Organizing Policy Into Practice: Reactions to the Cases

(Mrs. Oublier and Carol Turner) are favorably disposed to several of the big ideas in the California math framework and are already teaching in a manner consistent with these ideas; two teachers (Cathy Swift and Joe Scott) maintain their traditional style of math teaching with some minor adaptations to ideas in the framework; and one teacher (Mark Black) has not responded at all to the new ideas. We also learn that three of the teachers have never seen "the" policy, as represented by the Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools, K-12 (California State Department of Education, 1985) or by Mathematics: Model Curriculum Guide (California State Department of Education, 1987). One teacher has seen the policy but openly disagrees with it, and in one case it is unclear. The materials teachers use also vary. Two teachers work out of a text entitled Math Their Way; one uses another text, Real Math; one works within a district-initiated instructional management system known as Achievement of Basic Skills (ABS) and uses a third text, the California edition of Mathematics Unlimited; and with the fifth teacher we are only told that he has a new math text. Responses to ideas in the Framework include use of manipulatives and groupwork, together with greater attention to multiple representations of mathematical relationships and to problem solving. New content, including estimation and probability, makes an appearance in a few classrooms. But even the most innovative teaching among these cases seems a far cry from the full vision projected by the policy. Here and there the outer forms of the reform are present, but nowhere is the inner intent realized. There is little reflective, exploratory discourse about mathematics, teachers continue to dominate the airwaves, groupwork does not promote mutual student engagement with complex problem-solving tasks, and the aims of instruction remain focused on supplying students with correct procedures for obtaining right answers. This may appear as a familiar tale about the trials and tribulations of implementation, particularly in the early stages of a change effort, but buried in these narratives is a success story about instructional policy. The policy, of course, is not the new math framework, but the direct instructional modelalso known as clinical teaching, ITIP, or the Madeline Hunter model-which is omnipresent in the teaching described here. In each of these cases, teachers work quite consciously from a set of instructional principles purportedly validated through research and disseminated successfully through inservice education. In light of the academy's generally gloomy view of translating new ideas (or policies) into practice, it seems quite remarkable that this model has spread so far, so fast. How ironic, then, that a brief moment's answer, supplied by science through policy,