On one of the social media platforms I visit, there was a set of threads recently on the science of reading and three-cuing, a now-disdained prompt for early readers having difficulty with a word. As I understand it, three-cuing is a set of three prompts to guess the word. I’m not a fan of encouraging students to flail, so I’m not all that disappointed that this is now discouraged. But the discourse around it suggests that the vast majority of elementary teachers were using three-cuing in the first part of this century, and that it was destroying the teaching of reading.

There’s nothing but anecdotal evidence I’ve seen about the extent of three-cuing, and so I’m not sure how seriously to take the claim of its near-universal use. Surveys of instructional practices tend to be self-reported and related to specific research projects, not mapping out what teachers are doing in detail nationwide. But that is also true for almost every instructional technique in history: we don’t really know how widespread any instructional approach was. The best we can do is to know if there’s evidence it did exist in a time period and some evidence about the geographic and other dimensions of extent. I think of Barbara Finkelstein (1989) and Larry Cuban (1993) as the historians who have tackled century-long sweeps in teacher practices (Finkelstein for the 19^th, Cuban for the 20^th), and while their language is not the same as mine, that’s roughly the nature of their claims.

There is a different way of talking about school practices that have enormous stability, and that’s the term “grammar of schooling,” coined by David Tyack and colleagues (Tyack & Cuban, 1995; Tyack & Tobin, 1994). That term refers to any practice that has had enough of a feedback mechanism that a broad set of the population defines school in part by that practice. A good example is grading; giving students A-F grades is a sufficiently well-rooted practice that any school that attempts variation often faces resistance from both parents and teachers, even if the variation is only for the youngest students. But the concept of grammar of schooling is usually applied to structural elements of practice, not instructional details.

Perhaps more importantly, historians (and many others) need a way to describe instructional practices that were neither uniform nor random. In any era, it’s likely that most teaching falls within a limited set of practices, if for no other reason than the conservative nature of schooling across generations, or what Lortie (1975) called the apprenticeship of observation. Cuban focuses on what he sees as a teacher-centered versus student-centered spectrum. I think one could also describe categories of practices rather than dimensions.

But regardless of how one wants to lump practice, there is a useful term to describe this state of affairs without uniformity but with patterns: repertoire. Charles Tilly (1993) wrote the best definition that I have seen in social history:

The word repertoire identifies a limited set of routines that are learned, shared, and acted out through a relatively deliberate process of choice. Repertoires are learned cultural creations, but they do not descend from abstract philosophy or take shape as a result of political propaganda; they emerge from struggle. (p. 264)

In the hands of Tilly, speaking about repertoires of contention and civil strife, he finished the second sentence as “they emerge from struggle.” But we can think about historical repertoires as referring to many types of social patterns. A repertoire would thus be a common set of activities and norms that overlap without necessarily being tightly bounded or without variation. We can use the concept of the repertoire of school practices to examine the shifting set of overlapping practices that (have) had some foothold for years or decades. We can productively ask six questions about any part of the repertoire of practice, or rather any specific practice:

1. What were the boundaries of the practice in time and place?
2. What was the practice? Not quantitatively, in all likelihood, but what is the evidence of who engaged in such practices, who were the recipient/audience/target/respondent of them, and what the context was? (This includes evidence of changes in the practice during its use.)
3. What were the alternative practices within that span?
4. What is the evidence of overlap between practice and other features of schooling: what else was an important development in education that was related in some way to the practice in question?
5. What were the enablements and barriers to these practices? That includes what changes allowed the rise or heralded the end of a common practice, but also more mundane questions of what was necessary for a practice, and what made it more difficult?
6. What were the meanings of the practice, for those who engaged in it and those who were the recipient/audience/target/respondent?

Because of the loosely-defined nature of many historical schooling practices, the questions that we can feasibly answer are somewhat limited in scope. These questions are mostly descriptive, but they might help us understand something about instructional practice when the details are missing.

References

Cuban, L. (1993). How teachers taught: Constancy and change in American classrooms, 1890-1990 (2^nd ed.). Teachers College Press.

Finkelstein, B. (1989). Governing the young: Teacher behavior in popular primary schools in nineteenth-century United States. Falmer Press.

Lortie, Dan C. (1975). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. University of Chicago Press.

Tilly, C. (1993). Contentious repertoires in Great Britain, 1758-1834. Social Science History, 17(2), 253–280. https://doi.org/10.2307/1171282

Tyack, D. B., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Harvard University Press.

Tyack, D., & Tobin, W. (1994). The “grammar” of schooling: Why has it been so hard to change? American Educational Research Journal, 31(3), 453–479. https://doi.org/10.2307/1163222