ABSTRACT
Throughout the spring semester of 1997, I studied a ninth-grade English class as part of a larger research project on classroom authority and academic involvement. Within the first several weeks of observing Ms. Goodman’s “Perspectives in Literature” class, I saw how perplexed and frustrated the teacher became as her feelings of success at winning students’ consent and promoting their academic engagement turned into a sense of failure as she realized these same students were not meeting her expectations. She had spoken during our first interview about how pleased she was with students’ “incredible growth” as they appeared to be taking more responsibility for completing assigned work without too much prompting. A month later, in our second interview, my question about goals for learning sparked a long, emotional response about poor grades and students’ lack of willingness to fulfill her demands. Ms. Goodman believed her efforts had actually helped students to succeed, but her calculation of the report card grades revealed that students had
not been doing their assignments. She reinterpreted the engagement she perceived as “a semblance that they’re doing what they’re supposed to but they’re really not.” The semblance, she went on to explain, was “really good learned behavior about what it means to be, what it looks like to be a student.”
