the james s mcdonnell foundation (jsmf) announces a new program in 2017 that will fund education research on the science of teaching and expand our understanding of teachers as learners and as agents of change in education.
there is an urgent need to know how teachers think and work within complex, ever-changing educational systems to process, evaluate, and adopt “evidence-based” practices. there are numerous and ever growing lists of recommended evidence-based practices that teachers are encouraged to adopt, such as those identified in what works clearinghouse practice guides from the u.s. department of education (ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/) and the core practice consortium (corepracticeconsortium.com). but there is little research on how teachers view, interpret, or work to improve their use of such practices. this is an absolutely necessity, but a largely overlooked component of efforts to reform education. indeed, a new book on the topic of bridging research and practice asserts “there are too many guides and ‘cookbooks’ that indiscriminately propagate…dozens of techniques and strategies” without concern for how teachers understand, select, and take up these techniques.
the teachers as learners (tal) program will emphasize a cognitive science perspective on teachers as learners – including a focus on the cognitive constraints that guide teacher thinking and change in attitudes, knowledge, skills and behaviors. we need to know what aspects of cognition (e.g., memory, knowledge, goals, expertise, collaboration) help explain teachers’ learning and change, particularly as it relates to adopting evidence-based practices in classroom contexts.
understanding teachers as learners in the context of the many influences on teacher change across career trajectories is an important but understudied area of translational research with the opportunity for impact on both research and educational practice. understanding teachers as learners from a cognitive science perspective would advance the implementation of policies aimed at evidence-based reforms. we acknowledge that teaching occurs in a complex context and we want to situate the work in that context, but the focus of this program is on studying the cognitive dimensions of teacher learning as it takes place within these rich socio-cultural and institutional contexts, rather than the contexts themselves. a survey of the current landscape reveals that there is significant focus on smallscale experimental work on student cognition and on descriptive work on teaching – but the lack of a cognitive science framework for how teachers learn to process, evaluate, and improve their use of evidencebased practices within a complex, dynamic system.
