You are on page 1of 15

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

This article was downloaded by:


On: 26 April 2011
Access details: Access Details: Free Access
Publisher Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-
41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Studying Teacher Education
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713727674
Getting Real: Exploring the perceived disconnect between education theory
and practice in teacher education
Jean Ketter
a
; Brian Stoffel
b
a
Grinnell College, USA
b
Hope Charter School, USA
To cite this Article Ketter, Jean and Stoffel, Brian(2008) 'Getting Real: Exploring the perceived disconnect between
education theory and practice in teacher education', Studying Teacher Education, 4: 2, 129 142
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/17425960802433611
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17425960802433611
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf
This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or
systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents
will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses
should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,
actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly
or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Getting Real: Exploring the perceived disconnect between education
theory and practice in teacher education
Jean Ketter
a
* and Brian Stoffel
b
a
Grinnell College, USA;
b
Hope Charter School, USA
This article, inspired in part by the Levine report that criticizes teacher education programs in
the United States for being out of touch with practices that work in real classrooms, is a
self-study that explores the rift between educational theory, particularly theory that pushes for
social constructionist, child-centered approaches to teaching, and teaching practices in
majority African-American, inner-city schools. The authors conducted this year-long
self-study to answer the question: What could the colleges education program do to improve
preparation for teaching in inner-city schools? Through their year-long collaboration in a
middle-school writing classroom in an inner-city charter school, the authors examined what a
prospective teacher learned in his education program that helped and hindered him and then
explored how the successful approaches he developed as a new teacher could be incorporated
into the colleges preservice program.
Keywords: educational theory; real teaching practices; inner-city schools; rst-year teacher;
theory-practice connections; social justice
Aware that poor students of color are often disadvantaged because of an inequitable education
system, most education professors in the U.S. want to do something to remedy the problem.
Unfortunately, survey results published in the recent Levine report, Educating School Teachers,
state: More than three out of ve teacher education alumni surveyed report that schools of
education do not prepare their graduates to cope with the realities of todays classrooms
(Levine, 2006). This report describes what many practicing teachers perceive as a gap between
over-idealized theory and the real-world practice of the K-12 classroom. Contributing to the idea
of the researchpractice gap, college or university work is often described as coming from an
ivory tower while K-12 teachers work is said to occur in the trenches. This unfortunate
conceptualization of teacher educators and teachers work can inhibit communication between
university/college and K-12 teachers. Describing college professors as working in an ivory
tower posits a sort of class warfare between college faculty and K-12 teachers by depicting those
in the ivory tower as privileged dreamers hopelessly out of touch with what real teaching is like.
When the popular press depicts K-12 teachers as being in the trenches, the language creates a
divide that implies a power difference between teacher educators and K-12 teachers that can
make speaking to one another difcult. The phrase in the trenches brings to mindthe divide between
ofcers and enlisted soldiers, implying that the foot soldiers are taking the risks and doing the
grunt work that the ofcers, with their education and skill, escape. Discourse that deprofessionalizes
K-12 teaching leads policy-makers to advocate for reductive accountability measures, such as those
ISSN 1742-5964 print/ISSN 1742-5972 online
q 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17425960802433611
http://www.informaworld.com
*Corresponding author. Email: ketter@grinnell.edu
Studying Teacher Education
Vol. 4, No. 2, November 2008, 129142
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

A
t
:

0
3
:
2
0

2
6

A
p
r
i
l

2
0
1
1
reected in No Child Left Behind legislation, and pushes school district administrators to buy
pre-packaged, teacher-proof programs that devalue the expertise teachers bring to the classroom.
In addition, teacher educators sometimes add to the deprofessionalization of K-12 teachers by
depicting research in K-12 classrooms as getting into the eld. Using anthropological terms, teacher
educators perhaps inadvertently objectify K-12 classrooms as foreign cultures where the researcher
expects to encounter the Other. We in teacher education need to be aware of this perceived
disconnect between the research-based teaching practices education professors recommend and the
common-sense approaches that seem realistic to classroom teachers. Teacher educators must be
willing to listen to the honest critiques practicing teachers offer without becoming defensive or
dismissive and must be willing to engage in the sort of self-study that reveals our education
programs weaknesses and illuminates ineffective approaches.
A teacher researcher may conduct a self-study to articulate a philosophy of practice and to
discover inconsistencies between what one believes and how one teaches; thus a self-study
grows out of a teacher-researchers desire to better align theory and practice and to build on
what one learns through some public means (Loughran, 2007, p. 14). Our self-study is a
self-evaluation of the teaching of teachers from the viewpoints of Brian, a practicing teacher and
recent graduate of a liberal arts teacher certication program, and Jean, a teacher educator from
whom Brian took a methods course. The study was conducted during the 20062007 school year
in a highly acclaimed inner-city charter school. Jean sought out Brian because she hoped to learn
what her college education program in a small, highly selective liberal arts college could do to
better prepare students to teach in under-resourced and over-burdened, high-need urban schools.
The college Brian attended, where Jean currently teaches, states that it exists to graduate students
who are prepared in life and work to use their knowledge and their abilities to serve the
common good (Grinnell College, 2001). The college also afrms social responsibility as a core
value, with a particular focus on developing a strong tradition of social responsibility, action,
and personal responsibility (Grinnell College, 2001). The colleges education department
echoes this dedication to social justice, asserting in its mission statement that educational
leaders must be equipped to provide all students, particularly those whose knowledge and
experiences have been denigrated and marginalized, with opportunities to practice the critical
thinking skills that will enable them to act as effective and ethical citizens (Grinnell College,
2002). In this self-study, we describe the practices that seem to have been effective in the inner-
city charter school where Brian was teaching and investigate which of these practices are
incorporated already into the colleges education program, and which should be added or
strengthened to help it achieve its social justice aims.
Few of our graduates choose to teach in inner-city, high-need schools. For this reason, we
fear that our college falls short of its self-proclaimed social justice mission. We know that
Americas schools are resegregating, and this resegregation exacerbates the divide between the
haves and the have-nots in schooling. Evidence of school resegregation comes from a Harvard
Civil Rights Project report (Oreld and Chungmei, 2004), which found that students in todays
schools, especially in large urban districts, are likely to be isolated into racial groups and to have
little exposure to students of different ethnicities or cultures. Moreover, the schools that enroll
majorities of Black or Latino students tend to have fewer resources than the majority White
schools. Another study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project (Oreld and Chungmei, 2005) found
that schools with high concentrations of non-White and poor students tended to have
less-experienced and less-qualied teachers. We believe that these students deserve the
well-prepared teachers that matter most in improving students opportunities to learn (Darling-
Hammond, 2000). Thus, we believe it is crucial that we encourage licensed teachers graduating
from the education program at our highly selective college to choose to teach in Americas most
under-resourced schools.
130 J. Ketter and B. Stoffel
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

A
t
:

0
3
:
2
0

2
6

A
p
r
i
l

2
0
1
1
During our self-study, Brian worked at a charter school that we here refer to by the
pseudonym Hope Charter School (HCS). The school, which enrolled students in fth through
eighth graders, was located in a blighted metropolitan area and had a stated aim to address the
unequal education opportunity that students experience. Charter schools are sectarian public
schools allowed to operate free of many federal and state regulations imposed on traditional
public schools. Charter schools are particularly popular in this city because they are able to
employ innovative approaches that might not be supported in traditional public school settings.
At Brians school, for example, teachers are not required to have a teaching license and they
are not protected by a teachers union. They could therefore be expected to teach longer hours
and to supervise activities that a union contract might have prohibited. They could also be red
at the principals will. We note that Brian was the only member of this schools faculty who had
earned a teaching license in a traditional program; most of the others were Teach for America
volunteers who had acquired several years of teaching experience before joining the faculty at
HCS. Many have earned licensure through the Teach for America program or are currently
seeking licensure from Master of Arts in Teaching programs. Brian was hired at this school
directly from his preservice program at Grinnell College.
Students at HCS come from elementary schools all across the city. Many of the feeder
schools for HCS do not meet the annual yearly progress demands of No Child Left Behind.
District wide, African-American students perform on average 30% lower than White students on
the prociency standard. For the students entering HCS, the percentage scores for prociency
were even lower. For example, one of the neighborhood schools currently experiencing
restructuring had only 14.5% of its students testing as procient readers and only 6.1% testing as
procient in mathematics. Much research demonstrates that African-American students come to
school less well-prepared then their White counterparts (Farkas, Lleras, & Maczyga, 2002).
Charter schools like HCS were founded to help address this disparity, and this school employed
teaching and curricular approaches that had been successful in other charter schools in helping
students catch up with and surpass their suburban counterparts.
To identify and analyze this charter schools recommended teaching approaches, Jean
observed two classes a day, two or three times a week, for nine months. She kept dual-entry
observation notes in which she recorded details, snippets of conversation, and descriptions on the
left side and later analyzed what she had observed on the right side. Jean observed regularly in
Brians class and occasionally observed in other classes, including a sixth grade reading class, a
seventh grade science class, and a seventh grade Spanish class. Brian and Jean talked between
classes and during Brians planning period, time permitting, to discuss what they saw, to ask each
other questions, and, in many cases, to work out alternatives for approaching a lesson differently.
Brian shared all of his teaching materials with Jean, sometimes in advance via email, both to solicit
advice and as a way to illustrate what he was hoping to accomplish with his students. Over the
school year, Jean and Brian also met for four extended periods outside of the school to identify the
theories underpinning the teaching strategies his school was employing and to understand why
certain approaches worked and others did not. In all of their conversations, they considered how
what they discovered could improve their shared teacher education program.
We have structured this article as a conversation, attempting to echo the process Jean and
Brian engaged in as the year passed. We will begin rst with Jeans description of the education
program Brian had recently completed, which she and her colleagues believed would prepare
students to teach in schools like the one where Brian taught. Then, Brian will respond with his
analysis of what was missing from his preparation, explanations of the sort of preparation he
received through HSC, and insights he has gained from his early years of teaching experience.
Jean will then respond to his comments with her observations and analysis of the match and
mismatch between the colleges education programs approach and Brians and his schools
Studying Teacher Education 131
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

A
t
:

0
3
:
2
0

2
6

A
p
r
i
l

2
0
1
1
approach. Finally, we will complete the conversation with the conclusions that we have come to
as a result of this shared journey and address the original question of this self-study.
Grinnell Colleges Education Program
The education program at Grinnell College is quite streamlined, requiring only ve courses
before students spend their ninth semester in a 14-week teaching practicum and attending a
weekly seminar. At Grinnell, students begin their work in the program with a course titled
Educational Principles in a Pluralistic Society. This foundation course introduces our students to
the notion of institutionalized racism that has pervaded our schooling practices since our
countrys founding. The course description includes this statement:
We will devote a signicant portion of the course to philosophies informing multicultural education
and in doing so will explore how issues of race, class, sexuality, gender and ableness intersect in
schools to determine the privileges one is able to claim. (EDU 101 Syllabus, Personal
communication, 2006, p. 1)
In all subsequent courses in our program, students read texts that challenge racist assumptions
that may underlie explanations for low achievement in urban schools. While we explore how
inequities based on race and class are perpetuated in our schools, and examine the complex mix
of historical, social, institutional, and cultural factors that create such inequities, we also study
approaches that we believe can interrupt the replication of race, class, and gender inequity in
schools. Brian took the capstone course for students seeking a teaching license in
English/language arts in 2003. This syllabus begins with these words:
The course is aimed at helping you develop a personal theory of teaching as an intellectual as well as
a highly moral profession/vocation that can be transformative for students and teachers. Throughout
our program, we argue that teachers should view themselves as public intellectuals committed to the
practice of social justice, and I hope you will leave the course more clearly envisioning how teaching
can be a way to work toward justice and equity for all people. Thus, I want you to leave the course
able to imagine what sorts of approaches will help you achieve those ends as an English/language
arts teacher. (EDU 341 Syllabus, Personal communication, 2003, p. 1)
In this methods course, I emphasize that students recognize how the discourse of school matches
middle-class White discourse and disadvantages poor and non-standard English speakers
(Anyon, 1997; Delpit, 1996; Finn, 1999; Lareau, 2003). Students read arguments by those who
argue that we can attack this disadvantage by celebrating and reinforcing the home discourses of
the children; but we also emphasize approaches championed by others, like Delpit (1996), who
argue that non-standard English speaking children need to be explicitly taught school discourse.
She calls this the discourse of power, and Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) call it the rules of the
game. Our program acknowledges that these discourse practices reproduce class and race
divisions in schools and, in order to give all students access to the economic and political
advantages denied them, we urge our students to demystify the rules.
Students in the education program also observe a minimum of 60 hours in area school no
more than 30 miles from the college, conduct research projects, and prepare units and lesson
plans before they embark on their student teaching practica. Our program is highly theoretical
and is structured to encourage teachers to see themselves as teacher researchers who use
classroom data to improve their own practice. We do not focus on developing classroom tricks
such as de-contextualized behavior management strategies. I believe that a classroom is a
democratic community and I encourage teachers to view themselves as co-learners with their
students. In surveys of our alumni, we occasionally have been criticized for our lack of
practical coursework or preparation for rst-year management issues by some graduates of the
program, Brian included. For example, one particularly critical responder wrote in a recent
132 J. Ketter and B. Stoffel
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

A
t
:

0
3
:
2
0

2
6

A
p
r
i
l

2
0
1
1
survey: The classroom community idea is pretty useless without detailed strategies (Grinnell
College Education Department Alumni Survey, Fall 2007).
Brians Response
Jean is correct in saying that I was often wary of the highly theoretical, socio-cultural slant that
I received in my time at my alma mater. I just had a gut feeling that there was something much
more natural, more integral to human nature, more related to character beyond what a book
could ever teach that would play a role in whether or not I would survive as a teacher in a
low-income school. I was right.
Armed with enough educational theory to justify the cost of a private schools tuition, I found
it tting that my greatest worries going into teaching were never covered in depth in any of my
classes. In fact, they were quite simple. What would/should I do when the class enters my room?
What if I never developed the look and the kids never respected me as an authority gure?
Or, the one I most commonly asked, how am I going to teach something as complex as writing to
a class I may or may not have any control over? These questions, as unacademic as they may
seem, are the real ones that form knots in beginning teachers stomachs as they break out into a
cold sweat in the middle of an already sleepless night. Vygotskys socio-cultural theories do not,
Im afraid, consume our thoughts in quite the same way.
Five minutes into teaching my rst class at HSC, I realized how completely in over my head
I was. Teachers who were able to raise student achievement to the point that it got national
attention on an almost weekly basis surrounded me. I had somehow landed a job with this skilled
crew, feeling like the 12th man on the basketball team that should just be shooting around during
warm-ups, but never see any playing time. Except in education, there is no 12th man; we all
teach. This cruel caveat did not work in my favor. At the end of this rst class, a male fth grade
student came up to me and asked, Why do you let the kids get away with being bad when the
other teachers dont? I felt as though I had been punched in the stomach.
For the rst time in my life, I was faced with the very real prospect of either sinking or
swimming. If I was going to learn how to swim, I was going to have to ask for help. My kids were
perilously behind in their schooling, and I was doing them no favors by standing in front of them
like I knew what I was doing. After my rst week of teaching, I asked every sixth grade teacher
in the building to come and observe. I swallowed my pride, and asked them to tear apart my
classroom. With tact, they did.
I tried just about every suggestion that was offered. Some worked, some didnt, but I was
slowly building up a repertoire of strategies that were effective. I started using a Do Now in
class that gave the students a writing task to work on as soon as they came in. I set up procedures
for getting supplies instead of taking every question that came up for a pencil or a trip to the
bathroom. And instead of introducing a classroom procedure once and expecting the students to
automatically understand, I was encouraged by other teachers to take the time to devote a whole
class period to one simple task. I was taught the importance of occasionally calling a student out
for their misbehavior. The other teachers even taught me a way to clap that could instantly get all
of the students attention. Most importantly, if I wanted things to happen in my classroom,
I learned that it was more important to be seen as serious teacher rather than as nice teacher by
the students. By the end of the year, I felt I was acceptable for a rst-year teacher, although
I would not yet call myself a good teacher. Somehow, I became a nalist for a First-Year Teacher
of the Year award in the city I was teaching in. My progress was painfully slow and incremental.
Behavior management was my major concern, so it makes sense to think back on how my
college prepared me for behavior management issues. I certainly do remember discussing the
importance of procedures and routines during my courses, but that was as far as it went:
Studying Teacher Education 133
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

A
t
:

0
3
:
2
0

2
6

A
p
r
i
l

2
0
1
1
discussion. It is one thing to say that engaging lessons that build on students interests and lives
is all the classroom needs to avoid most behavior management problems; it is quite another to
actually do it. The problem is that during many of our practice teaching sessions, we taught our
peers as if they were students, and during our student-teaching experience, the co-teacher was
usually in the room and already had systems, procedures and expectations set up before we
entered the school. At no time were we ever expected to set up our own authentic systems,
procedures or expectations. While it might be difcult to imagine a situation where we could set
up such authentic experiences, I have always thought that if one were successful at creating
systems for very young children, one could then extrapolate from those experiences and apply
them to teaching at any level. The colleges approach to investigating behavior management was
an example of theory not necessarily tting together with practice.
Davis (2007) wrote in Phi Delta Kappan about the disconnect that exists between teacher
educators and those who are teaching in K-12 schools. When I read this during my second year
of teaching, I thought it shed some light on the huge obstacles (especially behavioral) that I faced
in my classroom. Davis argues that academics have lost touch with the day-to-day complexity of
human interaction in schools and accuses them of hit-and-run research that focuses on narrow
topics and requires only a short stay in any one school. He concludes his critique of academics
and the ineffectiveness of their research by stating that comparatively little of what is written
and thought about by scholars and policy makers actually has any appreciable impact on
classrooms or drives durable system-wide reform efforts (Davis, p. 569).
Davis (2007) also points out that administrators and teachers reach too quickly for easy,
simplistic solutions to complex problems and engage in wishful thinking about the universality
of reforms because they are under pressure to get results. In their desire to x the problems
quickly, administrators and practicing teachers sometimes seek a one-size-ts-all solution.
In reality, a positive change in a school is likely due to a variety of contextual factors that may
not be possible to replicate in another setting. Davis gives some advice to K-12 teachers for
applying the research they may have encountered either in their academic careers or in
professional development. He advises teachers to view research as a road map, not a
destination, arguing that teachers should learn to trust [their] gut (p. 571).
In our discussions during the year, Jean and I continually returned to the tension between my
distrust of what I saw as the often impractical, research-based practices Davis (2007) describes
and Jeans skepticism about simply trusting ones gut. In our discussions, Jean and I kept coming
back to an essential question: What can a school of education prepare you for, and for what is
there no substitute but the real thing especially if a key component is learning how to trust your
gut? Davis starts to answer this question by talking about research as a road map, but from my
experience, I think it can be taken a step further. Although education departments certainly have
a duty to expose students to current research and theories, I think that they have a far greater
duty. If a school of education wants to guarantee that every teacher graduating from its program
will be successful, it needs to cultivate within that student a healthy appreciation of the growth
made possible through genuine failure.
Every rst-year teacher, especially those working with traditionally underserved
populations, is going to fail and fail often. Those who succeed in their rst year do not
possess superior intelligence, charisma, or even empathy. They are able to swallow their pride
and squeeze every ounce of wisdom out of the countless failures that one will unavoidably have
in the classroom. In other words, learning to teach at a school such as HCS requires that a teacher
becomes really good at failing.
I got to practice this skill as the other teachers came into my room and tore apart my
practices. After two years in teaching, I thought I had it all gured out. To survive as a teacher
134 J. Ketter and B. Stoffel
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

A
t
:

0
3
:
2
0

2
6

A
p
r
i
l

2
0
1
1
in a low-income area, you had to have certain character skills, not book skills. You had to accept
failure as one of lifes natural teachers and become its number one student.
Jeans Experiences at HCS
When I rst arrived at HCS, I was a bit shocked by what I perceived to be a military school
approach to discipline in the school. Students were expected to be totally silent in the hall ways,
were told to line up on a certain square on the oor with their shoulders touching the wall, were
constantly reminded to tuck in the shirts of their uniforms, and were taught hand signals to use in
class to indicate their requests as a way of avoiding unnecessary interruptions. Table 1 is an early
excerpt from the dual-entry journal I kept during the rst semester of my time at HCS that
captures my concern about these approaches.
As this excerpt illustrates, I noted that Brians having aims on the board and essential
questions in the classroom reected the approaches recommended in Understanding by Design
(Wiggins & McTighe, 1995), a book that Brian and his classmates read in our methods class
together. I had concerns about the classroom management program enacted at the school
because it relied on a token economy. I believe that behaviorist approaches can be unethical and
ultimately, ineffective, so I questioned the token economy set up in the school. Students earned
dollars that could be exchanged for possible prizes but that were also tallied to determine the
top 50% of students who would be allowed to participate in the end-of-year trip. Each class
visited a different city, and trips always included a trip to a college or university campus. In this
excerpt from my journal on that same day I react to this system of paying students with points
and possible prizes for doing homework and following rules:
Im not comfortable with this sort of token economy. Especially since it determines who will be able
to attend the year-end trip. I will keep talking to Brian about how he feels about this. He explained
that they couldnt afford to take everyone on the trip. Which is understandable, but I wonder what
happens to students who are so far behind the others by mid-year that they can see no hope in
catching up. Do the rewards and punishments quit working? (If one person loses points, that means
I move closer to the top?) It sets up a zero-sum game. In general I think establishing a system of
extrinsic reward is attractive because its likely to work fairly quickly, but I dont have a lot of faith
Table 1. Excerpt from Jeans dual-entry journal.
Sept. 6, 2006/1:40 Class-Citadel Reminds me of McTighe and Wiggins and Under-
standing
by Design.
Agenda on board with learning
goals/Aim for the day. Classroom has
essential questions posted on the walls.
1:40 class has no break between science
and writing class; students move seats,
but dont leave the classroom.
Routines or rituals:
Do it Now a small review of
grammar/standard English.
Hand raising with signals so the teacher
knows what they want:
Bathroom: A closed st
Pencil: Crossed Fingers
Water: Three ngers
Genuine Question: Open hand
Brian explained that the hand-raising signals prevent
the students from interrupting class as much with a
request for something rather than an actual response
to a question. I can see this, but it is very distracting
for me to see all these closed sts up while Brian is
talking. (I see shades of Black Power). It is weird and
it seems more like a military training video to me.
Studying Teacher Education 135
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

A
t
:

0
3
:
2
0

2
6

A
p
r
i
l

2
0
1
1
in its working for a long time. Whatever is offered as a reward (after-school store, pizza, etc) soon
loses its reinforcing nature and the negative reinforces or punishments are too abstract to be very
powerful. I know that most behaviorists have found punishment doesnt work well at all (unless its
swift and severe), and that rewards work for only a short time. And rewards can be counterproductive
if what youre rewarding is already intrinsically rewarding in the rst place, you can extinguish the
behavior. I wonder if HCS people have studied behaviorism in all its complexity. Brian explained
that the school works to move toward intrinsic reward by eight grade, but I dont see much emphasis
on intrinsic rewards for the seventh graders. (September 6, 2006)
One other example from my observations shows my reaction to hearing a teacher saying to a
group of students who were chatting quietly in the hallway: Its good to see you, but NOT to
hear you.
I know that HCSs credo insists that the teachers respect the students, but Im not sure how the school
is dening respect. Is it respectful to assume these students have so little self-control that you cannot
allow them any freedom at all? I am not sure what this means, but its a bit disturbing to me. It sounds
a little like the old saw Children should be seen but not heard. Very Victorian! I do understand that
the school is trying to cut down on chaos and contact in the halls, and I can see why thats important.
I know from my experience that hallways are where ghts get started (and nished.) However, it
seems this insistence on silence might be a bit much. I need to talk to Brian about this more because
I wonder if its coming from the assumption that students cannot distinguish between a little talk and
too much talk. Or is it assumed that there will be some talk (which there is), but the prohibition keeps
it at a safe level. As I asked Brian earlier in the month, is this Discipline or Domestication?
(October 9, 2006)
One strong tenet of this schools mission was teaching the game of school and the language
of power. I am sympathetic to the idea that school is a sort of game with rules some children
(usually White and middle-class) seem to know intuitively while others (poor students of color)
need to be taught the game explicitly. In her sociological study of parenting, Lareau (2003)
argues that middle-class children, regardless of their race, are better prepared to negotiate school
because of parenting practices that cultivate a sense of entitlement and an ability to negotiate
with adults in order to make the system work for them. I agree that middle-class White discourse
is one of the tools students need to learn to be successful in school, but as I explained earlier,
I believe that students also should learn explicitly that school discourse is not inherently superior
to childrens home discourses.
I know that Brian did not believe that the language students spoke with their friends or their
families was inferior, but I was afraid that the school was communicating that idea to students
indirectly. And because I see a strong connection between culture and language, I was afraid
children were learning that their culture also was inferior. Repeated references by staff about
their hopes that students could get out of the ghetto and escape the inner-city schools they
would ultimately attend if they did not score well on standardized tests and get good grades
reinforced this concern. I am not arguing that poverty, drug use, and violence did not plague
these childrens communities, but I think it is important to recognize the positive aspects of their
lives as well, aspects that Lareau (2003) argues are unacknowledged by teachers and education
experts.
One story stands out as an example of what I feared students were learning due to this
emphasis on teaching the discourse of school, and through inference, the superiority of this
discourse and culture it embodied. A student (Jasmine) was writing a narrative about how her
mother tried to surprise her by getting her a kitten. The surprise was spoiled, though, when
Jasmine inadvertently discovered a note about the kitten when she was looking for something
in her mothers purse. As they were driving to get the kitten, Jasmine, seated in the back seat of
the car, admitted to her mother that she knew where they were going and how shed found out.
Then, the mother turned her head as she was driving and said, I gon pop you! The student had
136 J. Ketter and B. Stoffel
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

A
t
:

0
3
:
2
0

2
6

A
p
r
i
l

2
0
1
1
written the mothers words exactly as she had spoken them, without the am or the ing verb
ending. She called me over to ask if this was all right. I asked her what she meant by all right, and
she explained that it was exactly what her mother said, but she knew it wasnt proper English.
I told her that it was dialogue and that it was good to quote directly because it made the narrative
seem more real. She responded, But I dont want to make my mother sound stupid.
I understand that students need to catch up and learn academic discourse. However, I would
like to have seen more acknowledgement of the structural racism students experience and more
opportunity for students to bring their own lives into the curriculum at HCS. Students did read
books by authors of color and they did discuss these books in their classes, but based on my
limited observations, the discussions focused on the theme of individual choice and avoided
discussion of institutional racism that often disempowers and oppresses students, rendering
making good choices a luxury many do not have. As Delpit (1996) warns, students own lives
and experiences need to be at the center of the curriculum, and, at least in the classes I observed,
teachers appeared to focus almost exclusively on helping students adopt the academic discourse
they will need to succeed in the elite schools where HCS aims to place them. I did not see what
I consider to be a place for the glorication of their students and their forbears (p. 164) that
Delpit demands.
It is clear that I was not sympathetic to many of the approaches used at this school to
maintain order and create an atmosphere where students could learn. However, as I continued
my observations at HCS, I saw that many teachers, including Brian, were doing wonderful things
as well. For example, Brian was using a modied workshop approach to teaching writing,
allowing students some choice in topic and giving them opportunities to revise after teacher
feedback. He consistently modeled in his own writing what he expected of students, and in his
writing, he shared his life with students, demonstrating his trust in them and allowing them to see
him as a real, complex, awed human being.
Also, I observed a sixth grade reading teacher who impressed me both with her care and
concern for her students and her pedagogy. In fact, watching her teach brought tears to my eyes,
and after I had observed her, I felt I had to tell students how lucky they were to have her as a
teacher. Here is an excerpt from my journal describing my reaction to her approach to teaching:
These students clearly have a script for responding, but their answers are thoughtful and they do
seem to be listening to each other and building on one anothers responses. They seem to be referring
to a chart on the wall that provides a sort of template for fashioning their responses. When someone
simply states an opinion, the teacher requires that they restate it by including the question, and, when
applicable, refer to another peers previous response. (October 24, 2006)
During my time with Brian, I was struck by the high energy and idealism that drove all the
teachers in his school. I was also impressed with the amount of autonomy afforded them. They
had a great deal of freedom in designing curricula. The science teacher, for example, did not use
a textbook. Instead, she set up simple laboratories in her classroom and emphasized the process
of doing science rather than the facts of science. Brian, too, had almost complete freedom in
designing his writing class, and I believe this freedom was both a blessing and a burden. Here is
an excerpt from my journal written in early December:
For this writing class, the school has not given Brian a script to follow or a textbook with pre-set
lessons to constrain him, which is great. He does have some large goals (I believe developed by the
entire seventh grade faculty) but he also has no outline or overall structure for the course. It is all his.
Its not surprising that he relies on what I see as a formulaic approach suggested in a school-
sponsored workshop he attended. As far as I could tell, he isnt getting a lot of help about curricula
from his peers or the principal. I have tried to suggest that students might be more motivated if they
are writing for authentic purposes, and that form should follow function, but I think the structure
offered by this approach appeals to him, and he sincerely believes it provides students with
scaffolding they need to be successful. My take on it is that its constraining them too much and they
Studying Teacher Education 137
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

A
t
:

0
3
:
2
0

2
6

A
p
r
i
l

2
0
1
1
could be writing better than they are. I think he may be underestimating them, and I suspect they are
acting out because this work isnt challenging them. But, I could be wrong. Ill keep thinking about
this. (December 6, 2006)
Another aspect of the program at HCS that impressed me was how teachers at HCS use
informal and formative assessments to check on their students learning and then adapt their
curricula accordingly. After all, they know that their job depends on how well they are preparing
students. One example from my observations will clarify:
Last week Brian gave students a sort of quiz on the elements of a narrative. When he discovered that
they still seem confused about certain aspects of the difference between an expository summary and
a retelling of a ctional narrative, he remarked to me that he needed to gure out what he could do to
help them understand. He did not blame the students or fault them in any way. He clearly saw this as
a teaching failure. I was really impressed with his willingness to admit that something hadnt worked
and his desire to gure out what he might do differently. (October 3, 2006)
Early in the rst semester of my observing, Brian and I met to discuss pedagogical
approaches I saw Brian using that I thought were emphasized in methods courses at Grinnell.
I generated the following list:
I see now that the list was a bit defensive, but I believe I was trying to show Brian that we had
prepared him well, and Brian agreed that most of what I had listed was true. He also remarked
that when we were reading about backward planning and establishing routines or rituals in the
classroom, he had not believed these ideas were all that practical or useful. This inability to see
the connection between the abstract practices recommended in a text by experts and what one
would eventually be doing in a classroom was not unique to Brian. Many alumni from the
program return to tell me that they were not really convinced by some of the recommended
pedagogy in our classes because it seemed either too idealized or too obvious. I see this as a
signicant failure of our program.
Brians Response
Our discussions and visits with one another have continued into my third year of teaching. Due
in large part to Jeans time with me, I have come to certain realizations about the disconnect
Table 2. Comparing Brians approaches to what is taught at Grinnell College.
What we teach at Grinnell What we do not teach at Grinnell
Backward planning Using assessment to inform
instruction
Behaviorist approaches to classroom
management
Explicitness in giving directions Grading each others homework and announcing
scores to class
Strategic Approaches Emphasis on daily homework
Modeling
Guided Practice
Building on prior knowledge
Classroom routines (rituals)
Consistency
Ignoring negatives when possible
Not arguing with teens
Wait Time
Consequences as immediate and
logical as possible
Fast pacing
Writing with students
138 J. Ketter and B. Stoffel
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

A
t
:

0
3
:
2
0

2
6

A
p
r
i
l

2
0
1
1
between theory and practice. In my rst response to Jean, I wrote, I just had a gut feeling that
there was something much more natural, more integral to human nature, more related to
character beyond what a book could ever teach that would play a role in whether or not I would
survive as a teacher in a low-income school. I purposely decided to bold the word survive this
time, because I think it deals with what direction ones teaching career can take. If my only goal
is to survive, and not thrive, then what am I doing with my time once I gured out how to
control my students?
In Robert Redfords 1972 lm, The Candidate, a young, idealistic lawyer agrees to enter an
almost impossible race for Californias senate seat. As the race continues, the focus becomes
more and more about winning, and less and less about the issues. When Redfords character
does, in fact, pull off the improbable win, in an attack of disillusionment, he pulls his campaign
manager to the side and asks, What do we do now? The movie ends before the question can be
answered, presumably because it was never considered in depth. Surviving at an inner-city
school really is about character. But if growth as a teacher ends with surviving, then Im afraid
that once I have conquered the almost impossible task of gaining control of my classroom,
I would be left at the end of the day asking the very same question: What do I do now?
At the start of my third year of teaching, people within the national school network, of which
HCS was a part, began to ask the same question. As graduates of our middle schools went off to
high school and then to college, a pattern of decit began to surface. Students from HCS schools
were top-notch in math, they could read for comprehension well, and they were excellent test
takers. Their writing was not as good as it should have been.
A group of teachers within HCS got together to investigate the reasons behind our students
poor writing skills. An anecdotal story from their research gets to the heart of the matter: During
the course of their study, these teachers spent the rst half of a day at an HCS school with an
education professor. What they saw was excellent. Students were on task for the majority of the
time, learning in very structured, well-planned and well-executed lessons. It was clear that the
bar had been set high and both teachers and students were up to the task. After that, the group of
teachers, along with the education professor, went to a prestigious, upper-class private school
just outside of the city for the second half of the day. When they got in, what they saw made their
skin crawl. Students were running around and shouting in the hall. They chewed bubble gum.
Their shirts were untucked. This is chaos, they thought. None of this would be allowed at an
HCS school!
A funny thing happened when the bell rang and the classes after lunch began: the halls
cleared, and the classes started. The teachers sat in on many classes. They noted how the students
interacted with their teachers as if they were peers. They looked at their writing. It was
impressive. When the group of teachers left the school, they conferred together, and all of a
sudden, a light bulb went on. The kids at the private school were simply better critical thinkers
than the HCS students, and that was reected in their writing. At almost the same moment of
exuberance for discovering their silver bullet, the teachers realized what a daunting task that
was. How do we make our kids better critical thinkers?
When I was attending an HSC conference on this topic, it became clear to me why Jean had
been so against some of the practices that I employed. She said, Behaviorist approaches can be
unethical and ultimately ineffective. Apparently, the full-edged implementation of
behaviorism can strip away a students ability to develop critical thinking skills.
At the start of my third year, it became clear to me that I had gained a level of condence and
respect in the school, as well as developed systems and routines that were effective in my
classroom. I could do just about everything so that my students would at least look like they were
doing something. As I sat in my classroom after the rst week, happily realizing that many of the
problems that vexed me before were not going to be as much of a nuisance anymore, and
Studying Teacher Education 139
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

A
t
:

0
3
:
2
0

2
6

A
p
r
i
l

2
0
1
1
thinking back about what Id heard at the conference, I was able to think about What next?
And thoughts of Vygotsky, and Piaget and socio-culturalism came ooding to me the rst time
they had done so naturally since graduation.
Teaching writing has become far less formulaic for my students. Instead of giving my
students very basic, almost ll-in-the-blank type papers to write, we pull from a large pool of
writings to examine, dissect, and model from. My students have learned how to code switch
from what we call the Language of College (Standard American English) to the Language of
Friends (ones home dialect, whatever ones ethnicity) in a way that is both natural, and values
neither above another. More than anything, I have adopted the motto that HSC has in light of the
recent research: Make yourself obsolete. In other words, set your students up for success and
provide them with all of the tools they need in the front end, so that by the end of the year, the
students should be able to run the class themselves. Unless they learn how to do that, how can we
ever expect students to survive in the real world where a teacher isnt there with them all of the
time to provide help?
Jeans Epilogue
Since I have worked with Brian, I see justication for the concerns Brian expresses, and
I understand how students would deem my ideal of creating an egalitarian classroom community
na ve and uninformed, particularly to a new teacher in an inner-city classroom. Like many
education professors, it has been many years since I have conducted my own class or had the
responsibility for planning a curriculum or managing a classroom of young people. My teaching
experience was in a mid-sized town in Kansas, and although our population was fairly diverse,
I have never taught in an inner city, and my high-school teaching experience is nowover 15 years
old. My students sometimes understandably suspect that our programs lack of focus on
classroom management reects our misunderstanding of todays schools and todays challenges
because we professors are out of touch. Therefore, I know it is essential that all of our faculty
continue to seek out experiences where we are responsible for a classroom, if not for an entire
year, at least for long enough to renew our credibility with our students and to test our beliefs
about how to best prepare teachers.
Brians concerns have convinced me that I should emphasize practical concerns in my
methods courses more than I have in the past, particularly the importance of establishing
routines for getting students into the classroom, getting them to settle on a task, transitioning
from one task to another, and participating in small and large groups effectively. Since Brian
began his rst teaching experience thinking, What do I do now? I see that it is essential for
beginning teachers to have practiced planning that includes explicit strategies for dealing with
the inevitable behavioral challenges they will face and to understand that they need to be explicit
about the game of school with these students. Although I believe that teachers should develop
routines and other management approaches based on their own teaching philosophies,
developing a store of principled strategies will help them avoid some of the typical difculties
new teachers face and, perhaps, help them respond to failure positively. Routines like those
Brian describes in this article can be adapted to many contexts and will help establish the sort of
classroom atmosphere where students feel safe to express themselves and to commit themselves
to the high-quality work expected of them.
Since spending time with Brian, however, I realize that talking about these classroom
management approaches and having student write papers about them is not enough. This
problem of practice raises another question that I am certain concerns many teacher educators.
Of course, we want to place student teachers with competent, experienced cooperating teachers
as mentors. But, as Brian notes, with such experienced cooperating teachers, the student teacher
140 J. Ketter and B. Stoffel
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

A
t
:

0
3
:
2
0

2
6

A
p
r
i
l

2
0
1
1
inherits a classroom where classroom management issues are taken care of, even invisible, and
the student teacher seldom gets real practice in establishing him or herself as an authority or in
deciding what to do when students dont comply with requests. In the future, we can emphasize
to our cooperating teachers that our student teachers need to establish their own classroom
procedures, and perhaps the cooperating teachers should be counseled to take a more hands-off
approach with student teachers, allowing them to make more mistakes and gure out how to
correct them or overcome errors in judgment.
My work with Brian has reinforced my commitment to prepare teachers who believe in
challenging all students to be critical readers of their own experiences and active agents in their
own educations while also providing students with access to the discourses of power that will
allow them to succeed academically. In the past, I think I have overemphasized a need for
opening a space for student voices and underemphasized the need for students to acquire the
discourses of power. My interactions and observations at HCS have convinced me that I need to
challenge my education students to address the balance Delpit calls for. Students need to be
learning the discourses of power, but they also need to learn about the cultural and political
contexts of these discourses.
This self-study with Brian has energized and challenged me. Our discussions have helped me
trace more clearly the connections between theory and practice, and I have returned to my own
classes with a better understanding of how to help my students make those connections. My
discussions with Brian have revealed to me how theory can seem irrelevant and impractical.
I have been challenged to articulate the practical value of the theories underpinning our program
and to reevaluate those theories in light of Brians practice.
Brians Epilogue
As I stated before, it wasnt until my third year of teaching that I had established the routines and
systems necessary to help a class run smoothly. It wasnt until then that I could ask myself,
What next? and honestly start thinking in depth about what I was taught in college. Oddly, it
was at this moment that I nally was able to appreciate all of the teaching that Jean and her
counterparts had put forth during my college years. Many of my classmates from college
probably came to this realization far earlier than I did, but many of them were in situations where
the populations they were working with presented problems that they were far better equipped to
deal with.
It is now clear to me that student-run, democratic classrooms are possible and necessary.
As Delpit (1996) argues, giving the students direct and explicit access to the discourses of power
is vital, while at the same time respecting the discourse where the students have come from.
The theory that I learned in college really is practical once I learned how to survive.
Conclusion
Re-entering the classroom as a learner reminded Jean of the day-to-day challenges of teaching,
and it seems obvious that if teacher educators hope to change teachers minds about how
educational theory can serve efforts for equity, they must be willing to have their own minds
changed by listening to the teachers critiques and engaging in serious self-critique about how
truly useful their prized theories are in the life of the classroom. Pressures to publish may very
well push busy college faculty to produce supercial research that not only fails to portray
teachers lives in their full complexity, but also, because the research can be seen to dismiss the
sorts of challenges teachers face in schools, may reinforce practicing teachers beliefs that these
professors from the bubble of academia really do not know what it is like in the trenches of the
Studying Teacher Education 141
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

A
t
:

0
3
:
2
0

2
6

A
p
r
i
l

2
0
1
1
classroom. Because education faculty in schools of education are afforded the expertise to make
pronouncements about what teachers should be doing in their classrooms but spend little time
actually teaching in those classrooms, some skepticism about those pronouncements seems
understandable. Until education faculty can devise more effective ways to make the tacit
theorypractice connections more obvious and more powerful to prospective and practicing
teachers who choose this vocation to work for social justice, the communication barriers
between teacher educators and teachers will continue to produce misgivings about the uses of
educational theory and a lack of respect for the work teachers and teacher educators do.
References
Anyon, J. (1997). Ghetto schooling: A political economy of school reform. New York: Teachers College
Press.
Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1990). Reproduction in education society, and culture (R. Nice, Trans.).
London: Sage.
Darling-Hammond, L. (2000). Teacher quality and student achievement: A review of state policy evidence.
Education Policy Archives, 8, 150. Retrieved April 21, 2007 from http//epaa.edu/epaa/v8 n1.
Davis, S. (2007). Bridging the gap between research and practice: Whats good, and how can one be sure?
Phi Delta Kappan, 88(8), 568578.
Delpit, L. (1996). Other peoples children: Cultural conict in the classroom. New York: The New Press.
Grinnell College (2001). Core values of Grinnell College. Retrieved April 12, 2007 from http://www.
grinnell.edu/ofces/president/missionstatement/core/
Grinnell College (2002). Education department mission statement. Retrieved March 8, 2007 from http://
www.grinnell.edu/academic/education/
Farkas, G., Lleras, C., & Maczyga, S. (2002). Comment: Does oppositional culture exist in minority and
poverty peer groups? American Sociological Review, 67, 148155.
Finn, P. (1999). Literacy with an attitude: Educating working-class children in their own self-interest.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: Class, race and family life. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press.
Levine, A. (2006). Educating school teachers. Washington, DC: The Education Schools Project. Retrieved
April 17, 2007 from http://www.edschools.org/pdf/Educating_Teachers_Report.pdf
Loughran, J. (2007). Researching teacher education practices: Responding to the challenges, demands and
expectations of self-study. Journal of Teacher Education, 58(1), 1220.
Ofce of Institutional Research (2007). Survey for Alumni of College Education Program. Grinnell
College, IA: Grinnell.
Oreld, G., & Chungmei, L. (2004). Brown at 50: Kings dreams or Plessys nightmare? Cambridge, MA:
The Harvard University Civil Rights Project. Retrieved April 15, 2007 http://www.civilrightsproject.
ucla.edu/research/reseg04/brown50.pdf
Oreld, G., & Chungmei, L. (2005). Why segregation matters: Poverty and educational inequality.
Cambridge, MA: The Harvard University Civil Rights Project. Retrieved April 15, 2007 from http://
www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/deseg/Why_Segreg_Matters.pdf
Wiggins, G., &McTighe, J. (1995). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
142 J. Ketter and B. Stoffel
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

A
t
:

0
3
:
2
0

2
6

A
p
r
i
l

2
0
1
1

You might also like