How Classroom Life Undermines Reform (Mary Kennedy)
Mary Kennedy is a professor in teacher education at Michigan State University. She has written extensively about teaching, teachers, and assessment of teaching. This post is taken from pp. 1-3 of her 2005 book How Classroom Life Undermines Reform (Harvard University Press).
I never understood the phrase “knowing everything and knowing nothing” until I examined my knowledge of teaching. Like most educated adults, I knew everything, and yet nothing, about teaching. The “everything” part of our knowledge has to do with what teaching looks like. As children, we spent many days sitting before teachers. As adults, many of us have visited our own children’s classrooms. From these experiences, we have a sense of the variety of ways in which teaching occurs, and we have a sense of what counts as good teaching or bad teaching. Some of us also have strong views about what teaching should look like, and some of us become