Rachel Lotan's blog

Educating the world for 101 years and counting

Rachel Lotan — Thu, 03 May 2018 22:23:38 +0000

GSE faculty and alumnae reflect on the School of Education’s influence within Stanford and around the world

Stanford’s global reach owes greatly to scholars at the Graduate School of Education who have honed education’s power as change agent both here and around the globe, said a panel of GSE faculty and alumnae reflecting on critical moments in the school’s 100-year history.

Not only have GSE scholars seeded global research, policy and practice, but they also prototyped the interdisciplinary collaboration that is now a Stanford hallmark, panelists said at a March 13 event cosponsored by the Stanford Historical Society.

Education was a founding department when Stanford opened in 1891, and its elevation to a school a century ago expanded its mandate for service, said Dean Daniel Schwartz.

“We collaborate with all the other schools on campus. We reach out because education is important for every discipline,” Schwartz said.

In the post-World War II era, education faculty also shaped Stanford’s growing role in U.S. and global affairs, said Professor Daniel McFarland, who has studied the history of the school.

Professor Daniel McFarland's research delves into collaboration and social connection, whether among high-schoolers, business people or researchers at Stanford's BioX.
Sherry Tesler/LightFX Photo

Later, an influx of foundation money combined with civil rights activists’ drive for change furthered the school’s rise to eminence in social-science research, practitioner training, educational development and policy work, said McFarland, who moderated the discussion with Professor Martin Carnoy, Professor Emerita Rachel Lotan and alumna Rita Sanchez, former professor at San Diego State and professor emerita at Mesa College, San Diego.

“We’re a school at the crossroads of all these demands and concerns,” McFarland said. “We have humanities scholars, we have psychologists, we have social scientists. From era to era, they swing back and forth in terms of emphasis,” McFarland said.

Encountering this depth of talent, many GSE students find themselves on unexpected paths.

Lotan, MA ’81, PhD ’85, came to Stanford in 1980 as an international master’s student teaching English as a second language in Israel to students of diverse levels and backgrounds.

“Something really bugged me after 10 years of teaching,” Lotan said. “So I came here and learned not just how to un-track my classroom but why.”

She was one of many young scholars guided into an academic career by Professor Elizabeth Cohen, whose research helped change K-12 teaching by establishing the effectiveness of complex instruction.

Cohen also enriched the field by mentoring scholars of color, Lotan said.

Earning her PhD in 1985, Lotan co-led, then led, the Program for Complex Instruction that Cohen founded. From 1999 to 2014, she directed the Stanford Teacher Education Program.

Future STEP director Rachel Lotan and her mentor Professor Elizabeth Cohen at Lotan's PhD conferral in 1985.
Photo courtesy Rachel Lotan

Lotan said that as a student, and later as a faculty member, she was aware of a tension inherent in schools of education between scholarship and training but that, "for me, that tension was resolved in really beautiful ways.

“Is our job to do research and publish, in the tradition of the social-science disciplines? The answer is, ‘Yes, it is.’ Are we a professional school that prepares professionals? My answer is, ‘Yes, we are.’”

Sanchez, ’72, MA ’73 (STEP), MA ’74 (English), became a foundational Latina activist. Entering Stanford as a recently divorced mother of two, Sanchez said she had longed “to hole up in Escondido Village, read poetry and bake cookies.

“It wasn’t that way, because of what was happening on campus,” Sanchez said. “Every day you’d hear about something that needed to be changed.

“I noticed pretty soon that there was no Latin American literature in the curriculum we were teaching.”

While still a student, Sanchez developed and taught Stanford’s first course on Chicana studies and published its first Chicana journal.

Like today’s STEP students, Sanchez taught in local schools during the day and attended her School of Education classes at night: “grueling,” she said, “but amazing.

“My students in East San Jose were for the first time introduced to a brown teacher,” she said. “I took the students back home to Escondido Village. I took them to walks on campus, to Lake Lagunita, to anyplace I could that would help them see that they could have a different kind of life, that they, too, could go to college.

“It was so much a productive part of my [intellectual] growing up at Stanford that when students spoke up, people did listen and change did happen.”

Martin Carnoy, the Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford, helped to make the Stanford International Development Education Center a pathbreaker in interdisciplinary education research. He expects to hood his 100th PhD student in 2018-19.
Sherry Tesler/LightFX Photo

Carnoy, a labor economist, was hired in 1968 for the school’s Stanford International Development and Education Center (SIDEC). This pathbreaking cross-disciplinary graduate-level center was founded by Education Professor Paul Hanna to train “scholar-doers” to spread democratic values worldwide.

With its current successor program in International Comparative Education (ICE), it is the oldest extant program of its kind. Its graduates have founded or seeded at least 13 similar programs worldwide. Alumni also include the former heads of state of Peru, the Maldives and Guatemala.

“This is the real legacy of the GSE. The fact that we produce so many excellent teachers and policy people,” said Carnoy, who expects to hood his 100th PhD student in 2018-19.

Carnoy said Hanna, whose role also included fundraising for the university in Washington, played a key role in bringing an international perspective to Stanford.

“To go out and work as international students. Not just to populate Silicon Valley, but to go back out into the world, we do that probably more than any other department of the university.

“We’re making sure that that continues.”

Watch the video of the event.

-- Barbara Wilcox

Top photo, from left: Rita Sanchez, Daniel McFarland, Martin Carnoy and GSE Dean Daniel Schwartz. Sherry Tesler/LightFX Photo.

Equitable Classrooms: Where Policy Meets Practice

Rachel Lotan — Tue, 18 Oct 2016 22:34:47 +0000

Major contributions to the body of knowledge on the educational benefits of diverse schools and universities

We have a moral imperative to build equitable learning places to realize the intellectual, social, academic, and civic benefits of diverse schools for all students.

At Stanford University, we used sociological theories and research to design and evaluate interventions that promote equitable classrooms. Complex instruction is a theoretical research program based on robust sociological frameworks and solid empirical evidence. Well-known in the field of education, complex instruction is a pedagogical approach designed to create equitable learning opportunities and equitable outcomes for diverse populations by supporting equal-status interactions. When working with complex instruction, teachers purposefully and unceasingly plan for range and heterogeneity à priori rather than modifying or adjusting the curriculum and the instruction to “accommodate” diversity post hoc.

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, initiating a new approach to applied research in sociology and based on important value choices, Elizabeth Cohen conducted experimental tests of status characteristics and expectation states theory. She found that in four-member, mixed-race groups of adolescent boys engaged in an interactive task, race was associated with differences in rates of participation and measures of influence. White youngsters were more likely to have significantly higher ranks than African-American youngsters. Subsequently, in more complex field settings with more open interactions, Cohen and her graduate students documented the effects of race, ethnicity, gender, and perceived reading ability among mixed-status groups of school-aged children engaged in a collective task. They showed that through a process of generalization of high or low expectations for intellectual competence, status characteristics predict behavioral outcomes. Students with perceived high-status participate more often, are more engaged, and are more influential. Students with perceived low-status are much less so.

In the early 1980s, moving from the lab to heterogeneous classrooms, the Stanford team became concerned with specifying and testing the classroom conditions necessary to establish equal-status interactions among students from diverse racial, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds, varied levels of previous academic preparation and achievement, and social attractiveness.

Conceptualizing the classroom as a social system, we explored the interconnections between theories that explain classroom phenomena such as Bandura’s social learning theory, theories of classroom management based on the work of Perrow and Thompson, and the theory of evaluation and the exercise of authority articulated by Dornbusch and Scott. We developed methods of observation to test our theoretically-derived interventions. In close collaboration with practitioners, we honed and sharpened implementation in classrooms. Still mindful of applying theory in the development of concrete interventions, our work contributed to further refinement of theoretical propositions derived from expectation states theory.

We relied on organizational sociology to investigate central features of classrooms such as the role of the teacher in managing and orchestrating patterns of productive interactions among students, the nature of the learning tasks, and evaluation practices that promote deep learning. Because learning is a social activity and because on-task interactions promote learning, equal-status interactions among students engaged in collaborative problem-solving are essential. In other words, because perceived status predicts task-related participation in small learning groups and because participation predicts learning outcomes, we designed and tested Interventions to disrupt a status-order based on academic standing and social attractiveness, the two locally salient status characteristics in diverse classrooms. Two interventions were particularly effective in narrowing the participation gap by changing expectations for competence. First, we helped teachers to redefine and expand the definition of intellectual capacities needed to complete open-ended, problem-solving tasks. Second, we urged teachers to recognize publically the intellectually relevant contributions of perceived low-status students.

Weakening and often eliminating the effect of status differences on interactions in heterogeneous classrooms has important implications. With the intellectually challenging, multi-dimensional, open-ended learning tasks, the introduction of groupwork norms and roles, and the status interventions, it is possible to produce equal-status interaction. Raised expectations for intellectual competence are bringing about raised levels of participation of students perceived as low-status, without depressing the participation of high-status students. Furthermore, average learning gains increase when average rates of interaction and engagement increase, with the important added benefit of a narrowing the distribution of learning gains. Participation and engagement are not zero-sum game.

With the detracking movement in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, more secondary schools and teachers became interested in learning how to implement complex instruction in different subject areas at different grade levels. As we continued to offer professional development to teachers, we began to investigate the organizational conditions and arrangements necessary to support the fundamental change in instruction on a larger, school or district-wide scale. We applied and investigated a central organizational proposition that complex and intellectually demanding changes in the teachers’ work in the classroom will require parallel changes in the structural arrangements of the larger organization, i.e., the school. We found that soundly-based feedback to teachers, availability and coordination of curricular resources, an organizational climate of expectations, and administrative leadership were significantly related to the quality of the implementation of complex instruction.

The knowledge base of complex instruction and documentation of its implementation and educational outcomes encompass doctoral dissertations, journal articles, technical reports, and several books published in the US and in other countries. Scholars, educators, and maybe most importantly, teachers have gained confidence in the generalizability of the underlying principles of complex instruction, mainly due to their well-defined theoretical foundations and propositions repeatedly tested in vastly different contexts.

Theoretical and practical rationale for the research done

Academically, linguistically, socially, and culturally heterogeneous classrooms are a global phenomenon. The movement of people from one region to another, from racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically homogeneous places to cities, villages, and neighborhoods where people speak different languages, wear different clothes and eat different foods, celebrate different holidays, and keep different traditions has become ubiquitous and enduring.

Educational systems throughout the world are tasked with providing the youngsters of these multi-national and multi-cultural populations with genuine opportunities to learn, to achieve social and economic advancement, and to live safely as citizens with equal rights and responsibilities in democratic societies.

While the contexts differ, educators and scholars in the US and in other places share the proclaimed goal of the pedagogical approach known as complex instruction: equity in diverse classrooms and in diverse learning places. For example, in Hungary and in other Central and East European countries, schools with relatively high concentration of Roma students have adapted complex instruction to create classrooms that offer more equitable opportunities for all students to learn and to succeed. In New Zealand, commissioned by the Ministry of Education, Dr. Alton-Lee, author of a number of volumes describing best evidence syntheses on quality teaching for diverse students, found that the implementation of complex instruction resulted in significant effect sizes on achievement and higher order thinking, strengthened students’ social skills, reduced peer racism and bullying, and by supporting teacher inquiry reduced teacher stress. In the mid- to late 1990’s and early 2000’s, intensive research and teacher professional development were conducted under the auspices of the Institute for the Advancement of Social Integration in Schools at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. The Cooperative Learning in Intercultural Education Project (CLIP) that aimed at creating equitable and cooperative classrooms using complex instruction was conducted under the auspices of the European Union and participating institutions in Belgium, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

Complex instruction has traveled to near and far places. Its explicit theoretical principles and the invitation to test them under different contextual conditions have proven to be extraordinarily generative. Rather than imposing a requirement for fidelity of implementation -- the ban of many educational innovations, complex instruction welcomes further research and development, theoretical contributions, and practical innovations.

Future research

I am gratified and proud of the many documented benefits for students in complex instruction classrooms, and I remain interested in aspects of its dissemination and implementation in different settings. Some of the following questions are awaiting answers:

To what extent are theoretical principles continuing to guide and evaluate further developments and adaptations of complex instruction in different contexts?
What are the conditions that support complex instruction implementation in different contexts? How is research expanding, deepening, refining our knowledge base?
What policies lead to the introduction of complex instruction to diverse educational institutions and for what purpose?
What are the applications of complex instruction practices in higher education in general, and in the continuum of teacher education in particular?

Most importantly, we need to continue exploring how integration can and will benefit all students.

Rachel Lotan
Stanford University
September 2016

References

The Effects of Desegregation on Race Relations

Author(s): Elizabeth G. Cohen

Source: Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 39, No. 2, The Courts, Social Science, and School Desegregation: Part 2 (Spring, 1975), pp. 271-299

Published by: Duke University School of Law

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1191102

Joseph Berger, Susan J. Rosenholtz, and Morris Zelditch, Jr. 1980, Status organizing processes, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 6: 479-508, DOI: 10.1146/annurev.so.06.080180.002403

Cohen, Elizabeth and Rachel A. Lotan, 1995. Producing equal status interaction in heterogeneous classrooms, American Educational Research Journal, 32, (1), 99-120

doi: 10.3102/00028312032001099

Cohen, Elizabeth G. and Rachel A. Lotan, (Editors), 1997.Working for equity in heterogeneous classrooms: Sociological theory in action. New York: Teachers College Press

Cohen, E.G. and R. A. Lotan, 2014, Designing groupwork: Strategies for heterogeneous classrooms, 3^rd Edition, Teachers College Press, New York, NY