Several years ago Marsha Pincus, a high school
English teacher who is also a Carnegie Scholar, gave me a videotape
of her teaching that was shown on PBS. Whereas I did
not assign Marsha’s
site to my students
to study, I used this tape of her classroom practice to continue
our work on learning to learn from the practice of others. Based
on this introduction, several students went to explore Marsha’s
site on their own---in interesting outcome of the website work.
The 14-minute tape tells the story of Marsha transforming
her English class into a drama class which she believed would
better meet the needs of her talented, energetic, somewhat-disenfranchised
students in the poor Philadelphia community where she taught. Framed with the same set of questions
about learning about one’s learners and using that
knowledge to teach them, we discussed Marsha’s teaching
just as we had done the prior week when we discussed the
teaching of Claire Bove. In the clips below, you can see how we worked with this video "text." |
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| Students at Work |
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Initial
reflections:
The passion of both Marsha and
her students renders the viewing of this video particularly
emotional. The student teachers reported feeling inspired
by Marsha’s teaching---in particular to her willingness
to learn about her students, her openness to change her practice
to meet their needs, and her ability to inspire her students
to achieve. They were equally inspired by Marsha’s
hard-working students who were open, willing to take risks,
and extraordinarily articulate about their academic work and
about the circumstances of their lives.
It was in studying my students’ reactions to Marsha’s
video that I first became aware of the power of these materials
in teaching the dispositions associated with learning about one’s
learners. Some of those dispositions noted by the student teachers
observing Marsha were: curiosity, tolerance for ambiguity,
humility, conviction, and care. Additionally, whereas my entire course
is organized as a process of inquiry, I did not anticipate how
powerful the content of these materials could be in helping students
learn what it means to assume an inquiry stance. I organized
the sessions to study Claire and Marsha’s teaching to guide
my students in learning how to approach the work of learning
from the practice of others. Meanwhile I found myself on a steep
learning curve about the value of these materials in teaching
the dispositions one needs to build a practice with learning
as a core methodology of the work. |
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