What is my vision of how MRTs can contribute to the improvement of education in the next decade?  What are their distinctive features and advantages?  Nightmares?

My response to these questions reflects the work I’ve done in the past decade (more actually), much of it with Lee Shulman, to make teaching a more shared, collective, collaborative enterprise.  On the one hand, I’ve been struck by how few habits of exchange exist among teachers.  I recall a workshop I conducted on a college campus where participants were asked to bring and share syllabi; most of the room confessed that they had never, ever, looked at anyone else’s syllabus, nor shown anyone else their own.  On the other hand, there was great excitement about having a chance to talk about their teaching, learn about what others do in the classroom, examine student work together….So, my first answer is that MRTs speak to a felt need among at least some teachers, that they tap into an opportunity. 

My second answer (on the “distinctive features” front) is that the promise of MRTs, as a vehicle for sharing and exchange, lies in the fact that they are (in contrast to the many lists of best practices and guiding principles) concrete, embodied, contextual, personally engaging.  It’s one thing to know that students need to be actively engaged; it’s quite another to see what that looks like in a classroom like mine, where students are reading a piece of literature that I also teach. 

Nightmares?  That may be too strong a word but I’ve been mulling about the downside of concreteness.  My most direct experience with the making and use of MRTs is in Carnegie’s program with California community colleges, in which we’ve worked with faculty to create what we’re calling “Windows on Learning.”  They’re packed with good stuff: information about the context, course goals, videos of classroom interactions, materials and step-by-step processes others can borrow and adapt, statements by the teacher about the pedagogical thinking behind the practice, examples of student work and analysis of what it tells us, videotaped think alouds, links to other helpful sites, research literature…But it turns out to be not so easy to engage with all this richness and concreteness, or to extract useful implications, practices, understandings.  I do not mean to suggest that the sites are not being used or found useful.  We have had numerous reports from the sites’ authors about responses they have received from others who have viewed and sites.  But it’s not easy, not automatically useful. 

In the mid-90s Lee Shulman and I were directing a project on the peer review of teaching, one vehicle for which was what we called “course portfolios.”  At a conference session featuring three folks who were developing prototypes of these portfolios, one of them said, “it’s like writing a short story before the genre had been invented.”  One question for our meeting, I think, is about progress on defining the possible genres for  MRTs.  Having a clearer sense of this will be helpful both for the design and building of the things and for their reading and use.