Half Way to Real Teacher-hood: Where I've Been

I suppose I've been neglecting this blog of late, but that's not to say that I've been doing any less reflecting on teaching, theory, practice, etc. (See the last three blog posts, which are final reflections for various classes I've been taking this semester). However, I wanted to take this opportunity to look back on the last semester, summarize what I've done in my placement, and think ahead to what I'll be asked to do starting in January.

The first lesson I taught was one meant to open a unit on the Enlightenment. I asked students to do something of a think-pair-share to brainstorm ideas they had about what the Enlightenment was, and what factors in American society led up to the Enlightenment. From this lesson, I can see the beginning of a pattern that later emerged in my teaching lab, when I planned lessons for my peers. I LOVE think-pair-share. Even without intending to, I've noticed that I frequently model a large portion of my lessons around this pattern. For those of you who don't know, think-pair-share activities involve students first thinking about the answer to a problem, a question, or knowledge they have about a subject, character, author, or book. They first think/write individually on the topic, then share what they've written with a partner or small group, then we have a whole-class discussion, that can either function as something of a debate/discussion, or might be a place to accumulate the knowledge of all groups and appropriate it as class knowledge. This sequence of activities seems really natural to me and, as I've said, frequently finds its way into my lesson plans.

That said, I need to also really focus on ensuring that this model fits my lesson well. For example, for the activity I did with students about the Enlightenment, it may not be the best model. I relied on student comfort and ease at recalling knowledge related to the Enlightenment without sufficiently front loading them--as the video I took of my enactment of the lesson makes clear, there were many students who weren't sure about what/when the Enlightenment actually was; I asked them to hypothesize what social forces might be at work during the Enlightenment based on what they'd read about the Puritans and what they knew about the founding fathers and the American Revolution, but I still feel there may have been a better way to familiarize students with Enlightenment thought (probably something like the activities I did to introduce Literary Criticism/critical lenses to students, which I'll get to shortly)

The next couple of lessons I taught were introducing and facilitating a paper students wrote around the idea of social contracts. Students had generally studied social contract theory and had examined the Declaration of Independence as an example of a social contract, which they had briefly contrasted with the social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. For this unit, I designed the writing prompts students used to compose their own social contracts. I (attempted to) differentiate(d) the prompts, so students had the option to engage more closely with the texts/thinkers we'd examined in class, write about their school community, or write about their own personal beliefs about society more creatively. I also was able to work with my MT to design a rubric, co-design a grammar lesson to help students enhance their writing quality and sentence complexity, and plan and enact a peer revision lesson in which I modeled the type of feedback we expected students to give one another and then gave them a clearly guided worksheet to help modeled after the rubric to focus their feedback on the aspects of the papers that would be graded for.

I felt really good about my involvement in this unit. I prepared students for the activity by asking them to imagine the types of protections, rights, and restrictions they felt were most important for the welfare of society and that they would enact if they were in charge of designing the social contract by which society was governed. Interestingly, though I intended this activity to be something of a process drama, it ended up falling into the think-pair-share model as well. I then introduced students to the three options that they had for their writing project.

From this unit, I learned that (at least in my estimation) I have a particular talent for designing and facilitating student writing projects. I had a lot of fun writing the prompts, working with my MT to design the rubric and working on student writing by introducing complex sentences and peer revision. I would love to work with student writing much more (and I'll get the chance to, since I'm in charge of students' research paper unit, which I'll describe in greater detail later). I feel like this is the area I'm most comfortable (probably due to my special proclivity for writing, and my experience at the Penn State writing center) and where I sense the most possibilities for creative instruction.

I did learn some things, though, that I think will inform my future writing instruction. I actually used this unit, and the peer revision lesson in particular, for my teaching writing class, where I showed a clip of my modeling activity (I modeled the type of feedback I expected to see students giving to one another with a paragraph I quickly wrote up and commented on) and got some feedback about how I could improve the lesson/unit/student writing generally. After spending some time thinking about it and the advice of my peers, I think I would expand the time I spent introducing the prompts to students, spending several minutes introducing each option and leaving plenty of time for student questions, and perhaps even assigning an exit ticket that asks students to write a summary of what they think they might write in response to the assignment, and asks them to write any questions they have about the assignment.

I would also check in with (formatively assess) students more frequently and more fully --for this unit, I checked in half way through the process to ensure they had a rough draft, but I only checked for completion, I didn't read over the drafts in enough detail, so some student responses to the prompt were off topic and didn't reflect the student learning re: social contracts that they were meant to. Furthermore, I want to work with student participation in peer revision sessions more, so that I can help students be better readers of each others' compositions; I want students to be able to catch a peer's off-topic paper before it's turned in, for instance, which didn't happen this time.

The final unit in which I participated heavily was one on critical lenses/literary criticism. I introduced students to the concept of literary criticism via a PowerPoint presentation, and then had students work in groups to jigsaw psychoanalytic literary theory and marxist literary theory, as applied to Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" and Emerson's "Self Reliance." The way it worked (for those of you who aren't familiar with jigsaw, especially) was that students were divided up into groups (2 groups in my smaller classes, 4 in my large class) and one group (or two, in the case of my large 8th period class) viewed and took notes on a presentation about marxist literary theory, then completed a worksheet that guided students through a marxist reading of "Civil Disobedience," in which students determined whether or not Thoreau's disobedience constituted a Marxist-style revolution. They viewed the presentation one day, took notes on the theory, and came up with the essential vocabulary and key tenants of the theory, and the next day they worked with their group members to go through the "Civil Disobedience" worksheet. The other group(s) viewed a presentation on psychoanalytic literary theory one day and completed a worksheet that guided them through a psychoanalytic reading of "Self Reliance," which asked the students to assign an aspect of Freud's model of personality (ego, superego, id) to the author of the text and use quotes from the text to justify their reading. Then, each student was paired up with a partner from another group, so that they taught their partner about their theory. In this way, students learned about one theory as part of a group, then were introduced to the other theory by a student from the other group, so all students were introduced to both theories.

In the end, I feel really good about this lesson; my expertise was valuable, because I went from group to group to field questions, clarify points about the theories, question students' readings of the texts they were dealing with, etc. However, students were the ones responsible for guiding their own learning. It was a really student-centered few lessons, and I feel like students worked much harder to understand the theories than they would have if they hadn't been responsible for teaching them to a peer later. I'd like to use jigsaw-like activities more in the future, and I'd like to keep using literary criticism, and introduce students to feminist, new historical, formalist, and post-colonial theories in the future as well, with similar types of activities. I was so impressed with the sophisticated readings of texts that the activities produced.

So I think, all in all, looking back on what I've done with my classes this semester, I've got some really strong material to work with for next semester. It promises to be really tough, though, because obviously I haven't been prepared for every type of lesson or assignment I might have to assign or teach, so, though I've learned a lot from where I've been, there's still a lot to think about with regard to where I'm headed this upcoming semester But, based on the sheer length of this entry, I'm going to save the details of my upcoming semester, ideas, challenges, and questions for another post. We'll see what the future holds; I'm nervous and terrified, but also excited and really looking forward to learning a lot!

Might the Fear of Teaching be the Beginning of (Teacherly) Wisdom?

Okay, so I've been thinking a lot about everything I've talked about and thought about so far, and what I've identified as my (perhaps trite and simplistic) understanding of my obstacles to becoming a worthwhile educator is fear.

I had a student this week say some things that made me afraid--not afraid for me, really, but for him, and for the other students in the class who interact with him. And this really drove home for me some of the real challenges I'm going to face as a teacher. But this isn't the extent of it.

Let me go over some of the fears I have, going into teaching:

1.) The fear of inadequacy. I'm sure we all feel this from time to time, whether we're student-teachers or veteran educators. But it's a paralyzing fear, nonetheless. Sometimes, when I'm planning a lesson I'll be presenting in my placement, I'm almost paralyzed with fear. Concerns run through my mind: Is this topic going to be relevant to students? Will it help them meet their educational goals, whatever those might be? Will it help them to become more critical consumers of the world around them? Is it pedagogically sound? Is it internally consistent? Will it be accessible to students--not over their heads, but not too simple for them, either? Will I be able to implement it well? Am I expert enough in the content to be able to field any questions students might have? Can I give directions clearly? Are my estimates of the instructional time for each activity close approximations? Am I going to be running out of time, especially if I have to take time to manage behavior issues? Will I even be effectively prepared to handle behavior issues at all?

2.) The fear of unethical or ideologically questionable motives. I often, for my own sake, try to articulate why I want to be a teacher, what kind of teacher I want to be, and why. And I come up with extensive lists--Because I love reading and writing and, as an adolescent, found them to empower me in a way that, probably, nothing else could have, and I want to share the power and connectedness of the written word with students; Because I'm concerned about social inequities that exist in our society and I want to make our nation's youth aware of them, in an effort to create a critical and responsible generation of citizens; Because I believe that an English classroom should be so much more than what it too often seems to be--a place to learn formulaic rules about language and composition that are often archaic and usually function as tools to keep some people in power and most people marginalized...I want to be the kind of teacher who pushes students, and demands a great deal from them, but who also appreciates their contexts and perspectives; the kind of teacher who wants to work with the "challenging" students, because they're too often marginalized and deserve to have their perspectives heard and understood; the kind of teacher who is passionate about every single skill set or text she teaches, and who wants to share that passion with students.

Of course, whether or not I'm the caliber of person necessary to become this type of educator, and whether or not my preservice year is preparing me for this goes back to the fear of inadequacy. But my fear here is that these motives, these goals, are just the ones I tell myself I have, and, in reality, I fell into teaching some other way and have simply justified it to myself. Perhaps I felt there was little else I was qualified to do with a B. A. in English, since the challenging life of the professional writer is fairly intimidating. Perhaps the idea of having summers off to pursue further education in English was a factor, too. It's so hard for me to tell what considerations came first. And is my desire to work with marginalized students, particularly those in low-SES urban settings a misplaced sense of superiority, like I'm some savior figure that can come in and save these unfortunate students? I struggle with this consideration, in particular, because of another fear.

3. The fear of too-high aspirations--though I don't know if that's really a good way of putting it. Is it right for me to (believe that I) want to teach to marginalized, struggling students? Or does my desire to do this type of work come from a belief that they need extra help, my help? For what? To become upwardly socially mobile? I don't think this is the goal of education, but is it not my students' (present and future) goal? If it is, shouldn't it be my goal? Or would saying something like "you need to learn to read and write well so you can go to college and get good jobs" (which is not what I believe, I don't think, but is perhaps what many students and parents, and certainly several educators and policy-makers might say) just de-value where the students come from? And can I even say that students "come from" a place, or does that generalize in a harmful way, and blind me to students' individual situations? In any case, what it comes down to is, am I aiming to work with "at risk" youth because I think they need my help? If so, isn't that a horrible, condescending thing to think? And won't that attitude, even on a subconscious level, make me a bad teacher? But what's the alternative? Teach students whose social status is more "like mine?" As if that's an option, ethically or just realistically? And how do I uncover prejudices I might have, combat them, and still function as a good educator? Can I even do this (see #1, the fear of inadequacy)

4. The fear of saying the wrong thing(s). This fear is closely related to #3. How do you show that you genuinely care about students, respect them as individuals--many of them as adults, care about their contexts and their perspectives, but still manage their behavior, ask them to do things that they don't necessarily care about or want to do, or that might be useless or even harmful to them? Should I be asking them to do things they don't see the value in? Is it my job to make them see the value in a task? What if they don't buy into my explanation of its importance? How do I create rigorous expectations for my students while still validating their literacies, experiences, and interests? How do I push back on students thoughts and statements without seeming confrontational or authoritative? And maybe the biggest challenge of all: how do I make my students successful students and citizens whilst simultaneously making them totally critical consumers of the world around them? How do I prepare them for PSSA's while still allowing them the space to challenge the test makers and the school administrators and the policy makers? How do I prepare them to enter the work force and negotiate job seeking skills while teaching them to interrogate the validity of corporate rhetoric or media images? If I do only one and neglect the other, I'll be doing my students and society a disservice. That's a lot of pressure, and those stakes seem pretty high to me.

This is just a beginning. I'm also afraid of living in an urban area, of dealing with the low pay and the tons of work that go with being a teacher. If I get a job in an urban school, I'm going, I know, to be terribly afraid every time I walk from the train station to the school, because of the neighborhood it's in. Right or wrong, I know I'll be afraid. And, supposing I get a job teaching high school english in Newark, for instance, and I walk in to a classroom of 25-35 on-level 10th or 11th grade students. I'm going to be afraid. No matter how much I tell myself to be confident, I know I'm going to start out being afraid. How can I manage a classroom like that? Will the students respect me? Will I come across as uppity, or worse? AM I uppity or worse? Can I teach those students effectively? Without being overwhelmed by the difference between their lives and mine--a difference that would be shocking based on the different setting alone? Will I make unfair assumptions? Will I say something really horrible and offensive to a student without realizing it? Will I get mugged on my way to the train station?

These are fears that I wish I didn't have, that I know might be based on a whole slew of factors, ranging from my own ignorance to seriously valid concerns. The hard part is drawing the lines to determine which fears are founded and which are unfounded. But regardless of all that, I think that I sort of came to a conclusion today: what's important isn't whether or not I have these fears--I can't control that. What's important is how I deal with them. Like I said, this might come across as trite and oversimplified, but as long as I acknowledge the fears I have, which I tried to do here, and press on, trying to do what I think it the best I can do in spite of my fears, I think I'm on ethical and responsible ground. And I know I'm going to mess up. Professor X has assured me that all research suggests I'll mess up over and over and over again my first year in particular. And that's REALLY hard to acknowledge, because students don't deserve to be impeded by their novice teachers' mess-ups. But there's no way around it. It's going to happen. All I can do is try to be real with myself and my peers about that, and learn as much as I can, and try as hard as I can. And I have to figure out how to balance different priorities, which will take time.

But anyways, I feel like now that I've named my fears (some of them) I have a little more power over the trajectory of my life and career. And I don't think being afraid makes me a bad teacher (at this point, teacher candidate). On the other hand, I think, to be paralyzed by fear, or to try to avoid certain settings, discussions, or experiences because I'm frightened, would kill me in the proverbial crib. Being an English teacher is risky business, and I'm realizing that, and hopefully learning to deal with that realization.

Where're we Headed?

Today, and this week, I've been troubled by questions about curriculum. And this is another one of those now-familiar tales of the disparity between what I'm learning at Pitt and what I'm seeing at my placement. Trying to negotiate this disparity is beginning to seem like an unavoidable but quite challenging center to my preservice teacher training.

Let me start with a brief discussion of what I'm learning at Pitt. It all sounds really great and reasonable and smart and consistent, and I think I really like it so far. As far as planning/curriculum, we're learning how to plan unity using backward design. Basically, the unit (perhaps even the course) is guided by an investigative question like "What is a nation?" or "What is/are the American dream(s)?" Thinking about that guiding question, you plan your summative assessment for the course/unit, and you plan activities and texts for engagement that will help students to investigate the question guiding the unit/course. Each lesson, too, has learning goals of its own that help students work towards the unit question, and formative assessments that work towards the summative assessment. (broadly and simply: formative=assessment as you go, summative=assessment when you're done, though they're perhaps significantly more complex than these simple definitions can account for). So you might use three texts that describe three different versions of the American dream, ask students to articulate/critique/discuss the representations as you go, then ask them to describe their idea of the American dream, in comparison with the representations in the text.

(I think you can also work on particular skills through the unit, too, like crafting persuasive writing, so you would incorporate different elements of persuasive writing into the activities you use for each text, maybe you'd stage a debate between characters from one+ texts, and then as a unit assessment, you'd ask students to persuade you (or each other, or someone else) that their American dream is somehow best. We haven't explicitly worked on this aspect of unit planning yet, but I suspect it might be coming)

According to my mentor teacher, what I'm doing at Pitt and what my placement school tries to do is called understanding by design, or backward planning. However, what my placement is doing is somewhat different. Their units, instead of being focused on guiding questions, are built around state standards that are selected to go along w/ each unit. Each grade has a standard curriculum that the departments developed in conjunction with the textbook, and they go through each of the state standards and select texts/textbook activities that address those standards and structure their units in this way. My mentor teacher explained that this type of unit planning is, indeed, "teaching to the test," but that because the school I'm placed in has failed to make annual yearly progress for so many consecutive years, she says that they have little option but to teach to the test, because students need to pass the test, and if they're not passing, teachers need to be able to demonstrate that they taught from a standards-based, aligned curriculum so that they cannot be held accountable for students' failure on the tests.

That's not to say that my Pitt classes don't ask us to incorporate PA state standards. Every lesson plan we do addresses at least one, usually more, state standards, but we don't plan "to the standards," we more like plan with the standards "in mind," addressing them as we address the strategies and the investigative questions we're trying to cover.

To be honest, attempting to negotiate these two perhaps-similar-but-significantly-different approaches to unit planning is fairly exhausting and stressful. I totally understand my mentor teacher's and my placement school's attitude, even though I really don't agree with it. In our accountability-obsessed educational climate, it's really easy to become focused on covering the broad range of topics on the test--teachers and administrators understand that their schools and their jobs depend on test scores, so naturally that's what ends up being emphasized. Even if a noble, self-sacrificing teacher were to say, "Forget the tests, I'm going to educate my students the best way I know how, and if I'm successful, they will be able to do well on the tests." She's not doing her students any favors if her lack of an "aligned" curriculum gets her fired when the school fails to make AYP, and she's not around to self-sacrifice for pedagogical ideals any more, anyways. So I see this in part as a real problem with standards-based assessment. My mentor teacher told me it comes down to a choice; "You either dig an inch deep and a mile wide and try and cover as many texts as possible and use all the strategies and standards, or you dig a mile deep and an inch wide and really deeply and richly investigate a few texts/standards." The suggestion was not only that the former was preferable, but that it was the school's only option in this educational climate.

My classes and professors at Pitt, I'm sure, would not want me to be discouraged in this way. They would ask me--I think--to construct curricular units that are inquiry-driven and student- (or learning-) centered, but that also addressed state standards as I went. And I know there are ways in which this is possible--we've seen them done, in the examples our theorists lay out for us. But many of the preservice teachers in my program, as well as the teachers I've interacted with at my placement, are stuck with pre-fabricated one-size-fits-all curricula that prescribe texts to use and skills to use with those texts and activities/resources that work to achieve those standards/skills. I know that even within the tightest curricula, there's room for modifying activities, texts, etc to account for unique groups of students etc, but I think that requires even more creativity than planning one's own unit does, because it requires a lot of delicate work and tremendous insight and knowledge. I don't know that I even feel prepared to create my own units--I'm not even half-way through the program, so I'm sure the skills will come, but the fact remains that, at this point, I can't imagine planning units that are effective and inquiry based and not prescriptive and restrictive--much less to preform the exponentially more challenging task of trying to fit a pre-fabricated unit to fit my needs and, most importantly, the needs of my very different students.

This challenge, which I'll certainly have to face in the future as an entry-level teacher, says nothing of the challenge I currently face. How do I fit my lessons into my mentor teacher's curriculum? She simply doesn't use a lot of the strategies Pitt is asking me to use; can I ask her to when we're co-planning lessons? Or would that be totally an imposition on the unit she's designing with a very particular and calculated goal in mind? Will the shape of the class totally change when I "take over" in the Spring? Is that fair to the students, who will suffer from whip lash, being jostled from a class structured based on one pedagogical approach to one with a seemingly totally different approach? Will it adversely affect the school, or my mentor teacher, by robbing them of their overtly and explicitly "aligned curriculum?" I'm already running into issues, because the couple of small activities that I've conducted that, in my classroom, would be the foundation for building a unity, have been basically treated as tangents, footnotes, asides from the class, which is taught totally differently. Already, after only a couple of lessons, there's a disconnect between "her" classroom and "my" classroom (which, obviously, is still her classroom, but is also, in a way, Pitt's classroom, because Pitt is the institution telling me what to do/implement at my placement). Are the students already suffering? How much will they suffer over the course of the year?

I'm really at a loss about this. Even planning a unit based on a guiding question seems potentially overly-limiting to me, so planning within a prescribed curriculum seems that much more limiting and frustrating, and being asked to modify that prescribed curriculum to meet the standards Pitt is setting for a high-leverage-practice-based classroom is even that much more challenging. What do I do? I feel like I have no authority over ANY of these competing forces, so how do I work them all together for my good as a developing teacher and for her/my students' good?

Super challenging stuff that I am REALLY struggling with! Would LOVE feedback on these issues!

What's a Student-Teacher Even Supposed to Be!?

Related to my post about last week's observations and how I fit in in my district, this week, I taught my first lesson (and breathed a HUGE sigh of relief once I'd actually done it!) and it got me seriously thinking about what my role is as a student teacher, and weather it's really right?

Hopefully, again, this doesn't come across as a negative statement about my Pitt program. I LOVE it, even though it can be SUPER overwhelming at times. But I do have a hard time figuring out exactly what my function in my placement is really supposed to be. In short, who am I supposed to be when I'm there?

I know that, as a student-teacher, I'm some kind of weird hybrid of student-teacher-expert-novice-observer-observ-ee(probably not a word, but I mean it as the object of the observation of others)-critic-criticized-the-list-could-go-on! But what exactly does that mean for the many people interacting with me? In particular, what is my responsibility, and my mentor teacher's responsibility, to our students?

So I taught my first lesson, as I said, this Wednesday the 21st. And I felt like a failure after the first time I presented it. I was sure I'd been unclear, and that students had not understood the purpose.

I'll outline what my activity/lesson was, to give some context. My assignment from Pitt was to co-plan a lesson with a group of my peers that we could each use in our placements as a device for building literacy community/ies in our classrooms. (A literacy community refers, in my understanding, to a community of readers/writers/learners whose literacy practices and knowledge can inform one anothers' learning). My group came up with what we called a kite activity, because the idea behind it was to go from individual knowledge, to the knowledge of 2-3 peers in small groups, to the knowledge of a whole class, that could then be assimilated by all the individuals in the class.

My class was starting a new unit on the Enlightenment, and I wanted to implement the lesson so that students could learn to see one another as resources, and see how much knowledge could be constructed by working with their peers. Using a wonderful target-shaped graphic organizer from Jim Burke's Tools for Thought, I had them brainstorm one or two pieces of knowledge they had about the Enlightenment as it occurred in the US--be they ideas that were popular, trends, people who were alive/in power/writing at the time, etc. (they placed their ideas in the smallest, central circle of the target on the organizer). Then they got together in pairs or small groups, shared their knowledge, and worked on making possible connections to fill up the second-largest circle on the organizer. Then the pairs/groups "shared out" to the whole class, and we filled out the largest circle in the graphic organizer together. I then asked students what they perceived the purpose of the activity to be, explained that it was to see how much more knowledge they could develop as a community than on their own, and asked them to reflect on weather it had been effective, what they'd learned, and any other feedback they had.

Students completed the task successfully, but I didn't quite see the synthesis of ideas I'd hoped for, nor did I see students really, fully understanding how they had constructed a narrative that they could use to inform their readings from the Enlightenment period. I felt I'd failed.

My mentor teacher and supervisor both praised me, though. They reminded me that I could improve, obviously, but that I had done well, connected with students, been effective, etc.

My question, though, is this: Certainly, if I'd been an experienced teacher, I wouldn't have failed to notice the girl with her hand raised for several seconds. I would have given clearer directions, and explained the purpose of the activity more clearly. In general, students would have learned more--so why am I allowed to be in the classroom with students without the experience necessary to avoid those mistakes?

I know the answer, practically--how can I learn not to make the mistakes without the practice in a real classroom? But is it fair to the students, when I make rookie mistakes that perhaps prevent students from becoming motivated and engaging, or prevent them from asking questions for fear that they will look silly if I'm not answering them quickly enough, or when my lack of clarity about an activity prevents students from gaining anything purposeful from it?

Should my mentor, a veteran teacher, be stepping in every time I make a mistake, or could be doing better, or neglect something? Certainly, with that much support, I wouldn't be able to establish myself as an authority in the classroom, so how would I be able to develop professionally? But is it fair to the students? They're there to learn, not to help me to learn. They're not getting paid to educate me, but they're being expected to do just that.

I know that what I'm taking away from these questions is that I have to give it my all, I can't afford to make careless errors with the attitude that, "I'm new, I'll get it eventually," because, unfortunately, I'm my students' only chance to learn the ideas and material that I'm presenting. I have to be prepared, I have to try and anticipate as much as possible. And I have to try and think like a veteran teacher as much as possible.

But I wouldn't be a STUDENT-teacher if I could totally inhabit the role of a vet teacher. So I have to know that I will be making mistakes--probably TONS of them--and that my students may, at times, be wronged by my mistakes. How can I accept that, though? What level of leniency can I allow myself without short-changing the students? I know I'm being hard on myself (and probably on all student-teachers) but from students' and their parents' perspectives, these are the questions--perhaps the only questions--that really matter about teacher training programs, so I feel I'd be irresponsible not to at least think about them.

Wouldn't it be easier if teachers could all be perfect?

I know, this is perhaps unreasonable, but in other ways, it's totally important and relevant and it's a HUGE concern for me right now. What can/should I expect myself to be able to do for my students, who are also, since I'm a student, too, my teachers? How do other preservice, or vet teachers, feel about this? HELP!

Seeing Lots of Teachers!

Wow! Only 3 weeks into keeping this blog, and I'm already playing catch up for last week! I'll put up two posts today to cover my last two days at my placement, and, from now on, I'll be sure to stay on schedule as much as humanly possible!

So, for my observation on 14 September 2011:

This observation was a really nice opportunity for me to observe a range of teachers. When I say "a range," I mean I was able to observe teachers with a wide variety of teaching styles and pedagogies, teaching to a wide variety of grade- and presumed ability-levels. This experience really got me thinking about how we define "good" teachers--and "good" students, for that matter.

What was interesting to me was that, regardless of grade level, teacher, or students' perceived ability level, instructional strategies didn't vary greatly. True, teachers had severe or mild strategies for behavior/classroom management, spoke with varying tones of voices, referred to students in different ways, covered different activities and different texts. But, for all of that, the dominant pedagogy remained, at least from my vantage point, roughly the same. Perhaps the subtle differences I saw were more significant, and reflected really significant philosophical differences. I'm not saying by any means that my perception is perfect. But, it seemed to me that the school culture is one that I've yet to fully understand. I want to preface this by saying that not every single teacher I observed today fits this characterization equally, or to a great degree at all. But it seems to be a trend that I'm trying to understand.

To me, students are meaning makers, and they should be working really hard in school--maybe close to as hard as the teachers--to understand their readings on a really deep level, to understand how composing helps them to make meaning out of texts in their lives, etc. But it seemed to me that the teachers at my placement think a little bit differently. I haven't interviewed them about their pedagogies--perhaps that would be a good project to undertake--so I hope I'm not mischaracterizing them here. But it seems that they perceive English to be a static subject that one can obtain knowledge of through an understanding of literary devices and prescribed composition structures such as the five paragraph essay. And this could be a valid pedagogy--it's not one that I find very useful for me, and it's not one that my graduate program seems to promote, but it's certainly--again, as I perceive things--a dominant model in many schools, perhaps due in part to NCLB and policies emphasizing standards and accountability.

But this leads me, too, to question my perception. My placement has a curriculum that was decided upon at the beginning of the school year, and all teachers in the specific grade level must follow the curriculum. Perhaps this accounts for the prescriptiveness of many teachers methods.

My question, then, is what am I doing? What I envisioned today to be about, for me, is finding where I fit in a spectrum of teacher identities. I don't think I found it. I did find people whose demeanors are similar to mine, but none who I could tell from the lessons I observed thought like I do.

Does this mean that all the stuff I'm learning, that I find so compelling right now, is unattainable pie-in-the-sky ivory tower theory that has no practical applications? I've read studies that seem to say that this isn't the case, but that seems to be what I'm seeing, so what do I trust? The empirical observations I'm making and the things I hear teachers saying at my placement--and at the placements where my peers are student-teaching as well? Or the data and research I'm getting from my classes, that I want to believe in but that, based on what I'm actually seeing in the "real world" seems like there has to be something they're not telling us. For example, in a school where the curriculum is prescribed, is there any teacher autonomy? If not, why am I learning how to make choices about unit planning and text choices? On the off chance that I get into one of these "magic schools" that people write about these strategies working in?

I'm not trying to be cynical or pessimistic here. Quite the contrary! I'm super hopeful about developing my "praxis." But I'm struggling about how I'm supposed to be doing that in a classroom that's not my own, with a curriculum that some text book developer made up in an office somewhere, with no knowledge of my school district or my mentor teacher or my students or me.

And what about teachers who have lost hope? I've seen them, and I've heard of them, too. They look at the work we're doing at Pitt and call it "the new educational trend that will be replaced in five years by something else." They stick with the material they've been teaching and the materials they've been using because they feel its proven itself. Should I believe that to be true? That a "tried and true" approach/curriculum/writing format can exist? Should I be challenging that? How? When? Now, as a student-teacher? When I get my own classroom? Not until I have tenure? And what if I do find out, in five years, that I've been doing it "wrong" all along, even though I feel its been working for my students?

The teachers I'm talking about care about their students, and their students' test scores, college prospects, futures. I get the sense that they worry that experimenting with new strategies that they're not familiar with, and might not be good at, is a detriment to their students education, because students become guinea pigs, in a sense, having the effectiveness of a new strategy tested on them. And what if the theory WAS wrong on this one, for this student/class/school? So I understand their adherence to standard, test-prep focused curriculum, even if I'm learning alternatives that make much more sense to me, and I think will be more effective and help students more.

How do I negotiate this? And re: all the questions I just asked about when it's okay to try and shake things up a bit? Do I just hope for a job at a progressive school? Or does that defeat the purpose entirely, because then MY particular knowledge/training won't be required to help those students?

I hope it doesn't seem like I'm putting other teachers, with other pedagogies, down in any way. Like I said, I totally understand the pressures on them from all directions to do things in a certain way. But I'm afraid. I think I'm afraid that there's no place in my placement, and perhaps in today's US education system, for the teacher I think I'm becoming. What should I do?

I'd really REALLY love some feedback on this question from anyone with ideas, or anyone who is feeling some of the same things. Thanks so much for reading this one!