Teaching in Context: The Social Side of Education Reform

Teaching in Context provides new evidence from a range of leading scholars showing that teachers become more effective when they work in organizations that support them in comprehensive and coordinated ways. The studies featured in the book suggest an alternative approach to enhancing teacher quality: creating conditions and school structures that facilitate the transmission and sharing of knowledge among teachers, allowing teachers to work together effectively, and capitalizing on what we know about how educators learn and improve. The studies also show how social dynamics influence the speed, depth, and success with which any new idea is implemented, and how policies enacted without adequate consideration of their impact on the social fabric of schools can produce unintended negative consequences.
 
Policies aimed at improving teaching should focus on strengthening the organization as a whole so that all teachers are likely to improve. The chapters in this book point to the need to reevaluate current policies for assessing and ensuring teacher effectiveness, and establish the foundation for a more thoughtful, research-informed approach.
 

Esther Quintero is a senior fellow at the Albert Shanker Institute, where she conducts and synthesizes research that can inform education issues such as equity, systemwide reform, and improving the teaching profession. Specifically, she focuses on understanding schools as organizations, social capital as a lever for educational improvement, and the sociology of the classroom. In July 2014 Quintero launched the Social Side of Education, a research campaign and blog series focusing on the social and relational aspects of improving teaching where established and emerging scholars (and, increasingly, practitioners) share their research and expertise in accessible ways. She is also coinvestigator in an Institute of Education Sciences–funded project that will develop an instrument to capture rich evidence of teachers’ professional activity and the contexts in which it occurs. Other areas of interest to Quintero include social inequality, the sociology of gender and race, and group processes. She holds a BA from the University of Seville (Spain) and a PhD in sociology from Cornell University.