Educational professionalism: The development of a practice-centered frame and its application to the America's Choice school design.

Abstract

Scholars have long assumed that institutional and cultural forces act on the work of teaching. Environmental factors such as local control, resource allocation, professional training and licensure are frequently investigated for their effects on practice. Other scholarship, however, has reversed this causal sequence by claiming that practice, not environments, is the primary independent variable. This dissertation builds on this practice-centered approach by developing a frame in which instructional practice is seen as the independent variable that acts on environments. Three dimensions of practice are particularly salient: (1) the conceptualization of problems and goals; (2) the degree of effectiveness in solving client problems; and (3) the degree of consistency in clinical method and reasoning across contexts. The resulting framework is applied to the comprehensive school reform program, America's Choice, and evaluated for its utility as an instrument of analysis. The practice-centered approach is then compared with more traditional frameworks that see the educational environment as the independent variable and practice as the dependent one. The application of the practice-centered analytic frame highlights a number of salient issues that have not appeared in past analyses. One issue is the importance of a plan for practice, or design, that structures and guides clinical work. Second, the architecture of the design for work is consequential in how it defines the nature of teaching and learning, structures the tasks of teaching, and bears on the knowledge demands of practice. Third, the knowledge demands placed on practitioners is consequential for practice and the profession as a whole, and may bear on various indicators of professionalism (e.g. state protection). The main finding of this dissertation is that while viewing practice as the chief independent variable compensates for a weakness in past research, it is still important to understand how environments affect practice. In the analysis of America's Choice, environmental factors such as local control, policy, and resource allocation were found to be integral to understanding the functioning of America's Choice. This suggests that a more complete view of the education profession must account for the way in which practice acts on environments and how environments shape practice.