Change and Stability in A Four Decade Career in Teaching (Part 1)
I began teaching history in 1956 in an urban high school and ended my career of full-time teaching at Stanford University in 2001 when I retired (I did teach a graduate seminar every other year as an emeritus professor until 2013). Overall, I taught 14 years as a high school history teacher in two cities at all-black and low-income schools and 25 years as a professor of education working with highly motivated, high-achieving graduate students in a private university. I have taught for 39 years seeing reform after reform sweep by my eyes.[i]
Examining my career as a teacher offers possible insights into how, over time, a teacher working at different levels of schooling continuously changes lessons while maintaining the fundamentals of classroom practice. Sounds like a contradiction at first—change amid stability–but looking closely at one’s life as a teacher may resolve what appears to be a paradox
I make no claim that my reflection on how I managed both change and continuity in over decades of teaching in six public high schools and one university is typical. My experience may well be an outlier. Race, gender, class, the generation within which I was born, and passing through the seasons of a life cycle all have effects on one’s experience that may well differ from others. It is, after all, as my academic colleagues would point out an N=1.
Were there many biographies (or autobiographies) of teachers with sections on how they taught over their careers and the impact of the organization, reform cycles moving through their schools, and life events from marriage, raising children, illness, and death on their teaching, I would be able to position my story within these sources. But such personal descriptions and analyses of teaching over time in different institutions and what occurred in classrooms are sparse. [ii]
For those who prize research-produced knowledge married to experienced-produced knowledge as I do, the limning of one’s career may prove helpful in Change and Stability in A Four Decade Career in Teaching (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:
