Using
Reading & Wr iting to Build Community
Kathy
 Schultz
Developing Pedagogies
through Knowing Students

Bringing K12 Practice to
Teacher Education Classrooms

Translating Practices
   
Literature Circles
 
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We introduce student teachers to practice of conducting literature circles over two weeks. First, student teachers conduct a discussion about a children’s book that addresses a controversial theme in small groups. As a whole class we have conversations about setting guidelines.  These conversations complicate notions of safety and risk and draw connections to their elementary classrooms. Next, they conduct more structured literature circles with young adult novels. Each of these classes is linked to investigations of Yvonne Hutchinson’s website. For instance, they reflect on the ways she created norms for discussion in her classroom and the strategies she uses to build community through literature.
Connecting to
Yvonne's website
 


 Planning

     
   

 Discussion of
 The Wall

 

   

  

  Discussion of
  
safety and risk

     

It is a common practice to try out K12 practices in teacher education classrooms and then to use these opportunities to reflect on how they might be adapted to particular contexts and students. Student teachers have an opportunity to practice new activities in a relatively safe setting and to reflect with their peers on what happened. Each time after student teachers participated in a literature circle, we turned to their investigations of Yvonne Divan Hutchinson’s website to deepen our conversations. Students introduced several different ideas they learned from this website such as the way Yvonne established classroom norms, the importance of knowing students well when leading class discussions about difficult issues such as race and racism, and the ways that Yvonne used space in her classroom to facilitate discussions. Students drew on the images and ideas from Yvonne’s website translating them to practices they might adapt for their current and future classrooms. This did not always prove to be easy for some student teachers who explained that they would have preferred to see sites more similar to their own classrooms. Student teachers often want to see activities and ideas that they can immediately transport to their own setting. The necessity of translating ideas across multiple contexts was both useful and difficult for students.