Craft Knowledge: The Road to Transforming Schools

Abstract

Teachers take pride in their autonomy, but there is a downside to the tradition of working independently. If the teaching profession is to advance, Ms. Burney suggests, practitioners will need to share their individual knowledge with one another, and districts will need to create the conditions that make this possible. IN THE ONGOING effort to transform education, policy makers and educators are increasingly looking to for solutions to the problems of The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, as a number of commentators have noted, contains more than 100 references to scientifically or research-based practices. The recognition that knowledge is essential to transform educational practice is heartening. Yet for this transformation to occur, we need to rethink what we mean by research and practice. The traditional model, based on separate and distinct and practice communities, with the former possessing knowledge that will inform the latter, is no longer valid. We need to think of the road between and practice as a two-way street, where both are valid sources of knowledge about teaching. To be sure, teachers need to study and conduct on learning and cognition and to incorporate up-to-date findings of into their At the same time, they can also gain important knowledge about teaching through their own and one another's experience. Researchers, for their part, need to carefully examine the knowledge that teachers and school leaders have acquired. Only by recognizing and using both sources of knowledge can educators truly transform our schools and turn teaching into a true profession. Consider the way other professions operate. Medical doctors command enormous respect because of their knowledge and skill, and their expertise gives them a voice in health care policy. In everything they do, they draw upon a vast and substantive body of knowledge. But this knowledge does not come solely from research, at least the published in journals. It also comes from doctors' training, their practice of medicine, and their communication with colleagues -- what we might call their craft knowledge.1 Craft knowledge, like the findings gleaned from formal studies, is collected, codified, legitimated, and shared by professional bodies. Each source of knowledge is equally important -- each feeds the others, expands the body of medical knowledge, and holds the entire profession to very high standards. The education profession functions differently. To be sure, educational has produced a rich body of knowledge, but it is shared only haphazardly among teachers. And knowledge is largely hidden because there are no institutional arrangements for codifying, legitimating, and sharing it. Teachers have little sense of belonging to a professional community and only a weak voice in policy arenas because they do not, as a body, share an authoritative, proven understanding of the work they are charged to do. Educators, therefore, are more vulnerable to politics than doctors. Although politicians would never tell a doctor to treat an inflamed appendix with aspirin, they insist time and again that educators cure deeply ailing schools with bandages. Underlying causes of school failure are seldom even mentioned, because neither external stakeholders nor school-based educators know how to identify or treat these causes. If policy makers really want to cure our schools, instead of simply bandaging them where they bleed, they will need to help practitioners and researchers build a foundation of professional knowledge that incorporates researchers' findings and draws from what teachers already know and what they can learn from one another. Teachers, like doctors, already possess a great deal of knowledge -- a mixture of expertise, theories, propositions, and tacit knowledge applied in the daily conduct of their …