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This chapter reviews the rationale for implementing coaching as a key form of teacher professional development. It describes the impact of collaborative coaching and learning (CCL) on teaching and learning in Boston Public Schools (BPS) and considers the factors that affected whether and how the model was implemented in those settings. As Boston's schools worked to implement CCL, the factors that influenced their success include principal leadership, coach knowledge and skill, teachers' attitudes, knowledge, and skill. The factors also include the social context/climate of the school, school organization and size, and district support. The chapter elaborates these factors and discusses the ways in which adaptations to the CCL model, made in response to these factors, influenced the fidelity and quality of CCL implementation. Coaching, organized as CCL, holds out the promise of achieving this goal by fundamentally reforming teaching as a culture as well as a skilled practice.

Real Social Science presents a new, hands-on approach to social inquiry. The theoretical and methodological ideas behind the book, inspired by Aristotelian phronesis, represent an original perspective within the social sciences, and this volume gives readers for the first time a set of studies exemplifying what applied phronesis looks like in practice. The reflexive analysis of values and power gives new meaning to the impact of research on policy and practice. Real Social Science is a major step forward in a novel and thriving field of research. This book will benefit scholars, researchers and students who want to make a difference in practice, not just in the academy. Its message will make it essential reading for students and academics across the social sciences.

“The trouble is”, said Andrew spinning on his chair and poking me with the end of his pencil, “you still think of energy as caloric, don't you?” “Caloric?” I spluttered, puzzled and digging deep into the murky recesses of my knowledge of ancient chemical theories – phlogiston? No not phlogiston – caloric, desperate scramble to recall, “Isn't that some sort of stuff?” “Yes, energy as stuff flowing like ethereal water. That's why you are confused about fuel and energy – it's all caloric to you!” Properly trained chemist that he was, Andrew was right and here was I, a science curriculum developer, caught out in an embarrassing confusion about something central to the understanding of pretty well all science, I had been using an incorrect concept of energy for decades. But I had two lines of defence, one rather feeble, that I was a biologist and only ever learned enough chemistry to get by, and the other that endless educational research papers have shown that most students misunderstand most science most of the time, and too many of them never overcome the problem. I was clearly one of these unfortunates. But I had got on quite well because, to the extent that I needed ‘energy’ in biology, a caloric concept did a serviceable job. Was I as confused and partial in my understanding of everything? As far as I could tell: no. With theoretical concepts central to the science I was supposed to understand, genetics and evolution theory, for instance, I hoped my grasp of fundamentals was stronger. […]

INTRODUCTION Education, along with medical care, constitutes one of the most important components of social common capital and, as such, may require institutional arrangements substantially different from those for the standard economic activities that are generally pursued from the viewpoint of profit maximization and are subject to transactions on the market. Whereas medical care is provided for those who are not able to perform ordinary human functions because of impaired health or injuries, education is provided to help young people develop their human abilities, both innate and acquired, as fully as possible. Both activities play a crucial role in enabling every member of the society in question to maintain his or her human dignity and to enjoy basic human rights as fully as possible. If either medical care or education is subject to market transactions based merely on profit motives or falls under the bureaucratic control of state authorities, its effectiveness may be seriously impaired and the resulting distribution of real income may tend to become extremely unfair and unequal. Thus the economics of education and medical care may be better carefully analyzed within the theoretical framework of social common capital. In this chapter, we examine the role of education as social common capital within the analytical framework introduced in Chapter 2. EDUCATION AS SOCIAL COMMON CAPITAL We consider a society that consists of a finite number of individuals and two types of institutions: private firms that specialize in producing goods that are transacted on the market, on the one hand, and social institutions concerned with the provision of education as services of social common capital, on the other.

When I initially embarked on this chapter, I mentioned it to a well-known scholar of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. His response was “That is indeed a risky venture.” This attitude is probably fairly typical. The idea of a critical social science is, at best, unclear and, at worst, invested in a variety of outdated philosophical commitments of the early Frankfurt School. As Axel Honneth says in his contribution to this volume, many of the original ideas of this school seem, at least at first glance, to be “antiquated, dusty, and irretrievably lost.” Frankfurt School can be retrieved. My approach will be to take up the claim of the early Critical Theorists that they provided a philosophical basis for a systematic orientation to social science. To use more recent terminology, they imagined that their work constituted a “research program” or “research tradition” of a distinctive, critical sort. My argument is that this tradition can, when appropriately revised, constitute a defensible, critical social science. The necessary revisions come from two sources, one internal and the other external. The first is Habermas’s work after Knowledge and Human Interests , when he began developing the idea of communicative rationality as the ontological centerpiece of Critical Theory. It will hardly come as news to anyone to say that this turn constituted a substantial revision of the Frankfurt tradition. But what has not been adequately teased out is how this clear ontological modification impacts the possibility of a critical social science.

INTRODUCTION For the larger part of its history, those practising what they think of as a ‘sociology’ have not intended to be doing ‘science’, and have not been taken by others to be doing so. It is true that Auguste Comte, who coined the neologism in the 1830s, did so to distinguish a kind of social understanding that would be consonant with what he took to be the modern esprit , and called it ‘positive’. It is also true that nearly two hundred years later ‘sociology’ is commonly thought of as one of the ‘social sciences’. Comte’s programme for the reorganisation of all knowledge, however, had no direct intellectual descendants, and to think of ‘sociology’ in the twenty-first century as a ‘science’ is to accept a classification that is more institutional, or instrumental, than intellectual. It would nevertheless be wrong to suggest that there has never been any such aspiration. There has, and this was perhaps at its strongest at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even then, however, it was not pervasive. In Germany, the contemporary contrast was between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften , and although sociology might in practice have descended to empirical enquiry, and ordered the facts it discovered in the manner of what might be described as the administrative sciences, those who considered it in principle put it fairly firmly in the second of these two classes. In England and the United States, where the empirical impulse was stronger, the idiom in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may have been that of ‘evolution’, but this merely described the conviction, in the one, that there was some sort of progression from the simpler societies to the more complex, in the other, that what drove modernity was the pursuit of interest and the competition between interests, a conviction that soon found it convenient, in a culture that did not think of itself historically, to talk instead of ‘pragmatism’.

Making Social Science Matter presents an exciting new approach to social science, including theoretical argument, methodological guidelines, and examples of practical application. Why has social science failed in attempts to emulate natural science and produce normal theory? Bent Flyvbjerg argues that the strength of social science is in its rich, reflexive analysis of values and power, essential to the social and economic development of any society. Richly informed, powerfully argued, and clearly written, this book provides essential reading for all those in the social and behavioral sciences.

[T]he way to re-enchant the world … is to stick to the concrete. Richard Rorty After having explored in the previous two chapters the importance of power to a contemporary interpretation of phronesis and to social science, let us now begin to sum up the argument of the book by bringing together more explicitly what it might mean today to practice social science as phronesis . We will do this, firstly, by developing a set of methodological guidelines for phronetic social science in this chapter, and, secondly, by giving illustrations and examples of phronetic research in chapter ten. I would like to stress immediately that the methodological guidelines summarized below should not be seen as methodological imperatives; at most they are cautionary indicators of direction. Let me also mention that undoubtedly, there are ways of practicing phronetic social science other than those outlined here. The most important issue is not the individual methodology involved, even if methodological questions may have some significance. It is more important to get the result right, that is, arriving at a social science which effectively deals with public deliberation and praxis, rather than being stranded with a social science that vainly attempts to emulate natural science. As mentioned earlier, few researchers seem to have reflected explicitly on the strengths and weaknesses of social science practiced as episteme, techne , and phronesis , respectively.

Despite much debate, and much apprehension and cries of alarm from the scientific community, it appears to me that the basis [sic] outlines of the ‘social contract’ between science and government proposed in Bush's famous report to President Roosevelt, Science the Endless Frontier , have remained more or less intact, and are still broadly accepted by public and politicians. Reality has changed much less than rhetoric. True, there has been some intrusion of government into the management of the extramural scientific enterprise, but after many threatening draft regulations and bursts of threatening rhetoric in the Congress, the end result has not been much real change, certainly not as great as the alarmists feared. – Harvey Brooks (in Brooks and Schmitt 1985: 17) Introduction In Chapter 2, I located the social contract for science in the broad consensus among Vannevar Bush, his political allies, and his political opponents that although funding science was a public responsibility, maintaining the integrity and the productivity of the enterprise was to be left to the scientists alone. Contrary to the epigraph from physicist and science policy scholar Harvey Brooks, the outline of the social contract for science was not limited to Bush's report. Neither were all the major tenets of Science: The Endless Frontier part of that outline. But the social contract for science can serve, as Brooks suggests, as the basis for assessing change in the relationship between the political and scientific communities over time.