NEW FACULTY

Cynthia Coburn

Cynthia Coburn’s ideas about how education policies are implemented came out of dramatic experiences she had while researching her dissertation in Bay Area elementary schools. The schools were all following the same state policy directive to adopt new reading textbooks. The responses of informal groups of teachers couldn’t have been more different.

“In one school,” she said, “a group of teachers found the new textbook completely inappropriate for teaching students to read and they outright rejected the text. ”

In the same school, though, another group of teachers responded in their own way: “The second group liked to teach thematically, and they picked stories from the new text that fit the themes they had already planned to use, chosing stories out of order from the text.”
But that wasn’t all. “A third group in another school adopted the new textbook and followed the curriculum in sequence, as school policy directed.”

That experience shaped Coburn’s thinking about how school leaders need to be sensitive to teacher dynamics while working toward reform. The experience also shapes her teaching in the School’s programs for district-level administrators and for school leaders.

“Policy-making doesn’t just happen up top,” Coburn said. “It’s a multilevel process that gets reshaped and reformulated at multiple layers of the system as policies get implemented.”
For Coburn this means that school leaders need to understand informal teacher networks and the leading role they play. “School administrators need to think strategically about how to use informal networks for teacher learning. I saw principals put together task forces to implement reforms, and where those teams included someone from each of the school’s informal teacher networks, the policy got implemented more effectively. When the principal wasn’t aware of those networks or didn’t make use of them, the new policy ran aground.”

Coburn’s interest in the dynamics of public education stems from her childhood in Philadelphia. “My parents had a huge commitment to public education,” she said. “My mother was a special education teacher in the public schools, and I attended public schools. I emerged from that experience with a fierce pride in public education, but troubled by issues of inequality.”

Right after college Coburn took on a major responsibility for a new graduate. She ran a resource center for the non-profit National Coalition of Advocates for Students in Boston. The resource center provided support for schools faced with populations of new immigrants. “I was struck by the discrepancies between the policies I heard discussed at one kind of meeting I was attending, and the realities I was seeing in the schools.”

This disconnect made her think about doing graduate work in education. “I saw research as a lens to understand schools in a deeper and more complex way, as a way to inform policy-making. My interest is in policy that is more grounded in the real work of teachers and real conditions in schools.” Her approach to research is also based in the grassroots: “I don’t go into schools knowing what I’m going to find. I go into schools to learn.”

Coburn did her doctoral work at Stanford and then went back to Pennsylvania to teach at the University of Pittsburgh before accepting an assistant professorship at Berkeley.
She’s excited about starting at Cal. “I see Berkeley as strong in the area of policy,” she said. “There’s a group of colleagues I can learn a lot from. And there are dynamic students who care about the same issues I care about.”

This summer she begins teaching in the Joint Doctoral Program for Leadership in Education Equity, the School’s program for district-level administrators. “I’m excited about the program,” she said. “It’s an enormously ambitious effort to meet a real need. There’s no better way to bridge the gap between research and practice than to work with practitioners in the field.”

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