute messages to students from their parents, or asking kids to come to the office because their parent is waiting to take them to the dentist, or trying to find out if a kid has their sibling's lunch money. Sometimes the messages are transported to the room by students, and sometimes the phone rings. Sometimes, though, the loudspeaker blares with school-wide messages, which range from announcements for the students, to summons for a teacher or janitor, or requests for people to move their cars which are blocking others in the parking lot.

Besides that, there are also kids going from class to class inquiring about lost playground balls or sweaters, or asking teachers to sign get-well cards, or making announcements about upcoming events or asking to borrow teaching materials. Sometimes it's even parents popping in with flowers on their kid's birthday.

But all that is only the beginning, because in most elementary schools there is a system of "specialist" pull-outs throughout the day. In other words, there is a specialist teacher who has "graduated" from the need to be bound in a classroom, who takes kids out of class to give them particular lessons. Well, for some students who don't understand what's going on in class anyway, it may be just as well they're not there. Of course, if those students are part of a learning team of students, their absence will be felt, regardless of their own lack of academic skills. For others, who need speech therapy or other almost medical treatment, such pullouts are sometimes the only effective way to treat the problem.

But it's not only the students who are "behind" or the students who don't speak English that get pulled out. In our school, for example, small (and not so small) groups of students are constantly leaving class and returning in the middle of lessons in order to get music lessons. This goes on for most of the day, two days a week. Now for anyone who is trying to teach by the team-oriented, active-learning approach which works so well in Japan and in graduate seminars in America, which has been actively espoused by our own elementary education leaders for decades, this revolving door policy pretty effectively destroys lessons, not only for the ones who leave, but also for the ones who remain. No wonder American instructors often fall back on the tried-and-sort-of-true "Read the boring text book chapter and answer the stupid questions at the end" approach that has characterized American instruction for so long. At least, for that method, students don't really have to be in class or require instruction, unless they have trouble reading a particular passage.

And don't get me started about the kids who are pulled out for an hour or so day after day to work in the school cafeteria........etc. etc. etc.

It was my own good fortune to have studied learning theory at the graduate student level at the University of California in Berkeley after I had been teaching for several years, so I could appreciate, at a very intuitive level, exactly what the theory was addressing and espousing.

This graduate program, called "Developmental Teacher Education," not only imparted theory, they also taught a vision that all teachers in classrooms should be researchers, since only they can know how to implement the new pedagogical knowledge they discover. Indeed, only they can really know what sorts of things are even possible to implement in elementary school classrooms.

When I emerged from the university I was energized by my newly acquired understandings, and fascinated by a renewed appreciation of the human mind. It had taken me two years of work, including a lot of "lab work" using my poor longsuffering students as guinea pigs... (*plus a few more years to write the thesis, of course*)..... but it was all worth it. Now I really did know what I was supposed to be doing, and in my lessons, intellect began to augment instinct for once. No longer did prescribed curriculum guide every act, but instead I focused on the young mind, and what it does well and what it doesn't do well.

And the course of my theoretical and experiential background keeps me headed in the direction of wanting the kind of active, self-directed learning for my students that we find in Japanese schools and in American graduate schools. But I also find it a very frustrating path, because I'm quite familiar with the impediments to change that I outlined above. I deal with them every day, and I have never yet achieved the goals I set for myself at the end of my study. Nor am I likely to.

I knew what I wanted, but every change required corresponding compensations in other parts of the systems. Everything I tried came very slowly indeed - too slow at times, it seemed to me, and sometimes it didn't work at all. I used to picture myself as a "slow learner" because it happened so slowly. I also used to berate myself because I felt like I was taking what should have been a lesson and trying to make it into my own little "work of art." Little did I realize that Japanese teachers were moving in somewhat the same direction, making their lessons into cohesive, almost dramatic works of their own.

On the other hand, I have had a better opportunity than most American teachers to effect change, because I have been in a situation where I've had a mixed grade classroom - fifth and sixth grade - where each year half the class is carried over from the previous year, as the fifth graders become sixth graders. This means that I've been able to create and conduct a little of my own cultural change over the years, since I've had continuity for over ten years. It's been a constant source of reflection for me how the solution to some classroom management problem becomes established one year, developed the next year and innovated upon in subsequent years. It's like throwing a stone out on a lake and seeing the ripples persist "forever" in various forms.

Because of this I've been able to establish complex routines that have their own inertia and may be quite different from the routines in classrooms in the rest of the school, and they continue with relatively little effort on my part because the older half of the class demonstrates them to the younger half.

And once, in the middle of that tenure, I did have a completely new class. What a shock. It was the most difficult class I've had in all those years, something I attribute at least in part to the difficulties they had adopting the culture I'd come to expect.

Looking back on it I can easily agree with Stigler, Hiebert, and the Japanese about how cultural change must come about in small steps. It's not something that I need berate myself about. I can also appreciate that, if not for the supportive climate I found in that particular school and those particular parents, I might never have gone as far as I did, which I still feel is far from far enough. I've still got a long way to go.

Meanwhile, most school systems attempt to affect change by having their staff "trained," either in-house, or at outside seminars. By this time, the reader can probably appreciate why such efforts are doomed to failure - because even if the teacher enthusiastically embraces what's being demonstrated, the resources to implement it have to be there, or it won't work. And, again, by resources I don't just mean financial resources, but resources of time, space, access to materials and access to a supportive teaching culture.

I keep a rather concrete picture in my mind concerning the limitations of resources. Once I attended a conference for educators where one teacher presented how her class had constructed a nature trail. Biologist that I am, that had immense appeal to me. However, the presenter turned out to be from a private "college prep" type school located in an affluent neighborhood right next to a large vacant lot (which was where they constructed the trail). All of the materials were donated by parents, and in fact, many of the parents were carpenters or plumbers or sign makers, and they did a lot of plumbing, carpenting, and sign-making for the trail on the weekends. Having virtually none of these resources available to me at the time (particularly the vacant lot that could be closed off for weeks at a time), our nature trail never got built. Of course the resources needed to reform school in America are far more subtle and profound than a vacant lot. Still, in some ways, if a teacher goes to a "workshop" and hears someone teaching in a profoundly more effective way than they are, they are often unable to incorporate that type of teaching due to resource limitations.

However, the Japanese did it. They reformed their schools. This is what struck Stigler and Hiebert so strongly that they changed the whole thrust of their book from a simple comparative study to a plea for the USA to somehow emulate what they discovered almost accidentally in Japan.

So, how did the Japanese reform their schools?

The authors of The Teaching Gap strongly imply that, fifty years ago, Japanese teaching methods were not what we observe today. Rather, present-day methods are the result of educational reform, pure and simple. The question, then, is how the Japanese pulled it off, since all reform efforts in America have basically come to naught.

The answer is as breathtakingly obvious as it is commonsensical, once you realize that teaching is cultural, (that is, it is a complex and inter-related set of social skills, that are acquired by populations more than by individuals, and that are mainly learned subconsciously) and not a simple set of skills or directions that can be followed like a recipe. Basically, instead of attempting to train teachers, the Japanese set up a system that allowed the teachers to cultivate their own education in teaching theory learning theory.

Of course, if you take any large group of people and ask them to change themselves, rather than directing them, then you'd expect the change to come pretty slowly, and it has. Stigler and Hiebert point out that it has taken the Japanese fifty years from the time they started (fifty years ago) to produce the results that you see today. (And, since everything is still changing and improving, it will have taken sixty years to produce the results you'll see in 2010.) Now, fifty or sixty years is a long time - two generations at least. And the students who were in the first generation didn't get much benefit from reform, since it all happened so slowly. But what was lacking in speed, was made up for in thoroughness. In the meantime, American education has tried many "get rich quick schemes" and none of them has accomplished anything long lasting. So who's slow, really?

So how did Japanese educators change the system?

The answer rests on one assumption - they trusted their teachers to be intelligent, motivated people. (This was not such a stretch for them, since the status of "teacher" is considerably higher in Asia than in America.) They set up a system of collaboration - something much more far-reaching than anything ever envisioned in America. Then, having set up the system, they did everything they could to support it, like a gardener cultivating plants. And, over the long haul, just like a garden producing plants, the teachers' efforts produced their own kind of fruit.

So what exactly was this system for reform in Japan? It was a system where the teachers were all turned into researchers - doing educational, pedagogical, research. As I read through the sections that I'm about to share with you, I was reminded over and over again of my study of education at UC Berkeley. Our advisor once commented that, if we grad students got nothing else out of our two years of graduate schooling, we should at least learn to examine the student and how he/she learns before we do anything else.

When I read about the Japanese example, it was almost enough to make me cry. Here was the type of process we had envisioned so many years ago in grad school, the kind of process that, as far as I had known, had only been practiced in tentative steps among graduates of my own program, and here was an entire nation devoted to it. And furthermore, they had been doing it for fifty years, and furthermore, it had born fruit in profound (and clearly measurable) ways.

Of course, if you merely ask American teachers to participate in this sort of thing with no further explanation, you're liable to have a revolt on your hand. First of all, just like students expect the teachers to instruct them, the teachers expect the administrators and college experts to instruct them.

But that's really not the most important consideration. Even though most American teachers tend to be independent sorts who don't like others telling them what to do, almost every upper-grade elementary school teacher I've known has wished for more opportunities to collaborate with peers. The real problem is a lack of resources in time and space to accomplish it.

It's a safe bet that most elementary school teachers, at least those in California with multilingual classes of 33 or more students, spend 50 to 60 hours (or more) on school work as it is. When could they possibly plan and conduct a study? And if they did have the time, where could they find a place to reflect and consider the results? They have no office space of their own, and, in fact, they may not even have enough room in their own classroom for a desk of their own.

Now, it's well known that the Japanese student's day is considerably longer than his American counterpart's. What's not so well known is that the Japanese teacher's teaching day is considerably shorter than his American counterpart's. According to Professor Harold Stevenson, in The Learning Gap, somewhat of a companion volume to The Teaching Gap, Japanese teachers generally teach three 45-minute periods a day, and sometimes four, if they're lead teachers. And usually all their teaching is in a single subject, where preparation for one class may overlap with preparation for the other sections. What do they do with all their extra time? Well, about an hour a day is devoted to collaboration with their colleagues.

In Japan, teachers all have communal offices with other departmental members, separate from the classrooms, so even the seating arrangements favor collaborations.

But there's more. In their regular meetings, these teachers don't just sit complain about the many stresses in their lives. Among other things, they all participate in developing model lessons. They usually do this in departmental groups of 5 to 7 teachers. Each group might discuss their model lesson for weeks, figuring out the minutest details, such as what exactly to write on the chalkboard (or even where on the board to write it), or which numbers to use in any examples they may give. And after it's all hashed out, one of them volunteers to teach it to a class. On that day, all the other teachers in the group show up to the class and watch it being taught. Afterwards, there are more meetings, where they pick apart the results. And since they all had a hand in constructing the lesson, they really are picking apart the lesson and not the teacher who happened to teach it that time. That is, they are studying the teaching and not the teacher.

Next, they revise the lesson in light of their initial experiences and teach it again, perhaps with a different member of the group doing the actual teaching. Eventually they invite the entire faculty of the department to view it being taught. The whole process can take an entire year for a single lesson.

Stigler and Hiebert detail the process in their book, and anyone interested in this idea really should read what they wrote to get a proper flavor of the way it all comes together.

You can imagine how much can be gleaned from such meticulous analysis, such a collegial atmosphere, and  observations of real students reacting to a plan that's so thoroughly understood, but there's still more. After they've analyzed the lesson to dust, they publish it as a research paper, as if they were actually some sort of professionals or something. Other teachers in the district, or even other teachers in the county, or even, in some cases, other teachers all across the nation, can access and read such papers, and thus observe the lesson second-hand. Every teacher in the whole country can learn from it! And people in other schools can use it to plan model lessons of their own. It's all really elegant, but really common-sense.

When they started fifty years ago, these teachers were not privileged with the knowledge that I learned in graduate school about developmental education. They couldn't have known it, because most of it had not been written yet. And yet, they gradually moved, as a whole society of professionals, in a similar direction. Why? Because both the Western developmental psychologists and the Japanese teachers were performing experiments and adjusting their methods according to what actually resulted, according to their own measurements.

And as any good teacher knows, you learn nothing so well as something you learn yourself, so I would imagine that there are many teachers in Japan that have reached conclusions quite similar to what only we few in the university grad school reached, regardless of what theory they use to articulate it.

And in the process, the Japanese made a true profession out of teaching. They made teaching into a profession that cultivates its own knowledge, that publishes professional papers, and takes charge of its entire membership, just like doctors or lawyers do in this country.

In a move somewhat unusual for a scientific book, Stigler and Hiebert were inspired by their Japanese example to make specific policy recommendations for educational reform in this country.

Not surprisingly, they advocate a system of "lesson study" that draws its inspiration, if not its exact mechanisms, from the Japanese model. To this end, they state the following six principals:

1. Expect Improvement to be continual, gradual and incremental
2. Maintain a constant focus on student learning goals.
3. Focus on teaching, not teachers.
4. Implement improvements in the context of our own local classrooms.
5. Make improvement the work of teachers, not administrators or experts.
6. Build a system that can learn from its own experience.

All of these are pretty self-explanatory, but I think number three deserves some extra comment. When I first saw it, I assumed that by focusing on teaching instead of teachers, it simply meant to help teachers develop their skills in a non-threatening manner, coached by peers instead of evaluated by principals.

I have no reason to think Stigler and Hiebert would oppose such an interpretation, but they actually had a different reason for including number three. You study teaching instead of teachers because "teaching" is the culture you're trying to change, and the culture is bigger and more long-lived than any of the individuals that make it up. Therefore, it's not particularly productive to make too big a deal of differences in talent or skill between individuals. (Tell this to those advocating "merit pay" for teachers!)

In the concluding two chapters of the book, Stigler and Hiebert lay out how they would prepare a system for the improvement of teaching and then initiate and maintain it. It is only here that I can see some problems that they hadn't reckoned with.

For example, they state: "Establishing the program we envision is a monumental task, not so much because it is costly or requires new resources, but because it involves a change in school culture."

I agree with them that cultural change is extremely difficult, but I don't think they realize how costly it will be. It will be plenty costly. Maybe we could do it without teachers having the desks and offices that their Asian colleagues enjoy, but it simply cannot happen without relieving teachers of some of their present responsibilities.

I know this is true at the elementary school level, for sure. I mean, today is Memorial Day. I started this essay just after New Years. If this had been the summer vacation, I could have knocked it out in a two or three days. As it is, I'm running the risk of becoming hopelessly behind in my schoolwork in order to finish this first draft. I even had to take a few hours "break" from the writing today in order to go to my school site, where I, along with six other teachers, spent time working in our classrooms on things that weren't practical to bring home with us in the car.

If we're already working 50-60 hours plus time at home, where are we going to find the time to implement any new programs, even if we don't have a separate office.?

One saving grace in this picture is the new push for smaller class sizes in the lower grades. Since they have only twenty students in their class and fewer, shorter papers and projects to evaluate, they have more time left over. Of course, smaller classes make no difference unless there's a concomitant change in teaching methods. The kind of lesson study used by Japanese schools and proposed by Stigler and Hiebert could well be the ideal activity to fill that "extra time" which those teachers now have.

Stigler and Hiebert have proposed three phases for implementing a program of lesson study:

1. Build consensus for continuous improvement.
2. Set clear learning goals for the students and align assessments for these goals.
3. Restructure schools as places where teachers can learn.

I think most school districts would claim they are already doing numbers one and two. Indeed, number one in general doesn't need to be done, since the vast majority of teachers are already self-motivated to improve. Number two is being overdone, but not effectively done because, at least for elementary schools, the standards seldom take into account the fact that children's minds are not adult minds; they are developing at different rates in different students, and have both greater and lesser capabilities than what most people realize. In other words, few are following my grad school advisor's advice to study the child first. Instead, they structure curriculum as though it were a serires of university courses, and any reason that prerequisite knowledge doesn't "stick" is simply due to the fact that children's minds can't seem to learn as thoroughly as university students.  And this is despite the fact that everyone allows that children "learn better" than adults. Hmm...

Also, attempts to make assessment more relevant are often met with political (that is, cultural) backlash. At least, though, schools are making honest attempts to address phase two.

Phase three, though, has not been addressed at all, even though it's the only way that change will ever actually happen. Partly this is because the need is not understood. Also, it's by far the most costly of the three phases, demanding every sort of resource you can think of, because it's a cultural change, and not a change of skills or style.

As for the monetary cost, most districts have a hard enough time coming up with the money to send each teacher to a two-day local conference. What the authors are proposing would entail hiring new staff to provide more preparation time, if not changes to the physical plant itself.

However, I totally agree with their statement that "Improving teaching is not something that can be left to refresher courses in he evenings or during the summer in university classrooms. Improving teaching must be done at school, in classrooms, and it must be seen by teachers, parents and administrators as a substantial and important part of the teacher's workweek. Schools must be places where teachers, as well as students, can learn."

As always, the key factor is time. Anyone who has read this far might be tired of hearing it over and over from me, but I think that no one outside of the classroom really appreciates it.

I often remember the best teacher I ever had in my undergraduate university courses, Robert Thornton, who taught Biology 1 to several hundred students at once in a humongous lecture hall at Davis, California. I still remember him sharing with us that, before each lecture, he would hold all calls and isolate himself in his office for two hours, to meditate on what he'd say and to try to anticipate what questions might be asked. Mind you, this is testimony from a PhD in botany who's teaching the most elementary course in his field, one that covers material that many students would have learned in high school. Despite the simplicity, he was taking two hours to reflect. The fact that he eventually earned a Distinguished Teaching Award from the Academic Senate is no surprise. And he continues to chair the Committee on Education Policy at Davis to this day.

Anyway, I often think of Dr. Thornton and his two hours when it comes time to plan my classes. Given a typical 50 to 60 hour work week, of which about 25-35 hours is instructional time, that leaves about 45 minutes to an hour for each hour of class to not only plan, but also gather and/or manufacture the materials, write out tests, evaluate (grade) papers, tutor students outside of class time, deal with behavior problems, contact parents for various reasons, conduct fund raisers, do the "extra duties" such as study hall or after-school clubs that most schools require of most teachers, sit on committees, attend staff meetings, help in evening activities such as open house or musical concerts, etc. etc. If a teacher stuck to a 40 hour week, then there would be only 20 minutes per class hour to accomplish all that.

And often, you're asked to teach things you've never learned yourself, such as when the State of California changed its sixth grade social studies curriculum from Latin America to Ancient History, or when our district adopted a truly excellent math series (put out by TERC - formerly the "Technical Education Research Centers" - at Cambridge, Massachusetts) which many teachers totally ignore because the teaching methods it contains, though excellent, are totally foreign to the way they themselves learned math or have ever seen it taught. It would simply take too much time to read and understand the sense of them, time they simply don't have.

So I think that, in the implementation of their recommendations, Stigler and Hiebert have a much bigger fish to slay than they yet realize. At one point, they are amazed when a teacher involved in a restructuring committee says "Let's just go home early and use the time at home to prepare for tomorrow's lessons." They imply that the teacher said that because he or she didn't see the sense in all the collaboration. That may be true, but I think it's actually more likely that the teacher truly had no other time to prepare the next day's lesson and therefore, because of the committee meeting, would have to "wing it" with no preparation at all, something all elementary school teachers have had to do at one time or another. What will it really take to fry this dragon, I wonder?

I'm beginning to think, too, that in order to gain the time needed to make this change possible, it might be necessary for the upper elementary grades to deparmentalize (unless they are also given the benefit of class size limited to 20), so that teachers can specialize and therefore be able to use the same materials for more than one section or class. The only caveat with that would be to avoid making any sort of a junior junior high out of it. (in fact I think junior highs should not be like junior highs, either, but that's another story). Young kids are extremely sensitive to the social environment and benefit from stability. Classes should be kept together, perhaps with the teacher changing rooms instead of the kids, and the same teacher should teach their subject to a particular class for more two or more years. The disadvantage of doing this, of course, is that you split the curriculum and it will be more difficult to teach writing through science, math through social studies, etc.  That's currently one of the great strengths of upper grades education in America.

The reason most teachers went into teaching and stay in it is because they find the job is its own reward, and their greatest joy is to do the best they can, and effect young lives in a positive way. I've known many people who left or retired early from lucrative business careers to pursue teaching, so you know it's not the high pay. Those who know anything at all about the life of a teacher know that they didn't stick with it because they have more time off or a shorter day than other workers. Given those facts, then, it always mystifies me why some people seem to feel that teachers "need to be held accountable" or should be paid better if their students happen to perform better on standardized tests, etc. The truth is that most teachers, once they have the opportunities to participate in researching their own students, and given the resources to do so, will plunge right in.  It's utterfly fascinating and rewarding on its own.

To sum up, then, I think that Stigler and Hiebert are dead-on correct in defining the major task facing America's teachers as they attempt to professionalize and revolutionize their profession, and to reach all students. The only question is how to acquire the resources to make such change possible.
 

To read a review of The Teaching Gap by the Mathematical Association of America, click here.

To read a review of The TIMSS video study in the Phi Delta Kappan, click here.

To read the official report on the TIMSS video study from the US Department of Education, click here.

To see the official TIMSS site on the web, click here. There's another official site with more recent results here.

To buy The Teaching Gap from Amazon.com, click here.

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