After many years teaching high school social studies and then university graduate students, I documented the history of teaching. In this research and writing, I have struggled with a dilemma peculiar to being a researcher/practitioner. I prize teaching and respect K-12 teachers for the daily work they do. I also prize the value of researchers describing and analyzing classroom lessons as objectively as they can and then making judgments about change and stability in teaching practices. Those values came in conflict, however, when I researched and wrote about teacher use of high-tech devices in lessons.

Over the years, I have interviewed many teachers across the country who have described their district leaders buying computers, deploying them in classrooms while providing professional development. These teachers have told me that using computers, Smart Boards, and other devices have altered their teaching significantly. They listed changes they have made such as Powerpoint presentations and students doing Internet searches in class. They told me about using email with students and parents. Teachers using Smart Boards said they can check immediately if students understand a math or science concept through their voting on the correct answer.

I then watched many of these teachers teach their lessons. Most teachers used devices that they described in their interviews. Yet I was puzzled by their claim that using these devices had substantially altered how they taught. Policymaker decisions to buy and deploy high-tech devices was supposed to shift dominant ways of traditional teaching to student-centered approaches. That is not what I encountered in classrooms.

I am not the first researcher to have met teachers who claimed substantial changes in their teaching in response to district or state policies. Consider David K. Cohen’s classic article: “A Revolution in One Classroom: The Case of Mrs. Oublier.”

In the mid-1980s, California policymakers adopted a new elementary math curriculum intended to have students acquire a deep understanding of math concepts rather than memorizing rules and seeking the “right” answer. The state provided staff development to help elementary teachers implement the new curriculum. Then, researchers started observing teachers using the new math curriculum.

One of these researchers, Michigan State University professor David K.Cohen, observed one third grade teacher Mrs. Oublier (a pseudonym) to see to what degree Mrs. O had embraced the innovative math teaching the state sought. Widely respected in her school as a first-rate math teacher, Mrs. O told the researcher that she had “revolutionized” her teaching. She was delighted with the new math text, used manipulatives to teach concepts, organized students desks into clusters of four and five, and had student participate in discussions. Yet Cohen saw her use paper straws, beans, and paper clips for traditional classroom tasks. She used small groups, not for students to collaborate in solving math problems, but to call on individuals to give answers to textbook questions. She used hand clapping and choral chants—as the textbook and others suggested—in traditional ways to get correct answers. To the researcher, she had grafted innovative practices onto her traditional ways of teaching math and, in doing so, had missed the heart and soul of state curriculum policies.

How can Mrs. O and teachers I have interviewed tell researchers that they had changed their teaching yet classroom observations of these very same teachers revealed familiar patterns of teaching? The answer depends on what each person means by “change” and who judges the size and direction of the change: the researcher or the teacher?

Change in classroom practices clearly meant one thing to teachers and another to researchers. Teachers had, indeed, made a cascade of incremental changes in their daily lessons. Researchers, however, keeping in mind what policymakers intended, looked for fundamental changes in teaching. In the case of Mrs. O—from memorizing rules and getting the correct answer to focusing on conceptually understanding math. Or in this case, getting teachers to shift from traditional to non-traditional instruction in seating arrangements, lesson activities, teacher-talk, use of projects, etc. Mrs. O saw substantial incremental “changes,” while the researcher saw little fundamental “change.”

Researchers, however, publish their studies in professional and mainstream media. Teachers like Mrs. O seldom tell their side of the story. Yet teachers’ perceptions of change have to be respected and voiced because they have indeed altered their practices incrementally and as most practitioners know (lawyers, doctors, accountants) that is no easy task. How, then, can a researcher honor teachers’ incremental changes while pointing out few shifts in fundamental patterns of teaching?

Whose judgment about change in classroom practice, then, matters most? Should researchers “consider changes in teachers’ work from the perspective of new policies….[or intentions of policymakers]? Or should they be considered from the teachers’ vantage point? “(p.312). I believe both the teacher’s and policymakers’ perspectives count when documenting what occurred in classroom lessons and reporting what has happened in lessons. It is not an either/or choice.