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. 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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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