Experience Counts, Theory Doesn't: How Teachers Talk About Their Work

This article analyzes the ways in which and extent to which teachers draw on their own personal classroom experiences when making collective educational decisions. It is based on transcribed tape recordings of a series of curriculum decision-making meetings among the staff of an English 9-13 middle school and on interviews with the staff concerned. It is noted that there is an absence of references to nonclassroom experience in staff discussions but that this phenomenon is not repeated in the interview setting, where teachers often accord much greater weight to their experience as parents and so on. Thus, the exclusion of nonclassroom experience from discussions reveals not so much a neglect or unawareness of other perspectives but a shared cultural valuation of classroom experience to the exclusion of virtually all other kinds of experience. The article then concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the outcomes of curriculum decision making andfor possible policy options.