Cultural Barriers for the Professional Development of African-American Teachers: A Sociocultural

Sociocultural models are a complex cognitive schema that are intersubjectively shared by the members of a social group. By examining intertwining sociocultural models of authority, child development, and classroom management within a community of African-American teachers in an urban, high poverty school, this study explains why teaching teachers “from the textbook” may accomplish little toward lasting change in the classroom. We entered our host school as professional development providers, aiming to help teachers improve their classroom management practices, which in turn would engender deeper engagement among their students. The teachers welcomed this learning opportunity, but we quickly discovered that they struggled to adopt the strategies we were advocating. Digging deeper, we found that the sociocultural models shaping teacher thinking and decision making in this community differed markedly from the assumptions in textbooks and research on classroom management. This led to a communication divide, between the university researchers, who were functioning from the models of teaching into which they had been socialized as academics, and the school-based teachers, who were functioning from sociocultural models based in their personal histories as children, students, parents, and teachers. Using grounded theory approach, we mapped participants’ shared models through an iterative process of in-vivo coding of transcripts from interviews and other program activities, followed by analysis of recurring relationships between co-occurring codes. Ultimately, we find it necessary to make the sociocultural models of both groups explicit and acknowledge the affordances and limitations of each model vis-à-vis the aim of providing a supportive and engaging classroom environment.