This chapter summarizes evidence from Chapters 2 through 5 that organizational conditions in urban schools facilitate both single- and double-loop learning amongst K-12 teachers about their students’ lived experiences as racial and cultural minorities in American society. To recall, single-loop learning involves problem-solving without reflection on the assumptions, beliefs, and values that drove initial errors in the first place, while double-loop learning requires that individuals and organizations engage in critical reflection on how their espoused theories differ from their theories-in-use (Argyris, Reference Argyris2002). Within organizations, the latter also requires that individuals work together to overcome various challenges that exacerbate misalignment between the organization’s theories of action and theories-in-use (Argyris, Reference Argyris1982; Reference Argyris1985; Argyris and Schön, Reference Argyris and Schön1996). Though it is clear from information on previous rungs of the ladder of inference we have explored that double-loop learning conditions are challenging to cultivate in urban schools, there is evidence that preconditions for both types of learning exist in urban teacher communities.
Single-Loop Learning in the Literature Reviewed: Teacher Values and Actions That Thwart K-12 Urban Teachers’ Cultural Learning at Work
In the case of urban teachers, single-loop learning is a single feedback loop that justifies students’ academic challenges and failures using accountability-based standards and deficit-oriented cultural assumptions. In this section, I review evidence from the previous five chapters that the action strategies K-12 urban teachers use to manage cultural differences between themselves and their students represent Model I behavioral worlds characterized by defensive norms, defensive intergroup relations and group dynamics, little freedom of choice and risk-taking, and low internal commitment. Model I behavioral worlds – shared by individuals who espouse Model I theories-in-use – ultimately perpetuate single-loop learning cycles among urban teachers.
Defensive Norms
Many novice urban teachers enter the profession with just a societal curriculum on urban cultures - which often exposes them to negative stereotypes and other misrepresentations of people in urban neighborhoods - and limited experience directly engaging with LIMCCs for extended periods of time. Groups of teachers with limited experiences living in LIMCCs prior to joining the profession may unconsciously rely on their ignorance as justification for perpetuating the deficit narrative that people in these communities are naturally disadvantaged by the circumstance of their cultural origins. Defensive norms are established when urban teachers make the cognitive step from simply observing cultural differences between themselves to seeing those cultural differences through deficit lenses. The process of learning deficit explanations for student behavior and performance in urban schools has been described as an “act of domination,” by which white teachers and teachers from middle-to-upper class backgrounds unconsciously seek to affirm their positional superiority in relation to low-income and other minoritized cultural communities.
Consequently, even when urban teachers who are white or from more affluent backgrounds espouse normative commitments to the work of urban teaching, they are seen as representative of a dominant culture that marginalizes students’ cultural worldviews and perspectives to the point of their complete exclusion in the classroom. The propagation of dominant cultural competence further exacerbates defensive norms between students and their teachers, as does the existence of a hidden curriculum that implies students in urban schools must forfeit or trade in their own forms of cultural capital for those that can help them succeed in more Western and Eurocentric cultures. Defensive norms are evident in the hostile racial climates many urban teachers share, in which both white teachers and teachers of color may experience fear and anxiety that they will be made to defend themselves against cultural assumptions the other has about their own social identity groups. They are also implied where urban teachers work to avoid sharing emotions or otherwise being vulnerable with their colleagues for fear of not meeting expectations assigned to their roles.
Low Freedom of Choice
From the very start of their careers, urban teachers are socialized into school cultures that assess instructor effectiveness by their abilities to generate high test scores more so than their capacities for culturally responsive approaches to teaching and classroom management. Urban teachers are taught to maintain order and control over student behavior as a primary classroom management strategy towards the superordinate goal of producing valued student outcomes in terms of the accountability-oriented standards tied to their job evaluations. Consequently, ideas about what constitutes a “win” or a “loss” at work in urban schools are defined by the extent to which teachers are able to meet external performance standards tied to students’ test scores. These narrow conceptualizations imply that providing culturally responsive care and pedagogy is outside the teacher’s formal role responsibilities, and they provide support for the notion that the teacher’s primary responsibility is to support students’ integration of academic cultural norms into their own worldviews as a strategy for increasing their college preparedness and readiness to enter the workforce by graduation.
In seeking to minimize their losses – or those instances in which they can be held personally accountable for student failures to meet accountability-oriented standards – urban teachers seem to experience a sort of learned helplessness whereby they are more likely to attribute student failures to their natural dispositions than to question whether their learned understandings of students’ cultural perspectives are accurate or complete. The human capital challenge persists because urban schoolteacher qualifications do not require that teachers be trained to engage in critical reflection on their own or others’ cultural worldviews – even though research suggests that these skills increase teachers’ individual and organizational effectiveness in urban schools. Instead, many urban teachers learn to believe that students’ academic dispositions are culturally determined long before they get to school – which permits urban teachers to evade responsibility for challenging school cultures that disadvantage students from low-income and other minoritized cultural communities by treating their cultural differences as inconvenient at best and unimportant at worst.
Thus, urban teachers of all backgrounds experience the double bind of being both unprepared to enact culturally responsive strategies on their own and finding that there are few to no opportunities for them to engage in critical self-reflection on how their own cultural perspectives influence their work. Even urban teachers with the best intentions for developing constructive student–teacher relationships can struggle to translate the limited theory they learn for developing culturally responsive pedagogy and care strategies into effective practices for urban classrooms. This is exacerbated by the reality that urban teachers are frequently exposed to managerialist and technical discourses on how to improve their practice through teacher education and preparation programs, but have little to no opportunity for challenging the pervasive influence of deficit discourses and positional superiority in common approaches to developing student–teacher and parent–teacher relationships in urban schools. Low freedom of choice as to which cultural knowledge bases to reference and integrate into their own practice can make it difficult for urban teachers to develop self-efficacy or maintain a sense of individual effectiveness at work.
Low Internal Commitment
In Chapter 2 I reviewed several factors in urban teachers’ workplace environments that can compromise their commitment to teaching specifically in urban school organizations, most notably their experiences of intra-sender and intra-role conflict. Urban teachers’ psychological experiences at work are key influences on how they interpret their “fit” to the demands of urban teaching, and research suggests that fit is harder to achieve where teachers perceive that they do not have adequate social supports in the workplace, that there are too few opportunities for coaching and mentoring from more experienced colleagues, and that they often feel alienated from their colleagues. These interpersonal stressors are exacerbated by institutional pressures to “teach to the test” – especially for those with affective and normative commitments to urban teaching. Navigating competing conceptualizations of what constitutes good urban teaching (intra-sender role conflict) without the social and psychological supports to put their professional learning to use in practice diminishes urban teachers’ internal commitment over time.
Low internal commitment in urban teachers is also facilitated by governing values associated with single-loop learning in the Model I master program – specifically those that prioritize rationality and minimize displays of negative emotionality. Teachers learn to adopt these values through their experiences with practice shock in the encounter phases of their organizational socialization into urban schools, during which many first notice that their own emotions about their work are largely suppressed beneath the weight of multiple and conflicting demands on their roles. Forced to ignore their own emotions at work and estranged from their initial commitments to urban teaching, teachers engage ideologies like colorblindness, powerblindness, and the myth of meritocracy to maintain psychological distance from their students’ problems and focus on what they can control in the classroom instead. Coerced into prioritizing accountability-based standards over their students’ general well-being, urban teachers may resent being forced to comply with the reproduction of dominant cultural norms in their schools that ultimately disadvantage students from low-income and other minoritized cultural communities. Working to suppress one’s emotions for the sake of maintaining organizational efficiency takes a toll that ultimately diminishes teacher commitment to staying in urban school contexts over time.
Risk Avoidance
In this review, risk avoidance was evident in the research on how urban teachers learn to avoid assuming responsibility for student failures among their colleagues, by focusing on meeting curricular and instructional goals rather than cultivating knowledge for themselves of how students’ cultural worldviews influence their behavior and performance within it. Even when aware of the limits of their cross-cultural understandings, teachers use fancy footwork to avoid directly engaging with students’ parents, families, and cultural communities. Fancy footwork is also evident in the use of terms “suburban” and “urban” as euphemisms for racialized subgroups, as well as the observation that some urban teachers choose to avoid conversations about race in the classroom or with colleagues altogether. One could argue that fancy footwork is also at play where urban teachers are taught through organizational socialization to focus on technical and managerialist approaches to urban teaching, rather than to develop their relational perspectives to their student’s cultural perspectives and worldviews.
Though it is natural that urban teachers would seek to protect their positions in high-stakes workplace environments, an important consequence of low risk-taking is that when urban teachers are restricted in their abilities to challenge counterproductive norms in their workplace environment research suggests they will shift the blame for student failures to other people rather than explore their own complicity in operationalizing faulty organizational theories of action. Shifting blame serves the purpose of reinforcing deficit assumptions about students, their parents, and their cultural communities as earlier discussed. A second consequence of low risk-taking is that teachers become so preoccupied with the demands made on their time in accountability-oriented school cultures that they simply do not have time to find workarounds for integrating students’ cultural knowledge into their curriculum and pedagogy – especially when doing so could be considered taking time away from teaching to the standardized tests. Low-risk taking also maintains the undiscussability of counterproductive norms such that urban teachers learn quickly that challenging others they perceive to be acting incorrectly in public can lead to alienation from their colleagues.
Argyris’s seminal research on action science makes clear Model I and Model II orientations are not mutually exclusive – and this was clear in the literature reviewed as well. As the review was limited in scope, there are no conclusive answers as to whether urban teachers use single- or double-loop learning more than the other, but there was some evidence that – as Argyris argued – urban teachers experience both types of learning at work, and that each is useful for its own respective purpose.
Double-Loop Learning in the Literature Reviewed: Psychological Supports for K-12 Teachers’ Cultural Learning at Work
Double-loop learning keeps an organization responsive to threats in its external environment, and is focused on acquiring the knowledge required to respond to both opportunities and threats in the external environment more effectively. In the case of urban teachers managing cultural differences between themselves and their students, double-loop learning occurs where they detect the ways in which their own cultural assumptions operate as lenses through which they view their roles at work, and act to modify theories-in-use that are misaligned with organizational theories of action that purport to provide quality education for all students regardless of their backgrounds. Next I summarize evidence from the literature reviewed that the action strategies K-12 urban teachers use to manage cultural differences between themselves and their students facilitate behavioral worlds characterized by minimally defensive intergroup relations and group dynamics, high freedom of choice and risk-taking, and high internal commitment.
Learning-Oriented Norms and Minimally Defensive Interpersonal Relations
Learning-oriented norms in this context inform an urban teacher’s openness to learning from students, their parents, and their community members through direct inquiry about their cultural experiences and perspectives. Maintaining these norms requires that urban teachers commit to supporting their students by developing a “critical consciousness of the sociopolitical and hegemonic factors that work against [students of color]” (Matthews, Reference Matthews2020, p. 534). Otherwise, minimally defensive interpersonal relations are evident in the strategies some urban teachers use to reduce relational distance between themselves and their students as they are able, including the use of critical and asset-based pedagogies to highlight issues of social justice and multiculturalism, inquiring of and building upon students’ cultural perspectives in class discussions, and providing examples of role models from students’ cultural communities. These relational dynamics are established as K-12 teachers become intentional in their efforts to integrate the forms of cultural knowledge students bring to school with them into their curricular and instructional choices, and to cultivate the empathic concern that is critical for the development of positive classroom environments that support students’ socioemotional well-being in urban school.
High Freedom of Choice
Through there was substantially more research about how urban teachers experience restrictions on their agency at work in the literature reviewed, there was some evidence that they find reprieve in actions taken to work around organizational roadblocks when implementing culturally responsive teaching and classroom management strategies. For example, even if they lack shared frames of reference and common language for interpreting problems of practice with teacher colleagues, urban teachers can choose to “go rogue” by using discretionary decisions in their classrooms to support cultural and linguistic pluralism in the classroom. However, we have seen that supporting students’ cultural identities in the classroom is a risky choice to make in urban school environments that otherwise pressure teachers to prioritize accountability to external standards over accountability to students directly. Urban teachers are unable to take such risks in their work without fear of interpersonal, social, or professional consequences.
High Internal Commitment and Risk-Taking
Urban teachers experience feelings of high internal commitment when they are able to design situations or encounters in which they can claim high personal causation and experience a sense of self-efficacy through their abilities to meet students’ culturally specific needs in the classroom. In this review, high internal commitment is demonstrated in research on how teachers use strategies like information extraction, racial noticing, and individuating to go out of their way in establishing personal rapport with the student. It is also evident in the action strategies teachers use to develop successful parent–teacher partnerships, specifically when they work to earn the trust of students’ parents and caregivers or partner with them to produce desired student outcomes. High internal commitment also enables urban teachers of color or who are from the same neighborhoods as their students to persist in utilizing their cultural and linguistic capital in their teaching even when colleagues show resentment for the professional advantages teachers from LIMCCs experience being from the same communities as their students in urban schools.
From this summary it is clear that teachers experience limited opportunity to engage in double-loop learning at work for many reasons related to both organizational and intrapsychic constraints in the urban school environment that are beyond their control. Urban teachers can push back against dominant cultural norms by defining shared frames of reference for identifying common challenges, creating spaces in which they can express divergent views, brainstorm, test, and adjust their strategies, and developing support networks for sharing instructional resources and professional knowledge. What remains unresolved is whether teachers can feasibly engage in the work of double-loop learning amid organizational conditions that are not conducive to teacher action strategies that challenge the school organization’s theory of action. In the next chapter I discuss implications of the literature reviewed in terms of three types of cultural learning urban teachers experience at work, which I argue depend on their capacities for engaging in inferential thinking about student–teacher cultural differences.
