2.. .

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 

I.',.I...I\'.l I I I I I--L

IVESR SITY LIBRARIES

Illllll mill

 

 

 

l

 

 

 

 

 

 

lllllllllllllllllll ill

31293

This is to certify that the

dissertation entitled

THE ENACTMENT OF THOUGHTFULNESS IN COLLABORATION:
A CASE OF SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHING AND LEARNING
IN A PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SCHOOL

presented by

MICHELLE BETH PARKER

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

DOCTORAL degree“, PHILOSOPHY

 

 

Major professor

 

MSU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution 0-12771

 

LIBRARY
Mlchigan State
University

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE ENACTMENT OF THOUGHTFULNESS IN COLLABORATION:
A CASE OF SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHING AND LEARNING
IN A PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SCHOOL

By
Michelle Beth Parker

A DISSERTATION

submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Teacher Education

1995

ABSTRACT
THE ENACTMENT OF THOUGHTFULNESS IN COLLABORATION:
A CASE OF SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHING AND LEARNING
IN A PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SCHOOL
By

Michelle Beth Parker

Current educational reforms explore the potential power of
professional collaboration among educators, yet little is know about what
happens in collaborative work and its consequences for students' learning.
Three areas in the literature are addressed: detailed scrutiny of collaborative
work unfolding in high school Classrooms, attention to establishing and
sustaining collaborative work between schools and universities and
connecting collaborative work to changes in student learning.

This thesis analyzes one case of professional collaboration between
university and high school educators in a professional development school
over a two-year period. Focusing on the experiences and thoughts of key
team members—two high school social studies teachers, two members of a
college of education, and me (serving as an observer, participant, and
researcher), the study examines the team's inquiry, what the team did and
how, and connections between the collaborative work and students' learning.

Fieldnotes from meetings and classrooms, formal and informal
interviews, and document analyses provide the basis for a portrait of the

team's development. By identifying an initial problem about students'

learning, and working within supportive contexts, participants maintained a
focus on teaching and learning practice. Participants out-of-Classroom
collaborative work showed intellectual activity, conflict, and teacher learning.
Evidence from the high school classrooms illustrates change in one
participant's teaching and curriculum design that promoted Similar kinds of
thoughtful changes in students' understandings. Analyses also illustrate the
difficulties of teaching and collaborating about teaching, especially when the
content is morally and politically Charged.

This thesis suggests a normative framework, the enactment of
thoughtfulness in collaboration, for examining collaboration, and illustrates

its viability by using the social studies team as a case. The enactment of

thoughtfulness features four characteristics: (1) within Caring and supportive
Mpg, participants would be (2) having Conversations through which

they would be (3) WWW
learning and advancing a (4) mm W. These features

mark collaborative work among teachers that maintains a central focus on
students' learning. The dissertation concludes with a letter that summarizes
the team's successes while suggesting cautions and implications of enacting

thoughtfulness in collaboration.

Copyright by
MICHELLE BETH PARKER
1995

To my parents, Morris, Irene, and Adele,
for their encouragement and support

and to the

Big C

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

How many times I have thought about writing this part of my
dissertation! How many drafts I have written, turning to this file as I
reminded myself that soon, oh so very soon, I would be finished and ready to
write my final acknowledgements.

And now as I face the time, I feel so many different ways. How to begin
crafting a very large thank-you to so many folks who helped make this
possible...

The social studies team stands out; this story is OUR story, folks, and I
hope I did us right. To Pete, Jerry, Tom, and Trudy--words cannot express my
thanks. ’With you and from you I learned so much that continues to live on
in me and through me to educators in my college and school-based work.
Our laughter, our teasing, our seriousness, our honesty, and our caring
sustained me as I heard our voices and saw our faces throughout my writing.

To my other many colleagues at "HodgeS"--I will never be able to stop
saying my; school. Your openness and commitment remain salient in my
memories. To folks like Mike and Bruce, you English lads, who made me
always laugh; to Ann, Brenda, and Deb who made me feel welcomed; to the

science crowdnLowell, Barb, Larry, and Brian; to math buddies, like Mike and

vi

v ii
Bill; to the hosts of others who made me feel a part-Norm, Jan, Jeanne,
Nancy, Dorothy, Steve, Dan—you all helped me smile, laugh, and learn.
Special thanks to Tom and Sue for opening the school to this kind of work.
Even more special thanks to Sandy Bethell, a true friend in many ways. You
helped me learn to feel and discover the world around me. Thank you, my
friend.

Thank you to my Elliott Elementary 0 MSU PDS colleagues, especially
Kathy, Cheryl, Ramona, and Teresa.

And to my MSU buddies; where to begin? With so many folks, I’ve
formed relationships that will continue for a lifetime. Some have left:
Helene (Helen A.), Judy ("the two and four-legged support group"), Sally (the
Bowler Queen), Harold (how did you keep that desk so Clean?!) To all the
folks in 116: thank you so—o much. And others: Donnessuyou are my friend,
intellectual challenger, sedar partner, listener, and wonderful pal. I thank
you for your good tea, your good cheer, your bed after the defense and during
the formatting! I thank you, Dr. Donness. Pam—you pulled me through
comps, through the writing, through the defense, and that final massage???
Ihat really made it happen! Thank you, Pam. Martialnyou are my pal, my
positive buddy who always reminds me to appreciate all that we have. Thank
you, Martial. Deb—laughing with tears rolling down your Cheeks, or talking
about "the girls," or remembering Mellie. Thank you for hanging in, Deb.

Marcia-you supplied chocolate, names (I), good stories, and real caring.

viii
Thank you, Marcia.

My "Children" and their parents—When I started this dissertation,
Hannah and Guiliana were so tiny! Now, they talk to Mitchy on the phone,
and they even call Mi Michelle. Ah, on many gloomy days you both
provided a lot of light. To Jaime and Katia--through the dinners, the
laughing, the seriousness, the arguments with Jaime, and through your love,
I've come to this point. Constanzaul have no words. The words you wrote
me about this dissertation pushed me to work so hard to get it bound! I love
you dearly. Matthew-yes, Cubs tickets very soon!

And, then there is Jeremy. You seemed to have this uncanny way of
always knowing what to say, or when. The late night calls, the sleuthing, the
Cherrytreeusorry, Cherrywood Village news, the pool, Target and Meijers;
this made for good laughs and wonderful memories. This dissertation has
many of your intellectual marks. And my spirit has so much from you.
From my heart, I thank you so very much.

I thank my family who stood by me through the years, Aunt Frieda and
Uncle Sol especially. And my dad and Irene; I love you both so very, very
much. Dad—you are my intellectual giant and model. And thanks to my
"extended" family—Cathie ("Cita") and, of course, Ricki (Rickith P., I). This
dissertation owes a lot to Ricki, who listened to the soul-searching and helped
calm the tears. Thank you so much, Rickith.

To my dissertation committee; you are all my PDS colleagues. Doug

ix
Campbell—learning to do fieldwork, documenting, schematic drawings and
charts, and mostly long, caring talks that pushed me intellectually. Thank
you for it all, Doug, and especially the personal times that helped me move
forward in those important areas, too.

Helen Featherstone—-funny comments, good lunches, validation about
my teaching, your intense listening, editting (and editting some more!)
Thank you, my dear friend, for helping me learn to write--for freeing me--and
for the endless support. Jay Featherstoneumy theoretical framework swished
and swelled within our conversations. Thank you, Jay, for affirming and
challenging me.

Perry Lanier--my PDS mentor. You remain with me, always. What I
learned with you and from you about teacher preparation, teacher learning,
and collaborative work lives on in my current endeavors. Thank you so
much, Perry, for the many conversations over the many, many topics.

And my chair and dissertation director, Sharon Feiman-Nemser.
Gosh, I remember asking you to "guide me through my. doctoral work" on a
sunny spring day in 1987 over lunch at the Pantry. Through our work
together in Albuquerque (forgetting Fuller Brush bags, analyzing, endless
rewrites), our teaching and writing about TE 101, my first questions about
studying "Hodges" and your demanding scholarly questions that pushed and
pulled me in many directions, and our growing study of novice/ experienced

teacher learning I have learned. You are, and will always be, in my heart, in

x
my intellectual work, and in my spirit. Thank you, dearest Sharon, for your

love, your laugh, your pushing, and for YOU.

And now I Close, ready to tell Patty Noell to put this in the "final" file.
What can I say about Patty? As my confidante, assistant, supporter, and
friend, you remained through the end. Remember: we take relationships

with us in our hearts, always.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables ......................................................... xx

List of Figures ........................................................ xxi

Chapter One

Stages of Thought .................................................... 1

The Guild: The Social Studies Team ................................... 1
The Setting .................................................... 2
The Guild Players .............................................. 4

The Productions ...................................................... 5
Stage One: Doing Research ...................................... 5
Act One: The Meeting .......................................... 5
Act Two: Research and the Social Studies Team ................... 11
Commentary: What is this Story About? ......................... 12
Stage Two: Observing and Talking ............................... 14
Act One: Observing Teaching ................................... 14
Act Two: Talking about Teaching ................................ 19
Commentary: What is this Story About? ......................... 23

xi

Chapter Two
Collaborative Teacher Relations: Problems, Reconceptions, and Inquiry . . .29

The Study of Collaborative Teacher Relations .......................... 29
The Literature about Collaborative Teacher Work ....................... 30
What Counts as a "Study of Collaboration"? ...................... 31
School-University Relationships ................................. 34
Professional Development Schools ............................... 35
The Substance of Collaborative Teachers' Work ................... 40
Commentary about the Literature on Teachers' Relations ................ 41
Key Missing Points ................................................... 44
Enactment of Thoughfulness in Collaboration .......................... 46
Defining the Enactment of Thoughtfulness in Collaboration ............. 48
Components of Thoughtfulness in Collaboration .................. 49
Research Design and Analysis ......................................... 64
Exploring Thoughtful Collaboration: Data Collection and Analysis ........ 65
My Roles ...................................................... 66

Reshaping My Role, and Beginning Dissertation Data Collection. . . .68

Data Sources ................................................... 73
Data Analysis .................................................. 75
Steps in the Analysis ............................................ 75

xii

Chapter 3

The Team's Problem .................................................. 81
Social Studies Team Participants ....................................... 81
Categories of Participants .............................................. 82
Key Participants ................................................ 82
Key Participants: Similarities and Differences ..................... 88
Key Participants' Perceptions of the Team ............................... 91
What is the Social Studies Team For? ............................ 92
The Team and Official Role ..................................... 96
Definitions Linked with Personal Curiosities ...................... 97
Hodges Participants' Ideas ....................................... 97
University Participants' Ideas .................................... 104
The Missing Voice .............................................. 108
Commentary about Key Participants' Perceptions of the Team ...... 110
Workplace Conditions for the Team ................................... 112
Hodges High School ............................................ 112
Midstate College of Education ................................... 115
Hodges Professional Development School ........................ 117
Enabling Conditions within these Settings ........................ 119
Commentary ................................................... 123
Discussion ......................................................... 123

xiii

The Problem, the Conditions, and Reflective Thinking ............ 124

Reflective Thinking and PDS Work ............................. 126
Chapter 4
Out-of-classroom Team Work ......................................... 127
Participants' Self-Reports about their Work ............................ 127
Enacting the Work ................................................... 131
Out-of-Classroom Work ........................................ 133
Out-of Class Team Content ...................................... 135
What Did Classroom Work Look Like? ........................... 135
How Did the Team Work? ...................................... 138
What Did Members Do and Talk About? ......................... 145
The Team in Action: Three Examples of Practices ....................... 150
Three Views of Collaborative Planning .......................... 150
Commentary .................................................. 158
Debating the Team's Inquiry .................................... 161
Commentary .................................................. 167
The Rocky American History Subteam ........................... 173
Commentary .................................................. 179
Discussion ........................................................... 184
Collaboration as an Intellectual Exercise .......................... 184

xiv

Collaboration as Conflict ........................................ 186

Collaboration as Teacher Learning ............................... 188
Chapter Five

In-cl assroom Team Work and Student Thoughtfulness ................. 190

Setting the Stage ...................................................... 190

The "Conflict and War" Unit .......................................... 192

Unit Content ................................................... 194

The Holocaust and Japanese-American Internment Unit ........... 196

Vignettes of Students' Work .................................... 198

Act One ....................................................... 200

Scene 1: Steve and Jack .......................................... 200

Scene 2: What is a Jew? ......................................... 204

What are these Stories About? ................................... 207

Changes in Student Organization and Curriculum ................ 208

Breaking with Groups .......................................... 213

Changes in Adult Presence in Classrooms ........................ 214

Missed Opportunities in Changing Curriculum and Instruction . . . .219

Act Two: Oral Presentations ..................................... 224
SceneOne ..................................................... 224
SceneTwo...................................... ............... 227

XV

What are these Stories About? .................................. 236

Changes in instruction .......................................... 237
Student Thoughtfulness ........................................ 242
Missed Opportunities in Student Thoughtfulness ................. 244
Discussion ........................................................... 245
What Was Learned? ............................................... 246
Changing Roles ................................................... 247
Thoughtful Collaboration and the Enactment of New Roles ........... 251
Chapter Six
Enacti 1:13 the Enactment of Thoughtfulness in Collaboration .............. 253
EnaCtIIlent of Thoughfulness in Collaboration .......................... 253
The Team's Problem ............................................... 254
The Team's Work ................................................. 256
Team and Student Thoughtfulness .................................. 261
EnaCting the Enactment of Thoughtfulness ............................. 265
Erlacting Thoughtfulness in Collaboration:
Advice to Fellow Collaborators ..................................... 265
The Complexities of Playing Three Roles ............................ 270
Wearing Three Hats: A Play about Roles ............................ 271
commentary ...................................................... 273
The Researcher Role ............................................... 274

xvi

The Importance of Focusing on Student Learning .................... 278

'I‘he Difficulty of Representing a Cacophony of Interpretations ......... 278
APPENDR A ........................................................ 281
APPENDIX B ......................................................... 284
TEAM INTERVIEW PROTOCOL
APPENDIX C
TEAM PLANNING NOTES ........................................... 289
APPENDIX D

"CONFLICTS AND WAR" UNIT COVER SHEET ....................... 291
LIST OF REFERENCES ................................................ 292

xvii

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1.1

Core Team Participants, 1989-91: Roles and Affiliations ................ 3
Table 2-1

The Enactment of Thoughtfulness .................................. 53
Table 3-1
What is the Social Studies Team? ................................... 93
Table 3.2

Summary Statements of Social Studies Team Definitions ............. 98
Table 4-1

Self-Reports about Team Work ................................... 129

xviii

LIST OF FIGURES

MW! e 2.1
Web of Thoughts about Teaching and Learning ......................... 50
Figure 2-2
The Enactment of Thoughtfulness in Collaboration ..................... 52
Figure 4.1
Forums and Content of Social Studies Team Work ....................... 132
Figure 4.2
Social Studies Team Time Line ....................................... 136
Figure 5.1
Ken's Matrix for Student Use ....................................... 199
Figure 5.2 .
Students' Organization in Ken's Classroom ............................. 209
Figure 5.3
Steve's and Jack's Matrix ............................................. 228
Figure 5.4
Ken's Judaism Chart .................................................. 234

xix

CHAPTER ONE
STAGES OF THOUGHT

The following pages recount tales that unfold on multiple theatre
stages. The accounts have passion, humor, intrigue, daring, and wit. They
Show frustration and disappointment, hopefulness and success. All stories
reflect similar themes; that is, they are all about curiosity, excitement,
frus tration, exhiliration, realization-a wondering about ideas. Though
unfolding in different locales at times with various players and roles, like any
good narrative, themes weave together in intricate ways throughout the

stories. Characters, plots, and the theme of thoughtfulness about the

teaching and learning of social studies link the tales.
like members of a theatre guild, the "actors" in the theatre productions

are members of a professional organization. They act on different stages,
assume different roles, and enact the roles differently. Furthermore, the lead
character and the person playing the role changes, sometimes even within
the same play as well as across stages. Yet, like in a guild, the elements that tie
the aCtorS together are the common goals of "mutual aid and protection”.
The COllegial spirit that supports this sets a tone in the organization, while

PIOViding room for individual aspirations and growth.

\
1 As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary.
1

 

2
THE GUILD: THE SOCIAL STUDIES TEAM
Members of the guild in this case are a group of professional educators
who worked together toward the Shared goal of understanding and studying
the teaching and learning of high school social studies. With a core group of
five people, the group has met since June, 1989. They call themselves the
"social studies team". The team is an outgrowth of the professional
development schools formed in February, 1989 when Hodges High School
entered into an association with the Midstate University College of
Education. Hodges Professional Development School operates under the
ideas and principles outlined in the Holmes Group Reports (The Holmes
Group, 1986; The Holmes Group, 1990.)
The Settings
See Table 1.1: Core Team Participants, 1989-91: Roles and Affiliations
'I‘he productions that feature the social studies team take place in
multiple locations. For the most part, the team acts in Hodges High School
and Irtoves around to different classrooms (for meetings and observations)
and 1:Ormal and informal Chats in the staffroom and teachers' workroom. At
times, the team works on campus observing one member's teacher education
class or meeting in conference rooms or offices. I will discuss the settings of
the WClio-Hodges High School, Midstate, and Hodges Professional

Development School--in detail in Chapter Three.

 

5838 8:88
«88.88: 88888

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

mom 38:
€338 28680 Hwy—Cam 8:232
882:8
.888“ 98 893$: H88» 8 now
:8.“on consummmum $3.38 38883 8:83
8:83 «8822 9080 38m 883m 880m mmwuom “:0me >80
2:8on
“define—88C $88
30:8 5 85.882
98 E33980 88» em
83 628258 .8“ 388mm 83.85
.858. E SEEDS E82: .858»
3538 >8: 88822 88:62 Em 863m 888 mmwuom :88..— 8M
ZOF<UDQm m0 mWMaqOU mH<HmQHE A0038 EOE mmUDOE
22 a: C C A s
. :2 be can as E: a

”Sena is“; 882m 38m «5 co 2%

2 23

92.23 «.80

 

4
The Guild Players
This dissertation focuses on the five core members of the social studies
team: Ken Larson and Gary Gifford, two social studies teachers from Hodges,
and Bill Monroe, Sally Devon, and me from Midstate. These members are
"core" because they have been involved since the team's beginnings. At
tunes, 13 people have participated in the team, some staying permanently
while Others just one or two semesters. Team members include Hodges
teachers, Midstate faculty and research fellows, and Midstate student teachers.
The Productions
If different theatre productions could be mounted to portray the work
of the social studies team, the episodes I discuss in this section would
command center stage. Complex as they are, these events would warrant
separate "mini-productions"-almost like one or two act plays-that would be
connected by the purpose of thoughtfulness about the teaching and learning
of SOCial studies.
I describe two plays which detail the first few months of the social
Studies team's work. Separated by time, space, and situation, the productions
mustate processes of action and their consequences. After each description I
Offer a commentary around this question: what is this a story about? These
stories provide the groundwork for my analyses of the content and forms of
the te3111's work, its goals, and the relationships among its players. This

ana1Y$is led me to suggest a new way to think about collaborative work—the

5

enactment of thoughtfulness in collaboration. In the remainder of the
dissertation I develop and explore this concept from a theoretical and practical
stance.
Ag]; £313: The Meetm’ g

Over a two-week period in the summer of 1989, Hodges High School
met with five other developing PDSS (school and Midstate participants.)
During morning sessions, participants went to workshops, studying topics
around a particular area (e.g., mathematics, cooperative learning) for three or
four days. Afternoon sessions involved meeting with other PDS school
participants as well as school meetings for the purpose of planning for the
1989-90 school year. By the fifth day of the summer institute, Hodges PDS had
decided to form five working groups in which different inquiries would be
carried out". mathematics, science, literacy, social studies, and "organic
management" (in which participants would study what kinds of changes
needed to happen in the organization and management of the high school to
support the new kinds of teaching and learning that might evolve.)

$2311. At the summer institute, Ken Larson and Gary Gifford had
attended workshops about organization and management of schools and
cooperative learning. Having worked together at Hodges for 20 years in the
social studies department and as athletic coaches, Ken and Gary knew each

other well. They often finished the other's thoughts, and needled each other

6

all in good humor. They also shared an abiding commitment to organizing
students and their curriculum to support learning. Following a system
designed and implemented fifteen years earlier, the social studies (and
English) departments at Hodges had developed a "fundamental skills"
version in the non-elective courses of American History, economics, and
government. Ken and Gary believed that the fundamental Skills Class offered
options to students (through self-selection and some teacher assignment) for
having a course with less reading and less complicated assignments. In
addition, due to the homogenous grouping, students would not suffer from
lower self-esteems by being Challenged to do something they might not be
able to perform. So interested was he in the practices of grouping kids that
Gary had also read "The Shopping Mall High School: Winners and Losers in
the Educational Marketplace" (Powell et al., 1985) and some miscellaneous
articles about teaching high school and grouping kids. 50 perhaps it wasn't
surprising that Ken and Gary began talking about managing students in
different kinds of groups-small, large, ability and non-ability grouped—at the
first meeting of the social studies inquiry project.

Still in my documentor role, I asked if I could sit with them and listen.
Yeah, they told me, but Only if you also participate. "Hell, we can always use
another person!" Ken assured me by waving me to Sit next to him. "These

guys have a sense of humor!" I thought. And I recorded these questions in

7
my fieldnotes, asked by Ken and Gary, as we talked over the next couple

hours:

'1. In what ways are the conclusions of researchers like Jeannie Oakes and
Powell et al. about grouping students by ability true for students at Hodges
High School?

2. Do we as teachers have lower expectations for lower achieving students?
3. In what ways is the the self-esteem of students at all levels affected?

4. Are only certain kids learning certain things?

At the heart of some moral and ethical dilemmas in teaching, these
questions invited frank conversation. "Are we doing something wrong?"
seemed to be the recurring question that Ken and Gary asked, especially given
their belief that sorting and separating kids was best for students. Along with
some other names, I was added to a sheet that Gary and Ken were making in
order to tell other people about an intended meeting in three weeks. In
addition to giving the address of Ken's house and directions, the sheet
informed any other interested people that the "social science" group was
interested in

0 Clustering students

0 Diversity

0 Alternative evaluation for all students

0 Helping all students gain school and employability skills

0 Heterogenous and homogenous student grouping

m. We spent virtually the whole day together at our first
meeting on July 10 at Ken's "porch on the river" house. We decided to focus
our attentions on American History since Ken taught three levels of it:

fundamental skills level for special education students and others who have

demonstrated a low level of success in academics because of less than grade

8

level skills especially in reading and writing", general level which "assumes
that the skill level for the students enrolled is commensurate with the
materials and expectations of the course as currently taught", and Advanced
Placement honors, "for those who have demonstrated a high degree of
academic achievement and wish to participate in a course in which the level
is higher in terms of expectations and materials"2. Looking at what students
are doing in these different classes, we reasoned, would help us understand
the diversity among students and the ways diverse students handled learning
American history. Our research questions, then, would be

1. What is happening in these different classes in terms of what

students are doing and what they are learning?

2. What are students learning?

3. How do students in these different classes relate to each other?

4. Are there differences in the teacher's level and kind of involvement

and attitudes in the different classes?

We formed these questions from ideas gathered through discussions
and readings we'd each done in our personal and professional lives, and

during meetings at the summer institute3. But, especially Gary seemed

uncomfortable about some of the questions. He asked, "What will be the

 

2After this meeting, Ken and Gary wrote these comments for the
proposal we needed to submit to our Hodges PDS colleagues.

31 both mentioned and supplied copies of Anyon's 1981 study of
schooling and knowledge in five elementary schools in New Jersey (Anyon,
1981), Cusick's 1984 study of egalitarianism in high schools (Cusick, 1983),
pieces from Cohen's book about grouping students (Cohen, 1986), and
chapters from the Powell et al. book about shopping mall high schools
(Powell, 1985).

9

control group?" Gary seemed set on the idea that if we were doing a research
project—studying something-that we needed to have a control group and
experimental group. Not quite certain about what to say, I replied that the
kind of study we could do must be based on the questions we had identified.
These questions, I said, are about learning what is happening. Not until we
have a sense of what is happening, I added, can we think about the
intervention. And not until we implement the intervention do we need to
worry about a control and experimental group. Finally, I said, I'm not so sure
we would even need to do something in one class (i.e., have an experimental
group) that we didn't do in another (i.e, a control group).

My logic seemed to make some sense-neither Ken nor Gary argued
with it. But clearly they were not comfortable. I mentioned the readings I'd
distributed—upon Ken and Gary's requests--as examples of empirical work
done in the interpretive tradition I was talking about, pointing out that these
scholars were focused on learning what was happening in different settings. I
mentioned research by Jeannie Oakes (which they'd read in the recent
summer institute) as an example of combining observation and survey data,
which we might choose to do. There are many ways we can learn what is
happening, I concluded. But, first we have to look at what you are doing
presently before we can know what to gthge. Though neither Ken nor Gary
responded, their lack of agreement or disagreement signaled to me that they

remained uncertain and unwilling to commit to a plan of action.

1 0

Scene}. In our second summer meeting, after a couple telephone
conversations, we set ourselves the task of constructing a project which we
could present to our PDS colleagues at Hodges. A proposal with all the
Hodges projects would then go to the Director of Midstate PDSS, who would
consider the six school proposals and dole out money according to needs.
Ken typed while Gary and I walked around the basement, stirring up ideas.
(See Appendix A.)

And the question about research resurfaced. Again I said that what we
planned to do was researchuand then it occurred to me. Ken and Gary had
gone to school at a time when interpretive traditions were in their infancy.
Just looking at something and learning what is happening without making
some sort of intervention was not research in their Classic definition. Yet, I
felt uncertain about how I should talk about research. I didn't want to come
off as a know-it-all, as the person from the university who comes and tells
teachers what to do.

I decided to step into different roles and discuss the research. As a
graduate student, I began, this is what I learned about research (here I Shared
briefly what I learned in a year-long fieldwork research course and practicum).
As a classroom teacher, I continued, I disliked people coming and telling me
what to do from something they learned with a different set of students and
in a different school. Things just didn't seem so generalizable. So I welcome

a kind of research that is sensitive to a particular setting. As your colleague, I

1 1
continued, I need to be honest. I do not believe we are ready to make a
systematic intervention in one classroom. We don't know enough about
each set of students (e.g., fundamental skills students), and our design
changes for one set of students may be to the disadvantage of another. And
finally, I don't feel strong enough in my present understandings to design an
intervention and study it.

Everyone was quiet; my talk had lasted about three minutes. Ken
spoke first, suggesting we go on with what we have and try it out at the big
meeting (scheduled for July 30). We'll just see what people say, he added.

September 15, 1989 we had our first meeting at Hodges. Taking on his
new job as professor, Bill had also officially joined the group, and he began to
call it the "social studies team". Bill asked Ken, Gary, and me what we had
planned for the year. We were ready to talk about this, since at the July 30
meeting our Hodges PDS colleagues had overwhelmingly approved and
welcomed our project. Other departments in the school had "fundamental
skills" classes, and teachers wondered whether they, too, might be
differentiating their curriculum and instruction.

Sitting in the staffroom on that mid-September day I didn't say
anything, wanting Ken and Gary to say in their own words what they thought

we were do. I remained very uncertain about my actions in the previous

12

meetings. Was I imposing the research on Ken and Gary, I wondered. Did
they have enough input into shaping the project?4

Gary took the lead, explaining that the setting of our study was the
three levels of American History that Ken taught. We are not setting up a
control and experimental group, Gary announced, because that is not the kind
of research we are doing. First we have to see what is happening in our
classrooms, Ken added. Then we can see what we need to change. Gary
continued: we will begin by observing the different American History Classes
we are studying. From classroom observations we will look at the
curriculum, whether and how the teaching is different across the three
classes, and the assessment procedures. Ken added: we will review the
literature about homogenous and heterogenous grouping and how that
relates to the realities of Hodges High School.

I remained silent. And while I was happy to hear about the kind of
research they appeared to endorse, I still wondered: did they believe it was
research, or was this a case of colonialism where they'd simply taken up my
ideas?

Commentanr Elba]: is this SIDE}! 612521117
Two things stand out from these stories that became important issues

throughout the life to the team. One is the way that Ken and Gary's initial

 

4I discuss my uncertainties about being irnpositional throughout this
thesis.

1 3
questions about their curriculum and instruction remained the centerpiece
for the social studies team's inquiry project. The initial impetus and work
proposal revolved around social studies teaching and learninguthe concerns
and questions that Ken and Gary had. Instead of imposing an alternate
agenda of ideas and issues, my aim was to help Ken and Gary design ways to
explore their questions.

Another issue emerging from these incidents is the way participants
began enacting the new roles we took on as we began working together. My
views at the time—and my initial interpretations around this incident-—reveal
my discomfort about what I was doing. Throughout my fieldnotes and
journal entries I have notes to myself: "What is my role here?" or, "Should I
be questioning what they want to do?" To a colleague who interviewed me
about my collaborative work in early fall of the team's second year of work, I
said,

Ijust know I can't be real direct. I worry that I'm being too direct

and that I'll get people agitated and I'll say the wrong thing. And

then the invitation to work together will be withdrawn.

What I realize now, examining this and other incidents, is that Ken
and Gary began to see me as the person who had the research expertise while
they had the high school teaching expertise. Substantively, their questions
around teaching guided and became the goals for the inquiry. After all, their

interest in examining what they did on a daily basis in their classrooms were

the very reasons we even had a project. Since they were the teachers of

1 4
record, they had to take responsibility for acting on any ideas we had as well as
taking the heat if anything did not go as planned.

I had a different set of responsibilities. I provided the means for
making the inquiry. In that role, I acted on my knowledge and skills as a
teacher, but I also blended that with what I knew as a researcher. My
hesitations around the research design (whether it should be experimental or
interpretive) were founded based on my knowledge about research design. By
not disclosing what I knew and what I believed about research, I would have
been inauthentic and would not have been acting upon my responsibilities in
our joint work. I would have fit the classic stereotypes of the researcher who
lacks passion for her work and the people with whom she does the researchS.

SI I . Q] . l I ll .
E | Q . Ql . I l .

At an early October, 1989 meeting, the team decided to do a round of
observations in Ken's classes to determine if differences in teacher and
student actions among the three course levels actually do exist. As Ken
explained in a PDS quarterly report, written in early November, 1989, from
this two-week round we had hoped to

find out what is going on in classrooms under the present

system of tracking and current practices of the teachers involved.

During these observations the teacher activity and student
activity (will be) 'scripted'.

 

5Ken disclosed this idea of researchers lacking passion at the beginning
of 1992, when we worked together to prepare a presentation for a conference.

1 5
The plan was simple: either Gary, Sally, Bill, Ken, or I would observe periods
4, 5, and 6 each day from October 16-27. Ken could observe 4th and 6th period
since his student teacher taught those classes (the fundamental class and
general).

The team constructed an observation form in which we kept a running
record of the time, "teacher talk and actions", "student talk and actions", and
"observer comments". (See Appendix A.) Bill took the lead by creating the
actual document and writing out some of the "conventions" the team agreed
to follow, e.g., be descriptive about teacher and student actions and talk, keep
track of "comments, questions, and judgments" in the "observer comment
section", keep track by using a vertical squiggle of gaps in note-taking--"when
our concentration breaks or we go to sleep". In addition, Bill decided to
synthesize questions the team had asked over the four meetings it had had.
He wrote in the memo that he "organized and elaborated the questions that
were asked or suggested in earlier plans, in clumps that may help to keep
them in the backs of our minds as we observe". These clumps included
subject matter, students as individuals, and class organization and
interaction.

The observers kept two pieces of information in mind. First, both Ken
and Gary at the beginning of the school year had designed something they
called "teacher/ learner groups" which was a kind of jigsaw grouping.

Students worked first in their learner groups to read and decipher the text,

1 6

with each group reading a different part of the text. Then, members from the
learner groups dispersed and met with students from other learner groups in
order to "teach" each other what they'd learned in the text they'd read.
Secondly, Ken's student teacher was in his second placement. He was asked
to leave his first placement, the previous academic year, because he could not
carry out his teaching responsibilities. Since Jeff was not a strong teacher
candidate, Ken carefully supervised and adjusted when necessary his
planning, teaching, and evaluation. For the most part, Jeff followed Ken's
ideas and added little of his own6.

SmepmuLSsenLIJhefundaInentaLskillulass The fundamentals
students were studying the Colonial Period in the United States and events
and problems leading to the American Revolution. While the student
teacher led the class and did all the planning, a special education "consultant"
teacher also came to class7. For the most part, student assignments consisted
of filling out teacher-prepared sheets using their textbooks, e.g., causes and
effects of the American Revolution, and then listening to what different
students wrote while grading each other's papers. At one point they looked at

concept maps that the teacher had prepared.

 

6Eventually, Ken and Sally (his university field instructor) decided not
to grant certification to the student teacher.

7The district is moving toward an inclusion model in which Special
education teachers work along side teachers in classrooms that include
identified special needs students. The fundamental skills class had
approximately eight special needs students.

1 7

During the second week, students worked in small groups to outline
four chapters of the text. During one Class they generated five true and false
questions from the "main purposes and important parts" of the text. Across
the different groups students copied verbatim sentences from the textbook,
inserting the word "not" when group members decided they needed a false
statement. At times the students had trouble copying the words,
pronouncing them, or understanding their meaning. The next day the
teacher led a student reporting out about the main purpose of each chapter.
While one student spoke, others wrote in their notes what S / he said (often
asking the speaker to slow down). The teacher did not ask students to expand
on their ideas, and little discussion of issues or ideas ensued.

WW. General students spent the two
weeks learning about early forms of government in the US. After reading in
their texts about the Articles of Confederation, they studied the US
Constitution by reading small parts of it in groups. Each group then wrote a
summary of the particular constitutional article, and three days later they
each read the summary to a larger group of students who had summarized
other articles. In the larger group, students generated true / false questions
about the constitutional articles that the teacher promised to use on the next
quiz. The day before the quiz, in a teacher-directed recitation for about 15

minutes the teacher asked about key ideas in the Constitution, e. g., checks and

1 8
balances, three branches of government, why the Constitution came into
being. After the quiz the class began a unit about the US
Industrial Revolution in which different small groups took particular text
chapters and outlined them.

Synopsis ef Seene 3: The heners glass. Ken taught the advanced
placement/ honors class. While studying the Jacksonion Era in American
History during the 2-week observation period, the class moved between
"learner" and "expert" groups. In learner groups, they outlined parts of
different chapters within their small groups. Moving into expert groups,
they then read their notes to a different set of students. Ultimately, students
would be responsible for writing individual essays on an upcoming
examination about this era of history.

While the other classes also used this structure of learner/ expert small
groups, the AP/ honors class students had more discussion within their
groups than other students. They questioned each other about the content
and process of their studies. For example, one group of four students decided
to divy up the chapter sections between two groups of two students each. In
one sub-group, I heard this negotiation and conversation:

51: Want to take separate notes and compare?
82: No, let's talk about these ideas. Like, what is Jacksonian Politics?

51: It's how Jackson ran the White House. You know, the kinds of spoils

1 9

system he had, the kind of "kitchen cabinet". You know, all the things

he did to run the government.

After this negotiation and comment, both students returned to reading
and taking notes, asking each other questions now and again about what they
were reading. Another group took a different tact. They decided to take turns
reading the text aloud to each other, and stopping when questions arose. In
fact, this group had a disagreement about the the connections between voting
restrictions and property qualifications. While one student went to ask the
teacher, others offered explanations:

51: So say it's restrictions on voting dealing with ownership of property.
S2: When they paid taxes, they knew they were there for voting.

8]: Yeah, but the taxes had to be a certain amount--there were restrictions.
33: No, there were qualifications.

S1: Well, wait. That's the same (qualifications and restrictions), isn't it?

After this confusion surfaced, the group consulted a dictionary and the
teacher and continued to discuss the differences between voter qualifications
and the restrictions on it based on paying taxes.

In early November, 1989, the team met at Sally's house to talk about
the observations we'd recently completed in Ken's classroom and to have
what we called a celebration dinner commemorating our two-week round of

observations. This "dinner meeting" was actually the beginning of a routine

2 0
the team followed for the two years I participated. We met every couple
months over dinner, having an hour or so of conversation about our
teamwork before dinner and / or after. Dinner conversation included some
team talk, usually mixed with lots of humor and wine. 20 At this first dinner
meeting, Bill, Gary, Sally and I arrived before Ken. Bill quickly made a strong
suggestion/ announcement: This could be very uncomfortable for Ken since
we will be talking about his classroom and his students, he said. Can we agree
on these two policies: 1) that Ken can say at any time, "Stop! I don't want to
talk about this anymore." and 2) that Ken can say at any time, "That is not
what happened. I saw it this way." We all agreed, and when Ken arrived Bill
announced our agreed-upon policies for the discussion. Ken laughed, and
said, "Fine. I'm sure I'll survive this."

We talked in Sally's living room for about 45 minutes. I opened the
discussion by commenting that students indeed did act differently in the
classes, something with which everyone agreed and gave examples of.

Noone appeared shy in this group! We focused mostly on the diversity of
students' actions. We agreed that the honors students talked in small groups
more than other students, and that the honors students appeared more
involved with the material they were reading and discussing. Of all students,
those in fundamental skills seemed least engaged-a fact that Ken and Gary
repeatedly said they could have predicted. More than students in the other

classes, fundamental skills' students asked for directions to be repeated, and

2 1
for the teacher to say exactly what they needed to do to complete the
assignment.

Our discussions ranged across varied issues about the substance of what
we saw and its implications (e.g., So all students are not capable of reading the
same material. What should we do about students who can't read and
understand the course materials?; How can we help all students become
engaged with the material?; Was the material worth engaging in? In what
ways did the learner/ expert group arrangement, with accompanying
assignments, help or hinder students as they tried to understand the content)
as well as the process of observing (e.g., how hard it is to
write notes while observing, the extent to which "observers" can talk with
students while they worked in small groups).

Ken and Gary helped us understand the history of the different
courses—why they started, why teachers (in addition to themselves) thought
they could help students by devising the course. They reminded us of the
diversity of students' needs, and the complexity and difficulties that fell on
teachers as they planned for, taught, and assessed students. Sally and I
assumed the role of questioner, though we enacted the role differently. Sally
asked a lot of clarifying questions, e.g., so you started the fundamental Skills
course in response to students' needs or in anticipation of future needs? and
questions about what Ken and Gary did in their practices that we could not

see, e.g., what else might you have done to deal with the way that student

22

spoke out in class? I also asked questions to clarify and expand what was said,
yet in addition I asked questions and made statements as a researcher, e.g.,
when I look cross these observations, this is what stands out to me. From the
patterns I saw, I also usually chose one idea I wanted to explore at a meeting.
At Sally's house, I asked a lot about the role of reading in learning history:
must students be able to read in order to learn history? Bill made a lot of
syntheses, e.g., so we can all agree that we saw differences among the courses.
Or, "we want to create situations where every student can understand
historical ideas, and where every student can "do history"--have the
analytical skills to make interpretations." Little did we realize at this early
meeting that we were defining, communicating

expectations, and establishing personal ways of acting that would continue
through the duration of our work together.

Five days after this meeting, in the PDS quarterly report Ken wrote this
summary of what the team had learned in our two-week round of
observations and ensuing discussions:

There were differences in the student actions discerned between

the high and the low groupings. The low students often were

unaware of what had happened in class the previous days and

were quite unsure of what was going to happen in the present

and future class lesson. Thus, there appeared to be a

disjointedness in the lower level class. In the higher level class

there was little if any disjointedness with respect to student

awareness.

With respect to cooperative learning activities, we learned
that the project task and activities must be clearly defined by the

teacher. An intellectual model and a group process model must
be presented by the teacher if the lesson is to be effective.

2 3

These scenes from two connected acts illustrate the diverse forms and
content of the team's work. We worked Massmem observing and talking
with students and teachers about the teaching and learning of social studies,
and we worked en]; ef the elassrmm to reason about what happened in the
classroom around the teaching and learning of social studies. What connects
the two forms of work is its content-~the thinking about, and discussion
around, social studies teaching and learning. This focus on the teaching and
learning of social studies also served as the main purpose for the team's
endeavors. Whether the team examined ways to group students across
courses or in classrooms, teacher preparation for teaching social studies,
students' learning about social studies, team members' views about social
studies content, about teaching social studies, or about learning social
studies—all these dimensions of inquiry tied back to the purpose of enhancing
the teaching and learning of social studies.
W

In this very early scene from the team's work, we already see that
members' suspicions and assumptions were confirmed: differences in
curriculum and instruction among the three courses did in fact exist. The
fundamentals course was teacher-directed, with little input through
questioning or discussion from students. The main vehicle driving the

curriculum was the textbook, which had no primary source material.

2 4
Students literally at times copied ideas from the textbook (e.g., while writing
true/ false statements for the upcoming test), and little to no discussion of the
ideas occurred. The general class curriculum also relied heavily on the
textbook, and consisted of students working in small groups summarizing
ideas in the text. Little to no discussion about forms of government in the
United States took place in the large group nor in small groups.

While the honors / AP class also worked with the textbook, their text
provided significantly more primary source material than the other classes.
In addition, the kinds of discussions they had in small groups differed
radically from what we heard in other classes. Rather than writing true-false
statements (often by lifting sentences from the textbook), students in the
honors class had a different kind of assignment which required other kinds of
work. Preparing to write an essay exam, students seemed to realize that they
needed to talk about ideas, e.g., what is the connection between voter
restrictions and paying taxes. The text, moreover, provided interesting
examples from primary source material to alternative interpretations of
historians to probing questions about interpretation in history. On their own,
with no assistance nor push from the teacher, students struggled to
understand something that either they themselves or their peers did not
comprehend. And, the teacher provided the time, organization, and
materials that supported students while they wrestled with their

understandings and questions.

2 5

Eventually the team coined the expression "doing history" to refer to
students' engagement with historical ideas and interpretations. In chapter 4
and 5 I will Show how the team realized and changed the curricular content
and materials students used, a change that reflects our understanding about
how to support and promote active student learning and construction of
ideas and interpretations in American History.
AbnuLHanheleamDismssedeeas

The way that Bill realized and acknowledged Ken's possible discomfort
from hearing four other adults discuss his instruction and curriculum set the
precedent for future team conversations. At this meeting and others during
the beginning of the team's work, Bill would comment on things we said or
did as a team that challenged the isolated and private nature of teaching.
Acknowledging that how we acted as a team-the honesty of our comments,
the trust we each had that nobody would run and tell others, e.g., the
principal, that someone was doing a "bad" jobuwas quite different from what
we'd all done in the past. The acknowledgement of acting differently seemed
to make the breaking of institutional expectations and cultural mores less
frightening. I discuss and illustrate the substance and processes of
collaboration in Chapters Three and Four.
AhenLRoJes

Though the roles that participants defined and enacted over the course

of the team's work changed, the ways that people acted at this initial dinner

2 6

meeting became part of their overall actions in the team. Ken and Gary were
and remained the high school classroom experts; Sally and I remained the
questioners; Bill continued synthesizing. Ascribed partially by institutional
affiliation and expectations (Ken and Gary shenld be the high school experts
and Bill as an academic sheule be able to play with ideas) as well as personal
dispositions and biographies, the roles participants took on and enacted
evolved as the team's work changed. For example, the ways I could question
and nag about a particular idea changed as my fieldnotes and interpretations
expanded. The expertise that Ken and Gary had in the classroom changed as
they experimented with their curriculum and instruction. As our ways of
acting and thinking changed, the substance and process of Bill's syntheses
changed and Sally's questions did not need to Clarify as much as expand and
challenge team members. Role definition, role enactments, and
conflicts between roles (within the same person and across the team) are
themes that weave throughout this dissertation.

COMMENTARY: WHAT ARE THESE STORIES ABOUT?

Taken together, these and other stories to follow, span the temporal,
spatial and situational contexts of the social studies team's actions together.
They depict the process and content of the collaborative work in multiple
contexts, showing the slow development of working relationships and roles,
themes and purposes of the work, and changing work forms and content.

The complexity of collaborative work begins to emerge, with close-up

2 7
descriptions of the problems of forging new roles while acting in the same
contexts, acting in ways that challenge the salient norms of privacy in
teaching, and connecting collaborative work among professionals to teaching
and student learning.

The movements that players make in the work I illustrate resembles
those of professional actors working with new colleagues and wondering
what to expect of the situation, how they should act, what power they might
have, and how to express their thoughts about the piece of art they are
staging. Rather than operating as a one-person show, the actors become
interdependent. They share their interpretations of the play-the character
and qualities of human experiences as depicted in it-and act from jointly
constructed understandings of the situation. In collaborative work among
teachers, Little refers to this interdependence as "joint work". She defines
this kind of work as:

...encounters among teachers that rest on shared responsibility

for the work of teaching (interdependence), collective

conceptions of autonomy, support for teachers' initiative and

leadership with regard to professional practice, and group

affiliations grounded in professional work. (Little, 1990, p. 519)

In the remaining parts of this dissertation, I describe the substance of
two years of collaborative work by the social studies team as they shared
responsibility for enhancing the teaching and learning of social studies. My

research questions are: 1. What is the actual collaborative work? How do

participants perceive their work? What do they actually do?

2 8
2. What are the consequences of the collaborative work, especially for student
and adult learning?
3. What are the contexts and conditions of the work between two traditionally
separate cultures and institutions-«he high school and university? -and its
potential and realized influence on students' learning?
I conceive of thoughtful joint work, grounded in teaching practice and

as the enactment of

 

thoughtfulness, which I discuss in the Chapter Two. Using this theoretically
and practically-derived framework, I then describe and analyse the the social
studies team's collaboration and an creating an inquiry (Chapter Three), and
team work (Chapter Four) and student learning (Chapter Five). In Chapter
Six I conclude the dissertation with an analysis of the ways in which the social
studies team is an example of the enactment of thoughtfulness in
collaboration. In that chapter I also have a letter written to colleagues who
might try enacting thoughtfulness in collaboration, and the three most
important thoughts I've gained from working with the social studies team at

Hodges PDS.

CHAPTER TWO
COLLABORATIVE TEACHER RELATIONS:
PROBLEMS, RECONCEPI‘IONS, AND INQUIRY
THE STUDY OF COLLABORATIVE TEACHER RELATIONS

Serious collaboration, by which teachers engage in the rigorous mutual

examination of teaching and learning, turns out to be

rare...Collaborative efforts run counter to historical precedent, tending

to be unstable, short-lived and secondary to other priorities...An

emphasis on cooperation may place a premium on coherence and

uniformity at the expense of individual inventiveness and

independent initiative. Cooperation on any meaningful scale will

almost certainly require rethinking the present organization of human

and material resources. (Little, 1990c, p. 187-188)

Little's conclusion and cautionary note after reviewing the literature about
teachers' collaborative relations (see Little, 1990a; Little, 1990b) also accurately
portrays the investigations of others. Running contrary to cultural patterns of
isolation and individualism in teaching and to the organizational structures
commonplace in the profession (Feiman—Nemser 8; Floden, 1986; Hargreaves 8t
Dawe, 1990; Lortie, 1975; Rosenholtz, 1989; Smylie, 1992; Waller, 1932), collaboration
among teachers seems like an enigma rather than the norm many current policy
initiatives hope to promote. The cultural and organizational patterns that maintain
the rarity of teachers' collegial relations and instability wreak havoc on efforts to
enact thenghtfnlnese in collaboration that can enhance learning for students and
professionals.

When the social studies team began, Bill and I had many conversations about

how the traditional cultural and organizational environments in which the team

was embedded might thwart the efforts of our group. With many years of

29

30
experience working in schools and thinking about professional relations, Bill
appeared skeptical about how our efforts could be different from other collaborative
ventures that fizzled out over the last few decades. Though our group was part of a
professional development school effort, we had no notion of what such an effort
might do or enable. My fieldnotes Show many of our questions, asked over lunches
and quick hallway chitchats, during the fall, 1989: What will this team actually do,
and why? Who will benefit from our efforts? How will we learn to
cooperate—work in ways that respect the needs of all participantS--school and
university-based teachers m students? How will teachers with over 20 years
experience integrate new ideas, challenge old and new, and enhance the expertise
they already have? What will our collaboration have to do with student learning?
How can we avoid the pitfalls of other collaborative ventures that Show no lasting
changes after the funding evaporated? The concurrent question for me, in my
researcher role, was: What could I learn from studying this group that might lend
something new to our understandings about collaborative professional relations?
The Literature about Collaborative Teacher Work
While participating in the team, and collecting my data, I combed the
literature to learn what other teacher collaborative groups did, how they worked,
and the kinds of successes they had. Also, I wanted to explore different
conceptualizations of collaboration in an effort to understand the various aspects of

collaboration that have been studied. My efforts were disappointing; I found few

31
attempts to conceptualize collegial relations, and little in the way of guidance for
either filing the work or stndying it.
" f 11 r i "?

Deciding what literature to review presented my first major obstacle. Since'
collaboration is back in vogue as a favored educational reform strategy, discussions
about it appear in literature about educational change at the individual, classroom,
school, and district level (e.g., (Fullan, Bennett, 8: Rolheiser-Bennett, 1990; Fullan,
1991; Sarason, 1982). Since establishing and maintaining collaborative relations
demands change in current schooling structures and cultures, collaborative work
arrangements gain attention in essays about work conditions (e.g., Little, 1990a;
Lortie, 1975) and restructuring efforts (e.g., Hart, 1990; Smylie, 1992), and in writings
about the nature of teaching and the push toward enhancing the profession (e.g.,
Darling-Hammond, 1988; Sykes, 1990.)

Since I was studying the actual unfolding of a collaborative relationship, I
began looking at literature that described interactions between and among teaching
professionals. The literature varied in terms of who participitated in the
relationships (e.g., novice and experienced teachers, school-based and
university-based educators), for what purposes (e.g., working together to put in place
new curriculum and/ or instruction in literacy, mathematics, establishing new
governance structures) and toward what ends (e.g., learning to teach ethnically and
racially diverse students, learning ways to represent content in multiple venues for

learners, challenging larger social and political contexts that shape teachers' work).

32
Studies were based on chronologies of when the work began, what goals the work
had, and its "results." Usually reported via surveys, or in a few cases narrative
accounts, most empirical work provided little detail and even less interpretive
analysis about the processes of participants' enactment of their collaborative work
nor what resulted from it.
Methndeingies

A range of methodological strategies were used, from surveys with large
sampling populations, sometimes connected to open-ended questions and
follow-up interviews (Johnson, 1990; Parker, 1986; Ponticell, 1990; Rosenholtz, 1989;
Smylie, 1992) to a very small but growing number of case studies. Using a
longitudinal design, case studies often incorporate interviews and observations of
collaborative meetings and even some classroom work (e.g., Feiman-Nemser 8:
Parker, in press; McCarthey 8: Peterson, in press; Miller, 1990.) The latter kinds of
studies incorporate narrative vignettes that describe processes and offer participants'
beliefs about what they are doing, the intended results, and the actual consequences
as they see them.

Empirical work focuses mostly on the school as the unit of analysis,
sometimes narrowing the analysis to an individual teacher working in a group (e.g.,
McCarthey and Peterson, in press) or to the whole group of participants (e.g.,
Campbell, 1988; Rosaen 8: Hoekwater, 1990), but often embedding individual teacher
beliefs and actions in the larger contexts of school-wide, district, or school-university

partnership initiatives (e.g., David, 1990; see also empirical work conducted by the

33
Center for Research on the Context of Secondary School Teaching, Stanford
University, and cases of school-university partnerships detailed in Sirotnik 8:
Goodlad, 1988). Most of the published literature in journals and books is written by
university-based faculty, who appear primarily responsible for the research and
writing. Many of these researchers also participate in the work, though I found very
few pieces that directly address the enactment, conflicts, and questions within the
participant-observer role in professional collaborations (see Campbell, 1988 and
Miller, 1990 for notable exceptions.)
I 1 'E . I I E

Wading through this literature while participating in collaborative work
helped me focus my inquiry around learning how professional collaborative
relationships among teachers within schools and between schools and universities
unfold over time. Specifically, I wanted to learn in what ways these relationships
contribute to teacher and student learning. These initial research questions
paralleled the questions that Ken and Gary asked when we began the social studies
team in that their questions--and mine--were concerned with students' learning.

I narrowed my examination of the literature to two areas. Looking at
literature about professional relations between teachers from colleges and schools,
and what happens within them, led me to close scrutiny of professional
development school efforts and an examination of historic kinds of partnerships
relations between schools and universities (e.g., lab schools). The other arena of

literature I examined is much broader and more amorphous. Wanting to learn

34
about the substance of collaborative teachers' work, I focused my explorations on
work that centered around classroom curricular and instructional change minim
aimlefingjeamlng. Many collaborative efforts around issues of school
governance, school restructuring, and work redesign aim at enhancing student
learning, yet those efforts seem far removed from altering and enhancing pupil
learning. Therefore, when looking at the substance of collaborative teacher work, I
explored efforts in which educators asked questions about their practices or policies
in schools-similar to what we were doing on the social studies teamudirectly
related to student and teacher learning. Since the professional development school
literature is thin, I opened my search to include various kinds of structured
relations between teachers within schools and within universities (e.g., relations not
characterized as PDS). I wanted to find out about the collaborative processes teachers
have used to ask questions and to find answers, and what resulted from it in terms
of learning for teachers and students.
1- i i 1 i i
I was struck in my reading with the kinds of partnerships between
universities and schools that developed prior to the professional development
school movement. Some of these are historically well-known and documented
(e.g., the Horace Mann School at Teachers College , established in 1887, and the
Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, established in 1899). Other
relationships are less advertised and do not fit neatly into an existing kind of

structured relationship, like "laboratory school" (e.g., the partnership between

35

Albuquerque Public Schools and the University of New Mexico—~see Auger 8: Odell,
1992). Lab schools and portal schools share with the current emphasis on
professional development schools many similar goals. All three partnerships
hoped to be a place where new curriculum could be designed, new instructional
practices as well as new teachers could be inducted, and research could be done
(Nystrand, 1991 ; Stallings 8: Kowalski, 1990; Winitzky, Stoddart, 8: O'Keefe, 1992).

The professional development school movement seems to differ from
previous ventures in that it adopts a systems approach to change, involving a large
range of school-based and university—based participants (e.g., school administrators
and university faculty in colleges and departments other than education).
Furthermore, the PDS effort is infused with these dominant recurring themes in the
new wave of reform: fundamental changes in expectations for student learning, the
professionalization of teaching, and changes in traditional organizational structures
(Elmore, 1990).

f i l n l

Highlighted in two very influential national reform agendas in the late 19805
(the Carnegie Forum's Report (1986) and the Holmes Reports (1986; 1990), clinical
schools or the more popular term "professional development schools" are a
growing phenomenon in educational reform efforts. Looked upon as places where
the education of children and teachers (from schools and universities) can be
enhanced, these kinds of partnerships are often seen as panaceas for change. Yet

three aspects of the professional development school initiative give us just reason

36

to hesitate. First, professional development schools lack a clear conceptualization
about purposes, nature of the work, and significance of the joint venture. Secondly,
there is a paucity of literature about the processes of work and change in
professional partnership schools. And finally, partnership arrangements are
complex and conflictual since they necessitate significant and lasting changes in the
traditional cultural patterns of beliefs and thought, action, roles, and expectations in
the two institutions.
Ceneeptnalization of Professional Relations

Though I do not advocate that one conception of a professional development
school be adopted and used by all participants--such an idea actually runs counter to
the assumption that members of a PDS partnership will each benefit by identifying
the nexus of their needs and interests--I do believe that participants must discuss
views and identify ideas about what they want to learn, how they want to benefit,
and how each member's needs can be met through a professional development
school. Different from just laying out purposes, or just planning processes, or just
evaluating outcomes, a conception of the work can enable members to eenneet
purposes, work substance, processes, and significance. When problems arise due to
cultural differences, structural incongruities, or personal biases, they can be
managed by appealing to the broader set of ideas from which the work flows. Goals,
content, roles, and processes of work can be altered accordingly.

The paucity of clear conceptions promotes a reliance on old structures; what

else is there to work with? And not surprisingly, these structures usually come

37
from organizations outside the school. For example, funding sources and state
mandates often shape and alter innovations (Smith, 1992). In addition, university
teacher education programs often provide the basis for beginnings of programs (see
Smith, 1992 for her report of a follow-up study of programs that received the ATE '
Distinguished Program in Teacher Education Awards from 1977-1989). When
structural and conceptual guidance come from the university, issues about equity
and reciprocity between the school and university arise (we faced this at Hodges
PDS; other cases are described in Sirotnik 8: Goodlad (1988), in a review of literature
about professional development schools by Stallings and Kowalski (1990), and in
special issues of the WW 1992, 83(1) and Teaching
Education, L922.._4(2)-)

Often the difficulty of connecting purposes and collaborative practices is
avoided. Cases of the development of professional development schools recount
the struggles to find the time, write proposals for resources, learn how to talk
honestly and with trust (see the examples I listed above.) Issues like connecting
aims, practices, and outcomes in professional development school work, and facing
the often associated but unspoken conflicts among participants' orientations and
beliefs, require a lot of effort to understand and manage. Probably because of the
difficulty in broaching such issues and having extended conversations about them,
professional development school members seem to often avoid the discussions and

choose to exist with only vague conceptions of where they are headed and why.

38

E 'I E I 'I |

The experiences of the social studies team in which we found no literature to
turn to for guidance, questions, and a sense of comraderiena kind of "Whew, they
had to face this problem, too!"-—is far from unique. Though we see more descriptive
material currently about professional development work than we did in 1989 when
the team began (e.g., the collections of empirical work and essays collected in
Sirotnik and Goodlad (1988), Stallings and Kowalski (1990), and the IngmaLQf
Teacher Education, and Teaching Education), this material provides us with what
Little summarized as a sense of teachers' beliefs and interests enlx, concentrating on
the forms of collaborative work rather than the substance. Furthermore, when
content is discussed, the focus is on categorizing kinds of collaborative discourse and
descriptions of programs. Missing from this work, Little concludes, is a

close-grained account of the moral and intellectual dispositions that

teachers bring to or develop in the course of their relations with one

another...(and) careful scrutiny of the actual talk among teachers, the

choices teachers make in concert, or the ways in which individual

actions follow from the deliberations of the group. (Little, 1990b, p. 524)

While still emphasizing the structures of collaborative work without
explaining what happens, current literature also seems to give precedence to
participants' testimony rather than description and discussion of collaborative
content. Essays provide different participants' perspectives by presenting their own
thoughts in journals (e.g., Bruneau, Henderson, McCracken, Kimble, 8: Hawthorne,

1992, or taped conversations (e.g., Miller, 1990). Other pieces categorize participants'

ideas in order to emphasize different characteristics integral to PDS work (e. g.,

39

Rushcamp 8: Roehler, 1992), while still others try to draw conclusions from
participants' self-reports about, for example, the importance of a cacophony of voices
in PDS work (Navarro, 1992). While compelling and descriptive about the struggles
of partnership work, these accounts still provide little information about how
relationships develop over time, what happens within them, and in what ways
collaborative work supports individual action in classes with students (whether in a
school or university). Furthermore, testimony and description of structures
continue to provide little in terms of the content of collaborative relations, the
consequences of the work, and its pitfalls and successes over timel.
AlterintheCulmres

All the essays I examined about- professional development work, as well as
the historic patterns of relations between schools and colleges of education, agree
strongly about one thing: schools and education colleges have very different ways of
thinking about action, understanding and generating new knowledge, and building
and maintaining mutually productive relationships. Writers offer lists of
characteristics found in worthwhile human relations--for example, caring and trust.
We see historic documentation about misunderstandings between institutions;
about the lack of caring, trust, and honesty in relations; and about the historic

focuses of generating theory at the university and working atheoretically in schools.

 

11h searching the literature, I went back into the sixties, though concentrated
on the seventies and eighties. These were the decades in which modern reform
efforts began. But, historic pieces such as Mitchell's (1951) Qnr Children and Our
We could have informed the social studies team's efforts in terms of processes
and kinds of content that could be explored collaboratively.

40

What we do not see are close-to-the-collaborative-work2 descriptions of the
ways that people began understanding each other's goals and thinking, the ways
they developed caring and trustful relations, the problems they needed to overcome,
and the consequences of deriving a new kind of "scholarly activity" that combines
scholarship and practice within new collegial structures, invites the creation of new
ways of thinking about knowing, and assiduously studies school programs and
cultures (Lieberman, 1992, p. 8). Moreover, most descriptions never discuss the
ways participants chose to handle-—or avoid--the inherent conflict that develops
when two differing perspectives are joined. Without such honest accounts that
unravel over time, we miss the connections between caring relationships,
generating new knowledge, or creating new ways to think about theory and practice.

n f 11 r i ' r

The bulk of studies about teachers' collaborative work focuses on
school-based teachers; studies about university-based teachers' joint work are next to
non-existant3. Most essays document collaborative work around issues of special
education inclusion, adopting and enacting new curricular programs (especially in
literacy), and changes in governance (most notably in establishing site-based ‘

management plans).

 

2Here I borrow from Little's (1990c) use of the phrase "close to the classroom".

3Some studies are beginning, many in pilot stages. For example, see Schram
(1992).

41

Like the literature around partnership relations between schools and
universities, literature about collaborative work even within institutions focuses on
organizational outcomes, not process. Everything about the work appears rosy and
without conflict. The collaboration itself seems to be only a means toward an end of
instituting a policy mandate about structural, curricular, or instructional change.
Consequently, the worth and benefit of the collaboration is not treated as a
phenomenon for study.

Commentary about the Literature on Teachers' Relations

I draw three conclusions from searching the literature about teachers'
collaborative relations. First, the term "collaboration" remains conceptually and
theoretically vague. This has implications for recent policy mandates that throw
teachers into collaborative work groups with little to no discussion about the intent,
potential, and consequences of the endeavors. Furthermore, often "advocates for
collegiality do so on the basis of prescription rather than description." The
prescription may enable an emphasis on the presumed benefits of collaboration,
with a concurrent loss of a close examination of institutional norms, prior beliefs
and knowledge participants have about collaborative work, and the substance of the
project or problem around which the collaboration will center (Campbell 8:
Southworth, 1990, p. 2). Judith Warren Little calls for clarity by arguing that
collaborative efforts do not always result in enhancement of education.
Collaborations can be, she writes, "instruments both for promoting Change and for

conserving the present". Current forms of teacher interactions (e.g., story telling,

42
providing help and advice, and sharing materials, methods, ideas, and opinions)
may actually encourage isolationism in teachers and the belief that what they are
doing is adequate and beyond reproach (Little, 1990b, p. 509). Strong empirical
evidence for Little's cautions abound in a study of collegiality among British
primary teachers. Nias and her associates (Nias, Southworth, 8: Yeomans, 1989)
found that teachers seek out "reference groups" in which they find individuals who
support and reinforce the values and understandings they have. Teachers were
content with their convictions, supported by some colleagues, and thus did not seek
to work with other colleagues with whom they might have to defend their ideas or
be challenged to Change their ways of thinking.

My related second conclusion is that the literature lacks discussions about the
educative aims of collaborative work, both for participants and students. With no
conceptual or theoretical grounding, collaborative work often simply flows along
with little to no assessment about means and ends relationships. Deliberation and
reasoning about goal setting and achievement, learning and arguing about
conflicting beliefs and practices, and evaluating consequences are often set aside for
the immediacy of the work. What is educative, and rniseducative within the
relationships and about the outcomes of the work is rarely mentioned.

A final conclusion is that a host of connected socio-political issues around
teachers' collaborative relations must also be explored. Campbell and Southworth
have gathered a list:

Democracy and hierarchy, participation and control, leadership and
collaboration do not necessarily sit easily alongside one another. In the

43

absence of case studies showing how these matters are resolved "on the

groun ", in schools, we await a comprehensive analysis. (Campbell

and Southworth, 1990 , p. 3)

To this list I would add the difficulty of talking with school/ university
colleagues about orientations to teaching and learning and ideological perspectives
that differ radically when one teaches along side people day after day . Also, conflict
and collegiality often do not sit well together either. In addition to identifying these
often competing aspects of collaborative work, we need description of the
underlying assumptions about the change that collaborative relations may bring
about. At whom are changes aimed, for instance, and upon what criteriauand
whose—will new practices be assessed and mandated? These aspects of working
together are not resolvable--socio-political issues remain as inherent phenomena in
any relationship—but in order that they not stop the collaborative work, these
powerfuls dynamics should be recognized and understood when appropriate. Here
again, the literature gave little clues about the ways that socio-political dynamics
play themselves out and get handled.

Without more exploration and conversations in which we aim to define
what collaboration means i_n_s_ini, what educative dimensions the work supports,
and the socio-political aspects of these collaborative relations, our expectations of
what collaboration can do remain ungrounded and premature. As we contemplate
the process and substance of collaborative work, we first must think about the

ultimate goal of it; that is, to enhance education.

44
Key Missing Points

Keeping in mind the particulars of the team I was studying, hunches I had
about what was happening in our team, and pieces of the literature that mainly kept
reminding me how little we knew about the process of collaboration, I identified
three key missing points I wanted to know more about as a participant and
researcher, and on which my study might shed light. These questions eventually
helped me Shape, and continually reshape, my research questions.
1. What ham in secendary elassreems when teachers collaborate about teaching
and learning? What little we know about collaborative work related to classroom
practice speaks mostly about elementary school (e.g., Nias, Southworth, 8: Yeomans,
1989) , and as I've pointed out speaks little to the process and related consequences of
collaboration. Although there have been in the last decade a considerable number
of studies of American high schools (e.g., Cusick, 1983; Lightfoot, 1983; Perrone, 1985;
Powell, Farrar, 8: Cohen, 1985), along with the creation of the Center for Research on
the Contexts of Secondary Teaching, these studies have provided broad views of
teaching and learning in high schools with only glimpses of detail about what actual
teaching and learning look like. Even the essay by Ball and Lacey about teachers'
collaborative work in subject matter departments in four British comprehensive
schools focuses on the similarities and differences among teachers' beliefs and the
overall departrnents' strengths to influence school policy. No links to student

learning were made (Ball 8: Lacey, 1984).

45
2. Two groups of people seemed systematically excluded from current empirical
investigations about collaboration: learners, and university-based people who work
in schools with teachers and students.
3. In what ways is the role of the participant-observer perceived and enacted in a
collaboration? What are the felt conflicts and dilemmas? What can a professional
educator learn about teaching and learning through collaborative work?

Over and over as I read pieces I wondered about the connections between
collaborative work among professionals and learning. Attention to the
methodological and conceptual complexities of hooking student and adult
professional learning through collaboration has not been undertaken (Little, 1990b).
That undertaking would involve thinking about the ki_nd of learning we want to
promote, as well as how we would promote it. Therefore, my dissertation reports
on attempts to use Little's notion of "joint work," described as

...encounters among teachers that rest on Shared responsibility for the

work of teaching (interdependence), collective conceptions of

autonomy, support for teachers' initiative and leadership with regard

to professional practice, and group affiliations grounded in professional

work (Little, 1990b, p. 519)
and move one step beyond by linking evidence of joint work with conceptions of
pupil and teacher learning. In addition, I provide a portrait from both the
inside—my two-year participation in the work--and the outsideumy analyses made

one year after my involvementuof collaborative work in the social studies team at

Hodges Professional Development School. My research questions, reshaped

46
through my concurrent analyses of my data and the literature, enable me to describe
and study learning by looking at
1. What is the actual collaborative work? How do participants perceive their work?
What do they actually do?
2. What are the consequences of the collaborative work, especially for student and
adult learning?
3. What are the contexts and conditions of the work between two traditionally
separate cultures and institutions--the high schOol and university? What are the
work's potential and realized influence on students' learning?
ENACTMENT OF THOUGHT FULNESS IN COLLABORATION
Preliminary analyses of my data led me to see a common theme in what
students, individual teachers, and the team was doing: the evolution of
thoughtfulness in talk, action, and thought. I use the phrase "the enactment of
thoughtfulness in collaboration" to refer to the ongoing cycle of talk,
experimentation, and inquiry about teaching practice that can go on in a
professional collaboration. The concept illustrates certain aspects of the social
studies team's essence, and my study of it, as well as an ideal to seek for any
collaborative venture.
My definition of the idea begins by defining the terms. "Thoughtfulness" is
defined by the Oxford English Dictionary and Webster's Dictionary as that which is
characterized by careful reasoned thinking, and given to heedful anticipation of the

needs and wants of others. Though now a rare use of the word, the Oxford English

47
Dictionary adds that being thoughtful can be synonymous with "having the
intention or purpose, aiming at or desirous ef something (italics in original).
"Enactment" means to act out and to represent.

Taken together, these words help me illustrate in concrete and conceptual
terms actions mg; their consequences for the social studies team. Interacting in ways
that were heedful of othersnhigh school students, prospective teachers, and
themselves, team members carefully reasoned about the plans and actions they took
on behalf of these people. Their deliberations resulted in many ideas about what
might happen in practice. After bringing ideas to fruition through experiments in
the classroom, teammates made systematic inquiries through conversations about
what happened in their practices. Conversations took on a kind of thoughtfulness,
e.g., listening to colleagues' points, arguing about aspects of them, collective
reasoning about the likely success of a set of plans, negotiating ways to talk about
ideas to members outside the team.

Thoughtfulness not only characterizes the process of work, but also its
consequences. The team's ideas, which individuals acted on in their classes and the
members debated in the team's meetings, were filled with diverse thoughts about
how to support students (e.g., how to clarify assignments without taking away
opportunities for students to do what made sense to them), how to alter curriculum
and instruction (e.g., plan thematic units), and how to change school structures (e.g.,

homogenous grouping by ablility). In sum, the team acted toward each other in

48
thoughtful ways about teaching and learning practices, and the students they hoped
to touch.

Thoughtfulness also defined the team; it described the kinds of changes team
participants noted in themselves and in students. What students pointed out in
classroom discussions and the ways they challenged, refuted, and built upon one
another's ideas sounded very much like the ways team members interacted with
one another. Both sets of participants acted in thoughtful ways by bringing to bear
multiple perspectives, questions, and issues in discussions about alternative actions
to take, whether completing a class assignment or designing a curriculum.

Defining the Enactment of Thoughtfulness in Collaboration

In this section, I elaborate my definition of the enactment of thoughtfulness,
and offer it as a framework for examining the social studies team's work. A growing
body of literature examines the sources and kinds of knowing that educators use to
enact and reform their practices. This literature draws our attention to the fragile,
often tacit understandings that guide teachers' actions and shape their inquiries. I
draw upon these studies to introduce and define a slightly different conceptuthe
enactment of thoughtfulness--to broaden our ideas about what "knowing" in
teaching means when teachers work collaboratively.

When educators work together, they face an intrinsic dilemma in human
communication: how do we make the tacit, the implicit, the taken-for-granted
enelieij; so we can examine it with colleagues? In all forms of collaborative work,

understanding what others think and do is essential if the collaboration is to be

49
worthwhile and beneficial. But making beliefs and actions explicit to others, often
when they have remained under cover even to oneself, is a formidable task.

In addition to basic communicative essentials of making ideas and beliefs
understandable to others, studies of collegial enterprises suggest that :enditiens of‘
collaborative relations and enltgally diverse patterns ef aen'en and theught also
create difficulties. These factors, along with communicative realities, make for an
environment in which people in professional collaborations must design
conditions for making the collaboration worthwhile while concurrently wrestling
with ideas and actions.

n f In i l i

Enacting thoughtfulness in collaboration is a process that touches upon three
aspects of teachers' professional relations: the set of beliefs and actionsnthe
thoughts—participants discuss and act upon, the nature of interactions within
discussions, and the consequences of collegial work in terms of student andetg
leaning. In other words, thoughtfulness defines both the nature of the
relationships and the substance and outcomes of the work.

See Figure 2.1: Web of Thoughts about Teaching and Learning

In order to describe the interrelated aspects of this concept, I invoke an image
of a ball filled with beliefs and impressions, embedded in cultural histories, personal
biographies, and practical experiences. These thoughts would constitute the basis for

inquiry and action in teaching.

50

 

 

 

a(“stones and Id .
(PW‘ ‘i amt/“e,
Beliefs
____..> and «tr—'1
l m pressions
'9’,
6
e
.6 {ab
0,
§O
<4

 

 

se‘

Figure 2.1: Web of Thoughts about Teaching and Learning

51
See Figure 2.2: The Enactment of Thoughtfulness in Collaboration
We would see people acting upon these thoughts in this way: (1) within

Waffles participants would be (2) havingcenlersan'ens

10-11.11 1' .0...“ tag.” ‘i--'>('_:'-'u' 11:.
with learning and advancing a (4) eegain_knid_o_f W.

In the next sections I examine these four aspects of enacting thoughtful
collaboration, suggesting characteristics that mark the importance and presence of it.
In order to define the characteristics, I found myself drawing upon theoretical ideas
and principles from diverse areas and empirical studies and reviews focused on
grounded experiences of participants in collaborative work. Moving between the
particulars of people's everyday experiences and abstract theory enabled me to see
the "reciprocal relationship between data and theory," for as Lather argues

Data must be allowed to generate propositions in a dialectical manner

that permits use of a priori theoretical frameworks, but which keeps a

particular framework from becoming the container into which the data

must be poured. The search is for theory which grows out of

context-embedded data, not in a way that automatically rejects a priori

theory, but in a way that keeps preconceptions from distorting the logic

of evidence. (Lather, 1986, p. 267)

See Table 2.1: The Enactment of Thoughtfulness
E l I' l .

The importance of relationships to the concept of the enactment of

thoughtfulness in collaboration is two-fold. First, collaboration involves interaction

and interaction necessitates relating to other people. Secondly, enacting

thoughtfulness in collaboration involves careful reasoned thinking which can often

52

    
        
 

CONVERSATIONS '

 

[TEACHING PRACTICE

/

EXPERIMENTATION

 

Figure 2.2: The Enactment of Thoughtfulness in Collaboration

53

 

 

£28m

-8580va 8wa9.:

use 8:288 .mEmEuEam
we mcocmtummu LOB

uUNbGOU "GUOm mo EOIP

 

35:83

859d. 5 nuummmmm
now .88on CmZV
.8282 Co E: 25...

Eofimv ..aocaaa 2:
5:5 meccam8>cou=

8::
588:6 :0 958...

38:03

 

 

98:08 ..chumS
msoasEo>u<=

3282 :83 8%-sz
.:0 28283358278
:22? 32859:...

288533 £88380
991885 283

Co mafia 928:6 E8
882 28: 2 mmmgemm

HUSH—O £060 qu “9.51MB

 

Examégzuouv :58»
85 “mamawm wcfommb.

€282
a; Bonumv 8288£8D
Dam Coeds—Q85

586834
Bandy—-2803
8:958sz misuse—
?8 chumB 9:8sz
8 D868 98 Docwmmmu
>252 .889an

385388
wctmu 9 concflfiw

 

 

MOP—Ugh—
OIUH 46:0QO

 

ZO~H<HZmEEmmxm

 

mZOE<mmm>ZOU

 

mEEmZOEZAmM

 

cozfiongou E mama—stzwsof. no Emfiuumcm 2:.

ad 838,—.

 

 

 

54
be part of generating new kinds of knowing and understanding about teaching.
Relationships through which thoughtfulness can be enacted share three
features-attention to caring, trust for one another, honesty—that form a set of
obligations I liken to a social compact4.

Caring is the central element in the kinds of collaborative relationships I am
describing; it is the piece that enables a social compact to develop. Whether acting in
formal collaborations or not, as members of humanity we are bound to each other
and in some way must care for one another. The question thus becomes: what is the
extent of our obligation to care? Noddings develops two criteria for governing
obligations of caring: "the existence of or potential for present relations, and the
dynamic potential for growth in relation, including the potential for increased
reciprocity and, perhaps, mutuality. The first criterion establishes an absolute
obligation and the second serves to put our obligations into an order of priority"
(Noddings, 1984, p. 86). In the kinds of collaborative relationships I want to see,
obligations of mutuality and reciprocity become a priority as participants operate
under a conception of interdependence in teaching that will support mutual
investigations of learning. Furthermore, participants are bound together in
developing relations in which shared and complementary kinds of learning take
place.

Trust and honesty become necessary parts of the caring relationship because

they enable reciprocal learning. Trust and forthrightness are themselves connected

 

41 am indebted to Mark Smylie for the addition of this idea.

55
when present in collaborative work. Forthrightness in a group demands trust; trust
promotes deeper revelations of one's views and experiences. Collaboration in
which honesty and trust mark the exchanges invites expertise and commitment to
appear next to those views and practices that peers consider less admirable. Thus, '
the presence of trust and forthrightness can support a conception of teaching as
problematic, open to alternate interpretations formed via inquiry. To care, to trust,
and to be honest are elements that shape the range of content, forms of conversation

and work, and potential for growth within the enactment of thoughtfulness in

collaboration.
Conmsation

The enactment of thoughtfulness in collaboration holds conversation as a
central means toward the goal of enhancing and studying teaching and learning. I
focus on conversation because it is the vehicle through which we share our
observations, interpretations, questions, and beliefs. Through conversation, the self
comes in contact with others and with the cultural communities in which our lives
are embedded (Witherell 8: Noddings, 1991). Through these contacts, we come to
appreciate new ideas, challenge beliefs, and alter interpretations in order to create
new meanings. Writes Buchmann, "What makes conversation attractive is its
reciprocal quality, the breadth of subject matter and variety of voices compatible
with it, and the surprising turns it may take" (Buchmann, 1983, p. 3).

What do I mean by conversation? Along with other scholars, Florio-Ruane

has argued that conversation is a particular kind of extended dialogue that takes

II-

I'. .'

56
place within a relationship and has the purpose of drawing out speakers' ideas

and knowledge (Florio-Ruane, 1992). Gadamer (Gadamer, 1982) reminds us that
conversation is a process in which people try to make sense of a particular
subject and arrive at new meanings. The philosopher Robert Nash suggests that
in conversation people often exchange opposing ideas formally and informally
through daily living (Nash, n.d., as cited in Florio-Ruane, 1992) . Given these
ideas, and drawing upon my experiences within the social studies team, I
suggest four features of conversations that we would see within the enactment
of thoughtfulness in collaboration: 1) conversations will have purposes, decided

upon by the group, aimed at bettering teaching and learning for professionals

and students; 2) conversations will be characterized by an Wand

WW and Wabout experiences and feelings,

attention to the personal values that emerge from this kind of sharing, and
evaluation of one's own stance vis-a-vis others’ points of view; 3) participants
will at times take on W during conversations; 4) conversations will
include W of participants' teaching, thinking, struggles.

W. In the enactment of thoughtfulness in the

status, and institutional differences, but rather by the thonghtmd
WWW that bind the group together. Buchmann (1983)
has argued that conversations, rather than argumentation, can help
university-based and school-based participants transcend status differences by

maintaining a focus on the breadth and depth of content within the

57
conversations. Ideas informed by theory and practice share the floor (Florio-

Ruane, 1991). The role of conversation, then, is important in the enactment of
thoughtfulness in collaboration because participants bring ideas and beliefs
colored from different experiences, different institutional and political
structures, and different cultural mores of action and thought. These
differences in turn shape the depth and breadth of conversational purposes, in
both momentary discussions (e.g., when colleagues talk after a class observation)
as well as long-term conversations in which one idea braids itself into many

connected conversations (indeed, the idea becomes the connecting tissue among

the conversations.)

WW. When conversations are aimed at constructing

thoughtfulness in the enactment of collaboration, they often "grow out of
connections and they cement connections." (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, &
Tarule, 1986, p. 116) I refer here to the connections of ideas, values, and
understandings, and to the important presence of trust and honesty within
conversational exchanges. Conversational connections are formed through
what Gadamer calls the art of conversation, which includes placing in the open
many different issues and ideas (Gadamer, 1982, as cited in McConaghy, 1991).
Doing this often necessitates a lot of explanation and clarification of personal

values and "evaluation of one's ideas through seeing our thoughts from

58
another's point of view and re-presenting them to ourselves for reflection and
interpretation" (McConaghy, 1991). In addition, conversants must be aware that
others are listening and thinking with them.

W. Within both single and multiple exchange
conversations, participants may take on different roles, e.g., facilitator, documentor,
leader of discussion around a particular issue, questioner when enacting
thoughtfulness in collaboration. Role perceptions and enactment within
conversations will develop from the thoughtful content, purposes of the
conversations as well as broader purposes for the collaboration, and the needs of
individuals and the group.

Rich description. Conversations within the enactment of thoughtfulness in
collaboration will at times include talk about the daily routines and events of
teaching, with the interpretations individuals give to them, with the puzzles and
wonderments of teaching, with the dilemmas of the enterprise. Full and careful
description make it possible

for teachers to make explicit what is often implicit, to remember by

drawing on past experiences, to formulate analogies between seemingly

unrelated concepts and experiences, and to construct from disparate

data patterns in students' learning. When teachers' conversations

build thick description, they conjointly uncover relationships between

concrete cases and more general issues and constructs. (Cochran-Smith

& Lytle, in press, p. 15)

While all conversations will not include such full descriptions, the invitation

and possibility will be apparent.

59

E . |°

Within the concept of the enactment of thoughtfulness in collaboration,
experimentation is both the grist and result of the collaboration; experimentation is
what teachers do as they change their practices. It can have two interrelated aspects.
One dimension is of a thought-out, planned and deliberative nature, e.g., plarming
how to teach about the American Revolution or planning an experience in which
preservice students face their anxieties about teaching in urban schools. Often these
experiments draw on reflections from past lessons, rememberances of conversations
about previous lessons, thoughts about "what I should have done or could have
done better." Conversations about these kinds of experiments are the essence of
thoughfulness in collaboration. Through listening, debating ideas, and
co-constructing new ways of thinking about phenomena, participants in thoughtful
collaborations can design lessons that one or more people will enact in classrooms.
These "experiments" become the grounds of the cycle of thoughtfulness in
collaboration for they provide the basis for further conversations, revised plans, and
new ideas. But experimentation can have another aspect, one that has immediacy
and is situation-specific. Though conscious of previous plans and designs, goals,
and agendas, teachers face what van Manen calls "the pedagogical moment...when
the pedagogue does something appropriate to learning in relation to a child or
young person" (van Manen, 1991, p. 108). Such moments do not allow the teacher
to step back and think about those earlier plans because such moments require

usually instant action. They require "thoughtful action," writes Van Manen, and

60
this kind of thinking differs from thinking done before or after the moment when
one can distance oneself. He continues:
Living the pedagogical moment is a total personal response or
thoughtful action in a particular situation. Thoughtful action differs
from reflective action in that it is thinkingly attentive to what it does

without reflectively distancing itself from the situation by considering
or experimenting with possible alternatives and consequences of the

action. (p. 109)

van Manen's distinctions between reflective action and thoughtful action
that takes place on-the-spot becomes relevant in a discussion about enacting
thoughtful collaboration when we consider how experimentation is shaped through
collaboration. Collaborators can design curriculum and instruction. They can watch
each other. They can talk together and co-think about teaching6. They can think
back over situations, becoming aware of actions and feelings not consciously
realized or dealt with in the present. These are examples of reflective thought.

But enacting thoughtful collaboration can also shape on—the-spot thoughtful
action. One's ability to reason, to make sense of the ongoing business at hand, to
make connections between and among ideas within the moment can be greatly
enhanced by the opportunities to encounter ideas prior to the moment. van Manen
provides a compelling example of thoughtful action in the moment when he
describes the multiple changes a teacher makes on-the-spot as he introduces his
high school English class to a poem by Rainer Marie Rilke. The moves this teacher

makes, altering the start of the lesson as he connects it to a student's story about

 

6This lovely term, co-thinking, is the creation of a teacher par excellence in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, George Winchell (personal communication, 1988-1989.)

61
playing hockey over the weekend or dramatizing and lengthening the story of
Rilke's life, are created and enacted W. The reasons for these moves, the
sense they make mjitu, can only be understood inaction, though they can be
suggested as possibilities in collaborative conversations and design sessions prior to
the teaching.

This kind of thoughtful action within practice is similar to the metaphorical
idea of having conversations with the materials at hand. Drawing on Dewey's
studies of thinking and logic, Schon speaks of conversations within the situation.

Here an inquirer, in transaction with the materials of the situation,

encounters a surprise in the form of "back-talk" that momentarily

interrupts action, evoking uncertainty. The inquirer goes on to

transform the situation in a way that resolves uncertainty, at least for

the moment...The inquirer is in the situation, influenced by his

appreciation of it at the same time that he shapes it by his thinking and

doing--in Dewey's words, "instituting new environing conditions that

occasion new problems." (Schon, 1992, p. 121)

Such conversations with the situation, contributing to thoughtful action in
sing, can be enhanced when collaborators exchange ideas and critiques.
Experimentation, and refining it, can become a kind of design, which in Schon's
terminology refers to the ways that "we make things out of the materials of a
situation under conditions of complexity and uncertainty" (Schon, 1992, p. 126). An
epistemology of practice, asserts Schon, is an epistemology of design. An

epistemology of design both within collaborative relations and resulting from it, I

submit, is an epistemology of thoughtful collaboration.

0| ' an v.10. reflu'n -01 All 1' a. 1'1 0 he h 11' in

Within groups that are enacting thoughtfulness in collaboration, participants
experiment about learning in their classsrooms in two ways. In their classrooms,
they can put in place ideas created and designed through thoughtful conversation
with colleagues. Another kind of experiment results from the thoughtful
on-the-spot alterations teachers make which can be spurred on by the collegial
conversations mixing with situation-specific immediacy. When people talk about
both kinds of experiments--describe how things unfolded, offer interpretations, ask
questions about them, wonder about what they could have done differently-~the
conversations narrow the gap between the self and other.

Conversations that include planning experiments, reasoning about them, and
critiquing them become powerful means for connecting people toward joint goals of
educational improvement. Conversations about practices aimed at change break the
walls of isolation of the self from work (Grumet, 1991) and of self from colleague.
These kinds of conversations can become a powerful means for taking on the
diffith task of altering teaching and learning.

I l . E l'

The kinds of teaching practice that can be supported and promoted through
the enactment of thoughtfulness in collaboration have been called "teaching against
the grain" (Cochran-Smith, 1991), adventurous teaching (Cohen, 1988), "this kind of

teaching" (Center for Research on Teacher Learning, in preparation).

63
Cochran-Smith's definition of teaching against the grain, and its socio-political
dimensions, include the commonalities among these conceptions of practice, and
the kinds of practice I hope that enacting thoughtfulness in collaboration can enable.
She writes

...teachers are decision makers and collaborators who must reclaim

their roles in the shaping of practice by taking a stand as both educators

and activists...Teaching against the grain stems from, but also

generates, critical perspectives on the macro-level relationships of

power, labor, and ideology...(p. 2-3)

Five themes braid themselves through Cochran-Smith's concept of teaching
against the grain: 1) problematics abound in teaching, and language, practices,
policies, and assumptions need to be challenged continually; 2) knowledge in
teaching is ever-evolving, and teachers are both creators and users of knowledge
and theory; 3) teachers are creators and interpretors of curriculum; 4) tudents bring
individual experiences and resources to the learning context, and they require
careful observation by teachers from many perspectives; 5) teachers are learners
throughout their lives through systematic inquiry and self-critique. Through these
experiences, teachers become reformers mostly from the‘"inside-out and bottom-up,
but they also collaborate on reforms spear-headed outside of schools and from the
top-down within schools" (p. 2).

This conception of teaching practice, and learning this kind of practice (which
is the main purpose in Cochran-Smith‘s writings), posits the importance of

deliberation and reasoning about educational change within a society that needs

socio-political reform. And joint work among educators can enable these kinds of

64
changes, because together teachers can share the responsibility for conceptualizing,
enacting, a_r_1_d critiquing change.

The enactment of thoughtfulness in collaboration encourages conversation
and experimentation about change, keeping student and teacher learning central.
The ever-evolving and cyclical process of work in the collaboration-{he
conversations and experimentations--take place within caring relationships that
bound people within socially-agreed upon compacts. In the next section, I explore
the ways I chose to examine the social studies team as a potential example of the
enactment of thoughtfulness in collaboration.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND ANALYSIS

The commitment to get close, to be factual, descriptive and quotive,

constitutes a significant commitment to represent the participants in

theiLownjetmsu .A major methodological consequence of these
commitments is that the qualitative study of peOplei 1n situ is a process
ofidisecmezy. It is of necessity a process of learning what is

happening...It is the observer's task to find out what is fundamental or

central to the people or world under observation (Lofland, quoted in

Merriam, 1988, p. 68, italics in Merriam)

The design of this study rests upon a fundamental assumption that people
make sense of their world and give meaning to it through social interaction.
Within the interaction, individuals create and participate in experiences, forming
views and orientations toward the world constructed from their life experiences,
experiences which are shaped by the cultural, social, political and individual

realities of a person's life. When persons choose to work in a collaborative way, I

believe they enter into a situation in which they share their sense-making, alter it,

65
and take responsibility for social construction of new realities in which they and
others participate. A dialectic tension thus exists always between self and other7.

In my role as researcher, I must describe and derive meaning from the talk
and activities of social studies team participants which reflects the negotiation and
conflict between their individual perspectives as well as their negotiated meanings.
Such a task is made complex because of the multiple interpretations participants
have which will not be the same. Individual perceptions are influenced by different
and differentially-accessible knowledge, expertise, opportunities, power and status
dynamics, differences in motivation, and so on. I can work toward describing and
analyzing a reality formed by team members by comparing and contrasting
interpretations among individuals (including myself), yet that work must be done
in a fair and just way which celebrates each individual.

My burden as observer is complicated by my moral obligation to represent in
a just manner the world as it appears to the people in the social studies team at
Hodges High School, a world that I am both a part of and am studying. To what
extent and in what ways shall I exercise the knowledge I gather and construct from
my inquiry to effect the team's work? In what ways will my interpretations
preclude me from "seeing" the others' viewpoints? What will I do when I realize
that participants' interpretations may be alterable given new information or new

insight, which I might gain through the inquiry? As Lather points out, a key

 

7The work of George Herbert Mead has greatly influenced my thinking,
especially the essay entitled "The Self" (Mead, 1934).

66
challenge for a "praxis-oriented research paradigm (is) how to maximize the
researcher's mediation between people's self-understandings (in light of the need
for ideology critique) and transformative social action withouLoecommg
impositional." (Lather, 1986, p. 269)

Such dilemmas lie at the heart of this study and its design. In this section, I
discuss methodological aspects of my study, beginning with the sources of my data,
collection, and my analyses. Throughout these sections, and especially at the end of
the chapter, I address my multiple roles as participant and researcher. In this
chapter as in the entire thesis, my changing roles as participant and researcher, the
ways I struggled to blend them together, the ways they stood in stark contrast, and
the ways the dual roles presented moral, political, and intellectual dilemmas
become salient themes throughout this thesis.

Exploring Thoughtful Collaboration: Data Collection and Analysis

My whole dissertation, including the data collection, is a study of a
phenomenon that naturally emerged. As a participant I explored the overall effort
of establishing a PDS, establishing a team within that effort, and establishing
relationships and purposes for work within the team. I played a variety of roles
within these efforts, putting on and taking off the costumes for each many times.

MLRQLQS
I began my PDS participation as a "documentor." Hired by the university,
and supported through state funds that required documenting the newly-designed

"Professional Development Effort," I attended the very beginning meetings between

67

Midstate, the school district, the union, and eventually Hodges High School (I
describe some of these meetings in Chapter 3.) I listened attentively and kept
detailed fieldnotes noting mostly verbatim what different people said. After
meetings, I often spoke with key people and noted their reactions in my fieldnotes,
too. When Hodges PDS was established in spring, 1989, I attended all the initial
meetings in which participants identified their interests and designed missions
statements and goals. In fall, 1989, when Hodges PDS established a Coordinating
Council for PDS governance, I began attending those meetings (which I continued to
attend throughout the year), and took fieldnotes which I often shared with the
assistant principal who wrote up minutes for the Council and communicated via
memos and newsletters to the Hodges faculty about PDS governance. In addition, I
spoke with PDS participants informally during the 7-10 hours I spent at Hodges per
week as well as having one formal interview with each member of the team during
the 1989-90 school year. In these conversations I learned what participants did in
their PDS work, how they conceptualized this new phenomenon, and how they saw
themselves fitting into it.
Designing the Doeumentor's Role

What does a documentor do? This was a question that participants from both
Hodges and Midstate asked often. The question became a frequent one in bi-weekly
meetings I had with two colleagues who also "documented" at other PDS schools.
We soon realized that we needed to think about the purposes we served, both for

the state documentation and the participants in the PDS. Our notes of meetings,

68

and our perceptions from talking to people and seeing many different aspects of PDS
work, became valuable to participants. And as documentors, we soon realized that
the more we talked with people the more we moved "inside," the more we became
participants in this effort. Withholding our perceptions seemed not in the spirit of
the collaborative venture, and also felt uncomfortable personally to me. Are we
simply notetakers or secretaries, we wondered, or active participants in crafting a
new form of joint work?

The documentor role, then, became complex in that at times I took notes
while remaining silent. At other times, within the same meetings, I was called
upon to review the notes I'd taken (and by doing so I was offering my interpretation
since all reality is seen through our subjective lenses), or provide information about
Mi dstate, or offer something I'd seen or heard while talking with people in the
school. Privy to participants' views at both institutions, which at times were far
from complementary, I straddled my position carefully so that participants at both
H:<><:lges and Midstate would still share their honest reactions. I also struggled, with
my documentor colleagues, to know which views and information I should include
in quarterly reports I wrote, and how I could insure accuracy about facts (e.g., who

Participated in a project and what the project intended) and sensitivity to

individuals in choosing what to share.

h inMRl n innin Di rtinDat lle'n
While still in my documentor role during summer, 1989, I became interested

in the questions that Ken Larson and Gary Gifford asked (see Chapter 1). Cautious

69
about taking on yet another responsibility, I reasoned with myself that studying the
evolution of the social studies team would help me in my documentor role by
providing me with an in-depth case about PDS work in Hodges. Perceiving my

participation in this way, I began meeting and working with the team members in

fall, 19898.
I soon realized that my interests for dissertation study were peeked by the

relationships and work I observed in the social studies team. In November, 1989, I
informed the team that I'd begun thinking about the possibilities of studying our
work. This caught the Hodges-based members by surprise; what happened to
mentoring (which was my dissertation topic to that point), they asked. My interest
is peeked here, I explained, because in this group we are doing a kind of mentoring
of each other, of teacher candidates eventually, and of our students. And I'm here,
Watching this naturally unfold; what better study about schooling than one that is
aCtually happening? Participants gave their okays, and appeared quite unaffected by

Seeing me walk around with my fieldnote book and jot things down. They each told

me that in their eyes, nothing had changed.

DQ fining my New Role

In addition to being the "documentor" for the school, I now saw myself as the

"documentor" for the team. Teammates' perceptions clarified this, e.g., Bill used to

ask me if, "in your documentor role," if I could talk with different people about how

81 review the content and process of this early work in Chapter 1.

70
they were seeing each other. He never asked me to check back with him; I sensed
that he simply wanted it documented.

I began to see myself as something different from a documentor, because I
defined a documentor as someone who primarily took notes and shared the notes
when asked. I was doing more than that, though. When Bill asked me to talk with
team members, especially at Hodges, I found myself being a "liason" between the
university and school. Often I would explain administrivia from Midstate, e.g.,
when the term began and ended. Other times I would explain why some
university-based participants were not at Hodges as much, having to clarify roles
and expectations of university faculty and graduate students.

In addition to being a liason, I began to feel like a researcher-which had dual
irnplications for me. In early October we felt ready to begin responding to some of
tile research questions we had designed, and participants often turned to me with
questions such as, "How many classroom observations should we do?" "What
5110 uld we focus on when watching teaching?" "What might a classroom

Observation form look like?" Having taken a year-long practicum course in

fiel dwork methods, and having been employed for three years in a national research
PFOj ect using qualitative inquiry methods, I believe that participants felt that I was
POSitioned correctly to design our inquiry. Their belief that I could do this—and my
Mbelief that I coulduforced me to focus throughout the two years of my team

inVolvement on carefully checking the connections between our inquiry methods,

71

research questions, and conclusions. For me, this new role of "researcher" became

extremely educative.

W. These conceptions of my work as documentor, liason, and
researcher overlapped as I participated in the team. Beginning with Ken's classes,
and then branching out to observe Gary, Bill, and Sally, I observed classes and took
fieldnotes. Ijotted down what the teacher and students were doing and saying
during instruction. When students worked in small groups, which they did
especially in Ken's classroom, I circulated. Often, I would jot down bits of their
conversations or the ideas they raised and show this to Ken. When I observed in a
class, whether at the university or Hodges, I made it a point to have a brief chat with
true teacher after class or at lunch or after school. I would mention a question or
issue I had heard in a discussion, or something I saw happening that I wasn't certain
he teacher had seen. In the months to follow, Ken, Gary, and Bill became used to

the lending an extra perspective, and they sometimes asked me to watch a particular
thing and give them feedback (e.g., what a specific group of students do, or how

Stu dents participate in a discussion.)

As a seasoned classroom observer, I felt comfortable watching teaching and
lea rning and talking with participants about it. I entered a new realm, though,
when I began recording team meetings. I found it difficult to record the proceedings

While participating. I announced to the group, in spring, 1990, that I would probably
begin concentrating more on notetaking rather than verbally participating during

IIifiaetings. Ken, Gary, and Bill each approached me separately with essentially the

72
same message: your dissertation should not take you away from participating in
this team. You were first a team member, and we need your input esoegielly
because you are our documentor, they each echoed.
During the summer, I read researchers' ideas about participant-observers (e.g.,
Erickson, 1986; Merriam, 1988; Spradley, 1980), talked with my committee members,
and mulled over the dilemmas of participating in while studying the team. I
decided on this strategy: I would tape record team meetings to capture the
interactions as they happened as a way of supplementing, but not supplanting my
fieldnotes. I reasoned that my tape recording would also help me in two ways. First,
team participants had taken to asking me for reminders of what we had said or
agreed upon in previous meetings. I had the notes, and I could answer these queries
easily except that answering often took my time away from keeping notes. With the
tape going, I could recapture after the event what I had missed. Secondly, with the
ta pe going I could participate as a fuller member, and not be consumed by the task of
no tetaking. Participating fully, (e.g. helping set up student interview protocols and
SChedules, helping other members learn to interview) was important because my
team members counted on me and because _I_ wanted to continue learning through
my participation. Also, because the team clearly wanted me to continue

Participating as a full member, it seemed very selfish to me to change my role to that

Of "observer only" for my own ends (the dissertation).

W. In addition to tape recording meetings

and taking fieldnotes during naturally occurring events-conversation between

73
If“.— embers, classroom observations, and team meetings-J kept a journal about my

P articipation. Through this journal, I realized that my own perceptions of the work

a. 5 well as my changing roles were important in the overall analyses. Also, I learned

that my data collection strategies changed to mirror changes in work processes and
aims that the team took. Strategies changed as I became more and more certain of

In )1 research questions, which changed as I participated and did research on the

ta 8 In. Strategies also reflect my growing understanding of the importance of the

p a Iticipant-observer role.

Datamrtces
In this section I list the data sources that informed my analyses. I gathered

them in four categories that capture the range of information I have about

individuals and the ways they work: 1) interactions and relationships; 2) classroom
ha ppenings; 3) team happenings, and 4) miscellaneous documents.

11 r 'nan Inerie

Fieldnotes of naturally—occurring interactions with team participants, including

he or those I observed

- Fieldnotes of naturally-occurring interactions about social studies teaching and
learning and/ or PDS work between team participants and people outside the team
(3 - g- , Ken and special education teachers meet with assistant principal about

c011 apsing fundamental skills American History class into the regular class second
Se mester)

74
' Fieldnotes and some audiotapes of conversations I had with participants after a
Key event, e.g., a very conflictual meeting or the end of a set of events, e.g.,
(go—teaching between Bill and Ken
- :Fieldnotes and audiotapes of 3—5 hours of formal interviews with key participants
in spring, 1990 and spring, 1991
Wings
- Iieldnotes from class observations, 11/ 89 through 6/ 91
Ken (22), plus working with two student teachers
Gary (7), plus working with two student teachers
Bill (5), plus leading some student teacher seminars
Sally (17), including seminar leading and field instruction

“ Accompanying documents from class observations

"’ Students' weekly journals, essays, and matrices from a two-week period around

the teaching of a specific unit in spring, 1991

W

- Fieldnotes from meetings, 7/ 89 through 6/ 91 (over 40 meetings)

- Audiotapes and selected transcriptions of meetings during 8/ 90 through 6/ 91

.’ Documents produced by the team about the team, e.g., reports to the School Board
-

Reports written by me in my documentor role

75
w
4' Reports and other historic documents covering the time between the beginning of
faodges PDS and summer, 1991

. My journal reflections, questions, concerns

Data Analysis
...all manner of discovery proceeds by a see-saw of analysis and
integration similar to that by which our understanding of a
comprehensive entity is progressively deepened. The two
complementary movements are a search for the joint meaning of a set
of particulars, alternating with a search for the specification of their

hitherto uncomprehended meaning in terms of yet unknown
particulars. (Polanyi, 1969, 130)

Polanyi's description of what it means to come to know something describes
11‘ 3' coming to know about a certain kind of collaboration. I moved between
ex Ploring my fieldnotes, coming to understand the meanings that participants gave
to their collaborative endeavors, and trying to integrate my hunches with
descriptions and analyses of other collaborative educational ventures. Doing these
things in tandem enabled me to develop the concept of the enactment of
thoughtfulness in collaboration, which arises from the similarities and differences I
S a“ between the empirical literature and interpretations of my data.

5 . l E l .

My analyses followed a cycle of looking at the data, making assertions based
on my hunches, testing assertions by writing vignettes, pulling quotations from
i1'Iterviews, examining documents, stringing together assertions in research memos,

W ri ting analytic memos in which I revised my analyses based on my findings, and

76
1:: ran returning to the data to test hunches and begin the cycle all over. As I explored
my data, I developed questions which often sent me to the literature, e.g., "Isn't that
i. dea like what Duckworth wrote about curriculum?" As I looked at the ideas and

Endings of others, I looked at the ways my findings agreed and disputed others'.

A malytig Memos

After connecting assertions, I could begin identifying particular questions and

themes across my data; these major themes eventually became the topics for my
C hapters: what the contexts of the work are(Chapter 3); what does the work look like
(‘2 Ihapter 4); how do the collaborative endeavors connect with students' learning
CC Lhapter 5). Triangulating my data by connecting assertions and interpretations, I
W rote analytic memos in which I described events, and then made interpretive
c(>:l:'nmentaries; these memos actually served as the beginnings of my chapters. My
interpretive commentaries included what the event meant through the eyes of the
1:) a rticipants, including my perspective as participant w my distanced eye as
lTeSearcher one year later. My chapters include descriptions of particulars and

g e1"leral descriptions of connected situations; e.g., the unit I discuss in Chapter Five.
I iInterweave commentary throughout, ending each chapter with a discussion of the
Q‘Verall meanings I glean from participants and my distanced perspective. In

a. c1Clition, I connect the events and meanings of participants with ideas and beliefs

e><131essed by others outside the team (e.g., scholarly inquiries)9.

\

‘ 9Analysis steps are informed by a fieldwork seminar and practicum with
c>l1glas Campbell; Erickson (1986), and Spradley, 1980.

l I' C .

With over two years of data, I found myself in a deep pool of things to look at,
311d unable to find paddles with which to row a boat through! I eventually
i. dentified two paddles. First, I focused on my question which emerged from looking
a t literature and wondered, "Could I connect learning and collaboration?" Secondly,

I reexamined my research questions and followed my hunches about what aspects of

the collaborative work could enable me to talk about the processes of our work.
These questions and hunches became my two main analytic categories: 1) What
kinds of learning are happening, especially for high school students? and 2) What
S i tnations over the two years highlighted the team's processes of work?

Lmking for learning. My search through the data began with the analytic
c3_‘L:lestion: What evidence can I mount that convinces me of a relationship between
the professional collaboration and students' learning? I focused my response to this
question around a complete unit of study I observed in Ken Larson's classroom. For
two weeks, I observed classes in which students read about and discussed the
Ia panese internment camps and Nazi concentration camps in World War 2. I
followed the trail of connected data: fieldnotes, documents from the class, samples
of students' work (including their journals, oral presentation materials, and essays),
conversations with Ken, and discussions about the unit with teammates in and out
of team meetings. As a way to reduce the data and continue thinking about it, I
Wrote many analytic memos in which I gathered data and wrote interpretive

QQI'Jrurtentary about a particular theme or trend (e.g., "connecting team meetings and

78
(2:: lassroom work," "Journal writing and student change through the eyes of the
teacher"). I explored hunches that sometimes led me to dead ends, e.g., What ways
did Ken respond to students' journals? At other times I was struck by the
c: omparison and contrast I noticed in the teaching and learning in this unit
c: ompared with other units I had observed Ken teach. I culled instances from other
d ata that confirmed or disconfirmed my hunches about changes in Ken's classroom.
I eventually realized two main patterns from these data. First, contrasting the
C wriculum and instruction in this unit of study with other teaching and curricular
a C tivities I'd seen illustrated the extent and kinds of change Ken Larson had made
W i 1hin the two years of his participation in the team. Secondly, I saw the
c Orwections between the struggles we had in helping helping students wrestle with
c O:I:1flictual content, and the struggles we had working together as professionals.

W. Another strategy for reducing my data was following my
I‘~‘I-=l:l:1ches about something, e.g., a particularly stormy team meeting or interesting
c: 1 ass I had observed Bill teach. When I identified an interesting event that might
S hed light on my research questions, I followed the same cycle I have mentioned of
Wri ting analytic memos around particular themes.

Analytic memos around these events took into account a framework I had
devised while in the field. In the field, I faced daily questions about which events I
ShOlfld be attending and taking notes about. Thinking about my original research

q‘J-EStions helped me define aspects of the work that would allow me to get inside

the process. Examining purposes, occasions, content, and roles people played in the

79

work gave me access to the process and guided my notetaking and questions of
irformants. These categories also served me well as I analyzed the data. Therefore,
for each situation I pulled out of the data, I analyzed purposes (e.g., why did this
topic arise?), occasions and circumstances of the work (e.g., informal conversation,
planned meeting with the assistant principal, sudden agenda item at a team
meeting), the content (e.g., what was happening; what was talked about), and roles
people played--including their perceptions and enactment of roles (e.g., who led

meetings?, to what extent and in what ways did "observers" become "teachers" in

the high school and university classes?)

*I’******$***I~**

The framework of this thesis reflects the kinds of analyses I did. Chapter
nuee highlights the contexts of the team's work, Chapter Four speaks to key aspects
of the team's work, Chapter Five discusses connections between the team's
thoughtfulness and growing student thoughtfulness. The stories illustrate the very
non-linear development of the team's thoughts and actions, the complexities of our
S trmggles and successes, and the difficulties and dilemmas we faced together and

S eparately as we learned through collaborative relationships about the teaching and

learning of social studies.

CHAPTER THREE
THE SOCIAL STUDIES TEAM'S PROBLEM

As a participant and researcher, I explained to outsiders what the social
9 tudies team did like this: we thought about, and experimented with, different ways
to group social studies students to help them be thoughtful about disciplinary
c antent. Toward that end, our work together enabled and supported our struggles
w ith major curricular and instructional dilemmas. Most core participants,
i ncluding me, believed the team worked because people respected each other,
I. a 1.1ghed together, and cared deeply about what we were doing.

But I always wondered what made the team click; why did our collaborative
e f fort seem so worthwhile? Embedded in my question were two assumptions. First,
I b elieved that the team did work; we did worthwhile things. Secondly, I believed
that there was a "something" that I could say, "Ahha! Ihat is what made the team
W ork!" But that "something" remained elusive.

While analyzing interviews and fieldnotes from the team's work, however,
one "something" began appearing over and over. I found that the original
CJ.‘~1estions Ken and Gary posed in June, 1989, about the educational worth of
grouping students (see these questions in Chapter One) seemed to be a common
denominator for the team. These questions invited thoughtful conversations and
experimentation in practice for both school-based and university-based teachers.
Wmle varying in their thoughts and practices, given their personal and professional
i1iterests, team participants remained connected to each other around the common

p"~-11:‘suit of this inquiry, and the ways the original problem broadened. Additionally,

80

8 1
the team gained support from the environment in which it worked, support that

e fabled the inquiry to evolve.

In this chapter I explore the multiple aspects that enabled the social studies
.38 am to evolve. My analyses draw on personal and contextual factors that supported
the team's work. Looking at these factors provides evidence for me to argue that
from the original quandary that Ken and Gary identified, the team conceptualized
an inquiry that everyone cared about. Institutional conditions operating in the
context of Hodges PDS, furthermore, enabled participants' pursuit of their own
he eds while inviting challenge and change in teaching beliefs and practices.

SOCIAL STUDIES TEAM PARTICIPANTS

In this section I introduce the members of the social studies team. Five
pe Qple participated on the team continuously in fall, 1989 through summer, 1991:
Ken Larson and Gary Gifford, based at Hodges High School, and Bill Monroe, Sally
Devon and me, who are Midstate-basedl. These folks were the core of the team,
Si nee they were part of the group since its inception. In addition to these core
[3 a rticipants, other people from Midstate and Hodges have been active during
di fferent phases of the team's life. At any one time, up to 13 people have

P artjcipated in the team's work.

\

1Ken, Gary, Bill, and to a lesser extent Sally, participate currently.

8 2
Categories of Participants

Participants on the team fall into three main categories:
1. "Key" Participants: Bill, Gary, Kent, Sally, and me
2. Additional Midstate-based Participants

a. Student Teachers: Jeff and Barbara (fall, 1989); Fay and Joe (fall, 1990)

b. Undergraduate Interns: Barbara (winter and spring, 1991); Joe (winter and

spring, 1991)

c. PDS Interns: Walt and Teresa (fall through spring, 1990-91)

(:1. Additional Midstate Faculty: Leon, and the Midstate PDS Coordinator
3. Additional Hodges High School-based Participants

a. special education teachers: Susan (1989-90; worked only in Ken's

fundamental skills history course); Lisa (1990-91; worked only in Gary's

fundamental skills economics course)

Key Participants

I refer to Ken, Gary, Bill, Sally, and me as "key participants" for a few reasons.
First, as I've said, we were the original members. Secondly, other participants often
looked upon the original members as sages of wisdom, asking questions they
thought we had begun to untangle, e.g., what should be my role?; What is a PDS?;
What could be and should be my contribution? What can I and can't I say in this
context? Additionally, Gary and Ken were key because they acted as hosts for the
team's work. The team tinkered with and observed the curriculum and instruction

in Gary and Ken's classrooms. Team meetings happened in their rooms, and we

8 3
stored materials in their classrooms. Bill and I qualify as key, also, because of our
regular attendance at Hodges on Fridays (year one) and Wednesdays (year two.)
Sally joined us on Wednesdays during year two. Like me, she also popped in during

other days to observe student teachers.

Hodges High School
W. Teaching American history for most of his 26 years at Hodges

High School, Ken Larson taught three kinds of American history classes:
fundamental skills, regular, and honors / advanced placement. Ken seemed to love
American history, both teaching it and talking about it. He kept many books in his
classroom, about a variety of historical issues, and even more lined his many
bookshelves at home.

Ken seemed to enjoy almost every aspect of teaching; he could even tolerate
the paperwork! Hardworking and motivated, he arrived at school by 7:15 am.
(often earlier) to get ready for the day and give students any tests or quizes they
missed. He promptly returned students' assignments, which ranged from textbook
chapter outlines to essay exams. In addition to working hard with students, Ken
served on many school committees. He was, in fact, one of the original seven
teachers who helped craft the beginning professional development school plans. As
a loyal and very active union member, Ken served for many years as building
representative and played an important role in state-level union affairs. His
advocacy for professional development activities has been a prime reason for the

currently healthy partnership between the union, school district, and Midstate.

8 4

What I believe Ken liked most about teaching was talking with adolescent
kids. Whether helping a small group understand the difference between Jacksonian
and Ieffersonian Democracy, coaching girls' tennis, explaining an assignment,
talking with students in the hallway, or meeting with the German Club, Ken's dry
wit and humor always pervaded his conversation. Seen by Hodges students as a
very demanding teacher, Ken expected thought and commitment about American
history from all his students. Over the two years we worked together, I saw him
reassess many of his assignments. But he always based the changes on what he
thought counted as good practice; he never let his standards of excellence for
teaching and learning drop. He expected all students to excel, and his occasional
frustration with kids (especially in the fundamental skills class) was based on his
perception that they weren't trying hard enough. Most students realized his
sometimes gruff exterior covered a humorous, caring interior, and a teacher intent
on the worth of learning American history.

W. Gary has also spent all his 21 years of teaching at Hodges,
playing the dual role of teacher and social studies department head for eight years.
Trained as a social scientist, Gary taught a variety of courses—psychology, sociology,
comparative political systems, US government, economics (and he has taught
fundamental skills and regular classes in government and economics). An avid
reader in many areas of literature, Gary loved changing his courses in part because it

provoked his reading in a variety of areas.

8 5

Gary's humor and positive view on life filled any room when he walked in,
and his ability to be teased (about his almost constant coffee drinking and uncanny
knack of being able to "wax eloquently" on just about any subject!) made him one of
Hodges' most liked teachers among the faculty and students. Like Ken, he served
on many different committees in Hodges as well as at the district level (e.g., he
chaired the district K-12 curriculum committee).

Also like Ken, Gary seemed to enjoy his teaching. His manner was very
warm and friendly with students, and students enjoyed talking with him about lots
of different topics, e.g., sports, school, current affairs. Rarely did I see Gary sitting in
his classroom without a student popping by to tell or ask him something. Gary also
coached in cross-country running (in the fall) and track and field (in the spring).
Often he'd arrive home past 8:00 pm. after taking students to a meet and giving
rides home.

Gary's teaching seemed less planned and structured than Ken's. Whereas
Ken usually produced a "packet" of reading materials and assignments that
constituted a "unit," Gary would distribute materials as it popped into his mind.
Often students saw very recent editorials from newspapers, or Newswgek. Whether
reading or writing tasks, Gary often made the assignments as the idea struck him.

Also, Gary's teaching seemed more teacher-directed than Ken's; he lectured a great

8 6
deal2 whereas Ken through the years moved into a mode of teaching in which he
rarely lectured to students (students worked mostly in small groups.)
I l' I C 1] EE 1 .

BilLMomoo. A new professor at Midstate, Bill joined the team in fall,1989.
When asked about a PDS group he would like to join, he chose the social studies
team because of its initial inquiry problem about tracking.

Bill seemed to have a natural affinity for PDS work. He had an abiding
interest in thinking about the ways teachers work together. Trained as a sociologist
before gaining his doctorate in education, Bill worked on a variety of projects with
different role groups in mostly social arenas, e.g., teachers, social workers. He had
done extensive work with these groups of professionals, too, in a consultant status.
He focused on adult relationships, studying what elements promote successful
relationships that support efforts to accomplish productive work. For about six
years before coming to Midstate, he had studied mentoring among teachers.
Working with a noted scholar in the field of professional teacher relations, Bill had
written a number of articles and chapters about the dilemmas within mentoring
practices in the particular contexts he had studied.

Bill's teaching experiences with K-12 students were minimal—under a year.
Yet he enjoyed translating his thoughts and experiences from studying how adults

learn in groups into thinking about student learning in groups. In both 1989-90 and

 

2Gary and I always disagreed about what to call his teaching style. While I
called it "lecture," with some questions, he called it "recitation" with some
lecturing.

8 7
1990-91, he conducted a "cooperative learning circle" for all teachers at Hodges who
were interested in thinking about ways to use cooperative learning. He organized
these groups by asking teachers to talk about what they did in their classrooms, and
why. As one teacher presented, colleagues chimed in to critique and make
suggestions. The social studies team also look to Bill for similar advice about
arranging cooperative grouping activities (see Chapter Four for a lengthy description
of one such activity).

Sally Devon. In her seven years at Midstate, Sally served in many capacities
as a staff specialist. She managed the teacher preparation program that placed
student teachers at Hodges, and she also supervised student teachers (in fact, she
supervised the first student teacher Ken had in fall, 1989). In the teacher preparation
program, Sally led the seminars for the social studies teacher preparation students
throughout their preservice studies, developing relationships that extended
through student teaching (even when she wasn't supervising them). In addition to
her program work, Sally advised students in other college of education programs,
and was also involved with recruitment and admissionsat the college level.

Sally came to her position with over ten years as a middle school
interdisciplinary teacher in different metropolitan areas in the US. Since moving to
Midstate, she worked with preservice teachers exclusively. Like Ken and Gary, Sally
seemed to enjoy teaching a great deal. She talked with students a lot-over the
phone or in her officeuand continued asking about their progress even when they

moved beyond student teaching. In addition to taking her teaching seriously, Sally

8 8

also focused a lot of attention on her student advising, recruitment, and admissions
obligations. Even with all these obligations, though, Sally always seemed to have
time for a quick joke or a laugh.

Sally joined the team due to her social studies interests and teacher educator
responsibilities. She started her involvement when she asked Ken to work with
a student teacher (Jeff) who'd not been successful and needed to repeat student
teaching. She and Ken talked often about Jeff's progress, and therefore Sally hung
out at Hodges often in fall, 1989. Due to work obligations elsewhere (and me taking
on the student teaching field instruction with Ken's and Gary's student teachers in
1990 and 1991), Sally lessened her attendance at Hodges after fall, 1989 to once a

week3 .

 

While participants shared many common interests, drives, and experiences
(which I discuss in the next section), their individual life histories were also quite
unique. Their teaching experiences differed: three members have taught high
school (Ken, Gary, and Sally); Bill consulted in many projects, often in schools, but
had rare K-12 teaching stints, and I had taught elementary school. Participants'
initial views of what counted as inquiry differed, e.g., setting up experimental and

control groups, while I envisioned a different set of methods based on our

 

3During spring, 1992, Sally and Ken co-taught social studies secondary
methods, making the course mostly field-based in Ken's classroom. Ken and Sally--
and according to Sally, mostly Ken-planned ways to help the preservice teachers
take on planning, instructional, and assessment responsibilities across the 10-week
course.

8 9
questions. My teammates' ways of talking about phenomena differed, both in the
vocabulary they used and in the discussion style they assumed (some members
seemed comfortable with posing questions and deliberating about the outcomes,
while others wanted to talk only about what the team would do and when.) The
different experiences people had working collaboratively probably helped them
bring to the team's work fresh ideas, questions, and strategies. In short, the
differences in members' knowledge, expertise, experiences, and thoughtfulness
about teaching, learning, and conducting inquiries varied at times in the same
degrees to which they were similar!

Four categories of team participants were based at Midstate: (1) student
teachers, (2) undergraduate interns, (3) PDS Interns, and (4) additional faculty. Two
student teachers from a Midstate teacher preparation program, one each assigned to
Ken and Gary, taught at Hodges during each fall term4. They attended team
meetings and contributed to curriculum and assessment redesigns (e.g., Fay, Ken's
1990 student teacher, helped redesign quizes and tests in the fundamental skills
course). Student teachers also heard a lot about the team, because members often
attributed changing ideas and beliefs to "something I heard in the (team) meeting."

We usually hired one of the student teachers as an undergraduate intern.
Interns provided one period of reallocated time for Ken and Gary during the second

semester of the year. In Chapter Four, I talk about some conversations in which

 

4I served as the university supervisor for Ken and Gary's student teachers.

9 0
Barbara (who was Gary's student teacher in fall, 1989 and the intern for Ken and
Gary in spring, 1990) played an important role.

During the 1990-91 school year, Midstate received outside funding to support
professional (pre and post-doctorals) interested in learning about the workings of a
professional development school. Teresa, a veteran history teacher, and Walt, based
at a state university (other than Midstate), were hired as PDS interns and began
work at Hodges. They spent the first semester mostly talking with and observing
many people at Hodges along with the members of the team. By second semester
both tried to become involved with the actual instruction in Ken and Gary's
classrooms, but neither person felt very successful. Walt tried to design a mastery
learning program for an economics class. By mid-semester Walt and Gary changed
it, and Walt spent most of the rest of his time at Hodges learning about school-level
issues (e.g., faculty motivation to engage in PDS tasks). I talk about Teresa'
participation in Chapter Four.

Additional faculty members from Midstate also joined team discussions over
the two years. Leon became very involved in designing a new social studies course,
and contributed to team discussions usually by donating resources (e.g., computer
data bases for students' use). The Midstate coordinator for Hodges PDS also attended
some meetings, typically at dinner meetings which might have provided him with

an overall sense of the team's work5.

 

5Good food and good conversation, as he often mentioned to me, might have
been reasons he joined and even hosted one of our dinner meetings, too.

9 1
Hodgerbasdeembers

Hodges special education teachers, as they moved toward an inclusion model
across the district, worked alongside classroom teachers in classes that had a
relatively higher percentage of special needs students. Usually these were the
fundamental skills courses, whom both Ken and Gary taught. When Susan worked
with Ken in 1989-90, and when Lisa worked with Gary in 1990-91, they both attended
some team meetings (Lisa was especially active in meetings, and attended regularly
during second semester of 1990-91). Both teachers remained committed to helping
the team consider the potential affects of changing curriculum and instruction for
special needs students. Susan and Lisa would remind us that many of these
students had been spoonfed through their schooling. Susan and Lisa helped us
design appropriate directions for tasks, and build in assessments.

KEY PARTICIPANTS PERCEPTIONS OF THE TEAM

How did participants define the team, I wondered; did they see the team's
problem as central and uniting like I did? To check out my hunch, I looked back to
interviews I had done with each core participant in spring, 1991, nearly two years
after the team formed. I wanted to learn about how my teammates envisioned the
social studies team's "problem"-in some sense, the team's W.
Throughout this dissertation, I look at my teammates' perceptions in addition to my
own interpretations. Doing so allows me to give meaning to the team's endeavors

through participants' perspectives as well as my own (see Erickson, 1986).

9 2
Most responses I analyzed came from the first four questions in the
interview (see Appendix B), and they show the range of ways participants responded
to the questions "what is the social studies team?" Everyone interpretted my
question as a time to talk about the team's goals, though not everyone mentioned
the same ones. My analyses suggested strongly that participants defined the team's
raisonfi'etro in personal ways that fit with their curiosities and professional roles.

In Table 3.1 I display interview responses connected to the question "What is
the social studies team?" Though this table is very full, I could not disentangle
participants' ideas for fear of disrupting the meaning of their ideas.

See Table 3.1: What is the Social Studies Team?
What is the Social Studies Team For?

Team participants seemed to define the team's purposes according to their
professional duties and roles. Ken's and Gary's responses showed this clearly, as
they both connected the team's work to the work they do in classrooms. Gary
claimed the team was "looking at strategies for trying to allow the kids to learn
better, taking a look at what we're doing and what is it exactly that we're doing in
the classrooms," while Ken stated that the team was "collaborating in order to
change what happens in classroom practice." Also, both Ken and Gary commented
that the team's work was about high school students' learning. Gary believed the
team looked at ways "to allow the kids to learn better." Ken expounded on learning,

recalling the connections between learning, understanding, reading, and thinking

93

 

85%... x83
2 E85 .8 15.2... 88E 523 $88.... .0 928.6 8E8 822.
85 .2. .85... c. 988.... .8855 35. 8E E8. 85 E 8203..

88 9.3 838.. 85 85 8Ezmmm 83....858wo. chcfia E8 .8 wEow .

p.23 co Sap wE85mw m3~.>8.E 9539.8 .88 83 .23 Snow
map—.5 .58. 85c 58 $5883 5.3 cc 0. 8.6.. .85 8:530.
was—.53 .2. 8x83 :5. .0 8a a 8208 82m; 885 UC<E¢EE
885 c. .8E._EE8 .53 £5 m. 885 ..5 ..2c 85 Saw: 0. .C.
83 .8888 8E 8E8 8.. o. mE8m >8 82w a co 3.88 c8E 85
.23 .8E.. .o 8..E_E a 8.58%.: 82. 822. ..E... 2:. .coEEob
E mEE 8E8 8.6; 838%...»355 GS. 885 .o 25.0%.: 985
5.88. on o. vc< .85... 85 E. 98 maaEmu 85 co 52. 858:8
85.8. 5.8 .85.. 85 E 9588. m>o.mE. o. m. 883:; 9:...

.88on .8862

 

 

...mEx 885 =m $.58.

2.83 85 m. z .23 .32... x55 o. 58: 83 can 385...... .mi

83 anew .88.:5 885 2:. a: 55. 95.85 ...5 82 85 .968
o. 8.5:. 8E8 822 8_n8n_...8m..:oo 85 .a EoE 9.00. E88. 85 8
m.8E.885 898 .c 53.8. .0 5:... 30: a. 858.58 8585.58.
o. 39. E8. 855% .398 E 2858. .8538 85 wait... 83 883
3oz...co_.8:8 858. .m xoo. 8.8 o. 83 .8“. 5:08.. <...8wcm£u
..me o. .8283 83 852.3 8285 98 8&8: .m E23589
8:03.... :88 85 .a x8. 0. .83 mEEEB 85 .s 828.5...

 

83.82 Emuwoi

 

...P

3.8

 

E8 H 853m
.88 2.. .o 8:280

...E8... 853m .mmuom 85
5m 28...

802.8“.

m. .23

€85.th

 

94

 

 

 

.305. 80... 85 .23 .8 .8w 0. .C. 0. 00 0.:00 83 .2. ES... .850
8E0... 0:8 m.c8Em8m8 83.28.... .8 wc.0.00. 0:8...--wc.cc8.a 85 0:8
.. ”3.0: 8..83 30... $500 8..83 .23 .8 .00. a we}... 8:0... 8 8 m.
wc.0.0 8. E8. 85 .2. 89...... 22082 2.8. 85 .0 8:0 .E00.m8.0
85 :. w:.00 8..83 .85 2.088 .. m. .23 .05. 9:00 883 .23

.8 0.00. 8 9.0.2 ..8..8.. ...8. 0. 80... 85 30:8 0. war... .0. 8.8.8.8
.8 95.00. 8.8 8>> 8:8. .2. .3 08E:mc00 9.8.. .0 .50.. 85

.8: ..8..0w 8>.83 x:.5 . Ew:05.8 ..8 wc.0.00. 8..83 me5 85 .0
8E8 0. .280 .0 0:... 8. “3.0.0.... .0 8:8. 2% .wEE8. 008 9208.
wc.E80:00 2058:: 822805.. 85 .0 8E8 c. 8.882. 8.8

23 8w00: 028 8.8.8.3. E0.. 8.808.. .0 8:0... 8 m. .. 00.8.38 . m<...

 

288.. .868 a»...

 

 

 

95

 

 

 

.m0.00 8.8.85 .803 0. 08.8.8.0. 3.88. 8.8 003 8.8088 $0880.00
8.850 0088 80.08 003 8.8088 ..08E88.w8m.0 .85 w0.8..8008.88
.:05.3 .85008 800 5.3 88.w8m.0 080 003 8.8088 .5505

800 .0. .08888. 89% 8>80 8.8088 80080.8 .850 8.... $8.00.. 800

.803 0. .850 0088 ..0 088. 0. 0.88m ..88 8w.8. 0. 008 008:0 .0 88088
.88.w 8>80 0. 0.88.. 003 ..:008 ... 000888500 85 83.23 .:008
88.. 0. 88.. .850 0088 .803 0. 08.3.8.0. ....88. 8.8 003 28:03.00.
8.280. ..:..0w:05 8.8 83...8.0800..8.8. 8>..8.008..00 0800.88.88
8 0. 8.8.80. .. .85 903 .0 800800 .8..80 8 8>80 ...3... 8.80088.
80.0080 0. wc..80.8..8 3.8.800: 85 0. 8.8 .85 9:0. 880.... .85 08
882800028. 8>..8.008..00 08:08.88 0. 300 008 0008308080088.
0. 08.88.20. 08.8 8..8>>...m8mm8.0 8.0.8.0 0. 00 83 .803 .0 00.80808
08 80 ...w.E .85 88.500 8 88:00 E80..8.08.0.8.0. 85 0. 08.3.8.0.
8.8 83 302 .80 .85 0.2008 008 8888.0 .0 8.8.8. 30...? 0.8.8 .00.
>03 .:0 00.. 0. .083 83 838080 3.80.800 8.83 83 08.... .0808 .8888.
8 0. 00800.8 $00.08.. 0. 08.8.8.8.0. 8..8>> ... 0. 08808.8 8.838888
80 .w:_ 085 .858. 060.8... 00 3.8308 8.3.8800 ...3 >85

.80... .8880. .850 008 00086.0.0. 008 8880. 0883.80 8000080000
88.80. 0. 8.08 80 ...3 >85 .80... 080.88. 880. .803 0. w0.088E
00858 ...3 m0... .85--m.80w .0 3.08 8805 “8:80....0 088. 008
w0.008.m.800: .0. w0.088. 008 w0.008.m.800: .0. w0.0.88. 5.3 00 0.
88.. .85 w0.5 .0 ..08 .85 .0 5.80....0 0.0.0. 0. 8.08 80 ...3 8.08038
.85 008 85 0. m. 8...... .80..08.8 800.820 8 0. 808888.. .803 8&0800
0. .80.0 0. w0..8.008=00 8.8 885 008 8.8.80.2 008 8&00... .0. ...03
003 w0.0088. 008 w0.0.88. 0. 08.8.8.0. 28:03.00. .0 8:0.» <5

 

.208. .868 88.:

 

08v.

 

 

9 6
critically. He wanted students to "make connections between ideas and
information and other ideas."

Though Sally and Bill also mentioned the team's work connecting to
classroom practices, they gave the classroom connections a different kind of
attention. Sally commented that the original intention of the team was to examine
the social studies curriculum at Hodges, and Bill mentioned that the team's purpose
was to "improve teaching in the school." Like Ken and Gary, Sally and Bill also
referred to learning, though much less explicitly. Sally alluded to learning on the
part of team participants when she said that "people have come more to accept the
idea that breaking kids up into different groups was just arbitrary and we need to
think about what it is that we're teaching all these kids." The explicit part of Sally's
comments about learning focused on student teachers, and the ways the team helps
them learn to teach. Bill alluded to learning when he talked about "evolving a set
of half worked out working routines." These actions represented a changed way of
teaching, working with colleagues, and enacting the role of teacher. Teachers
needed to learn new ways of carrying out this new role.

W

The focus of Sally's and Bill's talk, and the degree and nature of its references
to classroom practices, differed from Ken's and Gary's. The nature of the differences
fit with participants' official positions as either school-based teachers or
university-based teacher educators. Given their positions. it made sense that Ken

and Gary would focus on the classroom practice aspects of the team's work.

97

Likewise, it made sense that Sally would focus on student teachers' learning, while
still seeing changes in classroom teachers' thoughts and actions (since it is in those
teachers' classrooms that student teachers learn to teach). And finally, Bill's
reference to research (and he is the only person who referred to research) and his
attention to altering norms and routines in schools and between schools and
universities fit with some expected duties of a university professor (e.g., research
and PDS work).
Definitions Linked with Personal Curiosities

Looking at Bill's comments suggested an additional assertion about
participants' definitions of the team: participants' ideas linked with their personal
dispositions, which I define as their interests, curiosities, and inclinations to act in
particular ways. To check this hunch, I referred to Table 3.1 again, and compiled the
main ideas that people touched upon into Table 3.2. In addition, I examined
observational data (from meetings and classroom work) to gain a sense of how
people acted on their personalized definitions.

See Table 3.2: Summary Statements for What is the Social Studies Team?
H e Prtii n 'Ieas

K211115108.

In his definition, Ken explained his ideas about learning as

...students will be able to think critically...that kids will attach meaning

to what they learned...they will be able to make connections between
ideas and information and other ideas

98

Table 3.2

Summary Statements for
"What is the social studies team?"

 

Participant

Position

Summaries of definitions of the team

 

Sally

Teacher
Preparation
Program Mgr at
Midstate

0 Examine social studies c'm
0 Examine teacher education in terms of how we help
STs learn to teach

0 Now a school focus
0 Examine tracking, though we've changed the focus
on that issue

0 Now a c'm and instructional

focus

 

"Bill

Asstfiofessor at
Midstate

'Examine teaching in Hodges and teacher education
at Midstate

0 Do research

0 Design and negotiate aims and work routines

0 Assume overlap of interests on the part of
pa rticilaants

 

Hodges Teacher

0 Examine fundamental questions of teaching and
learning
0 Examine tracking, though we've changed the focus
on that issue
0 Now looking at our teaching,

what is happening in the

happening in classrooms, our

planning, and "trying to

allow the kids to learn better"
0 Examine alternative assessments ”to get at what
the kids know"

 

Ken

Hodges Teacher

0 Collaborate "in order to change what happens in
classroom practice...to the end that students will
...attach meaning to what they learned"
0 Examine tracking, though we've changed the focus
on that issue

0 Now focusing on "why kids are in various levels
of classes and should they be"
0 Examine teacher education by beginning
professional collaborations that preservices teachers
could join
0 Mentioned the personal dispositions of
participants, and team members' relationships

 

 

 

 

 

 

99

(and)...will hopefully actually do history, rather than just be passively
exposed to it... (5)

This focus on the need for students to make their own sense of history, and not
merely passively accept others' interpretations, as well as make connections across
historical issues and themes is something I had heard often in our two years of work
together. Ken focused his energies on writing curriculum that he believed would
enable fl students (in the three different tracks) to understand historical ideas.
Later in the interview he returned to discussing student learning. When I asked
Ken "What stands out to you about the work of the social studies team?", he
spontaneously talked about his students' learning.
The only thing I can use, what I'm concerned about, is the classroom
and the students. My measure...is a subjective one, but it comes about
as a result of the journals that students write each week about what
goes on in the classroom. (12)
Ken said he is now quite interested in reading the journals students write because
he is
...entertained and (the journals) are interesting. Before they weren't so
interesting...(Now) students are writing reflectively about what's going
on in the classroom." (14)
According to Ken, many students' journals also were filled with discussions
about the classroom "content, and writing about it in a reflective way" (12-13). He
8013 so excited about what journals could indicate about students' learning that he

started sharing them. He urged Bill and me to begin looking at them as part of our

teatn's investigations into students' changing understandings. Ken also copied

1 00
journals for students' counselors so the counselors could see what their students did
in class.

Ken described in the interview one usually non-verbal student who used to

write sentences in her journals that didn't make sense, and who now was "writing a
lot of neat stuff. She is really thinking about what's going on in the classroom by
virtue of what she is writing down" (13). I asked Ken what talking about his
students' journals had to do with the work of the social studies team. His response
again showed his disposition to pay attention to and be interested in student
learning:

(Things have changed) because of the work of the team and because of

the ideas generated and because of what has been put into practice in

the classroom...because the activities and the lessons involve active

engagement of all students. They (students) are put in situations

where, like the young lady I talked about, they can express themselves,

where she had to express herself, where she became more responsible

for her own learning. (13)

Ken defined for himself a rationale for participating in the team. The team
enabled him to create opportunities in his classroom where even less successful
students could learn. Furthermore, these students could learn in ways that made
them accountable. I talk more about Ken's focus on learning in Chapter Five, when

I discuss a unit of study in his classroom, and highlight changes in curriculum and

inStruction that Ken made. My point here is that Ken, like the others, defined the

Work in part according to his personal dispositions and commitments.

1 01
fiandfldeas

Examining Gary's actions and beliefs on the team presents a different kind of

case that still has to do with participants linking the team's work to their personal
dispositions. Gary struggled throughout the life of the team with the issue of "to
track or not to track." He and I, just like he and other teammates, disagreed often
about the student grouping policies at Hodges. I believed that the three levels of
courses (fundamental skills, regular, and AP/ honors) offered in some science, social
studies, and English classes were different tracks, while Gary believed that Hodges
did not track its students. In our spring, 1991 interview he told me

I really don't think we track. I mean it's a shopping mall high school.

Nobody is made to take anything. Now people may be encouraged and

okay, so there's some subtle pushes there and sometimes perhaps not

so subtle. But no one is made to do anything and those kids that are in

the challenging curriculum aren't made to be in there other than by

their parents...We don't make them. (5)

Originally the issue of tracking had been at the center of the team's work, and
though many of us had changed ways of thinking about it (mostly by appreciating
the complexities of why it exists and what it means for students' success), Gary had

held firm to many initial beliefs. Also, he held onto beliefs not shared by his
teammates. Gary believed he had in fact "modified" his position because in the two
years of the team's work

...we've learned that the differences between the kids is a motivational

difference. Now that puts a whole different light on grouping...what

we really have are kids that want to function abstractly and other kids

who do not want to function abstractly...It's not a matter of one who

can and one who cannot; it's a matter of interest, motivation, and

desire...(6)...I would love all of my kids to be able to function at a high
level in a similar way, not making them all alike, but it's important to

102

me that they all get to the same point. The problem is, I don't know
how to do that with them all together. (7)

Long-held beliefs—over 20 years of teaching practice-are tough to shake, and
even perhaps more so when the stance has moral and political overtones like issues
around grouping students. In addition, Gary was a lonestar on the team in a few
ways. Everyone else on the team had adopted the stand that whether students were
placed in classes by ability or motivation, teachers still needed to provide
stimulating opportunities that would invite sustained and active engagement with
worthwhile content. That belief invited the kinds of actions the team took, e.g.,
setting new curricular themes, designing alternative class activities, changing the
role that teachers and students played in classrooms. Gary skirted around making
these kinds of changes, and seemed to harp on the idea that students were placed in
courses based on their own motivation, and not ability. In team meetings he
seemed to distance himself often from discussions about what we might do to create
opportunities for all students to wrestle with worthwhile content. Stuck on
convincing teammates about the problems with grouping studentsnstudents'
motivation, as Gary saw it--seemed to take all Gary's energies and stopped him short
of taking decisive action to change what happened in his classes.

I have a hunch that another struggle Gary faced was what counted as valid
research. I talk about this in Chapter One, when Gary asked where the control and
experimental group would be as we initially planned our collaborative work. He
Continued to worry about whether the research we did would be too "soft, and not

have full validity," as he explained at a February, 1990 team meeting. When Ken

1 03
wondered, at the same meeting, whether the statistics about deleterious effects of
tracking (as reported in a few research articles we were reading) applied to his
students, Gary made this conclusion and suggestion:

Students should not be separated, especially between the regular and

AP/ honors classes. But we need to work on the motivation factor. We

need to raise the level of expectations, not necessarily create smaller

classes (as Ken had suggested.) We can't dumb down to students with

different texts, tests, and questions. We need to use a high-level book

and the same kinds of assessments. Now the fundamental kids; they

are still a problem. They used to quit school when they were in with

the other students. Now (separated into fundamental skills classes)

they don't. (2/ 21 / 90 mtg.)

Motivation, opportunities, expectations; these were the ideas that Gary tossed
around over and over in team meetings, conversations with teammates, and
interviews and conversations with me. He offered good advice about changing
practice, like not scaling curriculum down to what we believed students could and
could not do. He offered sound rationales, also, for the creation and maintenance of
the fundamental skills class. His definition of the social studies team reflects his
ways of dealing with his beliefs that differed from the team's. In his mind, issues

around tracking remained central to the team's work, but now the focus moved to
"looking at strategies for trying to allow the kids to learn better" by looking at what
is happening in the classroom (Table 3.1). I am not certain whether he meant
exa Inining ways to motivate students, but I could speculate that looking at what one
iS doing and what is happening would include watching students' motivation. In

Otl‘xer words, Gary also seemed to define the team in terms of personal interests and

Concerns.

104

ll . . E . . | . I 1

Bill's Ideas
Bill connected the team's work to his interests in promoting professional
relationships through changing the cultures of schools and teaching. In Table 3.2 we
see that three of the five main points Bill made were about understanding the
nature of teachers' collaborative work. I knew this was a major line of inquiry for
him. He had worked with another researcher for 14 years, and their studies centered
on the organizational and cultural conditions of teachers' collaborative work.
Throughout the two years of our work together, I'd heard Bill say and think

aloud very consciously about "moves" or "strategies" or "tactics." He constantly
used these words in conversations with teammates. For instance, when talking
with me he often commented about "moves" I made, referring to questions or ideas
I said. When working with Ken to plan a semester unit about "Conflict and Wars,"6
he would talk about the strategies for engaging students in certain activities and for
helping them critique ideas. And at team meetings through the years he would

conjure up the same images of strategies and tactics, e.g., "A good strategy would be

to have students write a business plan and use it for your (the teacher's) evaluation

(9/ 5/ 90 meeting).

By "strategies," Bill seemed to mean the approaches he might use when

Planning and acting on an idea for one of the Hodges classrooms, for his own 1

classes, and/ or for supporting discussions in team meetings. In our Spring, 1991

K

51 describe and analyze this unit in Chapter Five.

105

interview I asked Bill about his focus on tactics, wondering "What, if anything, do

you get out of having conversations about the moves that you or others make?" Bill

replied,

Bill:

Michelle:

Bill:

Michelle:

Bill:

For as long as I can remember I've loved to talk tactics. My father
always used to tell me, "If you want to know how to do something,
watch people who do it. And you can do it, too." And so I guess he
encouraged me to watch him doing things around the farm. And
forever long as I can remember, I've loved to watch people work and
figure out what they're doing. Ijust love to talk tactics. That was
embedded (in work I did years ago with a professor who told me): "We
are always analyzing our practice (-which for us was in juvenile
delinquency and training volunteers, training police officers, and so
forth.) We constantly examine what did we do, even down to things
like presentation of self, the use of self as an instrument. Why are we
doing this? What is going on?" I formed my habits there. I just love
talking to people.

So you could have gone on and on talking tactics about Ken's
classroom (which is what we'd been doing.)

Yes. It's our stuff. It's what we do.

So is that what the social studies team does,talk about Ken's classroom,
watch it, talk about it?

Yes. I think that's the main thing it's about. Watch and talk. Watch
and talk. Watch and talk. Sort of plan, too, but more watch and talk, I
think. (32)

Bill enjoyed watching what people do and talking with them. He defined his

work on the team as just that—"watching each other teach and talking about what

we see" (Table 3.1). He defined his work as fostering routines that would allow the

Practices of watching and talking to occur in schools, where they usually do not

halppen. I believe Bill saw watching and talking as the means for doing what he said

the team does-"improve teaching in the school and teacher education on the

106

campus and in the school"--and for examining ideas and actions he found
personally engaging.
Wen:

Sally's definition rang of her personal interests, too. In her spring, 1991
interview responses, Sally talked about how teacher education had been part of the
team's original work. With the advent of the Teacher Education Seminar at
Hodges7, in Sally's view the teacher education aspects of the team's work moved
aside and gave way to a focus on "what it is that we're teaching all these kids
(Hodges High School students)" I wondered if Sally's responses indicated a
disconfirming case; I wasn't certain how looking at Hodges students connected with
Sally's official position or personal interests.

But at the end of the spring, 1991 interview, Sally helped me understand what
she gained from being part of the team. She told me

I'm glad that I get to go into a school. I like being connected directly

that way and seeing what's going on...In the work I do with the junior

and senior preservice students in learning how to teach, if you don't

have one foot in reality, which is where these students are, I don't

think I'd be very good. (33)

Sally saw her participation on the team as a reminder about what happens in

schools, and what her teacher candidates face. When she led seminars for student

teachers, I often heard her make a reference to something she either saw or heard

‘

7This seminar became part of Hodges High School's restructured Wednesday
mprning schedule (I discuss this restructuring in the next section of this chapter.)
Auned originally at supporting student teachers' growth and their work with

Hodges teachers, the seminar also became a place to think about what it means to
help someone learn to teach

107

about at Hodges. And her comments were not only about the social studies team;
she commented about other things she heard or read about happening at Hodges
(e.g., what the science and special education teachers learned through clinical
interviews with zoology students; the kind of performance mathematics final a
teacher gave in his Algebra 2 class).
Sally also said she learned from team conversations, especially pointing to

discussions of Ken's and Gary's teaching.

I have a better understanding now of how to try to work with these

undergraduates in helping them to learn to be teachers. There is a

parallel...The parallel is that when Ken or Gary or whoever talk about

teaching their students, ll can think about teaching my students. When I hear

them talking about how their kids try to make sense of something or what

methods they're going to use, I can think about the same things in relation to
social studies (teacher candidates). (34)

Sally's comments indicated her beliefs that whether talking about high school
students or preservice teachers, both kinds of teachers wonder about the ways
students make meanings from ideas and what teachers can do to help them. In fact,

most of Sally's activity on the social studies team was in team meetings or
one-on-one conversations with Ken and Gary when they worked with student
tea chersS. Conversations about teaching interested her, in personal ways and as part

Of her official role as teacher educator. In a way somewhat different from other

8Even when I did the field instruction for Ken and Gary's students teachers,
Sally still talked with Ken and Gary about teacher candidates' development. This
Information was important since she led student teaching seminars, and also cared a
great deal for the teacher candidates having taught them for one year in other
Catnpus coursework.

108

members, Sally also personally defined her work on the team by encompassing both
the high school teaching and teacher education aspects.
I] I l. . M .

I have not included myself in the charts nor analyses I have done so far. I
decided to do that because I did not interview myself9, and so data on me are not
comparable in the ways I could compare responses from Sally, Bill, Gary, and Ken.
At the beginning of this chapter I offered my definition of the team: we thought
about alternative ways to group social studies students to help them be thoughtful
about disciplinary content, and working together enabled and supported our

struggles with major curricular and instructional dilemmas for high school and
teacher preparation students. While reflecting my role responsibilities (as a
documentor and teacher educator) and my interests (talking about teaching), this
definition also illustrated my hopes to learn something in the company of
experienced school teachers (Ken and Gary) and teacher educators (Sally). I also
greatly respected Bill for the kinds of studies he'd done about teachers' collaboration.
Essentially, I believed I could learn from watching these professional experts.

Though that certainly happened, I would also say that I learned with my

teammates. I actually realized the power of collaborative learning. I experienced

fi rs t-hand how working together could help me generate ideas, discuss them, mold

~

91 originally considered doing this, in order to capture my ideas at the time
and in response to the same questions. I knew I needed to do the self-interview
beginning the interviews with my teammates, and time ran away and I did
n?) t get to it. After beginning the interviews, my own thoughts flew in too many
dlreCtions.

1 09
them into class activities, and assess students' understandings. Though this
awareness may sound trite, for me this "new" learning was not obvious. I actually
realized that while my colleagues knew a lot, putting our heads together (so to
speak) could challenge our perspectives and change even our most fundamental
beliefs. In my own case, the biggest example of that challenge had to do with the
very question our team began with—to track or not to track.

I had always believed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that to track students by
ability and set up homogenous groups in classrooms, across departments, or across
schools was a fundamentally inequitable practice. "If you learn one thing in this
class," I would tell undergraduate preservice students in my exploratory teaching

introductory course, "let it be that you think twice before you set up ability groups or
accept unchallenged your school's common practice of streaming kids. Such forms
of grouping kids are morally, intellectually and politically very problematic, and you
should never do this without serious consideration of the consequences for your
8 tudents now and in the future." I started working with Gary and Ken holding firm
to this belief, except that such a belief did not fit neatly with the kinds of facts Gary
offered, e.g., more kids stay in school now that the fundamentals classes exist. Just
collapsing the fundamentals class, as I once aimed to do, without considering what
might happen with kids who had been homogenously grouped by ability
throughout elementary, middle and junior high school (as many students in

Hodges were), I came to realize could easily end in comments like, "I guess I might

 

1 1 0
just be brain damaged" (as one fundamentals student, placed in a regular classroom
and not succeeding, told a special education teacherlO).
"So what do you believe about tracking now, a year after your work on the
social studies team?" a member of my doctoral committee asked me in April, 1990. I
responded that anything that doesn't provide all kids with the best possible ways to
learn is wrong. Usually tracked situations don't provide the best chances, I
continued, but my verdict is still out about what to do about tracking. Now, a few
years later, I would point to how I've learned with my colleagues about ways to
investigate questions around grouping students. I've learned ways to explore the
issues by observing in classrooms, with real kids and teachers, who themselves are
struggling to understand the moral, political, and intellectual dimensions of
teaching and learning social studies.
Commentary about Key Participants' Perceptions of the Team
How they defined the work, and ways they came to formulate and alter their
definitions, suggest that social studies team members found ways to connect
themselves to the original problem Ken and Gary posed in summer, 1989. Ken's
and Gary's original question invited different opinions and ideas, because the
question about ways to group students is a fundamental dilemma for teachers.
Furthermore, due to its moral, political, and intellectual aspects and consequences

for action, responding to the question provoked debate . The fact that the original

C 101 raised this story in a team meeting October, 1990, which I discuss in
hapter Four.

 

1 1 1
question they posed gave way to a broadened set of questions about, for example,
planning tasks for students, the content of tasks, and grouping practices in teacher
education, testifies to the ways participants came to care about this problem. They
didn't simply join a different PDS group or begin a new one. Rather, the very
quandary that Ken and Gary originally posed held the team's attention while

allowing participants to expand and explore different aspects of it.

Even though participants seemed to own the team's inquiryureally care about
it and broaden the scope of it along the lines of their personal curiosities—I still
wondered what enabled them to do the very hard work that the inquiry entailed.
Iust caring about a problem won't always enable action. We all have experienced
things we care about, but feel helpless to change (especially moral and ethical issues,

which are part of the essence of the teaching enterprise). I believe that elements of

the contexts in which the social studies team worked fostered and enabled its
inquiry to flourish and remain fruitful. I turn my attention now to examining the
three kinds of institutions in which the work of the social studies team
happened—Hodges High School, Midstate College of Education, and Hodges
Professional Development School--and the factors in these contexts that combined

to support the individual meaningfulness that social studies team participants

constructed.

 

 

1 12
WORKPLACE CONDITIONS FOR THE TEAM
Hodges High School
Opened in 1957, Hodges is the only high school in the town of Hodges, which
is a small community on the outskirts of the state capitol. Once a mostly rural
community, Hodges has witnessed a lot of change in the last decade. Members of
two professional communities—persons working in the state government apparatus
and those associated with the major state university--have started moving to the
community in part due to the reputation that the school district holds. The
community has remained mostly white, but now adds to its once predominant
working class a growing middle class. Small businesses are being resurrected, and
the business community has recently become more involved than in the past with
Hodges High School. Representatives meet with students; businesses open their
doors to students who are on work / school programs; many students hold part-time
jobs in the community.

Five elementary schools, one middle school and one junior high school
channel students to Hodges, which is a 10th, 11th, and 12th grade high school.
Approximately 1000 students attend the school. A survey of 1984 high school
graduates show that about 72% of students took some college courses, though the

college completion rate is unknown.

 

1 1 3
Fifty full-time teachers are on faculty at Hodges. The average teacher has 16-
22 years of experience. Most of Hodges' teachers began their teaching at Hodges after
earning bachelors and masters degrees mostly at Midstate. About 65% of the
teachers have their masters degrees or are earning them presently.
In 1989 and 1993, Hodges High School was chosen as one of ten state
"Exemplary Schools." The award is based on the school's innovative practices and
programs. Teachers in the school often refer to five years preceeding the award as a
time of real improvement in the school. One teacher would regularly leave each
morning to buy donuts for the staff, recalled one current English teacher. When I
asked who would stay with his students, the teacher smiled and said, "Oh, the
students? Few teachers ever thought of them." Other teachers recall the very low
morale among the faculty, and the ways that students seemed to run the school.
Numerous discipline problems went uncontrolled. "No one ever wanted to be near
the hallways when classes switched," explained one teacher. "That was like taking
your life into your hands."

Most teachers point to changes happening in the school when the current
principal came on board in 1986. He stopped the donut runs; he tamed the hallways.
He seemed to be guided by one principle: that Hodges High School would focus on
S tudents and their learning. He took steps to ensure that learning could happen by

enforcing a set of school rules shaped through ongoing conversations with teachers
and students. And he also spent time walking around the school, in the hallways,

111 teachers' classrooms. An example of his commitment became apparent when

 

114

Hodges considered becoming a professional development school. In a clear,
articulate manner he underscored the importance of the vague but very open PDS
agenda, adding that it provided a "great opportunity to get in on the ground floor of
a cooperative effort with the university to better train new teachers and better
ourselves."
Bestrusturingflfortutliedges
Given the support for school improvement since the principal's arrival in
1986, the school faculty continually seeks ways to alter itself and the school. In late
spring, 1990, a faculty group studying restructuring designed a totally new schedule
for Hodges. The purpose was aimed at providing time for people to do the
collaborative professional development activities they wished to pursue. With
support from the district's board and superintendent, school officials presented their
plan in three separate meetings to community members. When the school board
met to deliberate about the plan, not one parent or other community member
a clvised against it.
"Wednesday mornings," the appropriate name given to the Wednesday
morning restructured time, is still alive. The schedule is actually quite simple.
Teachers arrive as usual on Wednesdays at 7:30 a.m. However, classes for students

do not begin until 11:30. Teachers use the first three hours with no students to meet

115

in fourteen faculty groups (during the 1990—91 school year)11 aimed at improving

teaching and learning in Hodges.
At 10:30, many teachers take 30 minutes (and sometimes their 30-minute

lunch from 11:00 - 11:30) to have extra meetings with students. Lost instructional
time from the three hours is made up by adding five minutes to every class period
during the week and reallocating four half-days of professional development time
allotted by the district. Students come to school 25 minutes earlier and leave five

minutes later.

Midstate College of Education
Boasting a beautiful sprawling campus, Midstate University is a land-grant

university with its beginnings dating back to 1855. It has 12 colleges, and the College
of Education is one of its largest in terms of budget. In the mid-seventies to
mid-eighties, the College gained national attention when it pursued a research
agenda focusing on research on teachers' thinking. Researchers from the College
frequented classrooms to see teaching and learning, often collaborating with
teachers to shape and investigate research questions. They held forums with local
teachers in which they explored the benefits of and designed inservice education.

Many researchers introduced debates about the connections between theoretical and

 

11Groups included the four previously existing PDS groups: math, science,
social studies, literacy, and the cooperative learning circle that Bill led had
organized in fall, 1989. To these groups the school added: teacher education
S _erninar, inquiry, assessment, technology study, community service task force, at-
r1 Sk learners study, restructuring, developing senior-level outcomes, and
e‘Ieloping a new course called "global studies".

1 16
practical ideas into the educational literature. Numerous reports and scholarly
articles stand as hallmarks to researchers' and teachers' efforts during this period.
Concurrent with the end of funding for this research, the College leadership
became involved with the Holmes Group national reform efforts. The climate for
educational reform was once again very warm, especially following the 1983 report
by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, entitled W.

This report called upon educators to think about large-scale reform instead of

implementing peicemeal innovation.
Both Holmes Group reports (W and W)

called attention to the worth of creating and implementing change in the teaching
professions and in schoolle. Following the ideals of the Holmes Group, College
leadership initiated small funding requests to create partnerships with public
schools. After two years of seeking and being turned down for funding, in
November, 1988 the College finally secured a small amount of start-up money from
the state department of education. Midstate promised to generate, implement, and
study new practices in three areas of education: 1) K—12 teaching and learning,
especially for at-risk students; 2) preservice and continuing education for teachers in
public schools and universities; 3) the organization and management of schools to

S upport these kinds of changes. This process was to come about through the

12See Labaree (1992) for an excellent analysis and critique of the different
S tyl es of rhetoric in these reports.

1 17
partnership between the Midstate College of Education and six public schools in four
districts.

When Midstate began its work with Hodges, four faculty and one research
assistant assigned to document the development of the PDS (that was me) were
assignedfrom the College across the 1989-90 school year. Another professor
provided some support for the literacy teachers, but only on a very part-time basis
beginning midyear. Since this small beginning, the number of Midstate-based
persons has increased to over 20, including faculty, research assistants, and certified
teachers (called "co-teachers"). Co-teachers provide reallocated time to some
Hodges teachers involved in professional development projects who have
particular time constraints and needs.

"Being assigned" meant that the College provided funding for its staff's work
in Hodges (or in other PDSS). Assignment load time, for both faculty and graduate
students, was and remains usually 10 hours a week. The university coordinator
went to the school every Monday afternoon to work with the assistant principal to
plan PDS functions, participate in the Coordinating Council, and troubleshoot. In
his concurrent role as mathematics educator, he also worked with mathematics
teachers as they conducted classroom experiments in algebra 1 and 2 and practical
mathematics.

Hodges Professional Development School
When faculty at Hodges agreed to participate in defining and planning what

Hodges PDS might look like in February, 1989, nothing spectacular happened at the

1 18
school. In other words, the school still looked the same. It sounded the same. It
had the same odd mix of smells at lunch, after PE classes, in the halls. And to this
day the school retains many elements and problems that high schools with its size
and in its locale experience, e.g., tardiness, handling racist attitudes among students,
dealing with students whose part-time jobs take time away from studies.

What differs is the sets of routines, actions, and people in the school. While
it may seem odd in a school to see another adult sitting in a classroom taking notes
or talking with students, that is pretty commonplace at Hodges. Or it may seem out
of place for a college professor to be teaching Algebra 1 every day during second
period in some places, but not at Hodges. Just about any period of the day you might
hear Hodges faculty members in the staffroom, often accompanied by faculty and/ or
research assistants from Midstate, discussing a lesson or planning a unit or
wondering about a particular kid's performance.

Joint work in teacher education is also growing, albeit at a slower pace.
During two terms over the last three years you would have seen about 20
prospective teachers arrive in a bus ready to take their mathematics methods course
from a Midstate professor and Hodges mathematics teacher. Or, a Hodges science
teacher or social studies teacher sprints to campus to co-teach a methods course or
introductory teaching course with a Midstate faculty member. And finally, for one
week every spring and for 10 weeks every fall 12-14 student teachers work at Hodges.
For two years Hodges teachers have held "teacher education seminars" as part of

their Wednesday morning routine. These seminars are aimed at supporting

1 1 9
beginning teachers, which includes the student teachers and new teachers hired to
provide reallocated time for Hodges teachers doing professional development work,
as well as the experienced teachers who work with the novices.

The actions of Hodges and Midstate people and the routines of talking,
observing, co-planning, and assessing learning with colleagues combine to make
Hodges PDS. Certainly these occurrences aren't happening with all Hodges faculty;
some teachers still work mostly on their own and / or do not mix with Midstate staff.
But currently, about 90% of the Hodges faculty are involved in some collaborative
endeavor'with Midstate staff participants.

Enabling Conditions within these Settings

Many factors in the contexts of Hodges High School and Midstate College of
Education combined to support collaboration in Hodges PDS. One very salient
factor in the contexts of the team's work were core participants' personal
dispositions. Curiosity and interest about, for example, reasoning about tracking,
and improving teacher education seemed to act like driving forces for participants'
questions and observations (see the section above). Participants' curiosities about
the original inquiry spurred them onto questioning and studying connected ideas
and questions. I reiterate the importance of personal dispositions here because these
dispositions also acted as enabling factors in the sense that they probably helped
participants find the strength and drive to continue through the demanding nature

of changing teacher practices.

1 20

Another set of enabling factors were the resources to which Hodges PDS
participants gained access. Participants in Hodges PDS gained access to resources
they had never had before. The partnership between Midstate and Hodges provided
extra person-power and access to different materials, which enabled change in
teaching, curriculum design, and assessment. Midstate participants could present
ideas and ask questions from their university perspectives, take notes in classes
which allowed teachers to examine what happened, and track down curricular
resources. Likewise, Hodges faculty suggested alternative plans and ideas to
Midstate teachers about what preservice teachers needed to know before student
teaching, and what they needed to think about during it. Whether teaching in a
high school or college, participants in both places found new resources by talking
with colleagues about practice, and appreciated the conversations as another kind of
resource.

The time to talk, design curriculum, or track down materials seemed very
precious to Hodges PDS members, and probably this time was the most cherished
resource. Participants needed time to meet, time to plan, time to assess experiments,
and time to talk about teaching and learning. Through PDS funds and commitment
to use the funds in certain ways, Hodges-based teachers had reallocated time, away
from students, to plan and assess curriculum and instruction. Realizing the value
of the time, Hodges-based teachers designed the Wednesday restructured mornings
which provided forums for exploring a multitude of issues around teaching and

learning.

1 21
II 1!! [1].}. l S] 1'

Another kind of enabling condition was more amorphous than the resources
of personal dispositions, time, personnel, materials, multiple perspectives, and
conversation which I have mentioned. Instead, this enabling factor was a way of
thinking and taking action that challenged traditional ways of operating in schools
and universities. In Hodges PDS, the usual routines were under scrutiny, question,
and change; just the very action of Hodges teachers taking time away from teaching
students to talk with university-based teachers about teaching is evidence of the
differences. Building on practices at Hodges and Midstate College of Education in
which non-traditional forms of instruction and curriculum were accepted (e.g., a lot
of small group work, creating and teaching different pilot courses), Hodges PDS
participants seemed poised for change.

Combining the resources I have mentioned helped Hodges PDS members
create a cultural environment that differed from other school settings (even other
PDSS). Hodges PDS became a place where change was not only tolerated, but also
promoted and supported.

W
Promoting change seemed to be the message in policy initiatives under
which Hodges PDS was created. Two concurrent agendas helped form the idea of
Midstate and Hodges becoming a professional development school: the Holmes
Group reports, and a Midstate proposal to the state board of education. The first
Holmes Group report, entitled W (1986), called for "an agenda for

1 2 2
improving a profession" in which changes in the nature of teaching as well as the
workplace conditions would be supported by changes in universities and schools.
Although ideas for developing changes in universities and schools, by way of
partnerships that would subscribe to the six "design principles", were promised in
the second Holmes Report, Midstate needed to craft a funding proposal before that
report (eventually entitled WM) appeared. Therefore, the Midstate
proposal took into account the idea of change in the nature of teaching and the
potential for partnership relationships between schools and universities as one way
to effect change. In its proposal, Midstate created a definition for PDSs that served as
a guiding principle throughout the life of the social studies team. Midstate stated
that PDSs were schools in which to 1) implement and 2) study exemplary practices
in K-12 education, teacher education, and organization and management in
education.

The social studies team developed within these connected reform efforts of
the Holmes Report and Midstate proposal. The team was one of five professional
development projects within Hodges. Broadening the scope just a bit, the social
studies team was one of the many professional development projects within six
PDSs that operated within the Holmes Group agenda. Concomitant with operating
under the Holmes agenda, the social studies team operated under Midstate's PDS
definition (as stated in the proposal). And, finally, social studies team participants
operated under their own agenda formed around their personal interests and

dispositions as well as institutional positions.

1 2 3
Commentary

Enabling factors of personal dispositions, resources of time, personnel,
multiple perspectives, and conversation, and loosely-defined policy initiatives
combined to create a supportive environment for the social studies team. Members
took on educational issues and topics that W“
investigate. Teammates seemed to welcome the multiple agendas in Hodges PDS as
chances for new ideas and practices to be infused into Hodges, Midstate, and the
beginnings of Hodges PDS.

DISCUSSION

By describing participants' perceptions along with my own, and showing the
multiple contextual layers in which the team's work was embedded, in this chapter I
tried to account for why the team seemed to click. My analyses point to one
sustaining factor: the presence of a problem team members continually sought to
solve. Ironically, the actual questions as originally conceived by Gary and Ken were
not the enduring factor. Those questions about the worth of grouping students by
ability in high school social studies changed, broadening to an inquiry about the
substance and process of changing curriculum and instruction mm
mm. Yet still, the original questions provided the fodder, so to
speak, from which broader issues could organically develop from the collaborative
work. The team purposes and work remained tied around an inquiry.

One enduring substantive part of the inquiry emerged as important. In all its

iterations, the team's inquiry was in the form of a Warning.

1 2 4
The effort to learn about ways to promote and support students' understandings
about a” range of social studies—American history, economics, government,
psychology, sociology—remained as the team's core as well as shared interests. All
team members cared about student understanding and learning, and felt committed,
motivated, and invested in learning about it.
The Problem, the Conditions, and Reflective Thinking
Trying to understand the stability and richness of the team's inquiry, I
examined the characteristics that made up the contexts of the team's work. I believe
that these conditions prominent in the Hodges Professional Development
School-e.g., opportunities for people from a school and university to join their
expertise and understandings, time to talk together—provided enabling conditions
for reflective thinking, as Dewey defines it, to happen. When Hodges and Midstate
linked efforts, and participants began talking together to find mutual interests,
participants became exposed to different ideas that challenged long-held beliefs. Like
others at Midstate and Hodges, Ken and Gary formed a problem based on something
they'd begun to question amuttheiugaching. Students they taught were divided
into ability groups, and though Ken and Gary and teachers at Hodges believed for
years that they were doing the best thing for students, after reading and discussing
some of the literature about the deleterious affects on students of ability grouping,
Ken and Gary became uncertain about their practices.
Gary and Ken asked questions in summer, 1989, that provided, in Dewey's
words, "an intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity that ha[d] been fdt

1 2 5
(directly experienced) into a problem to be solved, a question for which the answer
must be sought." Elaborating on his "aspects of reflective thinking," Dewey writes
that after identifying a problem, the reflective thinker tries many different
suggestions or hypotheses" to initiate and guide observation and other operations in
collection of factual material," moves onto "mental elaboration of the idea or
supposition," and then begins testing hypotheses "by overt or imaginative action"
(Dewey, 1933), p. 107, italics in original).

This flow of activity that counts as reflective thinking takes into account past
experiences as well as future anticipations. When thinking reflectively, Dewey
suggests, the person conjures up a past question or experience from which the new
quandary arises. Or, we compare and contrast our new ideas with the previous
experiences, looking for ways the new is alike and different from the old. In all
cases, the reflective thinker who is thinking about practical matters continually
thinks about her actions, potential actions, and consequences. She sees her motions
and acts within the cycle of reflective thinking as problematic and changeable. In
Dewey's words,

[S] he makes a problem out of consequences of conduct, looking into the

causes from which they probably resulted, especially the causes that lie in

(her) own habits and desires. (Dewey, 1933), p. 116)

Individuals on the team began their work together by forming a problem
(Ken and Gary) or connecting with (Midstate-based people) a problem they actually
felt or experienced. Together the team could struggle to find solutions, and test

ideas. They could jointly deliberate about the consequences of their actions and

126

thinking, and become acutely aware of the ways their beliefs, curiosities, and needs
affected their teaching and inquiry about teaching.
Reflective Thinking and PDS Work

I draw on Dewey's theory of reflective thinking because I believe it suggests a
rationale for undertaking professional development school work. Talking about the
functioning of reflective thinking, Dewey writes that "The way (the aspects) are
managed depends upon the intellectual tact and sensitiveness of the individual"
(Dewey, 1933), p. 116, italics added). When engaging in reflective thinking within a
sociatjorom, participants can nourish and strengthen how they manage elements of
reflective thinking, how they access the past and envision the future, and how and
in what directions they change habits of action and thought. Within thoughtful
collaborative undertakings, more than just one individual is challenging and
critiquing suggestions, hypotheses, and experiments. Collective memories, visions
of the future, and suggestions for new actions and thought contribute to the
intellectual as well as moral and political aspects of action and thought. Through
providing the conditions that enabled participants to do these kinds of activities,
Hodges PDS enabled social studies team members to develop and continually revise

a problem requiring reflective thinking about student learning.

CHAPTER 4
OUT OF CLASSROOM TEAMWORK

What does the social studies team do, and how? In this chapter I look
at the team's efforts over two years, providing rich descriptions of the work. I
begin with participants' perceptions of the work, and then draw on
observational and interview data to discuss how the work was enacted.
Analyses focus on defining the work, routines and roles participants played as
they carried it out, and the substance of team interactions. Three vignettes
show examples of the team in action. By looking at ways that beliefs,
intentions, and practices shaped and were shaped by discourse and action, I
call attention to the matador; of collaborative relations because "It is precisely
(this) content (what is discussed in collegial exchanges) that renders teachers'
collegial affinities consequential for pupils" (Little, 1990), p. 511).

PARTICIPANTS' SELF-REPORTS ABOUT THEIR WORK

Throughout our relationship, members of the team referred to "the
team's work." What counted as teamwork in participants' perceptions?
Wanting to capture what they meant by this, and not just report my own
interpretations about what constituted "the work," I looked at the spring, 1991
interview data. During these interviews, I asked participants to say what I
would see them doing on the team. I also asked this question as a probe, if
appropriate, when respondents answered other questions. In Table 4.1 I

display the responses I heard.

127

128

See Table 4.1: Self-Reports about Teamwork

These responses suggest that the team's work, according to its
participants, included listening, watching, and talking about teaching high
school students. Team work involved "teaching, developing, and changing
courses" (Sally) and, for Gary and Ken, dealing with the daily struggles of
teaching and "interpreting" the team's thoughts (Ken) in order to put them
into practice.

Two aspects of the team's work were alluded to only by Sally and Bill.
Only Sally mentioned work with teacher candidates (something I wrote in my
journal when I responded to this question). Another aspect of work I
mentioned in my journal was attention to process issues, like those
mentioned by Bill. Bill saw himself working on two fronts. First, he built
conversation by fostering worthwhile habits of collaborative work, e.g.,
agenda-building, and "monitoring" conversations to check how means and
ends were or were not complementing each other. Secondly, he participated
in discussion by "putting in (his) two cents."

Overall, the responses fit with the ideas I discussed in Chapter 3; that is,
participants report that they would be doing the kinds of things expected
given their role responsibilities and personal interests. I noted one exception,
though. While all participants talked about how the team developed and
assessed Hodges' courses, only Sally mentioned teacher education goals. This

surprised me because Bill, also, had responsibilities for teacher education at

129

 

8......88.

a 0.:. 6:0. 2. .0 800. 2. 2.0.302. .m0..m.w0. 2. .:0 w:....03 ... 2.922.
.:030. 2. w:....3...:.m0. 2. .0 ....w:0:. 2. .:0 9......00 3.2.00 £0820 .0020... 2»...
2. 5.3 .80. .0 .20 2. 2 0m... 0.:03 . 20.2.... 20:... 2:20.: 0:. 00.. 2:03 :0»

.2000... m0w00...

:0v.

 

3-8 ...00 0. w:.0w 03 0.0 .23 30: .320 0.... 2000. 0. 0>2 2.3.00 03 .52. .
...:0 $020.02. .00. .2. .0 060m .02. :0..0w 2.03.350. .00. .0» ..c00 0>> .w:.Ea0.
0cm w:.:0m0. .0 8.3:... 20:30 .b...w .....c 05 :. 00waw:0 2:00: 00.. 2:03 :0»

.20m0i... m0w00$

 

3.9 .2 5.03 0200 03. .9: w:...:m .m::. E.. 3.3.2.0....05

5.20:. 0. w:..¢. .0:. 0..03 0m .:. 0.. .2220. .. .0050... 2.500. 02.0.2000

2. 30: 0:0 .2. 0. 0052.200 w:.00 .3000 w:.0..n. 8.03 .23 .0 w:.:000. .:02
.22.... 0..03 .33 2. .0523 .m:..a0. 00.00::00 .0 .w:.Ea0. 32:00:00 .0 .20m

2. .a w::.0w 0.0 03 .2.23 0:.E :30 ..E :. 00m 0. w:..0m..p:m 2 .... 0m....m0.0.:.
.0.:0.w 0:0 2.2.0.2005. 3:300:00 .030.» 8030.: .2. .33 a c. 2000. 0.

act... m. 3:... 2. .0 0:0 .22. 0:0 ...... 2.00% 2. :0022 :0..m.0. 2. .0 0.0.2 @000.
m. 00 0. .... . wcf. 0:0 00.0.53 7:23:20 .2. 0. 0.2...200 0. 2...... .2. 6......23
05. 03:00 32.0:000 00.39.. 2. c. 00 2:05. 03 2.30.302. .m0.:..0 .0 .0:... .23
v.03 0&0. .:000. <...w:..md.0...cd .m:.. m. .2.0 2... ... .0 ..2 2 0.:03 .2.....w:..00:.
2. 22.:0 2.... .m... 2. 2:02: :: w:.E.:. 0.... 3.02 00:00..:. 0. .... 0:: .0w.0:.0
0.:00 0:... .23 .m0ww:m .0 w:.w.0E0 2 0. E00. .2. mE.0: .0 ..0m 2. 02.0.00 .02
2 0.:00 .2. :0..mm.0>:00 .0 0:... 2. .000E 0. n.0,. .2. 8.6:. 00.2. .....:...:.. m...
.0523 .307... 0:0 w:.0m m. .. 302 w:.20.a3...:0..mm.0>:00 2. d: w:.0..:n 2 0.:03 ...

0.0.00.2
.0 880.05 ..mm<

...m

 

3-... ...m30.>..0.:. 200:... 2.0. 2:3 .:0 0092 .0 0:...

m. 0:00 0?. w:.:. .00. ...:0 2. 0:0 .0:... 0>2 ..:00 .2. ....0.0. w... 20> a w:...«. 0.:
00w. .0: 2:03 :9. :2. .E2. w:.w:20 0:0 w:.d0.0>00 0:». £0.58 2. .:000 w:.0..a.
....moE 0.03 0.000: :23 06.. a ... 2.00 :9. .. .2203. 200:... 0::0.a 20.92020
2. :. 009.20 0.0:. 0:. 00m 2:03 :0»...w:.:0a0. .:00:.m m:..:0 .:0 0E8

:0» .. 02002 0200. :9. 30.. .0 0:... 0L. :0 0:0:00 2:03 w:.00 0E 38 :0; .23..

0.0.20.2
.m .wS. 6030.:
:0..m.mn.0.n.

.2000...

...am

 

 

1.03 ...3. .:0na 3.2.0.22

 

:Omznan—

 

.:«flo...amr

 

2.03 :50... .:000 m..0n.0~.-..0m
..v 030....

 

1 3O
Hodges. Yet I believe he saw these as separate from his team work, while
Sally and I integrated teacher education with our team efforts. Sally and I
worked directly with the student teachers (in Sally's role as program manager
and Social Studies Coordinator and my role as field instructor) in helping
them learn to teach social studies in non-traditional ways. Bill, however, had
no teacher education responsibilities during the team's first year, and in year
two he worked in a school-wide teacher education effort (helping to design
and coordinate a Teacher Education Seminar for all mentors and student
teachers) and program-wide effort at Midstate (coordinating secondary
student teaching). Teacher education, therefore, was not part of Bill's team
responsibilities as it was for Sally and me.

Another pattern is that both Sally and Bill focused their comments
around W team work, while Ken and Gary emphasized
in-classroom work. Sally said I would see her "engaged in the discussions
around student teaching," and not so involved in course development. She
mentioned doing student interviews as her only in-classroom work. Bill
talked about his focus on building and sustaining discussion, which is also
mostly out-of-classroom work. Ken and Gary focused on their W
responsibilities. They mentioned how they "have to teach this class" (Gary)
and actually "carry out the thought of the team (by) writing the lesson,
managing it, working out the logistics" (Ken). All participants noted the

worth of conversation, something that happens in and out of classrooms.

1 31
ENACTING THE WORK

See Figure 4.1: Forms and Content of Social Studies Team Work

In Figure 4.1 I graphically display the two kinds of occasions for the
team's work: classroom work and out-of-classroom work (in interviews, both
Ken and Bill referred to the team's work using these same categories). In
"classroom work" I include observations, feedback about what the teacher(s) '
and observer(s) saw, and often on the spot discussions between team
participants about the teaching and learning they watched (e.g., while
students talked in small groups). In classrooms, the team also conducted
clinical interviews with students. In Chapter Five I analyse in-classroom
work by looking at the team's work in Ken Larson's classes.

In this chapter I look at team work that happened out of classroom
settings. Out-of-classroom work provided opportunities to step back from
observations, interviews, and samples of student work and assess what was
happening in order to design new curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
At times, the team studied students' cumulative records, talked with special
education teachers about ways to alter instruction with special needs students,
and read research reports analyzing the effects of different forms of
curriculum, instruction, testing, and student organization in classrooms and
across departments. Studies of its own work and others' inquiries (e.g.,

hearing what colleagues at Hodges were studying) helped team participants

132

xuoz Emma mowvaum Hmaoom mo muauucoo van mahom u~.< ouamwm

 

 

«0.92:... E! 802
30:28.... do 5:026:00
can “to; «5 .o €35

 

 

 

0528983:
«:83» ...3 330235
.E:_:u_t:o 9:838

v5 9.282 6553... Sean
coiaauwfi v5 sanctum“.

 
    

 

 

 

F

 

fo>> Eoouwwm_o;o-SO

“to; En»... «gnaw Eoom do «22:00 a «Econ.

J

 

«8023.3

3:38 55 05558.8
33 9.25.93 628:3...
Juan—x8. dob-3830

 

 

8:93 5 an»

as. an 2.8va .23
Sean cofiwaoafi 93
x03?! .cowatuano

 

Ute; Eoccwwfiu

 

 

133

construct ideas and theoretical principles which they used to design new
curriculum and instruction.
Out-of-Classroom Work

Out-of-class work happened in two ways: formal team meetings and
informal conversations among members. During the two years I participated,
45 formal meetings took place. Formal meetings occurred on the average of
three per month, and most or all members attended. I define formal
meetings as those times that we planned ahead to meet at a certain time and
place, and had particular purposes. In 1989-90, we scheduled our own
meetings around the fringes; e.g., Ken and Gary's preparation periods and
lunches. We also created "dinner meetings" where members hosted a
meeting over dinner at their homes. Beginning in the summer, 1990, we had
institutional support for meetings. Midstate arranged a 9—day summer
institute in 1990 in which we had daily time to discuss plans for the
upcoming year. In 1990-91 when Hodges adopted a restructured schedule, we
met during the designated time on Wednesday mornings.

"Side conversations, on the fly" chats, smoking room talknthese
were the many names my teammates gave to the informal conversations that
occurred during Gary or Ken's preparation periods, after school, or during
lunch At times they arose spontaneously as teammates tended to their

responsibilities; e. g., Bill and Ken both retreat to the smoking room for a

quick smoke after lunch. Many times these talks were planned, though,

1 34
especially by Bill. Given his experiences working in collaborative efforts with
and without teachers, Bill believed that often the best talks take place out of a
meeting. Let folks know what each other is thinking, he told me many times
over the two years, and then they can come to the meeting with their ideas
and arguments outlined. Meetings then became times when plans of action
emerge, instead of just places where initial ideas get explained and then more
meetings need to happen before action can be taken.

Informal chats needed two kinds of enabling conditions. First,
participants needed to have time (e.g., reallocated time in which someone
else taught their class) and to be in the same place (e.g., university-based
members needed to be at Hodges). Also, team participants worked in a school
in which they were encouraged to break with tradition and actually talk with
peers about teaching. As a team member, I used to take-for-granted what I
now see (with my "distanced eye") as the privilege of "talking teaching," as I
used to call it; talking about teaching had become an endorsed routine
structurally and administratively at Hodges.

Aside from formal meetings and informal conversations, the team
often worked together in other Hodges PDS contexts. For instance, the four
key members and I also attended the Teacher Education Seminar in the
school. At times we met while fulfilling other engagements, e.g., being
interviewed for a story in the local newspaper about our PDS. And still other

times we made presentations together about our general work (e. g., to the

135

local school board) and specific parts of the work (e.g., how literacy instruction
is part of teaching social studies, which we talked about at a state conference.)
Out-of Class Team Content

What did out-of-class work look like? How did the team work? What
did members do and talk about? These questions provide the framework for
this next section. In order to capture what the team did, I looked across the
content of team meetings, my fieldnotes about informal conversations, and
what members recounted in their interviews. To guide the reader, I provide
a graphic representation of a time line with the territory we covered in our
meetings and a small sense of the changes in processes over the two years.
(See Figure 4.2: Social Studies Team Time-Line.)

llll 12°12! H II ”.1 7

I begin with the question of what did out—of-class work look like.
Wanting to begin with team members' perspectives, I looked back at the
spring, 1991, interview when I asked participants what I might see if I were a
journalist observing the team. Bill offered an interesting set of pictures:

It seems to me some days you may see something that made you

wonder whether there was a team at all. People sort of show up

and it's not clear what the agenda is. Talk wanders from this

and that to things that are going on in the school...On other

occasions you would see one or more people from the

university, or one or more of the Hodges teachers, more typically

one engaged in a fairly pointed conversation about what was

going to happen in a class or what had happened...For example,

the potential virtue of a primary document in history. We're

talking about what might be done with it and simultaneously

trying to figure out what that document had to do with the
objective of teaching history that was also conceptual...On other

136

 

 

T' ‘- a
F Social Studies Team Time-Line
+ Februay 89 - Initial PDS meetings
_ “What is a PDS?"

June 89 Initial 88 team meetings
Proposal for study of existing practices

and potential innovations

October 89 Regula SS team meetings begin
Classoom observations begin

 

 

 

C wno )L WHAT QC ABOUT 2

 

  
  
  
  

 

 

 

 

 

. Teacha candidates ‘ . Discussion (Questions and issues

- Experienced - Expe'imentation about:
classroom teachers - Study - Curriculum

. University-based - Instruction
teaches - Student organization

. lfigh school Social - Student and teacher
Studies students J K roles ' J

 

 

Januay 91 'Conllict 8; W3’ semester unit begins

Mach 91 C8.W‘s 'World We ll' unit begins

April 91

 

 

 

C

Figure 4.2: Social Studies Team Time Line

137

occasions you would see them around somebody's dinner table,

drinking wine and talking about what has been up over a period

of months and what ought to be happening next, and then of

course just shooting the breeze about the weather. (p. 3—4)

Comments from other teammates (see Tables 3.1 and 4.1 as well as
elsewhere in formal interviews and informal chats) and my own
interpretations paint similar portraits of team meetings. In fact, Ken used
some of the same verbs Bill alluded to: participants would be "talking,
thinking, listening, interacting, and watching." (4) Everyone also mentioned,
as I did, too, in my journal, that conversations had a mix of humor and
seriousness. Ken and Gary had a history of 20 years of working together, and
often made quips to each other about coaching (which they both did), about
coffee-drinking (which Gary did in copious amounts), about the differences in
their teaching styles (Ken planned and readied everything weeks ahead, while
Gary was more last minute). Bill, Sally, and I fell right into this norm of
teasing ourselves.

When meeting as a team, we usually congregated in Gary's classroom
since it was larger. Participants usually walked in talking, or started talking to
someone as soon as they entered (team members seemed never short on
words!). Pulling student chairs into a circle, usually university-based people
pulled out notepaper while school-based people often had materials they
were teaching with. Informal conversations happened mostly at Hodges

since that's where we all would see each other, and we mostly talked in the

teacher staffroom during a lunch or preparation period.

1 38
Hora: Did the Ieam Work?

I found a number of similarities across the 45 meetings and informal
conversations. A few routines emerged, for example, that remained salient
despite the diversity of topics, structural changes, and changes in personnel.
Also, though participants took on a variety of roles, the roles they took
became quite predictable.

Routines

The team's work developed a kind of seasonal rythmn that remains
intact even presently. Since student teachers worked in Hodges during fall
term, the usual conversations were around their progress and learning. By
winter, we turned our attention to designing curriculum and by mid-spring
we looked at what we hoped would happen next year. The end of spring and
summer found us working on end-of—year reports and new proposals.

Many routines also developed within meetings. One routine I call
"attempted and actual agenda-making." Bill introduced the idea of making
an agenda at the beginning of each meeting at the start of our work in fall,
1989. We did this in other collaborative work, he told me, and I believe it's
useful because it invites everyone's ideas to come onto the table (2 / 11 / 9O
fieldnotes). I call the routine "attempted" because many times the
agenda-making never got finished before the team started discussing the idea
or question! Sometimes Bill would act directly to keep agenda-building going

by asking people to list the item and hold their discussion; this seemed to

1 39
happen especially around logistical stuff, e.g., setting up a dinner meeting. He
seemed to let the discussion begin, however, when Ken or Gary wanted to tell
about incidents in their classroom.

The opening of meetings always came when Bill asked for agenda
items. People usually stopped talking (but not always!) Agenda-making
proceeded by participants saying what they needed and wanted to address in
the current meeting. Bill kept track, and especially when we had a lot of
items we called for the team to rank order what to discuss via immediacy.

Another salient commonality across all the team meetings was their
lack of closure. When we discussed a class or curriculum, we discussed it
until we had no more time or, if Bill was keeping us to an agenda, when Bill
suggested we move to attend to other business. No one was ever held to
committing to try something that we had discussed. In addition to no formal
commitment, meetings never seemed officially to end; they simply stopped
when the school bell rang signalling the end of the period or another meeting
beckoned participants. When I raised this observation with Bill in the middle
of our second year, he smiled but did not seem surprised. Maybe that's so, he
speculated, so that no one—especially the teachers—feels "trapped" into
agreeing to do something he might be uncomfortable with (January, 1991
fieldnotes).

Usually after team meetings, we had a schedule-making time when

participants checked with each other about plans for the day. Again, no one

1 4 0

said, "Check schedules." But, participants usually milled about sharing--if
Hodges teachers-what they were going to teach or, if Midstate
teachers-whom they planned to observe. Usually, Midstate people talked
with the Hodges person they had been working with; e.g., given my interests,
I had worked a lot with Ken to plan curriculum, so it made sense that I often
"hung out"—which was what we often called observing--in his classroom.

Out of team meetings, Bill and I developed some routines, too. Mostly,
we agreed to check with each other over the course of a day about logistics; in
what classrooms would Bill be and where would I be? We started this
because we didn't want to crowd Ken and Gary; too many observers did not
make sense to any of us. But by the middle of our first year Bill and I realized
how much we counted on this time together. We used to seek each other
out, set times to meet, and sometimes talk later or the next day on the
telephone. Conversations enabled us to describe what we saw and heard in
classrooms at Hodges and how we interpreted it, e.g., Listen to what I heard
Steven say in Gary's 5th period. What do you think he might have been
thinking?, or "Groupwork around what it meant to live in the Progressive
Era is working as we planned, but I'm not sure if the kids are into it." At
times, these conversations got picked up later, when Ken or Gary were
around. Also, these kinds of conversations about teaching and learning
incidents and/ or curriculum design and evaluation often invited other

teachers in the staffroom, which was where Bill and I usually talked, to join

141

in. We welcomed those moments, feeling like we were part of a community
larger than just the teaml.
Roles

Over the two years of the team's work, participants took on roles that
they continued playing throughout our time together. Gary and Ken, for
example, continued to be the classroom specialists who put into action the
team's ideas. Sally maintained her involvement mostly with teacher
education, yet also kept up her questioner and clarifier role. Bill played a kind
of jack-of-all trades; he synthesized ideas while summarizing discussions, and
extended the team's thinking and possibilities for action. Though I altered
my official roles when I moved from a PDS documenter to working only on
the team, and when I decided to study the team's work while doing it, I, too,
continued as a notetaker, questioner, and liason between Hodges mentor
teachers and the university-based teacher preparation program (see my

extended discussion about my role in Chapter Two). In Chapters One and

 

1Other Hodges teachers eventually asked Bill and me to observe in
their classrooms, too. For Bill, these requests came from teachers who
attended weekly and bi-weekly cooperative learning circle" meetings in
which they discussed their attempts to teach ideas through cooperative
learning strategies. Bill volunteered, and about 10 teachers took him up on it,
to watch classes and talk about what he saw. Teachers also talked with him
about planning ideas. For me, many requests came in the first year of the
team's work when I was also a PDS documentor. Teachers often thought I
could understand something they were trying to do if I saw it. The more time
I spent at Hodges, the more teachers started talking with me about ideas they
had and asking me to observe. Bill and I both fielded more and more
observation requests the more time we spent at Hodges.

1 42

Three, and later in this chapter, I describe examples of participants enacting
these roles in team meetings, in informal conversations, and in teaching.

These roles remained quite salient and predictable across the two years,
and I wondered why that was the case. Also, I wondered if I was the only
participant who noticed their sustainability. In order to examine these
questions I looked back at the spring interviews to see the ways participants
perceived their teammates acting; did they see the same things I saw? I
examined each time a participant talked about a colleague, and especially
looked at the responses when I asked directly, "What would I see other
members of the team doing?"

In many ways my teammates' perceptions fit the impressions I had.
They painted a picture of participants doing many different things, but
overlapping around the team's main purposes of tinkering with curriculum
and instruction, talking about it, and considering the best ways to help
students understand (e.g., what forms of grouping facilitated learning?) Yet
in one important way my teammates' perceptions differed from my own, and
that came out when they talked about (or didn't talk about) what Sally did,
and why and how. I was surprised that Bill never mentioned Sally's role;
when he explained what the team looked like (see the section above), he
never mentioned the teacher education focuses. Both Ken and Gary defined
Sally's role on the team quite vaguely, believing that because Sally

concentrated her energies on teacher preparation she wasn't really involved

143

on the team. "Sally is not that involved with the team...She does a lot of
work with the student teacher and the mentor program, like setting up the
situation," said Gary (p. 10), while Ken believed that Sally was "sort of" a
member, because she

hasn't been that much a part of the actual classroom...She is sort

of an adjunct. She's interested in it; she participates to the extent

that she can, but she has a lot of other things to do. I think her

university work precludes her from really becoming part of the

team...And that's a shame (because) she has a lot of ideas and

she's a bright person. I'd like to see her in a position of doing

more things like a Michelle or Bill. (p. 3)

These reactions surprised me, because in my view Sally's teacher
education work counted as teamwork; she played the role of teacher educator.
In the team's first year, she supervised the student teachers with whom Ken
and Gary worked, and led seminars (at Hodges and Midstate) in which those
student teachers participated. In year two, though I supervised the students,
Sally often talked with me about them, and Ken and Gary heard and knew
that Sally and I conferred a lot. I saw Sally as playing an important role on the
team because I saw the teacher preparation aspects of her work feeding into
the team's endeavors; she worked with the student teachers who worked
with our team.

I believe that Ken's, Gary's, and Bill's comments reveal their beliefs
that work in teacher education did not constitute a major part of the team's

work. Sally became less of a member because her job focused more on teacher

preparation than work at Hodges. This perception, perhaps, also had to do

1 44
with Ken and Gary's views that participating on the team meant heing_at
Hodges. Their perception of Sally being less of a member seems based on her
lack of presence at Hodges. Ken and Gary held similar ideas about Teresa's
"adjunct" status on the team. Like Sally, Teresa went to Hodges only for team
meetings and she even missed some of those. Sally, Bill, and I saw Teresa's
lack of attendance at Hodges as a symptom of her non-involvement, not the
cause. Ken and Gary, on the other hand, seemed to see non-attendance on
Sally and Teresa's part as the cause of a different kind of participation (I
discuss this later in the chapter.)

In any case, the role of teacher educator, which was Sally's main
position at Midstate, seemed to take on less importance for my teammates
than for me. Aside from what I think may have been the reasons for Ken and
Gary's alternate views, I also think that teacher education took on greater
significance for me because I had some particular questions about teacher
preparation I had hoped to answer while working with the team, e.g., in what
ways might learning to teach within a team that is committed to reforming
teaching practices be helpful? How would such learning to teach unfold?

I explore the range of roles participants played and their saliency in the
three examples of team practice I describe and analyze in the bulk of this

chapter. By looking at the ways participants enacted their roles in cgnteth, I

 

28ee (Feiman-Nemser & Parker, in press) for examples and rationale
for studying role enactment within teaching practice.

1 4 5
gain an understanding of how participants came to expect certain actions on
each other's parts. I believe that participants took on certain roles, and kept
playing them, because they were reinforced by teammates, and clearly able to
play the roles given their knowledge, expertise, and interests.
Di M m er D n T 1 A ?

While doing out-of-classroom work, the team spent its time in three
ways: planning, doing, and discussing and debating beliefs and orientations.
In this section, I talk generally about these activities, providing the specifics
within the contexts of the actual work which I describe in the next section.
Planning

Across the two years, the social studies team planned for two types of
occasions, teaching and learning in classrooms, and out-of-classroom work.
Planning in-classroom work involved considering the worth and benefit of
possible actions, e.g., piloting a mastery learning plan in one economics class;
planning a test in which students analyzed primary documents and wrote
essays about them in groups. Planning discussions touched on what we
would have to do to make something work; e.g., how to explain ideas to
students in ways that would extend their thinking, how to assess the first
exam students probably ever took that requested them to analyze primary
documents on the spot.

Out-of-classroom work plans included a lot of logistics, e. g., how many

students would be interviewed in which classrooms; should the team request

1 46
meeting time on Wednesday mornings? Planning dominated the team's
agendas at the beginning of each semester and especially at the end of each
school year in part due to institutional obligations. All PDS participants were
required to complete end-of-year progress reports (which I usually wrote,
based on our discussions and my notes) and write funding proposals for the
next school year. I

At times, the team also planned ways to involve especially Ken in
teacher education efforts in an introductory course Bill taught (and Ken co-
taught with him one term) and in the recruitment and assessment of student
teachers. A few times during the two years, we planned times that team
members would attend Bill's teacher education class. For instance, one day
Gary, Teresa, Bill and I held a team meeting in the middle of Bill's class.
Before that day, we talked about what we wanted the teacher candidates to
listen for and comment about after our meeting.

Another major idea we planned during year two that never actually
occurred was to write a paper together about the work we did. Tentatively
called "Mixed Monologues," we envisioned the paper would be a collection of
our ideas, individually written and then summarized (probably by Bill and
me). At one point we even set up "writing partners" who would comment
and read each other's drafts. Finding and making the time to write, revise,

and write again probably stopped this project from ever happening.

1 47
Doing

While the team's actions focused on changing and studying
curriculum and instruction, each year saw a slightly different way to approach
it. In 1989-90, members spent most meeting time looking at cumulative
records from individual students, trying to organize a data base in which we
could examine why and how students got placed in the kinds of courses they
had. Some time was spent talking about individual students, especially in
mid-fall, 1989 when we all observed in Ken's classroom (see the vignette in
Chapter 1). Our hope was to deepen our understanding about the range of
abilities students had in the different courses, something we hoped would
help us plan and enact improved curriculum and instruction. Unfortunately,
while we looked at the records and conducted the interviews, we found little
time to talk together about what we learned from our inquiry and how that
might shape our next steps.

The following year ushered in a shift of focus in meetings in which we
paid close attention to the actual curriculum in two courses. Our efforts
centered on Gary's economics course and at first Ken's general US. history
course (and we eventually included his fundamentals skills history course.)
By mid-year the team split into subteams to facilitate this work. While Gary
worked with Walt (the Midstate intern) and Lisa (the special education
consultant) to alter the economics curriculum, Bill, Teresa, Sally (to a lesser

extent) and I concentrated on planning a semester unit Ken wanted to teach

1 48

about wars and conflict in the 20th century. Accompanying curriculum and
instructional changes (necessary to teach the altered curriculum), the team
conducted interviews over the year with five or six students in two of Gary's
and two of Ken's classes. I describe the decisions about this interviewing later
in the chapter.

Debates during team meetings centered on two major sets of beliefs.
First, the team talked about the actual problem that Ken and Gary crafted in
summer, 1989—essentially, to track students or not. Most team meetings had
to do with this issue of tracking, and its off-shoot question about enhancing
curriculum and instruction to meet all students' needs whether or not they
are in homogenous or heterogenous classrooms. Teammates differed in the
ways they thought students wound up in particular courses, and the
feasability of combining successful and less-successful students in one class.
At the beginning, Ken and Gary believed that students were placed in tracks (a
word they actually rarely used) via students' motivation; some students
decide to work and other don't, they would say. Bill set up the questions
around tracking as a kind of test of the theory that motivation determines
placement. Sally rarely expressed her opinion, and while I seldom took a
strong stance, I kept asking questions about what students learned and

understood in the different classes. Might not their understanding and

1 49

comprehension of the material have something to do with motivation, I
would suggest.

While we talked about our different views, and especially Ken and
Gary tried to convince teammates that tracks represented grouping by
motivation and not ability (and that, they seemed to say, was something they
couldn't change), we also thought a lot and talked about how to study
tracking and what works best for students. Over the two years, team
participants spent a lot of energy trying to figure out how to study the
questions they posed. They looked at students' records, they interviewed
students, they altered curriculum and discussed it. At one point, Ken even
asked the head counselor about the feasibility of collapsing the fundamental
skills track the following semester (something Ken and others decided not to
do.)

Yet to some extent the team never made a decision about the larger
issue of collapsing a track. Instead, by 1991-92, Ken designed and piloted a
new course that combined American history and American literature and
included a heterogenous group of students. Gary continued arguing that
tracking didn't have the bad effects it had elsewhere because Hodges students
were in tracks based on their own motivation. Bill concentrated on curricular
design, abandoning the decision because, he told me, probably Ken and Gary
weren't ready to make it (spring, 1991 interview). Sally maintained her focus

on teacher education.

1 50
THE TEAM IN ACTION: THREE EXAMPLES OF PRACTICES

To illustrate what the social studies team's out-of-classroom work
looks like in action, I present three "plays." One is an informal set of
conversations expanding over a couple different episodes; the other examples
come from team meetings in the second year that illustrate discussions about
the two major issues of the team's work: grouping students, and changes in
curriculum and instruction. Illustrative of the features of the work in terms
of how the team worked (routines and roles) and what members did, these
slices also bring to light something often passed over in the literature:
conflict within collaborative groups.

Three Views of Collaborative Planning

This play had three scenes. In the first, participants are Bill, Gary, and
to a much lesser extent, me. A week later these folks met again with Barbara,
a novice teacher who had just finished student teaching with Gary and was
now teaching one course for Gary (one section of psychology) and one class
for Ken3, about the same issues. I resurfaced the conversation nine months
later when working with Joe, who was student teaching with Gary.

W:
Coming into the staffroom toting his briefcase and ever-present cup of

coffee, Gary sat down and sighed. Putting the psychology textbook on the

 

3This person was the first "intern" teacher hired at Hodges by PDS
funds. She and other interns provided reallocated time for teachers. Now
this position, called "co—teacher", is commonplace in the school.

1 51

table, he looked at Bill and said, "I need to do something quick and dirty to
help the kids get through some introductory stuff in this psychology text."
The new semester had just started the week before this particular Friday in
early February, 1990. As usual, Gary was teaching two one-semester courses
in US. Government and psychology. This semester differed, however, in
that Gary's fall term student teacher taught one section of psychology thereby
giving Gary one period of reallocated time (which was now).

"I want to use some kind of cooperative learning to do this, but how
can I do it?" Gary asked Bill. He continued

The problem as I see it is a problem of quality versus quantity.
The text begins with a chapter on normal psychology, abnormal
psychology, and then one in which they treat the two together.
They go through a whole lot of conditions, behavioral and
physiological. Now most of this stuff gets picked up later in the
book, so these chapters are just introductory. But there is a lot of
stuff in there, a lot of vocabulary and ideas, and the kids do need
to know it. I just don't want them to get hung up on it like they
usually do. We'll see this stuff again later in the semester.

Bill listened attentively, leaning in on the table and nodding a lot as
Gary presented the problem. When Gary finished, Bill said,

Yeah, we can arrange some kind of cooperative learning exercise.
It makes sense to do that, doesn't it? I mean, it sounds like you
know what you want them to know. You want heterogeneous
groups in which students get to know the vocabulary of
psychology. And we could design something in which we might
say, "You'll know this stuff in three weeks," and you model for
them how to do it. Seems to me like you'd have to model how
we use a textbook in this way—going through and getting the
main ideas—and how to learn vocabulary, how to get the words.
Essentially, you model drill and practice."

152

Gary agreed that students needed to see a model. He talked about the
negative press that drill and practice now received, explaining how he
believed that in some instances (like the current situation in his psychology
class) students still needed to drill on ideas. They need these ideas, and they
need to know them and be able to use them, to understand the more difficult
ideas yet to come, he explained to Bill. Bill nodded, and synthesized the
conversation so far while asking a question

So you say to the students, "You have to think about how to

plan and represent the material to yourself, your group and the

class." And you (pointing to Gary) model how to do and talk

about psychology vocabulary. And you let them practice doing

it. So seems like we have to think about what kinds of practice

we can have them do.

Gary agreed with Bill's ideas, and said he thought he would have
students make lists of the different characteristics of normal and abnormal
psychological conditions. As Bill leafed through the textbook chapters, I had
an idea. Could groups of students compile descriptions of particular
conditions, and then share them with other groups, I wondered aloud. Bill
nodded, and told us about sociology tests he had prepared when working at
another university. The test consisted of sentence stems that described
different situations. The respondent had to choose the proper term, among
four possibilities, for the description. As Gary and Bill talked about this kind
of test, they broadened their conversation and talked about what kinds of

learning go on when students learn about concepts. They have to learn the

label for the concept, what significance the label has, what the concept means,

1 53
how it links to other ideas; these are some of the things Bill and Gary
discussed.

After about ten minutes, Bill turned the conversation back to Gary's
classroom. "You have to stress to students what you want them to learn, and
that is the vocabulary, right?" he asked Gary. "Yes," Gary said, "I want them
to learn vocabulary and learn how to learn it. They'll see a lot of different
vocabulary in the textbook." The bell rang, signalling second period. Gary
snatched up his belongings, and asked me if I wanted to sit in on his second
period (U .3. government). "There's a class where we'll be talking about 1915
of concepts as I help them (students) understand social contract theory," Gary
added with a laugh. I trailed after him down the hall to his classroom.

32mm

One week later the same small group gathered in the staffroom, adding
Barbara to our discussion. Usually she was teaching Gary's class when we
talked. But since Hodges had a half-day in-service which the principal had
allotted to teachers' use, we had time to all sit together and talk about the
psychology course. Involving Barbara in our discussions especially pleased
Bill and me because we wanted Barbara to hear and see conversations about
wrestling with problems of practice.

Gary briefly told Barbara about the ideas we had discussed the week

before, and the decisions he had made in the meantime about actually

carrying it out.

154

Each group of students will define psychological terms and create
a situation that describes that particular term. Then students
will design test questions, using the situation they described and
creating multiple choice items to identify it. And we will use
these items in a test, adding some of our own, too. Now, we'll
have to be careful choosing students for groups because we have
a lot of diversity. Make sure we balance groups and have some
higher achieving students and some middle-range kids.

Barbara nodded while she took notes. Looking to Gary, she asked about
how many days such an activity should take. "Oooh, two class periods
maybe? I don't have a sense of how long each group will take to do it." Bill
nodded, suggesting that "we try it and see."

Bill proposed that students receive two grades on their test, one
individual grade and one based on the average of their group members'
grades.

Giving them the average grade of the group will push them to

work together. They need to understand what task they are

going to perform, and how that task is meant to be performed

together.

Gary and Barbara agreed with Bill's idea. Barbara said she especially
liked having students generate scenarios about each condition, maybe even
using their own experiences and getting away from relying on the text. Bill
cautioned her:

You are raising the ante on an exercise like this from recognition

to application. Be clear about the task and the test. Show

students a sample test question...You'll have to coach them, too,

because if you have them generate scenarios from their

experiences, you are testing them on one thing—recognition and

application-and the task is something else—generation of
descriptions.

155

After a phone call, Bill started talking again about how these activities
might look in practice. Turning toward Barbara he said,

Will this take two days? Let's run through it. You need 10-15

minutes to group students and make the assignment. You'll

have about nine groups, if we have them in groups Of three or

four students. Each group will need about 30 minutes, and then

maybe some time for general discussion?

While Bill talked, Barbara took notes and jotted down the times as Bill
suggested them. In the end, Bill, Barbara and Gary decided the exercise might
take three or probably four days. Bill added,

Think ahead to possibly using it later in the semester, because

that will indicate how much time you should take to explain

(this particular) set-up for the task. If it looks like your textbook

asks for a lot of definitions of terms, you might want to use this

format in class again.

When Gary and Barbara appeared ready to move forward with the
plan, Barbara told the group her tentative plan for teaching about stress
(which was the next topic in the course). She planned to use small groups
and have each group discuss adaptive and less-adaptive stress by thinking
about the stressful situations in their own and in friends' and relatives' lives.
"Doing this thing (the lessons the group had just planned) first will help get
students ready to talk in small groups," Barbara concluded. Since Barbara and
Bill needed to go to another meeting, the conversation ended.

Scenelhree
Nine months after this incident I was working with Joe, Gary's then

current student teacher. After being at Hodges for the day, I stopped in after

1 56
school to say good-bye to Joe and ask if everything was ready for the next day.
Joe was having a difficult time student teaching, and I very recently had a
frank conversation about the improvement I expected to see within the next
month. A question like I had asked usually got me a mumbled, "Sure," so I
was pleasantly shocked when he said

Well, I'm not sure what to do with this chapter tomorrow in

sociology. There is a lot of stuff to get throughuit's about

personal development and theories of Piaget, Freud, Kohlberg,

all in something like 15 pages. How do I get through that

without just lecturing about it?

This sounds so much like Gary's comment last year, I remember
thinking, when Gary wanted to move students through a lot of introductory
content in the psychology text! I was so struck by the comparison that I told it
to Joe, and said, "Let's see what we can learn from what Bill and Gary and
Barbara worked out last year." I was hoping Joe might begin to understand
the value of talking with others, and see that conversations about teaching
were not admissions of failure (like I believed he thought).

After asking Joe what he wanted students to learn from this part of the
chapter (familiarity with theories), we talked for 15 minutes about what parts
might be important for student to understand. Then I explained what Gary
and Barbara had done in psychology last year, telling him what our plans
were and how Barbara and Gary reported it turned out. Putting my head on

my hand, I asked, "Now given what your goals are, and your content, can we

learn anything from what they did that might help us with tomorrow's

1 57

lesson?" I had wanted Joe to think more about alternatives to lecturing, and
having students work in a range of small groups was a favored strategy used
not just by social studies team members, but also by many other teachers (and
student teachers) in the school. Given the mini-case I just told him, I hoped
Joe might have some ideas. "Well, maybe they could look at the different
theories in small groups, each group taking a theory. And maybe they could
pull out the key ideas from the textbook." "Sounds like a plan," I replied.
"Now how can you make it work?" And for the next 45 minutes (some of
which Gary joined us for) we planned what the exact task would be, how Joe
would get students into groups, how he would explain the task, and how this
plan fit with the goals he had. I even made joe write down what we planned!

We planned a 2-day set of lessons. We asked each group of students to
write a couple paragraphs about the theory they had discussed, and Joe would
compile the paragraphs and distribute them to everybody. The paragraphs
would be summaries of each theory, based on a few questions Joe and I
generated (e.g., Why did xxx propose this theory? What concerns did it take
into account?) I was able to observe the first day, and I made sure that Gary
would observe at least some of the second day. On the first day, I helped Joe
make the assignment clear to students (students were initially confused) and I
also worked with students in their small groups. Students' paragraphs for the

most part answered our questions, and Joe believed they served his goals.

9F

St

lee

WC

5le

1 5 8
Commentary

Typical of the kinds of informal conversations among team members,
this set of connected incidents took place in the usual settings, the staffroom
and in a classroom. Another common feature illustrated in this example is
that though the conversation changed in its different iterations, it began with
a particular purpose that had to do with W. Gary's original
question was about student learninguhow can I help students learn necessary
vocabulary and concepts? When helping Joe, my goals also involved
enhancing his learning and focusing his attention on student understanding
by drawing upon the case of Barbara, Gary and Bill's work helped me.

HwDi TemMemer r

Some typical routines in our work reveal themselves through these
episodes. When a teacher presented a problem, teammates listened and made
suggestions. Another common thing was the way Gary invited me to observe
in his classroom; since the next lesson seemed relevant to what we were
discussing, he asked if I wanted to sit in.

Typical, also, were the roles participants played. Gary initiated the
discussion, which emanated from a question about classroom teaching and
learning. With the idea of trying a new strategy (cooperative learning) for
working with the particular content he had, Gary wanted help refining the
task and putting it into action. In Scene 2 Gary took on the roles of classroom

specialist and implementer in which he put into practice the ideas he and Bill

1 59
had discussed by designing curricular tasks (e.g., have students create
situations to define psychological terms, and then write multiple choice test
items in which other students needed to fit the proper term with the proper
situation).

Bill took on his multiple common roles of synthesizer, summarizer,
and extender. He recapped the problem Gary presented—you need a plan to
teach a lot of important vocabulary. He summarized parts of the action plan
by restating what had been said, e.g., that Gary will model ways to define and
discuss psychological vocabulary and the concepts they name. In addition,
Bill played the summarizer and extender when he said, "What kinds of
practices can we have them do?" My roles also were quite usual in that I
remained mostly quiet during the discussions with Gary, Bill, and Barbara,
and added something (having students work in groups to compile
descriptions of psychological conditions) only when it pertained to students'
learning. When working with Joe, in my role as teacher educator I helped
him learn to identify a problem of practice (introducing students to many
sociological theories) and establish an action plan. Finally, I acted as a liason
between mentor and novice teacher when I included Gary in planning the
lesson and asked him to observe Joe teach it.

T m M r D n l A
In these episodes we see teammates discussing content (psychological

concepts), talking about ways to teach it, and helping people learn to teach it

1 60
(Bill's work with Barbara and mine with Joe.) While devising a plan to teach
the psychology vocabulary, Bill and Gary also talked about the content, e.g.,
what is a psychological concept? What do students need to understand about
psychological concepts? This discussion seemed to be a kind of planning for
the lesson, that is, understanding what the content was and the worth of
learning it enabled Bill and Gary to actually figure out what the tasks should
be. Learning to teach tasks that are strategically, logistically, and conceptually
different requires some time in organization and management. The three
different discussions demonstrate the considerable amount of time spent
discussing these issues. While Bill helped Barbara understand the tasks she
devised (asking students to generate versus asking students to recognize
ideas) and plan the logistics (e.g., how much time each phase of the lesson
might take), I helped Joe with these issues and provided him with a kind of
safety net by asking Gary to observe one day and taking a turn at observing the
next day. In both instances, Bill and I paid attention to helping novices learn
to teach by coaching the novices and helping Gary see what he might say and
do to help them.

Overall, these conversations illustrate an inherent problem in the
team's work as well as a plus. Often planning conversations like those I
described could not be followed up by observation or participant observation
during the teaching. Schedule conflicts often seemed to stand in the way no

matter how we played with the schedule at Hodges. The Midstate schedule

1 61
and obligations, moreover, never seemed to change in ways that allowed Bill,
Sally, or me to be at Hodges as much as we wanted. Schedule problems also
wreaked havoc on the timeliness of even a conversation about what
happened in a classroom, and often by the time we could talk about how an
activity was the teacher forgot the particulars because a week or more had
passed. Yet despite—or perhaps, in spite-of these schedule constraints,
conversations among teammates maintained continuity in themes, topics,
questions, and ideas. Like these episodes point out, team members drew
upon previous experiences whether they happened the week before or nine
months before!
Debating the Team's Inquiry4

The team meeting I describe now happened in October, 1990, when the
group needed to make decisions about interviewing students. I had spoken
with Gary and Ken about what questions we wanted to ask students, and I'd
drafted themS. We gotta get these interviews started, I remember thinking,
and I had hoped that at this meeting we could critique the interview protocol

I'd drafted and schedule student interviews. I started talking with Ken and

 

4We welcomed a visitor during this meeting who eventually wrote an
essay about our team. My description and analyses are informed by her
fieldnotes and interpretations, for which I am grateful.

5We asked questions aimed at finding out what students thought they
were learning, and why. We asked them to recount what they'd been doing
in their social studies class, if they thought it was important, and how they
might use what they were learning.

1 62
Sally about the logistics of getting the interviews started, and eventually
everyone started listening to what we were saying.

Bill moved the conversation to the consideration of this question:
how many students did we want to interview? Bill thought that the 18 we
had targetted was too high, and Ken suggested we cut back by only
interviewing students in the general course. While Bill agreed, I didn't.

MBP: I would suggest continuing to interview fundamental skills and
honors because if our purpose is also to understand the ways kids are
understanding American History, and if from last year we were
thinking that different tasks and assignments for different groups of
kids will be associated with different kinds of understandings, then
interviewing...a couple kids from each of those classes can help us
understand the ways in which kids...are understanding history.

Bill: So you're arguing for a comparison study.

MBP: I think I'm arguing for two concurrent agendas or studies. [somewhat
startled at the curtness I heard in Bill's voice]

Ken: There are two questions.

MBP: Yeah, there are two questions and the one question is to try to
understand the different ways that kids are understanding and doing
history. There are three kinds of classes right now. And if what we're
interested in doing is thinking about the ways to collapse those classes,
then I would argue we need to understand how kids in each of those
classes understand history...l guess one kind of study would be trying to
understand how kids understand history. And I guess a second kind of
study would be the comparison, but I'm not so certain about the/ 6

Bill: You've made a two-part study...One of them is how are students
experiencing history in the general, fundamental skills track, and
honors...The other study is how are a range of students of diverse
characteristics reacting to attempts in one class to teach for conceptual

 

6 A {/1 shows when the speaker was interrupted.

163

change and make a class more cohesive and more pleasing and
precipitate more interest.

Many people started talking at once, considering what resources we
needed and, therefore, how many students we could work with. Bill stopped
these conversations with a summary:

Bill: Well for me it's not clear enough yet what we want to find out. I guess
I'v been thinking that, uh, this choice is still coming up. It could still
be that what we need to be working on is the issue of how does
instruction unfold differently in the three levels of the system.
Because what is still really on the table and it might still really be
important is whether the classes should be any different. If that is still
really on the table then it seems to me that that is what we have to do.
If what we did last year got us far enough in the direction of
improving, then the more important issue is how does one design a
class for diversity and in that the preference moves toward focusing on
a class and thinking about how our efforts to change a class works for a
variety of kids.

Bill pushed Ken to think about what he wanted, as well as what he
thought, would happen with the fundamental skills level in American
History next year. Ken thought the fundamental skills level should be
collapsed into the general level, and Bill concluded that we then needed the
"more intensive study" which concentrated only on the general level
students. But Teresa reminded the group that "with these fairly low
self-esteem students" we need to consider not just their academic success.
"Throwing them into a regular classroom of 28 or 30 kids with not much

individual attention and being expected to function in the same level creates

problems that are more than academic."

164

Again participants began having different conversations at the same

time about what students needed, and how we as teachers might find out and

then provide it. After about 3 minutes, I addressed the group by reminding

them about a set of interviews which a Hodges special education teacher had

done last spring with fundamental skills students who had been enrolled in a

general level science class. The teacher told me about what she had learned

from the students, and to the team I said,

lvll3I’:

Ken:

Bill:

MBP:

Bill:

...a couple things she told me very deeply affected me. She told
me about students from the fundamental skills class. One
particular student (from the fundamental skills class) said to her,
'I just didn't get this. But that's ok. I'll just repeat this class next
year. But, the problem is I probably won't get it next year either. I
don't know. Maybe I'm just brain damaged.’ [1 provide more
examples of students' responses] I guess my question is: Do we
know that the fundamental skills students think that way, so
we...understand them and...we just have to design appropriate
group work...and take into account that we might have to help
them a little bit more. Or do we need to really understand more
about the ways that kids who have been less successful all the
way through school understand and do history? And I don't
know the answer to that. Do we need -

I think that's a real good question...(Tells a story about an
academically and socially troubled student)...And I can—we can
design the hell out of something and it ain't gonna do squat.

That's not the issue. The issue is we can't do it all, so/ under
what program in this school are his odds better.

I feel that's bullshit. I'm not advocating doing it all, Bill, but

We want to, but we can't. The issue is under what program in
this school are his odds better]

 

7These four lines of text were all said at the same time.

165

Teresa: Let me get this straight. Are we talking about holding these kids
in Ken's classes, classes that are designed for diversity, or folding
them into (other teachers') classes, some of which are designed
for diversity, some of which are not? (Is that) a kind of a sink or
swim mode?

Bill: That is why it's a department question.
Ken: Yes. A very good question.
MBP: [in a very controlled voice] And I don't — If I was a betting

person...I can't lay money down because I don't [looking at
Bill]--this is a personal reaction—I don't think that I understand
the kids that we're going to be collapsing into the general class.
And I'm going to underline that it's a personal reaction because I
don't teach fundamental skills history. I never have taught
fundamental skills history. I, Michelle Parker, may not know
those kids, you and you and you (pointing to Ken, Bill, and Fay)
may know those kids...What I'm saying may be totally personal,
but it's coming from something deep down that's bottom.

Bill: [in a voice that sounded like Bill was very frustrated] What'd we
do last year, Michelle?

MBP: Bill, this is problematic/

Bill: What did we spend eight months doing last year? /

MBP: I don't think we know enough from last year./

Bill: Michelle, own up to what you are saying!8

Bill believed I was suggesting that folding the fundamentals skill class
into the general track was too hasty, and I agreed that "putting all students
together who have troubles is difficult to do." When Bill said he thought I

was "going back over old terrain", I said this in a very slow and low voice

 

8These four lines of text were spoken at the same time.

Ken:

166

I'm turning back to what are we going to do this year. I think that we
need to still continue talking with atJeasl the kids in the fundamental
skills class so that we can understand the ways that students who have
been troubled in school understand and do history. And, we need to
continue talking about that and not just concentrate on looking in the
general classes because that's the place where there's a lot of diversity. I
think that we need to keep looking at the general classes; we need to
keep playing there and interviewing students and doing
observations...But I don't think that we can abandon doing some
systematic study of how kids know, understand, and do history in the
fundamental skills class because we have to try to keep understanding
those students and understanding our practices with those students so
that we can try to speculate what will happen next year when they are
together. So I'm not going to say that it's too hasty to collapse these
classes next year. But I think that we have a lot of work to do before we
do that and part of that work is to keep watching and understanding
how fundamental skills students learn history and understand it.

I think maybe what we could say what we ought to do, for
purposes of resources [looking at Bill], is take two classes, one at
the general level and the other one at the fundamental level.
And maybe not deal with six students in each, but deal with
maybe three students and eliminate consideration of honors
students. Because in my experience as a teacher particularly with
this (honors) group—and I could be full of crap—those kids (the
honors students) are so damn good at learning that they will do

it anyway.

As Ken suggested his plan, everyone nodded in agreement. Bill said he

liked Ken's proposal because it cut the scope of the data collection, land the

study is relevant to the merger and whether there should be a merger." Bill

asked Sally what she thought, and she raised the next issue of discussion; that

is, how to make decisions like collapsing the fundamental skills class when it

related to more than the people on the social studies team. For the remaining

10 minutes the team discussed ways to involve department members in a

1 67

discussion about the merits and costs of undoing the fundamentals skills
track.
(meeting transcript, p. 6-15; fieldnotes from me our visitor; my journal)
Postscript

The preceeding discussion had lasted about 20 minutes. After the
meeting, Bill and I saw each other in the teacher staffroom. "Some meeting,
eh?" I asked Bill. "Yeah," he replied with a smile, "we really showed 'em
how to argue a point!"

Commentary

More than any other scenario from my work on the social studies
team, this one always comes immediately to mind. Showing conflict within
collaborative work, and a range of views about the ways to explore the team's
original question--to track or not to track, the meeting also sticks out to me
because of my strong feelings at the time. My journal entry reminds me of
what I was thinking

What's the deal here? We haven't made a decision about what

to study and there we were progressing to studying it! I was so

[angry] because I thought Bill had just assumed we would do it

the way he thought-look at one class. I couldn't see how that

study would help us examine what kids in all the classes were

thinking and understanding. Isn't that what we've said we

needed to know all along?! (journal entry, 10/4/1990)

My work with Bill during this meeting struck me as anything but

"collaborative". Saying things like "Own up to what you are saying!" and

"Why are we going back over old terrain?" sounded very harsh to me. I had

1 68

never heard him talk with others on the team like that, though it Was the
second time he had spoken in a very blunt way to me at a team meeting (and
that was also around the issue of whether we should be collapsing the
fundamental skills class before, while, or after we studied what was
happening in the classes). Why is he trying to corner me into making the
same interpretations he has, I asked myself at the time.

Given my distanced eye now, however, I would call the exchanges that
Bill and I had a kind of enactment of thoughtfulness in collaboration. With
trust and openness in our relationship, Bill and I took on a conversation that
embraced conflict about teaching and learning. We debated ideas and
opinions, and negotiated about what to do in classrooms. At the time, I took
our disagreements in too much of a personalized way.

WW

Probably due to the heatedness of the issues and discussion, this
meeting broke some typical ways of acting in team meetings. Breaking with
the usual routine of agenda-making, for example, this meeting began when
participants attended to the currently pressing problem of arranging student
interview data collection. Another difference was the way in which whole
group discussion often gave way to conversation among just a few
participants. Both Bill and I at two different times ended these, and brought

the team back into a whole group discussion. For Bill, guiding the

1 69
conversations and keeping them on a certain track was typical of the role he
played, though for me playing the "guiding" role was very unique.

Though this meeting shows how routine actions sometimes were
abandoned, it also shows the saliency and predictability of participants' roles.
Bill, for example, continued in his roles during this second year of our work
as summarizer (e.g., "So you are arguing for a comparison study."),
synthesizer (e.g., mixing together and presenting his concerns, what he
perceived to be my proposals, and the problem of mounting the data
collection with the scarce resources we had), and extender (e.g., at the end of
the part of the meeting I described, Bill seized upon Sally's point about
having to involve other social studies teachers in any experiment like
collapsing the fundamental skills class). This episode also illustrates another
role Bill played—the questioner. He directly asked Ken and Sally what they
thought about the ideas on the table, drawing them in to the discussion by
asking pertinent questions (e.g., what did Ken think would happen to the
fundamental skills class.)

Ken's role in team meetings is also clear in this episode. He clarified
(e.g., "There are two questions (to consider.") and (like Gary in the first
vignette) acted as the classroom specialist by considering the pros and cons of
interviewing students in different classes and what might happen to one of
the classes he taught (the fundamentals class). Moreover, Ken provided the

team with examples of teaching and learning from his classroom. Sally also

8X:
58!

1 7 0
played her usual role, remaining quiet at meetings unless she had a question
about clarification or Bill asked for her thoughts.

My actions in this meeting were at times common and other times
unique. Maybe because I was doing research, and/ or because of my interests
in inquiry, I often took responsibility for things connected to the empirical
aspects of our work, e.g., interviewing students. In addition, I noticed as I
looked across the two years that I would often interject comments about other
people's inquiry projects, e.g., the questions they asked, the methods they
used. Raising the special education teacher's work was another example of
pointing out other related studies and a different perspective, one I suspected
would be regardly highly since it was derived from Hodges students' work.

Yet, playing the role of vehement advocate for a particular stance was
something I rarely took on again. Maybe we needed this meeting, and two
others in which I debated with Bill about purposes for the inquiry9, to iron
out design issues. Making the decision about what data to collect forced the
debate about design, which forced the question of what were we studying.
Since our inquiry was about enhancing student learning, I stepped out of my
usual notetaker role and entered a conversation that I believed had moral

and political implications for students' learning.

 

9One meeting was at the beginning of our work when Ken, Gary, and I
explained what we wanted to study (see Chapter One) and at a dinner meeting
seven months before this meeting.

1 71
WW

Though we started our conversation at this meeting with the relatively
narrow problem of arranging data collection, the exchanges soon became
' embedded in the essence of the team's purposes, that is, studying and taking
action about student grouping practices at Hodges. We had started the
academic year focused on designing new curriculum in the high school
classes, but this meeting reminds me that we didn't ever move away from the
team's main purpose as Ken and Gary had crafted themlO. By listening to
what students said through interviews, we hoped to learn about the ways
they understood history in order to plan and implement meaningful
instruction and curriculum and decide if the best ways to do that was in
homogenous or heterogenous classes.

Another element of the team's work evident in this episode is that no
one person's ideas or opinions determined the team's work. By talking and
presenting at times opposing views (studying what happened in classes across
the tracks or within one), considering the consequences of potential actions
(problems with resources), and listening to what Teresa, Ken, and Sally
thought, the team's final decision to interview a smaller sample of students
in two of the three kinds of history classes represented the product of

negotiation and consensus from all members present.

 

101 discuss the saliency of the team's initial problem statement in
Chapter Six.

1 72

While this meeting illustrates how the team talked, debated, and
negotiated ideas, the episode also shows something that did not get discussed.
I never let Bill know what I thought about what he said and how he said it to
me. I conclude that the norms of openness and honesty we developed in our
team were aimed mostly at beginning and sustaining the relationship
between the school and university folks. While working hard to make sure
we would share ideas across institutions, we seemed to assume that people
within the same institution (be it Hodges or Midstate) would have established
similar norms of open communication. However, we never considered the
importance of status differences within institutions that shape
communication (see Thelen, 1954 and Oakes, Hare, 8: Sirotnik, 1986)for very
good discussions about parity within collaborations.)

In this episode and the two other similar kinds of heated exchanges Bill
and I had around the same issue, I believe that status differences constrained
whatI said. Bill was the professor, and I was the graduate student. And even
though I never felt that I "worked" for Bill-I was hired and paid by funds not
connected to him—I felt as though he was the team coordinator, that my
teammates looked to him for guidance“, and that my disagreement with his

ideas was in someway wrong. Furthermore, I respected his scholarship and

 

11Interviews with participants later in the school year actually
confirmed my hunch that Bill was perceived as the leader.

1 73
practical experience in the area of professional teacher relations and I didn't
feel that my expertise allowed me to challenge Bill."
The Rocky American History Subteam

While the "Debating the Inquiry" vignette dealt with the general
question of grouping kids, this next excerpt from a team meeting illustrates
talk and action about curriculum and instruction. To understand this set of
episodes, one needs background. The team decided to split into subteams in
October, 1990, in order to spend more time than we were on the design and
implementation of new curriculum (we never had enough time to consider
the American History and economics curriculum in addition to other
business). Subgroups seemed to form naturally along people's expertise and
interest. As a veteran American History teacher, Teresa worked with Ken.
Sally and I also joined that group (though Sally rarely participated). Calling
themselves the "econ subteam," Gary, Bill, Walt and Lynn (who was the
special education teacher assigned to Gary's fundamentals economics class)
worked together. Subteams met mostly in addition to the large group
meetings.

Bill had hoped that forming a history subteam would help Teresa feel
more a part of the team. Teresa had shared with Bill, Sally, and me,
separately, that she wasn't quite certain what her role should be on the team.
With encouragement from Bill, she even raised her concerns at a team

meeting mid-December. "I just can't seem to find my niche," she confided.

1 74

Teresa did not want to do a lot of classroom teaching; she was on leave from
her own 21-year teaching career for one-year of full-time graduate study. But
other than teaching, she wasn't sure what else to do with the team.

Bill suggested, and the team agreed, to a strategy in which Teresa and
Ken would plan some experiences for students to do in groups because Teresa
wanted to learn more about teaching with cooperative group arrangements.
In addition, Teresa might help the "intern" teachers the team planned to hire
learn ways to implement cooperative grouping strategies. The first
opportunity (and last) arose about a month later, when Ken said he planned
to launch a semester unit about Conflicts and War in the honors class, but "it
would be nice to work with someone and do the same in the other classes."
Though pressuring himself to plan the unit to teach the next semester, Ken
also faced a time crunch given that he needed to prepare and grade finals for
the first semester (which was about to end). Bill suggested that he and Teresa
could work on a beginning plan for the unit the next Wednesday morning
while Hodges teachers gave final exams. Since Gary felt ready for next
semester and was co-planning and co-teaching with Lisa and Walt, Bill said
he would like to spend time working on the American history curriculum.
Later Bill confided in me that he made this "move" because it seemed like the

perfect way to get Teresa involved in some meaningful team work.

1 75
W

Ken liked the idea, and Teresa and Bill met the following Wednesday
for two and a half hours (on campus). At this meeting, Teresa and Bill talked
mostly about a way to organize the unit (see Appendix C for the document
that Bill prepared for Ken based on this meeting.) They agreed to something
they called "windows" in which students would examine closely particular
periods in the 20th century that led up to and/ or preceeded wars. Believing
that these "windows" would allow students to focus in and study something
more intensively, Teresa and Bill built upon Ken's new belief that narrowing
the scope of study would encourage students to be more thoughtful about
ideas and make connections.

Another major topic of discussion was what themes could weave
together and provide a conceptual framework for the studies of 20th century
conflicts. They tossed around numerous themes, e.g., reform and reaction,
nationalism, the fall of colonialism, national security, imperialism,
xenophobia. About half-way into the meeting, Bill suggested to Teresa that
they "play out the themes of colonialism and imperialism. "We would go
lightly (across the material), and dig in where?" asked Bill. They decided to
focus on four periods: the Spanish-American War of 1898; 1917 and World
War 1; 1920s and 19303; 1945 and World War 2. Within each "posthole" time

period Teresa and Bill brainstormed "experiences" students could have while

1 76
studying it”. The document that Bill produced (in Appendix 4.1) showed
revisions he and Teresa made after this meeting.

I asked Teresa and Bill, after they finished their meeting, how and what
they planned to present to Ken from their deliberations. Looking at Teresa,
who nodded as he spoke, Bill said

We'll tell him how we organized the curriculum around these

slices. We'll tell him how we attend to the foreign side of things

in American History. We can talk about how we addressed the

more is less idea (which was how Ken explained his belief about

close scrutiny of particular ideas rather than a broad only surface

study), and how we are doing this in a conceptual way...We'll

make our suggestions for themes, and how we treat postholing.
(fieldnotes, 1/ 16/ 91)

W

Things didn't seem to go quite as planned, which wasn't unusual for
the social studies team. But the ways they went awry, as Bill and Teresa
reported to me later, they both found disturbing. Through my audiotape (and
transcript) of the meeting with Ken and fieldnotes of about half of it, I could
string together a set of exchanges that seemed less like a conversation than
most meetings. At the beginning of the meeting, while Teresa and Bill
continued to discuss their unit planning, Ken talked with Gary and other
teachers in the staffroom about his upcoming trip to San Diego for a

conference. After about seven minutes, he looked at the chart Bill had

 

1250me of these activities actually made it into students' assignments,
e.g, the comparative biographical essays about Hitler and Roosevelt in the
World War 2 unit. I mention this particular activity in Chapter Five.

6P.
We
Oil:

slot

Ker

Bill:
Ken.

Bill:

1 77

prepared and said, "What the hell did you do here?" Bill quickly responded
that he and Teresa were

...working through a little exercise that we might work on to try to get a

final organization. Just to recount it historically. And we were trying

to think mostly about international stuff. (mtg. transcript, 1/ 23 / 91, p. 4)

For the next 40 minutes, Ken, Teresa, and Bill talked about historical
ideas. They spoke about the ways that imperialist and nationalist feelings
pushed and pulled on America and leaders' decisions during the 20th
century. Ken also wanted students to think about what he called "the people
aspects" in which racism led to violations of human rights and ultimately
military force.

During the discussion, Ken got up a lot from the table, walked around
the staffroom, and left a couple times to check things in the office. Ken did
most of the talking; the transcript shows that Teresa never said anything past
approximately 70 words at a time, whereas Ken's text went as high as 375
words and averaged approximately 150 words at a time. Even Bill, who spoke

often at meetings, remained relatively silent. The meeting ended when Ken

stood up and announced

Ken: Okay. I'm going to fool with that and think about it. I appreciate
this. Thank you.

Bill: You're welcome. Now you are headed into World War 1, right?

Ken: Yeah.

Bill: Okay.

Ken:

Bill:

Ken:

Bill:

Ken:

178

And I'll probably proceed along the lines (you suggested on this
graph.) But I also may alter it.

Well, I was thinking we could have, we could have, what we
could do is we could form an intention to start some
development (around) this point, like one month from today,
with regard to the 1933-1937 period or, you know what I mean?
And then we could work toward that?

I could begin to think about this, or what we've been talking
about with respect to this (pointing to the graphic). It might, I
don't know yet but I, well, yeah, that's cool.

Would that work?

Yeah. (mtg. transcript, p. 31-32; fieldnotes)

Postscript to this meeting

The meeting was tense, and exchanges between Ken and Teresa seemed

clipped and curt with little eye contact between them, little smiling, and no

humor. As soon as Ken and Teresa left the staffroom Bill wanted to talk with

me. He said he found the exchanges "very surprising and frustrating. I can't

understand what happened!" (fieldnotes, 1/ 23/ 91). I spoke with Bill about

this meeting two days later. He believed the meeting was a

...series of monologues between Teresa and Ken. No, it's not that
they're monologuing. One would say something and the other
would go back at it. It was more than differences of opinion that
weren't being explored. Ken would offer...the flat claims, bold
and flat...I didn't think they were hearing each other. A claim
would be made. Teresa would come back with, "Well there is
this and this and that," and Ken wouldn't respond. He would
either go to a different area (or not respond) (interview
transcript, p. 3-4)

179

Bill said he felt "agitated," because with so little time for conversations
about planning units, one couldn't afford to waste time. With "no meeting
of the minds," Bill explained, the work couldn't be done.

Shortly after this episode, Teresa started missing team meetings while
also trying to negotiate a different role as a PDS intern. She explained to Bill,
Sally, and me that she wanted to learn about the bureaucratic and political
aspects of the PDS movement especially at the state level. But, she never
talked with Ken nor Gary about her movement away from the team.

Commentary
As these events show, Teresa's work in the team contributed to rich
discussions about historical ideas and how to help students understand them.
Yet, the relationships she developed and failed to develop remain a troubling
part of the team's history. Like Bill, I continue to wonder why Teresa never
fit in to a team that seemed to welcome thoughtful people. I explore this in
my analyses.
WW1:

This vignette shows yet another instance of one of the team's major
efforts, planning curriculum and instruction. As in the other instances I
have described, team members planned instruction by welcoming a
cacophony of ideas, opinions, and debate. In the second year, planning for
American History rested on Ken's belief that worthwhile American history

curriculum paints the view that history is problematic in its moral, political,

1 8 0
economic, and social consequences. In order to help students understand
that, Ken believed the curriculum had to focus on concepts that are connected
via themes (see Chapter Five for a full discussion of Ken's beliefs about
curriculum). Team meetings during the 1990-91 year show participants'
attempts to identify the concepts and themes important for students to know.
Members read primary and secondary source documents, and had long
conversations about what the writer might have been trying to communicate
and why that had (or didn't have) consequences for American and world
action. This process of reading, talking, planning and then beginning the
cycle over happened again and again especially on the American history
team.

The presence of subteams also shows another integral process of joint
work for the team; that is, the work changed depending on participants'
needs. When members realized they weren't having sufficient time to plan
both American history and economics curriculum, they altered the ways they
worked. Eventually, in addition to the subject matter subteams, other
subgroups developed, too. At Hodges, for instance, Ken and Gary worked
with other social studies teachers as well as teachers across the school in two
groups planning new social studies courses, and study groups about
restructuring, community education, designing educational outcomes for
Hodges students. Midstate team members also met occasionally to talk about

what they were doing and learning at Hodges. In addition, Midstate people

1 81
who worked at Hodges met six times during the 1989-91 school years to
discuss the same kinds of questions. From these other affiliations, team
members gained insights and introduced them into our meetings. These
out-of-team experiences broadened and challenged our team's thoughts and
actions.

The set of interactions I described confirms the numerous and multiple
obligations of the roles participants played. Bill's purposeful actions (e.g.,
suggesting Teresa and he begin planning a unit of study) illustrate his
extender and synthesizer roles, and how he could anticipate needs and derive
strategies to meet them. Ken continued to play the classroom specialist, who
readily spoke about the content he taught and wondered about the ways to
teach it. And Teresa continued in her role of basically not fitting in. While
talking with Bill, she too could play classroom specialist. But with Ken, she
even lost that role given his place as the teacher who would carry out the
unit.

My strong suspicion is that like two cooks in the kitchen, two
classroom specialists often get in each other's ways because they may see
things differently. Moreover, Ken might have had difficulty accepting the
expertise of a female. He'd never taught with females (the department was
always 100% male), and my hunch is that he rarely had conversations about
history in which the depth and breadth of his understandings could be

matched (like Teresa could). I suggest in Chapter Five that some interactions

1 82
I had with Ken also seemed shaped by Ken's seeming uneasiness with
handling criticism and expertise from a female. I never felt comfortable
talking with Ken about my hunches, though I mentioned them to Bill,
Teresa, and Sally who seemed to agree with my interpretations and even
mentioned them to me when they reached similar interpretations. To my
knowledge, no one else ever mentioned it to Ken either.
WhaLDidleainMemberfllmandlalkAhQut
Like in the first vignette, "Three Views of Collaborative Planning", the
Rocky American History story illustrates the depth and breadth of
participants' talk about content, curriculum, and teaching. Planning never
seemed to proceed before at least a few conversations about the content
teachers wanted to teach. Inevitably, questions about what was worth
knowing and teaching weaved themselves through discussions about
content, yet they never seemed to replace the importance of actually talking
about history or psychology (like in the first vignette). Teresa's and Bill's 2
1/ 2 hour conversation included talk about what important events happened
during the 20th century and how the themes of imperialist and nationalist
tendencies in the world coincided with American ideals and wants. These
considerations broadened when they added Ken to the conversation.
When considering historical ideas, team participants seemed always to
ask why do students need to know about this, and what should they know.

Early in our work together, Ken asked these questions rarely. Instead, he used

1 8 3
the history text and assumed it had answered the questions of what was
worth knowing and why. In an effort to scale down the scope of the
American history curriculum, however, Ken began wondering (and the team
took up his question) about what students needed to know. That question led
him to take many actions, e.g., discussions, reading different kinds of
established curriculum, looking at primary documents that students from all
three tracks might understand. Because he wanted to expose all students to
important and conflictual intepretations of history, in 1990-91 Ken (in
consultation with the team and two special education teachers) designed a
four-step plan to help students in the fundamentals class who had reading
and comprehension problems.

In addition to conversations about content, curriculum, and
instruction, this vignette illustrates something else teammates did; they
talked about the team's work. As in these examples (right after the meeting
and two days later), Bill often confided in me about what he was thinking,
hoping, and/ or concerned about. Often I thought he did this because he knew
I would want to know his viewpoint in my role as team documentor (in fact,
early in our work he used to say things like, "In your role as documentor you
might want to know that...", or "Here's something for your notes..."). By the
time of the incident I describe, however, I think he wanted to talk with me
simply as another person sharing in the hopes and dreams for this team's

work. And Bill and I weren't the only folks who talked; members frequently

1 84
chit-chatted with each other about things going on in the team, including
student interviewing, reports we had to write, decisions we had to make.
DISCUSSION

In this chapter, I've described and analyzed the substance of the social
studies team's work, showing how its essence is about changes in curriculum
and instruction aimed at enhancing student understanding. Whether talking
about psychology or American history, or methodological issues like
interviewing students, the aim of the conversations and classroom
experiments was to deepen students' thinking and understanding. The
analyses suggest three ways to think about the team's collaborative work:
collaboration as an intellectual exercise, as conflict, and as teacher learning.

Collaboration as an Intellectual Exercise

Two very important and related questions became integral to the
team's work: what concepts and ideas make up the content we are teaching?
and, What about the content do students—all students—need to understand?
Through discussions and reading materials, participants deepened their
thoughtfulness about the substance of the social sciences, realizing the depth
and breadth of its myriad perspectives and interpretations, and seeing that
history especially is a '

...narrative that sets forth a chain of motive, action, result...The

chain need not be long...but it must be thick, for the motives and

actions, being those of many individuals, are always tangled, and
the results cannot be understood unless a full view of that

Pa
CO

Te

col

dlsi

185

preceding tangle is given. (Barzun, as cited in Wilson 8:
Wineburg, 1988, p. 538)13

Throughout the two years of the team's work, participants' discussions of
social science concepts and events reveal the tangled webs of conflict and
problematics in scholars' interpretations (e.g., the discussion about the war
and conflicts unit), difficult methodological questions that are posed from
studying social science teaching and learning, and the tangled webs of the
team's own histories of learning to talk about and teach content in different
ways. Discussions of planning how to teach this kind of material to students
required team members to figure out what ideas were most worth helping
students understand. Team conversations provided forums for participants
to share their experiences, and then begin collectively to imagine and design
strategies and tasks that differed from traditional curriculum and instruction
(e.g, having students generate examples of psychological ideas in groups.)
Discussing the contentious nature of social science content, the
difficulty of helping students comprehend and challenge social science ideas,
and the long-held beliefs we each had about "good" teaching helped team
participants recognize ways in which teaching becomes even more
complicated when we increase the range of student abilities in one classroom.
Team collaboration didn't diffuse this hardship, nor disavow it. Instead,

collaboration became the means for being thoughtful about the complexities

 

13This article by Wilson and Wineburg (1988) is something I actually
distributed to team members.

1 86
of teaching, and approaching teaching as an intellectual activity. Teammates
studied, reflected, and speculateduall of which are activities associated with
being intellectual (Webster's Dictionary)-about the nature of the content and
teaching and learning it.
Collaboration as Conflict

The recognition of the increased hardship of teaching when different
ability levels are mixed, I believe, was a crucial step in cementing the team.
We realized that the essence of the work--the beliefs and orientations that
informed it, the actions, and the discussions—were bound to be varied within
a group of very insightful, caring, and committed educators. I believe the
team also recognized that the problem that defined us invited frank and
honest presentations of our disagreements. Yet the saliency of our mutual
commitments to understand and manage the dilemmas of fair and just forms
of student grouping—for the sake of enhancing student
understanding—seemed to allow us to overcome the urge to falsely agree on
something or define an easier problem to investigate. We seemed to tolerate
the conflict as a potential way to finding solutions.

Defining collaboration as conflict may seem, to some, an irony. Yet,
conflict is part of the world and even though "[t]he collaborative model is a
friendly, trusting, congenial one the world...is not always so (Oakes, et al.,
1986, p. 546.) By accepting that conflict is in the world and, therefore, will be

embedded in the team's deliberations, social studies team members seem to

1 87
have protected themselves from dismissing any challenging comments both
from within the team and those derived from the multiple memberships
team members had in Hodges and Midstate. By accepting alternate
perspectives, members called upon themselves to closely scrutinize their
assumptions, their new ideas, and their changing practices. As Nias (Nias,
Southworth, & Yeomans, 1989) concludes in her study of primary teachers'
professional relations in Britain, team members did not have to engage in
long philosophical discussions. Rather, a negotiated consensus which
allowed for particulare actions to happen came about through pointed
discussion (e.g., deciding on student interviews) or through deliberation over
time about content and teaching.

Though the team could reach consensus in terms of what actions to
take, team members' conflicting views often remained undiscussed. Talking
about conflict is difficult, I believe, because it involves the recognition and
intersection of various aspects of collaborative work, e. g., perceptions and
enactment of acribed roles, expectations, norms for actions, instititutional
conditions, and the content of the conflict. These aspects can act as forces
which drive people to dance away from dealing with the conflict since the
ensuing discussions may be uncomfortable. Moreover, open disagreement
might have stopped action, which would have been antithetical to the team's
purposes of setting out different teaching and learning activities. Teaching

demanded immediacy and, therefore, little time for potential wounds from

1 8 8
disagreements to heal in order to plan actions. Additionally, frank discussion
might have alienated some members, which would not have fit with the
norms of the team.
Collaboration as Teacher Learning

Analyses of the team's work illustrate the centrality of "learning on the
job" about content and teaching content14. With the aim of enhanced student
understanding, team members juxtaposed knowledge of content, teaching,
learning about teaching, and the expertise they were constructing together
about the worth and potential of collaborative processes and outcomes.

Social studies team work illuminates different kinds of learning about
multiple aspects of curriculum and instruction. Talking about content,
students' understandings, students' histories, and different teaching strategies
are but a few examples of teacher learning I have mentioned in this chapter.
Considering the means and ends of inquiry about teaching, and the processes
of debate, negotiation, and the conscious establishment of norms to support
this kind of conversation provide additional examples. These instances paint
a picture of teacher learning informed by teachers' own experiences,
intellectual conversation, and the establishment of supportive conditions
(Feiman-Nemser, 1983) through institutional arrangements and participants'

own doing.

 

14In the next chapter, analyses show the additional importance of
examining student thoughtfulness.

CHAPTER FIVE
TEAM AND STUDENT THOUGHTFULNESS

most teachers can benefit from, make good and judicious use of,

someone else's thoughts about ways of opening up some part of

the world to their students (if we can consider this to be the

essence of curriculum)...Curriculum (can) become a set of

accounts by teachers of how they went about engaging their

students in the subject matter, what the student did, said, and

thought, why the teachers did what they did, what they thought

about what they did, what they would do another time.

Teachers decide for themselves how they will go about engaging

students in their subject matter; detailed accounts by other

teachers—whether school teachers or what I have called
teaching-researchers--are available as a source of information

and suggestion to help them in making their decisions.

(Duckworth, 1987), p. xv)

This chapter develops and explores three aspects of Ken Larson's
American History course: 1) the changes that happened in curriculum,
instruction and students' thoughtfulness; 2) the persistent entanglements of
power and status dynamics, moral and emotional conflicts I faced; and 3)
students' cultural misunderstandings. I relate two connected sets of
experiences, one about students' work on an assignment and the other about
their oral presentations and written work. In an effort to account for what I
saw, I analyze constraints I felt while observing these incidents, and raise
questions and hunches about how my teammates may have experienced our
collaboration, the constraints, and the conflicts across the two years of our
joint work.

Representative of the kinds of student learning the team tried to bring

about, the stories offer a glimpse into "someone else's thoughts about ways of

189

190

opening up some part of the world to their students" (Duckworth, 1987, p.
xv). Portraying more than just one person's thinking, however, the scenarios
provide a means for looking into the telectile thoughts of the social studies
team. The scenarios offer examples of mostly how Ken and I worked
together, and illustrate glimpses of Bill's work in Ken's classroom. The
historical content of the students' work follows from some of the designing
done by Bill, Teresa, and Ken which I discussed in chapter Four (the Rocky
American History Team vignette.)

Importantly, the accounts of the team's experimentation and study are
linked with accounts of students' studies. Narratives about what happened
in Ken's classroom as revealed through classroom observation, informal and
team meeting, conversations, spontaneous interactions, and students' work
samples help me discuss what participants designed and studied as they tried
to foster a new kind of student thoughtfulness characterized by communal
exploration and reasoning about ideas and interpretations of history. These
same analyses reveal, however, a disturbing sense of missed opportunities for
addressing students' concerns and questions as they emerged.

SETTING THE STAGE

Near the end of my data collection I had decided to scrutinize closely
one unit of connected lessons in Ken's classroom. I thought this would give
me a picture of what his classroom teaching and learning looked like now,

nearly two years after the team had started. I knew that Ken and the team

1 91

were working hard at learning how to design and teach a thematic
curriculum, which they called the Conflicts and War unit, and I wanted to see
the fruits of the labor. One aspect of the unit, a study of the Holocaust and
Japanese-American internment camps, fell at a time that I could spend a
couple weeks in daily observation, and the particular content intrigued me.
The entire Conflicts and War unit substance welcomed frank discussions
about politically and morally sensitive issues in history as well as current
affairs; the United States had just participated in "Desert Storm", a fancy
name for the war in which the US and its allies had bombed Iraq into
vacating Kuwait. In both Ken and Gary's classrooms I had heard the range of
views that Hodges students had about the war and American involvement. I
applauded Ken's attempt to help students support and challenge their views
by embedding the current events in a historical backdrop.

What I found out from my subsequent analyses of the Conflict and
War unit, and my especially close scrutiny of the Holocaust and
Japanese-American Internment Camps unit, is that teaching curricular
content charged with moral and political dilemmas in ways that allow
students to struggle with ideas can place teachers—like Ken and me—in the
middle of moral dilemmas. We found that facing these dilemmas while
participating in a professional collaboration helped us manage them, e.g., we
had opportunities to talk about the conflicts. Yet I have come to believe that

the collaboration concurrently eemplieates the picture. The teacher is not as

1 92
free to take a particular stance, because now the stance must be justified to
colleagues. The questioning and challenging of the justification is
complicated by power and status dynamics operating within the professional
collaboration, especially a group like the social studies team which combined
people from different institutions, cultures, and statuses (public school and
university)1 .

In this chapter I discuss the striking coherence and continuity of
themes I found between and among a) Ken's classroom ideas, actions, and
talk; b) the team's ideas, actions, and talk; c) and the ideas, actions, and
discussion that characterized students' experiences. While trying to
understand the coherence, I uncovered evidence of change in three aspects of
Ken's classroom: changes in student organization and tasks, a new kind of
collaborative instruction, and emergence of a new kind of student
thoughtfulness. Yet even within these changes, I saw the persistence of a
messy entanglement of issues about power dynamics, the moral and
emotional conflicts of teaching, and the nagging saliency of students' cultural
misunderstandings.

THE "CONFLICT AND WAR" UNIT
The setting for this chapter's set of stories is Ken Larson's classroom,

spring semester of the 1990-91 school year. During the second semester of the

 

1See Chapter Three-, the section entitled "Perceptions of Key
Participants," for additional analyses of the complications of instititional role
and the ways the work is defined.

1 9 3
1990-91 school year, Ken and the social studies team designed and taught a
unit for his general American History classes about war and conflict in the
20th century. In Figure 4.2, I illustrated where the Conflicts and War unit and
the miniunit about the concentration and internment camps fit in the team's
chronology of collaborative work.

As a veteran teacher of high school American History, Ken had learned
that students' interests piqued when studying the Vietnam Conflict. He
wanted to help students understand that conflict by embedding it in a study of
connected conflicts in an international arena. Designing the unit like this, he
told me, could help students learn to draw "connections"--a word he used
over and over—among ideas. Finally, Ken believed this unit could capitalize
on students' interests while helping them interpret and understand the
interrelations between the past and the then current Gulf Crisis.

The idea for this unit grew out of ongoing team discussions about the
difficulty of helping students connect different kinds of tasks we gave them
into a coherent understanding of themes. Ken saw the move toward a
thematic curriculum in which students study historical idea; as the team's
major work. In March, 1991, for example, he summed this up in a document
he wrote and submitted to the Hodges School Board about the social studies
team:

The social studies team...focuses on the "applied economics"

course and "American History"....The team is engaged in a

collaborative effort to restructure the courses. The restructuring
involves a thematic, conceptual orientation to the courses as

194

well as a cooperative learning (groupwork) management
system...With respect to American History, the goal is to enable
students to develop a deeper understanding of history as well as
an ability to think critically about the subject matter...Students
have had to make sense of information (documents, literature,
articles, etc.) in a larger historical context. This sense has been
evidenced...when students have written essays and
presentations together, and then present this "student-produced
history" to others.

Unit Content

As introduced by Ken on January 30, 1991, the unit revolved around

these themes which blended throughout the different phases of the unit:

nationalism, imperialism, mercantilism, racism, force, and rhetoric. The unit

packet—a set of readings and assignments Ken distributed to students for use

over the next few weeks--had these questions on the title page:

Why wars (causes)?
What are their effects?
What are the connections among them?

What changes have they brought about?

(See Appendix D)

Inside the packet students learned that they would be examining these

questions:

What caused the wars?
Was the US a part of the cause, or how did the US get involved?

What were the effects of the war?

195

...on the rest of the world
...on the foreign policy of the US
...on the domestic life of the nation
What is the relationship between one war and another?
How much is the "family analogy" similar to the concept map?2
The initial set of materials Ken distributed to students included
1.) a one-page description of a metaphor he'd written comparing war to
family disputes.
2.) a one-page concept map, drawn by Ken, which suggested a "pattern of
connections" between and among World War 1, W2, the Korean and
Vietnam Conflicts, and the current Middle East Crises.
3.) six pages providing timelines of events, significant terms, people, and
concepts which Ken had gathered from other textbooks.
4.) one or two page summaries written by Ken about World War 1, World
War 2, the Holocaust, and Japanese involvement in the war.
5.) two supplementary reading lists, one about WW1 and the other about
WW2.
Throughout the semester, Ken distributed four packets of information

similar to this that contained diverse reading material. The packet told

 

2Ken told students that wars often grow out of disputes that share
many characteristics of family arguments.

1 96

students which textbook chapter to read3, provided primary source readings,
suggested supplementary readings they used for presentations and group
essays, and described assignments and due dates.

By the end of March, the class had moved into their study of World
War 2. This unit included five sets of activities. After reading, outlining, and
taking a small quiz about one textbook chapter (entitled "The Road to War"),
students watched a documentary about the Third Reich, and took a quiz on it.
Students had three groupwork assignments. First they wrote group article
analyses4. In another assignment they compared and contrasted Roosevelt
and Hitler, using historic documents and speeches made by the leaders.
Finally, students studied the reasons for creating Japanese Internment and
Nazi Concentration camps that blotted our world during the 305 and 405.

I] H l l I _ E . I II 'I

This mini-unit contained information about the Japanese internment
camps and Nazi concentration camps. Students looked at over 30 pages of
readings that were gathered from a Time-Life series about WWII and primary
source readings collected in a book aimed at teachers teaching about World

War 2. They read over four pages from the IimrzLife series about the

 

3 The class read three textbook chapters during this unit. "First World
War", "The Road to War", and "World War 2".

40f the eight possible articles, some appeared in journals, e. g., the
’ while some came from books of essays, e.g., The Ameg'een Peat-

Wm

1 9 7
internment experiences, including how people were forced to leave their
property, live together in poverty, and go to makeshift markets, schools, and
recreational events. Primary sources about the internment of Japanese and
Japanese-Americans included a description written by a Japanese-American
woman interned as a child in Manzanar Camp; comments made by
government, military, and media officials defending the internments camps
based on racist hatred and paranoia; and an essay entitled "My Last Day at
Home," written by a ninth-grade student who attended the Tule Lake
Relocation Center's Tri-State High School (with a short description
recounting Tule Lake's change in status when the camp became a holding
place only for persons claiming loyalty to Japan or designated disloyal by the
Department of Justice).

Primary sources about the Nazi concentration camps included a poem,
written and etched on the walls of the Terezin Concentration Camp by an
adolescent, and some questions meant as a guide for readers (e.g., "how might
you react to this tragedy?) These questions and the poem came from a
teacher resource book of primary source materials from the 20th century.
Most of the material about the Nazi concentration camps came from the
Time-Life series. Ken included a few pictures of the skeleton-like bodies of
the concentration camp slaves working to supply the German war efforts. A
lot of the material was text about Nazi plans to create the camps, how the

Nazis executed Jews in mass murders before the camps (e.g., the Babi Yar

1 98
atrocity), life and death within the camps, and how the Warsaw Ghetto
uprising was stopped.

Students knew what to do with such materials, following a similar
routine with other packets of materials: you and your two peers who
constitute your small permanent group5 read the materials, at home and
aloud in class, and discuss the ideas. Then, for this particular assignment, you
transform what you are learning into cells in this matrix:

See Figure 5.2: Ken's Matrix for Student Use

Ken had used matrices similar to this since the beginning of the semester,
since he believed that the format of a matrix pushed students to make
"connections" between and among ideas. Students worked on the
Holocaust/Japanese-American Internment camps set of lessons during eight
class sessions. They had about five class periods to complete readings, fill out
the matrix, write a group essay, and decide what and how to present it orally
in class.
mi Jillii :ESI :1: 215' 111:]

Such is the setting for the following two acts. The acts detail the two
main parts of the unit: groupwork to prepare the matrix, presentation, and
essay; and the oral presentations. I chose these particular events since they

were representative of common features of student work that I saw across the

 

5Assigned in January at the beginning of the new semester, these
groups worked together to complete assignments during the entire semester.

199

on: uaovsum now “Quad: 3an “fim mam

 

2502 38985

 

finwalcafism

 

8.8m

 

museum—BE

 

own—mu

 

828510:

 

836mm

 

 

9388va £380 333m 8883
cozmbgocou ..cocfiom FEE: EmEEBE c8:~8<-~8§m£

 

 

HUmZZOU

 

 

.mCOmuUQEOU US... $3.25 Ufim XMBQE a 0&6:

mmEmU coumbcoucou Eons—om 35m:

2: new
waEmU 328535 cmutmfi<$mmcmm£

 

200
year in Ken's classroom (e.g., groupwork, discussion among students, writing
group essays), and because they highlight key events in this particular unit.
Moreover, they stand out as examples of the general claims I am making
about the relationships between and among Ken's teaching, the social studies
team's work, and students' learning about American History.
In Act One, we see two very different sorts of student and
student/ teacher interactions. Act Two takes us to the first day of oral
presentations, and I describe three presentations which detail a diversity of
student responses and quality of work as well as a set of interactions that Ken
and I had in response to students' actions. After each scene and act, I ask:
what is this story about?
ACT ONE
Scene 1: Steve and Jack
After some initial announcements, students began work in their
pre-established small groups. At times, students across groups would chat
and share information or ideas. Some students sprawled out on the
classroom floor, moving desks in order to lay out their large sheet of yellow
paper and draw their matrix. Most students drew their matrices on
computers in the computer room down the hallway. Ken walked around the
room, stopping at different groups and asking questions mostly aimed at

helping students clarify what they'd written and/ or explain their reasons. I

 

2 O 1
did the same, rarely initiating conversation but responding when asked for
help.

Around 30 minutes into the period, I roamed down to the computer
room. I noticed Steve and Jack, who were members of one small group. Ken
had purposely assigned no other student to this group; Steve and Jack often
did not carry their weight in groups, and Ken was experimenting with putting
them together, alone, to see what they would do. He was counting on the fact
that one or both would get moving, and in fact that was the case, especially
with Steve.

I had developed an interesting relationship with Steve through two
clinical interviews I had done with him (in October and January). He had
taken to calling me "the Martian," because when I first started hanging out in
third period, he and his buddies had asked, "Where are you from?" I
couldn't resist responding to the funny way they asked the question with a
somewhat funny response. So, with a deadpan expression, I said, "Mars."
They laughed, and asked somewhat more seriously than before, why I was in
class. "To see the ways you guys do school," I had responded. And I
remember thinking how true my response was whether or not I was from
Mars or the local university! Steve took to calling me "the Martian" from
that time on, and seemed to pride himself when he saw me in the hallways
and could address me with an arm around my shoulder and tell his friends I

was "the Martian."

2 0 2

Steve had wonderful ways of connecting ideas in history, which I
learned about in our interviews. He spontaneously linked up current racial
conflicts with historic white supremacy. He liked history, saying that it
enabled him to argue -and win!!- with some friends about issues especially
around the Gulf Crisis. He felt it was important to know history in order to
understand the current Gulf Crisis and why the United States might be part of
it. "If I would't have taken this class, I would have just been like, yeah; let's
blow up Iraq. I wouldn't have known that it's about this and that, and I
would have just thought, well, Iraq's messing with us so we're gonna blow
them up." [26-I.1] He ended the interview by explaining to me that he was a
"skinhead, but not the Nazi kind or anything." Being patriotic and believing
in the worth of the United States, are the kinds of things that he and he
friends stood for.

Considering what I knew about Steve, I was especially curious when I
noticed that he and Jack had written on the computer, in the matrix cell for
racism and concentration camps, "supposedly 6 million Jews died." Pointing
to the screen, I asked them why they had inserted the word "supposedly."
There's no proof, they told me, that all these people died. I leaned on one of
the desks, and asked what they would count as proof. "Well, there are no
exact records about all these deaths." I pulled around a chair, taking a deep
breath, and wondering how to counter this view.

Michelle: Do you think the Nazis would have kept very exact records
when they were trying to just get rid of people?"

203
Steve: But the Nazis kept track of everything.
Michelle: But killing all these people?
Steve: Yes.

While Steve did most of the talking, Jack nodded in agreement.
Sometimes he mumbled a confirming yes. I remained quiet and thought,
"Could they really mean this?" I tried another tact.

Michelle: Would the photographs of human beings burying each other,
some still alive, count as proof. You know those photos that you

have seen.

Steve: Yes, but it could have been the same photographs used over and
over.

Michelle: What about people who never heard from their mothers,
fathers, aunts, uncles, sisters? How do you account for that?

Steve: Maybe they just went somewhere else; after all, it was wartime.
My journal reflections remind me of the mix of thoughts I had at the

time: sickened that people might actually believe that the Holocaust did not
happen; uncertain as to whether Steve and Jack might actually believe what
they were saying or were simply teasing me; not sure what I should do as a
teacher and as a human being. Do I feel like this because I am Jewish, I
wondered, or because I am human and am worried that future atrocities like
this could happen again if attitudes like Steve's and Jack's prevail?

I left the computer room, shaking at the horror that they might

just believe what they were saying. I went immediately to tell Ken what I'd

204

heard. He didn't seem surprised, nor especially concerned. Either they don't
or can't believe it, he said.

They probably couldn't admit that to you, especially as a female

and they are into being males. What they were saying could be

bull or they could believe it. Just wait until they see the video

about the woman who was enslaved in Auschwitz for 14

months, and recently took her son back there. I videotaped it

from the BBC documentary. That tape always gets these kinds of

kids.

My first reaction to Ken's words were mixed with disbelief and an
aching old feeling: how to be honest. Close to two years of knowing Ken, I
thought, and I still do not know how to say: I think you need to charge down
to that room and have a conversation with Steve and Jack! How can I say
that I am disappointed with his seemingly calm response to what I see as a
serious problem in the way that Steve and Jack view the world?

Uncertain about how to raise these concerns with Ken—how to say, "I
think you are wrong"-I simply left the classroom.

Scene 2: What is a Jew?

I returned to the computer room a few minutes after talking with Ken
about the Steve and Jack incident, calming myself by looking and listening to
other groups. Walking into the computer room, I noticed about ten students
propped on desks talking to each other. I smiled as I entered the room,
believing beyond any shadow of a doubt that these students were off the

given task and were talking about anything other than the concentration and

internment camps. Instead, one student (Jim) threw me this question: is

2 0 5

being Jewish a race? Taken aback by the obviously thoughtful question that
effectively washed away my assumption that students were not doing their
academic work, I smiled and said, "Good question." They all groaned;
obvious teacher response, they said. "Well, what is race?" I asked. Wanting
students to understand that race is a socially-constructed idea, I steered them
in the direction of defining race, not Judaism. Someone looked it up, and
read the definition aloud (upon my urging): a class or kind of people unified
by community of interests, habits, or characteristics...division of mankind
possessing traits transmissible by descent and sufficient to characterize it as a
distinct human type. "So what is it?" said one student. "This didn't help us."

Just at this point, Ken came in and Jim asked him the same question.
"Well, what is a Jew?" he retorted to the question. Students began to explore
that, noting that it was a religion—just like being Protestant or Catholic. For
about five minutes with a lot of guidance from Ken, the group discussed how
Jews descended from the original tribes of Israel, how their stories appeared in
the Old Testament, how many gentile religions used to condemn Judaism.
Students raised most of the ideas, drawing upon things they had heard about
Jews in their life experiences.

I kept quiet about being Jewish during this discussion; I didn't want to
be taken as the token Jew, the person who could tell them everything about
being Jewish. I also did not feel very comfortable about my expertise in

responding to questions about being Jewish. I added a few questions and

2 0 6
statements myself, aimed at helping continue to explore what Judaism is, and
I nodded when Ken looked my way to confirm some things he had said (e.g.,
about the Israeli tribes).

One student, Dillon, began wondering aloud if being Jewish was like
being Catholic. Both Ken and I encouraged this analagous thinking, throwing
out questions that might push students' thinking: What do you do that
makes you Catholic? How do you become Catholic?

Just like what happens to many interesting discussions, the time was
cut short by the bell. I stayed around as Jim gathered up his materials, and we
both turned off the computers. "This stuff is something," he told me. "I'm
going to call a Jewish priest and talk about it." I suggested he call the Jewish
organization Hillel, and ask to speak with a local rabbi, since that's what
Jewish people call their spiritual leader.

Postscript to the Day

Later on the same day I went on campus, and I mentioned the "Steve
and Jack" incident to three colleagues. One person suggested that both Ken
and I had acted in a morally incorrect manner; especially as a Jew, he said,
how could you stand by and do nothing? Other colleagues empathized with
me and commented on what emerged as two connected dilemmas for me: 1)
the troubling comments that the students made and not knowing how to
counteract them, and 2) Ken's troubling reaction and not knowing how to

counteract that.

207

The weekend passed, and not until Monday did I realize something
about the entire incident, which I told Ken when I saw him. I didn't believe
my own rhetoric, I said. I talk about the importance of scaffolding
understanding in learning, of how we have to create opportunities that
continually challenge students' thinking. I talk about how just telling kids
something cannot work because it doesn't challenge their understandings
and orientations. Yet, I wanted you to go in and tell Steve and Jack; just set
them straight! And Ken agreed. "Yes. But we need to trust in those tasks if
we've built them right." Later that day I wrote in my journal

And maybe that is where the collaboration comes in We hope

that we've constructed them (the tasks) right and that we can be

there to build them up and make changes when we need to."

[4/ 20/ 91]

Now, over a year after the incident, I find myself with three lingering
thoughts. First, I remain shocked that Ken wasn't horrified-or at least didn't
show it if he was--at Steve's and Jack's comments. Secondly, I still believe
Ken and/ or I should have taken some action on-the-spot. We skipped
opportunities to push Steve's and Jack's thinking about racism and possibly
sexist attitudes they seemed to hold. And finally, I remain in awe about the
uncertainties and real messiness of teaching as illustrated by my continually
changing thoughts, questions, and reactions to situations.

WHAT ARE THESE STORIES ABOUT?

Two common features of Ken's classroom, which stand out as different

from traditional American History classrooms, are exposed through these

2 0 8
stories: 1) that students worked in small groups completing a task for which
they received a joint grade; 2) that two professional teachers were in class, and
could confer on the spot about a classroom incident and consequential
actions. Events such as these are the product of a long evolution in Ken's
practices.
Changes in Student Organization and Curriculum

During the past two years, Ken changed the way he organized students,
their curriculum, and his teaching several times. He moved through four
phases of student organization during the duration of the social studies
team's work together: students work individually; students work in
learner/ teacher expert groups; students work in randomly assigned small
groups; and students work throughout the semester in permanently-assigned
small groups.

See Figure 5.3: Students' Organization in Ken Classroom
Concurrently, Ken experimented with different kinds of learning
activities for students to complete in groups. Back in fall, 1989, he told me (as

we watched students working in groups)
Cooperative grouping works best with finite, graphic, and visual
activities aimed at creating a product. They also shouldn't be

very long, on-going activities that extend over many, many class
periods.

209

Eooummmau m.:mM :« coaumNHamwuo .muamvaum "N.m ouswfim

 

 

85> =D< ICE) €u<

 
 

3:20 =uEm 2:66 :25
8:992 \/ \) —. 38......
2:35.53

zoom—3.2.5 9sz z.
zop§z<omomezm85

  
     

8_.s_.u<
3:95 teem
. 8:80.. ‘85th

llhalulll
00 0v .

  

.m 1.2.3
133s...

  
 

 

21 0

Yet in the spring of 1991, he had students working on comparing and
contrasting World War 2 "camps" over five periods, with three periods set
aside for presenting what they had learned. In addition to the change in
duration of the task, Ken also altered task purposes. In the 1989-90 school year
his group assignments were mostly aimed at supporting students' completion
of a finite task such as reviewing for a test. For example, many times he
distributed sample questions which might appear on the upcoming essay
exam. Each group had a different question, and would analyze it according to
a common framework (the cultural, political, social, and economic forces
behind events and movements). All class members received a copy of the
notes. Again, the World War 2 unit illustrates a change in purposes in that
students studied idea: with peers in small groups, e.g., reasons leading to the
war, the political rise of Roosevelt and Hitler, forces behind the "camps."

These changes in the focus and content of small group tasks came
about concurrently with changes Ken made in thinking about the scope and
sequence of his American History curriculum. He moved, as he called it,
from a topics-oriented curriculum to organizing what he would teach around
themes and concepts. Ken defines a concept as "a set of ideas, often
something that implies a comparison or contrast. A concept needs more
explanation whereas a topic may or may not." He concluded this definition
by reminding me of a chart he had made up for students in this unit, which I

will discuss a bit later in the chapter. The chart listed "myths and realities"

211

about Judaism in terms of "political and economic ideas, religious ideas,"
and "racial ideas." On the chart he wrote "History as a fable agreed upon...or
as gossip." The chart allowed Ken to help students understand a few
concepts: Judaism, and the notion of myths and realities as part of history.
Ken had become taken with the idea of "history as gossip" because it helped
him convey history as something to interpret, something expressing a point
of view and having particular purposes, something about which people have
preconceived ideas and assumptions.

While making this change in curriculum and instruction, Ken pointed
to the helpfulness of the social studies team.

...with a little help from my friends--the team-I've gotten a

couple of ideas together on how to help students pick up on the

idea of history as gossip. The other day, when Bill and I talked

about (the idea of history as gossip) before class, we also

mentioned it in class and I noticed that the kids sort of picked up
on it...Also, through reading students' logs, I see I am doing

right.

In and of itself, the movement from different forms of student
organization and different student learning activities is interesting. Yet the
educational relevance of the movement is in Ken's views of himself as a
teacher, and of the messages his actions send to students. Ken believes
wholeheartedly in the power of having students work together on
assignments in class as well as on assessments, including the semester final.
On his own, and with the help of the social studies team, he has designed

ways for students to assess each other's groups when they do oral

212

presentations, figuring these student peer assessments into individual grades.
For the unit I have spoken about, for example, he assigned 200 possible
points: 50 for "groupwork" as he and his students assessed it, 50 for the group
essay, 50 for the group matrix, and 50 for the oral presentation.

Ken believed that placing students in groups provided a way for them
to work together on historic themes and concepts and to enhance student
understanding. Working together on ideas, he believed, added to the
richness of thought and understanding students could derive from studying
in his classroom. Individual assignments like outlining the text which used
to be a mainstay in Ken's classroom, he now believed were not as central. He
pointed to the connection between the individualistic process and the kinds
of content students worked on when assignments like outlining the textbook
constituted the main part of the curriculum

When I used to have them individually outline the text, they

couldn't see the worth of it. I had to try and force them to do it

by looking over their shoulders. Now, the tasks we have them

do in groups builds in the necessity. They see the worth of it

more by working on it together and I don't have to build in the

punitive stuff.

Now, students evaluate each other's work, and Ken evaluates it. And
the evaluation is more than just who got what multiple choice item correct,
according to what the teacher or the text said. Now, students work together to
transform ideas onto a matrix, for example, and write a group essay from

their analyses. They aren't tested on what they can spout from the textbook

nearly as much, but rather on how they make sense of primary and secondary

21 3
source material about the Nazi concentration camps and Japanese internment
camps. Students must construct knowledge through multiple interpretations
based on their readings and discussions rather than just by outlining others'
interpretations. Students' peers and Ken share responsibility for helping all
students understand ideas, rather than just learn facts.
Breaking with Groups

Even though the social studies team designed particular tasks, and Ken
added to them and decided to place students in permanent groups, the
spontaneous discussion around what is Judaism showed how even our
carefully planned grouping structures could still break down! Yet as teachers
we applauded this particular break with the typical structure, and Ken and I
encouraged it as we came upon the discussion. That students spontaneously
began a discussion around an idea they genuinely wondered about-what is
Judaism—fit within the team goals for what students should be learning about
social studies. Furthermore, understanding the aspects of race, ethnicity,
religion, and culture in Jewish thought and practice contributed to
understanding the reasons for the mass genocide of Jews in Nazi Germany.

Without a classroom structure that allowed for this spontaneous
discussion, Ken may not have found out about the extent to which his
students did not understand Judaism. Similarly, without small group
discussions, I might not have heard Steve and Jack air their perverted views.

Through both of these discussions, and others within and across small groups

21 4
along with the oral presentations, Ken could realize the naive conceptions his
students had about Judaism.
Changes in Adult Presence in Classrooms
Uncommon to most American high school classrooms is the presence
of more than one adult in a classroom. At times Ken's classroom had four
adults: Ken, a student teacher, a special education teacher, and one or two
team members6. Though holding different official positions, often people's
actions overlapped. For instance, while Ken gave directions the special
education teacher and I observed; when students went into groups both she
and I observed and participated in group discussions.
Cellaberative Instrttetien
Ken felt strongly that having other professionals with whom to
collaborate was a main reason for why he could see changes in students'
thoughtfulness. The team helped him design tasks and then watch what
happened when students did those activities. Inside the classroom, however,
Ken and I have realized that the collaboration became what he and I have
come to call a new kind of "collaborative instruction" (between Ken and me,
when I was in the room and between Ken and Bill, when Bill sat in). This
came about as we faced two problems. Social studies team members

perceived early on that organizing students into small groups raised the

 

6Team members usually dispersed themselves to different classrooms
so that only one team member, in addition to Gary or Ken as the classroom
teacher, stayed in classrooms.

215

management problem of how could one adult in the classroom hear, see, and
think about what all students were saying. Concurrently, I faced a problem in
my role as "observer," which I shared with members of my team and wrote
about in my journal. One of my early journal entries from the first year of
our work together (February, 1990) indicates the tensions I felt:

I am struggling with the tension between being a professional

and a researcher with assumptions that research means staying

outside the situation. I am first a professional, and as a

professional I am obligated to do what I think might be

useful...Any kind of research involves some intervention and

interpretation. Why not study—systematically--what the

"researcher as professional" does? What role conflict arises?

What changes happen in the context (from assuming such a

role)?

Both of these questions—about my own role and ways to get a handle
on what students were saying and doinguactually began answering
themselves. As students worked in groups, I walked around to listen to the
things they discussed; after all, I needed to hear this for my notetaking. And
sometimes during class, sometimes afterwards, Ken and I would meet and
exchange things we heard. At times Ken came to listen to a group with me.

This way of talking with each other and sharing observations and
interpretations is the first form that the collaborative instruction took. An
example from our early work, in fall, 1989, demonstrates. Ken and I listened
to a group that included one student named Lisa, and Ken thought aloud to

me:

In groups, Lisa works hard, but working individually she doesn't
do anything. Combined with that and her inconsistent

216

attendance, she is a failing student. Yet, look at what she is
doing in the group.

These quick comments to me highlighted one imporant thing I might
do in the future: keep an eye on what Lisa was doing. My observations could
help in two ways, I thought. First, I could be helpful to Ken by telling him the
things that I saw and heard Lisa doing, which might help him better help her.
Secondly, talking about Lisa's actions to the team could help us see first-hand
the kinds of student learners we were especially trying to reach.

5” K'lECll] . I .

While these exchanges continued in class, and often led to discussions
in our team meetings, by the 1990-91 school year a second form of
collaborative instruction evolved. This form had a more active and
intentional quality than before. Examples include Ken and Bill discussing
and/ or debating issues in front of students in the classroom, sometimes I
planned and sometimes not. For example, during one set of oral
presentations in the World War 2 "camps" unit, Bill worried that students
were missing the "human reality of the event." Because they heard and read
that the Jews did not have a large active and organized resistance throughout
the war, he explained in an interview one month after the unit, students
seemed to believe that the Jews went mumglx. They didn't understand
and / or take into account the surrounding issues about people's inherent faith

in the law, their disbelief that such an atrocity could even happen, or that

21 7
many Jews actually did engage in active resistance at times along with others.
Bill wondered,

Is that their source for willingly? Because see that's real different

from willingly. So there's this question of understanding, which

is different in it's scariness from what Steve said to you, but in

other ways just as scary. Six million people walked away

i lin l ?

Worried that students defined "willingly" based on a lack of
understanding and accounting for the "human reality of the event",
spontaneously during one class presentation Bill pointed to a student. To the
class he said, "He is a Jew. You all are Hitler. Why should you kill him?" He
then asked "the Jew" how he could resist and how he would be stopped.

In this instance, Bill took the role of teacher, setting up a learning
activity in Ken's classroom. My discussions with Steve and Jack, and my
contributions to the larger discussion around the "what is a Jew?" question
are just two examples of ways I participated in classroom instruction. Team
members' participation in Ken's classroom teaching and learning took these
different forms which ranged from active participation in class discussions (in
small and large groups), to observing and providing feedback about what we
saw and heard, to mostly listening to budding ideas, results of new
experiments, and / or questions Ken had.

As I have illustrated with examples in this chapter and Chapter Four,

team involvement in the actual planning, implementing, and assessment of

students' learning and thoughtfulness evolved and increased over time, e. g.,

21 8
Bill and Teresa planning the unit versus Ken's teaching at the beginning of
the team's work that was based on following the next book chapters. This
seems so for three reasons. First, since the team experimented with many
new ideas-thematic curriculum, constructing activities that people could do
in groups, searching for rich primary and secondary source
material—participants realized the need for each other's help. Furthermore,
members shared a deep commitment and caring about helping kids be
thoughtful about and critical of American History as preparation for
participating in a democratic society. Finally, the "observers" commitments
and interests provoked their involvement in a role that became more
interventionist than the traditional "observer" role. In my own case, once I
started talking with Ken about what I saw, and my interpretations of it, I got
pulled deeper and deeper into the dynamic nature of classroom teaching and
learning. Like Ken, who believes that in order to design cooperative learning
activities he himself must be engaged in a group, I also felt the need to engage
actively with students. I needed to understand what students were thinking
in order to help design learning activities.

Traditional role boundaries of "teacher" and "researcher" began to blur
as team members became at times co-teachers, co-inquirers, and co-learners
engaging in what Ken and I have come recently to call "authentic research in
teaching"-that is, research that actively engages students, and the

traditionally-ascribed roles of teacher and researcher in genuine inquiry about

21 9

the act of teaching and inquiry, the learning of classroom pupils, and our own
learning (Parker 8: Kressler, 1992).

Missed Opportunities in Changing Curriculum and Instruction

I have illustrated numerous examples and made a case about the
changes in curriculum and instruction evident in Ken's classroom and
contributed to by the social studies team. Yet this very coherence and
continuity also covered some problems. Even though classroom structures
allowed for some flexibility (e. g., changing small group membership, altering
curriculum as the team planned units over the semester), some important
missed opportunities became evident through my analyses. These had to do
mostly with a curricular scope and sequence that became quite immutable.

One example illustrates this. The team followed Ken's lead in
planning and preparing units of study well in advance of when they were
needed. However, the desire and need to have the unit content and structure
ready to teach well ahead of teaching it presented problems at times, e.g.,
when Ken and the team wanted to organize a semester-long unit, which
required lots of work, but Ken wanted the unit planned peter: the semester!
This gave the team only about a month to design the unit. In other words, at
times the team had too much to do in a short period of time. Even more
importantly, though, the emphasis on pre-planning prevented the

curriculum from changing in ways that reflected students' needs.

2 2 0

Some evidence from my analyses suggests that the curriculum and
instruction did not change enough to fit with students' understandings. One
example is the presence of permanent groups. Even though students
remained free to interact with people across groups when they worked on
assignments in and out of class (e.g., the spontaneous discussion about
Judaism), they still were evaluated based on their work with peers in their
permanent group. Staying in permanent groups, though, limited the kinds of
questions, challenges, and points of view students heard. The literature from
both small groupwork (e.g., Thelen, 1954) and adult collaboration (e.g., Little,
1990; Nias, Southworth, & Yeomans, 1989; Sarason, 1982) bears comment
here: we know that often participants in groups either share common ideas
to begin with, or develop them, and become less tolerant of dissenting
opinions as time goes on. Sometimes groups come to adopt a set of fixed
orientations, aimed mostly or only at getting the job done. Often, not
wanting to rock the boat, so to speak, other members remain silent. Relating
these ideas to classroom learning, Thelen (Thelen, 1954, p. 67)) reminds us

...Experiencing is an active process of working with others for

common goals...Experience is educative to the extent that it

involves thinking about what one is doing, why [S]he is doing it,

and the general significance, usefulness, and applicability of the

methods [S]he is using in doing it...While all experience may

produce changes in a student, the part that is educative is the

part that is understood through conscious thought

processes...Utilization of consciousness to guide experience, and

to improve the constructiveness of subsequent experience,

requires that experience be seen as inquiry; and this includes

such functions as explanation, experimentation, and test of the
consequences of behavior...

2 2 1

The tendency to remain silent and not urge "explanation,
experimentation, and test of the consequences of behavior" can be amplified
in a high school classroom. Under conditions of heavy peer pressure
complicated by issues of race, class, and gender that contribute to the
popularity contests common in American high schools, students may either
choose to be silent or to be silenced by peers (and often these are connected).
Thus three empirical questions arise: in Ken's classroom, is the permanent
group structure, and the tasks designed to do within those structures,
edneatiye? In which situation--permanent or temporary groups-would
students be challenged, and feel free to express and experiment with ideas?
Did they provide the challenges to students' beliefs and thoughtful
experiences for which the team strived?

Using the "Steve and Jack" incident to consider these questions, I
conclude that eventually Steve and Jack should have been separated. They
seemed very capable of playing off each other's resistance techniques.
Together they could construct unfounded ideas. Their means for seeing
experiences as inquiry and for using experimentation and testing to learn
from the experiences was curtailed by their limited access to others' ideas.

What I find equally troubling about this speculation is that the team
never considered the question of whether or not to maintain permanent
groups. We never even realized the educative dilemmas of maintaining

permanent groups and how that might contribute to and/ or intermix with

222

our shaping of curricular content. In looking at team meeting fieldnotes and
transcripts for the 1990-91 year, I find no evidence of discussion about the
makeup of the groups, about the actual students who interacted in the groups,
and very little discussion about the actual small group interactions7.

A connected problem associated with the lack of attention to
individual students in groups is that when students raised issues in
groups-either directly or indirectly--often the issues were not taken up in the
whole class discussions mostly because they did not fit within the curricular
scope and/ or time constraints. Having to make decisions about what to
include and when in a classroom is no strange problem in classroom teaching
and learning; indeed, I have not made a major discovery by raising it in this
discussion. However, the criteria of when to call attention to a student issue,
concern, or question—when to stray from the set curriculum-remained
undeveloped and unaddressed in social studies team meetings or in side
conversations (at least those that I heard). Looking back, I find this surprising
because the team thought it was studying students' understanding and
learning within a restructured thematic curriculum. Yet the team missed
talking about some important student issues, like the Steve and Jack incident.

Steve and Jack presented two views that, if they really believed them, were

 

7Any discussion about particular interactions usually came up when I
referred to my fieldnotes. These discussions usually occurred after I observed
in a class, either after class, at lunch, or during prep period, and for the most
part were only between me and Ken or me and Gary.

223
very problematic for living in a democratic world: perhaps not believing the
magnitude of the Holocaust atrocity, and perhaps responding to me as they
did because I was female (something Ken suggested). If true, these views
about women and an attempted genocide needed to be addressed. Curricular
changes, at least in sequence and / or scope, might have been necessary in
order to address these issues.

Having participated in the social studies team for two years I know
first-hand the difficulties of addressing the numerous questions that arise
from the complicated nature of classroom teaching and learning. Yet, the
team never spent time deciding which particular topics and issues it would
consider within its goals of enhancing curriculum, instruction and student
organizational structures let alone which stndent issues and questions would
be important to listen for in the classroom work. Certain kinds of attitudes,
like those expressed by Steve and Jack, threaten a democratic world; they
threaten the very kind of thoughtful community the team was trying to
establish. If these ideas are not raised in a social studies class, can we be certain
they will be addressed elsewhere? In addition, not examining student group
structures and interactions as well as the questions, issues, and concerns that
surface from these groups and may need to be brought before the whole class
posed a problem and problably influenced the actual inquiry the team was

doing. The team seems to have not asked some pertinent questions

224
connected with its inquiry and well as student learning goals. I return to this
point later in the chapter.
ACT TWO: ORAL PRESENTATIONS
Scene One

On April 23, 1991 the oral presentations began in third period. First
Ken asked students to look at each group's matrix, and compare and contrast
it with their own. Students in the other class, he explained, found it
redundant listening to the presentations. Since each group had done the
same matrix and essay, the content of the presentations was the same.
Therefore, Ken asked students to "bear with me" as he shaped an alternative
plan. Ken modeled for students a way to talk about their matrices, pointing to
the importance of doing more than just reading from their sheets.

You might say something like, "When we talk about racism we

are referring to x. With respect to racism in the internment

camps we found x, while in the concentration camps we found

blah, blah, blah."
Students expected this part of the assignment; it was similar to others they
had had. Ken then added the new part of the assignment:

Then I want you to make statements about how or why your

matrix is the same or different from the others. You want to say

what your group wrote and what their group wrote. Then talk

about how those particular ideas or statements differ. Don't just

read it off the matrix because we each have the matrix and we

can read it ourselves.

Students spent close to ten minutes talking in their groups about the

different matrices. As the first presenters, Michelle and Amy, made their way

225
to the front of the room, Ken took a student seat in the middle of the class
(which he always did during students' oral presentations.) The first
presentation started about one third of the way through the hour-long period.
The students, Michelle and Amy, took about three minutes, reading aloud
from their essay and matrix. Their remarks focused on aen'ene taken by the
Americans and Nazis, e.g., "Japanese-Americans lost their jobs and homes,
grocers refused to sell them food, and banks wouldn't cash their checks, and
their insurance got cancelled. "The Jews," they reported, "lost jobs,
citizenship, were killed, and lost civil rights." When discussing the
"economic motive" they couldn't list only actions, and instead they said
(partially reading from their essay)

The Japanese had many jobs in the west, and when they were

removed that left the jobs open. And when the Jews were

removed, well, that opened up money, too, since they owned

most of the money.

In the middle of their presentation, when talking about "cause,"
Michelle and Amy pointed out that the cause of internment in the US was
because the "Japanese attacked at Pearl Harbor, and the US worried that the
Japanese would join Japanese forces. For the Germans, they wanted more
power. The Jews owned most of the money and they killed Jesus, so they
became the scapegoats for the loss of WW1." At the end of their presentation,
they returned to this point. Following Ken's directions, they said the

difference between their matrix and others was that they said the Jews killed

Christ. Accordingly, that was why Hitler could point his finger to the Jews

226
and convince the Germans that they should dislike the Jews. "That was a
stupid thing for the Jews to do," they concluded, "because they knew the
Romans were going to get him (Christ)." With this comment, they ended
their presentation.
When Ken called for questions from other students, Dillon raised his
hand and said
I think you are not right. I disagree with you. First of all, it wasn't like
the Jews just got Christ and gave him to the Romans. First of all, if you
read the Bible, it was prophecy that Christ was going to be killed
anyway. And secondly, I think it was stupid of you to say that it was
stupid of the Jews to get Christ because they should have known the

Romans wanted him. Because you know it was in a different time
period. And, the Romans came looking for him anyway.

Amy retorted that "Well, it is stupid to turn in a friend." Michelle
added that 'Whatever, Hitler used it for propaganda."

Dillon only frowned, and fell silent. Ken asked if there were any other
questions, and after thanking the group and calling the next one to get ready,
he looked over his shoulder and directed this comment in Dillon's direction

Sometimes what is true is not how everyone interprets it and learns
about it through the centuries.

227
Scene Two
Steve and Jack presented next, focusing their presentation on defining
four of the seven terms in the matrix: racism, genocide, intolerance, and
human rights. In addition to stating definitions, the content of their matrix
differed a lot from the first group's. While Michelle and Amy used actions to
connect the ideas and the camps, e.g., that racism manifested itself in the
Final solution via the taking of citizenship, civil rights, etc., Steve and Jack
wrote statements in the cells which often did not seem to connect the idea
and national action.
See Figure 5.4: Steve's and Jack's Matrix

For example, in the row about genocide, they wrote under "Japanese in-
ternment" that "the Americans took over Japanese companies and tried to
push the Japanese economically" while under the "final solution" they wrote
that "Adolf Hitler tried to destroy the whole Jewish race." Under "cause" and
"internment" they said the "the Japanese internment caused much hatred
among Japanese and the White Americans" and with the "final solution"
they wrote that "It started a war among countries. It also caused a lot of

racism to brew."

228

d7IhI’IEIVlE£5£§-J7I§Filt£3fi £4£TESGPIQIEJ§CPT4£EDIQF

 

connect

”Japan internment

irinal Solution

 

Racism-The belief
that one race is
better than another
due to genetics

2.

The people of
America at the time
were afraid that
Japanese Americans
were linked with
there home country

.Adolf Hitler
believed that the

1Jews were i

;responsible for the ‘
loss of H31.

1

 

 

 

caused much hatred
among Japanese. and
the white American.

GenoCide-The ;The Americans took :hdolt hitler Tried
Destruction of a ,over Japanese .to Destroy the I
"hole Race. icompanies and tried -whole Jewish Race.
:to push the j !
1Japanese ]
.economically 1
cause Japan Internment lit started a war

among countries.
It also caused a

[lot of racism to
brew.

 

intolerance-The
”hot putting up
with something of

- L-.__.._.

 

The Americans of
the time did not
tolerate the

hitler was
intolerant of the
Jews. he put them

 

..- —.-. -

somebody” iJapanese Americans. .in concentration
-camps. There he
JRilled up to six
Vmillion Jews

Force Americans hitter Tried to

Threatened the
Japanese workers

with brute force I
TQMC

towu‘ 611nm

wipe out a race
with brute force.

 

Human Rights-The
rights given to
somebody due to
humanity

The Americans took
away the human
rights of the

Japanese-Americans.

nitler believed
that Jews had no
human rights.

 

Economic Motive

 

 

J

The white man could
take over the
Japanese peoples
Jobs.

The Jews had owned
everything. like
the banks. and the
companies. nitler
took all of the
jews from there
house. and from
there jobs

 

 

 

Figure 5.3:

Steve's and Jack's Matrix

 

2 2 9

While Jack read pretty much verbatim from the matrix, when Steve
presented he seemed more contemplative than Jack. When he spoke about
"cause" for the camps, for example, he mentioned what they had written on
the matrix—"Japanese internment caused much hatred among Japanese, and
White Americans"--and then grimaced. "We didn't understand why others,
like the Italians or the Germans, weren't also interned. I mean, well, we just
didn't know the answer to that question." When he defined "economic
motive," he explained that

the white man could take over the Japanese people's jobs while

under the Final Solution the problem was that the Jews owned

everything, like the banks, and the companies. Hitler took all of

the Jews from their houses and from their jobs.

Steve ended the presentation by pointing out that the matrix he and
Jack had differed from others because they defined the terms on the matrix
and didn't use the word "Japs" instead of Japanese. After Steve and Jack
finished, Ken commented about their careful non-use of the word "Jap":

Jap is also a derogatory and pejorative term used especially with

Jewish females. It stands for Jewish American Princess. The

term is akin to "nigger".
A couple students wondered what a Jewish American Princess was, and after

Steve explained it as "a person who bargains on prices and penny-pinches,"

Ken disagreed. "No. It is meant to refer to a person who is over-pampered

2 3 0
and superficial. The term refers to many people irrespective of their
ancestory."

Ken then commented on something he had heard in both
presentations, and possibly in the group conversations as they had carried out
their assignments. He said, "I've noticed that under "economic motive", you
all (and he waved his hand to encompass the class) talked about jobs. Jobs
were not a factor." Jim, a vocal and very interested student in class,
challenged Ken. "Yes, it was. I mean, it was about farms and farmers for the
Japanese Americans"8. Ken argued back:

The issue is land. The white people welcomed the camps in
order to acquire the well-worked land all around California that
the Japanese Americans held. In a sense, you could say they
wanted the jobs they held [here Ken looked toward Jim], but
what they really wanted was their land. For the Jews, jobs were
not an issue. For them, the economic motive came after the fact.
After they put them in camps, they took all that they had. But
not before. And furthermore, Jews did not own everything.
There were many poor Jews, just as there are many rich and
poor Catholics and Protestants. This myth, that the Jews owned
everything, is a prominent myth in our culture. So you can ask
why the Jews? We resent people with money—any people. So
they took it out on the Jews, many of whom had jobs in finance.

 

8This comment could have been motivated by the primary source
readings in the packet that focused on framers losing property. Jim seemed to
define "farming" as a job, and therefore losing a farm was like losing a job.

(I')

(n

5h

2 3 1

Students remained quiet after Ken's comments, perhaps taking them
in, surprised that Ken made the claims he did, or simply not registering them.
Students were used to Ken guiding them to say things; rarely did he state so
emphatically what he believed and/ or what he considered to be "fact." Jim
reacted with a comment that didn't really fit with what Ken had said. Jim
said he wanted to change his group's matrix to say that genocide "is definitely
racial because that is what the definition is." With about one minute to go
before the bell rang, and some students already beginning to collect their
materials to leave, Ken offered:

Many times, reality and perception are different. Genocide can

apply to ethnic groups, too. Often times the reality of things, like

even definitions, may not match perceptions. And those

perceptions get handed down through history.

As students left the class, I sat staring at my notes. Ken's last comments
about reality not matching perception struck me as very important. The often
different realities and perceptions that people have fit with an idea that Ken
had been promoting to his students the last few months; i.e., that "history is
like an agreed-upon fable, or like gossip." What Ken had just told his

students described how he thought about history, how he saw and

understood history. By offering his way of defining history, he was also

2 3 2

offering a way of deing history—looking for the realities and perceptions that

people see and hold, and the gap between them.

And this last comment helped me better understand Ken's comment
to Dillon about "sometimes what is true is not how everyone interprets it and
learns about it through the centuries." Ken had offered some evidence-the
misconceptions about why the Jews were chosen to be slaughtered—about
what he thought history was--the agreed upon fable. Did Ken realize the
significance of this comment, I wondered. Did he realize the connections he
had made? And did students realize it? If I had just realized it, just put two
and two together, then could all the students have done it also (especially not
having the time to sit back and think about it)?

I made a decision to point out the comments to Ken, and said, "I was
really struck by what Dillon said." He nodded, and said, "Yes."

Michelle: And then at the end of class you told students that "reality
doesn't always match perception.‘ That's a great line. And a
really important one. I wonder if students got what you meant.

Ken: Yeah. It had to be quick with the bell.

Michelle: See, I think that line is an example of how Mr. Larson "does"
history—how you think about it and approach it as

interpretation. That's why it's important for kids to understand,
and I'm not convinced they do.

2 3 3
Ken: Yeah, the statement was a bit pithy.
Michelle: Yes. And I guess I think it's too important to miss.
Ken: Pithy or is it pronounced pithy [rhyming with "pie"]?

I ended our conversation then, knowing that Ken had to deal with
students coming in for the next class. I had also learned to detect the times
that Ken wanted to pursue something, and he had mentioned in meetings
that sometimes he simply had "to close down" usually from overload. So I
just let the subject be, hoping I might find another way later in the day or
week to raise the episode again.

The next day Ken came to class with a chart he had prepared entitled
"History as a fable agreed-upon...or as gossip!"9 in which he wrote:

Often what many believe to be true is the product of ignorance

and bigotry / unreasonable hate, based on what they have been

told by those who wish to promote that product to their

ends/ power / wealth.

The chart had two columns, one entitled "myth", the other called "reality",
with three rows entitled "political/ economic ideas", "religious ideas", "racial

ideas". In the cells he talked about the myths and realities about Judaism

related to these themes (see Figure 5.5: Ken's Judaism Chart).

 

9’This is the same chart I mentioned earlier in the chapter.

innuaujnrunr

IIITOR! I. I 71358
£01339 UPOI...OI
1! OOIIX’II

2134

IIIBILII

 

IIALIYT:

 

arm: wiur am
arum 70 as not
is no: rnooucr or
resource: rum
sicorar/
UNREASONABLI HATE
. . .sism on wax:
run nave star row
sr rnosr we wish
to manor: mar
paooucr to ram
neuron/WEALTH

 

political]
economic ideas

 

 

l. The idea that
jews are quite
wealthy

2. the idea that
because of the
riches jaws have a
great deal of
political and
economic power in a
particular country.

3. the idea that
jew use the above
power to influence
and/or control the
nations in which
they live.

s. the idea that
all jews are
coordinating their
efforts from
country

to country in order
take over the world

 

..generally jaws
have no more money
than any other
QtOUP of people and
that there are many
poor jews in the
world.

..it is true that
some jews did
become powerful
bankers in Europe
but so did many
other kinds of
people.

..most people who
have a large amount
of wealth use that
wealth to influence
the policies of
their notion;s
government, jaw are
not an exception to
this as is no one
else

 

 

religious
ideas

the idea that jaws
were solely
responsible for the
death of
Christ..they killed
the Savior!

..if one reads the
Bible one would now
that the death of
Christ was very
complicated and
filled with
prophesy so it
would be ridiculous
to blame any one
group of people for
the
execution..especial
ly if one believes
that God determined
the death when one
reads the Old
Testament.

...the Church did
teach that the jews
'killed' Christ for
a thousand years
and obviously had a
major influence on
the thoughts of the
population.

 

racial ideas

 

 

 

the idea that the
jews are a separate
race and that race
is pomehow evil and
insidious. the
idea that the jaw
will morally
pollute other races
as well as make the
others genetically
inferior than they
are

 

..jews are not a
separate race but
are a culture kept
alive b y their
religious
activities.

 

Figure 5.4:

Ken's Judaism Chart

 

 

235

Postscript

On their matrix, Steve and Jack had erased the comment that
"supposedly six million Jews died", and put in its place (in the "intolerance"
row), "Hitler was intolerant of the Jews. He put them in concentration
camps. There he killed up to six million Jews." During the presentation,
when Steve read this aloud, I sat staring at him, though he didn't look in my
direction. A host of questions ran through my mind: where did this change
in response come from? Was it a change; were Steve and Jack just teasing me
last week? Did they become locked into taking the non-mainstream stance--
only 300 Jews died—because they were together and didn't want to lose face?
Had something I had said persuaded them? Did watching the documentary
about Auschwitz influence their thinking and if so, how? Was their thinking
changed, or were they simply taking the politically-correct—the anneal-correct
view, and giving teachers what they thought teachers wanted to hear?

At that time, and even now as I look back, I have a sense of mystery
and uneasiness about the change Steve and Jack made in their matrix. I will
never know what went on in Steve's and Jack's heads, nor if my comments
served as adequate intervention. Did they make a real change, which I define

as a change in thinking, or did they co-op into the system of school where the

2 3 6

"right" things are said, or was it no change at_all? That is, did Steve and Jack
disbelieve that six million Jews were murdered and did they continue to
maintain that belief (no matter what they wrote)? This sense of uncertainty is
very common teaching, and many scholars have addressed it (e.g., Lortie
(1975) and Jackson (1986). But their acknowledgement of it didn't help me as I
was engaged in the actual teaching. And, this sense of mystery about
students' thinking and understanding wreaked special havoc for me and for
Ken as we tried to assess our experiments with teaching and learning. Placing
students in groups, in which we couldn't keep track of the many ideas,
arguments, and processes of negotiation they used, increased the uncertainty
we felt about what students thought and understood. Steve's and Jack's
comments and changes stand as direct evidence of how much Ken and I
remained in the dark about their understandings.

WHAT ARE THESE STORIES ABOUT?

These accounts provide the grounding from which I can discuss Ken's
instruction and his students' thoughtfulness. These aspects of life in his
classroom changed over the two years the team met, and the changes can be
linked with the team's collaborative work. Two major changes present

themselves: 1) that Ken changed his instruction midstream by planning and

2 3 7
implementing two different experiences for students--asking students to
compare and contrast matrices and creating and discussing the "myth and
realities" chart; and 2) that students' actions and comments to each other
appeared richer than they had ever before. Students' discourse was
characterized by risk-taking, negotiation, and challenges to one another as
well as to instructors. Comments reveal the views that students
had-sometimes racist, often blatantly wrong. But, the surfacing of these
views is the first step toward challenging the ideas.
Changes in Instruction
As I mentioned earlier in this chapter and in chapter four, Ken was a
planner. Leaving little to chance in his out-of-school as well as in-school life,
Ken usually had units designed at least three weeks before distributing them
to students. While due dates may be altered, the substance of the unit and
assignments usually stayed intact. Given this history, I find it even more
amazing that Ken would take a risk and change his instruction and
curriculum so relatively quickly within the unit I have described.
Yet the conditions surrounding Ken's instruction suggest ways to
account for the swiftness and depth of the changes in April, 1991, close to two

years into the team's collaborative work. Ken could trust and respect the team

238

members who observed his classes and spoke with him about what he was
teaching. Bill and I were the two main participants who observed, and Ken
knew us very well since we had been active in the team since its beginning.
We also knew Ken's students individually and often by name, and so we
could talk with Ken about specific things we saw and relate them to particular
students. And finally, both Bill and I had shared our observations through
conversations (in writing and verbally) in which all of us were trying to learn
how to design thematic curriculum; clearly neither Bill nor I considered
ourselves experts.

Perhaps these are the reasons why Ken adopted the changes he did.
One particular episode is illustrative of the way Ken changed what he did
based on conversation with a team member. The impetus for the change in
the oral presentations (when Ken had students compare and contrast their
matrices with each other) came from observations and ongoing conversations
that Ken and Bill had. Bill explained to me that he had been in Ken's
classroom observing presentations from the first period class, and the same
nagging issues occurred to him that he had wondered about during other oral

presentations10

 

1(’Having students present in groups to the whole class had become a
mainstay in Ken's classroom over the year.

2 3 9

You have this group activity which is conceptually organized.

You know the way you organized it. And the students do it

together. They are active. They produce a presentation for other

kids. And in some ways it works out to be unsatisfactory because

of the kind of similarities of the work they do. But there's not

enough difference between the reports. So you need to develop

a new piece of repertoire which is, "Well, what finishing piece

do you use that makes use of what students learned and know?"

In the interview, Bill compared this concern with one he had in his
own teaching with teacher candidates: "If you give students the same task,
they come up with pretty much the same report." Though he had mentioned
his concern to Ken, and he and Ken had tried a bit of a change in class that
day, Bill said he had not had the time to talk about the problem with Ken. As
he had continued thinking about it, he had framed the problem as one in
which the team needed to design better culminating activities for students.
He wrote a note to Ken, suggesting this way of seeing the problem, and
suggesting a debate as a final activity in which the focus could be on two
questions: 1) Are these events (the Holocaust and internment) morally
equivalent? 2) Just assume the Holocaust was not a reasonable event; was the
internment reasonable?

A couple weeks after this incident I checked with Ken about his

reactions to this note; this was the first time Bill had ever sent a note (and no

one in the team had, either). Ken thought the debate had been a good idea,

240
but much too sudden to pull it off well. "Something like that needs to be
planned—how to organize the kids, what to tell them to look at and think
about. But we might do that next year." In fact, in the 1991-92 school year,
Ken's student teacher did a kind of debate in a town meeting format. Ken
liked it so much that he did the same activity in another class, and planned
more debates through the year.

Changing one's instruction, whether adding a debate format or
changing one's view of curricular organization—both of which Ken did-is not
an easy thing to do. First of all, when teachers reform their practice, they are
usually going against established teaching practices based on often
unquestioned traditions. Informed by taken-for-granted unchallenged
practical ideas, these folkways of knowing, as Buchmann (1987) calls them, are
resistant to change. In addition, since one's teaching is a reflection of one's
self (Cohen, 1988; Kohl, 1984), change in teaching practice is often associated
with change in one's self. And finally, when working in a collaborative
setting in which other professional teachers are observing and talking with
you constantly, one's changes and experimentations are laid bare for the
world to see and critique. That Ken made the changes he did under these

risky conditions is amazing! As I mentioned earlier in the chapter, Ken made

241

some significant interconnected changes in curriculum and instruction. He
altered his curricular content and goals to reflect sources of knowledge in
addition to the textbook; he concurrently altered student grouping patterns
which caused him to teach another way (one cannot lecture to small groups);
conversation within and across small groups became a mainstay instead of
individual student assignments.

Ken's strength and drive to change his instruction seemed to come
from two sources: the social studies team and himself. In a conversation
between Ken and me he referred to the collaboration we had, as part of the
team's work, and noted the kinds of help the team provided:

As a classroom teacher, I'm often thinking about the process

that's going on, but I'm not always aware of absolutely

everything, and when you are there and writing down things

that are going on and remark to me later, it causes me to think

about what went on beyond what I was assessing.

Ken believed that through another set of eyes, team members helped
him focus on what was happening in his classroom because additional adults
in the classroom could illuminate different classroom processes that may
have passed Ken by. The conversations that followed from me sharing what

I saw with Ken—or when other members gave feedback—helped Ken make

alterations in his practices. In short, the sources of change for Ken seemed to

242
be the ongoing cycle of conversation and self-reflection. But as Ken pointed
out, not only the observing was important; he liked when I commented on
things I had seen. My comments reminded him about things that happened,
and offered another point of view. In short, I imagine that a source of change
for Ken were the eenyereatiene—the give and take, the sharing of stories and
interpretations, the joint construction of ideas--that we had. In those talks,
we thought we discussed students and their understandings. I discuss this in
the next section.
Student Thoughtfulness

The level and depth of students' thoughtfulness is demonstrated in the
scenes I described. The question "What is Judaism?", which certainly grew
out of, but was not directly part of the assignment, is one illustration of it.
Dillon's strategy for analysis--comparing and contrasting it with something
known (being Catholic)-is another illustration. The earnestness of students
to explore the idea--finding the dictionary, examining the meaning of race,
and being critical of their findings by questioning the usefulness of the
definition and idea, and questioning the suggestion made by me to explore
the idea of race—illuminates the thoughtfulness, too. When they redirected

the question to Ken, and he helped them identify what they didn't know

243
about Judaism, students began taking charge of their learning in a thoughtful
and intentional way.

Ken's own observations of students in both oral and written arenas
offer additional claims about the depth of his students' thoughtfulness. He
seemed amazed with the student discussion about Judaism, raising it
spontaneously at a team meeting about a month after the event happened:

I've been around for a long time. And it's not too often that a

group of general level kids sit around and get into the kinds of

discussions [they did] because of something I did or said. They

generated ideas on their own.
Around the same time of year, in an interview, he talked about students'
thoughtfulness in their journals:

...the reflection and the writing, and the amount of writing the

kids are engaged in now in the journals has increased

monumentally...another thing that is happening is I'm finding

myself reading them—really reading them—because I'm being
entertained and they are interesting and before they weren't...

As I discussed earlier in this chapter, the "before" Ken referred to is a
time when student written work consisted mostly of outlining the text,
answering study guide questions, and circling a multiple choice response on
the chapter test. Even when Ken made the transition to having students

wrestle with ideas and write collaborative essays, for example, the beginning

pieces followed particular recipes that Ken gave students, e. g., begin the essay

244
with this sentence: The main thesis of the article, "[name]", by [name], was
that [xxx]11. During the semester unit on conflict and war, Ken loosened the
reins on writing. He allowed students to expand on issues that interested
them in logs. Though group essays usually still needed to include particular
themes, these essays resembled the one for the "camps" unit in that students
could still develop their ideas, interpretations, and responses around the
readings and discussions they had about the themes.

What we saw and heard in Ken's classroom indicated that students had
taken up the bait; they seemed engaged in the curriculum the team had
designed. Yet just as importantly, we believed we had structured the class
such that students could ask questions and alter our agenda when they had
ideas and issues they wished to explore. The goals we set in our social studies
team for student learning clearly encompassed what we witnessed; we wanted
to place students in situations where they could learn and construct
meaningful ideas and interpretations about American History.

11' ID |.|. °S|l|Il III]
In a disturbing way, the Steve and Jack incident also illustrated a kind

of student thoughtfulness, though the content and conclusions are

 

11He wrote these kind of essay starters on the board and in documents
he handed out.

245
problematic. Their retorts to me were logical and connected to the comments I
made. In many ways, the comments were classic examples of student opposition in
that they halted the teacher's efforts to talk about content. Steve and Jack seemed in
some ways to be striking a bargain with me. Perhaps they wanted to test themselves
and see how well they could manipulate the teacher. Perhaps they wanted to test
the perverted idea they came up with (or heard from friends). Perhaps they simply
wanted to get out of working on the assignment at that moment. In any case, their
responses showed a kind of thoughfulness that effectively controlled the situation
and stopped the learning of content.
DISCUSSION

Taken together, the classroom vignettes and analyses in this chapter illustrate
collaboration on the part of adults and students aimed at student and adult
Earning. The analyses and stories illustrate multiple forms and content of students'
learning activities, as well as the varied forms that adult professional collaborative
work can take. Focusing as they do in one classroom, the vignettes form the basis
for the portrait of a teacher whose views about teaching, learning, and knowing
have changed in ways that support and promote a certain kind of learning on the
part of students. Ken struggled to bring about meaningful learning of ideas in
American History through students' active participation in what the team called
"doing history"--considering and critiquing the varied interpretations history
records. The team provided Ken with the support that helped him question and

challenge his views and practices for the sake of a new kind of student learning,

246
learning rich in thought and complexity.
What Was Learned?

Overall, both students and team members wrestled with a kind of American
History content that differed from the traditional school history course that, as one
group of students said on the first day of school, focused on "facts, dates, and dead
peOple." Both students and team members faced revised curricular goals, scope,
sequence and themes for learning American History in Ken Larson's course.
Whereas Ken's students in earlier years read history in a textbook, memorized it,
and mostly reproduced the knowledge via responses on a multiple choice exam, in
Ken's present classroom students needed to think about ideas, and discuss and
debate alternative interpretations made by themselves, by peers, and by scholars.
Knowing history now meant gathering ideas and interpretations as evidence to
argue a particular point. Tempered by their personal histories, beliefs and
orientations, the ways students understood evidence differed even when they used
the same sources of information (e.g., differences in the interpretations and actions
of Dillon, Steve, Jack, Jim.)

Invited to shape their own meanings about American History as they were in
Ken's classroom, students' previous interpretations as well as the ideas of others
take a different shape from how they originally looked. History knowledge is
reconceptualized to be an interconnected web of factual knowledge, voices from the

past and present, chronologies and descriptions of events, justifications, questions,

247
and critique”. American History curriculum rings of power and oppression, success
and defeat, hope and despair. Drawing on investigations in social studies and other
disciplines, the team determined that in order to see US. history in a new way,
students needed opportunities to question and challenge ideas through reading and
discussion. Therefore, concurrent with a reconceptualization of history knowledge
came a change in the means of learning the knowledge. The student reorganization
in Ken's classroom both came from and shaped changing epistemologies of history;
knowledge and the process of constructing it became mutually dependent.
Changing Roles
Given changing views of knowledge and changing processes of
understanding and learning it, Ken and his students needed to craft and assume
different roles. No longer could Ken simply lecture; how can one use such a
method to teach about knowledge that is dynamic, interpretive, and open to
question and critique based on personal, cultural, and scholarly histories? And for
the same reasons students could no longer sit as passive learners.
ChangingleacheLRoles
When knowledge is viewed as dynamic and changing, the complexity of the
teacher's role is intensified (Cohen, 1988; Jackson, 1986). Concurrently assessing
students' understandings, searching for materials and ideas that will stretch and

challenge them, and enriching one's own understandings can be time-consuming

 

12See Wilson & Wineburg (1988) for a discussion about the importance of
some of these dimensions for teaching and learning to teach American History.

248
in physical, intellectual, and emotional ways. In an essay about the endemic
uncertainties of teaching and changing views of knowledge, Jackson (1986) calls
attention to the relationship between teaching and knowing. Two models of
knowledge exist, he argues, and reminds us of the nature of the differences:

Under the transformation model the teacher is no longer primarily

concerned with whether some fragile commodity called knowledge has

arrived safely and is properly stored somewhere in its original carton

(as in the reproductive model)...Rather, the central questions now have

to do with such things as how the knowledge in question is being used

by the learner, how it relates to what was learned before, how it

becomes personalized by being translated into the learner's own

language, how it becomes applied to new situations...(The focus) now

encompasses levels of mental functioning that customarily fall under

the rubrics of "judgment" and "understanding." (Jackson, 1986), p. 71)

In a transformative role, rather than the teacher just checking if cartons of
knowledge are correctly labeled, the teacher wonders how learners make sense of
historical knowledge. In Ken's case, his role now included searching for primary
and secondary source materials (at a variety of reading levels since many students
had special learning needs), and creating small group tasks that invite students to
wonder and debate about ideas. He needed to provide help to students that ranged
from teaching some how to write essays, to helping others learn how to track down
a piece of evidence in the 1932 We, to helping still others define words
before they can begin trying to comprehend the New Yerk Timee column.

ChangingimdenLRQles
Two aspects of students' changing roles stand out. First, as American History

became something more than merely memorization of "facts, figures, and dead

people," students' repertoire for learning and understanding historical knowledge

249
also changed. Just reading the chapter in the textbook (sometimes the evening
before the test or not at all) and listening to the teacher lecture didn't work anymore.
To be successful, one needed to debate ideas and interpretations—which was now the
basis of the curriculum. While doing so, personal views and values were
uncovered and opened to critique. Could students handle the kinds of comments
and ideas they heard from peers and revealed themselves? In designing
opportunities for small group and whole class discussions, the team assumed that
students genld handle both the process and substance of the conversations. Early in
the year the team designed some initial activities to help students learn the
processes of working in groups (e.g., coming to consensus about an idea or action),
yet by mid-year this concern faded from our attention. Meanwhile, little to no
notice was paid to conflicts that might arise due to the controversial nature of the
content as well as process.

A connected issue to embracing new roles and learning how to learn a new
kind of American History content is the teacher}; acceptance of students' new roles.
At times, neither Ken nor team members seemed to hear nor pay attention to the
direction students wanted to take the curriculum. Two types of what I've called
"missed opportunities" present themselves. The first kind was identifiable through
students' explicit questions and statements (e.g., what is the relationship between
Hitler's hatred of the Jews and the killing of Christ? Jews had all the money in
pre-World War 2 Germany). Another set of missed opportunities were more

hidden, however, than these. They arose from comments students made or beliefs

250
we attributed to them that never became part of whole class exchanges, e.g., Ken's
idea that Steve and Jack dismissed my comments because I was female; students'
wonderment about what Judaism was. Whether explicitly or implicitly expressed,
sometimes significant student comments—often significant because of their blatantly
misguided interpretations—got lost under layers of pre-planned curricular goals,
scope, and sequence.

What emerges is an entangled web of changes including changing
epistemological definitions, changing curriculum, changing instruction, changing
student reactions, and changing teacher roles, but a somewhat static view of the
stndents' places in relation to curriculum design and goals. In wondering about this
strange finding, I actually began questioning myself: why didn't I find this lopsided
change pattern earlier? My conclusion sheds light on the all-too familiar
insider/ outsider debates; until I got myself sufficiently outside the data, like my
colleagues on the social studies team I simply couldn't see that changes in students'
roles presented problems for the team. Conversations in team meetings rarely got
down to talking about the particulars of altered student roles; usually the team was
busy figuring out and attending to the big picture. Units needed planning; we
needed to scout out resources; tasks needed to be created. Though we conducted
student interviews and occasionally raised what we heard in team meetings”, we

rarely turned our focus in team meetings to talk about what particular students said

 

13One problem with the student interviews was the long periods that passed
between the actual interview and the transcription.

251
and did in class. Though I had a lot of this information from my observations, I
usually did not discuss it in the team meetings and instead shared my
interpretations with Ken, Gary, Bill, or Sally after class or over lunch. Clearly we
needed to do other work, I used to think, and so I could talk about individual
students with the appropriate teacher.

I also have come to understand the intricacies of my multiple role
performances. While team members played multiple roles-especially me—and the
roles often overlapped, inevitably certain roles would become prominent given
particular situations. While participating in the team, I seemed to see myself as a
teacher. I interacted with students whether in the high school or in teacher
preparation classes. When I eased out of the team's work, however, I began
distancing myself from assuming the role of "teacher" and moved into the role of
"researcher." In that role, I could take a different perspective. No longer bound by
the presentism of teaching (e.g., the planning, the assessment), I could look for
patterns within the team's work. Between the different roles, the rigor of research
when one pours over data, and simply the distance from the events (over one year
has passed), I could see the team's missed opportunities in terms of the students'
roles in relation to curriculum”.

Thoughtful Collaboration and the Enactment of New Roles

Seeing the missed opportunities even as a team participant might not have

 

141 thank Peter Kressler, Kathy Roth, and especially Constanza Hazelwood for
our many discussions about the often conflicting roles of "teacher" and "researcher".

252
made the situation change. I might have raised the topic in meetings, and/ or in
side conversations with Ken, yet the scope of my responsibility and the power I had
remained limited. Ken was teacher of record and, therefore, had final say about
curriculum and instruction, and final responsibility for students. Given this
situation, I could only raise issues and suggest change; I couldn't necessarily make
the changes. Even though Ken and I worked together in a joint effort that was
producing some clear changes in our own learning and that of our students, my
actions and discourse within the collaboration were still monitored by conflicting
institutional and cultural mores and expectations.

The analyses I offered in this chapter illustrate the ways in which
relationships, experimentation, and conversations about practice --elements in the
enactment of thoughtfulness in collaboration-~shaped our actions in the face of
persistent conflicts. The relationship Ken and I had was still shaped to a large extent
by particular power and status dynamics (e.g., he was teacher of record, and I still
worked in Hodges at his invitation.) Additionally, our team goals (e.g., shape a
thematic curriculum and teach it through small group interactions) focused us on
trying certain kinds of experiments and having conversations about what happened.
Thoughout all our conversations and experiments, however, we faced explicit as
well as undiscussed and unrecognized moral and emotional conflicts (e.g., the Steve
and Jack incident, and Kens' response.) Impinging on our relationship and work,
mostly in hidden ways, these conflicts constrained what we said to each other and

altered our actions in ways I have yet to even realize.

CHAPTER SIX
ENACTING THE ENACTMENT OF THOUGHTFULNESS

In Chapter Two, I offered a normative framework, theoretically and
practically derived, that detailed the kind of collaboration among teachers that
I believe has the potential for enhancing student thoughtfulness about
academic content. My two years of work on the social studies team, and my
subsequent year looking back at it, place me at a good vantage point for
thinking about what aspects of the team's endeavors epitomize the
enactment of thoughtfulness in collaboration. In this chapter, I analyze the
team's work as a case, and comment about the viability of other collaborative
endeavors to enact thoughtfulness in collaboration.

ENACTMENT OF THOUGHTFULNESS IN COLLABORATION

In my description of the idea in Chapter Two, I mentioned that four
aspects of collaborative teaching and learning contribute to what I call the
enactment of thoughtfulness in collaboration: 1) working within caring and
supportive relationships in which participants have 2) conversations through
which they would be 3) shaping and reshaping experiments having to do
with learning and advancing 4) progressive kinds of teaching practice.
Looking at the team's problem (Chapter Three), its work (Chapter Four), and
its connections to student learning (Chapter Five), I now suggest apparent
features and missing characteristics in the team's work of the enactment of

thoughtfulness in collaboration.

253

2 5 4
The Team's Problem

In trying to understand why the social studies team seemed to click, I
found that W remained central in people's thinking and in
the actions they took around team questions. Recast in ways, moving
between questions about grouping students by ability and designing different
curriculum and instruction, the team's central questions acted like a kind of
magnetic field. They pulled participants' curiosities, expertise, and needs
around something common-attention to enhancing student learning and
understanding. Inviting many different points of view, the questions invited
debate. In a Deweyian sense, the questions gave way to a problem in which a
doubt--how to group students and what curriculum and instructional paths
to follownarose about the next steps to take (Dewey, 1933). In order to wrestle
with the problem, team participants continually searched for and marshalled
resources aimed at helping them solve the problem through its many
iterations. Furthermore, the environment in which participants designed
and studied the problem provided time, money and support.

The team enacted thoughtfulness in its collaboration when it designed
and stayed focused on its problem of changing teaching practice in social
studies in order to enhance student learning. To change practices in the
direction of progressive education, participants conversed about different
points of view, speculated, and debated. They designed changes in

curriculum and instruction, had conversations about it, and then redesigned;

255
this cycle of talk and experimentation flourished. Equally important for
individuals, I found, was the connection of the collaboratively designed and
re-designed problem to individuals' interests and needs.

Through all its iterations, the problem's richness developed and
remained powerful. Participants cared about the problem, wanting to think
about it because its potential solutions had meaning for their practices.
Working collaboratively became a worthwhile means for broadening the
potential for finding solutions. Bound by obligations of mutuality and
reciprocity, two characteristics inherent in the kinds of caring relationships
that mark the enactment of thoughtfulness in collaboration, participants had
conversations in which they remained open to each others' points of view as
people talked about their thinking, actions, and beliefs. In essence, the team's
problem became both the substance of the collaborative work and the reason
for doing it.

We:

The enactment of thoughtfulness in collaboration rests upon the
assumption that personal and contextual factors can combine to create
enabling conditions for reflective thinking, as defined by Dewey, to happen.
Currently, many schools and universities are encouraging and even
arranging opportunities for colleagues to meet and talk. While these
opportunities can be enriching because they break down the walls of isolation

that guard against the sharing of ideas, such occasions will not necessarily

2 5 6
foster thoughtfulness and change around student learning. In order to have
conversations and shape and reshape experiments towards progressive
teaching practices that take into account new kinds of student learning,

participants enacting thoughtfulness in collaboration need the presence of an

enduring problem, felt in their ewn teaehing experieneee. that peeple ean
WW. Secondly. exploring the inquiry seems to

require close-to-the classroom work that allows for professionals to have
common experiences grounded in a focus on student learning. Conditions of
the collaborative setting-e.g., time to meet, time to see colleagues teach,
resources in the form of materials and personnel—need to support and
promote a thoughtful inquiry into student learning.
The Team's Work

Throughout this dissertation I stage productions of the team's
work—vignettes about what the social studies team did and how. The team
had two kinds of occasions that marked its work, one being when members
worked in classrooms with students, and the other in meetings and informal
conversations. The substance of the work ranged over broad areas I defined
as 1) planning classroom work (e.g., changes in curriculum and instruction)
and team business, 2) actually doing the classroom and outcf—classroom
work, and 3) sharing beliefs and orientations. Highlighting different routines
and changing roles participants played helped me illustrate how the team

worked.

2 5 7

In the examples of team work, one could note varied conversations
that included debate, negotiation, listening, and building on others' ideas
(e.g., the three connected events around planning psychology lessons). The
essence of the team's talk focused on experiments in either curriculum and
instruction, or team actions (e.g., questions about interviewing students).
Additionally, the team thoughtfully operationalized and continued
redefining their inquiry and the work it spawned.

Collaboration became a worthwhile and necessary m a means to
meet the difficulties of peering into one's teaching practice and attempting to
change it. By talking together and planning together about changing teaching
practices, and doing things together in and out of meetings, participants could
face the hardships and handle the endemic dilemmas of teaching with
gelleagnee, instead of in the usual isolated and individualist ways. The
collaboration provided the forum for talking about the difficulty, for facing it
with help and guidance, and for assessing the consequences.

I concluded in Chapter Four that the multiple descriptions of the
team's work throughout the dissertation could be understood in three ways:
collaboration as intellectual work, collaboration as conflict, and collaboration
as teacher learning. Now I explore the ways in which these conceptions fit

with the enactment of thoughtfulness in collaboration.

258
WWW
Conversation and experimentation about practice are hallmark
features of enacting thoughtfulness in collaboration. The team's work
illustrates, however, that thoughtfulness about practice involved
thoughtfulness about the academic content of practice, too. Participants
talked about the social studies, recognizing the contentious nature of the
disciplines' epistemological substance. Transforming the complex and often
competing ideas and values into practices that promoted debate and critique
on students' parts in many ways fenced participants to talk and experiment;
conversation and experimentation as processes in enacting thoughtfulness
seemed to emerge organically from the substance of the team's work.
Wow
Conflict in many ways is the essence of the enactment of
thoughtfulness in collaboration, because by expressing alternate and
sometimes opposing points of view participants support and stretch1 their
thinking. In the social studies team, conflicting beliefs, understandings,
actions, and orientations provided the reason and grounds for teammates' to
continue discussions and critiques. Collaborative work about changing
practice invited participants to talk about their conflicts on two levels. They

spoke about their on—the-spot thoughtful action, the kind of thinking that

 

1This term, support and stretch, is an idea common in the advisory
work literature.

2 5 9
happens in_sitn and that can only be understood by knowing about the
contexts in which the action occurs (see Dewey, 1933; Schon, 1992; van
Manen, 1991). Teammates also spoke about conflicts while planning,
observing, and participating in in-classroom and out-of-classroom work.
11 r ' n T h r rnin

Features of the enactment of thoughtfulness around teaching and
learning were evident in a lot of the team's work. Participants constantly
asked questions of themselves and of each other. Moreover, responses to the
multiple questions about how to teach something, what to teach, how to
shape the team's inquiry, or how to talk about each other's teaching in
respectful ways opened the door to debate, challenge, and critique.

I find this focus and commitment to teacher learning especially
interesting given team members' multiple experiences and their longevity in
teaching. Why would very experienced teachers (e.g., Ken, Gary, and Sally)
and consultants (Bill) continue to engage in hard work aimed at changing
what they do and have done (they all believed) rather successfully? The only
plausible explanation I can make for this commitment is that participants felt
invested in the inquiry. As I have said before, members connected to the
team's central problem which remained a W.
As the team constantly reshaped the problem and its resulting work, the
problem remained something that connected to individuals' interests and

curiosities.

260

Enacting thoughtfulness in collaboration that encourages teacher
learning meant, for the social studies team, focusing on and appreciating the
having of wonderful ideas. I lift this idea from Duckworth's work, which
began with a focus on children's learning. She writes,

The having of wonderful ideas, which I consider the essence of

intellectual development, would depend to an overwhelming extent

on the occasions for having them...The greater the child's repertoire of
actions and thoughts...the more material he or she has for trying to put
things together in his or her own mind...children increase the
repertoires of actions that they carry out on ordinary things, which in
turn gives rise to the need to make more intellectual connections.

(Duckworth, 1987, p. 13)

Enacting thoughtfulness in collaboration foisted social studies team
participants into occasions in which they could create, acquire, discuss, test,
and reshape a large set of actions and thoughts about teaching and
learning--both their own and their students' learning. These ideas mixed
with past experiences, questions, and beliefs that individuals held, and the
new ways of acting and thinking gave rise to new ways of putting things
together. Carrying out teaching in the usual ways, given these new and
different understandings, simply couldn't happen any more. The new
repertoire of actions that team members constructed, and new connections,
enabled participants—indeed, almost forced them, to teach and learn
differently than they had.

CautionariLhLQtes
In order to enact thoughtfulness in collaboration, participants need to

invest in the idea that collaborative work can be aimed at their own learning,

2 6 1
working through conflict, and doing intellectual work. In order to support
and promote action and change, conversations and experimentation around
these topics need to be embedded in caring and trusting relationships. Only
within such relationships can attempts to learn and change be genuine, not
forced. A mix of personal and institutional factors need to be present to
encourage such thinking and genuine work.

What this translates to is that collaborative work requires time, and its
effects will only be seen over a long period of time. Furthermore, I believe
that I only began to see the many effects of our team's work after careful and
laborious analysis; consequences of change in teaching and learning aren't
very obvious to insiders. I return to this point later in the chapter.

Team and Student Thoughtfulness

Characteristics of thoughtfulness permeated both in-classroom and
out-of-classroom team work, as I mentioned throughout Chapter Five. I
found similarities between how the team acted and how we saw students act,
leading me to believe that when teachers contemplate and discuss content
and how to teach it, they design tasks for students that foster and support
similar kinds of discussions and curiosities. A cycle seemed to develop in
which the team designed and taught particular tasks, students responded in
ways that often the team hadn't even imagined, and such reactions

continually took team members back to the design table.

2 6 2

Some examples serve to illustrate my point. One comes from student
journals in Ken's classes. Ken said that he now wants to read the journals,
finding them more "interesting," "reflective," and "making more sense."
Students' journal entries reflect the kinds of questions and ideas posed in
class as they wrestled with what does being Jewish means, could another
Hitler rise to power, are Jews to blame for Germany's demise. Seeing entries
that reflected these ideas, instead of just a listing of facts (which is what Ken
used to see in journals), encouraged Ken and team members to continue
designing the kinds of tasks we offered students. Exchanges among students,
e. g., the one between Patrick and Rachel and Lisa during their oral
presentation, enabled Ken to ask questions and make statements that opened
the door to debate. The set of exchanges that followed the oral presentations,
for instance, resulted in Ken's questions and statements about the myths and
realities of Judaism. Hearing these exchanges, and realizing the
thoughtfulness behind the ideas, pushed me to say something to Ken, and
resulted in his design of the chart about the myths and realities of Judaism.

As in the team, students' exchanges began to embrace controversy.
Instead of Patrick silently disagreeing with Rachel and Lisa, for example, he
raised his hand and openly stated, "I disagree with what you said." Such an
event reminds me of the conflict evident in the October, 1990, team meeting
(see Chapter Four) when the team (and especially Bill and I) needed to dispute

the reasons and methods for our inquiry about student learning.

2 6 3

Connections between the team's and students' thoughtfulness
illustrate the essence and purpose for enacting thoughtfulness in
collaboration. Thoughtfulness, willingness to engage in debate and
negotations about different ideas, and willingness to change practices-both
the processes and content of teaching and learning—are the elements of the
kinds of student learning that will enable individuals to make educated
choices and changes in their worlds inside and outside school. They are the
elements, too, that enable professional educators to make the same changes.

CautionanLNotes

Students' actions and thoughts mirrored the team's thoughtfulness in
ways that the team might not have chosen intentionally. As I discussed in
Chapter Five, the team paid too little attention to helping students learn ways
to talk about and wrestle with contentious content. While we carefully
organized how to teach the content, we didn't spend time thinking about
how to help students learn the ways to debate ideas. Though Patrick and Jim,
for example, showed the ways they could argue thoughtfully, I am not certain
how they learned it. Did team participants do anything, say anything, and/ or
demonstrate anything that helped Jim and Patrick, but that didn't come clear
to other students? Or, could Jim and Patrick debate in such ways before they
came to our class? Or, did they get engaged with the content and push
themselves while other students remained indifferent and, therefore, didn't

engage in thoughtful discussions?

264

Looking back on my observations, I noted some characteristics that
suggested student thoughtfulness, e.g., students engaged in discussions in
their small groups; students spontaneously raised and discussed questions ("Is
being Jewish a race?"); at least one student went beyond the classroom to seek
answers to questions (when Jim wanted to call a Jewish "priest"); students
showed initiative when asking questions and pondering issues; students
expressed themselves well orally (e.g., when disagreeing) and in narrative
(e.g., in journals); students struggled to understand and work with ideas
multiple historical perspectives; students questioned others' intepretations
(both historians and peers' ideas). But, is student thoughtfulness the same as
student learning? I wondered if these characteristics I just named counted as
learning. My many questions about thoughtfulness, including how to
account for it, how to teach it, how to engage students in it, are part of a larger
question I wrestled with throughout the dissertation.

My hunch is that others, like the social studies team, will wonder what
counts as student learning. Uncertain about what to look for, and how,
especially within the changing nature of teaching, learning, and knowing,
even the best-intentioned professionals may fall back to long-standing
educational traditions in which educational change seems driven by calls for
and changes in curriculum, instruction, and policies, with little

acknowledgement of the learner as an active knower (Cohen, 1988; Elmore,

2 6 5
1990; Fullan, 1991). Educators thus limit their attention to changing teaching
while agenming that students are learning. I return to this point shortly.
ENACT‘ING THE ENACTMENT OF THOUGHTFULNESS

These analyses of how the team's efforts fit within a conception of the
enactment of thoughtfulness raise two main questions in my mind. First,
what can others learn from the social studies team's work and attempts to
enact thoughtfulness? Secondly, how can others do this--or can they—and
what might they need to know? I begin this section with a letter to people
who might try enacting thoughtfulness in collaboration, and then I mention
three important things I learned that others should know about: the
complexities of playing three roles in my collaborative work, the importance
of focusing on student learning in collaborative work, and the difficulty of
representing a cacophony of interpretations.

Enacting Thoughtfulness in Collaboration: Advice to Fellow Collaborators

If I wrote a letter to my collaborating colleagues it might read like this:
Dear Colleague,

Having been part of the social studies team, which is a group of school
and university-based educators committed to an inquiry about the teaching
and learning of social studies, and having conducted a study and written a
ehert essay about it, I feel ready to share with you some things that might help
you establish professional relationships that remain committed to enhancing

learningnboth your own and students' learning. Of course I simply assume

2 6 6
your work together is aimed at students' learning; for what other reasons do
we teach if not to help students learn worthwhile content?

First, let me clearly state that these words are not meant to be a recipe;
they won't fit onto a recipe card, no matter what size it is. My understandings
grow from working at Hodges PDS, which is a professional development
school partnership crafted around the principles articulated in the Holmes
Group report entitled W. Hodges PDS includes Hodges
High School, a mostly white working-class mid-sized high school that joined
with Midstate, a land-grant university located near Hodges. Many
experiences I had are colored by these contexts, in ways that I can't even see.
While your contexts may differ, and the questions, problems, and conditions
you'll face will vary, perhaps sharing my questions, my hunches, and my
ah-has! might provoke your thinking.

The social studies team had no models, blueprints, or letters like this to
go on. But what we had was a set of connected and very compelling questions
ahmitjeaehingandJeaming. The heart of these questions had to do with
student learning, as we wondered about the effects of placing students in
homogenous ability groups across classes--tracking, in the popular
vernacular. Though we eventually broadened our inquiry to include
attention to wondering about the effects of our changing curriculum and

instruction, we still maintained a focus on enhancing student learning.

2 6 7

Our work together encompasses planning instruction, teaching
(sometimes with colleagues), and discussing and debating our beliefs and
orientations in informal conversations and team meetings outside the
classroom. We often spoke about the actual content we taught—real
intellectual discussions about social studies!!-and then thought about how
we might translate our excitement to our students.

In our actual work, we did many different things—almost like playing
different roles in theatre productions! I can talk best about my own roles, of
course. I started my work as an observer for the entire Hodges PDS, hired to
document what was happening so that we might share what we learned in
our professional development school with others. Keeping track of what
happens at meetings, what happens in classrooms, what questions you all ask,
the hunches you have—this is important to do because it gives you an
understanding of what you have accomplished.

While observing, I started concurrently participating in the social
studies team because I became interested in the initial questions the two high
school teachers asked about grouping kids. For most of the two years, I played
these two roles of observer and participant. I watched teaching, usually
talking afterwards with the teacher about what I saw. Often I interacted with
the students as they worked in small groups, especially when student teachers
were working in teammates' classrooms (I also supervised the four student

teachers who worked with the team over the two years). During team

268
meetings and informal conversations, I mostly listened and took notes. I
directly participated when the team was making decisions about
methodological work (for example, which students to interview) and when
the team discussed issues directly related to student learning (for instance,
setting up a small group task).

After close to two and a half years, I stopped working with the team in
order to engage in other collaborative work and analyze the two years of data I
had. The contents of this letter are what I found out through my analyses.
Another finding is about the power of stepping back from the work, and what
I found out from doing that. For example, I never realized that we missed
some important opportunities to support and promote students' learning
because we didn't talk enough during team meetings about student learning.
I bet you can see now why I conclude that distancing oneself from the actual
collaborative work is important especially in order to see things that one
might not want to recognize.

Let me say one more thing I've learned about the process of
collaborative work: don't be afraid to disagree. But let me add: make sure
you set up norms-fancy language for "rules"-about how to talk about things
that can be potentially uncomfortable. For folks in the social studies team, we
really needed to recognize that talking about each other's teaching or
thoughts and beliefs about teaching is something we'd rarely if ever done.

And we had lots of different ways of thinking about almost every part of

2 6 9
teaching, probably because we each had lots of different experiences in and out
of education. Also, work conditions and even the very nature of teaching
differs in colleges and high schools. Many of us used time differently, had
different sets of obligations, and different expertise and understandings.
These are the reasons why you might see things differently from colleagues,
and why you want to talk about them hefere they separate you.

On the social studies team, we had to figure out how to talk about our
differ points of view in order to do our work. So, we said to each other in the
first couple months we worked together, that anyone at any time, and
especially the person whose teaching we were discussing, could stop the
conversation and argue with colleagues' interpretations or tell the other folks
to bug off. You know, no one ever did this, but probably knowing that we
each cenld made watching each other teach and talking about it much less
threatening.

I've talked with you, so to speak, about the processes of our work, but
I've said little about the substance. I need to talk about that, because most of
the literature you will see talks little about the content of the work. I can sum
up the substance in one sentence: we focused on learning. We made changes
in curriculum, instruction, and assessment aimed at enhancing students'
understanding and learning. We wondered about ways to group students,
experimenting with different versions of and reasons for small groupwork, in

order to help them think about social studies ideas. As a team, we talked

270
about social studies (as I've mentioned) in order to help us think about
helping students talk about social studies.

I suppose the team thought about student learning almost like a
mantra. I'd suggest you also say it over and over, and really think about it.
Arrange a set of questions around student learning, ones that you'll continue
asking yourselves on a regular basis. I believe that these questions, and your
conscious efforts to think about student learning, might help you remain
focused on actual individual students' learning in more direct ways than the
social studies team seemed able to do.

I leave you with three pearls from the wisdom of experience. First,
wonder, wonder, and wonder some more about learning, especially students'
learning, because it's the wondering that will keep the work intellectually
stimulating and give you the strength to continue. Secondly, don't spend
your time seeking models and blueprints. Trust your gut while concurrently
talking a lot with others who are engaged in similar kinds of work in and out
of your particular partnership. And finally, maintain a sense of humor!
Good luck!

The Complexities of Playing Three Roles

In my team work, I played the two roles of observer and participant.

Only after distancing myself from the work could I realize a third role,

researcher, which differed in many ways from observer. Though I examined

my roles in Chapter Two, I add this discussion of the implications of realizing

2 7 1
and playing three sometimes overlapping roles. One particular event
illustrates clearly the "nestedness" of my roles, the confusion I sometimes
felt, and varied experiences I faced and learned from as a team observer,
participant, and researcher. I offer this "production" as the final vignette of
this thesis.
WW2:

On a cold mid-February day in the second year of our work, some team
members accepted Bill's invitation to go to his introductory teacher
preparation class. Bill asked team members to come because he needed help.
Like Gary and Ken, he explained a few days before our visit, I need some folks
to interview my students and help me find out what they are understanding.
Also, Bill (and the team concurred) thought it would be interesting for
preservice teachers to see and hear experienced teachers engaging in
conversations about teaching. To only me, Bill added his concerns about
reciprocity. My fieldnotes contain this paraphrased record of his comments:
We're always in their classrooms, and I think especially Ken wonders when
they'll get to help the university change. He's right, and I'm going to try and
make these kinds of invitations that will act as tokens until we really make a
change. (fieldnotes, 2 / 20 / 91)

Bill began class by explaining to his students who we were: These are
colleagues of mine from the social studies team. Our purpose is to help each

other teach better. We take notes while watching teaching. We interview

2 7 2
students. We talk about teaching, and talk about what we learned. After a
short explanation of the assignment (in small groups, read the article "Math
Learning in Context" by Magdelene Lampert and discuss the five important
ideas that Bill pulled out from the article), Bill and three other students
modeled how they would play the Reading Game in their small group2.
Within fifteen minutes from the start of class, students were working in their
small groups.

During small group work, Gary, Teresa, and I were to pull students and
interview them on a few short answer questions about what they were
learning, how they thought they were learning it, and what about it seemed
worthwhile. After about one hour, the whole class reconvened to discuss for
15 minutes aspects of the Lampert article. With 30 minutes remaining in
class, students made a circle with their chairs and listened as the social studies
team sat in the middle and talked about the teaching we had just seen. We
talked about what caught our attention (e.g., Gary wondered about the larger
ideas and purposes Bill had set, and what he was thinking about as he guided
the whole class discussion), and about how difficult teaching is when the text
is complex and filled with important ideas that are hard to understand. And
shortly before students left, we opened our meeting and responded to

students' questions about what they had just seen.

 

2Bill had created this strategy to help students handle texts with
multiple ideas. In the game, each student played the role of either oral reader,
reactor, questioner, and summarizer.

273

Postscript

During this class, I played many roles. My fieldnotes record these
observations on the side of my margin:

Woe! Here I sit in Bill's class, observing him teach. But I'm also

observing Gary and Teresa, who are observing Bill! And, I'm watching

Bill introduce an experience to students that emphasizes observation (I

refer to the ways Bill helped his class become observant of the ideas and

mathematics Lampert had in her article.) And, I'm watching Bill

watch his students as they work in groups! And while I observe, I gotta

participate because Bill just came over and told me to go interview a

student—"Come on, kid, I need your help," he tells me. I need help,

too!

After class Ijotted down this question: Is, and in what ways,
observation a form of participation.
Cemmentary

This incident is only one of many in which I had overlapping and
ever-present obligations in my teamwork. In Bill's class, I played the two
roles I played during the two years I worked with the team: observer and
participant. As so often happened, too, the obligations and responsibilities I
had within each role overlapped. And like what happened in Bill's class, I
sometimes had to stop and wonder which role identity I was wearing, how to
step into another identity, and how to keep track of what was going on
around me.

In addition to my main roles as observer and participant, I had

subsidiary responsibilities. For example, I often played confidant to

participants, as I did in this incident when Bill confided in me about his

 

 

2 7 4
reason for inviting team members to come to his class. I played teacher,
illustrated in this incident when I worked with small groups of students in
Bill's class. I also played that role with small groups of students in Hodges
classrooms. In this incident, I also played teacher educator. Bill was teaching
a course I had taught many times, and using material I had also struggled to
teach. The activity he had students doing was something I had never tried. I
watched to see how Bill and students made sense of it, and wondered about
ways I might use it in my work with high school students and future
preservice teachers. Another role I played was recorder, illuminated in this
instance when Ken asked me the next day what we had done in Bill's class.
The Researeher Rele

Only when I stepped back from the work, ending my observations and
participation in fall, 1991, did I even realize that I played three roles. While
engaged in the work, I considered my observer and researcher roles to be the
same. I now see them as different. My observations added to my
participation; observations provided the common grounds for conversations
and experimentation around teaching and learning in which I participated.
My researcher role differed from the observer role because as researcher I
could ask questions and wonder about ideas that didn'_t_ha1e_immediate
WW Removed from the
active part of the work, in my researcher role I had many important insights.

For instance, as I discuss at the end of Chapter Five, only after being away

2 7 5

from the team for about six months, doing some analysis, and then revisiting
these analyses five months later did I see that changes in students' roles
presented problems for the team. Furthermore, team conversations rarely
examined these changing roles and individual students' learning. The ways
in which status and gender dynamics influenced our collaboration and its
consequences also became more vivid to me as a I divorced myself from the
intensity of the relations. Realizing problematic interactions with people one
cares about is painful; one doesn't want to face the conflict that these actions
may raise. Yet, realizing them is important to sustaining collaborative efforts;
in the future I can be aware of the possibilities of these kinds of dynamics and
talk about them while engaged in the work.
ILthiaReseaclfl

Did I do reseach? Many might ask this question. To me, this
dissertation is research because it represents a systematic ongoing exploration,
explanation, and interpretation of phenomena. The work is more than just
description, and more than interpretation from an outsider who reflects only
the meanings that insiders constructed. Rather, it includes a plethora of
perspectives from persons who created their work realities (my teammates),
with additional perspectives and interpretations from my "insider" position
as well as my distanced "researcher" stance. The dissertation frames these
multiple perspectives in ways others can understand and challenge, while

also having the potential to extend the conversation of my teammates.

 

2 7 6

I suggest that this kind of research, in which I played the observer,
participant, and researcher, is a new kind of inquiry which is integral to
collaborative work. Rather than being cast in traditional ways, the researcher
in collaborative work forges new intersections among the three roles. She
provides meaningful feedback to school-based personnel who cannot
routinely engage in the regularity and intensity of questioning, reading, and
discussion due to the immediacy and presentism of work demands. She
provides the kind of knowledge generation that universities seek to construct
and contribute. But, this time, the essence of the knowledge is about practice--
the practices of school and university-based educators and learners. The
common ground between university and school-based people, analyzed and
constructed by the collaborative researcher, is teaehingandJeatm'ngpzagtiees.

This new form of collaborative research that focuses on practices can
contribute to our understandings in numerous ways. First, we can establish
common goals and work to create means for approaching them. We can gain
from systematic ongoing explorations of university-based educators' teaching
(e.g., my descriptions and analyses of Bill's and Sally's teacher preparation
work). Making these explorations more common than they are now will
help university participants gain what Erickson (1986) has called
"co-membership," in which common sets of understandings emerge from
similar experiences. Finally, and probably most importantly, we can begin to

uncover and challenge political dynamics between universities and schools

 

277
that often mirror larger societal problems (e.g., differentiated treatment based
on gender). If no one sees them, and raises them to our collective
consciousnesses, we will continue to reproduce relationships which we all
question (or, at least, should).

While I obviously endorse the worth of persons who serve the
multiple roles of observer, participant, and researcher, I also add a cautionary
note about the processes of collaborative work. Persons outside the
collaborative effort--people not engaged in the actual work--seem important
to talk with from time to time because they may raise questions, challenges,
and reactions. These "outsiders" need not be outside the whole enterprise. In
the case of the social studies team, they could have been local outsiders, e.g.,
people who worked at Hodges PDS, but who were not in tune with the
intricacies of the team's inquiry. Outsiders can challenge and raise new
issues. Additionally, they can point out the contentious nature of the work
content and/ or processes when it may not be readily apparent3.

In summary, as I look at the roles I played and those of my colleagues

and potential outsiders, I ask one question: How can we gather information

 

3As I have pointed out earlier in this chapter, the contentious nature of
the content of the social sciences contributed in many unexplainable ways to
the team's deliberations. Would the teaching of negative numbers enable the
kinds of conversations the team had, Helen Featherstone asked me one day
(personal communication, November, 1992). I remain uncertain about the
answer, except to suggest that questions charged with political, moral, and
social energy are part of the essence of the social sciences in different ways
than they are integral to mathematics.

 

2 7 8
that can enable us to enact thoughtfulness in collaboration while recognizing
needed understandings and possible changes in our roles, status and gender
dynamics, and cultural beliefs and norms? Only when we can recognize these
aspects of collaborative work-—and others that we haven't yet even imagined--
and openly discuss them with each other will we truly be collaborative.
The Importance of Focusing on Student Learning
Throughout this dissertation I've focused on the importance of
exploring student learning along with reflecting upon professionals' own
learning. I believe that any inquiry about teaching and learning must place its
central focus on student learning because students' learning lies at the nexus
of professional endeavors in education. Even things that seem quite remote
from student learning, e.g., governance issues, articulation between policy
and practice at different levels, directly connect to learning given that all that
we do in schools is aimed at helping students learn worthwhile material.
The raison d'etre of teaching is learning, and therefore I believe that the
raison d'etre of collaborative work among teachers must be focused on
learning.
The Difficulty of Representing a Cacophony of Interpretations
One thought remains unmentioned in these pages, mostly because I
did not know where to include it. It is a thought about my teammates, who
will most certainly read my musings in these dissertation pages. What will

they say about the interpretations I have made? In what ways will their

2 7 9
reactions, to my perspectives, alter, my ideas and theirs? In what ways will the
interpretations made throughout this thesis affect the future work of the
team, and affect me as I enter into relations with other school and
university-based educators?

The interpretations we each make now and in the past are part of the
story of this team's existence, broadening its history due to new
understandings derived from stepping back and drawing novel conclusions.
As my colleagues read this, and we talk about it, our sense of the team's
meanings and history will change. Can a team's history and story start and
stop, I wonder. And, in what ways is it ongoing?

I also struggle with the very nature of writing this opus, isolated from
my teammates, but in many ways touched by them. I have their words, their
beliefs, and their actions captured in fieldnotes, interviews, reports, audio and
video tapes, and transcriptions. Yet it feels odd to be writing about
collaborative work alene. Is this aloneness necessary, I wonder, to gain
distance and new and different perspectives? Certainly others have lodged a
similar debate within themselves4. I know the power of distance and playing
different roles, as I have mentioned. But, doing collaborative work and then
retreating to "do research" feels very traditional and out of kilter with the aim

and rhythm of doing collaborative work.

 

4See Miles Horton and Alan Peskin as two well-articulated examples.

280

As I close this dissertation, the words of the well-known and indeed
"greatest philosopher of the province and therefore of the world," Doctor
Pangloss, come to mind. In Voltaire's tales of Candide, we meet the young
Candide and follow his life adventures as he is expelled from the Baron's
castle, searches for his love, finds his way into the Inquisition, wanders
around America, and commits murder. After some years, Candide finally
finds himself back in the company of his idol, Doctor Pangloss. The good
philosopher suggests to Candide that while he may not understand how and
why, his adventures all connect and have meaning because "all events are
linked up in this best of all possible worlds." Like Candide's adventures, in
ways that I haven't even yet come to imagine, the experiences chronicled in
these pages link together my unending questions and wonderings about

observing, participating in, and researching teachers' collaborative work.

 

 

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

—¥MIIF

 

 

 

APPENDIX A

American History, American History, and
Honors American History.

The following will be studied and analyzed:

- materials: text, A-V, support materials

- lecture: teachers choice of vocabulary

- discussion

- desk/seat work .

- projects and assignments

- classroom strategies i.e. cooperative
learning etc.

- criteria for student course selection

3. Study depth of information across the US
History curriculum

- topics

- concepts

- detail/data

- quantity of work/information

- Bloom's Taxonomy

4. Study of rational for details of method and

curriculum.

- Is the rationale sound? As cowared to whats
district philosophy, goals, and objectives?

- ls rationale consistent with actual practice

- Hhat is assessment methodology?

- Do the levels of American History create an
inequitable situation?

- Is the conceptual framework common to the
three levels?

5. Review of the literature.

- What does the current research say about
homogeneous/beterogeneous grouping?

- How does the current research relate to the
realities of Holt High School?

RESOUEQEfi NEEDED:

1. H80 support: Research specialist to help with
methodology.

'2. Clerical help to collect student data.

3. Time to organize, structure, and analyze data.

281

282

4.

5.

Setting: Three Levels Of American History

85111. level ior those students that are
l.E.P.C. students and others that have demonstrated a low
level 04 success in academics because or less than grade
level skills, i.e. reading and writing.

um an w W lav-1 assumes that
the skill level tor the students enrolled is commensurate
with the materials and expectations 0! the course as it is

currently being taught.

mummmmm than

students who have demonstrated a high degree 0! academic
achievement and wish to participate in a course in which the
level is higher in terms 04 expectations and materials. The
general level is a first year college/university one.

283

 

 

been.

 

access—cu
.ootoa

 

2.2.: see ...3 2.33m
c.2025

 

2.2.9. see a... ..eeueeb ape.»
334.6 265.: 23.5.2 m1... no zofi<>¢mmmo

APPENDIX B

TEAM INTERVIEW PROTOCOL

APPENDIX C

284
APPENDIX B

TEAM INTERVIEW PROTOCOL

This interview is in two parts. Part I will be today; part 2 we will continue
after break Since we know each other, talking about some of the things in
this interview may seem unnecessary. So let’s pretend I am a journalist sent
from a newspaper to do a feature story about the social studies team.

1. WHAT IS THIS?
1. I've heard of the social studies team at Hodges High School. Can you tell
me what it is?
mammmmmmmwmmwm
dos the team do?]

a. What would I see if I watched the team? WHY?

b. What would people be doing? WHY?

c What would you be doing? WHY?

2. Who is on the team?
a. How did those people come to be on the team?

b. Why do you suppose those persons are on the team?
(1 What do those persons do on the team?

3. When do you do the work? WHY?

4. Where does the team work? WHY?

5. How does the team work?

6. How does the team decide what is going to happen in the social studies
team?

a. What input to the team do you personally have?
b. Is there a leader?

‘I. What does s/ he do?
2. In what ways is that the same and [or different from

285

what others in the team do?

3. What about what that person does makes him [her a leader?
In your view, WHY is 5] he the leader?

4. How did that person(s) come to be the leader?

7. What strikes you most about the social studies team? What seems most
important for me to know about the team?

8. What, if anything should I know about the social studies team if I wanted
to join it?

a. Could I join it? What would I have to do?

11. WHAT DOES THE TEAM DO?
A Can you say what the team does in working together?

[for each thing listed, ask]

1. What would I see if I watched _?

2. How does ________ begin? and then? and finally?

3. Does the team have any particular expectations of what will happen?
WHY? Does that seem important? What about that seems important?

15 there anything especially important I should know about ?
WHY?

4. Do you personally have any particular expectations of what will happen
with ? WHY?

B. Do any particular events stand out to you from about what the team does?
WHY?

1. What about this event stands out?
2. How did it happen? WHY?

III. CONTENT OF TEAM WORK
A Over time when the team has met, what topics has it discussed?

1. Why those topics?

 

 

 

 

286

2. What about that topic seemed important to discuss?

a. Did you agree that it was important to discuss? WHY? or
WHY NOT?

B. Has the team discussed problems?
1. What kinds of “problems?"

a. Did you agree that it was important to discuss? WHY? or
WHY NOT?

 

C. What topics and issues have you personally raised during the team’s work?
1. Why did you raise that topic?
IV. GOALS
A Does the team have goals for what it does? What is the team wanting to
accomplish?
1. What are the goals? [for each, describe and ask]
a. How did this come to be one of the team’s goals?

2. What goals do you have for your involvement with the team?

V. DESCRIBE A MEETING
Please describe a meeting for me. [Try and get the time of year]

A What would I see?
WHY?
B. What would I hear people talking about? WHY?
C. Why did the team discuss this topic?
1. Did someone initiate the topic?
D. Is this meeting you described typical?

1. What about it strikes you as typical?
[get characteristics]

287
2. Is there such a thing as a typical meeting?
3. Why did you choose the particular meeting you did?
VII. AGREEMENTS
A Does the team always agree on the direction the team is going? WHY or
WHY NOT?
1. Do you always agree? WHY?
2. If not, what do you do?
B. Does the team always agree on substance of the work the team does?
1. Do you always agree? WHY?
2. If not, what do you do?
C. Does the team always agree on the goals the team has set?

1. Do you always agree? WHY?

2. If not, what do you do?

LEARNING

1. What benefits do you get, and what worth, from being a part of the social
studies team?

2. Since you have been working with the social studies team, have you
changed?

In what ways, if at all, have you felt you have changed since you began
working with the social studies team?

PROBES

3. Since you have been working with the social studies team, have you
changed anything about your teaching?

If so, what? WHY?

To what do you attribute the changes?

 

288

In what ways, and what kinds of change have you noted in your fellow
members of the team?

WHY?
To what do you attribute those changes?

4. Since you have been working with the social studies team, have you
changed anything about the way you view your job as a teacher?

If so, what?
WHY?
To what do you attribute those changes?

In what ways, and what kinds of change have you noted in your fellow
members of the tem?

WHY?

To what do you attribute those changes?
5. Since working with the team, have you changed the way you view the
world outside your professional work?

[e.g., professional relationships]

6. Would you recommend to others that they should join the team? WHY?
or WHY NOT?

 

289

APPENDIX C

TEAM PLANNING NOTES
‘ Ba

F n.

  

" National Security"

 

ACentnryofWats gs ,
MarchesmFolly 5D.

A

‘

h?

 

Theme Imperialisn.
colonialism. coo-colonialism
Pros and Congress

 

Then'sedtbeglobal
economy

 

Then:

 

need 1% — — _ _

Reform and reaction

I990

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DOMESTIC

NOTIONS: “less is we.” 'tbanatic.‘ "post-holing.’ “the tie a) literann'dditeracy.”

THEME:

Runs through time

has a strong image. e.g., “Federalism.“ but oat “political“

has interpretations. cg. pluralistic distribution of we: is recognized in constinrtions
inrerpwution has facets. e.g.. political. intellecnr economic. social

ERA:

cross-section of a time; cuts across themes

has a Strong image. e.g., professionals go to political war with machine bosses

has an interpretation. "Progressive era. middle class meritocnts try toput government above politics
economic.

interpretations have faces. e.g., intellectual. social. political.

290

 

FOREIGN Fa

 

 

 

Theme: A Cen d E - __ #t
Wm my . Spain $.E. Asia

 

 

 

Theme: The long. slow
death of colonialism

 

 

Theme: Theriseofthe
globalecmomy

 

 

Theme

 

 

Ian 1m 19”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DOMESTIC
NOTlONS: “less is more.“ 'thematie.‘ 'post-holing.‘ “the tie e liter-awaken.“

THEME:

Runs through time

has a strong image. e. g.. “Federalism.“ but not 'politieal'

has mterpretations. e. g.. pluralistic distribution of is recognized in constitution:
interpretation has iacets. eg.. political. intellectu .economic. social

ERA

cross- seco'oo of a time; cuts across themes

has a strong image. e. g.. professionals go to political war with machine bosses

has an interpretation. “Progressive era middle class meritoo'ats try to put government above politics
interpretations have faces. e. g.. intellectual. social. political. economic. .

APPENDIX D

291

twins» . $195.1 2du..s\£.wl

v u \m N \miwt
rte» ..kswim

n. JWSd 10 II
knxmwmmmww m. “2°.skdvcsov I.“
...: ...- n. "Luv“... w ..l
V333» “ yIBI

-_ M. I \</

Hmmzm mm>ou HHZD :m<3 Q24 mHoHAmzoo:

/4/£r/’

mam/(mica

Q xHszmm<

LIST OF REFERENCES

LIST OF REFERENCES

Auger, F. K., 8: Odell, S. 1. (1992). Three school-university partnerships for teacher
development. WW 43(2), 262-269-

Anyon, 1. (1981). Social class and school knowledge. W 11(2), 3-
41.

Ball, S. 1., 8: Lacey, C. (1984). Subject disciplines as the opportunity for group action:
A measured critique of subject sub-cultures. In A. Hargreaves 8: P. Woods
(Eds), ._ mu .H' . omit“ Ut‘ Act-0:4 o ‘-_ I‘ <10 -. tt'(pp.
232-244). Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

 

Belenky, M., Clinchy, B., Goldberger, N. 8: Tarule, 1. (1986). W
.New York: Basic Books.

Bruneau, B. 1., Henderson,1. G., McCracken, N., Kimble, P. K., 8: Hawthorne, R. D.
(1992). Collaborative reflections of teacher educators. W
;4_(2),11-21.

Buchmann, M. (1983). Argument and conversation as discourse models of
knowledge use. (Occasional Paper No. 68). East Lansing, MI: Michigan State
University, Institute for Research on Teaching.

Buchmann, M. (1987). Teaching knowledge: The lights teachers live by (Issue
Paper 87-1). East Lansing: Michigan State University, National Center for
Research in Teacher Education.

Campbell, D. R. (1988). Collaboration and contradiction in a research and staff

development project. W 20(1), 99-121.

Campbell, P., 8: Southworth, G. (1990). Rethinking collegiality: Teachers' views.
Palo Alto: Stanford University, Center for Research on the Context of
Secondary Teaching.

292

293

Carnegie Task Force on Teaching as a Profession. (1986). A nation prepared:
Teachers for the let century. Washington DC: Carnegie Forum on
Education and the Economy.

Center for Research on Teacher Learning. (in preparation). This kind of teaching.
Unpublished manuscript. East Lansing: Michigan State University:

Cochran-Smith, M. (1991). Learning to teach against the grain. Hammjdticaficnal
m @113), 279-311-

Cochran-Smith. M., 8: Lytle, S. (Eds). (1992). Ccmmunifiesfcueachecmcatch;
Fringc gr farcfrcnt? Albany: SUNY.

Cohen, D. K. (1989). Teaching practice: Plus ca change... In P. W. Jackson (Ed. ),
an is .11 0‘1 .|.la.1L01 _a‘qa‘ 01 ‘A‘.~g .gaa_.:_‘

(pp. 27-84). Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.

Cohen,E. G. (1986). ,I- ' ' .7. .2
chasm. New York: Teachers College Press.

Cusick, P- (1983)- IhmalrtaumlcaLamLmeArneucanlughsshml New York:
Longman.

Darling-Hammond, L. 8: Berry, B. (1988). Wham. Santa
Monica, CA: The Rand Corporation.

 

David, 1. (1990). Restructuring in progress: Lessons from pioneering districts. In R
Elmore 8: Associates (Eds), WW (pp. 209-250). San

Francisco: 1ossey-Bass.

Dewey,1. (1933). ..a t‘ ' -. 'u t o l‘ ‘ III. ‘3‘ I. ‘ l.|.I:
W. Boston: D. C. Heath and Company.

Duckworth, E. (1987). W. New York: Teachers College
Press.

Elmore, R 8: Associates (Eds). (1990). W. San Francisco:
Iossey-Bass.

Erickson, F. (1986). Qualitative methods in research on teaching. In M. C. Wittrock

(Ed). HanthanLLesemhaneacmrdediflm (PP. 119-161)- New York:
MacMillan.

 

294

Feiman-Nemser, S. (1983). Learning to teach. In L. Shulman 8: G. Sykes (Eds),
WW (pp. 150-170). New York: Longman.

Feiman-Nemser, S., 8: Floden, R. (1986). The cultures of teaching. In M. C.

Wittrock (Ed) WWW (PP 505-527)
New York. Macmillan.

Feiman-Nemser, S., 8: Parker, M. B. (in press). Mentoring in context: A comparison
of two U. 5. programs for beginning teachers. WW
Educationaljesearch

Florio-Ruane, S. (1992, May). A conversational interpretation of teacher researcher
collaboration. Paper presented at the 1992 Research and Policy Colloquium
Series, East Lansing, MI

Florio-Ruane, S. (1991). Conversation and narrative in collaborative research: An
ethnography of the written literacy forum. In C. Witherell 8: N. Noddings

(Eds ), WWW (PP 219-243)
New York: Teachers College Press.

Fullan, M., Bennett, B, 8: Rolheiser-Bennett, C. (1990). Linking classroom and
school improvement. EducaficnaLLcadfiship, 512(8),13-19.

Fullan, M. with Stiegelbauer, S. (1991). W.
Ontario and New York: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/ Teachers
College Press.

Gadamer, H. (1982). W. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co.

Grumet, M. R. (1991). The politics of personal knowledge. In C. Witherell 8: N.

Noddings (Eds), SteriesJixesJelLNananmndnialoguejucducaticn, (pp
67-79). New York: Teachers College Press.

Hargreaves, A, 8: Dawe, R. (1990). Paths of professional development: Contrived
collegiality, collaborative culture, and the case of peer coaching. Icachingand

Teacheslidrtcancn 6(3), 227-241.

Hart, A. W. (1990). Work redesign: A review of literature for education reform. In
s. B Bacharach (Ed ). Adxanccsinflseacclsmdthecdesntsshml
management (pp. 31-69). New Haven, C1“: 1A1.

Holmes Group. (1986). W. East Lansing: Holmes Group.
Holmes Group. (1990). Mama. East Lansing: Holmes Group.

 

295

1ackson, P. (1986). The uncertainties of teaching. In W (pp.
53-74). New York: Teachers College Press.

Johnson, 5. M. (1990). W New
York: Basic Books.

Kohl, H. (1984). Gmingrnindsaflnhemmingnmmer. New York: Harper
Colophon.

Labaree, D. F. (1992). Doing good, doing science: The Holmes Group Reports and
the rhetorics of educational reform. WW 23(4), 628-640.

Lather, P. (1986). Research as praxis. WW $6), 257-277.

Lieberman, A. (1992). The meaning of scholarly activity and the building of
community Edncafinnalfiesearcher. 21(6) 5-13

Lightfoot, 5.1-. (1983). WWW:
New York: Basic Books.

Little, 1. W. (1990a). Conditions of professional development 1n secondary schools.
In M. W. McLaughlin, 1. E. Talbert, 8: N. Bascia (Eds.,)

Ihunntmmeashing
WWW (PP 187-224). New York: Teachers
College Press

Little, 1. W. (1990b). The persistence of privacy: Autonomy and initiative in
teachers' professional relations. MW 21(4), 509-536.

Little, 1. W. (1990:). Teachers as colleagues. In A. Lieberman (Ed. ), Mans
WW (PP 165-194) New York

F almer Press.

Lortie, D. C. (1975). W. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.

McCarthey, S. 1., 8: Peterson, P. L. (in press). Creating classroom practice within the
contexts of a restructured professional development school. In D. K. Cohen,

M. L McLaughlin, 8: S. Talbert (Eds),
. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

McConaghy, I - A- (1991)- WWW Unpublished
doctoral dissertation, University of Alberta, Alberta, CA.

296

Mead, 1. H. (1934). The self. In W. (pp. 135-227). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

Merriam, S. B. (1988).
San Francisco: Iossey-Bass Publishers.

Miller,1. L. (1990). ' ' °
W. Albany: State University of New York.

Mitchell, L. S. (1951). Quachflmmaadmschmls. New York: Simon 8: Schuster.

Navarro, 1. 1. (1992). Will teachers say what we want to hear? Dilemmas of teacher
voice (Research Report 92-5). East Lansing: Michigan State University,
National Center for Research in Teacher Learning.

Nias,1., Southworth, G., 8: Yeomans, R. (1989).

NoddingsN. (1984). ._ ° ' '
Berkeley. University of California Press.

 

Nystrand, R. O. (1991).

(Trends and Issues Paper No. 3).
ERIC Clearinghouse on Teacher Education.

Oakes,1., Hare, S. R., 8: Sirotnik, K. A. (1986). Collaborative inquiry: A congenial
paradigm in a cantankerous world. WM 82(4), 546-561.

Parker, M. B. (1986). Teacher networking as a mechanism for improvement of
primary mathematics instruction. In G. Lappan 8: R Even (Ed. ),N_Qr_th

.u .q ga'ag't‘quaq as: 1" 1:04:

Mamcmaticsfidncaficn (pp. 211-218). East Lansing, MI: Michigan State
University.

Perrone, V. 8:. A. (Ed). (1985). ° '
School. California: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Polanyi, M. (1969). Knowing and being. In M. Grene (Ed) Kaming and thing;
WWW (pp. 123-138). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ponticell, 1. A. (1990). School / umversrty collaboration: The need for a common

language and shared vision. In H. S. Schwartz (Ed. ), Wag
W (pp. 150-154). Washington, D. C.: ERIC Clearinghouse on

Teacher Education.

 

 

297

Powell, A, Farrar, E., 8: Cohen, D. (1985). W
W Boston: Houghtin Mifflin

Rosaen, C., 8: Hoekwater, E. (1990). Collaboration: Empowering educators to take

charge. W616). 144-151.
Rosenholtz, 5- I. (1989). W

New York: Longman.

Rushcamp, S., 8: Roehler, L. R. (1992). Characteristics supporting change in a
professional development school. Wan, 43(1), 19-27.

Sarason, 5- B- (1982). WWW
adifiQa. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Schon, D. (1992). The theory of inquiry: Dewey's legacy to education. Cmnimtlnm
Lagging, 22(2), 119-137.

Schram, P. W. (1992). Learning mathematics to teach: What students learn about
mathematical content and reasoning in a conceptually oriented mathematics
course. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Michigan State University, East
Lansing.

Sirotnik KA &G00dlad I I (EdS) (1988) W
W. New York: Teachers College Press.

Smith, S. D. (1992). Professional partnerships and educational change: Effective
collaboration over time. laymaLQLIcacthEdacafiaa, 43(4), 243-256.

Smylie, M. A. (1992). Teachers' report of their interactions with teacher leaders

concerning classroom instruction. WM 23(1), 85-98.
Spradley, 1. P. (1980). W. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 8:

Winston.

Stallings, 1. 5., 8: Kowalski, T. (1990). Research on professional development
schools. In W. R. Houston, M. Haberman, 8: 1. Sikula (Eds), Haadbmzhof

researchnnJcacheudusation (PP- 212-234) New York: Macmillan.

Sykes, G. (1990). Fostering teacher professionalism 1n schools. In R. F. Elmore 8:
Associates (Eds), ’ - _ , . ._ _ . .
rcfcrm (pp. 59-96). San Francisco: Iossey-Bass

 

298

Thelen, H. A. (1954). W. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

van Manen, M. (1991). ' '
maughtfinngas. Albany: State University of New York.

Voltaire. (1949, originally published in 1759.) Candida. (Translation by Richard
Arlington.) New York: Viking Press.

Waller, W. (1932). W. New York: Wiley.

Wilson, S. M., 8: Wineburg, S. S. (1988). Peering at history through different lenses:
The role of disciplinary perspectives in teaching history. IeachchCcllcgc
Record. 82(4). 525-539-

Winitzky, N ., Stoddart, T., 8: O'Keefe, P. (1992). Great expectations: Emerging
professional development schools. WW 43(1), 3-19.

Witherell C & Noddings, N (13(18): (1991) StoneshyesjelLNananxeand
W. New York: Teachers College Press.

MICHIGAN S

TATE UNIV. LIBRARIES
l llHHIIWIll]llWVIIIIVIHHIIIHIIHIIIIIIHIIHHHI
3014005395

3129

 

ill III III III III III I... III III III ii! III III