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Reveals how centering teachers' experiences and insights is essential to understanding schools and creating meaningful, lasting educational reform.
What if the most important voices in education have been the least heard?
In Teachers, Marilyn M. Cohn and Robert B. Kottkamp bring readers inside the lived experiences of teachers—revealing the realities behind policy debates, reform efforts, and classroom change. Drawing on rich narratives and careful research, this book uncovers the tensions, challenges, and untapped strengths that define the teaching profession today.
Far from offering quick fixes, Cohn and Kottkamp confront the complexity of schooling with honesty and depth. They explore how shifts in students, parents, and policy have reshaped teaching, and why many reforms fail to address what truly matters: the voices of teachers themselves.
Through compelling analysis and firsthand accounts, the authors present:
· A powerful examination of stability and change in schools over two decades
· Insight into teachers’ purposes, motivations, and rewards
· A candid look at how reforms impact teachers’ roles and identities
· A forward-looking vision for meaningful, sustainable educational change
Praised by leading voices in education, this book is both a wake-up call and a roadmap—urging policymakers, administrators, and educators to rethink how change happens in schools.
"Teachers advances knowledge, provokes concern, and offers fresh perspectives that stimulate the search for solid solutions. By grappling with messy complexities, Cohn and Kottkamp point up the shallowness of the panaceas that are so common in educational policy and practice. I strongly recommend this scholarly and accessible book and hope that those whose ideas and decisions shape American education will give it the close attention it merits." — Dan. C. Lortie, Professor of Education and Director of Midwest Administration Center at the University of Chicago
"Marilyn Cohn and Robert Kottkamp have it just right in terms of what schools are and need to be: they've caught the voices of teachers, particularly as they reflect on their inability to affect the system; they've captured in text and nuance the considerable strengths that teachers could bring to the changing of the system; and they have described a future for teaching and learning that will work in the best interests of all of us." — Robert M. McClure, Director, Mastery in Learning Consortium, National Center for Innovation, National Education Association
"We all hear that schools aren't what they used to be. But Cohn and Kottkamp get behind the newspaper headlines and into schools to show us just how different—and similar—things really are. The result of uncovering schools as teachers see them is an eye-opener to the problems of education and the prospects for reform." — Albert Shanker, President, American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
"Those who believe, as I do, that teachers must be at the center of school reform, will find Teachers: The Missing Voice in Education an enormously useful and truly important book. Marilyn Cohn and Robert Kottkamp have been in the classroom themselves, and, in this book, get us very close to teachers and their work. They provide a clear understanding of the agonies and the joys of this great profession—both past and present. By telling teachers' stories that are both poignant and compelling, and by interpreting the implications of those stories for meaningful change, this book offers us a different and more viable vision for the future." — Ernest L. Boyer, President, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Marilyn M. Cohn is Director of Teacher Education at Washington University. Robert B. Kottkamp is Associate Professor in the Department of Administration and Policy Studies at Hofstra University.
List of Tables
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
PART I. STABILITY AND CHANGE OVER TWENTY YEARS: PURPOSES, MEANS, AND REWARDS OF TEACHING
1. Stability and Change in Today's Schools: An Overview
2. Teacher Purposes and Means
3. Rewards in Teaching
PART II. THE IMPACT OF CHANGE IN THE CONTEXT OF SCHOOLING: THE TEACHER'S STORY
4. Changes in Students and Parents, and the Decline of Psychic Rewards for Teachers
5. Competency-Based Education and Accountability: Teacher Responses to Attempts to Change Their Role and Work
6. A Teacher is Not a Teacher is Not a Teacher: Differences in Contemporary Teachers' Beliefs and Behaviors
PART III. INTERPRETING AND ACTING UPON THE TEACHER'S STORY
7. Interpreting the Voices of Teachers: The Underlying Tension Between Learning and Control
8. Learning as Meaningful Interaction: What is Good for Students is Good for Teachers
9. The Challenge of Change: Pausing to Raise Questions
10. Getting Started Through Inquiry-Oriented Schools
Methodological Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Author Index
Subject Index