Dewey's theory that education should be linked to students' real-world experience (1897) is often cited and not infrequently valorized in the professional literature. But veteran teachers have long known that real-world classroom experience rarely rises to a level at which instructors face meaningful choices regarding theory or praxis. As reported in the popular press and documented in various ways in the literature, classroom dynamics in modern public education can sometimes be less a matter of learning facilitation and experientially relevant instruction than monitoring the quality of interactions between teacher and students on one hand or student peers on the other (Lago-Delello, 1998; McDaniel, 1994; Cotton, 1990; NCES, 1998), accommodating the special needs of various student constituencies deemed to be at risk for everything from low self-esteem to consciousness of social and civic inequity based on gender, language, ethnicity, and/or culture (Wentzel, 1991; Wang, Haertel, & Walberg, 1990; Gillespie, 1999), and policing what the methods prescriptions refer to as ground rules of lesson civility (McDaniel, 1994; Chan & Treacy, 1996)--all while coping with the mandate to meet academic goals measured by standardized tests (Bracey, 1998; Snowman & Biehler, 2003; Weinstein, 2002).
Virtually every aspect of classroom dynamics cited here is a matter of dispute, not to say controversy, in the popular and professional literature. Additionally, as an influential instructional theory has it, the teacher is meant to be "reflective," or capable of looking retrospectively at classroom sessions and asking what happened, why, what it means, and what the implications are for future work (Snowman & Biehler, 2003, pp. 520-23). Perhaps it is small wonder that one readily observable feature of classroom dynamics is that, by the time they are ready to graduate from secondary school, relatively few students are truly motivated to learn and achieve. ...