Anna Richert Professor of Education Mills College

My response to this exhibition grows out of my participation in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning where I worked with a number of K-12 teachers who produced some of the first websites like those displayed here.  Several years ago, I began incorporating some of the sites into my teacher education classes at Mills College in Oakland California because they were filled with examples of “real life” teaching, and I was intrigued to see if drawing on them would help my students learn to learn from the practice of more experienced teachers. 

Like many of my teacher education colleagues at Mills and elsewhere, the practice of K-12 teachers has figured heavily in my classes.  Early in my students’ credential year we talk about sources of teacher knowledge and sites for teacher learning.  “Experience” is always at the top of our list.  In our thinking about learning from experience we distinguish between having or observing an experience and learning from it.  We also distinguish between learning from our own experience, and learning from the experiences of others (Ball and Cohen, 1999).  The K-12 websites such as those displayed here provide a rich source of records of teaching experience, but stepping back from my work to view this “Making Teaching Visible” exhibition, I ask myself whether or not (and how) these materials are different from others I’ve used in my teaching up to this point.  What are some of the opportunities for learning these sites create and what is it about the sites that make this so?

The class where my work has been most carefully documented is my Adolescent Development class where I drew on a small collection of sites (including that of Yvonne Hutchinson that is included in the exhibition) to help me teach my secondary teacher education candidates about learner responsive practice.  What drove me to consider drawing on the K-12 sites for this class in particular was a dilemma I face in teaching the Adolescent Development content:  the challenge of helping my students recognize the importance of knowing their learners well.  As a relatively new teacher of Adolescent Development, I noticed early on that I had a good number of students who entered this class with a clear idea that knowing their subject matters would be important to good secondary school teaching, but a less-clear understanding of how vital it would be to know their adolescent learners as well.   Additionally, I saw the challenge of knowing one’s adolescent learners heightened by the fact that in most instances, the learners my students were preparing to teach – poor children of color in underserved urban schools – would have different life experiences and perhaps different learning needs from their own. I had the idea that if my students could see teachers successfully teaching rigorous subject matter content to adolescents in poor urban schools, we could investigate together what informed that practice, including the knowledge base held by those teachers. In turn, this would begin to reveal the importance of Adolescent Development to one’s professional preparation.

To begin, I selected five different K-12 sites representing practice in the different subject areas my students were preparing to teach.  In addition to Hutchinson, I drew on the work of:  Claire Bove, a middle school science teacher;  Joanne DaLuz, a high school math teacher; Vanessa Brown, a 9th grade special ed. humanities teacher; and Marsha Pincus, a secondary school English teacher whose first website focused on an inquiry into her teaching in a drama class.  

Yvonne Hutchinson

Claire Bove

Joanne DaLuz

Vanessa Brown

Marsha Pincus

I framed our work with these sites as a class investigation guided by three questions: 

Looking over this Exhibition and reflecting on the past three years of using these websites in my Adolescent Development class raises a number of issues that I summarize here.

Many ways to enter in

One of the first things I noted as I studied these sites is that they are multilayered in form and thus contain images of many different aspects of teaching and learning.  As a consequence, they offer multiple entry points.  Depending on the purpose for studying the sites students can focus on teaching practice; student learning (by watching students engage with the work or studying the “products” of their learning efforts); teacher learning (by listening or reading the teachers’ reflections about their practice) ; and issues of context issues of context (by observing the classrooms represented and/or hearing the teachers speak about the context of their work). The sites allow for studying these parts of teaching and learning separately; but they can also be studied in their importantly connected ways.  The connection between teaching decisions and context, for example, is easily explored on the sites as is the connection between opportunities for student learning and the teaching practices that create them.

The connection between learning opportunities and student outcomes are available for consideration as well.   For example, I use Sarah Capitelli’s site in my Inquiry into Teaching class, which is a second year MA class (Richert, 2005).  We begin our investigation of Sarah’s site by considering the urban context, which she carefully describes on her site and the relationship between that context and the inquiry questions that emerge from it.  I ask students to study Sarah’s site and think about a number of questions:  What does Sarah tell us about her context and why she might choose those things to report?  What is it about her context that “matters” from her point of view?  Why does context matter for teaching?  How does context help frame our teaching questions?

Another entry point for my students to study Sarah’s teaching is to consider student learning in the various forms it’s represented on her site.  We can think as a class about what questions she has about her students’ learning.  We can also consider what evidence of student learning she draws on as she tries to understand what her students know and how they learn.  After considering what Sarah thinks her students know, we can look at the student work ourselves and analyze it to determine what we think they know, and so forth.

Studying the sites alone and together:  New opportunities

In addition to being multi-layered with many possible ways to “enter,” these complex representations of teaching lend themselves to sharing by students in a variety of different ways that also open new opportunities for teaching and students’ learning.  Before working with these websites, the primary context for learning from experience for my students was their student teaching placements.  While this continues to be my students’ “favorite” learning location – and clearly an important part of their preservice work – there are drawbacks or limitations that present predictable challenges with this as the primary context for the work of learning to teach.  For one, every student’s experience in the student teaching setting is his or hers alone.  Unless students videotape their or their cooperating teacher’s teaching and bring it to the teacher education class, we are not able to explore that teaching text together other than to work from the student teacher’s explanation of what occurred. Websites like those in this exhibition give us the opportunity to all watch the same classroom events and study them collaboratively.  In the past I’ve used videotapes for this purpose, but this, too, is limited in ways these websites open up.  With in-class videos students cannot return to view the teaching on their own (very easily).  Not being able to return to the teaching limits how students can pursue on their own the thinking behind the teaching or the learning they view on the clip.  With the web-based representations of practice, on the other hand, students can take the time they need to review the materials and investigate what they see.  By drawing on the site’s multiple representations of teaching and learning, students can ask question of what they see and pursue answers as well.  This work can be done alone or with colleagues and take as much time as the student has – or wants – to give.

Another feature of the websites that has been particularly helpful to me is that along with the multiple images of practice there are multiple images of teachers learning from their practice.  Whereas the websites are not constructed to present “best practices,” they do provide images of teachers committed to learning in and from their teaching, which leads to better practice all the time.  This learning stance towards the work is critically important to the kind of teachers I hope to prepare---and/but it is a stance that I’ve found is challenging to teach.  Because the sites include various forms of teacher reflection (writing, interviews, conversations with colleagues, etc.) student teachers see veteran teachers actively engaged in their own professional learning.  For example, on Claire’s site she talks with her student teacher about what she’s learning. Vanessa’s video is filled with comments about her learning---also sources of her learning such as her own journal writing, her reflections on conversations with colleagues, etc.  Yvonne reflects on her practice on video, and Sarah uses reflection cards with her students.  Marsha has many different places where she demonstrates the reflection part of learning.  These sites are incredibly rich in this way. Recently the group of former students of mine whose work is displayed on the site describing my Adolescent Development class was surveyed by a group of Carnegie researchers during their first year of teaching.  They were asked about what they remembered about the teachers represented in the websites and what role the investigation of their practice had in their teaching.  One of them remembered in particular what she learned about the role of learning in teaching.  She said: 

I particularly liked listening to the veteran teachers reflect on their own teaching practice.  It reminded me how important it is in this profession to be thoughtful practitioners and constantly reflect on the strengths and areas of improvement in our own practice.  As a beginning teacher, observing the Carnegie teachers was inspiring and motivating.  It allowed me to see what successful outcomes can occur when teachers ask questions, take risks, and openly share and reflect on their own practice.

Multiple images of practice allow for multiple teacher ed. pedagogies to teach them

In addition to providing multiple entry points into practice, the sites also create opportunities to use different pedagogical strategies and arrangements for teaching with them.  For example, in the Adolescent Development class, in addition to investigating what the teachers know about their learners, we were able to investigate whether or not they used that knowledge in their teaching.  To answer these questions the students studied the sites on their own and with partners.  We looked at the sites in class and they followed up by studying them out of class as well.  Some students downloaded the work of the adolescent learners available on the sites to explore what the teacher could learn about their students from what they produced in their written work.  Others identified questions about the teaching they saw on the site and/or the learning, which they brought to class to share with their peers as you can see in this clip where my students are sharing their impressions of Vanessa Brown’s site.   One step in the process of using the sites in my class had the Mills students exploring the sites with high school partners.  This opened up a conversation about teaching and learning from the adolescent learner’s point of view.  On another occasion the Adolescent Development students shared in cross-disciplinary groups their findings about learner-responsive practice, which generated a rich conversation about learning in the different disciplines and an exploration about of learning “in general” and learning “in particular.”

While using these websites has been extremely generative in my classes in these ways, there are also challenges to working with them that warrant mentioning as well. The first challenge is the beginning task of studying the K-12 sites to determine their potential use in one’s teaching.  As I’ve just described, the sites are rich, multi-layered records of practice.  They go a long way in representing some of the vast complexity of teaching, which is why they are such a powerful resource for teacher education.  At the same time, this very richness heightens the challenge of knowing them well.  Studying the sites and then preparing a curriculum to teach them both take a considerable amount of time.  Part of that time comes in identifying for oneself the purpose for which the website will be used in the first place.  When I first started using the sites I found myself pondering the fact that I was drawing on them for my teacher education purpose, which was undoubtedly different from the purpose the teacher had when teaching as she did. Yvonne, for example, uses the strategy of the anticipation guide to help her students connect with the text.  In my class we studied the anticipation guide as a means for getting “to know one’s learners.”  Whether one is thinking about the teacher’s purpose or one’s own purpose for teaching with the site, how to focus the students’ investigation or, how to assess what students learn from the sites, etc. the teacher education work is labor-intensive.   The process involves studying the site thoroughly and then stepping back to consider the teacher’s practice as illustrative of the teacher education principle one hopes to teach.  As we become more familiar with the sites and as they become indexed in various ways, perhaps this time commitment will be lessened some.  At the same time, in order to use these texts well, one has to know them well.  We can be certain that this will not change. 

Another difficulty in using the sites at first was finding a way to help my students engage with them productively.   For example, I found it challenging to balance between my guiding students to engage with the sites and allowing them to explore on their own---something. I had not anticipated when I began this work.  As my site shows, I developed an early stage in the process to help my students “learn to learn” from the websites. I developed this step in the process after having assigned the first website as homework and noting that students had vastly different experiences in doing the work.  A few---those who didn’t have computers and had to use the computers at school---were overwhelmed by what was there on the sites and frustrated by the assignment that  required computer time they did not have.   A number of others immediately saw the sites as examples of “best practice,” the purpose for which was to borrow strategies with no analysis of what or why. Neither of these responses to the websites was what I was after. I learned to back up and take class time to carefully establish with my students the goals for studying the sites as well as procedures and norms for doing so. We spent several class periods investigating the sites as a collective as the “Learning to learn from the practice of others” link above illustrates.  Once students had an idea about how the websites were organized and what a focused investigation might reveal, we were then able to branch out and conduct both student and faculty initiated investigations depending on the goal for which we were studying them at any given time.

Learning to tailor the practices of others for one’s own classroom

An additional instructional challenge that I faced when I began working with thesewebsites concerned the “enactment” piece of the “pedagogy of investigation and enactment” that my teacher education colleagues and I used to frame our use of these sites.  My first attempt at the enactment piece is represented as Step IV on my website.  I asked the students to choose one of the strategies they saw on the site they studied for getting to know their learners, tailor that strategy for their own teaching context, and try it out in their own student teaching classroom.  When they presented their work to their Mills colleagues I realized that I had not scaffolded the enactment step of the process adequately.  It became clear to me that there are a number of steps between the processes involved in studying the practice of someone else and then tailoring that practice appropriately for one’s own classroom.  Because I was documenting my own practice at the same time, I was able to note the difficulties my students encountered in doing this work.  When I repeated this enactment step the following year, I was able to build in the steps students needed to take between their selection of the strategy they wanted to tailor for their classroom and their trying it out.  It was clear from this second go-around that these tailoring processes can be learned---and these web-based materials offer a powerful opportunity for that learning to occur.  The challenge for the teacher educator is to guide the students in this aspect of learning from the practice of others.

The opportunity these websites offered for my learning about my teaching is perhaps a good note on which to close this commentary.  I find that because I am able to bring the practice of veteran teachers into my classroom in the way that the websites allow, I am able to observe closely my students “sense-making” of the practice of others.  In doing this work over the past several years it has not been uncommon for me to be surprised by my students’ ideas and responses, which provided much new insight about the challenges I face in teaching them well.   In truth, as I examine the sites displayed in the “Making Teaching Visible” exhibition, my mind races with ideas about how to draw on this work in new ways next year.  The possibilities seem endless to me.  Even with all of these various foci I developed for studying the sites in my Adolescent Development class where I drew on the work of Yvonne Hutchinson and four others, for example, and those I developed for the Inquiry class where I drew on Sarah Capitelli’s work, I feel like I’ve just begun to mine this resource that these websites provide.  At this point I look forward to beginning my planning for next fall and deciding where in my classes I’ll draw on these sites to help me accomplish my many far-ranging goals.  I also look forward to the new insights I will undoubtedly have about my teaching and my students’ learning as I continue this work.