Once we had some experience studying the Claire and Marsha in
action we began studying a set of three additional Quest websites: Yvonne
Hutchinson, Vanessa
Brown, JoAnn DaLuz. I
assigned the students according to their subject areas so that
the English student teachers studied Yvonne’s site, social
studies - Vanessa, math - JoAnn’s, and science more of Claire’s.
Overall the project involved the students studying their assigned
websites first alone and then with a peer study partners. My goal
was for students to learn about the adolescent learners in these
different subject matter contexts. I reasoned they could
learn about the learners by watching them in action and by watching
their teachers teach them. By reasoning backwards from the
teachers’ pedagogical actions I hoped students would begin
to hypothesize as to the teachers’ “knowledge of the
learners” that may have prompted those actions.