Journa od Cur ulum anid SuprvisionF11l 1968. Vol 4. N 1.65-76 65

Perspectives and Imperatives

PRACTITIONER-ORIENTED INQUIRY BYTEACHERS: MEANING, JUSTIFICATION, AND

IMPLICATIONS FOR SCHOOL STRUCTURE

HENDRIK D. GIDEONSE, University of Cincinnati

I teach seven classes a day (four different preparations), but I began attending eveningclasses to expand my knowledge and teaching expertise. As my workload increased,WIFM's (what's m It for me?) began to invade my thinking. My university courses addedto the 4 + hours of preparation and paper grading and made the $200.00 raise on thepay scale inconsequential. At school I had to do all the student record-searching orlocate and fill out materials order forms. Attempts to advance a young man into aprogramming class commensurate with his ability met with stony resistance. Uncov-ering the fact that 21 of 24 seniors failing my pre-calculus class had PSAT scores in the17th percentile and below even though they had three years of A and B math gradeson their records brought disdain and dislike from my principal. His spoken answer?"Develop 24 individual education programs." His meaning? "Give them the A's andB's and get the parents off my back!" I wanted everyone to gain knowledge, but themost important thing to the principal, parents, and students was the grade. Teachingin the "reflective practtioner" style became an impossibility due to the lack of time,numerous impediments, and seeming lack of support. The course to follow becameincreasingly obvious. I had to resign.

A refugee from teaching'

The teaching profession you and I entered upon to practice, to study, orto prepare others for is undergoing revolutionary transformation. The paceof that transformation may be imperceptible to those of us in its midst. In fact,claims for change on such a scale may appear to outweigh reality. Certainly,the testimony with which this article opens would appear to belie the prop-osition. Still, the die is cast.

Bellwethers of the transformation abound. They include:

* the recommendations of the Carnegie Forum Task Force on Teachingas a Profession,

* inclusion of the American Federation of Teachers in the governanceof the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE),

'Thls excerpt was drawn with permission from a review prepared by a tniversity of Cncinnauidoctoral candidate in curriculum and instrucuon

66 Practitioner-Oriented Teacber Inquipy

* the recent creation of the National Board for Professional TeachingStandards,

* the emphasis given knowledge bases for teaching and teacher prepa-ration in the newly adopted NCATE standards and in the professional devel-opment activities of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Edu-cation (AACTE),

* the National Education Association's sustained thrust to create state-level professional practices boards with responsibility for certifying teachersand for approval of teacher preparation programs,

* the surprisingly large number of instltutlons (95) that responded affir-matively to the invitation to join the Holmes Group.

These activities and initiatives are professional, political, and structuralThrough them, irresistible forces have been set in motion Although thespecific outcomes of those forces may be in doubt, the long run implicationsjustify the opening sentence of this article.

One measure of the richness, confusion, anxiety, and opportunity of thecurrent era in teaching is that the dramatically different assessments in thetestimony of the "refugee" teacher and the claim for revolutionary transformation can both be true. It may seem impossible to fulfill the numerous,complex, and, yes, sometimes contradictory prescriptions for reform-forexample, higher entering pay for teachers, career ladders, merit pay, greaterprofessionalism, more accountability respecting the objectives of teacherpreparation, greater attention to specialized and nonspecialized knowledgein teacher preparation, new structures for schools and the profession Andyet, something like them-or their intents-will have to be achieved if teach-ing's "professional project"2 is to be realized.

An article the length of this one cannot hope to cover the waterfront ofeducational reform. By focusing on the inquiry functions and responsibilitiesof teachers, however, it can attempt to illuminate one facet, albeit one thatlends great explanatory power to the end of fully professionalizing teaching.More specifically, a number of questions are addressed:

* What is meant by practitioner-oriented inquiry?* In what ways is it integral to the calls for greater professionalizatlon in

teaching?* Why Is It so important as a starting point for conceptualizing profes-

sional reform?* How does an increased orientation toward reflectiveness and teacher

inquiry relate to calls by the Holmes Group and Carnegie Task Force fornewly structured schools and a newly structured profession?

2Gary Sykes's phrase from his "Teacher Education and the Professional Project An Accountof Its Predicaments" (unpublished paper. National Instilute of Education, Washington. DC. 18May 1983)

66 Pradhtioner-Orzented Teacker Inquny

lendrnkD Gideonse 67

* What will it take to help teaching become more reflective, more char-acterized by the spirit, processes, and products of systematic inquiry'

PRACTITIONER INQUIRY. MEANINGS

Inquiry as practiced by teachers (which, after all, is what the phrase"practitioner Inquiry" means) c .n refer to two broad classes of activity Onehas recently emerged as a needed corrective to the hegemony academics hadinadvertently imposed on participation in the advancement of the professionthrough research This class of activity asserts the centrality of practitionerinvolvement in the research strategies and activities aimed at advancing theperformance and effectiveness of teachers and schools. Exponents of this viewinclude, for example, Ann Lieberman, Gary Griffin, Susan Florlo, Arthur Bols-ter, Beatrice Ward and William Tikunoff, Marilyn Rauth, and Robert Yinger, toname lust a few. Important as this work is in the larger scheme of things, it isnot the focus of attention here. Our focus is the second class of activity-allthose kinds of clinical, evaluative, or problem-solving inquiry that better equipteachers in the dacy-to-dayperformance of their duties and responsibtlities.'

Much of the inquiry that teachers potentially do relates to their planningresponsibilities

'W7Wat should I teach?" Several levels of inquiry are suggested by thissimple question. At the district and possibly also the state levels, variousprescriptive statements establish curricular parameters. The school itself ma)have defined additional expectatlons. The extent ' , which curricular aims ina given class articulate with those that precede or follow it is also an importantconsideration.

Finding accurate answers to questions asked at this level, however, onlybegins the inquiry processes in which a teacher must engage in order toprepare specific curricular plans and strategies. For example, deciding whatmaterials to employ, how to use them, and how to supplement those suppliedby the school or district will extend the process of curricular inqulry to everfiner levels of explication.

"How should I teach?" The identification of curricular aims and contenttriggers the next phase of planning inquiry: Which instructional approachesshould be used to achieve curricular ends? This will be determined in partby the teacher's existing repertoire. It will depend in part on the students'familiarity with possible instructional strategies that may require their activeparticipation It will depend on the teacher's awareness of the level of cognitivecomplexity of the curricular aims. It will depend on the needs of individuals

'The exposition that follows was prepared independently of my reading of Eleanor Duck-worth s excellent and moving account of teachers as inquirers n Teaduing as Research. HartardEducatornal Revreuw 50 tNovember 1986) 481-495. It is an engaging illustration of hov teachersneed continuously to learn in order to be able to teach

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68 Pi-actitioner Oriented Teadier Inquiri,

or groups of students at discrete points in time, needs that are ascertainedthrough inquiry and evaluative strategies.

"'ow shall I assess students' learning?" The loop of instruction comesback on itself in the teacher's responsibility to assess students' performanceagainst the goals of instruction. There are dozens of different technologiesavailable for undertaking such assessment. Choosing or designing and devel-oping the appropriate instruments entails numerous different forms of inquirn

"Who are my students?" All teachers, in one way or another, inquire intothe characteristics of their students. Some of that inquiry pertains to individualcharacteristics. Some of It may seek to develop understanding about thestudents as representatives of cultural and socioeconomic groups whose normsand values are pertinent to instructional planning and class or behavior man-agement.

'What's going on here?" Although much of teachers' inquiry relates totheir planning responsibilities, some of it is diagnostic in character. Teachersmay encounter disruptions in their classes or their school. Often, the reasonsare not immediately apparent. Specific responsibility for disruptive behaviormay be difficult to assign or understand In such circumstances, teachers willseek answers through appropriate inquiry strategies--direct interviews, reviewof existing records, or, perhaps, more extensive background probes intofamily or community circumstances.

'What do these children know nou.w" Teachers can assume that instruc-tion preceding their own direct responslblhty has had the intended effects,or they can assess children directly to learn "where they are." Such informationcan prove invaluable in curricular planning. To the extent that learning issequential or cumulative, for example, unknown or inadvertent gaps can provecrippling to a child's subsequent performance

"Isfailure to learn the chlddren's responsibili, or mine?" Teachers areobliged to assess the performance of their students. In turn, the teachers canuse children's performance to form reasonable hypotheses about the effec-tiveness of their own Instruction Well-designed multiple-choice tests, forexample, can be used to identify items on which student performance is souniformly bad as to point, as the cause for failure, to shortcomings in instruc-tional performance, design, or evaluation rather than indlvidual student capac-ity or responsibility. The evaluation of student performance is, thus, a type ofteacher inquiry aimed both at individual assessment and at quality controland continuing professional development.

"How can we solve thisproblem?" In the hands of professionals, inquiryis also a problem-solving tool. It makes little difference what kind of problemis at hand. When it is approached in the fashion suggested by the questionthat begins this paragraph, an inquiry process has begun. The process may gono further than the two people who make the word "we" meaningful. On theother hand, it may come to involve an entire school staff It may go beyondthe school to the district or outside to the school's client/geographical com-

68 Practitioner-Oriented Teacher Inquzri'

HendrikD Gideonse 69

munity. In such cases, the activities launched in response to the question arelikely to be much more complex in their management than the ones under-taken in response to the more localized teacher concerns illustrated by theprevious questions, but they are inquiry processes nonetheless

WHY STRESS INQUIRY PROCESSES FOR TEACHERS7WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS OF DOING SO?

Whatever our collective aspirations may be, most of us would argue thatteaching has not yet reached full professional status Many factors are impli-cated in that "not yet"--compensation, conditions of practice, the organizationof the work of teaching, preparation arrangements, patterns of legal authori-zation and control of teaching, and so on.

Reduced to its essence, however, any true profession may be character-ized in three ways: It serves a deep and abiding social value; it operatesaccording to a rich fund of specialized kniowledge; and it controls entry to theprofession and the conditions of its practice.

Professional status for teaching cannot hope to spring full blown fromthe head of Zeus. Rather, it will emerge gradually, as members of the pros-pective profession are perceived, by themselves and others, to generate sat-isfaction in their performance through effective and responsible service. Pre-suming that teachers, in fact, serve a deep and abiding social value (in ourown culture, the quintessential public responsibility of preparing succeedinggenerations of citizens for the multiple responsibilities of membership in afree society), the route to full professional status lies through the acquisitionand application of the specialized knowledge and skills requisite to thatresponsibility. The key assumption In the argument is that successful andresponsible performance in the use of that knowledge and skill will ultimatelylead to social acceptance for the teaching profession controlling entry stan-dards and the conditions of practice. Note the wording. It is not success inachieving the end, although that is an important consideration over the longhaul. It is competence and confidence in the use of the knowledge and skills;that is, the demonstration of an intelligent decision-making process that is atleast the equal of anything a layperson might employ.

Specialized knowledge acquires its status in a variety of ways. Status mayarise from the conceptual difficulty or sophistication of the knowledge. It maybe special, not because It is difficult, but because it is privileged; that is, itarises from settings and interactions to which access is controlled by virtue ofthe need to respect privacy and the often delicate quality of interpersonalrelationships, especially between minors and adults. It may be specializedbecause the ability to perceive relevant data, interactions, circumstances, per-formances, and conditions emerges only after considerable training and/orequally considerable cumulative experience. It may be specialized, too, becauseof an epistemological awareness that emerges only from intimate exposure

flendnk I) Gideonse 69

70 Practitioner-Oriented Teacber Inquigy

to knowledge In a field, a sense ofnot only the substantive content of thatknowledge, but the dispositions and orientations to knowledge that are justas much a part of the whole.

Specialized knowledge is not a unitary concept. It embraces theoreticaland practical as well as abstract and concrete understandings. Most important,it requires a deep understanding of the linkages between both pairs of under-standings. Furthermore, given the applied nature of teaching as a profession,the academic and disciplinary sources of knowledge about teaching are asbroad as all the behavioral and social sciences combined and extend beyondto the arts and humanities as well. Psychology, sociology, economics, politicalscience, history, and anthropology are all potential sources of insight andillumination. But so are art, music, literature, sculpture, drama, and philoso-phy. So are the more distinctly professional specializations of learning andmotivation theory, curriculum design, small-group processes, instructionaland behavior management, and evaluation, to name just a few.

The concept of specialized knowledge-a product of formal inquiry inthe research and scholarship sense and, equally important, a product of theimmediate circumstances of practice settings-is one of two key instrumentsto achieving professional status. The second might be called the habits ofmind, the processes of analysis and decision, whereby specialized knowledgeis applied in the course of professional practice.

These two are instruments because they can be used to achieve thepurposes for which the profession of teaching exists. They are also instrumentsin the sense that they are in the hands of the profession to secure its ownaspirations to status, respect, and reward.

And have we, as a profession, seized these instruments? On two counts,the evidence is not compelling.

First, until the last decade or so, teacher education programs have notdefined themselves in terms of the implications of the amount of specializedknowledge that exists and how much cognitive capacity and time it wouldtake to acquire that knowledge. Instead, teacher education programs haveoperated on a different assumption; namely, that the prime constraint was notwhat beginning teachers needed to know, but what could be done within theconfines of a baccalaureate program. This assumption remained unchallenged,in large measure because of the severely depressed state of starting salariesin teaching, but also because of competing assumptions that teaching is notparticularly demanding intellectually and that on-the-lob clinical experienceis far more crucial to later success than is formal study. (A companion assump-tion is that children are resilient enough that they can safely "pay the cost" ofwhatever shortcomings they might encounter during a teacher's inductionperiod.)

Second, examination of the role-structure of teaching and the actualoperation 9f the school settings within which teaching takes place makes itobvious that the application of specialized knowledge and the systematic use

70 Practitioner-Oriented Teacjer Inquity

Hendrik D Gideonse 71

of inquiry and professional decision processes are not the controlling assump-tions underpinning teaching. Instead, a combination of two different assump-tions-first, that teachers are "tellers" and second, that they are custodians ofgroups of children of the same chronological age-actually control the work-place and the conditions of practice The result is the factory, model of school-ing. Children report to school at the same ages, in the same size class group-.ings, at the same times every day, to classrooms where they can learn largelythrough observing their teachers' performances.

STRUCTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF TEACHING AS INQUIRY

By contrast, professional commitment to organize the preparation, roles,and workplaces of teachers according to the products and processes of inquirywould create dramatic differences. The watchwords of the new structureswould be:

* flexibility (of time, curriculum, grouping, and instructional approach),* individualized instruction,* consultation (among professionals and with learner and learner's fam-

ily),* data-based decision making,* mastery and performance orientation,* self-correction,* teacher acountability for student performance,* collegial professional management,* end of age-isolation for learners,* deep reduction in teacher-presented material and full use of print and

electronic media,* differentiation of function among teachers,* differentiation of rank/status among professional staff.

Individually and even collectively, these concepts may not be new. Whatwill be new is the commitment to act upon them and thepossibiliO, to act onthem because systematic effort will have been expended on redesigning therole and the workplace in which it is performed.

Consider an analogy. In the 1950s, a revolution took place in aircraftpropulsion. It did not occur as a consequence of gradual improvements inpiston and propeller technology; rather it involved replacing the piston enginewith the jet engine. Newly structured roles and workplaces in schools will notcome about by gradual modification, any more than gradual improvementswould have transformed piston engines into jets. In each case--vhetheraircraft propulsion or school-the new concept constitutes a break with theold system. The purpose remains the same, but the technology to achieve itrepresents fundamental departures in assumption and process.

To realize the possibilities of new roles and structures, however, it willbe necessary, first, to create fully developed conceptual models of new schools

72 Practitioner-Oriented Teacber Inquiry

and then, following the models, to establish, test, and adjust prototypes of thenew institutions to reflect unanticipated or otherwise emergent needs

Conceiving of new roles in new school structures to permit basing teach-ing on the products and processes of inquiry rather than on teacher "perfor-mance" and custodial function will take development projects specificallygeared to that objective. Design specifications for such projects will need toattend to a number of intersecting features and dimensions

1. Teacher role. The notion that the teaching role should be guided byboth the processes and products of inquiry takes its primary focus from theproblem-solving and decision-making functions associated with instruction ascontrasted to the direct performance responsibilities of teaching. The focusshifts from delivering instruction to students (although that will always occupysome time and attention) to activities aimed at diagnosing learning needs,prescribing suitable self or other instructional strategies, and managing anddelivering the prescribed activities. It is important that the inquiry seek toachieve clarity on the rationale for the prescriptions derived from it. Fullexplication of rationale offers the best evidence of the quality and directionof professional reasoning. It also constitutes a vital starting point for second-and third-order analysis and diagnosis whenever initial prescriptions proveless effective than hoped.

2. Classification of children. We demonstrably know, through formalresearch, student evaluation, and the accumulated wisdom of practice, thatyoung people of the same age display dramatic differences in performanceand capacity. New schools must accommodate those differences far moreeffectively than does the current age-grade lockstep. This cannot be donewithout rethinking the current organization and sequencing of curriculum. Itcannot be done without considering the prospects of children of differentages working together, whether they display the same or different levels ofskill. Sociologists and practitioners alike know the tremendous power of peerinfluences, yet we need not be imprisoned by the view that peer means "sameage" when it could mean "same performance level " We could also enlargeour view to the idea that any child in a school is a peer of every other Realpossibilities exist, for example, for roles for older children in peer tutoringand other forms of instructional assistance.

3. Student role. As the roles of teachers alter, so must those of students.Design specifications must pick up on the active character of learning as apsychosocial process. If teachers no longer spend the bulk of their time"performing ' for students, then the passivity that characterizes student behav-ior in contemporary schools must give way to greater engagement on the partof students and greater individual responsibility for their own progress throughthe curriculum. At present, schools too often accept students' assumptionsabout their proper role in the school, and too often those assumptions are

72 Practitioner-Oriented Teacher Inquiry

Hendnkr D CGueoilse 73

antithetical either to learning or to a sense of identification with the school asa social organization As a result, students (especially adolescent students)often identify with the school in an adversarial way that creates "noise" ratherthan facilitating the school's purposes.

4. Uses of time Schools designed and structured to facilitate teacherinquiry would reflect different assumptions about the ways teachers spendtheir time. For example, teachers would be expected to plan, design, andevaluate instructional and learning activities to a far greater extent than theynow do and, therefore, to spend proportionally less time in direct instruction.By implication, greater portions of teacher time would be spent working withother adult professionals than is now the case and, therefore, proportionallyless with children.

Use of student time would also change, but the more dramatic shift wouldbe in the students' orientation to time as a parameter for their learning.Students would almost certainly come to assume greater responsibility forimplementing various learning prescriptions. This would be consistent withreducing thd emphasis on the teacher as the primary source of instructionand would entail accessing materials and making use of them either individ-ually or with other children in different-sized groups.

The shift in orientation would almost certainly be away from year-longor even quarter-long blocks of time to smaller, more discrete units corre-sponding to a continuous-progress conceptualization of the curriculum. AlbertShanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, speaks approvingly of the Boy Scouts' merit-badge approach as an alternative to the current"annualized" box within which schooling now finds itself.4 The point is simplythat when the age grade lockstep is finally abandoned, a far more flexiblesystem must be substituted, and that flexibility will be manifest, in part, bythinking of the units students orient themselves to in far smaller blocks oftime than the quarters and years of effort we think in terms of now.

5 Character of professional interactrons. Professional inquiry, espe-cially in the behavioral and social domain, is rarely an individual enterprise.Until now, however, teaching has been lust that. Schools that express an Inquiryorientation toward teaching, therefore, will necessarily look very different interms of their professional interactions.

Teachers will work together to identify individual and group learningproblems and aspirations and to devise strategies for addressing them. Suchcollaborative effort has many desirable features: It assures application ofmultiple perspectives; it provides for input by all those who have exposureto individual children, and it brings to bear different professional expertise(such as curriculum design, instruction, evaluation, subject-matter expertise,

'in a presentation to the Cincinnati Federation of TeachersJune 17, 198'

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74 Practitioner-Ortenled Teacber Inquay~

and knowledge of handicapping conditions) These interactive relationshipswould be consultative in character, and the end products of the work wouldfully reflect the shared responsibility for collectively defining and imple-menting standards that is the essence of what it means to be professional s

6. Authonry relationships. Any organization.requires carefully definedand widely understood authority relationships, and schools are no exceptionChanging operational assumptions, however, will necessitate changes In tra-ditional authority relationships.

Schools organized to permit teachers to engage in inquiry and then toact on the products of their inquiry (as well as that of others) would, in effect,be based on the assumption that the most important authority for professionalaction Is specialized knowledge-theoretical, practical, and responsive to thespecifics of immediate school and learner circumstances.

The authority relationships within traditional schools have always beenhighly ambiguous. Principals have been perceived as having high power andauthority within the school, but the "flatness" of schools as organizations andthe high degree of autonomy (authority?) that exists behind the closed doorof the classroom make for quite a different picture. Further complicating thatpicture, building administrators have often found themselves in adversarialrelationships with teachers, the obverse side of the coin is the low regardmany teachers have for the professional leadership skills and capacities of theadministrators with whom they serve.

As already suggested above, authority relationships in inquiry-based schoolswould be much more collegial, far less hierarchical. Major decisions wouldbe formulated by teams of teachers representing diverse professional func-tions, specializations, experience, and perspectives. The most major changesare likely to be worked on the principal's role, which becomes much moreexplicitly one of administrator, facilitator, and coordinator of the professionaldirection determined by teacher teams.

7. Physicalfacilities. The physical environment of schools will ultimatelyhave to change. Spaces conducive to the deliberations undertaken by teacherteams will need to be provided-if not individual offices, then workstationsthat fulfill many of the same purposes. The so-called "egg-crate" structureswill finally yield to buildings with variegated spaces, conducive to more fluidinstructional and learning arrangements, all centrally managed by computerand controlled to facilitate the work of the teaching teams. Finally, to symbolizethe importance of individual students and the expectation that the work oflearning is the principal obligation of each as a member of the school com-munity, provision should be made for individual, permanent workstations foreach student that students can, in effect, consider their "offices."

'Linda Darling Hammond, "Schools for Tomorros, s Teachers,' leachers College RECORD,88 (Spring 1987): 356

74 Practitioner-Oriented Teacher Inquiry

Hendnrk D Gideonse 75

The topics discussed above do not exhaust the implications for organi-zational change as a consequence of adopting an inquiry orientation. Anarticle-length treatment cannot hope to cover them all, to say nothing ofcovering each exhaustively. For example, I might have considered teachers'relationships to their multiple clients-children, parents, the school com-munity, and the larger society I might also have considered the hiring, development, and replacement of teachers, the technologies of teaching, and thecosts of the new schools, to list just a few more.

The point is that systematically designing new school organizations toaccommodate inquiry based teaching roles will require attention to man)concerns It is not a small project There will be no single approach. It is nota paper-and pencil exercise, but a major development effort in its own right.

Three comparisons may be helpful to indicate the scale of effort required.In the heyday of the first generation of large-scale NSF curriculum develop-ment, each project commanded multimillion dollar budgets (multiplied b) afactor of three for today's dollars) Second, the annual operating cost of theERIC information dissemination system is about $6 million. Finally, assuminga spare one half FTE faculty allocation to the Holmes project on each membercampus, wholly apart from membership fees and grants received, nearly$3 million will be dedicated to the Holmes Group project in its start-up year.

Developing the detailed specifications of schools suited to inquiry-basedteaching and creating full-scale models of their characteristics and functionswill take large project development efforts of at least equal scale. Given tightfederal budgets and the relatively narrow vision of those currently responsiblefor educational research and development at the federal level, support on thescale required is not likely to come from that source. On the other hand, nostate appears to be in a position to finance such projects. That leaves founda-tions or private enterprise as the only remaining potential sources of funding.So far as I know, no initiatives in that direction have been taken, but the factthat foundations have been willing to consider-and support-the beginningsof the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards suggests that theymight, indeed, be responsive to proposals for design projects to create newkinds of schools in which newly qualified and functoning teachers couldwork.

CONCLUDING COMMENT

An inquiry/decision-making orientation entails sweeping changes for theperformance of teachers, their working relationships with one another, andthe manner in which schools are organized and structured. The school daywill look different. The ways children present themselves to schools and whatthey do when they get there will be altered.

The purpose of such a conception of things is not the changeper se butthe promise such a conception offers for professionalizing teaching; that is,

Hendi-ik D Gideonse 75~~~~

to increase the stability, predictability, and performance of teachers. If weachieve that public goal, then we will also ultimately achieve our own personalaspirations, for in doing so, we will surely increase public trust and regard.All the benefits that go with them-status, attractiveness of the profession toever more capable candidates, economic reward, and intellectually stimulatingworking conditions-will then follow.6

HENDRIK D. GIDEONSE is University Professor, College of Education, 413 Teach-ers College, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 4522140002.

Vars, Gordon F. Inrerdisciplinary Teaching in the Middle Grades Why and HowColumbus, OH. National Middle School Association, 1987. 50pp $6 00

Vars examines the "whys and hows" of interdisciplinary teaching and describesseveral organizational approaches for the middle grades Correlation, fusion,and core-three basic means of interrelating different subject areas-are dis-cussed, and practical examples are given for each. Vars explains how ' contentcharting," "webbing," and "problems and issues" depend on the degree ofrestrictiveness placed on the curriculum Other topics addressed are classroomenvironment, student involvement, and evaluation Practitioners working incurriculum and supervisory areas will find the chapter on teacher guidanceespecially useful

-M Lee Manning

76 Pxactitioner Oriented Teadwr Inquiry76 Practitioner-Oriented Teacher Inquiry

'An important stimulus in the writing of this anicle was the discussion in late May 198' ofthe Center for Policy Research in Education's "Policy Forum on New Roles and ResponsibilitiesIn the Public Schools" While the particular tack taken in this article is the present author'sresponsibility, the day and a half dialogue with 15 other colleagues had a substantial formativeimpact and is gratefully acknowledged

Copyright © 1988 by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. All rights reserved.