RUNNING HEAD: Reflective Thinking

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Reports of Research and Reflection

Reflective Thinking: The Essence of Professional Development

Margaret EganCollege of Mount Saint Vincent

Abstract

This article discusses the processes and challenges of enabling preservice teachers to develop their ability to reflect meaningfully on their teaching performance as it relates to their ongoing professional development. It reviews previous and contemporary definitions of reflection. From this perspective some differing approaches to the reflective process in preservice teachers are reviewed—those more typically external and/or reactive and those that stem more from one’s inner core. Korthagen’s extensive work on the reflective process is summarized and his emphasis on Core Reflection is carefully considered and presented for implementation.

Introduction

During the past 20 or more years there has been consistent emphasis on the utilization of reflective writing—journals, essays, portfolios—as a form of documentation of progress in the professional development of preservice teachers. Serious thinking, sometimes marred with frustration, led to the realization that we cannot help preservice teachers craft any authentic evidence of growth or any insightful product unless we first help them begin to develop the art of reflective thinking. Hence, the purpose of this article is to examine the different approaches to facilitating reflection and to consider the various ways that teacher educators can assist genuine reflective thinking in preservice teachers. Essentially, we are exploring some key questions: What is reflective thinking and how does one actually help develop reflective thinking in preservice teachers?

There are many who in their versatile and practical works have offered us much encouragement in our task of developing reflective thought. Posner (2000) warns, “If you merely ‘do’ your field experience without thinking deeply about it, if you merely allow your experiences to wash over you without savoring and examining them for their significance, then your growth will be severely limited” (p. 22). Kilbane and Milman (2003) advise that reflection should occur throughout the entire process of one’s professional development. Beattie (2007) encourages the use of the Circle of Inquiry—from Experience to Reflection to Interpretation to Application—to help foster continuous professional development. In a similar vein, Kronowitz (2008) clearly and extensively explains that it is never too early to begin reflecting on one’s teaching performance. Foster, Walker, and Song (2007) give considerable emphasis to the art of reflection as they describe the process as the need to “dig beneath the surface observations to uncover possible explanations for what happened” (p. 34). Thus, reflection must give evidence of disposition as well as ability—key elements in the teaching process. Barrett’s (2007, Electronic Portfolios.org) extensive work with the development of electronic portfolios gives unequivocal testimony to the necessity of formative reflective assessment in preparation for the summative product—in this case the electronic portfolio that speaks to the professional development and competence of the individual. While Barrett’s emphasis is on the portfolio as an electronic masterpiece, she cites reflection as one of the key pedagogical requirements for development: “An electronic portfolio without reflection is just a multimedia presentation, a fancy electronic resume, a web page, or a digital scrapbook. The power of reflection turns our COLLECTIONS into EVIDENCE of our learning…” (Barrett, Reflections, 2003).

In his work on understanding and assessing the reflective thinking processes of preservice teachers, Lee (2005) defines reflective thinking as a developmental process that encompasses three levels or depths of reflection. He describes Level 1 as the Recall level in which the preservice teacher merely describes the teaching situation in which he finds himself. For example, the preservice teacher might report that as he was teaching his lesson, the students were rowdy. Level 2 is the Rationalization level in which the preservice teacher tries to find relationships or reasons for situations. Here, the preservice teacher might reflect that student rowdiness was caused by the upcoming holiday or by his own inability to organize his materials. At Level 3, the Reflectivity level, the preservice teacher views the situation with the resolve to adjust his practice in subsequent situations. His reflection can include comments such as “Next time I will provide more interesting activities that are more challenging and less flavored with drill and routine.”

LePage, Darling-Hammond, Akar, Gutierrez, Jenkins-Gunn, and Rosebrock (2005) claim that those who practice reflectively can readily move beyond the trial-and-error stage to systematic teaching performance. Furthermore, they note that those who are disposed to reflection are less likely to blame parents or children for lack of progress in learning. Rather, these reflective practitioners have a stronger tendency to engage in critical self-analysis to modify and adapt their strategies.

Deliberation upon reflection would be severely lacking if we did not draw inspiration from John Dewey (1933) who insisted that reflective thinking must be an educational aim. There is no choice. Dewey noted that we need to change action that could be merely self-seeking, blind, and impulsive into action that is intelligent—action that is more “in the virtue of thought” (p. 18). Needless to say, one would hope not to find self-seeking, blind, and impulsive action within the teaching profession (or any profession). Regrettably, such unreflective patterns of behavior can develop. That is why we must help preservice teachers cultivate good habits of reflecting appropriately, consistently, and effectively from the very beginning of their professional development.

Unanimous agreement among the writers reviewed points to the necessity of reflection in all aspects of professional development. Unfortunately, good, purposeful reflection does not come easily. And so, before documenting growth in teaching, one must first have the reflective content that makes the documentation authentic. The journal, essay, portfolio or discussion, of itself, does not ensure reflection. To put it glibly, there is reflection and then there is high-quality reflection. Before there is reflective content, there must be a person who is learning to think broadly and deeply on all aspects of his or her ongoing professional development. When this has been accomplished, or at least well begun, then the journal, essay, portfolio, or any piece of writing or any in-depth discussion will become the means through which the preservice teacher will be able to express more viably the evidence of external and, equally as important, internal growth as a teacher.

Theoretical Considerations about Reflective Teaching

First, we must ask ourselves how we define reflection. Korthagen (2001) warns us that we will not find unanimity regarding the definition of reflection. Lee (2005) sees reflection as a systematic analysis of an event (or problem) that can be characterized according to content (the main concerns of the thinker regarding a particular situation) and depth (the way the thinker develops the reflection process in relation to that situation). After drawing upon the definitions offered by others, Kilbane and Milman (2003) describe reflection as “taking time to think and contemplate metacognitively about teaching practice” (p. 63). Wolf (2006) explains reflection as a thoughtful analysis and reporting of one’s philosophy and teaching experiences. Dewey (1933) defined reflection as a “better way of thinking” that consists of “turning a subject over in the mind and giving it serious and consecutive consideration” (p. 3). This “better way of thinking” he refers to as “reflective thinking” (p. 3). In this article, as we discuss the quintessence of reflection, we prefer to use Dewey’s simplistically accurate terminology that says it all—“reflective thinking” or “reflection.”

Second, we realize that in this discussion we will probably not be able fully to explain clearly how one can actually teach reflective thinking. We can only discuss ways to help preservice teachers cultivate a reflective attitude or way of life. Fortunately, we are dealing with a non-controversial issue regarding the necessity of reflective thinking which leaves us with the

luxury of concentrating on the basic issue of how we actually help develop reflective thinking in preservice teachers.

Let us return to Dewey (1993) to review what is really essential. When we are working with preservice teachers (or any teachers for that matter), we must begin with the basics. Dewey noted there are certain attitudes that one must have to engage in worthwhile thought. These attitudes or dispositions are open-mindedness, whole-heartedness, and responsibility. He defined open-mindedness as freedom from prejudice and any other negative qualities that “close the mind and make it unwilling to consider new problems and entertain new ideas” (p. 30). The causes of this “mental sluggishness” (p. 30) could be self-absorption, fear, lack of knowledge, or any of a host of related factors.

Whole-heartedness, according to Dewey (1933), is absorption in the task at hand, the task of becoming a competent, caring teacher. Without this whole-heartedness, one’s focus is divided or distracted and one cannot give full single-minded devotion to the situation of issue. Dewey noted that when one is fully absorbed, then one is carried with the task. Questions arise; challenges are welcomed; energy is spontaneous. Today, we might describe this positivism as motivation, creativity, devotion—a true sense of professionalism.

Dewey (1933) defines the third quality, responsibility, as more of a moral trait than an intellectual asset. One who is intellectually responsible has fully considered the consequences of one’s professed goals. If one desires to be a good teacher, there will be commitment to the tasks required to attain that goal. There will be a focus, a habit of thoroughness and preparation. There will be no short cuts to professional competence. These three attitudes that Dewey has defined are essential to a strong sense of mission without which a preservice teacher cannot be successful. Getting in touch with one’s personal qualities of open-mindedness, whole-heartedness, and responsibility helps one define that personal mission, the identification of which is a crucial component of the reflection process.

If we are to continue with this article in the exploration of ways to foster reflective thinking, we can do so only with the assumption that these three requisite dispositions—open-mindedness, wholeheartedness, and responsibility are present within the preservice teacher. These are the dispositions that can drive the preservice teacher to fulfill a personal mission to strive for excellence in professional development. The habit of sustained reflection will help the preservice teacher focus on that mission. It is the teacher educators who must consider how they will inspire and support this ongoing practice of reflection. For the most part, reflection does not occur spontaneously. Dewey (1933) suggested that to develop habits of reflective thinking, we must have a method by which we can provide conditions that nurture reflection. Korthagen and Vasalos (2005) claim that structured reflection is a necessary component of ongoing professional development and behavior.

Perhaps we can draw a simple parallel here. When we “teach reading,” we usually follow a method, although not one method for all. We try to foster thinking skills in children. We know that we cannot say to a child, “read and comprehend this selection.” Rather, we must provide questions that stimulate, questions that require what we traditionally define as literal, interpretive, and critical thinking to foster true comprehension. We also know that to teach reading more effectively, we must help children draw upon their background experiences, their schema. Often, we use a method, more or less structured, to help them recall their knowledge, consider their experiences, ponder their values and beliefs, and express them accordingly. Then, maybe we can say we have “taught” comprehension. Or, have we? Maybe we have just helped develop the essential dispositions for thinking literally, interpretively, and critically. Similarly, in

helping preservice teachers with reflective thinking, we need to follow a method that will help us and them to draw upon their knowledge and experience as well as their personal beliefs and values.

Fostering In-Depth Reflection: Theoretical Models

In his discussion of reflective thinking Dewey (1933) clearly emphasized the importance of a sequence or method. In defining reflection, Dewey’s use of the word “consecutive” reminded us there has to be some meaningful order in the process, or as Dewey indicated “not just a sequence but a con-sequence—a consecutive ordering in such a way that each (thought) determines the next as its proper outcome” (p. 4). To nurture reflective thinking in preservice teachers, the supervisor must be clear, competent, and comfortable with the reflective approach that she is using. She must be clear about her expectations.

What type of reflective response from the preservice teacher is necessary? Various excellent models of reflection are available for use. Kolb’s model (Kolb’s Learning Styles 1984—recently updated in May, 2006) invites the learner to follow a process by which one methodically proceeds from the concrete experience to the observation of the experience to the application and then to the active experimentation or redoing of the activity. The steps are logical and should lead to successful outcomes.

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (Self-assessment: The Reflective Practitioner, 2007) offers teachers a clearly developed circular model of reflective teaching that requires the practitioner to select the standards, evidence and artifacts for the learning process; then to describe the who, what, when, and where of the learning activity. That is followed by analysis—the why and how of what took place. The next activity is the appraisal of the activity—interpretation of events and determination of their impact and effectiveness. Finally, there is the requirement to transform one’s approach—utilizing the data to develop new goals and strategies that can be applied to one’s teaching. Each of the directive headings includes specific descriptors that help to make the directives as concrete as possible (Figure 1).

The circular model can provide the structure that guides the thinking patterns and conversation of the supervisor and preservice or regular teachers. Here is where the influence of the teaching supervisor is critical. Appropriate questions must be asked at the differing levels of reflective development in the circular model so that the preservice teachers may respond appropriately and revise teaching practice accordingly. Through their responses to the guiding questions, preservice teachers may be able to supply the evidence that demonstrates their specific knowledge and teaching skills.

Korthagen (2001) discusses his approach to experiential learning, which can be described by the ALACT model of reflection. This model consists of five phases: action; looking back on the action; awareness of essential aspects; creating alternative methods of action; and trial (Figure 2). According to Korthagen, this approach to reflection offers less dependence upon rational or clinical thinking and more emphasis on thinking, feeling, wanting, and acting. These interpersonal and intrapersonal reflections are fostered by questions such as “What did you want? What did the pupils want? What were you thinking? What were the pupils thinking? How did you feel? How did the pupils feel?” (p. 214).

Figure 1. The cycle of reflection. (Replicated with permission from the public schools of North Carolina, March 2007.)

According to Korthagen’s (2001) plan, Phase 5, the Trial is usually Phase 1, the Action, of the next developing cycle, ensuring that reflection and growth are continually occurring. In explaining this model, Korthagen emphasizes that the preservice teacher, aware of these five phases, progresses through them under the guidance of a supervisor who offers a safe learning climate that supports honest reflection. The supervisor—who, needless to say, must be knowledgeable and aware of the many cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions of teaching and learning—is the stimulator of the five-phase process. The supervisor does not dominate the conversation but knows when to keep silent and when to probe, challenge, and encourage.

1. SelectWhat am I describing? What information do I need to include?

2. Describe Who? What? When? Where?

3. Analyze Why or how was it meaningful?

4. Appraise Interpret events. Determine impact. Determine effectiveness. Determine the relationship to any goals, values, and philosophy.

5. Transform How will I change my teaching practice as a result of this information?

Creating alternative methods of action

Trial

Action

Looking back on the action

Awareness of essential aspects

51

4

3

2

Figure 2. The ALACT model of reflection. (Copyright Institute for Multi-Level Learning, Amsterdam, 2005.)

Practical/Personal Application

In my ongoing practice as a supervisor of preservice teachers, I have found myself struggling with the realities of helping preservice teachers as they reflect upon their experiences. Often, at the conclusion of the preservice teacher’s classroom performance I found myself asking, “How would you describe your accomplishments?” Most often I was greeted with the response, “I did well. The children liked it.” Needless to say, I deserved that type of shallow response. Why? My question was too broad, too superficial. As I refined my supervisory skills, I realized the importance of utilizing pre-teaching questions to guide performance. So, I would have the preservice teachers respond, first in writing and later during the pre-teaching conference, to questions that would require them to indicate their lesson objective, rationale, students’ prior knowledge, strategies, materials, and means of evaluation. These were all good preparatory questions and required a greater depth of focus by the preservice teachers. After the lesson, I would withhold my practiced tendency to comment immediately upon the lesson. Instead, I would have the students respond first to specific post-lesson questions such as: Did I attain my objective(s)? How do I know? Did I motivate the students? How did I handle any difficulties that occurred? In the future would I do things differently? Then, after this extended time of reflection, usually one or two days, the preservice teacher and I would confer specifically about these post-observation questions. Again, these were good post-teaching and necessary reflective questions that required a more focused response. Nevertheless, there was a missing element. I was operating somewhat superficially. Was I getting to the heart of the matter?

To seek some answers I referred again to Dewey (1933) to review the qualities that he emphasized: open-mindedness, whole-heartedness, and responsibility—the connectedness to the inner core of the person, the personal mission. A teacher cannot thrive without a personal

mission that enables him to be passionate about his teaching and student learning. To possess a personal mission, one must be able to go to the core of one’s inner being, to the inner self that contains deep-rooted, core values, so to speak. Some of these core values could be identified as determination, courage, strength, compassion, flexibility, and so on. This, I believe, is getting closer to the heart of the matter.

Core Reflection

Additional answers to the search for ways of promoting in-depth reflection are found in the more recent writings of Korthagen and Vasalos (2005). In this work the authors build upon or refine Korthagen’s earlier (2001) ALACT model with a renewed emphasis on more in-depth reflection or core reflection. Core reflection is that which takes the preservice teacher to her inner core of values and beliefs, her personal mission. What is it that motivates the preservice teacher to want to teach this group of children? Is it just a response to a required or imposed national, state, or local standard or is it more an inner sense of mission expressed in a personal philosophy? Within Korthagen and Vasalos’ (2005) framework core reflection penetrates beneath the environment, behavior, and competencies of the externals to the inner realm of beliefs, identity, and mission. Essentially, core reflection goes beyond the goals, objectives, rationales, developmental activities, and assessments of one’s teaching. Core reflection gets to the heart of the matter. Korthagen and Vasalos (2005) use the “Model of Levels of Change” or the “onion model” (p. 54) to describe the various levels of perspective that we can look at to explain how teachers function and how they think. This “onion model” can be referred to as an adaptation or modification of the earlier Diltz (1990) model.

Figure 3 lists these levels of reflective thinking as they are identified from the more external to the innermost core of one’s being. The outermost levels of Environment and Behavior could be those most easily measurable in the classroom, the students, and the school. Interestingly enough, these are the levels of reflection and discussion that often attract most attention from supervisors and preservice teachers. They are most visible and apparent during the teaching and observation of lessons. Still somewhat external, although not as apparent as the environmental and behavioral levels is the level of Competencies. The level of Competencies represents not so much the behavior as the qualities that precipitate the behavior. This level includes the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that the preservice teacher possesses. Development of these competencies has been the primary focus of national and statewide teacher improvement initiatives for several recent decades. As Korthagen (2004) has noted elsewhere, reflection on these levels can have an inverse effect upon one other. For example, one can learn how to strengthen one’s behavioral influence in the classroom environment; then this knowledge and improvement of skills, in turn, can make one more competent in dealing with future issues.The three inner levels that Korthagen and Vasalos (2005) describe are beliefs, identity, and mission. Beliefs are what influence the acquisition of competencies and the resultant behaviors. For example, if a preservice teacher believes that teaching is a continuous transmission of knowledge, then that person will develop the corresponding instructional competencies and behave (teach) accordingly. Professional identity is the self-concept that the preservice teacher has—his awareness of who he is and what he is about. This identity enables the preservice teacher to define his philosophy (which probably is still developing) and his role as teacher. The commonly used ancient Greek aphorism “Know thyself” has full application to this concept of identity. Needless to say, this goal of helping preservice teachers acquire a sound

Figure 3. The onion: A model of levels of change. (Copyright Korothagen & Vasalos, 2005.) Note: Figure reflects British spellings as used in original version.

professional identity requires initial and ongoing primary emphasis in teacher education preparation programs.

The most inner component of the “onion model” is mission. Mission is what drives the person, the spirit that moves one to be and do what she values most. It is the reason why she wants to teach, why she wants to be the best teacher possible. A sense of mission is what lends quality to one’s life, making it purposeful and fulfilled.

Korthagen and Vasalos (2005) suggest two questions that may be helpful in enabling the preservice teacher to begin to move beyond external, almost reactionary reflection, to reflective thinking that touches the core of one’s existence. The first question is: What is the ideal situation that I want to bring about as I teach these students? This is the situation that the preservice teacher wants to create, and it is closely connected to personal mission. If response to this question is hesitant, then one has to re-think or re-explore one’s personal mission and perhaps has to ask oneself, “What am I doing here?”

The second question to be asked is: What are the limiting factors that keep me from this achievement? These limiting factors are usually external to the teacher. They could include the classroom environment, the behavioral characteristics of students as well as general school atmosphere. Nevertheless, if the preservice teacher allows these limiting factors to influence behavior in a negative fashion, there is cause for reflection on one’s personal mission as well as one’s ability to summon the inner qualities required to be a caring, competent teacher.

Recommendation

When we combine Korthagan’s (2001) ALACT process (Figure 2) with the onion model (Figure 3), we can see an effective schema that can guide the supervisory clinical process (Figure

4). Needless to say, utilizing this format requires even greater supervisory expertise as well as appropriate and timely but non-intrusive intervention. Crucial supervisory questions need to be asked at opportune times and challenging, supportive guidance is a necessity. For an in-depth discussion of these six levels of professional and reflective awareness and how the supervisors of preservice teachers can facilitate appropriate and effective reflection, one can consult Korthagen’s 2004 publication.

Use of the revised ALACT Model (Figure 4) in the supervisory process should serve to give the supervisor as well as the preservice teacher the means to focus more deeply on this process of cyclic reflection in response to teaching performance. Thus, it is strongly recommended for considered implementation. Will this ongoing practice by supervisors and preservice teachers not lead to what Dewey (1933) stressed as fundamental to the teaching professional—the foundational inner mission that drives the open-minded, whole-hearted, responsible teacher? Preservice teachers deserve no less from their supervisors.

Figure 4. Actualisation of core qualities. (Copyright Korthagen & Vasalos, 2005.) Note: Figure and caption reflect British spellings as used in original version.

Related Comments

In a vein similar to Korthagen and Vasalos (2005), Tickle (1999) called for a de-emphasis on requiring teachers in preparation to conform blindly to national, state, or locally imposed standards of performance without searching within to identify the core of their being. Tickle (1999) claimed that minimal attention has been given to reaching these core values. Instead, educators and others have focused on the important, but less enduring peripheral qualities that have to do with process and product. Tickle warned that several troubling consequences can result from an imposition of overly regulated performance and curriculum standards, the most notable of which is to leave teachers in a state of depersonalization that colors their perspective so they relate to and reflect upon only the technical skills of teaching while ignoring the more humanistic aspect of their professional development. Tickle noted:

In the past decade I have drawn extensively upon evidence from new teachers that shows how they initially came to seek identities largely within the technical competence of teaching…how they use and develop clinical competence in the form of practical problem- solving, which involves reflective action for the improvement of instructional strategies…. One of the features of their work was a lack of opportunity to make explicit, let alone review, their own educational aims and values (p. 122).

The conclusions that Tickle (1999) drew from his work with preservice teachers was that in addition to the development of instructional competence in teachers there was a real need for teacher preparation programs to take seriously all aspects of self in the professional development of new teachers. From the very beginning, teacher education programs must help preservice teachers be aware of the different dimensions of their professional selves—their dispositions, beliefs, personalities, fears, weaknesses, strengths, responses to failure, responses to success—all of the qualities that, directly or indirectly, affect their teaching performance. Teacher education programs must developmentally nourish these inner, core qualities with the same vigor that is used to nourish external behaviors and demonstrations of competence. Surely, appropriate emphasis and reflective thinking related to the development of the inner person, not just the external professional, will help preservice teachers come closer to the core of their true professional personhood.

Summary Considerations

In this article we have briefly reviewed the literature that reiterates the importance of engagement in reflective thinking for all teachers but specifically for preservice teachers. Success in teaching requires that reflective thinking be a professional way of life. A review of varying approaches to good reflective practice pointed to the ultimate goal of reflective thinking—coming in full touch with one’s internal goals, values, and sense of mission. This is just as necessary as awareness of the external qualities of performance that result in effective teaching and student learning.

Focusing only on external descriptors of good instruction may lead to the improvement of teaching and learning, but it can fail to grapple with the essentials of why preservice teachers

do what they do or fail to do what they want to or should do. For too long we have not looked deeply enough into the positive, inner core qualities that are required to effect strong teaching and lasting learning. Reflection, for the preservice teacher, or any teacher, is not just thinking about what or how one teaches but how one’s inner or core qualities influence one’s total teaching performance.

References

Barrett, H. (2003). Dr. Helen Barrett on electronic portfolio development. Retrieved January, 2007 from http://newali.apple.com/ali_sites/ali/exhibits/1000156/Reflections.html.

Barrett, H. (2007) Electronic portfolios. Retrieved January, 2007 from http://electronicportfolios.com/.

Beattie, M. (2007). The art of learning to teach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Dewey, J. (1933). How we think. Boston, MA: D. C. Heath and Company.Diltz, R. (1990). Changing belief systems with NLP. Cupertino: Meta Publications.Foster, B., Jr., Walker, M. L., & Song, K. H. (2007). A beginning teaching portfolio

handbook. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.Kilbane, C. R., & Milman, N. (2003), The digital teaching portfolio handbook. Upper

Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.Kolb, D. (2006) Diagrams of Kolb’s learning styles. Retrieved February 28, 2007 from

http://www.businessballs.com/kolblearningstyles.htm.Korthagen, F. (2004). In search of the essence of a good teacher; Towards a more holistic

approach in teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 20(1), 77-97.Korthagen, F. A. J. (2001). Linking practice and theory: The pedagogy of realistic

teacher education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Korthagen, F. A. J., & Vasalos, A. (2005). Levels in reflection: Core reflection as a

means to enhance professional growth. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 11(1), pp. 47-71.

Kronowitz, E. L. (2008).The teacher’s guide to success: Teaching effectively in today’s classrooms. New York, NY: Pearson Education.

Lee, H. J. (2005). Understanding and assessing preservice teachers’ reflective thinking.Teaching and Teacher Education, 21, pp. 699-715.

LePage, P., Darling-Hammond, L., Akar, H., Gutierrez, C., Jenkins-Gunn, E., & Rosebrock, K. (2005). Classroom management. In L. Darling-Hammond & J. Bransford (Eds.). Preparing teachers for a changing world. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Posner, G. J. (2000). Field experience: A guide to reflective teaching. New York: NY:Addison Wesley Longman.

North Carolina Public Schools. Self-Assessment: The Reflective Practitioner. Retrieved January 2007 from http://www.dpi.state.nc.us/pbl/pblreflect.htm.

Tickle, L. (1999). Teachers’ self-appraisal and appraisal of self. In R. Lipka & T. M.Brinthaupt (Eds.). The role of self in teacher development. Albany, NY:State University of New York Press.

Wolf, K. (2006). Self-assessment: The reflective practitioner. Retrieved November, 2006from http://www.ncpublicschools.org/pbl/pblreflect.htm.

Author Biography

Margaret Egan, Ed.D., is Professor of Education at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, Bronx, New York. One of her primary research interests includes the development of reflective practice in preservice teachers as well as the improvement of effective supervisory practices in teacher education. Email: margaret.egan@mountsaintvincent.edu.

RUNNING HEAD: Shaping Pedagogy With Lesson Study

Shaping the Pedagogy of an Undergraduate Teacher Education Program With Lesson Study PLEASE SET THIS TITLE FLUSH LEFT. FOR SOME REASON IT

WON’T LET ME CHANGE IT!!

Ann R. Taylor, Susan E. Breck, Barbara D. O’Donnell, Stephen Marlette,Jennifer Bolander, Stephanie McAndrews, Gloria Reading Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Abstract THIS LINE SHOULD BE FLUSH LEFT BOLD ITALICS BUT IT WON’T LET ME CHANGE IT!~~

A team of seven faculty at a regional state university developed the pedagogy of an undergraduate teacher education program using Japanese lesson study both for program improvement and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) accreditation. Faculty describes how they introduce lesson study assignments in all methods courses (mathematics, science, language arts, children’s literature, social studies, and reading). Groups of teacher candidates complete lesson studies in partnership schools. Faculty’s action research approach to their program includes examining literature on teacher education (Feiman-Nemser, 2001) and finding that their developing pedagogy using lesson study meshed well with goals for quality programs.

How does a faculty develop curriculum and pedagogy that both prepares reform-minded elementary teachers and meets NCATE program accreditation needs? Our solution, as faculty at a metropolitan state university, was to abandon a nascent program-wide portfolio process and instead implement lesson study assignments across our curriculum. Lesson study (Lewis, 2002) is a professional development process in which groups of four to six teachers, or in our case teacher candidates, collaboratively set a teaching goal, then teach and observe a lesson they have planned in great detail; their subsequent group discussion of this enacted lesson enables them to raise questions about their students’ learning and their pedagogical choices based on their collective experience.

We believe our use of lesson study has enabled us to focus our program around teacher candidates’ collaborative inquiry into their planned and enacted teaching. In this paper, we offer a description of our recently accredited program to stimulate conversation on how one teacher education program developed and studied its pedagogy; this includes explanations on how content methods courses in mathematics, children’s literature, science, reading, language arts, and social studies implemented lesson study. We suggest that our shift to lesson study offers one contribution towards solving the contextual dilemma in research on the pedagogy of teacher education (Grossman, 2005): how to study the effects of pedagogical approaches across teacher education programs.

Making the Decision

The decision, in May 2003, to embark on an ambitious plan to implement a common assignment, lesson study, across our program emerged from a dual attempt to produce quality teachers while paying attention to program accreditation needs. Seven program faculty worked on this project, none having been with the institution for more than three years; four were new to higher education, one had one year of previous experience, and the other two faculty brought experience of working on integrated cross-curricular projects in teacher education. As we attempted to make sense of our new work environment, streamline curriculum, and fulfill our education passions, we took the common route of developing a portfolio process to use for program assessment purposes.

From July 2002 through March 2003, in response to national and state demands for accountability, we produced a portfolio-based assessment system to document our teacher candidates’ progress. We defined the relationship between state standards and course artifacts, designed cover sheets to link the former to the latter, and rubrics that assessed the cover sheets. However, discussion revealed our mutual concern that the developing portfolio process may be superseding the importance of teacher candidate learning (Delandshere & Arens, 2003). Was our standards-driven portfolio system worth the enormous teacher candidate and faculty time and effort? Was our attention to “the standards” and accreditation colonizing our program with a technical-rational model of teaching? Were we subverting our ultimate conceptual framework goal: to prepare Inquirer-Professionals, characterized as teachers with a disposition “to learn in and from their practice” (Feiman-Nemser, 2001, p. 1016)? Were we meeting accreditation requirements but losing our teaching soul?

Two faculty in the group, one of whom is the program director, had been experimenting with Japanese lesson study in mathematics methods courses for four years and suggested its use as a possible solution to concerns about the way we were developing a portfolio process. One outcome of our previous six months of intense focus on accreditation was that we had developed

a team spirit manifested in a willingness to coordinate work and an eagerness to build a program of quality and coherence. After some initial examination of lesson study, we recognized that it might enable us to achieve our program’s conceptual framework goal of producing reform-minded Inquirer-Professionals, through engaging with our candidates in deep examinations of rich teaching episodes in their field placements. In this shift to lesson study, we would bring to the foreground the processes of planning, teaching, observing, and analyzing classroom teaching and move to the background attention to the standards. In May 2003 we agreed to pilot a program-wide lesson study approach to elementary teacher preparation beginning that fall. Although other U.S. colleges are engaged with lesson study in parts of their teacher education programs (Hiebert, Morris, & Glass, 2003; Reeve, Pelletier, & Morley, 2003; Tucher, Perry, & Lewis, 2003), we believe ours is the first program-wide implementation with undergraduate elementary teacher candidates.

Deepening Our Understanding of Lesson Study

As teacher researchers we were asking ourselves: Could we implement this ambitious innovation across an undergraduate teacher education program in a way that improved our teacher candidates’ learning as well as meet program accreditation needs? Faculty immediately began to give serious attention to developing an authentic understanding of the lesson study process. Two approaches were central to this effort.

First, faculty was provided with opportunities to learn about lesson study. All faculty attended a workshop given by the program director who was knowledgeable about lesson study. During this process faculty were provided with research materials (Lewis, 2002; Lewis & Tsuchida, 1998) about lesson study. Then in May 2003, seven faculty took part as observers in the first public lesson study in the Midwest at DePaul University, hosted by Akahiko Takahashi (Takahashi & Yoshida, 2004) one of the leading Japanese lesson study experts in the United States. The keynote speaker was Catherine Lewis, another national researcher in lesson study (Lewis, Perry, & Murata, 2006; Lewis & Tsuchida, 1998). During the session, we took notes as observers during a mathematics lesson taught to fifth-graders, and then took part in the post-teaching debriefing. Our return trip was filled with vigorous debate, verbalized doubts and thoughtful reflection about lesson study.

Second, we recognized that deep understanding develops through faculty’s study of their practice over time, and we wanted to avoid just focusing on surface details of this innovation (Fullan, 2001; McLaughin & Mitra, 2001). Our approach was rather for each faculty member to engage with their own inquiry, both into lesson study and also how it could become part of their practice. Faculty identified a variety of methodologies and approaches to teacher inquiry through which the lesson study innovation made sense to them, including “kidwatching” (Owocki & Goodman, 2002), practitioner research (Zeichner & Noffke, 2001), purpose of social studies (National Council for Social Studies, 1994), microteaching (Arends, 2006), and critical friends (Allen & Blythe, 2004). Viewing lesson study through these lenses enabled faculty to ask many clarifying questions as we continued our process of introducing lesson study across the program.

In the next section of this article, we will describe the process of lesson study as understood by the faculty in our program. Although the purpose of this paper is not to discuss research findings or analysis, we will include a description of the types of data we collected as we engaged in this implementation process. Then, we will describe the common features of the lesson study assignment in our courses and provide specific descriptions of assignments.

Lesson Study

Since its introduction in the United States from Japan in the 1990s, lesson study has been adopted as an exciting professional development structure for classroom teachers (Fernandez & Yoshida, 2004; Lewis, 2002; Stigler & Hiebert, 1999; Takahashi & Yoshida, 2004; Taylor, Anderson, Meyer, Wagner, & West, 2005). Lewis, Perry, and Murata define lesson study as characterized by “observation of live classroom lessons by a group of teachers who collect data on teaching and learning and collaboratively analyze it” (2006, p. 4). This is a very simple idea, that a group of about four to six teachers, working together, plan, teach, and discuss a specific “research lesson” in the context of a larger study of the curriculum. However, the specific structure built into each stage of this process provides a rich learning opportunity for teachers to study their practice.

The “research lesson” will focus on a general learning goal teachers have set to address an area of their students’ development that needs attention. For example, teachers may identify that students need to learn to think for themselves, within the context of a social studies lesson. Once members of the group have pooled their ideas and made a detailed written plan to meet this goal, the lesson is then taught by one of the teachers in an actual classroom, while the rest of the group observes the students’ and how they learn in response to the planned lesson. When the lesson is complete, the teachers have a formal discussion, drawing on their detailed observations of student learning: They share insights, critique their own plan, and make recommendations for improving and re-teaching the lesson. This entire sequence of activities, from goal setting to final discussion, is what is known as “lesson study” and may be spread over a period of weeks or months. Lesson studies are the main form of professional development for Japanese elementary teachers (Lewis & Tsuchida, 1998), and they provide a rich learning experience that enables teachers to question, research, and change their teaching practices.

Data Sources

Data were collected from both faculty and teacher candidates as we implemented lesson study assignments: faculty authoring this paper wrote their own journals and field notes during courses; faculty wrote observation notes during research lesson debriefing sessions; and all program faculty, including adjuncts teaching some sections of the methods courses, completed weekly surveys for the 2005-2006 school year. Data from teacher candidates included self-reflections within their lesson study reports, informal writing during courses, and formal surveys within some courses (science and mathematics). Additionally, teacher candidates completed annual lesson study surveys.

To make decisions about the program implementation, methods faculty analyzed the data from teacher candidates’ responses within their courses. Faculty held monthly research meetings during the initial implementation year and annual meetings thereafter to discuss analyses; additionally, many informal discussions took place between faculty teaching the same candidates. One example of our analysis occurred at the January 2005 monthly meeting: Three faculty described how they thought about and participated in a debriefing meeting with teacher candidates after a research lesson has been taught in school. The differences were substantial in terms of how much faculty led the discussion and what their intended outcomes were. As a result of this discussion, faculty articulated both a commitment to balance the academic freedom of individual faculty with the need for some uniform program expectations about lesson study.

We are still working on the many issues that arise when a group of faculty seeks to work together to bring more coherence and common expectations into their program.

Overview of Lesson Study in Our Program

Candidates enter our undergraduate program as juniors in what we term Year One of a two-year sequence. During the field component of the program, each of four cohorts of thirty teacher candidates partners with six public schools for two academic years. Each teacher candidate will have placements in three of those schools, rotating through a rural, urban, and metropolitan school at primary-, intermediate-, and middle-level grades. This system places groups of five teacher candidates together in each building during each placement. Our program is very field-placement rich, having over 700 clock hours prior to student teaching. Lesson study enables us to link this extensive time to our methods classes.

During Year One, our entering 120 teacher candidates are in schools for two mornings a week and in the afternoons attend methods classes in math and science, or reading and children’s literature (Table 1). They complete a lesson study assignment for each course for a total of four separate assignments; each includes detailed planning. Three of these require subsequent teaching of “research lessons” in their field placement classrooms. Reading methods is the exception, where the teaching is on-campus in a microteaching format (Arends, 2006).

Candidate’s groups for the assignment are thus determined by their field placements. Each group of candidates is responsible for discussing the lesson study assignment with their cooperating teacher and determining which of the five teachers’ classrooms would be most appropriate for this assignment. This flexibility of choosing one of five classrooms enables groups to locate a supportive cooperating teacher whose curriculum expectations match what candidate are able to provide through the lesson study assignment. (In a high-stakes testing environment, not all cooperating teachers value a detailed reform-minded lesson). The selection of one classroom from five is particularly important during the first semester of the program when teacher candidates are inexperienced: The group is able to choose the most confident candidate to teach from the groups’ detailed plan. This is usually a teacher candidate’s first experience of whole-class teaching, and our data suggests that this process is successful.

During Year Two, teacher candidates work in schools two full days a week for a semester while concurrently enrolled in social studies, language arts, and a diagnostic reading course. They complete one lesson study assignment in their schools during this semester, integrated across the three methods courses. Each course is responsible for a component of the lesson study process, thus reinforcing the natural integration of literacy within content teaching.The general pattern for all assignments uses Lewis’s four-stage lesson study cycle (Lewis, Perry, & Murata, 2006) as a basis (Figure 1). In step 1 Goal-Setting and Planning, groups of teacher candidates identify a general goal for student learning (a research theme), then they move on to step 2 Research Lesson. The candidates as a team then set about producing one detailed research lesson to accomplish this goal for a specific classroom of field placement students. In step 3 Lesson Discussion, the research lesson is taught in a field placement classroom by one teacher candidate and other group members. Where possible, university faculty gathers and discusses the data collected during the lesson, after which the final move, step 4 Consolidation of Learning, may be taken. The outcome of this discussion is a consolidation of their learning, possibly a re-teaching of a modified lesson with another class. This always concludes with a written report for a methods course assignment.

Table 1

Schedule for Field and Methods Courses in the Elementary Education Program

Semester One Semester Two Semester Three Semester Four

Morning Field Placement (Tues, Thurs) Field Placement(Tues, Thurs)Social Studies, Language Arts, Diagnostic Reading Methods (Mon, Wed, Fri)

Student Teaching (Mon-Fri)

Afternoon Science Methods andMath Methods (Tues, Thurs)

Children’s Literature and Reading Methods(Tues, Thurs)

Specific Descriptions of Lesson Study in Methods Courses

Year 1 Mathematics Methods

There are two mathematics methods instructors, one of whom implemented Japanese lesson study in math methods courses in 2000 and one who, prior to arriving at the university in 2002, had experience evaluating a grant that required her to attend the teaching of research lessons taught by experienced teachers. The mathematics lesson study is the most developed form of the assignment in the program. It is designed as a vehicle through which teacher candidates study how to learn about their teaching of mathematics (Hiebert, Morris, & Glass, 2003).

Since mathematics education faculty has used this assignment many times, their focus was on refining the lesson study assignment. Three areas were targeted: to improve teacher candidates’ content knowledge, to refine observation and data collections skills, and to foster critical analysis of the lesson. One way the assignment was strengthened during fall 2003 was to support teacher candidates’ weak content knowledge (Ma, 1999). Candidates were required select their lesson from a research-based mathematics reform textbook series where content was emphasized (Economopoulos et al., 1998). This lesson was developed in detail for their particular classroom. Teacher candidates also specifically study the mathematical concepts in the lesson using a content-focused course text (Chapin & Johnson, 2000). Faculty require lesson study observers to focus on how K-9 (K-9 is Illinois elementary certification, with an add-on 6-9 middle-level endorsement available) students learn by observing only a few students in the classroom, recording and interpreting their understandings and misconceptions. This data justifies and supports a critical analysis of the lesson.

Year 1 Science Methods

The science instructor teaches both sections, and he is familiar with action research and other forms of teacher inquiry as strategies for instructional improvement (Keith, 2001).

Additionally, he was already focused on inquiry as a central theme in science as embodied in the National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, 1996). This process of change was difficult and took time because the faculty had several years of investment in course assignments; however, he readily agreed to adopt this assignment to bring coherence to the elementary education curriculum.

1. Goal-Setting and Planning

Identify goals for student learning and long-term development. Collaboratively plan instruction designed to bring to life these goals, including a “research lesson” that will be observed.

Figure 1. Lewis’s lesson study cycle. From Lesson study: A handbook of teacher-led instructional change (p. 3) by C. Lewis, (2002), Philadelphia, PA: Research for Better Schools, Inc. © 2002 by Catherine C. Lewis. Reprinted with permission.

2. Research Lesson

One planning team member teaches classroom lesson while other team members collect data on student thinking, learning, engagement, behavior, etc.

3. Lesson Discussion

Share and analyze data collected at research lesson. What is the evidence that goals for student learning and development were fostered? What improvements to the lesson and to instruction more generally should be considered.

4. Consolidation of Learning

If desired, refine and re-teach the lesson and study it again. Write report that includes lesson plan, student data, and reflections on what was learned.

Although several of his existing assignments related to lesson study, this faculty member had to rethink the entire set of assignments to make lesson study a framework for other assignments. For example, a child interview (Arams & Bradshaw, 2001) and research into pedagogical practice were combined to become an investigation into student understandings in preparation for the lesson study. Rather than standing alone, each assignment served to assist teacher candidates in planning their research lesson.

Year 1 Children’s Literature

One faculty member teaches both sections of children’s literature. Lesson study seemed to her to extend an idea proposed by Ken and Yetta Goodman that teachers should engage in “kidwatching” (Owocki & Goodman, 2002). That is, teachers should observe students as they think and perform in the classroom then document their successes and challenges. Studying their students gives teachers valuable information about motivation, strengths, language development, social interactions, and needs. This faculty identified a connection between the kidwatching concept and the emphasis lesson study places on observing learners during a lesson. As a result, she added a lesson study assignment to her course.

She felt she was only one step ahead of her candidates when it came to implementing lesson study. She assigned lesson study groups and required they make the foundation of their lesson a piece of literature. The faculty was impressed with the quality of lessons teacher candidates developed.

Year 2 of Program (Diagnostic Reading, Social Studies, Language Arts)

During the second year, third semester, of the program there are three methods courses taught (diagnostic reading, language arts, and social studies). Rather than assign three separate lesson studies, methods instructors—all new to lesson study—envisioned an ambitious plan for one complex integrated lesson study. They decided the lesson study experience would be fully implemented within social studies with key sections developed in diagnostic reading and language arts.

The development of a two-week unit and teaching a lesson during the field placement was already an assignment in the social studies methods course. These assignments were changed to fit the lesson-study process simply by placing teacher candidates on teams to develop the unit and requiring one lesson within the unit to be the detailed research lesson taught in their field placements. Lewis’s (2002) lesson and unit outlines were used. Candidates were provided with a table of contents to demonstrate how the unit should be developed including where each of the other two classes assignment should fit into the end product. Using the defined purpose of teaching social studies: “to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world” (National Council for Social Studies, 1994, p. vii), the methods instructor designated as the research theme for all lesson studies: How can we help students become good citizens in a multicultural, diverse democratic society?

Reading is a crucial skill in determining success in the social studies, so the diagnostic reading methods instructors asked teacher candidates to assess students’ reading abilities in the research lesson classroom using the Qualitative Reading Inventory-3 (Leslie & Caldwell, 2001). Based on this assessment, teacher candidates choose appropriately leveled social studies texts for

the unit and selected reading and questioning strategies for effective student learning (Walker, 2004). In the language arts course, candidates identified and integrated a writing strategy into the research lesson as the assessment component. The development of writing strategies was already a requirement; it was now focused on the research lesson. Candidates then assessed student written work samples from the research lesson, using this as one piece of evidence when reflecting on ways to improve the lesson.

By semester’s end, despite all the challenges, the three faculty saw positive growth in teacher candidates and in themselves. Result of analysis of previously described data sources indicated that this assignment needed refining, especially in how the unit was assessed. Also, communication between faculty needed to be strengthened to provide a better-integrated experience for candidates.

Discussion With Literature

From May 2003 onwards, as teacher researchers (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993) we engaged with the tradition of educational action research focused on curriculum improvement and change (Elliott, 2003). Our larger purpose was developing and refining the pedagogy of our teacher education program and examining program outcomes for both NCATE accreditation and program improvement. As such, our methodology cycled through planning, acting, observing, and reflecting where each phase included elements of the other phases. For example, as we began, individually and collectively, to act on our early plans for lesson study assignments, we adapted and changed those plans in response to discussions with each other—sometimes in formal meetings, but often over the lunch table. Such inherent messiness (Ackoff, 1999), so familiar to reflective practitioners, was compounded because faculty from different disciplines, with different research assumptions, worked across a large teacher education program. The result was an organic process of identifying and responding to these contextual local needs as we went along (Lewis, Perry, & Murato, 2006). For example, initially faculty drew on their own frame of reference to make sense of lesson study (i.e., kidwatching from Owocki and Goodman, 2002, or microteaching from Arends, 2006).

As our discussion deepened and our experience increased these individual understandings moved toward a common definition. Our concern was always to improve instruction, and we were justifiably focused on the issues of practice. Our questions ranged from general: How is it going? To the specific: How can we sequence assignments so that lesson studies will fit into our teacher candidates’ schedule?

However, there was also another activity at work. As researchers seeking to make sense of our work, we examined our achievements. As we read a variety of literature over the next three years, several pieces stood out to us: They spoke of the challenges in teacher education and the ways in which successful, quality programs address these challenges. They ranged from scholarly pieces for the insider teacher educator audience (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Feiman-Nemser, 2001) to reports for policy and public audiences (Levine, 2006). We found ourselves surprised that in our commitment to our passions, through our abilities and knowledge as reflective practitioners, and in the quality of our daily interactions with each other, we were building a program that had begun to meet the best visions of quality teacher education programs.

For example, Sharon Feiman-Nemser (2001) articulated a vision that teacher educators’ role should be to provide opportunities for teachers to engage in “serious and sustained learning

opportunities” (p. 1014) across the continuum of their careers, preservice, induction, and professional development. We focus here on her framework for thinking about a preservice curriculum. She identifies five “central tasks” based on “what teachers need to know, care about, and be able to do in order to promote substantial learning for all students” (p. 1016). These central tasks also encompass the beliefs and images of teaching that preservice teachers bring to their education.

Based on preliminary analysis of our data, we suggest that aspects of each of the tasks and practices can be accomplished through lesson study; however, we would argue that each needs careful study if one is to confidently assert that a program is meeting these demands. The scope of this paper does not provide for such detailed analysis; however, we are in the process of refining our data collection and analysis for later publications. What we assert here, rather, is that the goals, structure, and context of lesson study, setting astride a study of actual teaching episodes, does make the achievement of each of these tasks and practices possible in very interesting ways. To stimulate further conversation about the pedagogy and curriculum of preservice teacher education, we will illuminate her central tasks and promising practices with examples from lesson study in our preparation program.

Central Task #1: Analyzing Beliefs and Forming New Visions

Feiman-Nemser (2001) warns,

Unless teacher educators engage prospective teachers in a critical examination of their entering beliefs in light of compelling alternatives and help them develop powerful images of good teaching and strong professional commitments, these entering beliefs will continue to shape their ideas and practices. (pp. 1016-1017)

While we would like all our cooperating teachers to provide “powerful images of good teaching” (p. 1017), the reality of a high-stakes testing environment and a large state teacher education program is that some of the best experiences of successful reform-minded teaching are provided by the carefully planned research lessons taught by our undergraduate teacher candidates. Each semester some lesson study groups report that during the teaching of their research lesson their students seemed significantly more engaged and motivated than during previous lessons. Therefore, research lessons offer evidence to some teacher candidates that alternatives to the everyday drill and practice approach, often found in public schools, can be more effective for student learning.

Central Task #2: Developing Subject Matter for Teaching

Few would disagree that teachers need to know the subjects they teach. However, in her second task, Feiman-Nemser (2001) reminds us that this kind of knowing includes not just understanding the main concepts but also knowing how evidence and proof are thought about in different subjects: “How is a proof in mathematics different from a historic explanation or a literary interpretation?” (p. 1017). Additionally, drawing on Shulman (1986), Feiman-Nemser (2001) identifies what a teacher needs to understand about what students typically find difficult, common effective analogies and models that may be used for clarification.

The emergence of research lessons from a subject-based methods courses helps candidates develop this kind of knowledge of subject matter. For example, the mathematics lesson study requires candidates to engage specifically in a study of the mathematical concepts in the lesson, as well as studying how children best learn these concepts. In social studies, the development of a research lesson requires the teacher candidates to clarify to themselves how to teach inherently complex concepts such as democracy to primary student.

Central Task #3: Developing Understandings of Learners and Learning

Feiman-Nemser (2001) believes that teachers need to cultivate tools, dispositions, and knowledge about their students’ development, learning, community, and culture and use this understanding in their teaching to make and justify curricular and pedagogic decisions. The children’s literature and science lesson study assignments, for example, specifically require teacher candidates to study the children and their thinking prior to planning and teaching their research lesson. Thus, teacher candidates begin to link knowledge of how students may respond to particular contexts to specific pedagogical decisions by requiring that teacher candidates predict, plan for, and observe these responses. When teacher candidates are observers of student learning during a research lesson they have planned, they gain new insights into their pedagogical decisions.

Central Task #4: Developing a Beginning Repertoire

Feiman-Nemser (2001) argues that preservice preparation’s fourth central task is to provide a beginning repertoire for teacher candidates of strategies, approaches, and assessments, and help them make the appropriate decisions for using these approaches. In the semester 3 lesson study, teacher candidates are required to gather and provide a thoughtful analysis of reading assessment data to select text and provide instruction in social studies. Through their language arts course, candidates assign writing to their students and analyze this as evidence of their learning of social studies. Thus, they begin to put into practice an increasingly sophisticated approach to teaching that engages them with assessment, strategy selection, subject matter integration, as well as reflecting on their practice and its effectiveness.

Central Task #5: Developing the Tools to Study Teaching

As they engage in this process as a lesson study group, teacher candidates seem to embody Feiman-Nemser’s (2001) fifth central task. Feiman-Nemser asserts that:

Pre-service preparation is a time to begin forming habits and skills necessary for the ongoing study of teaching in the company of colleagues. Pre-service teachers must come to see that learning is an integral part of teaching and that serious conversations about teaching are a valuable resource in developing and improving their practice.

The study of teaching requires the skills of observation, interpretation, and analysis. Pre-service students can begin developing these skills by analyzing samples of student work, comparing different curricular materials, interviewing students to uncover their thinking, studying how different teachers work toward the same goals, and observing what impact their instruction has on students. Carried out in the company of

others, these activities can foster norms for professional discourse such as respect for evidence, openness to questions, valuing of alternative perspectives, a search for common understandings, and shared standards. (p. 1019)

The lesson study assignments throughout the program provide candidates with opportunities to work with others on a complex analysis of their students’ learning and how it is related to the instructional decisions they made, both in terms of curriculum and pedagogy. The prior planning, and the subsequent debriefing of the research lesson, frequently in the company of faculty who have also observed the lesson, provide rich experiences in using evidence of student learning to inform this analysis. Groups struggle to come to common understandings, as they question their decisions and learn to develop a respectful professional discourse around teaching.

Feimen-Nemser (2001) then considers three promising practices that enable teacher education programs to accomplish these central tasks. She reminds us that the meaning and impact of any one individual strategy or component of a program depends on “the overall purposes they serve. And these, in turn, are influenced by a program’s conceptual orientation…. Everything depends on the quality of ideas that give the program direction and purpose” (pp. 1022-1023). She names three promising practices that promote reform-minded teaching: 1) conceptual coherence, 2) purposeful, integrated field experiences, and 3) attention to teachers as learners. We believe each of these practices can be implemented through lesson study assignments.

Promising Practice #1: Conceptual Coherence

Accrediting bodies such as NCATE require that programs have a conceptual framework (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, 2006) to provide them with a central focus. Although our program has such a framework, the Inquirer-Professional, in uniting around lesson study, we decided on a common set of practices that would bring this language to life in our courses and across our program. Importantly, using lesson study also increased our program coherence because we chose a common strategy that put the practices of teaching in public school classrooms as the central focus of our methods courses. Simultaneously, we gave structure to our expectation of inquiry: We directed who would conduct the inquiry (groups of teacher candidates), what the inquiry would be about (planning and enacting teaching episodes in public school), and how the inquiry would be conducted (through study, research, detailed planning, and gathering evidence, observing student learning, hearing perspectives from fellow professionals, drawing conclusions). With this increased program coherence as similar events began to take place in different courses, we also worked on the second promising practice. Promising Practice #2: Purposeful, Integrated Field Experience

Our program from July 2002 onwards provided both varied and extensive field experiences. But as teacher educators know, teacher candidates need to learn “desirable lessons” (Feiman-Nemser, 2001, p. 1024) from these school placements. The lesson study assignment, with its emphasis on the thorough, detailed planning, teaching, and analysis of one high-quality lesson, provides many candidates, cooperating teachers, and public school children with an unusual experience of successful learning through an engaged, student-centered, active lesson.

Most significantly, these intense lesson study experiences are driven from the subject matter methods courses, and observed by both clinical and subject faculty where possible, thus providing a constant interplay between field placements and methods courses. Candidates report learning these desirable lessons—the importance of planning, of engaging students actively in learning during lessons, and the significant role that watching students learn plays in strengthening teaching. This last point leads directly to the third practice.

Promising Practice #3: Teachers as Learners

Lesson study, rather than directing what teacher candidates learn about teaching, provides them with a rich experience and takes them seriously as a team of learners. We have observed during lesson study debriefing sessions, teacher candidates in their research teams question together the impact of their actions on student learning. The lesson study experience models the kind of effective learning experiences we hope they will construct for their students.

Our approach seemed reasonable to us, and our review of literature confirms our ideas were sound and well grounded. The literature also challenged us to maintain our focus and examine more closely, through a practitioner research lens, the pedagogy of our teacher education program.

Implications for Accreditation

Refocusing our energy on developing a program that met our vision for teaching, rather than using accreditation as our goal, in the end served us well. We found our semester 3 lesson study assignment met two of our required NCATE assessments. These assessments indicated that our teacher candidates were able to plan, teach, and evaluate instruction and have an impact on K-9 student learning. Data collected from our Program Advisory Board, along with anecdotal data provided by our field supervisors confirmed that our constituents considered our program to be high quality. While this analysis was satisfying, we still need to study our program in more depth. We again turn to the existing literature to help provide us with a more specific focus to how we might continue.

Next Steps

In her contribution to Studying Teacher Education: the Report of the AERA panel on Research and Teacher Education, Pamela Grossman (2005) contends there is a lack of attention to the pedagogy of teacher education. She argues that attention to how one teaches is part and parcel of what one teaches. Grossman defines the pedagogy of teacher education broadly as including two aspects: classroom instruction and interaction, and tasks and assignment. Classroom instruction and interaction include “all interactions among faculty, students, and content during class time.” Tasks and assignments “focus students’ attention on particular problems of practice and introduce them to ways of reasoning or performing” (p. 426).

Grossman (2005), however, does warn of the dilemma of research on the pedagogy of teacher education, addressing “the inner relationship of any particular pedagogy to the larger context of the teacher education program” (p. 448) may be problematic because it is hard to isolate the effect of any one strategy across a teacher education program. We believe the strength of our program lies in the fact that we have a common pedagogical strategy, expressed

in specific tasks and assignments around lesson study. This may offer an approach to solving this contextual dilemma. The lesson study approach is program-wide and would enable us to examine its effects with more confidence than one could examine any strategy used in one particular methods class. Therefore, Grossman’s attention to tasks and assignments provides us with a possible lens for looking at our program.

In conclusion, the implementation of lesson study assignments across methods courses left us encouraged by the outcomes for our teacher candidates, administrators, and practitioners in the field. We believe that abandoning our less productive portfolio system was justified and through this shift we were able to focus more deeply on preparing Inquirer Professionals than preparing portfolios. This does not preclude future requirements of a portfolio of lesson study artifacts across the program.

We see possibilities for teacher candidates becoming reform-minded teachers as they focus on student learning and keep a critical eye on their teaching. Additionally, our candidates’ ability to plan for and impact K-9 student learning was confirmed by Association for Childhood Education International approval, as part of our recent NCATE review using semester 3 lesson study data. We have grown together as we struggled with the complexity of implementing our vision and feel great professional satisfaction and growth from our collegial efforts to incorporate lesson study throughout our undergraduate program. Data suggests our teacher candidates’ have responded positively. We are excited as we consider the next stage of our research.

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Takahashi, A., & Yoshida, M. (2004). Ideas for establishing lesson-study communities. Teaching Children Mathematics, 10(9), 436-444.

Taylor, A., Anderson, S., Meyer, K., Wagner, M. K., & West, C. (2005). Lesson study: A professional development model for mathematics reform. Rural Educator, 26(2), 17-22.

Tucher, P., Perry, R., & Lewis, C. (2003, April). Lesson study in preservice education, Mills College. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL.

Walker, B. J. (2004). Diagnostic teaching of reading. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice Hall.

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Author Biographies

Ann Taylor, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Education at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Her research interests include teacher professional development, mathematics education, and action research. Email: ataylor@siue.edu.

Susan E. Breck, Ph.D., is Associate Professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Her research areas are social studies and middle-level education. Email: sbreck@siue.edu.

Barbara D. O'Donnell, Ed.D., is Associate Professor of Education at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in Edwardsville, Illinois. Her research interests in mathematics education include problem solving and instructional discourse. Email: bodonne@siue.edu.

Stephen Marlette, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Education at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His research in science education is in the implementation of reform-based ideas and the use of informal learning environments. Email: smarlet@siue.edu.

Jennifer A. Bolander, Ed.D., is Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Her research interests include literacy and beginning teacher induction and mentoring. E-mail: jebolan@siue.edu.

Stephanie L. McAndrews, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in Literacy at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, in Edwardsville, Illinois. Her research interests include developing literacy leaders, literacy assessment, and clinical practice for K-12. E-mail: smcandr@siue.edu.

Gloria Reading, Ed.D., is Assistant Professor of Education at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in Edwardsville, Illinois. Her research interests include multicultural children’s literature with a Middle East focus. Email: greadin@siue.edu.

RUNNING HEAD: Writing Report Cards

“Between a Rock and a Hard Place”: A Second-Year Teacher’s Experience Writing Report Cards

Jennifer TutenHunter College

Abstract

This article documents the report-card writing process of an early career urban fourth-grade teacher. Her account and reflections upon the report-card writing process are interwoven with a critical discourse analysis of report form she completes along with her narrative comments. Re-considering this “taken for granted” aspect of teaching illuminates the everyday reality of teaching in an era of increasing accountability.

Ellen Martin, a fourth-grade teacher in an urban school, recounts a dilemma in completing a report card for one of her students:

One of the children was having a hard time that year and his grades really went down significantly but not so much that he was in failing status. But the principal thought that he would need to have another year in order for him to be able to stay in the school, he’d have to do fourth grade over again. So actually she did change my grades so that they were failing so that we could hold the child over. The mother was kind of upset. But I kind of made a commitment to myself. I’m not going to own this and I just referred her to the principal [Ms. Walsh]. I was very—I knew that it was wrong and I wasn’t going to say that the principal was wrong. But, I said, “Please talk to Ms. Walsh about this. I can show you my records if you would like to see them.” That was a rock and a hard place.

For Ms. Martin and many other teachers, the process of writing report cards is filled with personal and philosophical quandaries. Lyons (1990) explored the types of dilemmas teachers encounter as they work with students. These dilemmas arise from “this particular set of elements—of self, relationships, craft, one’s values and one’s stance towards knowledge…” (p. 167). Teachers may experience these dilemmas in the grading and subsequent report-card writing processes, as they balance their knowledge of students as individuals with whom they have developed caring relationships and in relation to the curriculum, against their awareness of the audiences for report cards, namely, families and the school administration. Ms. Martin faced such a dilemma when she found her grades changed by her supervisor. She was torn between her professional knowledge of her student, her responsibility to the student’s family, and her job. Noddings (1984) described grading as an intrusion upon the caring relationship between teacher and student, contending, “The teacher is torn between obligation to the employing community and faithfulness to the student” (pp. 193-194).

Ms. Martin’s story illuminates the tensions frequently faced by early career teachers as they complete report cards. While report card writing may appear to play a minor role in a teacher’s professional life, it does embody the complexity of teaching. Report cards can be viewed as a textual intersection—a written expression of a relationship—among teacher, family, student, and school. In completing report cards, teachers negotiate the embodied intersections of accountability, family, and professional expertise.

In this article, I explore the report-card writing process of an early career urban fourth-grade teacher. Through interweaving her account and reflections upon the report- card writing process with an analysis of the form she completes, I problematize this “taken for granted” aspect of teaching. Ms. Martin’s story illuminates the everyday reality of teaching in an era of increasing accountability. It is a story important to consider as we develop our teacher preparation programs and work with in-service teachers.

Research and Theoretical FrameworkTeachers and Report Cards

While report cards are a fixture on the educational landscape (Gurskey, 1996), there is little recent research that addresses teachers’ experiences and perceptions of this aspect of their

All names and identifying information have been changed. Quotations were taken from tape-recorded and transcribed interviews and are reported verbatim.

professional life. Two studies described the challenges experienced by teacher, novice and veteran, while writing report cards. Despite completing an assessment course, preservice teachers interviewed by Lomax (1996) felt unprepared for the difficulties of grading and report-card writing. While they had learned about different ways to assess students, they did not anticipate the difficulties of decision-making about grades and comments, and they reported great anxiety about family reaction. Veteran elementary level teachers also find writing report cards challenging. In a study of reading teachers, Afferblach and Johnston (1993) described conflicts between what they knew and valued in their teaching and the system and structure of the report cards they were required to complete. The authors concluded, “We did not anticipate how stressful teachers would find the report-writing process or how severely the process would be affected by the constraints under which teachers worked” (p. 85).

Report Cards as School Discourse

One possible reason for the stressful nature of report-card writing may be their official status in schools (Afflerbach & Johnston, 1993; Gurskey, 1996). As formal documents, they embody what counts in school. This “school knowledge,” as described by Luke and Luke (1995), is “knowledge and practice discursively constructed and achieved in the classroom site” (p. 369). Teachers write report cards for multiple audiences; once a report card leaves its “author,” it is frequently used for multiple functions.

Educational documents, such as school brochures, letters, compacts, and report cards, can be seen as discourses that construct identities of families, students, and school personnel, and position participants. Keogh (1996) argued that through letters and brochures the school discourse competed with families for control in the home. Keogh says, “From analysis of various types of home-school communications, it seems reasonable to view schools as agencies of regulation and control over homes” (p. 456). Similarly, Nakagawa (2000) found the official discourse in school compacts established an “idealized parent.” She stated, “Ultimately, the discourse not only represents parents to others but also represents parents to themselves” (p. 466). A family member who reads about her child’s shortcomings, for example, may feel the teacher views her as an inadequate parent or guardian, particularly if the teacher advises closer supervision of homework or other responsibilities.

The present study, through its documentation and analysis of a teacher’s report cards and report-card writing process, investigates the school discourse that as Keogh (1996) states, represents students to others and themselves, as well as the expert discourse that directs what the teacher can say, both embodied in the report card form. The result is an “idealized” student and an “idealized” family, as well as perhaps, an “idealized” teacher.

This study assumes it is important to hear from teachers first-hand. Furthermore, apart from Comber (1996), the discourse of report cards has not been considered in conjunction with teachers’ experience. Report cards are texts that make claims to “represent” the achievement of children. How does a teacher interact with that discourse? Critical discourse analysis provides an analytic lens to figure out and discover the complexity of that representation for the teacher.

Critical Discourse Analysis as a Theoretical Lens and Methodology

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was the theoretical and methodological perspective informing the study design of (Fairclough, 1989; Gee, 1999; Rogers, 2002). Rogers (2004) provides a useful framework for explaining CDA from a research perspective. The “critical” in CDA, as she writes, refers to the analyst’s goal to describe and interpret the relationship between

the form of language and its function, with an attempt to explore why and how certain forms and functions of language are privileged over others (Rogers, 2004, p. 4). The “discourse” in CDA is not an isolated product, but is an expression of socially constructed and socially constructing representations of “the world, social identities, and social relationships” (Luke, 2001, p. 8). Finally, the “analysis” in CDA includes the methodological decisions an analyst makes to “figure out all the possible configurations between texts, ways of representing, and ways of being, and to look for and discover the relationships between texts and ways of being and why certain people take up certain positions vis-à-vis situated use of language” (Rogers, 2004, p. 7).

CDA, as Luke (1995) argued, is a powerful tool to examine how knowledge is constructed through texts in institutions and how students are represented. The report card discourse, then, presents what is “sayable” and “knowable” about a student to a teacher, even though teachers may have other, “extra-textual” discourse they would like to include. The methodology of this study was designed to unpack and explore report card discourse. The design combined a narrative case study with critical discourse analysis (CDA) of both the interview transcripts and the report cards. Ms. Martin’s experience of writing the report cards is presented as a narrative, primarily in her own words. The CDA analysis follows to probe the intersections and interpretations of the discourse.

Thus, what follows is the story of Ms. Martin as she negotiates the challenges of completing report cards with a CDA lens focused upon the report card text itself and the narrative comments she selected and composed to add to the number ratings. Each of the narrative comments is discussed in a separate section. The focus then shifts to an analysis of Ms. Martin’s understandings of her report-card writing process.

Context of the Study

Washington School is a public pre-kindergarten through grade six elementary school, located in one of the poorest areas of a large northeastern city. There are 755 students with five classes per grade level. Ninety-five percent of the students are eligible for free lunch. According to 2002 data from the school district, 29.2% of the students were African American, 69.3% Hispanic, and 0.8% Asian and others. Ms. Martin, 25 years old and European American, was a former student of the researcher and agreed to participate in the study. It was Ms. Martin’s first year at Washington School; her first year of teaching was at a parochial school while she attended graduate school.

The research study was an in-depth assessment of Ms. Martin’s experiences with report cards during her first year teaching in a public school and an analysis of the report card framework and language.

The Limits of the Report Card Framework: Numbers and Comments

Learning the Rules: “There’s Only 1s and 2s…”

Ms. Martin first saw the report card forms one week before she was required to submit them to her principal, Ms. Walsh. The teachers at Washington School received the report cards at a staff development meeting. They also received a list of comment sheets that had been previously used for an older computerized system. Teachers were directed to write a comment into the box on the fourth page:

We had a meeting last Tuesday on our staff development day, and about 45 minutes or so was devoted to report cards and other issues related to, relating to that day, just kind of like protocol. And I raised my hand and said, can we try to fit as many comments in there (laughs) even though it’s not very big? And they said, no, we want one comment and it has to be from this list.

The report card given to Ms. Martin was the standard evaluation form recommended for use in the large urban school system for use in grades three through six during the 2003-2004 academic year. A numeric system is used on the form : 4—Exceeds grade-level standards; 3—Meets grade level standards; 2—Approaches grade-level standards; 1—Far below grade-level standards. The same system was also used for the fourth-grade examinations that the students would take later in the year. Teachers were also instructed to only use the two lower end “numerical indicators” (that is, “2—Approaches grade-level standards” and “1—Far below grade-level standards”) in assessing their students’ progress. As Ms. Martin explained:

Everyone should be approaching the standard so a 3 would be exceptional….The majority of your class should be having lots of 1s and 2s and this box on the back side if there’s any inkling that they might be struggling and there’s only 1s and 2s, then you need to check that, to be on the safe side if there’s any chance that the child might not meet the criteria, including the test scores you have to mark this box ‘cause if you don’t mark it here and here [points to the two boxes on the form]. It can’t be legal to hold the child over.

Additionally, Ms. Martin’s colleagues told her not to give the highest mark, a 4; “I’ve been warned that if you’re giving 4s your report cards will probably be given back to you to redo them.”

The Ideal Student: “Demonstrates Effort and Completes Homework”

Ms. Martin initially directed her attention to the second and third pages of the report card that contained the evaluation grid. The grid was organized by content area, such as reading, writing, and mathematics. Beneath each general area were two or three performance indicators. For example, the performance indicators for mathematics were “Demonstrates an understanding of content; Computes with accuracy and efficiency; and Solves problems and explains solutions and strategies.” The teacher then inserted a number by each performance indicator.

The ideal student, constructed through the language of this grid, is an independent actor. Through the repetitive use of initial active verbs, the ideal student takes an active and visible role in the learning process. This learning is made visible through the cluster of nouns found in the grid. One cluster contains oral language, with nouns such as listening, speaking, discussion, turns, conversation, and opinions. Learning is made visible through writing, vocabulary, grammar, and spelling. More developed specifics and content of all activity, however, were not made visible in this construction. There were fewer adjectives and adverbs than verbs and nouns. Only three phrases used adjectives to add detail to the clauses: “Reads independently for sustained periods of time.” “Uses a wide range of vocabulary,” and “Uses correct grammar and spelling.” Yet, even these adjectives are vague and undefined.

The linguistic construction of the report card created constraints, according to Ms. Martin. In a previously quoted segment, she asked at a staff meeting if she could “fit in” as many comments as she could by writing small. Even the physical layout of the form imposes constraint. The teacher was limited by the narrow range of numerical indicators that were “allowed” as well as by the requirements of one prewritten comment. The limited number of the learning behaviors constricted her ability to fully address the curriculum she taught. For example, Ms. Martin was concerned about the indicator “Shows evidence of understanding text.” She stated, “That’s all they’re saying about reading comprehension and that’s such a huge block of our day.” Additionally the combining of two independent phrases in several of the learning indicators made it difficult for her to accurately communicate her evaluation of students (Table 1). She stated:

I felt that “Demonstrates effort and completes homework”… shouldn’t have been coupled together because there are a lot of kids that I know and working with the families and working with them that a lot of them, for practical reasons have a lot of difficulty completing the homework at night and sometimes it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not demonstrating effort.

Thus, instead of facilitating a more nuanced or descriptive evaluation, the language of the report card itself created problems. While she would have liked to integrate her understanding of a context wider than the school, that of the family, she was limited.

Table 1

Examples of Phrases on the Report Card FormActivity Phrase 1 Phrase 2

Reads aloud fluently with expression

Writes independently on a variety of topics

Demonstrates effort and completes homework

Listens respectfully and takes turns

Uses correct grammar and spelling

Reads independently for sustained periods of time

More specifically she questioned the report card language such as the social studies indicator; “Applies social studies skills—I don’t really know what skills they’re talking about.” Because of her uncertainty, she decided to give 2s to all students “with the exception of a couple of kids who haven’t produced much or are not participating. Then they are getting 1s.” The language of the report card text, as previously noted, is too general for the teacher. She refers to the text as “they,” an institutionalized body that created the report card text at a distance from her

lived classroom experience. The result is her evaluation of student behavior based on production and participation.

The “Real” Student: “Disrupts the Class With Poor Behavior”

After completing the performance indicators on pages two and three, Ms. Martin turned her attention to the comment section on the back page of the report card. The fourth page of the form contained boxes for the teacher to include comments. During her first year of teaching at a parochial school, Ms. Martin had written five-to-seven-sentence comments for each student. Here, at Washington School, she was told to select one comment from a prewritten list. Her initial impression of the list was that “they really don’t say very much” and she felt that they would communicate very little without additional elaboration. She tried to look at each student individually but “found that there were some I was drawn to or drawn away from.” She explained:

I tried as much as possible to find positive ones but with only one comment I didn’t want to leave the impression that everything’s okay. “Doing satisfactory work but can do better” I used with a couple of my kids who I think can show improvement and I think maybe I would word that a little differently but I think that’s a message I could want to convey.

Ah, “Disrupts the class with poor behavior” I have to put because I really wanted that to be what I was communicating to a lot of parents that their kids were doing that. I think if I had my druthers I’d be able to explain more about it.

Here, Ms. Martin shares that she has “extra-textual” information, different discourses, she could use in talking about her students, but she feels boxed in by the report card discourse.

Eighty potential comments were provided to the teacher for insertion into the comment box. Out of the 80 possible comments Ms. Martin selected 14 different comments for use with 19 students. Most of these prewritten comments were brief. The number of words per comment ranged from three to eight. There were six different comments with three words, three different comments with four words, and one or two comments with five to eight words.

The focus of the verbs was on state of being such as “is doing” or “can do. “ The other focus was on behavior. “Disrupts” appeared three times. As an early career teacher she was particularly concerned with classroom management, Ms. Martin indicated that it was important to “send a message to parents.” The adjectives were grouped as positive evaluative terms; these included word such as satisfactory, good, excellent, positive, great, or poor. Behavior was the focus of the nouns with—in addition to the word behavior— words such as habits, effort, and initiative. Three of the 14 statements did not contain verbs but were descriptors, such as “Excellent work habits.” These comments focused on the behavior or work habits of the students. They did not extend the evaluation of the students’ academic work.

Ms. Martin added her comments after she had completed the report card with the numeric indicators. She attended to the line in the middle of the comment box that stated, “Suggestions for parents to support student’s achievement” by writing the comment beneath the line. For the 19 report cards analyzed, she wrote 16 one-sentence comments and three two-sentence comments. All 19 statements included the student’s name, making it the only place on the report card that directly linked an individual student with a particular comment or assessment. The average length of the sentence was ten words. Twelve of the nineteen sentences began with the student’s name followed by should; for example, “Susan should participate more in class

discussions.” The lexical terms for the teacher’s comments showed the verbs clustered around the word should and then the activity that should be done: practice, work, complete, and participate. The activities, then, centered on behavior. This emphasis on should shifted responsibility from the teacher to the families and students. The nouns revealed a focus on the products in school, such as books, journals, class work, and most commonly, schoolwork and homework. The adjectives stressed qualities of that work, words such as neat, organized, extensive, and excellent.

Only one sentence out of the 22 sentences found in the comment box added an additional academic assessment of the student; “X had excellent reading comprehension skills.” Many of the comments used the language of the report card text and the teacher added should to it (Table 2). In two cases families were specifically asked to read with and to their child. For the remainder of the comments, the suggestions “to support student’s achievement” took the form of extending the teacher’s role and acting as a kind of surveillance. The teacher’s selection of words and syntax was very closely aligned with the prewritten comments. As Schyer (1993) and Smith (1997) found in their studies of genre, Ms. Martin’s genre knowledge informed discourse on these report cards in terms of syntax and lexical selection. The language of the form dictated her discourse.

Ms. Martin directed attention toward areas that needed improvement without explicitly labeling or criticizing the behavior. For example, a statement such as “Please remind [name of student] to finish all class work and homework assignments” implied, but didn’t state, that the student does not sufficiently finish class work and homework assignments.

Both the prewritten comments and the teacher-generated comments focused upon the discourse of behavior. The cultural models these lexical choices tapped were of a compliant, well-behaved student. This ideal student follows rules, in writing and in social settings, and is prepared and productive.

The comment section, then, became a place where a single message was conveyed. As previously described in the linguistic section of this analysis, the messages the teacher selected concerned behavioral issues. This excerpt also shows the teacher’s concern for the potential family and student readers of the report card, as she stated, “I didn’t want to leave the impression….” Concern about the reading of the report card was demonstrated, too, by the school policy that controlled the distribution of report cards. At Washington School report cards were distributed, read, and collected at the family-teacher conference evening:

What she [the principal] keeps saying over and over again is have them sign it on the spot and leave the report card there because it’s always so hard to get the report cards to come back in. They can’t sign it and make a photocopy so it’s a big problem for them.

The conference setting, then, became the context for the families’ reading of the report card. Ms. Martin reported that students had not mentioned the report cards at all in class. From her perspective, the report cards seemed to have little impact on them. There may be several reasons for this. It may be the limited feedback the report cards provided students. Because the family was not able to take the report cards home, only students who accompanied their family actually saw the report cards. Students may resist or dismiss the report card discourse. Finally, the fourth grade was a critical testing year. Greater emphasis was placed on the scores of a January English Language Arts test and an April Math test, which were to be the determinants of promotion to the fifth grade.

Table 2

Comparison of Report Card Text and Teacher-Generated Comments

Report card phrases Teacher-generated commentsRead to your child (p.1) Read to ___ for at least 30 minutes daily

in addition to homework.Continue reading with ___ daily.

Uses correct grammar and spelling (p.2) ___ should practice following grammar and spelling rules while writing.

Writes independently on a variety of topics (p.2)

___ should practice writing about various topics.___ should practice writing about a variety of topics.

Shares information and opinions in class discussions. (p.2)

___ should contribute more to class discussions.___ should participate more in class discussions.

Solves problems and explains solutions and strategies (p.2)

___ should work on mathematical problem solving and discussion of strategies.

Demonstrates effort and completes homework (p.3)

Remind ___ to complete all homework assignments.Please remind ___ to be prepared for school with complete homework.

Respects class and school rules (p.3) Please remind ___ to follow school rules.

Conflict, Concern, and Confidence: The Intersection of a Teacher’s Discourse

Several cultural models (Gee, 1999) emerge through the preceding excerpts and the core of the teacher interview as she explains her experience and processes writing report cards. One model refers to the lack of autonomy as she positions herself in relation to the school. Another model addresses her professional concerns and questions, and the third is her own position of professional confidence. These three overlap at times, in “cruces” or “moments of conflict in the data” (Rogers, 2002, p.257). In addition, this language recruits a different discourse than is presented in her written comments in the report card texts.

Throughout her discussion, Ms. Martin positions herself as the subject of the school’s requirements regarding the report cards. This is evident in the grammatical construction of her sentences about this process. Several statements begin with they, while she is positioned with the us. For example, “They gave us comments that were acceptable,” “They told us,” and “They

want us to put in a grade.” The pronoun “they” is used repeatedly to encompass the principal and more widely the school system. She aligns herself with other teachers, the “us.” Interestingly the principal’s name is only mentioned once, “I can tell by the way Ms Walsh talks about it that report cards are kind of a headache to her.” Ms Walsh, the individual, is more frequently seen as part of the larger, institutional “they.” Indeed, Ms. Martin recognizes that Ms Walsh, in turn, also is positioned by the a larger entity, the district, “She [Ms Walsh] just wants it to be very easy, you know, no one going to the district.” Ms Martin also hypothesized a possible rationale behind the control of the numerical indicators, stating that the numbers were controlled to demonstrate progress during the year:

You start with the 1s and 2s. You go to the 3. There’s a reason why the kids are passing. They can’t really question why these kids are passing in the fourth grade…They [school administration] don’t really say that explicitly although they do day that, no, the district will get upset is we do that and there’s an obvious accountability to the district.

There are several layers of “they.” They is the district; they is the administration. The accountability chain reaches even further to the federal level. The No Child Left Behind (2001) legislation focus on using test scores to measure academic progress is the final “they” that impacts the teacher. “The kids are really coming in and the school and the child is giving an effort every day, you know. But then you talk about No Child Left Behind and they don’t want to hear that.” In this statement, she explicitly links the local and the global contexts for the report card assessment. The efforts of teachers, students, and schools engaged in learning are not the test scores that the count in No Child Left Behind. With the multiple levels of “they” there is a dehumanizing effect. Numbers matter, not individual children.

The format of the report card creates constraints. In a previously quoted segment, Ms. Martin asked at a staff meeting if she can “fit in” as many comments as she can by writing small because so little room on the report card was allocated for comments. She was constrained by the narrow range of numerical indicators that were “allowed” as well as by the requirements of one prewritten comment. The limited number of the learning behaviors constricted her ability to fully address the curriculum. One example is the indicator “Shows evidence of understanding text.” She stated, “That’s all they’re saying about reading comprehension and that’s such a huge block of our day.” Additionally the adding together of two independent clauses in several of the learning indicators made it difficult for her to accurately communicate her evaluation. As discussed earlier, linking “Demonstrates effort and competing homework” presented her with difficulty in communicating her knowledge of her students. Thus the language of the report card creates problems; it doesn’t facilitate a more nuanced or descriptive evaluation. While she would have liked to integrate her understanding of a context wider than the school, that of the family, the discourse limited her.

Another cultural model addressed is professional questioning and concerns. This is, in part, the result of being asked by the researcher to reflect upon her own experiences, but the language here fully expresses the concern felt about this process. As she is aware of the constraints, she also questioned the constraints and probes underlying reasons for them. She theorized about the school culture and the emphasis on reduction of conflict, first between families and school, and to a degree, school and district:

I think at Washington School they really don’t want a lot of drama going on because there tends to be a lot of conflict when parents get upset. There isn’t really a systematic way of dealing with problems there other than people just yelling in the main office. So I think she [the principal] just wants to avoid conflict by things that—easy in, easy out.. …No one going to the district.

I think it’s related to the fact that they don’t want conflict. I really do. There’s a problem at our school with parents/administration relationship. And there are a lot of fires that are being put out.

They [the school administration] want us to keep them [family members] content to some degree.

As an early career teacher, Ms. Martin was particularly sensitive to this notion of conflict. Her repeated use of the pronoun “they” distanced her from the school as an institution. Her understanding of the nature of conflict in the school impacted her discourse. It measured her awareness of the potential for her to be involved in conflict. There is the message, too, that informed family members may be equated with conflict.

A cruce (Rogers, 2002) or conflict in the discourse is found in Ms. Martin’s relationship to institutional conflict. Upon reflection, professional quandaries and conflicts emerged as she filled in the report cards and talked to family members. One challenge involved balancing her desire to communicate what is important to her about students she knows in many dimensions, and her desire not to fuel or contribute to any conflict between families and herself, and families and the school. Indeed, this was a dilemma she recounted in her first teaching position the previous year, the anecdote that opened this article.

The “rock and a hard place” metaphor exemplifies the teacher’s cultural model. Inherent in her position as a teacher is the role of an intermediary between family and student, family and principal. Her superiors have the potential to mediate and change her professional judgment. Her language constructs her equivocation of the situation, her alliances with all the participants. For example, she states that the student’s grades “really went down significantly” but qualifies her assessment in the same sentence “not so much that he was in failing status.” The mother was “kind of upset.” She “kind of made a commitment to myself” about not “owning” the decision yet did not actively oppose it.

Similar dilemmas appear in her discussion of completing the report cards investigated in this study. When asked to talk about report cards she had difficulty completing she related several stories:

Here’s an issue that’s hard for me ‘cause [Aaron] does his homework every night with his mom but he demonstrates no effort in class. So I had to put sometimes. Although I would like to be more clear here. He has like almost a phobic thing in class about not getting started and then he gets disruptive. But he does his homework every night. So I know that his mom does engage in conflict so I wanted to communicate to her that I know he does his homework. So this was hard for me.

She gave him the comment “Disrupts with poor behavior.” As previously mentioned it was important for the teacher to convey a message and so she selected only one. Class management, she disclosed in the interview, was a pressing professional issue that concerned her greatly. Her

discourse here presents causal relationship between Aaron’s difficulty in getting started with the work and his behavior. The situation is difficult for the teacher, as her professional understanding is more complex than the report card discourse. It is important for her to also demonstrate to the family her professional understanding of the situation.

The comments Ms. Martin added to the prewritten comments, as previously discussed, were authoritative. They were intertextually linked to both the structure and content to the established report card language and prewritten comments. In that context, the teacher’s discourse speaks with the institutional discourse. In the interview context Ms. Martin’s confidence in her professional judgments emerged as well as her concerns. For example, she did not check the promotion status in the question box for all students as was suggested, “I just ended up not doing it because I didn’t think it was what I wanted to say.” Confidence was expressed in her ability to assess students in specific areas such as literacy and math: “I think the literacy ones were easy for me. I knew what they were trying to say and I knew how to assess it” and “Because it’s [math] very hands-on I’m aware of what they can do.”

Yet, the process left her with many questions. When describing her process of completing the report cards, she had stated that the 4, 3, 2, 1 system was “pretty clear to me.” When she reflected upon the meaning of the system, she had questions: “Do you think that’s an academic problem [getting a 2 or 1]? I mean, I don’t know. But if you say it’s November and they’re far below the standard but they’ll probably meet the standards by June, does that mean there’s an academic problem?” Here she wrestles with tensions between school policy and professional responsibility as she did with the issue whether to inform all families (as suggested by her administration) that the promotion status of their children may be in doubt. What does a 1 or 2 in November mean? Although in her public discourse, the written report cards and her conversations with families, she evidenced authority and confidence, her reflections revealed confusions and concern about the meanings she co-constructed in the report cards.

Further Discussion

The report card text investigated in this study framed Ms. Martin’s discourse in several ways. The ideal student constructed by the text was an independent, compliant student who mastered generally described academic skills. The teacher was given a limited number and range of performance indicators, which frequently contained more than one attribute, making it difficult to exactly describe a student’s progress. The teacher also reported that she was also told to use pre-written comments in the comment boxes, rather than construct her own. While she did add an additional sentence of her own, these sentences matched the prewritten comments and the report card referents in syntax and lexical choices.

The performance indicators did not match, in Ms. Martin’s view, the details of the curriculum she taught. More importantly, the context within which she completed the report cards also constrained and limited her discourse and her view of what control she had over her own discourse. She was explicitly told to only use two out of the four available numeric indicators, the lowest two indicators. This limited her ability to account for her students’ strengths. The comment sections of the report cards revealed an emphasis on behavior, as evidenced by the use of the word “should “with expectations that the student and family needed to work to change that behavior.

While in interviews Ms. Martin positioned herself as resisting the controlling discourse of school, on paper she acquiesced. She followed the administration’s request and selected

prewritten comments. While she independently added one additional original comment to the comment box, her discourse was found to be restricted to the same lexical choices and grammatical constructions as the prewritten report card discourse. No new information was added. As an early career teacher she may have been particularly vulnerable to the dilemmas of resistance versus submission. The wider school discourse, articulated by Ms. Martin, was the avoidance of conflict between school and families. This was the message she heard when instructed to limit the comments to pre-written comments. Her perception of this discourse had the effect of silencing her. The limitations of the report card discourse and the procedures by which she completed and distributed them imposed restrictions on her discourse that she was unable to resist. As stated in the opening section, Noddings (1984) wrote that the grading process elicits in teachers feeling “torn between the obligation to the employing community and faithfulness to the student” (p. 194). While Ms. Martin spoke with specificity and insight about her students in an interview context, she obliged her “employing community” with the restricted discourse on the report card form.

Implications for Teacher Education and Further Research

From the teacher’s perspective, the multiple constraints placed upon her created professional conflicts as she negotiated the report-card writing process. Ms. Martin found the general language of the card did not help her to report her assessment of her students. It also was evident the administration exerted a high degree of control over the teacher’s report-card writing process to the extent of delineating the range of grades as well pre-written comments. She felt “between a rock and a hard place.”

How can we, as teacher educators, help teachers negotiate these hard places? First, greater attention to current assessment theories and practices throughout teacher education courses is warranted. Stiggens, Frisbie, and Girswold (1989) argued that teacher education programs inconsistently prepare teachers for assessing students. Surveys of teacher education programs (Schafer & Lissitz, 1987) and teachers (Jett & Schafer, 1992) indicate insufficient attention to assessment. Yet, simply adding more assessment information is not enough. Changes in assessment practices from NCLB (2001) have also created dissonance between assessment practices learned in teacher education and those in practice in schools (Campbell & Evans, 2001; Maylone, 2004). As teacher educators, we need to continually update our knowledge of the assessment and reporting practices used in the schools in our areas. Including real examples of assessments, especially report cards in our courses would give preservice teachers an opportunity to initially become familiar with the forms in use. As field supervisors we can facilitate conversations with cooperating teachers about report cards and encourage ways for preservice teachers to apprentice this aspect of teaching. Even more, critically examining report cards in the context of teacher education courses would enable preservice teachers to pose questions and anticipate problems without the immediacy of the pressures experienced by Ms. Martin. Course activities could also include using case studies, with student data, to enable preservice to try completing report cards and explore their language choices. By examining report cards and the assessment process with their peers, in a supportive context, novice teachers can also see the value of building supportive relationships with school based mentors and colleagues and be encouraged to draw upon those supports as they negotiate the hard places during their professional careers (Graham, 2005).

Ms. Martin’s story also highlights a need for greater dialogue in teacher education courses about the challenges presented by the different audiences for report cards. We need to address the roles of administrators and district or city policy play in the day-to-day lives of teachers (Grossman & Thompson, 2004; Youngs, 2007). Similarly, preservice teachers benefit from greater attention toward understanding the complexity of the perspectives of the families with whom they will work (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2003). Hearing first hand from families about their expectations for their children, either as guests in teacher education courses or through planned activities at student teaching sites could be a powerful experience for new teachers and reinforce the need to begin, as Lawrence-Lightfoot terms, the “essential conversation” that is the bridge between home and school.

As report cards remain a fixture in schools, future research could further document and investigate the report-card writing processes for teachers with an additional focus on the development of strategies to enable teachers to articulate and address their concerns. Future research should investigate the methods and kinds of training preservice teachers receive concerning assessment strategies, including report cards, and the challenges they face as they put this knowledge into practice.

The numerical indicators used on the report card were the same numerical indicators used on the state standardized tests. With the discourse of accountability that has resulted in increased standardized testing, its impact on the professional lives of teachers and educational experiences of children needs to be more fully researched. Johnson (2001) found a correlation between report card grades and state assessments in Washington State. According to Ms. Martin, the numerical grades were carefully controlled by the administration so that progress would be shown throughout the year and match the numeric scores on the state assessment. As state and federal standards and mandates exert more and more control in setting and implementing specific educational policy, it is imperative to document and critique the relationships that emerge and its impact on teachers’ practice and students’ learning. Critical discourse analysis, as Rogers (2004) argues, is a powerful research tool in investigating the complex, often contradictory discourses constructed in the intersections of policy, education, and pedagogy. Allington (2002) and Shannon (2004) have described the pressures exerted on schools, teachers, and children through the increased levels of government involvement in curriculum and assessment policies. The intersections and impositions of these discourses, located in the report card discourse, places teachers between a rock and a hard place. Future research is warranted in investigating these “hard places.”

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Author Biography

Jennifer Tuten, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Education at Hunter College in New York City, New York. Her research interests include teacher-parent communication and the assessment and instruction of struggling readers. Email: jtuten@hunter.cuny.edu.

Typesetter: This begins a new section of the journal so this next heading should match the Reports of Research and Reflection heading on the first page of this file.

Sharing Perspectives, Practices, and Approaches

Learning Anytime and Anywhere With Advanced Distributed Learning: Some Opportunities and Challenges for Educators and Education

J. D. FletcherInstitute for Defense Analyses

Sigmund Tobias Institute for Urban and Minority EducationTeachers College, Columbia University

Robert A. WisherDepartment of Defense

Abstract

The implications for educators and educational institutions of universally accessible instructional resources that are available anytime and anywhere appear to be extensive and substantial. Some implications can be seen in the implementation of the Advanced Distributed Learning initiative and the likely culmination of technology and learning trends in instruction delivered as anytime-anywhere tutorial conversations. Opportunities for education include more accessible learning, more individualized learning, and continuous, unobtrusive assessment. Challenges include needs to re-assess the roles and responsibilities of formal education, the budgetary and other administrative practices of schools, and the procedures and standards for the preparation of teachers.

Notes: This article is based on a paper delivered at the annual convention of the American Educational Research Association, April 2007. The findings, views, and conclusions expressed in this paper are strictly those of the authors and do not represent official positions of the U.S. government or the Department of Defense.

BEGIN RUNNING HEAD: Advanced Distributed Learning

The time may be coming, if it is not already here, when any student can access available teaching-learning resources at anytime and from anywhere, including schools. Are we ready for this? Do we know how to prepare teachers and other K-12 personnel for such a future? Fortunately for its authors, this article avoids answering these questions. Instead we hope to encourage others, better informed about the problems and processes of K-12 education than are we, to seek and develop the capabilities needed to ensure affirmative answers to these questions. Our approach here is to share what we have learned from the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative and discuss the challenges and capabilities that may be presented by anytime-anywhere learning to educators and educational institutions.

The Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative

The ADL initiative was undertaken by the Department of Defense (DoD) at the request of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and in cooperation with the other Federal Agencies. It is intended to lead all the Federal Agencies in making education, training, and job performance aiding available anytime and anywhere. It is supported by correspondence between the Office of Science and Technology Policy and DoD and by Presidential Executive Orders issued by both the previous and current Administrations.

The central role for DoD may surprise educators, but the extent to which DoD is involved in all levels of instruction is both large and comprehensive. DoD training and education is not limited to people in uniform. In addition to 1.3 million military personnel, about 800,000 civilian employees receive DoD-supplied education and training. About 85 percent of this instruction involves preparation for tasks, jobs, and occupational skills with direct civilian counterparts (Fletcher & Chatelier, 2000). The DoD also provides K-12 schooling for about 90,000 military dependents both overseas and in the United States. These schools are noted for their ability to establish and maintain high levels of achievement among a diverse and mobile population of students. Given the scope and intensity of this activity, it does not seem unreasonable to expect the Defense community to exercise leadership in developing ADL.

Learning in ADL refers equally to education—preparing people for life—and to training—preparing people for specific tasks, jobs, and careers. Distributed refers to delivery anytime and anywhere, including formal settings such as classrooms and schools but also informal venues such as homes, workplaces, museums, libraries, community centers, or any place where someone might seek assistance in learning. Distributed learning, in contrast to distance learning, is intended for use either with or without the physical presence of a (human) teacher. Advanced is meant to emphasize learning that is presented interactively and adaptively, capitalizing on the capabilities of computer technology to adjust quickly to the needs of individual learners. Advanced Distributed Learning is, then, implemented via computers—in some cases by the World Wide Web. ADL has developed specifications and techniques for portable, sharable, and reusable instructional objects (digital learning materials that are deliverable over the Internet and can be accessed by multiple users). Its specifications are being adopted by governments, businesses, and schools around the world. Through the use of these objects, ADL can provide significant economies in the preparation of materials for training. Stout, Slosser, and Hayes (2003) found

that about half of the development costs for instructional materials can be saved through the use of sharable instructional objects.

We estimated (Fletcher, Tobias, & Wisher, 2007) that approximately six million sharable instructional objects have been developed by government, industry, and academic institutions for ADL. The objects can be delivered over the Internet and/or the World Wide Web to multiple users who can access and use them separately or collaboratively. Most of these objects are applicable to both education and training. They can be downloaded, used, and reused by themselves or in combination with other instructional materials and by as many different learners for as many different purposes in as many learning contexts as needed. ADL is presently focused on government and business applications, but it has significant implications for the classroom structures, processes, and activities of K-12 education as well (Fletcher et al, 2007; Fletcher & Tobias, 2003). Development of ADL has involved software engineers, instructional designers, and educators from government, industry, and academia. For a continuing discussion of all ADL matters pertaining to education, please subscribe and contribute your comments, ideas, and suggestions to the complimentary ADL Newsletter for Educators and Educational Researchers at http://www.academiccolab.org/newsletter/ADLnewsletter.html.

Why Technology?

It is difficult to conceive of practical ways to make ADL materials available anytime and anywhere, to anyone who needs them without the use of technology. Other reasons to use technology stem from two perennial challenges to classroom instruction: pace of learning and active engagement.

Learning Pace and Classroom Instruction

Many teachers have been struck by the differences in the pace with which their students learn. Here are some findings about the ratios of time needed for different students in different domains to reach the same instructional objective:

13:1 by kindergarten students to build words from letters (Suppes, 1964). 4:1 for students with hearing impairments and Native American students to reach

mathematics objectives (Suppes, Fletcher, & Zanotti, 1975). 5:1 for individual students learning in grades K-8 (Gettinger, 1984). 7:1 by undergraduates to learn features of the List Processing (LISP) programming

language (Private communication, Corbett, 1998).

The magnitudes of the differences in pace are remarkable. As Gettinger’s review suggests, a typical classroom will have students who are prepared to learn in one day what it will take others in the same classroom five days to learn.

This diversity presents daunting challenges to teachers. How can they ensure that every student has enough time to reach given instructional objectives? On the other hand, how can they enable students who mastered the content to move ahead? Despite heroic efforts by teachers to resolve these issues, student diversity remains a serious challenge in our classrooms of 20 to 30 students. Many classes contain students who, at one end of the spectrum, are bored and, at the other, are overwhelmed and lost.

Active Engagement and Classroom Instruction

Graesser and Person (1994) compared instruction using one-on-one tutoring with classroom practice in two curriculum areas: research methods for college undergraduates and algebra for seventh-graders. Tutors for the research methods course were psychology graduate students and algebra tutors were high-school students. Graesser and Person report the following data regarding the average number of questions in a classroom hour asked by

• a teacher: 3.00• a student: 0.11

Here are data on the average number of questions in a tutoring hour asked by

• a student and answered by a tutor in research methods: 21.1• a student and answered by a tutor in algebra: 32.2• a tutor and answered by a student in research methods: 117.2• a tutor and answered by a student in algebra: 146.4

These findings suggest students being tutored one-on-one are more actively engaged in their learning than those in one-on-many classrooms. These differences in interactivity appear to be linked to achievement. Bloom (1984) compared one-on-one tutoring with classroom instruction and found an improvement in achievement approximating an increase from the 50th to 98th percentile. Bloom’s findings, and those of others, suggest that, like the data about interactivity, differences between the results of one-on-one tutoring and classroom instruction are very large. Why, then, don’t we provide these benefits to all students? The answer is obvious: We can’t afford it.

Technology in Education

Enter technology. Computers can provide instruction that proceeds as quickly as students wish or as slowly as they need. They can present questions tailored to maximize the student’s rate of learning (Fletcher et al., 2007), and they can allow either the student or the machine to take the initiative in asking questions in a mixed-initiative learning dialogue (Carbonell, 1970). As a bonus, Moore’s Law continues to operate. In 1965 Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel, noted that engineers were doubling the number of electronic devices (basically transistors) on chips every year. In 1975, Moore revised his statement to say that the doubling was occurring every two years instead of one. If we split the difference and predict that it will occur every 18 months, our expectations fit reality quite closely (Service, 1996). One effect of Moore’s Law is that computers initially selling for, say, $1,000 will cost about half that in 18 months with little, if any, loss of capability. In effect, computers are making individualized instruction affordable.

Results from the use of computers in instruction are promising. Reviews across many assessments of computer-based instruction have suggested increases that approximate raising student achievement from the 50th percentile to anywhere from 65th to the 85th percentile (Fletcher, 2003). These are statistical summaries; they do not specify cause and effect. However, it seems reasonable to expect that adjustments for pace and increased interactivity contribute to

the results. Overall, the data suggest that computers can be used successfully for instruction in a variety of areas. The proper balance between human tutors, classroom teachers, and computers clearly requires more research.

We can now envision a world in which all human knowledge is available anytime and anywhere to any student via the World Wide Web. The emergence of wikis, blogs, instant messaging, and chat rooms enable students to collect information and collaborate with one another to solve problems, form opinions, and discuss all matters great and small. Lessons, simulations, and tests can be downloaded. Instructional one-on-one dialogues between students and individual instructors, computer and human, are becoming increasingly routine. All this activity suggests that we are racing into an anytime-anywhere distributed learning future.

So, Where Are We Headed?

In the future learning anytime and anywhere may be delivered by Personal Learning Associates (PLAs), which could become as prevalent and widely used as today’s PDAs, iPODs, and cell telephones. PLAs will be small enough to be carried in a pocket or even worn as clothing. (They could even be implanted, but let’s set that possibility aside for the moment.) They will be used by individuals learning alone, in web-based collaborative learning, or in classrooms. PLAs will combine wireless communication from the Web with data from their own memories to assemble objects, interactions, and presentations into instructional interactions on demand and in real-time—anytime and anywhere—to meet the individual needs of students. Most of the hardware technology needed for PLAs exists now. A significant portion of the software technology also exists—including the necessary object-oriented programming techniques for manipulating and managing the instructional objects needed to realize PLA capabilities.

The instructional objects delivered to PLAs will be retrieved from the Web. To be useful, they must be (a) accessible, so a server (computer) can find them; (b) portable, so they function successfully on whatever device the server sends them to; (c) durable, so they will function regardless of updates in servers or supporting software; and (d) reusable, so they find wide use across many applications. These qualities are precisely the criteria for Sharable Content Objects developed for ADL. Specifications for these objects are found in the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM).

SCORM

SCORM specifies standardized procedures for communicating between sharable content objects; it is under continual development and its current version can be found at www.adlnet.org. Successive versions are able to accommodate an increasing variety of instructional approaches. ADL has focused on the development, implementation, and use of shareable content objects. Such objects could be entire courses; lessons within courses; modules within lessons; or material not seen by students but used to register them, report on their progress, aggregate them into classes, or store data needed to tailor instruction to their needs (Dodds & Fletcher, 2004). The objects could also be algorithms that aggregate, integrate, and sequence other objects needed to manage student progress. Gibbons, Nelson, and Richards (2000) emphasize that the objects will be most useful if they are small enough to be used without major modifications across a variety of instructional materials.

SCORM-conformant instructional objects do not require a standard computer configuration, operating system, browser, authoring tool, or programming language. Instead, developers may do whatever is needed within each object while SCORM specifications ensure reliable communication among objects and between objects and other instructional resources. Examples of instructional objects for educational purposes, and how they may be accessed, are given in the last issue (No. 5) of the ADL Newsletter for Educators and Educational Researchers previously described. An important next step in the development of instructional objects is to enhance their capabilities for responding to learner achievement, progress, as well as needs and bodies of knowledge by increasing the potential for recognizing semantic linkages among them. This point brings us to the Semantic Web.

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web (Berners-Lee, Hendler, & Lassila, 2001), which is being developed under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium, is also included in ADL planning. Its goal is to improve cooperation between computers and human beings by imbuing Web information with meaning. It is intended to identify and expose semantic linkages between bodies of knowledge regardless of how disparate they may appear to be (e.g., Chandrasekaran, Josephson, & Benjamins, 1999). If there are semantic linkages between third-grade geography and quantum mechanics, to cite an extreme example, the Semantic Web will find them.

By noting semantic linkages, the Semantic Web will allow instructional programs to create models of subject matter domains as well as learners’ levels of mastery. It will help different applications running on different operating systems, developed with different object models using different programming languages to cooperate and become increasingly capable educational applications. The Semantic Web will significantly expand our capabilities for modeling student knowledge and achievement. It will enable major advances over the current text-crawling procedures used by Web search engines, and it will do much to enhance the capabilities of anytime-anywhere learning.

Instructional Dialogue and Instruction as Conversation

In the anytime-anywhere future envisioned by ADL, instruction may stress conversations between students and the instructional delivery system, rather than didactic presentations of material. ADL instructional objects can build and incorporate models of student competence and achievement derived from these conversations, just as other technology-based approaches to education have done for some time (e.g., Fletcher, 1975). These models are essential in adapting instruction to the needs, abilities, and backgrounds of learners.

Computer-based tutoring systems developed from the 1970s (e.g., Brown, Burton, & deKleer, 1982) until today (e.g., Graesser, Gernsbacher, & Goldman, 2003) have used mixed-initiative dialogues, which allow either students or the tutoring system to initiate interactions. These systems have demonstrated both the feasibility and utility of natural language interactions in technology-based instruction.

An illustrative example of such a conversation adapted from an interaction between a student and SOPHIE, an electronic troubleshooting tutoring system (Brown, Burton, & DeKleer,

1982), follows. In this example, the student is learning to find a fault introduced into a power supply by the SOPHIE instructional materials.

Student: What is the base emitter voltage of the voltage limiting transistor?SOPHIE: The base emitter voltage of Q5 is -0.037 volt.

The student-SOPHIE interaction in this example is a straightforward question and answer. SOPHIE has introduced a fault into the simulated power supply, and the student is trying to locate and repair it.

Student: What about the voltage for the current limiting transistor?SOPHIE: The base emitter voltage of Q8 is 0.349 volt.

The second interaction is less straightforward. In addition to simulating the faulted power supply, SOPHIE must parse the dialogue sufficiently to know that the student is asking for the base emitter voltage of transistor Q8.

Student: What should it be?SOPHIE: In a working circuit, the base emitter voltage of Q8 is 0.593 volt.

The third interaction continues its dependence on SOPHIE’s understanding of context and dialogue. Notably the dialogue requires SOPHIE to extract answers by simulating both the faulted power supply and one that is operating correctly.

Student: Replace Q8.SOPHIE: I am going to ask you some questions about how Q8 is faulted. Are any

junctions shorted?

The fourth interaction goes a step beyond what Brown et al. (1982) described as knowledgeable behavior by SOPHIE to what they considered to be intelligent behavior. In it SOPHIE has continued to exercise its capability to parse student questions, simulate various states of the power supply, and then provide answers, but it also appears to have exercised what might be called tutorial intelligence. Note the importance of having developed a model of student progress to manage the conversation. SOPHIE has shadowed the student’s solution paths, modeled his/her troubleshooting hypotheses, determined that they were incorrect, and then took over the dialogue initiative in order to pursue a series of tutorial interactions intended to guide the student to a correct solution.

SOPHIE provides an example of both individualization and goal-oriented, tutorial, problem-solving conversations between learners and a computer-tutor. Such conversations could also point learners to pre-stored didactic lessons, tests, simulations, and other presentations or learning environments. The adaptation of instruction in this conversation arises from a model of the student generated by the system during the dialogue and a model describing the organization of the content.

Implications for Education

ADL capabilities can be used in classrooms and anywhere else. Applied appropriately, they can be minimally disruptive to the organization and culture of any school. In addition to being relatively unconstrained by the computer systems used, they can be used across a variety of school organizations and classroom approaches ranging from inquiry-oriented classes to relatively traditional ones.

Instructional objects can be used to support approaches such as situated learning (Paavola, Lipponen, & Hakkarainen, 2004), facilitated communities of learners (Brown & Campione, 1994), anchored instruction, (Cognition & Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1997), and case-based learning (Allen, Otto, & Hoffman, 2000). Teachers have been urged to consider changing their instructional practice “From sage on the stage to guide on the side.” In this view, instructors deemphasize the delivery of instructional content and stress providing guidance to students in locating and using appropriate instructional resources, much the way a coach or individual tutor might. The availability of instructional objects can facilitate such a transition by helping students learn to explore, analyze, and synthesize information from a variety of sources while receiving guidance from their teachers.

The objects could be used in traditional teacher-led classes by assigning them to one student, a class sub-group, or the whole class. Students could work on objects in school or as homework, working alone, in small groups, or in physically separate but networked locations. Similarly, instructional objects could be referenced in curriculum guides, workbooks, and teachers’ editions of textbooks. We hope that teacher educators will alert tomorrow’s teachers to the availability of instructional objects and ways to use them to achieve educational goals. Many teachers and teacher educators have an understandable skepticism about how helpful technology can be. Such doubts may stem from the enthusiasm that supporters of technology often bring to education where promises have outstripped what technology has delivered. The advent of anytime-anywhere instruction and advances in both instructional psychology and educational technology suggest that we may be at a point when technology can deliver on its promises to support education.

Instructional objects can be used while we are still learning the best ways to apply them. Computer-based education was used in schools before definitive evidence of its value accumulated (Tobias, 1985). Novel instructional arrangements are being implemented while evidence of their effectiveness is still being collected (e.g., Duffy & Kirkley, 2003; Paavola et al., 2004). When anytime-anywhere instruction and instructional objects become ubiquitous in business, industry, the government, and the military, it seems likely that they will be used in schools even as research dealing with their effectiveness and applicability continues.

Finally, an attractive aspect of instructional objects is that once students have learned to retrieve them they can do so whenever their curiosity has been aroused. The ready accessibility of ADL objects can help educators and students take best advantage of “teachable moments,” which we have discussed elsewhere (Fletcher et al., 2007). The availability of instructional objects to arouse and/or satisfy curiosity, help students solve problems of immediate interest to them, or simply to complete assigned schoolwork anytime and anywhere, may make the objects as valuable and ubiquitous in educational settings as they already are in training contexts.

Benefits and Challenges

At least three general benefits, and some challenges can arise from ADL teaching-learning environments:

More individualization. These environments can take whatever direction and pace might be needed. Instructional objects allow affordable on-demand, real-time, responsive interactivity to be more nearly realized (Gibbons et al., 2000). In contrast to training, doing so seems especially important in education where objectives may be negotiable as teachers and students work to identify and develop their abilities, interests, and values.

Continuous assessment. Assessment in instructional conversations can become continuous and less intrusive as capabilities for generating models of individual learners from their instructional interactions evolve. Such assessment may occur by noting the learner’s vocabulary, use of technical information, level of abstraction, clustering (chunking) of concepts, hypothesis formation, and the like. These capabilities have yet to be fully explored and verified, but enough research has been completed to suggest their promise for the adaptive assessment of knowledge and abilities needed to tailor instruction to learners’ needs (Fletcher, 2002). Explicit testing and probing may still be needed to assess learner progress efficiently. The optimal design and development of assessments capitalizing on all existing and emerging capabilities is a challenge for educators, instructional designers, and the testing community to integrate evaluation with instruction as Baker (2003), among others, have strongly recommended.

More learning. Increasing the accessibility of learning resources is a worthy goal for both educators and instructional developers. Results from research on tutoring, individualization of instruction, and computer based instruction suggest that student learning can be enhanced by the increased accessibility provided by instructional objects. The active participation of educators in the process is important to assure that the objects are maximally useful for education.

Some Challenges

Teacher preparation. Once anytime-anywhere instructional resources, as implemented by ADL, are increasingly used by students, a number of issues will have to be addressed. In-service teacher education will have to be provided so that teachers can integrate those resources with their instructional practices. In the absence of such education, whatever anytime-anywhere learning is available is likely to be ignored by teachers and ultimately by students, despite the rapidly growing use by both groups of out-of-school Web objects and resources. Teacher education programs will need to prepare future teachers to use anytime-anywhere learning resources effectively and appropriately.

The advent of anytime-anywhere learning can increasingly give rise to situations in which students become more expert than their teachers. How should teachers be prepared to deal with such situations that may become increasingly prevalent when students have ready access to instructional objects making most human knowledge, information, and, notably, misinformation readily available to them?

Evaluation and credentialing. How will anytime-anywhere learning be evaluated? How will such learning be articulated with existing curricular objectives? If students determine that learning from instructional objects is not evaluated as part of the curriculum, they are likely to assign little importance to it.

There are also issues dealing with credentialing. How ill anytime-anywhere learning be recognized for credentialing purposes? Many professions and occupations have a prescribed curriculum, and questions will arise about how objectives mastered with instructional objects will then be accredited.

Budgeting. Full-time teaching equivalents and instructor contact hours are commonly used to establish budgets for education and training. These procedures often work well for standard classroom practice. We may know how many teachers to assign for classrooms of various sizes. But what might happen in an anytime-anywhere setting when the number of students a teacher can serve increases dramatically and may well be unknown? Should we reduce the budget proportionally? Increase it? What procedures should be used to deal with these questions?

Roles and responsibilities of schools. We are seeing many discussions about the role of teachers. These discussions should also consider the roles and responsibilities of the institutions that teachers serve. In a world where instructional resources are available anytime and anywhere, what are the roles and responsibilities of schools? How should the activities and capabilities of formal education be ‘blended’ with anytime-anywhere resources?

Privacy. Concerns have emerged regarding privacy for users of the Internet. If PLAs are capable of modeling student progress, interests, and abilities who should be able to access this information? To what extent should teachers and schools use this information?

Equity. It is well known that children from poor and minority backgrounds, in urban or rural areas, have less access to technological devices supporting instruction than their wealthier peers (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1999). There is a lack of equity even in the content available for access by technology (Lazarus & Mora, 2000). This “digital divide” is likely to make it easier for more affluent children to access ADL instructional objects than for their less affluent peers, and wealthier students are more likely to have easier access to PLAs than their less affluent counterparts. Clearly some thought will have to be given to take steps to reduce the digital divide.

Intellectual property. If educators develop materials that can be made globally available anytime and anywhere, what protections should be provided for their products? How should teachers be compensated, financially or in released time, for their development of instructional objects? What protections should be provided for the products of students, and should they be compensated? If they should be compensated, should that be financial, or in terms of providing them with release from other instructional requirements?

Summary. The concerns summarized here are only a sample of the issues confronting education in a world where students can avail themselves of instructional resources anytime and anywhere to master curricular objectives. We hope to stimulate serious attention to both the opportunities and challenges presented by initiatives such as ADL and by anytime-anywhere education in general. The issues raised are far more extensive than those listed here. It is hoped that educational administrators and teacher educators can begin to think about these issues so they may be ready to address them when anytime-anywhere education becomes as ubiquitous as cell phones, IPODs, and PDAs are today.

Final Word

We have discussed the significance of learning anytime and anywhere for education and described its present implementation in ADL. Most probably the advent of ADL, and learning

anytime and anywhere more generally, will produce many challenges that we were unable to list or even foresee. Columbus did not expect what he found when he embarked on his epochal journey. A “Columbus Effect” was evident when wireless telegraphs, horseless carriages, and a host of other technological innovations were developed that led us into territory not envisioned in the original, precipitating metaphor. We anticipate a similar effect with the advent of anytime-anywhere learning. Unexpected benefits and challenges are likely to arise and will have to be addressed as the future we have outlined, or some variant of it that we have not expected, become realities. We hope that educators will contribute to the development of anytime-anywhere capabilities for learning, such as ADL, so that they will use their educational experience and wisdom to deal and profit from these events.

References

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Author Biographies

J. D. Fletcher, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, Virginia. His research interests include military and industrial training, design and evaluation of instructional technology, and cost-effectiveness analysis of human performance. Email: fletcher@ida.org.

Sigmund Tobias, Ph.D., is Distinguished Research Scientist at the Institute for Urban and Minority Education, Teachers College, Columbia University.  His research interests include metacognition, adapting instruction to student characteristics, and learning with technology. Email: stobi@aol.com.

Robert A. Wisher, Ph.D., is Director of the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, OUSD(P&R), Washington, DC. His research interests include design and effectiveness of technology-based learning, acquisition and retention of skilled performance, and international applications of training technology.

RUNNING HEAD: Making the Journey Into Teaching

Making the Journey Into Teaching: A Different Approach to Student Teaching at the Secondary Level

James J. CarpenterBinghamton University

Abstract

In the fall of 2002, the Adolescent Education Program at Binghamton University, responding to New York State requirements increasing the number of days needed for student teaching, initiated a new approach to placing and supervising student teachers in their graduate preservice programs. In place of the traditional single placements for six to eight weeks each, the program places students simultaneously in both high school and middle school settings for what amounts to a full day’s experience. This article discusses the advantages students and faculty have experienced using this approach as well as continuing problematic issues. To date, the experiences of our students suggests the advantages, among them improved planning, greater understanding of student learning styles, and developing classroom management skills, outweigh persistent complaints or difficulties.

The most critical element in the preparation of preservice teachers is the practicum or student teaching experience. It is during this experience that would-be teachers get to practice the theory and methods they have been taught. It is where they begin to define their teaching personas. It is where they first attempt to manage a classroom and implement the teaching strategies they hope will result in meaningful lessons for their students. It is, in other words, where the “rubber meets the road.” As a social studies educator, I see my preservice teaching students look forward to their student teaching assignments with a mix of feelings ranging from excitement to terror.

In so many ways, student teaching is an artificial experience that fails to adequately prepare our future teachers for what awaits them in their first teaching positions. Student teachers often feel more like guests in someone else’s classroom. Often they may lack authority or standing, and they may be treated more as an aide than as professionals beginning their journeys to licensure. Britzman (2003) describes this potentially schizophrenic world of the practicum: “Marginally situated in two worlds, the student teacher as part student and part teacher has the dual struggle of educating others while being educated” (p. 36). McGuire (1996) alleges that “while university students generally rate their student teaching as the most valuable experience in their preparation for teaching,” there is often a disconnect between program expectations and practicum experiences owing to “a lack of cohesiveness” (p. 75). From complaining about cooperating teachers to looking forward to the end of the experience, student teaching is a rite of passage for the teaching profession.

In my position as social studies educator in the School of Education, I have seen the look of fear on the faces of some of my secondary student teachers. I work with preservice teachers for two semesters. My initial experience with them is the first of two discipline-based methods seminars. This seminar is offered in the spring prior to their practica. The second methods seminar complements their student teaching during the fall term. To say that some of my students have viewed the approach of Labor Day with differing degrees of anxiety would be an understatement.

In this paper, I will describe a different configuration to student teaching being employed by the adolescent education program at Binghamton University. I will explain why the faculty opted for this different approach and also identify what we believe are both the strengths and problems inherent in it. In doing so I will make explicit the reasons why we believe this to be a better experience than the traditional practicum for our students. In conclusion, I will offer some suggestions derived from this programmatic change for consideration for the future of student teaching for preservice teachers.

The Way We Were: The Former Student Teaching Experience

The education program at Binghamton University is exclusively a graduate degree program. The School of Education offers masters degrees in early childhood education, inclusive childhood education, special education, literacy education, and adolescence education. Our programs are designed for preservice teachers and in-service teachers. Our preservice adolescent education program is also a small one with our students typically totaling 40 to 48 students, with 10 to 12 students each in the content areas of English, math, science, and social studies (As of July 1, 2006, the former School of Education and Human Development as divided into two with one being a free standing School of Education. The new School is committed to

controlled growth over the next five years. The overall numbers will, however, continue to represent a small graduate program).

Prior to 2002, the student teaching experience for students in adolescence education was essentially one placement at either the middle- or high-school level. Student teaching lasted 16 weeks from the first day of school in September until the day schools closed for winter break in December. As a small program, we offer student teaching only in the fall semester. During this time, students would have a brief additional experience at the other level—perhaps team teaching with a classmate or assisting a teacher in that setting (Figure 1). The student-teaching experience was a half-day with the rest of the day devoted to keeping up with class work for the university.

Figure 1. Diagram of former practicum experience preservice teachers with some of its advantages.

typically eight credit hours in addition to student teaching (except for the science students who were required to spend the entire day at their placements).

This configuration for student teaching enabled our students to develop a small sense of what was involved for planning several units and also for directing students through the first marking period for grading purposes. They established their classroom environment from early

Week 1 Week 16

Full-Semester Student Teaching, Half Day in One Placement

Student Teachers Get “Experience”

At Other Secondary Level for Two to Three Weeks

Students develop nearly a semester’s worth of lesson plans Students experience assessing student work and assigning grades for a quarter and

report card grading Students can progress in developing their classroom management Students can see development and progress in their students Meets the letter of the law by providing “experience” at both levels

in the school year, if not from the very first day. Relationships with students were fostered and the student teachers could see the progress their students were making. This arrangement was also convenient for the university supervisors to schedule their site visits to observe their student teachers and to meet with them to discuss their progress.

The Need for Something Different

Effective February 2, 2004, New York State implemented several changes in the certification process (see http://highered.nysed.gov/cert/part52-21.htm). Most significant for our model of supervising student teachers was a document published by the State University of New York in 2001. A New Vision in Teacher Education stated that effective with the fall 2002 semester, “Student teaching will consist of a minimum of 75 days in classrooms and schools [with 90 days being desirable] in two separate experiences…” (2001, p. 2). As a result of this change, we could no longer continue this practice that had served us well. The question confronting us, therefore, was what would our new practicum look like?

Given the fact that we had to change, we considered two options. One would be to follow what I will call the traditional structure used for student teaching in much of New York State. This model divides the semester into two distinct blocks with the preservice teachers spending one block in a high-school setting and one in a middle-school setting. To meet the requirement of forty days in each setting, these blocks would each have to be eight weeks in duration. The second option would be to develop something different. Our question then was would we adopt the familiar pattern common to other institutions or would we develop something out of the ordinary that would enable us to provide what the faculty believed would be a better experience for our students.

By traditional model, I mean a practicum in which student teachers work for a full day in one secondary setting, either middle school or high school, for a quarter – that is, eight weeks or half a college semester – and then change levels completely and work for another eight weeks at the other level (Figure 2). Typically, student teachers attend district and building meetings held the Tuesday after Labor Day and report for their assignments the first day of school in the fall. Their placements usually end just before the winter holiday break in December. By dividing the assignment into eight-week intervals, students would apparently meet the requirement of forty days of teaching at each level though obviously this does not take into account days lost to holidays, vacations, and weather.

There are at least three advantages to this arrangement. For one, students get to experience a full day of teaching in the same setting. Typically, after a week or two, they are given the full schedule of their cooperating teacher, thereby, enabling them to live the life of a teacher, if only for a brief time. Second, many, if not most, middle schools utilize teaming, a practice in which the student population is divided and the same students are assigned to teams of teachers representing English, math, science, and social studies. Often a special education teacher is also part of the team. Student teachers are then able to attend team meetings no matter what period in the day they may be scheduled. This allows them to observe and take part in common planning and to discuss problems relevant to a common team of students. Third, there are no travel issues between buildings nor is there a disparity in the amount of time spent in each setting.

Figure 2. Diagram of a traditional model for student teaching spread over 16 weeks and some of its advantages.

Regardless of these benefits, shortcomings to this traditional arrangement must be noted. First, “the short duration of the preservice period limits its impact” and the requisite “critical examination of one’s ideology and its relationship to practice takes time” (Patterson & Luft, 2004, p. 140). Six to eight weeks, while not without value, is not long enough for preservice teachers to “understand the relationship of beliefs and practices and their interaction” (Patterson & Luft, 2004, p. 141). Second, experience suggests the second block of time in this arrangement is less satisfying for both student teacher and classroom teacher. Student teachers complain they have no ownership of the class; they are simply enacting the lessons of the cooperating teacher (CT) lessons. “She wants me to teach her class” complained one student teacher (quoted in Bullough et al., 2002, p. 72). For many CTs the student teachers appear to only want “to parrot” what they observe (Schlosser, Liles, & DuPre, 2007).

Believing a longer experience would produce greater benefits for preservice teachers, the adolescent education faculty (representing English, math, science and social studies) at Binghamton University decided to do something different. Instead of dividing the semester into halves for student teaching, we divided the day into halves for teaching at both the middle school and high school levels. Recognizing our former configuration was now inadequate, we explored the possibility of a full-day experience with our student teachers spending a half-day at the high school level and a half-day at the middle school level (Figure 3). By doing this, we could maintain the advantages that we believed were present in our earlier model, and at the same time we could ensure our compliance with the

__________________________________________________________________ Week 1 Week 16 Eight Weeks in the First Secondary Placement

Full-day experience at both levels Able to participate in team meetings at middle school Available all day to help students Better able to participate in school activities

Second Eight Weeks in the Next Secondary Setting

Figure 3. Diagram of current Binghamton University model for student teaching with some of its advantages.

new state regulations. However, our motivation was more than mere compliance with state regulations. We wanted an experience that would be more beneficial for our students than traditional eight-week placements. We wanted one that would minimize the artificial nature of an admittedly artificial experience, one that would facilitate “the growth of the prospective teacher through experience, reflection, and self-examination” (McIntyre, Boyd, & Foxx, 1996, p. 172). At each level, our student teachers would be responsible for at least one class. At the discretion of the cooperating teachers they could teach additional sections of the same course. They would also have a duty at one of the sites. Our students would thus only be responsible for two preparations and could, by the end of their practicum, teach four or five classes or the equivalent of a full teaching load.

The goals for this different approach were to have our students maximize the potential benefits of working in both settings for themselves and for the students they would be teaching. This new paradigm for student teaching seemed to offer a greater number of benefits than did the traditional configuration. The problem then became how we were to present this to the CTs who worked with our students.

Week 1 Week 16

Full-Semester Student Teaching at High-School Level (Half Day)

Nearly half year of lesson plans at two levels Can see growth of students over a quarter and a half Developing long-term relationships with their students Can see and be part of start of school year at both levels Get a better sense of the school culture in two settings Will be responsible for seeing students complete a marking period and be

responsible for computing grades Have a more realistic teaching experience at two levels Have more time to develop pedagogical skills at both levels

Full-Semester Student Teaching at Middle-School Level (Half Day)

Making the Case for Change

By making this change, we knew we had to persuade the cooperating teachers of the value of doing so. Additionally, by doubling the teaching assignments, we were also doubling our need for CTs. As a faculty, we needed to make a convincing case for selecting this manner of facilitating student teaching instead of relying on the more traditional approach.

The reasons for implementing this model were several. First, we wanted to maintain the advantages of our old approach, especially student teachers developing a nearly semester-long relationship with their students. Additionally, we thought it advantageous that the student teachers began the year in both sites to witness—or participate in—two different school openings. There would be two different building cultures, two different approaches employed by the CTs to open their academic years, and, of course, two different class environments. This would enable the student teachers to observe the strengths and advantages to the different styles used that would facilitate the early development of their own approaches. Furthermore, they would be part of the classroom ecology from the very first day in both settings rather than entering one (the second placement) in mid-semester. In the latter instance, the students would be “running at full speed” after seven or eight weeks together. The classroom culture would already be established including a clearly defined system for classroom management. Meanwhile, the student teachers would be entering the class and essentially be starting at week one in terms of learning the names of students, acclimating to the learning environment, and establishing themselves in their roles as teachers. As Bullough and colleagues (2002) put it, the major issue for student teachers in this situation is “to fit into the established curriculum” (p. 72). In this situation, our students would clearly be perceived as visitors who were student teaching an established curriculum rather than as teachers charged with defining and enacting the curriculum.

A second reason for implementing this program was our belief that our model would enable the student teachers to better establish authentic relationships with their students and, not coincidentally, with their CTs. In the traditional model, just as they are gaining acceptance and becoming confident in their role in the first setting, they are removed and need to start over at the second placement. There is no sense of continuity. Often student teachers find themselves merely mirroring lessons and strategies employed by their CTs. Beyer (1987) has described how “student teachers tend to accept the practices they observe in their field placements…as a model for accepted practice” (p. 21). In the traditional model, student teachers often feel pressured to continue in the mode established by the CT—to perpetuate this style of teaching—so as not to disrupt the CT’s classroom. This is a less educative experience for student teachers as they are less likely to try to implement what they have learned in their methods classes. Furthermore, in such an environment, it is increasingly likely that “a student teacher assumes that outside forces determine standards, that people conform to established practices, and that people follow mandates handed down by those in authority” (McIntyre, Boyd, & Foxx, 1996, p. 172). This behavior of being a follower may, therefore, be passed on to his or her students. The model we adopted enables our student teachers to see greater continuity in the curriculum than when they only work with seven or eight weeks of it. This longer experience also affords a greater opportunity to observe developmental changes in their students and the pedagogical results from their teaching. In both settings they will have been responsible for the “real stuff” of teaching (e.g., attendance, discipline, classroom management, and grading) for at least one quarter. This affords them greater credibility with both students and parents. In some middle schools, students

receive report cards every six weeks. Our student teachers, therefore, will have the opportunity to be with their classes through two grading periods. Wilson, Floden, and Ferrini-Mundy (2002) found that preservice teachers whose practicum experience lasted a full year “were more satisfied with teaching and with their teacher education program” (p. 196). While our configuration is not for a full year, it offers more of the benefits Wilson and her colleagues describe than would a seven- or eight-week experience.

Our third reason for implementing the program was that our student teachers benefit from teaching nearly a full half-year of their respective New York State Education Department (NYSED) curricula at both levels. This is first-hand experiential learning that means they will have two sets of lesson plans—one at each level—that may be useful in their future careers. When compared to seeing approximately one quarter of each curriculum under the traditional model, our approach offers real benefits in this regard. Again, there is increased continuity of learning on their part. This longer experience also facilitates our practicum students developing stronger pedagogical skills at both levels and allows for greater experimentation with teaching strategies they have learned in their methods classes. The longer tenure at both levels increases opportunities for improved teaching performance, reflection, and professional growth.

Fourth, our students will gain a clearer picture of the differing academic and social demands that exist at the middle- and high-school levels. They will gain a better understanding of the developmental differences, of the differing skills required, and of the varied pedagogical strategies required in middle- and high-school classrooms. Additionally, they may serve as potential conduits of information between middle- and high-school teachers and curricula. Practitioners frequently complain there are not enough opportunities to discuss curricular and/or pedagogical issues with their colleagues in their buildings, let alone across grade levels (see, for example, Corcoran, 1995). This fact is also confirmed by participants in summer workshops for social studies teachers sponsored by the Center for Teaching American History at Binghamton University from 2002 to 2006. On the evaluation instrument I administer at the close of the week-long workshops, the teachers frequently comment that such opportunities for professional discussions are rare yet very productive when they do occur. Our students can make better connections between the grade levels and also become more familiar with two distinct curricula. We expect, therefore, that our student teachers will be able to better serve the students they teach at both levels.

Finally, this extended experience in both settings will facilitate our student teachers in acquiring a sense of two different school cultures and climate. This can help them get a sense of any teaching preference they may have for those particular grade levels. Also, the two principals in the different settings would have increased opportunities to observe their teaching and assess their performance for possible hiring in the future. These observations would provide additional constructive feedback for the student teachers to use in reflecting on their work.

Each university supervisor for the respective disciplines utilized these arguments when contacting the cooperating teachers in the late spring in anticipation of the upcoming fall semester. Typically, lengthy letters were sent describing the expectations for the CTs, the student teachers, and the university supervisors. Included in this letter was a description of our new configuration and also the rationale based on the preceding reasons. Feedback was mixed, but we pressed forward. A majority of the placements were made according to this new configuration.

Evaluating Our Practicum to Date

Strengths

At Binghamton University we have used this configuration for the practicum for five cycles (again, fall semesters only) and believe our program has been very successful. This is not to say there are not problems. Overall, we are convinced this design for student teaching offers more advantages than the traditional model.

We have found the advantages we anticipated as outlined in the previous section have, in fact, been the case. Our students in these half-day arrangements have experienced a full 15- or 16-week experience in two distinct settings in which they have developed lesson plans for nearly half a school year for two levels. They have benefited from the longer exposure to two different classroom environments. “I liked it. I think I learned a lot. Dave and Terry have very different styles but I think I learned from each of them” a former student told me. They have developed long-term relationships with both faculty and students in two settings and have been responsible for determining student grades for one and one-half quarters. Students in their classes, therefore, have come to see them as “teachers” more than as “student teachers.” This aligns nicely with the work of McIntyre, Boyd, and Fox (1996) who found that longer student teaching experiences “helped students develop confidence and self-esteem” as well as “a better understanding of teachers’ actions, curriculum, and student behavior.” (p. 175). One of my student teachers told me that while

…it was a pain to race from the high school to my middle school placement, in the

end I was better able to deal with my high schoolers. I don’t think I would have been able to get them to cooperate and work if I was there for only eight weeks.

Student teachers also have essentially four months to be observed by their cooperating teachers, the university supervisors, and school administrators. For example, one former student told me that “in addition to Kirk [the CT] in a three-week span I was observed by Doug [the department chair] and both the high-school and middle-school principals.” This affords multiple opportunities for constructive criticism of their work and enhances their prospects for future employment.

From the perspective of the university supervisor, this arrangement works better because there is a greater window of opportunity to observe the student teachers than in the traditional model. Speaking from personal experience, due to health concerns, I was not able to be out in the field for nearly six weeks in the fall of 2005. In those cases in which students were doing blocks of eight weeks each, I was unable to see them in those settings and lost valuable observation time. This deprived the student teachers of my feedback on their progress. In those settings in which students were teaching half days for the entire semester (and really two to three weeks more), I did not have this problem. I could easily schedule later observations at both locations.

Further evidence of the success of this model comes from the students themselves. This was true of students who worked the half-day arrangement as well as those who did not. One of my student teachers put it well when she told me that originally she was thrilled to be working in

two settings as she preferred eight weeks at a time in each placement. However, at our end of the practicum debriefing, she told me she “was envious” of those who had been in the half-day arrangement.

I was just getting to know the kids and establish myself, when I had to pick up and leave. Then I had to start all over again and by the time I was getting to have a real rapport with them, I was finished.

This student was not the only one to express this frustration with the traditional student teaching experience.

To be honest, the rushing from the high school to the middle school was a problem. But I am glad I had the half day placements because I think I got a better feel for the two levels of teaching. I think it helped me to decide I prefer teaching high school.

In sum, my experience has been that students enjoy a broader experience that enhances

their professional development. They grow in two settings and are responsible for starting out a school year and maintaining appropriate classroom management and discipline in each. In the traditional configuration, the second of the two blocks of time is especially artificial as the student teacher inherits a classroom environment that has already been established. He or she is really “playing” teacher rather than teaching. As Bullough (1989) has noted, in this environment “planning for management obviously was not required, since she entered a classroom already reasonably well routinized, perhaps rule bound, where student passivity was much more of a problem than acting out” (p. 142). McIntyre, Boyd, and Foxx (1996) found that a year-long extended student teaching experience “helped students develop confidence and self-esteem” and “a better understanding of teachers actions, curriculum, and student behavior” (p. 175). While the configuration espoused by Binghamton University is only half that, we believe it is certainly better than a practicum that lasts only eight weeks. Students experienced the “growing pains” of working and learning on a daily basis in two different settings for which they were responsible.

Problematic Concerns

While we believe this new model to be better than the traditional model, that is not to say there are not problems with it. First, by dividing the student teacher’s day into two parts, the new model restricts their time to be available to the students they teach. Obviously, they are only available for the periods of the day they are in the building. These may not coincide well with the periods students are free to come to them for help or to make up work. As one CT put it, “the problem is Pete is so dedicated and he wants to be there for the kids. But with his schedule he has to rush out of here to get to [the middle school] on time.”

This can be complicated by a second factor; namely, it is rare for a person to have exactly a half-day in one setting and a half-day in the other. Typically, a student teacher is in one building for five or six periods and in the second for two or three (assuming a traditional eight- or nine-period day is in place). Middle-school and high-school schedules usually run at different times, and this can cause the student teachers to either rush out or be rushing in to make it to their next assignment on time. In many of our placements, the middle and high school share the same campus and in cases where they do not, it usually is not more than a ten-minute drive for

them. Still, the arrangement can be somewhat problematic because of these schedule differences. “I know you prefer your arrangement,” a former student teacher said, “but personally I hated it. I rarely had time to meet with students in one place and get to my other placement on time.” Likewise some CTs complained of not being able to easily meet with their student teachers. “My schedule is so weird this year, that by the time I have a prep period to sit and talk to Pete, he has already left for the middle school.” Of course it should be noted, too, that there are instances in which a secondary teacher’s workday is split between high-school and middle-school assignments so our arrangement of the practicum is not totally unrealistic.

The final, and probably the most significant, problem we have encountered is the resistance on the part of some cooperating teachers to try this new model. Wilson, Floden, and Ferrini-Mundy (2002) have found that “cooperating teachers have a powerful influence on the nature of the student teaching experience” (p. 195). This should not come as a surprise. However, a consequence of this influence is “student teachers tend not to rock the boat in the classrooms in which they are placed” (p. 195). The resistance to our new configuration of the practicum has been especially the case with middle-school teachers. Their rationale for preferring the traditional structure is their belief that the student teacher benefits more from being in the same setting for the full day and that this more closely approximates the lived experience of teachers. One CT told me:

You know, I like the old way of doing student teaching. I think it is important that the student teacher gets a sense of what a full day of teaching is like. Besides, with my schedule I can get a chance to talk to him this way.

I suspect, too, that most teachers themselves went through programs that were of the eight-week/eight-week (or a similar configuration) variety. Therefore, the traditional model is more familiar to them. Some CTs have expressed their preferences for the traditional arrangement—and a few have insisted on it. This can make assigning placements difficult. Some CTs who at first resisted our new model have been converted to—or are at least tolerant of—this new approach to the student teaching experience. Others continue to resist. As one CT put it, “I understand what you are saying. I just like it when the person is with me all day.”

Ironically, as I noted earlier, there is evidence of dissatisfaction with the traditional configuration on the part of both classroom teachers and student teachers. At an open forum regarding student teaching held at the New York State Council for the Social Studies (NYSCSS) several teachers complained that especially in the second block of student teaching, student teachers seemed content to simply mimic what the CTs were doing and lacked any initiative (Schlosser, Liles, & DuPre, 2007). A student teacher at the same session commented that he felt constrained and obligated to follow to the letter the direction set by the CT. These comments correlate with the findings of Bullough and colleagues (2002): “Lesson plan topics almost always came from mentor teachers, and preservice teachers rarely sought greater control of the curriculum or more involvement with it” (p. 72). Similarly one of my former student teachers told me “I almost always use Jerry’s lesson plans. I mean he has a ton of materials, and this way I am not screwing him up when I leave.”

Another component to this resistance seems to be the increased pressures of high-stakes Regents testing and the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. Pryor (2006) has noted “the narrowing of school curriculum and a devaluation of pedagogical knowledge” (p. 116) as a result of NCLB in the area of democratic educational practice. One district administrator told us

teachers in her district were reluctant to work with student teachers in general because they fear the loss of time with their students and, not insignificantly, annual summative evaluations of teachers are based in part on student test performance. The same is true for teachers who feel pressured to do more to produce good test scores and less to develop high-order thinking skills and in-depth learning. Consequently, teachers fear that after fifteen or sixteen weeks one or two of their classes may be too far ahead or behind their other classes when the student teacher leaves. This increases the stresses associated with producing desirable test data when the examinations are given in June.

Quite frankly, there have been cases in which we have had to utilize what I have referred to as the traditional model. There have been situations in which the CT was so skilled that we did not want to deprive our student of a very valuable learning experience. The second case was when due to a lack of participating CTs, a student had to be placed in two different districts. The commute made a half-day arrangement impossible. Finally, in cases when there has been a shortage of placement opportunities we have, of necessity, placed our students with a CT who insisted on the traditional model. Obviously, the needs of our students for placements had to take precedence over any disagreement over the nature of the practicum assignment. Some CTs continue to object to our preferred model, and this is problematic. However, as our program becomes more established and more of our graduates are working in area schools, we anticipate less resistance and, therefore, fewer instances in which the traditional model would be necessary. Also as we “preach” the benefits for the student teachers some cooperating teachers have agreed to try our configuration.

Conclusion

In their review of teacher preparation, Wilson, Floden, and Ferrini-Mundy (2002) offer a convincing argument that “as a field, [we] must make changes that will, in the coming years, give us a better grounding for the practices we believe in or perhaps give us reasons to rethink some practices” (p. 201). For preservice teachers, the practicum is arguably the most important—and most difficult—component of their preparation. It is critical to becoming grounded in the profession. Ideally, it is an experience in which discovering ideas for pacing material and managing a class are learned. It is a time when student teachers are beginning to find their classroom voice and learning how to interact with students in ways that will result in their defining appropriate boundaries.

T

he Study of the Education of Educators surveyed both faculty and students in teacher education programs in 1990 and found that student teachers thought student teaching had “the greatest potential for contributing to their future success as teachers” and that it was “the most interesting part” of their preparation (cited in Edmundson, 1990, p. 720). It is also, regardless of which model a teacher preparation program follows, an artificial attempt to provide students with the real-world experience of classroom teaching. More than 15 years ago, student teachers often found they were “devoted to a single teacher and classroom, not to teams of teachers or to whole schools” and that “theory and practice rarely were intertwined” (Goodlad, 1990, p. 190). A decade ago McGuire (1996) also argued that tensions existed in student teaching placements due

to conflicts “between the teaching setting and university program, time and curriculum constraints, teaching styles and personalities, and a myriad of other factors” (p. 75).

Arguably, these concerns are no less relevant today. Situated in the social context of a classroom (and a school) in which individuals with their own histories and perceptions collide in a common environment, tensions may arise. Given the student teacher’s status as a beginner and essentially a visitor, his or her personal view or philosophy is the most likely to be compromised. The road to teaching represents “a social process of negotiation” and is a “time of formation and transformation, of scrutiny into what one is doing, and who one can become” (Britzman, 2003, p. 31). Our job at the university level is to guide and support their initial development in this process. Bullough and colleagues (2002) argue that it is “crucially important to future school improvement efforts that this taken-for-granted view of teaching and of learning to teach be altered” (p. 79). Providing the best possible practicum experience is, therefore, essential. The new configuration for student teaching being used by the adolescent education program at Binghamton University can be one way to accomplish this goal.

In an era when public education is increasingly under attack and teachers are being put under closer scrutiny to produce higher standards, it is essential that teacher education programs meet this challenge with new approaches to producing tomorrow’s teachers. This external pressure further exacerbates “a growing need for experimentation with configurations of field experience and for the generation and study of new models to determine their effectiveness” (Bullough et al., 2002, p. 69). Traditional models for student teaching may not be as serviceable today as they were a decade ago. At Binghamton University we will monitor our programs to better accommodate the interests of our students and to build stronger professional relationships with area schools and teachers. We at Binghamton University hope the different approach we have implemented can add to the discussion of how to improve the practicum experience for preservice teachers. At the same time, we hope to be able to better meet the challenge of building and extending collaborative relationships with our public school partners.

Note I would like to thank Professor Beth Burch for her comments and suggestions to an earlier draft of this article. Also, I am deeply indebted to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their very constructive suggestions for improving this manuscript. Their recommendations were invaluable.

References

Beyer, L. (1987). What knowledge is of most worth in teacher education? In J. Smyth (Ed.), Educating teachers: Changing the nature of pedagogical knowledge,

(pp. 19-34). London: The Falmer Press. Britzman, D. P. (2003). Practice makes practice: A critical study of learning to teach

(revised edition). [Electronic version]. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Bullough, R. V. (1989). First-year teacher: A case study. New York: Teachers CollegePress.

Bullough, R. V., Young, J., Erickson, L, Birrell, J. R., Clark, D. C., Egan, M. W., et. al.

(2002). Rethinking field experience: Partnership teaching versus single-placement teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(1), 68-80.

Corcoran, T. C. (1995). Transforming professional development for teachers: A Guidefor state policy makers. Washington, D.C.: National Governors’ Association.

Edmundson, P. J. (1990). A normative look at the curriculum in teacher education. PhiDelta Kappan, 71(9), 717-722.

Goodlad, J. I. (1990). Better teachers for our nation’s schools. Phi Delta Kappan, 72(3), 184-194.

McGuire, M. E. (1996). NCSS and teacher education. In O. L. Davis, Jr., (Ed.), NCSS in retrospect, (pp. 67-77). Washington, D. C.: National Council for the Social Studies.

McIntyre, D. J., Boyd, D. M., & Foxx, S. M. (1996). Field and Laboratory Experiences. In J. Sikula, (Ed.), Handbook of research on teacher education, (2nd ed., pp. 171-193). New York: Association of Teacher Educators.

Patterson, N. C., & Luft, J. A. (2004). Creating a continuum: Considering induction programs for secondary social studies teachers. Theory and Research in Social

Education, 32(2), 138-152.Pryor, C. R. (2006). Preservice to in-service changes in beliefs: A study of intention to become a democratic practitioner. Theory and Research in Social Education, 34(1), 98-123. Schlosser, L. K., Liles, J., & DuPre, J. (2007, March). The next generation: A conversation about mentoring our future social studies teachers. Presentation at the 69th Annual Conference of the New York State Council for the Social Studies,

Rochester, NY. State University of New York. (2001). A new vision in teacher education: Agenda for

change in SUNY’s teacher education programs. Albany: author.Wilson, S. M., Floden, R. E., & Ferrini-Mundy, J. (2002). Teacher preparation

research: An insider’s view from the outside. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(3), 190-204.

Author Biography

James J. Carpenter, Ed.D., is Assistant Professor of social studies education and Coordinator of the doctoral program in Educational Theory and Practice at Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York.  His research interests include citizenship education, the educational thought of John Dewey and Thomas Jefferson, and the empowerment of teachers in an era of high-stakes testing.  Email: jcarpent@binghamton.edu.  

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Nota Bene: Resources of Note

The New York Comprehensive Center: Supporting Faculty who Prepare Teachers

Susan VillaniLearning Innovations at WestEd andNew York Comprehensive Center

The New York Comprehensive Center (NYCC) is working to support institutes of higher education (IHE) faculty who prepare teachers. It is doing this in a number of ways. As the IHE Teacher Quality Team Leader, I would like to share with you information about the resources NYCC offers, specifically these two:

1. Symposia on literacy for IHE faculty and the New York State Education Department (NYSED), and

2. Teacher Quality (TQ) Online, an online environment designed to provide information on literacy and teacher preparation and a protected space for registered faculty to write to each other about their practices.

Before I describe these endeavors in detail, here are a few things you should know about NYCC.

What Is NYCC?

NYCC, one of 16 regional comprehensive centers funded by the U.S. Department of Education, supports education leaders in their respective states as they strive to meet the goals of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and improve achievement outcomes for all students. The mission of NYCC, which began its work in January, 2006, is to develop the capacity of NYSED, its networks, and its agencies to assist districts and schools in improving achievement outcomes for all students. In doing so, the Center strives to engage with state education leaders in

Thinking systemically about the relationships among all elements to create coherence and articulate a common purpose;

Using research-based findings and rigorous evidence to evaluate impact, refine practices, seek new solutions, and meet learners' needs;

Acting strategically to maximize opportunities and make the best use of available resources; and

RUNNING HEAD from here to end: Nota Bene: Resources of Note Working collaboratively across leadership levels and organizations to leverage resources

and overcome barriers.

What Does NYCC Do?

NYCC engages New York State education leaders in using research-based findings and rigorous evidence to meet the goals of NCLB. The Center’s purpose is to design technical assistance services that meet education leaders' priority needs, further the key initiatives of the U.S. Department of Education, and have the greatest potential for developing state capacity to help districts and schools improve.

Through specific requests and regular meetings with state education leaders to discuss their priority needs for technical assistance, NYCC develops and continually reviews the New York State Service Delivery Plan to ensure that the Center’s work is attuned to the State’s emerging needs. Some of NYCC’s special initiatives include teacher quality, the role of higher education in preparing the teacher workforce, and other concerns that are common across all areas of the state.

NYCC has a website www.nycomprehensivecenter.org and listservs to share up-to-date information about Center events, NCLB updates, news from NYSED, and a variety of research resources. The five U.S. Department of Education Content Centers are a major source of current research and resources available to educators. Some are referenced on the website.

Who Are the Staff Members of NYCC?

The NYCC draws staff time and expertise from four partners. RMC Research Corporation is leading this endeavor and is working with four distinguished partners in designing, managing, and delivering technical assistance in New York. They are The Education Alliance at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island; the Education Development Center, Inc., Newton, Massachusetts; Learning Innovations at WestEd, Woburn, Massachusetts; and the United Federation of Teachers Teacher Center, New York. For more information about these organizations, visit their websites: RMC Research Corporation at www.rmcres.comThe Education Alliance at Brown University at www.alliance.brown.eduThe Education Development Center (EDC) at www.edc.orgLearning Innovations at WestEd at www.wested.org/liThe United Federation of Teachers Teacher Center at www.ufttc.org

NYCC engages leaders of IHE with teacher preparation programs in action planning to incorporate the use of scientifically based research findings in early literacy. In addition to the NYCC committee that is focused on institutes of higher education and teacher quality (IHE TQ), other initiatives include Adolescent Literacy, Assessment, E-Learning, and Parent Involvement.

What Has NYCC Done to Support IHE Faculty?

NYCC has had several events and begun an on-line environment for IHE faculty to interact with each other about their curricula and resources they use in their practice.

Enhancing Teacher Effectiveness Symposium

August 2006, College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY

The NYCC Enhancing Teacher Effectiveness Symposium brought together teacher educators from IHEs across New York State with representatives from NYSED and local education agencies. Participants joined to expand their knowledge of scientifically based research in reading (SBRR) and explore ways to enhance teacher education. The Lally School of Education at the College of Saint Rose hosted the event, which launched NYCC's IHE/Teacher Quality initiative.

This symposium, the first of several planned NYCC events, gave IHE faculty who prepare K-12 teachers a forum to discuss SBRR and how to teach it to future educators. Language and literacy experts Dr. Catherine Snow and Dr. Shari Butler spoke with participants about SBRR and incorporating it into teacher education programs. The symposium was also an opportunity to brainstorm future opportunities for collaboration, both among and between IHE faculty, state personnel, and district personnel. New York State Commissioner of Education Richard P. Mills discussed the importance of the participants' work in preparing highly qualified teachers—thus ensuring that every child in New York State has access to a good teacher. He concluded by telling participants, "It is desperately important that you succeed in what you are doing."

Teacher Quality Webinar

Let's Talk About Content Area Literacy: Pre-service and In-service Teacher Educators Share Notes

May 2007

This webinar was for pre-service teacher educators, in-service teacher trainers, and others with a stake in teacher education from New York and New England. A webinar is a presentation that is done online, with both a visual and oral component. Participants dial in and are able to see a PowerPoint online while hearing the speaker(s) discuss it. Webinars also provide opportunities for participants to write or speak their questions and comments. This one was the first webinar to be offered by the New England/New York Comprehension Centers Teacher Quality Collaborations Team.

Invitational Symposium

Promoting Student Literacy Through Comprehension: Enhancing Teacher Preparation and Professional Development

June 2007, Albany, New York

This symposium, jointly offered by NYCC and the New England Comprehensive Center, was the second in a series of symposiums to strengthen teacher education. Michael Kamil of Stanford University and Nell Duke of Michigan State University were the featured speakers. In addition to hearing from these prominent researchers, participants had opportunities to engage with New England colleagues and each other on issues of policy and practice for enhancing teacher education. Said several participants,

This was a wonderful opportunity to hear distinguished educators and interact with them about their research.

It was great to find out what others are doing, both in our own state and throughout New England.

I am so excited about this event. I can’t wait until tomorrow to hear more.

How Else Does NYCC Promote Communication Among IHE Faculty?

One of the NYCC’s tools for building the capacity of states and IHEs to enhance the use of SBR-L in teacher preparation and professional development is TQ Online, a dynamic online space for those with a stake in teacher education. TQ Online is co-sponsored by the New York and New England Comprehensive Centers.

TQ Online provides a meeting ground where teacher educators, state education personnel, and others throughout New England and New York can test new ideas, brainstorm solutions, share resources, and seek advice from colleagues and experts about how to align instruction with scientific findings—and to do so across geographic boundaries.

Participants have praised TQ Online as a resource that supports their work, saying it “is almost like free professional development” and “supports my teaching in ways that are only limited to my own participation.” TQ Online offers the following benefits:

Unlimited conversation with a network of diverse colleagues throughout New York and the six New England states;

The chance to build partnerships with cross-role colleagues; Access to the latest scientifically based research in literacy, including research on special

education, English language learners, and adolescent literacy; Webinars featuring in-demand speakers on topics requested by participants; Facilitated follow-up conversations online after each webinar; “Ask the Expert!” forums in which participants can have discourse with a visiting expert

on SBR-L or policy for prescribed periods.

There are currently two collaboration areas on TQ Online:

Sharing Syllabi & Resources Collaboration

Membership: Exclusive to IHE teacher education faculty and New England and New York Comprehensive Center staff. In this online area, teacher educators, including full-time faculty, adjuncts, and graduate teaching assistants, can share and discuss syllabi for literacy-related teacher preparation courses.

Discussions focus on enhancing the alignment of course content and materials with SBR-L, and incorporating SBR-L into teacher preparation coursework.

The following comments were written by IHE faculty during online discussions about courses they teach:

Thanks for the feedback; it's good to know that others would structure this course in similar ways.

Please let us know your results. If you find it effective I'd like to emulate you and substitute a PD group for the shadowing/interview assignment currently in my syllabus.

To access the membership request form for this area, go to http://nycomprehensivecenter.org/form_ws1.

Scientifically Based Research in Literacy (SBR-L) and State Standards Resource Collaboration

Membership: Teacher educators, leaders from state and local education agencies, and others with a stake in teacher education. Here, members can:

share and discuss resources about SBR-L and teacher education; examine best practices for increasing SBR-L into teacher preparation programs and

professional development initiatives; and dialogue about aligning teacher preparation programs with state standards.

The New York Comprehensive Center enthusiastically invites New York IHE faculty to participate in TQ Online and the symposia. To access the membership form for this area, go to http://nycomprehensivecenter.org/form_ws2.

Here is an unsolicited comment one NYSATE member wrote about TQ Online.

I find I can't resist clicking on the postings as they come to my mailbox each day to find out what people are saying. It only takes a couple of minutes, and it's a good learning experience for me. It's opening doors to conversations that otherwise wouldn't happen. I not only learn from people I talk with face-to-face at my college, but the whole state is open for conversation now! I don't feel I'm helping you or the forum [when I participate], but that you and it are helping me by supporting my teaching in ways that are only limited to my own participation.

Closing Thoughts

I have heard many IHE faculty speak about the isolation they experience when preparing and teaching their courses. They have said they welcome dialogue with colleagues at other IHEs to learn what they are teaching and thinking and to share ideas. Similarly, I have heard SED staff comment that they would welcome more opportunities to have collegial dialogue with IHE faculty about working together to prepare and support new teachers. I know NYCC is committed

to providing opportunities for such collaboration, all in service of the teachers and the students of New York, and invite you to bring your voice to the conversation.

Please visit the NYCC website for information about upcoming events and valuable resources for teacher educators. For more information about the New York Comprehensive Center, contact Lawrence Hirsch, Director, at lhirsch@rmcres.com or 212-972-4762.

Author Biography

Susan Villani, Ed.D., is Senior Program/Research Associate at Learning Innovations at WestEd and IHE Teacher Quality team leader of the New York Comprehensive Center. You may reach Susan at svillani@wested.org. or 781-481-1112.

Book Review of Readers of the Quilt: Essays on Being Black, Female, and Literate Edited by Joanne Kilgour Dowdy. (2005). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Kjersti VanSlyke-BriggsSUNY Oneonta

Dowdy brings together an excellent collection of essays in a community of voices that all consider the role of the Black woman in a literate society. Although the essays are diverse in their approach to the central subject, each writer examines the experience of education for Black women. Several of the essays model a research format while others reflect more personal stories. Each, however, recounts tales of struggle, empowerment, and the difficulties in negotiating an academic life and societal expectations.

The topics covered in the essays range from an examination of women in the welfare system (Golden) to women and the roles portrayed in feature films (Dowdy). The book is divided into three sections. Within each section, multiple authors are represented, including doctoral candidates, established professors, master’s degree students, and past high-school teachers. The texts each consider different aspects of literacy and portray the multiple literacies that play an active role in constructing one’s identity. Of those considered, functional literacy, traditional literacy, and media literacy play a predominant role.

One of the themes that plays a predominant role through many of the essays is that of storytelling. Most of the essays include some personal narrative in communicating the thesis and in some cases the authors have chosen to examine those stories for deeper meaning. Chapter 9 Storytelling (Franklin and Dowdy) examines the role of storytelling as a “function in life for all people because they [stories] help create a foundation on which we build an understanding of the world” (p. 119). The inclusion of these stories strengthens the text as the reader encounters each essay. The personal narrative adds a sense of authority to the text as well as identity.

Perhaps due to the variety of backgrounds the authors represent, some essays are stronger than others. Unearthing Hidden Literacy: Seven Lessons I Learned in a Cotton Field (Smith), for instance, is a stronger selection than several others in the text. This essay resonates with the use of personal narrative and a wonderful sense of voice. Smith is able to draw connections between an academic view of literacy and her experiences picking cotton on her aunt’s farm. The selection has a beautiful sense of imagery and reflects an author who is attentive to the craft of writing. This pace of writing is not continued, however, in the next selection, Voices of Our Foremothers: Celebrating the Legacy of African-American Women Educators, A Personal Dedication (Birney). This essay reads like a weak term paper that relies too heavily on the work of others. This results in a series of textual quotations from other sources and a brief analysis by Birney.

Readers of the Quilt, despite the inclusion of some essays that are not as strong as others, remains an interesting read. Dowdy includes a wide selection of authors, and each has a different story to tell about literacy for the Black woman. This text is appropriate for a wide audience range and should not be limited to those in the field of education. The text would be suited for a graduate class focused on issues pertaining to literacy and the struggles of Black women. At the undergraduate education level, the inclusion of one or two essays in a course may be beneficial to students; however, several of the essays are not suited to this academic

level. As a text of resistance, this book continues to bring attention to the issues of equality and the importance of valuing the multiple literacies in which Black women participate.

Author Biography

Kjersti VanSlyke-Briggs, Ed.D., is an assistant professor at SUNY Oneonta.  Her research interests are in literacy and feminist approaches to understanding classroom dynamics.  Other academic interests include social justice curriculum and critical literacy. Email: vanslykb@oneonta.edu.

Book Review of Ph.D. Stories: Conversations with My Sisters By Joanne Kilgour Dowdy. (2007). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Anita C. LevineKent State University

Ph.D. Stories: Conversations with My Sisters opens the doorway for readers to gain a glimpse into the rarely explored world of Black literate women. Joanne Kilgour Dowdy, frustrated by her feelings of loneliness and isolation as the only Black female professor in her university department, embarked on a journey to seek out other Black women professors. She explored their experiences of and strategies for success in predominately White Eurocentric academic environments. Through her well-designed ethnographic study, which utilizes storytelling and extensive interviewing as the primary research methodology, readers share in the participants’ struggles, challenges, joys, setbacks, seeking of community within and beyond the academy, and manifestation of dreams as they have engaged in their educational careers.

As with her prior books, Readers of the Quilt: Essays About Being Black, Female and Literate (2005), which was nominated for an Ed Fry book award by the National Reading Conference, and GED Stories: Black Women and Their Struggle for Social Equity (2003), Dowdy continues her exploration of Black female identity in the United States. This time, she focuses on the lives of nine Black women (including herself) who earned their doctorates, and their experiences as professionals in their respective fields. The nine participants include assistant and associate professors, an associate dean, a department chair, and an independent business consultant. Although these women did not know each other, similarities between their life experiences and philosophies emerged during transcript analysis. Based on these recurring similarities, each chapter in Ph.D. Stories is devoted to a particular theme.

Chapter 1 lays the foundation for the rationale behind the study, its whys and wherefores, methodological framework, and an introduction to each of the participants. Chapters 2 through 4 explore the participants’ family backgrounds, influential people in their lives, their development of support networks and roles as mentors for their students, and how all these experiences shaped their inner drive to realize their dreams. Chapter 5 explores their research interests, which range from issues of diversity in higher education, arts administration, language translation, video technology, to issues of transformative education and social justice. In both chapters 5 and 6, the participants reflect on ways they have negotiated the inevitable frustrations that have beset them as academics writing for publication and offer valuable advice for budding scholars, advice that cuts across gender, race, ethnicity, and age. It is applicable to all who are engaged in the process of research and writing. Chapter 7 briefly reiterates the themes discussed in the preceding chapters and then examines larger patterns that emerged from the interviews. These include the issue of balance between work and home and role as a parent, their identification as African descendents, the influence of international travel on their careers, service commitment philosophies, views on teaching and learning, and lessons learned from their journeys as Black, educated females.

Two criticisms of the book are the inclusion of one non-academia participant in the study and how it seems that all the participants came from a middle-class family background. Dowdy’s stated goal was to learn from the life experiences of Black women Ph.D.s who work in a predominately white academic environment. Yet, one participant was a businesswoman who,

after earning her doctorate, did not pursue a career in academia. Perhaps better would have been to keep the book focused solely on women in academia and in a separate study explore the experiences of Ph.D. Black women who have chosen to not work in the university setting. I also would have liked to have seen more diversity among the participants chosen. All the women but one were married, and it seemed they all came from a predominately middle class, two-parent family background; either one or both of the participants’ parents were college-educated. I see these as limitations of the study, as Dowdy does not address this in her research design. How different or similar would the responses have been had the voices of self-described working-class Black women who earned their doctorate been included, or perhaps women who, unlike the participants, had little support from their families or a spouse?

These criticisms notwithstanding, Ph.D. Stories fills a void in the academic literature in which little can be found written about the experiences of Black, female scholars. It is a gentle and insightful read, and offers much to women of any color and ethnic background who wish to or have embarked upon the stressful and often lonely journey of earning their doctoral degree. Through the participants’ voices, the reader will find herself surrounded by an extended family of mentors.

Teacher educators may find Ph.D. Stories useful for serving as a discussion springboard on the interplay of race, gender, and perceived prejudices towards educated women of color in today’s American society. As noted earlier, chapters 5 and 6 are particularly useful for their advice on academic writing and publication. This can be of great benefit for faculty in their professional growth, as well as answer many questions students have regarding the world of writing for publication in academe. The best summation I can offer for the value of this book is in Dowdy’s own words: “[T]he important lesson that we can learn from the stories that are shared in this collection of testimonials is that they will to be formally educated and to shape the lives of those who value formal education is alive and well among Black women in the academy” (p. 13).

Author Biography

Anita C. Levine is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. Her research interests include education foundations, curriculum theory, teacher education, and comparative international education. Email: anita.levine@yahoo.com.

Book Review of Pledging Allegiance: The Politics of Patriotism in American SchoolsEdited by Joel Westheimer. (2007). New York: Teachers College Press.

Charles F. HowlettMolloy College

In a 1936 poem “Let America Be America Again” (in Westheimer, 2006), the noted African-American literary giant, Langston Hughes, spoke to the wide gap existing between a form of rhetorical patriotism based entirely on symbolic gestures and one that embodies love of the American ideals of liberty and equality. He knew this was the right kind of patriotism all Americans could and should embrace.

O, let my land be a land where LibertyIs crowned with no false patriotic wreath,But opportunity is real, and life is free,Equality is in the air we breathe. (p. 620)

In 240 pages of insight and commentary, the editor of Pledging Allegiance: The Politics of Patriotism in American Schools, Joel Westheimer, has put together a galaxy of contributors addressing the hard questions about what it means to teach patriotism in our nation’s schools. This book is aimed at all citizens, but even more to teacher educators, especially those in the field of social studies. While specifically focusing on critical issues related to patriotism and democracy in education and how it should be taught, the work also examines the social studies curriculum, the role of military recruitment in schools, student dissent, and the impact on teacher education programs. Some of the notable contributors are Bill Ayers, Chester Finn, Maxine Green, Diane Ravitch, and Howard Zinn. Readers are provided valuable insights into how our schools have changed since September 11, 2001; the growing demand on teachers to toe the new “patriotic” line; and what schools of education should do to prepare preservice teachers for the realities of the profession. Westheimer, a former New York City schoolteacher and now professor and University Chair in Democracy and Education at the University of Ottawa, sets the tone in his introductory remarks and subsequent chapter “Politics and Patriotism in Education.” Westheimer argues that the drive for patriotic instruction is taking on new fervor for those of us in teacher education. He provides two reasons. First, the form of patriotism being adopted by many schools boards, city and state legislatures, and the federal government is, simply put, “monolithic”: an attitude of American right or wrong. Educators have become increasingly alarmed by recent legislative attacks on democratic openness. Second, these new developments have not included teachers or local school administrators in terms of conception or development. These factors have led the editor to call upon other writers to express their opinions and to reflect upon what the late Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Merle Curti examined in his popular post-World War II book The Roots of American Loyalty (1946). Responding to Westheimer’s call, a number of writers comment in Pledging Allegiance on educators’ commitments to teaching for democratic citizenship. This work focuses on the kind of citizenship that recognizes ambiguity and disagreement and encourages debate and

deliberation as the foundation blocks for patriotism and civic education. The more popular contributors mentioned earlier have written essays addressing national policy as opposed to everyday matters impacting the classroom and the art of teaching. Yet, for teachers of education there are some helpful essays to consult. Among the essays relevant to teachers of education, besides Westheimer’s, are those by Pedro Noguera and Robby Cohen, Deborah Meier, Gerald Graff, Joseph Kahane and Ellen Middaugh, Diana Hess and Louis Ganzler, and Cecelia O’Leary. This review focuses specifically on these essays. Pedro Noguera and Robby Cohen’s “Educators in the War on Terrorism” is timely and provocative. The authors argue that it is time for educators to think of patriotism and citizenship in terms of accountability. They insist that “Every student in our nation’s secondary schools should be…able to write a coherent essay exploring the merits of various courses of action and putting forward their own perspective on the ethics of U.S. foreign policy” (p. 29). Realizing that schools of education have a tremendous responsibility for fostering the health and well-being of our nation, they evoke the pioneers of the idea of a public education—Thomas Jefferson, Horace Mann, and John Dewey—who argued that it is a teacher’s responsibility “to foster critical thinking among our students” (p. 34).

Certainly, this idea is carried further in the noted early childhood scholar and senior researcher at New York University Deborah Meier’s entertaining essay, “On Patriotism and the Yankees: Lessons Learned from Being a Fan.” Although a diehard Yankee fan, she carefully makes a distinction between loyalty to a baseball team and allegiance to the state, noting that “…a sounder definition of patriotism that is consistent with modern democracy” (p. 54) must be incorporated into teacher education programs. In her opinion, “Schools need to fight to hold up open an inviting picture of the marketplace of ideas—all the ways in which we express our different, sometimes very uncommon ideas in music, dance, painting, and so forth” (pp. 54-55). Her most telling point is that

Kids…have too long associated school with silence, with exercises in answering questions one doesn’t care much about, with a bland student government that only gets to decide on whatever is viewed as not sensitive, and with ‘the rules’: keeping the building clean, waiting one’s turn, following orders, and being polite. (p. 55)

For her, the essential question is whether or not schools can be places that instill love of country and places that explore the “true” meaning of nation. Of concern to every classroom teacher today is the issue of political correctness. Gerald Graff, recently elected President of the Modern Language Association, maintains that a curriculum “in which the dialectical clash of concepts and terms is screened out…is a prescription for political passivity and intellectual illiteracy” and “When students don’t experience terms like ‘social justice,’ multiculturalism,’ or ‘patriotism’ in comparison and contrast with their conceptual alternatives…they tend to be deprived of a clear sense of what these terms mean and what is politically at stake in them” (p. 69).

That point is also made in compelling fashion in Joseph Kahane and Ellen Middaugh’s “Is Patriotism Good for Democracy?” They have called upon educators and those developing curricula to embrace a critical loyalty perspective. For democracy this orientation is imperative. “The point is…to help students use their love of country as a motivation to critically assess what is needed to make it better” (p. 119).

Finally, the last two essays worthy of comment for teacher education are Diana Hess and Louis Ganzler’s “Patriotism and Ideological Diversity in the Classroom” and Cecilia O’Leary’s “Patriot Acts.” The Hess and Ganzler piece is particularly appropriate for discussion in teacher education courses because the authors encourage the creation of schools and classes that “are as politically heterogeneous as possible” (p. 138). The authors’ main idea is for teacher education programs to encourage the notion that students have as many opportunities to engage in vigorous discussions of political issues as possible. And, for those in education programs seeking a broader historical overview of the idea of patriotism, O’Leary’s essay challenges that form of learning “shaped by the demands of war, infused by racism, narrowed by anti-immigrant positions and political intolerance of dissent” (p. 154). Her essay offers an easily understandable critique of the evolution of the debates surrounding patriotism in twentieth-century America. Pledging Allegiance: The Politics of Patriotism in American Schools offers quite a collection of essays with multiple perspectives. Structurally, the work consists of relatively short and easily readable essays that are intended for a popular audience. It is a valuable sourcebook for teachers when discussing the issues of citizenship and patriotism. Educators in teacher education programs are encouraged to sample the numerous essays addressing this very important topic. Useful for teachers is an appended list of resources dealing with this matter. Again, as we prepare the future citizens of this nation, how do we deal with the complex and deeply problematic role of patriotism in a democratic society? How do we, in the classroom, generate a love of country while encouraging a more thorough examination of the meaning of country itself?

References

Curti, M. (1946). The roots of American loyalty. New York: Columbia University Press. Westheimer, J. (April 2006). Politics and patriotism in education. Phi Delta Kappan, 87, p. 620.

Author Biography

Charles F. Howlett, Ph.D., teaches in the Graduate Program, Education Division, Molloy College. He is a retired secondary school teacher and former school administrator. He is also a noted scholar in the field of American peace history having authored over 100 scholarly and popular articles, including seven books. He is also a member of Excelsior’s Editorial Review Board. Email: chowlett@molloy.edu.

An Analytical Outline of Why Social Justice Matters by Brian Barry. (2005). London, UK: Polity Press.

Jason BlokhuisUniversity of Rochester

In a nutshell, social justice matters because a society that does not acknowledge, assume, or accept collective responsibility for the well-being of all its members is doomed. This is Brian Barry’s central thesis; his key claims lend support to this overarching theme. Barry structures his arguments, chapter by chapter, in a manner that highlights the cumulative disadvantage principle. Cumulative disadvantage (like its corollary, cumulative advantage) describes a growing gulf between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. Concentrated wealth entails concentrated poverty. When extremes of wealth become too great, the sense of common purpose or shared fate on which the continued existence of any society depends is lost.

Why Social Justice Matters is indispensable reading for teachers and teacher educators. Good teachers are philosophers – people who seek truth, think critically, love knowledge, and respect the inherent dignity of all persons as moral agents. Good teachers help to develop the rational capacities of children so that, as adults, they can make good choices for themselves and for their fellow citizens through the exercise of practical reason (phronesis). “If all communities aim at some good,” wrote Aristotle, “the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good” (Aristotle, trans. 1885). In short, the society for which teachers are preparing their students for full membership and participation is supposed to be a partnership for living the best kind of life. Human beings are ‘political animals’ because we rely on ourselves and others to lead complete and flourishing lives (Curren, 2000). A system of unequal wealth and resource distribution is just only to the extent that the greatest benefits accrue to the least advantaged, lest the poor become mere means to the ends of the rich (Rawls, 2001). Barry argues that individual responsibility as a government mantra is more than a symptom of the growing disparity between haves and have nots. Individualism accelerates inequality. Society is a zero-sum enterprise insofar as benefits to some necessarily come at the expense of others. As the gulf between the privileged and the disadvantaged widens, the cost of sustaining privilege grows exponentially. Readers of The Jungle (Sinclair, 1906) might recognize a parallel in the relentless ‘speeding up’ process that bedeviled slaughterhouse workers. Chicago’s packinghouses operated as a monopoly. Within a closed system, no increase in profit can be gained by expanding markets or otherwise externalizing costs. Thus, growth in profit, built on extracting maximum labor for minimum cost, can be maintained only by ‘squeezing’ workers and suppliers. When the institutions of government – another closed system – are operated in such a way as to extract value from one group for the benefit of another, the result is much the same. The stakes, however, are much higher. Barry’s first key claim about the perils of cumulative disadvantage is made in his chapter on education: A society that does not assume responsibility for the education of its young sows the seeds of its own destruction. A competitive market for schooling ensures that children will

receive the best education their family can afford. For the children of privileged families, this is the beginning of cumulative advantage, as well-educated children gain ready access to the offices and opportunities society has to offer. For the children of underprivileged families, a competitive market for schooling is the beginning of an even more severe cumulative disadvantage. A child who does not learn to read may not qualify for a driver’s license, limiting her mobility and employment prospects. She will not be able to participate fully in public discourse through print media. She will be unable to defend her interests as a citizen, making her easy fodder for those who would exploit her ignorance for financial or political gain. Between the well-educated and the ill-educated, there is little sense of a ‘common good’ at which a government might aim. Instead, the privileged live in fear, assuaging their guilt with ever-costlier bread and circuses for those who would resent their exploitation (if they were aware of its magnitude). When the privileged live in fear of those whom they exploit, warehousing is an easy – though costly – solution. In a chapter entitled, “The Making of the Black Gulag,” Barry describes how a penal system assigned to market forces adds to cumulative disadvantage. A government that invests in education in a discriminatory fashion – or which makes education an individual responsibility – can expect more respect for law among those whose rational capacities were well-cultivated than among those whose rational capacities were not. What can government do for the ignorant, the incapable, and the alienated who have ‘chosen’ not to obey the law? Why, lock them away, of course! Any concern that government might be complicit in the ignorance, incapacity, and alienation that led to unlawful conduct is brushed aside with a rather hypocritical appeal to rational choice: ‘They’ chose to break the law; therefore, ‘they’ chose the consequences. All the while, a penal system operated by competing private corporations manipulates public policy to ensure an ever-growing prison population, with concomitant profits generated at public expense. Indeed, as Barry points out, societal collapse is that much closer as investment in public goods (education and health care) is reduced to pay the Pied Piper of privatized prisons. The capacity to think critically is a necessary condition for personal autonomy and democratic participation. It is also a necessary condition for well-being in its most fundamental sense: Barry’s chapter on health illustrates the cumulative disadvantage that accrues in a society that relinquishes both education and health care to market forces. In brief, the inadequately educated are readily manipulated by the irrational appeals of hucksters. Barraged with advertisements touting unhealthy foods, the undereducated suffer disproportionately from obesity and diabetes. Many cannot read nutritional information and product warning labels. In a society that assigns health care to a competitive market, the haves can ‘choose’ to buy top-of-the line medical care, while the have nots are held individually responsible for the consequences of their poor nutritional ‘choices’ and their ‘decision’ not to buy adequate health insurance. Ultimately, cumulative disadvantage leads to a gulf so wide between the haves and the have nots that neither side recognizes the other as fellow citizens. This alienation – exacerbated by governments committed to individual responsibility – obliterates any lingering notions of shared fate, a necessary condition for a society to be recognizable as a partnership for living the best kind of life. Yet Barry goes a step further. In the final chapters of Why Social Justice Matters, Barry invokes the Aristotelian tragedy of the commons, ascribing the imminent collapse of the earth’s ability to sustain human life to governments that promote materialism and individual responsibility above the common good. The reluctance of the U.S. government to tackle global collective action problems such as global warming and resource depletion may have catastrophic

consequences. An irresponsible society is a doomed society, to be sure. But what is ultimately at stake is not the survival of American society or British society; it is human society. That is why social justice matters.

References

Aristotle. (1885). The politics of Aristotle, translated into English with introduction, marginal analysis, essays and indices by B. Jowett. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.

Curren, R. R. (2000). Aristotle on the necessity of public education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Rawls, J. (2001). Justice as fairness: A restatement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sinclair, U. (1906). The jungle. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co.

Author Biography

Jason Blokhuis holds degrees in History, Law, and Education. He is currently working on a Ph.D. in Educational Thought and Policy at the Margaret Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development at the University of Rochester. He also serves as Student Representative on the Executive Board of the New York State Association of Teacher Educators (NYSATE). Email: jblokhuis@warner.rochester.edu.