i UNDERSTANDING LEARNING TO TEACH FOR UNDERSTANDING: AN ORDINARY TALE By Loucia D. Constantinou A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University i n partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education Doctor of Philosophy 2015 ii ABSTRACT UNDERSTANDING LEARNING TO TEACH FOR UNDERSTANDING: AN ORDINARY TALE By Loucia D. Constantinou journey of learning to teach for understanding during her internship year, the fifth year of a five - year teacher prepara tion program at Great State University, a large University situated in the Midwestern United States. The t raditional literature on learning to teach introduced stages of development that intellectually demanding teaching. Critics of the learning to teac h literature have disputed the above assumption of linearity in teacher development , and have drawn attention to the monolithic way in which novice teachers have been portrayed, underlining the importance of taking context into account in order to understa nd how learning to teach takes place. Similar to the traditional learning to teach literature, the teaching for understanding literature does not consider novice teachers as capable of engaging in constructivist - oriented teaching as early as their pre - serv ice level exposure to the profession. To bring these two lines of literature together, I developed the conceptual framework of paying Sara learned to grow out of an orientation t oward herself and her performance as a teacher into an orientation how that change influenced her teaching; and how she herself perceived that change in her practice and developed tacit knowledge of it. iii I spent a year journeying with Sara in her teacher preparation program at Great State University ( GSU ) and in her internship placement at Ordinary Elementary School an urban, K - 5 public elementary school loca ted in a mid - sized Midwestern city. Sara taught fifth grade in an ethnically, racially, and economically diverse classroom. To capture the evolving life of learning to teach in a school setting, I employed ethnographic methods for crafting a qualitative ca se dissected dail y. Triangulated data consisted of interv iews with cooperating teachers, the school principal, and course and field instructors; field notes , which I recorded daily; reflective journal and various artifacts (GSU coursework assignments and other Grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) and the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss and Corbin, 1990) were the main methods of data analysis. To present the study a story of rise and fall; of roller coaster rides; of demanding respect from and expecting to be listened to by students; and of arriving at new understandings of respect for and listening to students education. It is essentially about the story of democracy, a story in the making, and a story far away from ordinary. iv Copyright By LOUCIA D. CONSTANTINOU 2015 v In Loving Memory of my Mother and Father, whose work ethic and love for learning, have taught me (phronesis) (and virtue) And In Loving Memory of my Grandparents, my Guardian Angels. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Arriving at the acknowledgement section is a daunting task: who might I forget? Writing it is an impossible act: how do I fit half a century into a few pages? These pages are the product of great emotional labor: translating feelings into thoughts; alignin g thoughts with moments. The acknowledgement section of any piece of writing is the place in which private thoughts and feelings are made public, and where various aspects of one´s life personal, professional, public, and private are inevitably blended and intertwined. In my case, thanks to extensive travelling and long - term studying, various spectrums of my life blended together smoothly and created new places for me to grow and to flourish. Friends became family and family became friends; people became id eas and ideas became commitments; faraway places became home, and up close and personal evolved into unfamiliar and strange: a post - structural act (and gift). For this unexpected but wonderful blending of the public and private spheres of my life, over th e course of a thirty - year period of higher education learning, I owe many thanks to many people from many countries, for a million reasons. It is impossible to list them all. I can mention by name but a few, hoping that the rest will know they have been, a nd still are, as important to my growth personal and professional, public and private. From my early childhood years, I still have very vivid memories of my Grandparents. Grandfather Loucas was always holding a book, reading and telling me stories. Grandm a Agathe was always there, cooking and caring for me. They both taught me, by example, patience, humility , and love: the foundations of a good life. THANK YOU! vii During my formal schooling in Cyprus I had the good fortune to be in classrooms where teachers were truly committed to students an idea, and a stance, I did not understand and appreciate until many years later, while attending graduate school. Many thanks to my many committed teachers! Special thanks to the late Richard Staley, my American teacher o f English, stand for something. My early studies to become a teacher at the Pedagogical Academy of Cyprus helped me realize the necessity of teacher education, and both how and why this particular field of study would become so important to me. My sense of wonder urged me to travel to faraway places quite early in life. It was then that I made the familiar strange and the strange familiar and close to home: an incredible intellectual gift. Attending the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University offered me some even more important intellectual gifts that shaped my subsequent course of development in significant ways. As a young graduate student in education, I le arned of foundations (social, psychological, philosophical) upon understanding education. I am deeply indebted to Professors Eleanor Duckworth, Howard Gardner, Carol Gilligan, Israel Scheffler, and my Academic Advisor Catherine Krupnick. They all taught me about the importance of listening well to students the ones who speak and the ones who do not. It was at Harvard, and through Catherine Krupnick, that I was e xposed to the methodology I employed in my study. And it was at Harvard that the intellectual commitments of my work were shaped. Eleanor Duckworth is in the beginning of this study, at the end, and everywhere in between. She taught me, early on, about th viii intellectual virtue, and an essential quality of every teacher and of every human being. THANK YOU! My graduate studies were furthered and advanced at the University at Albany - SUNY, in the Department of Educational Theory and Practice (ETAP). I am greatly indebted to many people there, both Professors and academic staff, as well as fellow graduate students, who pushed my thinking about Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment, and around t heir complex and multidimensional relationships. Through both studying and teaching at Albany, I came to appreciate, once again, the importance of preparing teachers well. I am very grateful for the guidance, the exemplary mentoring and all the professiona l opportunities offered to me by the former Dean of the School of Education Judy L. Genshaft (currently University of South , and by Professors Audrey B. Champagne, David Champagne, the late Alan Purves, Sandra Mathison, Diana Newman, D avid Chapman, Paul Wallace, the late Donald Biggs, the late David Martin, and many others. Special thanks also to Steve Thompson former Director of International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS), John Pomeroy Chief International Admissions Officer, Dee Warner Director of Academy for Initial Teacher Preparation, and Joan Hughes ETAP Department Secretary. Many, many thanks! It was time for me to move to the Midwest, to Michigan State University and the Department of Teacher Education, my home away from hom e. I had no idea at the time, that my doctoral work at this place would have had such a profound impact on me as a person, as a pro fessional and as a citizen. It wa s at Michigan State that I understood even further why it is needs such serious attention. In the company of an incredible group of individuals Professors, acade mic staff, graduate secretaries, fellow graduate students, teacher candidates, and retired ix professionals from various fields I marveled at the ideas of democracy in education, diversity as a strength, and teaching for understanding. Through many valuable p rofessional opportunities (teaching and research assistantships, field instruction, professional conferences, service on various committees) I learned to welcome uncertainty, and that forming good questions is more important than any answer. I learned to v alue puzzlement as a good state of mind, and that any understanding is but provisional and partial waiting to be recon structed while in the company , and through the collective wisdom , of critical friends. Over a long period of graduate study at Michigan St ate University, I worked with many Professors, gaining a lot as both a scholar and a person. Some of my Professors helped me built a solid theoretical foundation for my evolving scholarship, either through courses or joint research work. Others provided fo to study my own practice. I am grateful to all of them for their wisdom and good grace, and I list them alphabetically: Drs. Janet Alleman, Dorothea Anagnostopoulos, Linda Anderson, Laura Apol, Ann Austin, Maenette Benham, Tom Bird, Rog er Bresnahan, the late Jerry Brophy, Margaret Buchmann, Doug Campbell, the late Cleo Cherryholmes, Christopher Clark, Sandra Crespo, Brian DeLany, Corey Drake, Christopher Dunbar, Patricia Edwards, Carol Sue Englert, Sharon Feiman - Nemser, Helen Featherston e, Jay Featherstone, Lynn Fendler, Robert Floden, Susan Florio - Ruane, James Gallagher,Elizabeth Heilman, Mary Kennedy, David Labaree, Judith Lanier, Reitumetse Mabokela, Wanda May, Susan Melnick, Lynn Paine, P.David Pearson, Gail Richmond, Cheryl Rosaen, J ack Schwille, Avner Segall, Jack Smith, Rand Spiro, Randi Stanulis, Maria Teresa Tatto, Steven Weiland, Lauren Young, Peter Youngs, Yong Zhao. Many other people at MSU, whom I worked with in various positions, have been as important to my development as ha ve faculty members. Thank you to Paul Kurf, Margo Glew, x Sally Labadie, Sharon Schwille, Trudy Sykes, and Philippa Webb for our conversations about how to run such a big teacher preparation program. I benefitted from your deep insights and grounded understa nding of teacher preparation. Big thanks to Anne Schneller, Chery Moran, Marlene Green, Todd Drummond, and Christine Caster for always being of service on the fifth floor: outstanding, humbling service. Many others made sure things kept running by processi ng tedious paperwork with a smile and a lot of grace. Thank you to Terry Edwards, Kristi Lowrie, Kathy Lessard, Karla Bellingar, Tena Harrington, Karen Gray, Kathy Dimoff, Tracy Abbott, Terri Gustafson, David Dai, and Eric Mulvany. Amy Peebles was my angel in the building. cheered for me. And Linda Brandau was the captain of the ship. My graduate school journey was turbulent and long. Linda made sure everything was in place. She was always on top of every form, always ahead of any trouble. I had fewer sleepless nights knowing that Linda was there. THANK YOU! It also made a difference knowing that every time I came back to the building, ith a warm welcome and genuine curiosity about my whereabouts, academic and otherwise. Thank you to the Teacher Education Department Chairs Drs. Henrietta Barnes, Steven Koziol, and Margaret Crocco. During my doctoral years at MSU, I had the good fortune to meet and study with the most incredible group extraordinaire of fellow graduate students from all over the world. Our parea (companionship) took us from heavenly potlucks to exquisite conversations about each acy and education. I feel very fortunate that my teacher education make up is founded as much on informal interaction with my colleagues from abroad as on my formal education within the Department. Michigan State University, and the Department of Teacher E ducation in particular, attracts an unusually large and very talented xi group of international and internationally minded students, scholars and faculty, from whom I benefited greatly in all respects. A very big, heartfelt salute to Ailing Kong and Jian Wang of China; Rajendran Nagappan, Suseela Malakolunthu, Kurnia Yahya, and Kaliamma Ponnan of Malaysia; Vibha Bhalla of India; Oumatie Marajh of Trinidad; Magane Koshimura and Takayo Ogisu of Japan; Isabella Turtowalujo and Wenda Nofera of Indonesia; Anne Mun gai and Rachel Ayieko of Kenya; Lillian Muofhe, Thidziambi Phendla, Manelisi Genge, and Thoko Mpumlwana of South Africa; Marie Mayoya of Burundi; Gaston Dembele and Martial Dembele of Burkina Faso; Tangeni Iijambo of Namimbia; Leaps Malete of Botswana; the late Robert Chimedza, Kedmon Hungwe, and Letina Ngwenya of Zimbabwe; Olga Kristkaya and Olena like them all to know that they have brought MSU, and its community, closer to the world, making the place even more special. For their priceless international care and concern, I am eternally grateful to my international colleagues, friends and family! ! The Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State h as very strong programs on New Teacher Induction and Mentoring. It also has a strong tradition on some other, just as precious kind of mentoring that of senior graduate students serving as mentors for incoming students. I had the very good fortune to have three incredible individuals as mentor graduate students: Elaine Howes, Bill Rosenthal, and Don Duggan - Haas. All three took me under their wing the minute I arrived on campus. They nurtured my body, my mind, and my soul. I will always treasure their friend ship, their care and concern, and their love. A land - grant University second to none, Michigan State University offered me a window to the country and showed me the reasons that the US commitment to working closely with schools, and its care for their improvement, taught me xii valuable lessons on how research and practice can work for each other productively. My years as a field instructor in local scho ols led me to my dissertation work. Multiple opportunities to advance professionally were offered to me very strategically, and in abundance, through the and to the Dean of the Graduate School Professor Karen Klomparens for exhibiting a unique example of female leadership: always there, always attending, always pioneering new paths. Thank you to both of you for being such powerful role models! Thank you, also, to Asso ciate Dean for Academic Affairs Dr. Tony Nunez and to support staff Deanne Hubbell for always being there, always open to questions, and ready to give answers. The Office for International Student and Scholars (OISS) always had the magic stick to make it all happen. Very few people in the University understand the complexities of coming to study from a far - away place. Even fewer know how to handle complicated documents and the maze of deadlines with Washington. Many of us would have been lost without OISS on campus. I am very indebted to Drs. David Horner and Peter Briggs (OISS directors during my years at MSU) and their impeccable staff: Dr. Rudie Altamirano, Chris Bangerstock, and Nancy Rademacher I could not have done it without you. THANKS! MSU extended itself beyond its own campus, engaging students and scholars with the local community through innovative programs and initiatives like LATTICE (Linking All Types of Teachers to International Cross - cultural Education). I have been very, very fo rtunate to be part of the LATTICE family for many years. Through LATTICE I learned about the United States and its make up, both physical and human, in ways that I could not have predicted when I first entered MSU , and in ways that MSU alone could not have offered me. A seemingly simple demonstration on American tapestry untangled precious threads, which brought about new xiii understandings of school and society. So many people from LATTICE and beyond became nd feeding us, essentially adopting so many of us. I am a better person because of the many families who adopted me, during my years at MSU and beyond: cheers to the families of Jack Schwillie, John Metzler, Doug Campbell, Lynn Paine, Maria Teresa Tatto, R eitu Mabokela, Chris Clark, Anne Schneller, Chery Moran, Marlene Green, the late Sally McClintock, Lynn Bartley, Karen Schultz, Margaret Holtschlag, Jean Peter Sk inner. To all these families, who made me and my friends part of their families, I THANK YOU and I LOVE YOU! The Greek - American community in Michigan surrounded me with a very stable and sustaining environment so that I could feel I never left home. Specia l thanks to the community of the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Lansing for its support and Greek hospitality. Particular individuals have been, for decades, angels on earth and pillars to lean on in so many ways and for so much. I am deeply, unend ingly grateful to have met, and to be part of the families of Professor Elias Strangas (the Godfather), Sophia Koufopoulou (the fairy Godmother), and Frances Katsiris (the red - nosed reindeer): , , ! A Uni versity in its own merit, the local community always welcomed me and wanted to learn from me, offering me love and care in ways that were quiet, least expected and ordinary, but so very special and humane. In the many communities I lived, there were always the kindest people waiting to be of service to me: Kyria Eleftheria expected my visit to her restaurant to offer me her most special piece of feta cheese; Presvytera Athanasia took off her special perideraio (necklace) to give to me as a gift for my depar ture; Agape P. helped load a container, xiv despite an injured leg; Peter S. stayed home from work to ship my boxes through the Post Office; and Alina had coffee ready for me at her 711 Store, to warm me up at the end of an exhausting fieldwork day. So many or dinary people, in so many ordinary ways, have made my lived experience in my multiple sites so very extraordinary. Their kindred spirits taught me lessons, rare in conventional institutions, about human care. I am humbled by and very grateful to all of the m! Many years of studying and paying for school in the US brought about some financial challenges and hardships. During those difficult years, I have many people to thank for their generous financial support, without which I could not have completed my Ame rican higher education. I am very grateful, and quite honored, to have been awarded a Fulbright Grant twice: once to fund my graduate work at Harvard, and once again to fund my work as a Visiting Research Scholar at Michigan State. Enormous thanks to the Fulbright people in Cyprus and to the Fulbright people in Washington, DC. They made it all happen with so much patience and grace. The Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture funded my graduate work at Albany for one whole year. The Bank of Cyprus offered me a loan, in the form of a scholarship, for many years. I am grateful to both of these institutions. At the School of Education of The University at Albany - SUNY, I am thankful to Professor Audrey B. Champagne for the honor of working for and with her. Th ank you to both the School of Education, as well as to the Department of and for the various graduate assistanships. At Michigan State, I am grateful for all the gene rous financial support: University Graduate Recruiting Fellowship, University Graduate Continuing Scholarship, Teacher Education Endowed Scholarships, Global Young Scholars Travel Grant, Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and various graduate and research assistanships. xv Thank you to Dr. Michael Sedlak, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the College of Education, and to his staff, for always finding solutions to any problem, financial or otherwise, and for taking care of business so effectively. Big tha nks also to Dr. Cassandra Book, Associate Dean for External Relations and Student Affairs at the College of Education, now Emeritus, for always supporting my academic pursuits. During my time away from my regular job as a public school teacher in Cyprus, I had to rely on a number of people to approve my lengthy leaves of absence. I am grateful to many people at both the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture (MOEC) and the Educational Service Committee (EEY) for processing forms and acquiring signatures i n a timely fashion. I am also grateful for the many professional opportunities afforded to me by the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture, via fellowships to attend seminars and conferences abroad. Those experiences complemented my American higher educ ation significantly. Many thanks to superintendents (inspectors) of schools and Heads of Elementary Education, Andreas Damianos, Alecos Kouratos, Nicos Leontiou, Savvas Nicolaides, Nicos Pentaras, and the late Michael Stavrides. You always cheered for me a nd my goals, never questioning, never raising obstacles, always encouraging, always supporting, always loving. An unending group of individuals, not only at MSU but also in local University libraries in Cyprus, now all good friends, provided precious assis tance by allowing me to use their space for extended periods of time and by finding references for me at the snap of a finger. Thank you to my library friends at MSU, at the University of Cyprus, and at the Frederick University in Cyprus. xvi Two individuals, associated with Cyprus and its affairs, educational and others, have always cheered for me as well, seeking me out every time they visited Cyprus, and wanting to hear my news. Dr. Andreas Kazamias, Professor Emeritus of Educational Policy Studies and Profe ssor Emeritus of Comparative Education, and I spent many hours over delicious food and good laughter, musing about educational reform both for Cyprus and the US. Professor ep. My work has benefitted greatly from his sharp and uncommon take on teacher education, educational reform, and education for democracy. I first met Dr. Evangelos Coufoudakis, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, at a CIES Conference in the Midwest. He left his important business as Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at IPFW (Indiana University Purdue University at Fort Wayne), to come and listen to my presentation about growing up in my torn - apart island. An expert on US foreign policy on Cyprus , and an Honorary Consul of the Republic of Cyprus, Professor Coufoudakis taught me about my country a whole lot I did not know. Above all, he taught me what it is like to love a country that much to make it your academic career. It has been my privilege a nd great honor to share intellectual companionship with these two individuals, who both showed care and concern for my well - being and for my scholarship, and who both have so much love for my country, our country. I am very grateful for all the profession al opportunities offered to me at the Hellenic College and Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Boston, where I served as Assistant Professor of Teacher Education and Director of Elementary Education. My students there, and all of my colleagues and the Administration were amazing: thank you to Father Nicholas Triantafilou, and to Drs. James Skedros, Aristotle Michopoulos, Anton Vrame, Demetrios Katos, and Ellen Lanzano. xvii I would not have been where I am today had it not been for my students. Day i n and day out, over decades of teaching elementary school, the children gave me perspective and the reason or could. !!! Likewise, this study would not have come alive without the gracious participation of Teacher Candidates, my research participants. I am humbled and greatly indebted to them for welcoming me into their lives and for letting me ride with them on the roller coaster ride cal led a year full of excitement and frustration, of rise and fall, of confusion and clarity, of getting it right and of getting it wrong, everything that learning to teach is really all about. A particular thank you to Sara, who taught me about humility, resilience, and other diversions in the intricate story of teacher education, which I did not I could not learn as a field or course instructor, or even as a veteran classroom teacher. I would like to thank the course and field Instruct ors, as well as the Team Leaders and School Liaisons at Great State University, for all the trust they showed in me and for always welcoming me in their courses and seminars. For one whole year I shadowed with my camera their every move. They always made t ime for me to talk about any question I had, and offered great insights on my work. Particular thanks to Eliot Singer, Philip Bailey, and Rachel Lander for their non - territorial attitude, and for their deep insights about learning to teach intellectually d emanding subject matter in school settings. Special thanks to the principal, the cooperating teachers, the students, and the parents and guardians, as well as to the supporting staff of Ordinary Elementary School, the school in which I have conducted my st udy. You have always been very kind and welcoming to me, a stranger, xviii researching in your classrooms and not telling you much. You taught me about US schooling as much as you taught me about schooling in my country. Thank you! At Michigan State University, I understood the importance of situating arguments in context, and how and why it matters upon educating children, all children children. For all of these ideas, which became commitments, I am grateful to a special group of individuals, pas t and current members of my guidance committee: Dr. Margaret Buchmann took demic Advisor at MSU, carefully designed a wonderful doctoral program for me. Drs. Steve Weiland and more recently Elizabeth Heilman taught me important lessons about qualitative research. Drs. Linda Anderson and Cheryl Rosaen offered their expertise on ap proaching the literature on learning to teach and on teaching for understanding with a critical eye, and on crafting research questions and designing a doable study. My current doctoral dissertation committee members offered me their time and advice endles sly and generously. Words are very poor to express my gratitude to my doctoral dissertation committee members, with whom I worked more closely from the initial stages of my coursework through the final stages of my dissertation writing. I am endlessly inde bted to all of them. Dr. Rand J. Spiro has kept the ball rolling. Practical as he is, he always gave me sound advice as to how to use my time productively, and he served as the person behind the scenes, the He wanted to make sure we all enjoyed the xix work, an important Dewean stance. Dr. Rand Spiro insisted that I find joy in my puzzlement and in my work, the essence of all learning. Dr. John (Jack) R. Schwille, now Professor Emeritus of International Studies in Education, taught me to be skeptical about things, to question my assumptions (cultural, conceptual, and methodological), to pay attention to detail , and to shake my comfort zones. Jack was always happy to see that the world puzzled me and wanted to mak e sure I understood that puzzlement is the prerequisite and the spice of all academic pursuits. He taught me to go after puzzlement, an intellectual virtue he is a master of, and to enjoy it! Apart from many other roles, Professor Schwille dutifully served as the Assistant Dean of International Studies in Education in the College of Education at Michigan State University for thirty years. Through his work with international and internationally - oriented faculty, students and scholars, he pioneered in the Col lege of Education a kind of hidden (although very visible) curriculum, and an intellectual culture found nowhere else. My doctoral education at MSU was advanced and en riched because of Dr. Jack Schwille . A special salu te to Professor Joseph (Jay) Featherstone: the poet, the scholar, the penetrating writer, the democrat, the visionary, the humorist, the survivor, the friend. What an incredible life - lasting gift to have met this timeless figure who walks and talks Dewey a nd Freire, Paley and Duckworth, Deborah Meier and himself! Just like good nutrition, Jay gave me solid courses, sound advice, resilience, and humor to help me last through graduate school and beyond. Jay urged me to not resolve, but to rather make human, l iterary sense of the data and beyond: the best academic advice of all time. A great admirer and true embodiment himself of is a long one, full of adventure, f ull of discovery. Wish that your road is a long one. Do not hurry xx the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years; old already, you will settle on the island, wealthy u the . For that marvelous journey, I am, with Dr. Lynn W. Paine has been one of my first and most important mentors since I entered the College of Education some years ago. I consider myself very lucky to have run into this woman, who neve r stops asking questions all sorts of questions, questions that other people do not think to ask. She is the one who taught me to pay attention to the way I draw inferences, to always ask how and why and to know when and how to complexify. A researcher and a teacher of researchers second to none, Lynn Paine taught me, mostly by example, that good research is first and foremost humane. If not looking for shortcuts, e veryone should have a Lynn Paine on their committee! Dr. Douglas R. Campbell has served as my Academic Advisor, the Chair of my Guidance Committee, and the Director of my Doctoral Dissertation for more years he could have wished for. When he agreed to serv I would turn out to be. Apart from providing academic advisement on so much and for so long, Doug found himself serving as a kind of a US Diplomat, dealing with US Customs, different types of visas, foreign Departments of Education, frequent financial challenges, family losses, extensive international travel and much, much more. Through all of these various and difficult roles, Doug never lost his sense of hope, his sense of humor, and his respect for me and my unending needs. He never lost faith in me and my potential: the essence of pedagogy. Doug Campbell taught me, with his rare diplomatic stance and skills and by his example, so many xxi phroneses : that there is a solution to every problem; that humility and patience always pay off; and that humbleness eventually ensures us respect. Doug understood my project early on, guided me through several months of fieldwork and the maze that comes with it, and provided deep ethnographic insights that shaped my writing. Doug never looked at the clock (or at his phone bills for that matter); he was always available, always supportive, always working very hard for me and my case. Everyone should have a Doug Campbell on their committee, and certainly a Dou g Campbell in their lives! I am thankful to Dr. Sharon Senk, Professor of Mathematics and Mathematics Education, dissertation writing, I was lucky to have seclusion in the country. The lilies and the hummingbirds joined forces, used their magic to pull strings together, and it all came back and became alive. During my many years of studying in the US, many people and their family members have provided ample support to me and to my family members. During these very many years, and despite the multiple goodbyes, my friends were always there, becoming family to me, always welcoming me back, saving my place in their lives, and having dinner ready for me at their tables. and never doubting my choices. Thank you to the Monasteries of Amasgou and Exarchia in Cyprus for their constant prayers for me. A big thank you to the families of Aphrodite Kyriakidou - Iosif, Eleni Stavrou - Kostea, Panayiota Klokkari - Loukaidou, Maro Mavrogiorgou, Morfo Nicolaou - Stavrou, Kiki Chini - Pofaides, Stelios Ioannides, Andreas Theodo rides, Anastasia Zambakidou, Eleni Sea, Marios Lysandrou, Loucas Prastites, Yiannis Miralis, Stelios xxii Smyrillis, Andreas Smyrillis, Elena Papanastasiou, Maria Hadjipavlou, and Michalinos Zembylas of Cyprus; Helen Phtiaka, Anastasia Nikolopoulou, and Leda St amou of Greece; Calla Grabish and Ann Burland of Canada; Diane Chessen of New York; Irene Messina of Connecticut; Peter Skinner of Albany; the late Tony and Joan Michaels of Cambridge; Sharmon Davis of San Diego; Cindy Hartzler - Miller of Indiana; Missy Sot o of California; Athena Mclean of Pennsylvania; and Susan Blake, Theda Gibbs, Carolyn Schein, Peter Hafner, the late Sally McClintock, and the Bartleys of Michigan. I would like you all to know that I saw your tears, even though you veiled them from me. I heard your prayers, even though you never shared them with me. I felt your agony for me, even though we were continents apart. You are all part of this work, its driving force, and I am as proud of you as you are of me. There are no words to thank you. I l ove you all dearly, and I am greatly indebted to all and each one of you! Last but not least, my late parents, Demetrakis and Elli, taught me about the power of setting goals, of working hard to achieve them, of being fair to people, of bolstering roots before spreading out wings. My late grandparents, Loucas and Agathe, told me stories and fairy tales and taught me love dedicate this work to their loving memory. xxiii PRELUDIO The whispers of our lives want us to take notice. They may just be whispers, small voices tacked deep inside the pockets of our hearts. But we must hold their possibilities close to our chests and allow them to step into the light. Kelly Rae Roberts xxiv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES............................................................................. ............................... ..... . . xxvi CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION............................................................................................. 1 How It All Began............................................................................................................. ... 1 ... 2 CHAPTER II: SUPPORTING LITERATURE........................................................................ 9 Teaching for Understanding................................................................................................ 9 Vulnerabilities/Criticisms of Constructivism and Where Teaching for Understanding Is Falling Short................................................................................................................ ....... . 14 Why Stud y Teacher Candidates' Learn ing to Teach for Understanding D uring the Internship Year?............................................................................................................. ..... 17 CHAPTER III: METHODOLOGY................. ........................................................................ 24 Research Questions........................................................................................................... .. 24 Why Qualitative Research Methodology ?.......................................................................... 26 Why Engage In Qualitative Case Study Research?............................................................ 27 What Is Tria ngulation, and Why Triangulate a t All?..... .................................................... 2 8 The Site and the Participants............................................................................................... 29 Research Design............................................. ..................................................................... 31 Obtaining Informed Consent and Spiraling Into Data Collection ...................................... 35 Data Analysis: An On - Going Process................................................................................. 37 CHAPTER IV: FINDINGS THE CASE OF SARA............................................................. 40 Who Is and Wh y Sara?........................................................................................................ 40 Vignette One................................................................................................................. ...... 42 42 44 Getting Our Feet Wet..................................................................................................... 46 Vignette Two....................................................................................................... ................ 47 Sara Entering New Found Land..................................................................................... 47 What Is the Matter with Them?.................................................................... .................. 51 Learning to Think, to Know, and to Act Like a Teacher............................................... 54 Vignette Three............................................................................................................... ...... 6 0 6 0 62 The Power of Reflection................................................................................................ 66 Vignette Four......................................................................................................... .............. 69 Diving in Deep Waters: Lead Teaching 2...................................................................... 69 Sara Noticing Her Inattention........................................................................... ............. 73 Vignette Five................................................................................................................ ....... 77 Figuring Out a New Life................................................................................................ 77 xxv Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry 81 91 Vignette Six................................................................................................................. ..... ... 94 94 When the Possibilities Become the Focus...................................................................... 100 Coming Full Circle......................................................................................................... 103 CHAPTER V: DISCUSSION.................................................................................................. 107 wo Lines of Literature: Learning to Teach and Teaching for Understanding ........................................ ........................................................... .................. 107 CHAPTER VI: IMPLICATIONS............................................................................................ 115 Implications for Teacher Education.................................................................................... 115 Implications for Research................................................................................................. ... 118 EPILOGUE..................................................................................................................... ......... 123 The Story of Teacher Education..................................................................... ..................... 123 CODA......................................................................................................................... .............. 127 APPENDICES................................................................................................................... ....... 128 APPENDIX I: Summary Chart of Data Collection................................. ............................ 129 APPENDIX II: Consent Forms............................................................... ............................ 132 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................................. .. . 144 xxvi LIST OF TABLES 130 1 CHAPTER I : INTRODUCTION How It All B egan This dissertat io n is about a true story, a tale 1 , of a Teacher C internship year, the fifth year of a five - year teacher preparation program at Great State University 2 , a large University located i n the Mid - western United States. This story w as witnessed and recorded by myself, a veteran elementary public school teacher from another country l ocated in Southern Europe . I trained and worked as an elementary classroom teacher in my home country before moving to the United States to study and work (I elaborat e on my positionality later in the i mplications chapter of my dissertation) . As a Teacher Education graduate student at Great State University , I had the opportunity to assume various roles in the teacher preparation program, such as research assistant, course instructor and course evaluator, and field instructor (this is the person who oversees teacher candidate g in their school placement , and who leads a graduate seminar throughout the internship year). Before conducting my study, I spent four years as both a course and field instructor at GSU , and I worked with many teacher candidates (TCs), cooperati ng teachers (CTs), other course and field instructors (CI s, FIs), school principals , and ot her key players involved with teacher candidate s process of learning to teach. I learne d very much about how schools in the same district can be very different but also how they can be very much alike. I learned how curriculum can be ver y flexible , but also very rigid. And I learned th at teacher candidates do learn many things, being for an entire year in real classrooms with teachers and s tudents, but that 1 Tales of the field: On writing Ethnography, in order to convey to multiple audiences knowledge gained in the field. 2 A pseudonym used in place of 2 they also have a whole lot to learn. I remember that what struck me at first was see ing how nervous the teacher candidates were as they bega n their internship year. Being a teacher for a long time, I must have forgotten how hard it was fo r me as well: I, too, was worried if my CT would like me, if the kids would listen to me, and if I would remember to recite "all that I had prepared for th em to learn ." Trivialities, such as "I s my CT going to give me a desk next to hers ?" and "W ill the ki ds treat me l ike their teacher?" beco me central concerns for tea c her candidates, concerns that a re not resolved in a trivial ma n ner, concerns that sometimes do not get resolved at all. The fifth year of the five - year teacher preparation program at G SU, the internship year as it is known, is indeed an intense experie nce (for all player s involved) . I t i s , however, a very fruitful year: teacher candidates (interns) eventually learn how a thirty - minute session differs from a fifty - minute sessi on, and how that affects what they do with kids. They learn that five minutes in their lives as teacher candidates can make a lot of difference, something that was not the case in their lives as undergra duates. They learn that raising their voice affects certain chil dren in ways that it does not affect others, and that this is not effective classroom management in the first place. They lear n to wake up early , and they learn what it is like to live the life of a teacher. They even learn to form meaningful conversations with children, by discovering their thinking and reasoning, and by using these discoveries as a source for their learning to teach. The latter does not happen for quite some time, a phenomenon that fascinate d me , and one I set out to study for my dissertation . T he Context and the Phenomenon Great State University adm its teacher education students i n their junior year, during which 3 they take foundation courses including the psychology of learning, the social aspects of schools, and a course on how to conduct teaching in classrooms (i.e. learning about classroom management and lesson planning). I n their senior year, teacher education students take t heir methods courses (i.e. how to teach language arts, math, science , and social s tudies). During their internship year (the fifth year of their p rogram), teacher candidates are placed in a school for an entire year, beginn ing in late August and ending the following May , teaching and participating in all activities of their school. T he t eacher candidat es start their internship year by mostly observing teaching in their classrooms, and they gradually assume full responsibility f or the teaching. D uring the fall semester, their p rogram requires that they teach for most of the day for a total of three weeks during the month of November ( Lead Teaching 1 ). During the spring semester , which starts in January, teacher candidates need to take the lead in teaching for a much longer period : a total of seven to eight weeks , beginning in February ( Lead Teaching 2 ). Throughout their internship year, teacher candidates attend a field placement seminar (a 500 - level seminar in the fall and another 500 - level seminar in the spring) , in which they meet weekly with their field instructor (FI) and other fellow teacher candida tes , in order to discuss wha t is going on in their school placement. Because the five - year p rogram at GSU is a post BA p rogram, teacher candidates attend, during their fifth year, two graduate 800 - level courses in the fall semester , and another two 800 - l evel courses i n the spring semester, all four of which can count later egree. During these five years in the p rogram, teache r candidates pay tuition and fees to the University . They do n ot get any reimbursement, from either the University or the school district, for their internship teaching for an e ntire year in a classroom. Aside from being expensive, however, Great State University runs a great teacher preparation program, offering gre at experiences to teacher candidates , and expecting great accomplishments from the m! 4 As a field instructor at Great State University, I had to observe teacher candidates' teaching throughout the internship year, and m ore intensively during the two Lead T eaching periods, one in the fall (three weeks beginning in Novem ber - Lead Teaching 1 ) and one in the spring (seven to eight weeks beginning in February - Lead Teaching 2 ). What I saw as mor e of a n initial norm was what I identified as a "body or ientatio n." Teacher candidates we re , in the beginning of their internship , more concerned and occupied with their physical self: what to do with their hands; whether to stand in front of the class or move around , or both , and how much; how close to get to children or not; whether to smile or to maintain an expressionless face . I observed s ome very good lessons, some of which were very thoughtfully planned and went according to the plan, and some that wonderfully escaped the plan and flourished anyway. I did not see , however, anything resembling active list ening to their s tudents . There was always that one kid who would "mess up. . ." He just had to ask that one, difficul t, "out of the blue question." The above is an unarticulated fear among teacher candidates, cert ainly more so during Lead Teaching 1. They worried that things would not go smoothly if someone wa s to "mess up," especially so when they knew that they would be observed. I do no t recall seeing any of the teacher candidates I worked with , a t least in the beginning of the internship, paying a ny serious attention to what the children were say ing , even when children were activel y invited to say what they thought . Paley's (1988) notion of "listening with curiosity" wa s totally absent from their interactions with children , and so wa s any notion of constructing knowledge with children , taking seriously what they brought to the classroom , and doing something with i t. Come to think of it, however, why should they? Lortie's (1975) research on teacher soci alization revealed , fact, that during formal teacher preparation prospective teachers activate 5 models of teaching which they have internalized earlier in their careers as students 3 . Their teaching is not the outcome of learn ing in academic environments; it is, rather, a reaffirmation of the profession as they have experienced it: "W hat students learn about teaching is intuitive and imitative, rather than explicit and analytical; it is based on individual personalities rather than pedagogical principles ." (Lortie, 1975, p. 62) The following is an excerpt from an interview I conducted early in my Teacher Education p rogram with one of the teacher candidates under my supervision: ...One thing I try to do is move myself around the class, position in different places in the classroom, make sure everybody is on task and that they can hear my instructions and that they are doing their work. Students would be si t mind if they get up and do something relat ed, like sharpen their pencils, they can do that, as long as they can make responsible choices. There will be movement in the classroom. I like to ask questions, I'll be asking a lot of questions to the students. I try to call on everybody, use a lot of vi suals. I try to bring things to them t o become more engaged . (John, GSU teacher c andidate, end of October ) In the f all, John had a view about children's participation and engagement that was very much self - directed, initiating from him: he started his internship year thinking that if he brought into the c lassroom the right material, s tudents would "become more engaged." The re wa s , then, an absence in John's talk a s to using children's ideas which they brou g ht in to the classroom, ideas that might have se rve d as the very source of engagement in learning, his students' learning as well as his own. During the fall, John wa s still within this "body orientation." Miraculously 4 , a few months later, during Lead Teaching 2 in the s pring, teacher candidates develop a really meaningf ul relationship with children, one which goes beyond the standard social 3 Lortie's research on teacher socialization has grown to be very influential in teacher education, but it also grows older and older. We do not know, for example, if teacher candidates who went to school ten years after Lortie published his work had, in fac t, no experience in constructivist classrooms. Other work on teacher socialization by Zeichner and Gore (1989) is discussed in a la ter section of the dissertation. 4 Things do not, of course, happen miraculously. Nor is the fall vs the spring lead teach ing per iods a dichotomy. During the fall Lead T eaching period , teacher candidates reveal behaviors that may constitute active listening to children's thinking, but this happens more sporadically, with less intensity, and very differently according to each person's particular disposition . 6 jargon of the "learning community" and moves into an authentic intellectual relationship with children who have ideas that matter, whose ideas we "better list en to and take seriously , " because they constitute our very curriculum . Children often come to school with ideas that are idiosyncratic, ideas that do not make much sense, and ideas that oftentimes are even "false." It seems easier and more practical to di sregard those ideas and move along acco rding to one's lesson plan. It is harder to take those ideas seriously and to treat children as though they are reasonable. Eleanor Duckworth (1987) called this notion "giving children reason" (p. 83), which happen s upon probing children's thinking, in order to "appreciate how they are making sense of a situation, and to understand their understanding ." (Duckworth, 1987, p. 84) Teacher candidates gradually learn how to ask students questions , such as " what do you th ink about X?" T hey also learn to actually wait to hear what students have to say. They learn to take those answers seriously, by trying to understand them and to give them reason. The way I understand Duckworth is that "g iving children reason" is different from " giving children an excuse." M erely to listen to students, even with the greatest curiosity, just for the sake of it , is not enough at all. To give children reason for tho se odd ideas that t hey have is different from offering them an excuse (i.e. , they are just young, they do not know much, etc . ). To give children reason, rather , is to be engaged in the act of stepping out o f one's reality and the way in which one makes sense of it, and try to enter into children's reality in order to underst and why they might be saying what they are saying. I have seen this happening with some teacher candidates who were confident enough to let students' ideas teach them, and who happene d to be with thoughtful CTs who were interested in taking those ideas s eriously. The following is an excerpt from an interview with a different teacher can didate under my supervision the same year that John (the previous teacher candidate) was interviewed. The following interview with Ellen took place in the spring, at 7 the en d of the Lead Teaching 2 period: L : Ellen, what did you learn this year in your internship? What do you think you have accomplished? E : At first, it was scary and also confusing because I wasn't sure what I would become. Now that I look back, I cannot believe how much I've learned and how much more comfortable and confident I am. L : How do you remember yourself being in the beginning of the year? E : I remember how frustrated I was when students didn't know what I thought they should know. I was not a s patient, and also a little bit more afraid of situations of children who I couldn't figure out, like Eric who told me in the beginning of the year "I hate you." Now I know him, I know his personality, and what kind of learner he is. L : When do you know that you know a kid? How do you get to know someone else? What does that knowledge mean for you as a teacher, and what does it do to your teaching? E : I think it is anticipating...I can predict what a lot of the kids in the classroom will do, or say, at a given point in the day. I am a real visual person and I am always looking and watching, not so much listening, but that goes along with that...I spent a lot of time this year learnin g about the kids and their ages . (Ellen, GSU t eacher candidate, end of Ma rch) Although Ellen's point about prediction is a bit alarming because i t shadows the unexpected, what was present in her talk wa s a st ance of active listening to student s that, as she admitted, had evolved over her in ternship year. Ellen had learned during her internship year to pay attention to students' thinking and reasoning. She learned to "seek to understand the way in which what children say or do could be construed to be making sense ." (Duckworth, 1987, p. 86) My dissertation is an et hnographic study, in which I systematically research ed how the process of learning to pay attention to students' thinking and reasoning, as a central element /feature of learning to teach for understanding 5 , develops among elementary teacher candidates during the ir ye ar - long internship , and in the context of the G SU teacher preparation program. In the following 5 I use the term "teaching for understanding" to mean the kind of teaching that takes place when constructivist theories of lea rning serve as the underlying ideological orientation. I discuss constructivist theories of learn ing, as well as how the term "teaching for understanding" has been used by others, later on in the literature review section of the dissertation. 8 chapter , I review literature relevant to the study that aims to inform the "learning to teach for understanding" process, as well as literature t hat points to the importance of studying this process among elementary teacher candidates , as it takes place during their year - long internship in schools. 9 CHAPTER II: SUPPORTING LITERATURE Teaching for Understanding The term "Teaching for Understanding" has been used by various researchers in the past (Prawat, 1989; Perkins, 1994; Stone Wiske, 1994; Simmons, 1994), and it is closely associated with the idea of constructivist teaching, an approach to teaching based on construct ivism, which is a theory about how people learn and how knowledge is constructed. According to this theory, knowledge is a matter of interpretation, d econstruction , and r econstruction, and it is a process of transformation of already existing prior knowled ge. Constructivists take into account the individual's prior knowledg e and understanding of an idea/ concept , becau se they believe it is crucial to how new knowledge will be constructed. Learning, according to constructivists , results from the reorganizatio n of old mind structures , and it i s a life - long phenomenon. Lauren Resnick (1989) argued , f or example, that "learning is a process of knowledge construction, it is situated in context, and it i s knowledge - dependent on current knowledge" (p.1). Leinhardt (1992) further supported that knowledge is of multiple kinds (i.e. both skills and concepts); it is a sociall y constructed cultural artifact; and it is based on prior knowledge. D evelopmental psychologist Jean Piaget, whose name is, perhaps, the one most often cited in relation to constructivism, saw knowledge construction as a process of the individual (whom he called the "epistemic subject") reorganizing already existing conceptual structures (i.e. "schemata"). That the individual is , eventual ly , the one responsible for such a reorganization of knowledge is really at the core of constructivist theories of learning, a stance which sets these theories apart fro m othe r lea rning theories (i.e. behaviorist oriented ) , which placed no emphasis on eith er the role of the individual in the construction of knowledge, or the role of the individual's prior 10 knowledge in the development of new learning. While constructivism, as a theory of learning , and its implications for classroom teaching and teacher educa tion h ave been developed to the extent that they have been only recently (during the 19 80s and 19 90s , with the writings of Duckworth, 1987; Shulman, 1987; Paley, 1988; Brophy, 198 8; Cohen, 1988; Prawat, 1992; and Fosnot, 1996 , among many others), its t heoretical orientation dates back much further . Bruner (1960/1977) urged us to start where the learner IS, and Dewey (1902/1990) wanted us to "psychologize" the curriculum to see it in a continuum along with the child's needs and interests at the time. T he above assumptions underlying construc tivist teaching suggest a number of implications for the work in classrooms. According to Brooks and Brooks (1993), in such classrooms the student has a crucial role, as an individual, in his/her construction of know ledge. Learning in these classrooms is an active process, and it is an outcome of interaction with the physical a nd social environment . The curriculum draws, mostly, from students' current understandings of various concepts and ideas, since "students are v iewed as thinkers with emerging theories about the world ." (p. 17) Assessment becomes an on - going process, in which the students' point of view is actively sought out by the teacher, and it becomes the basis for subsequent planning. In constructivist cla ssrooms, the role of the teacher changes quite a bit from earlier, more traditional notions of teaching. The teacher is not the authority on knowledge any more, but rather a co - investigator of knowledge , along with students 6 . The teacher becomes a facili tator of knowledge construction by listening carefully to s tudents' current understandings; by probing them to articulate further their "won derful ideas" (Duckworth, 1987); and by providing rich in mat erial learning environments , which offer ample opportun ities for interaction and engagement, and which lead to further intellectual development. 6 Later in this section, I refer to a number of criticisms generated by misinterpretation of the role of th e teacher in constructivist teaching . 11 Building on students' current understandings, creating opportunities for intellectual developmen t, and negotiating knowledge are at the center of talk about teaching for understanding in contemporary literature. For Gardner (1994), teaching for understanding is being able to figure out students' current understandings and to advance them. Teaching for understanding, according to Gardner (1994), aims to "enable student s to take knowledge, skills, and other apparent attainments and apply them successfully in new situations ." (p. 564) The teacher knows that teaching for understan ding is taking place when there i s specific evidence that students are able to use their knowl edge in new situations, something that Perkins (1994) id entified as "performances of understanding ." (p. 6) Pe rron e (1994) had a view on understanding quite similar to Gardn er's and to Perkin's. For Perron e (1994) , "understanding is about making connections among and between things, about deep and not surface knowledge, and about greater complexity, not simplic ity ." (p. 13) Per ro ne associated teaching for understanding with having students intellectually engaged in subject matter , and he made a few recommend ations to teachers interested to teach for understanding. Finding the "overarching goals" (p. 12) (i.e. what do I want students to come to understand through this particular lesson, what are the long - term goals) a nd outlining them is, according to Per ron e, what the teacher who teaches for understanding needs to do first. Second, the teacher needs to figure out the essentials: what topics are worth pursuing, what concepts must be addressed, what ideas help students develop significant un derstandings? Per ro ne recommended that teachers focus on fewer topics in order to get to more in - depth understandings , and on topics that have a generative quality: "the topic invites questions that students have about the world aroun d them and taps the issues that students confront ." (p. 13) On - going assessment is another key feature in the teaching for understanding fr amework 12 that Per ron e (1994) used . On - going assessment , for Per ron e (1994) , had to do with longer term proj ects that produce real works ( i.e. regular writing from students in a variety of styles, across a variety of topics , and for diverse purposes ). On - going assessment is, ultimately and according to Per ron e, performance oriented . Prawat (1989) also discussed the idea of on - going assessment as an essential element in teaching for understanding. Teachers who teach for understanding, according to Prawat (1989), have a conceptual orientation in their teaching, which is charac terized by three key att ributes. These three key attributes are: focus and coherence in their selected topics for instruction; negotiation which is informed and skilled around structuring classroom discourse in dialogic ways that promote and advance knowledge among students; and an analytic/diagnostic nature in their interactions with students. Prawat's view of the analytic/diagnostic natur e of teaching for understanding resembles very much the element of "on - going assessment ," one of four elements in a framework for Teaching f or Understanding (TfU) developed by a group of researchers (Wiske et al., 1998) at the Harvard Graduate School of Ed ucation. Prawat (1989) considered the analytic/diagnostic attribute of teaching for understanding to have an assessment function, and he re commended that it be performed interactively: . ..conjectures about student thinking should be part of the lesson planning process. Knowing what sorts of concepts or understandings are likely to be troublesome for students is important data for teachers to have when setting content priorities. Because the focus in this approach to assessment is less on the production of correct responses and more on the process of reasoning that underlies the responses, student learning is best analyzed in an in teractive co ntext . (p. 326) Similarly, the Teaching for Understanding the concept of "on - going assessment" to portray the importance of both the formative and summative purposes of a ssessment. On - going assessment wa s one of four elements in the Teaching for Understanding 13 framework that addressed the question: "H ow can we tell what students understand?" On - going assessment provides, primarily, access to students' thinking ; it occurs frequently; it takes multiple for mats; a nd it informs planning: "T hese formats of on - going assessment remind students to monitor their work and provide the teacher with more insight into the students' thinking than the product alone may offer . " ( Wiske, 1998, p. 80) Duck worth's (1987) wo rk takes us , I believe, one step further into understanding learning to teach for understanding . Duckworth wrote about teaching for understanding from the perspective of "understanding children's understanding" that happens upon "giving children reason." For Duckworth, "giving children reason" is a mental stance, in which the teacher is involved in close observation of student s' behaviors and actions, and is trying to figure out the meaning s that their talk and work might b e ar , even though those meaning s may not be immediately obvious. Giving children reason, essentially , is about "seeking to understand the way in wh ich what a child says or does could be construed to make sense . " ( Duckworth, 1987, p. 87) The above three contributors (Prawat,1989; Wiske,1998; and Duckworth, 1987 ) to the Teaching for Understand ing literature see as central to the process of teaching for understanding the active stance of what I conceptually fram ed as paying attention to students' thinking and reasoning , and as the latter takes place within an interactive classroom environment. Duckworth (1987) wa s, perhaps, the most explicit in laying out the process of listening to children as a teacher quality that involves other important personal qualities as well: curiosity about other people's thinking; generosity in being willin g to accept their contributions; and tole rance fo r ambiguity and messiness. However, w hile all of the abo ve three contributors underscore d the challenges and difficulties involved in the process of learning to teach for understanding, none has researched what this process might look like among no vice teachers. In fact, novices´ attention to students´ thinking has 14 been examined only in more recent literature (i.e. Levin , et al. 2009), as have been the inherent challenges of constructivism in practice and its implementation(s) by teachers . (Windschi tl, 2002) Thus, I decided to study for my dissertation what the process of learning to pay attent ion to students think ing and reason ing might look like among teacher candidates, given that this process is part of their curriculum and assessment in teacher education as well ( i.e. program standards 7 ) , and keeping in mind that the context in which this learning evolves (i.e. a school placement) is not always an ideal place 8 . Before introducing the study's research questions, I address, in the next section, some vulnerabilities of constructivism as a theory of learning , and I discuss where I see teaching for understanding to have fallen short. Vulnerabilities/Criticisms of Constructivism and W here Teaching for Understanding I s Falling S hort Constructivism, essentially, opens possibilities for knowledge to be tentative and open to "...reinterpretation, reconstruction, reformulation ." (Cherryholmes, 1994, p. 211) It allows for knowledge to be more personal and subjective, mor e situated , and more meaningful. C onstructivism , however , as a theory of learning , also carries with it some problems and dilemmas: is all knowledge good and valid? Who decides? What are its consequences for our work in institutions and organizations, such as schools and schools of education, if everyone is allowed their own time to construct their own knowledge that makes sense to them a t th e time, which will later deconstruct anyway? 7 TCs were held accountable toward four program standards, which aimed to guide their progress, as well as assess their performance during the internship year: a) knowing subject matters and how to teach them; b) working with students; c) creating and managing a classroom learning community; and d) working and learning in a school and profession. 8 Please note that my aim was not to study or evaluate the GSU teacher preparation program by any means, nor was I t rying to determine the effect of context on the participants' learning. For further discussion on the way context becomes relevant in this study, please refer to pages 21 - 23 of the dissertation . 15 Cons tructivist teaching's activi ty - oriented nature also makes constructivism quite vulnerable and prone to misinterpretation. Dewey (1938) w as one of the first critics of such misinterpretations, especially found in progressive schools at the beginning of the twentieth century. Dewey (1938) argued that activity alone and experience not designed to lead to further experiences were miseducative. Prawat (1992), in critiquing the naive way const ructivist theories of learning we re being interpreted by practitioners, point ed to various tendencies evident among teachers in classrooms, such as the tendency to see learners and curriculum in a dichotomous way , and their job as reconciling the two; the tendency to think that activity alone will lead to lear ning (i.e. "hand s - on" learning); and the tendency to think of learning as hierarchical. D. C. Phillips (1995) further critiqued naive interpretations of constructivism, calling some of it "ugly" in that it had become like a secular religion. Constructivist teaching has also received vario us criticisms, mainly from social constructivists (i.e. Vygotsky, 19 7 8 ; Rogoff, 1990; Lav e & Wenger, 1991; G redler, 1997; Ernest, 1999) , who claim ed that constructivism has disregarded knowledge's capacity to be socially constructed amon g a group of people. Constructivist teaching has also been characterized as race - less, gender - less and social class - less, because of the lack of attention it has given to the "epistemic subject's" inherent and socially acquired characteristics (R ichardson, 1997). For example, constructivist teachers, in their attempt to be curious as to what children are saying, end up paying little or no attention to their silence. When is it , for example, that children are silent, which particular children are these, and what h appens (or does not happen) when particular children remain silent? Constructivism seem s to be paying more attention to the conditions that we, as educators, need to create so that children are engaged with phenome na and are articulate about their "wonderful ideas," but it does not explicitly handle the issues of silence and voice that feminist 16 theorists (i.e. Belenky, 1986 ) have widely explored. In regards to the literature on teaching for understanding, despite the heavy emphasis on the teacher being a learner, there i s absence of talk about the teacher actually learning about subject matter from students. While there is talk about "sharing intellectual authority" ( Wiske , 1994) with students, the teacher is still the one who decides in what ways that authority is going to be shared, and who is going to take which piece. When charging the teacher with intellect ual authority to begin with , the tea cher is appointed as t he source of intellect. Wideen , e t al. (1998), in reviewing research on learning to teach, have poi nted to this problem as well: " the influence of pupils in classrooms on the student teaching experience remains virtually unexplored ." (p. 153) Another problem with the teaching for understanding literat ure lies with the conceptual tilt that characterizes its language. While the talk about how to structure dialogic discourse in the classroom , in order to promote more sophisticated understandings among st udents , is quite advanced, there i s lack of talk reg arding the influence of either the affective or the kinesthetic components on the nature of such understandings. What does it feel like, for example, to debate with the teacher? What does it feel like to talk about racism in a multiracial class? In what wa ys does such talk make people act? Other problems with the teaching for understanding literature have to do with the hegemonic nature of its talk: If we are to teach for understanding, new and better curricula have to be developed in mathematics and science. Tests need to be altered, schools must be changed. Without changes in schools, it is unlikely that fundamental change wi ll occur at the classroom level . (Prawat, 1989, p. 326) A self - defeat ing literature, one might think, setting up hierarchies and conditions upon which change may occur: change schools before attempting any change in the classroom ? In my study , that was not the case. I observed teacher candidates accomplishing wonderful, reform - 17 minded teaching, despite deeply rooted conventional practices in their school placements. There is, indeed , not enough literature o n how novices learn to teach for understanding at the pre - service level. The newly developed literature on teaching for understanding, in other words, does not intersect sufficiently with the already existing literature on learning to teach. In the following section, I examine the learning to teach literature, I address its problems, and I introduce my study in light of bringing together these two lines of literature : teac hing for understanding and learning to teach. I also explore the notion of understandin g context as an integral part of understanding the process of learning to teach for understanding , as it develops among elementary teacher candidates during their intern ship year in schools. Why S tudy Teacher Candidates' Learn ing to Teach for Understanding D uring th e Internship Y ear? The year - long internship, which takes place during the fifth year of G SU's five - year teacher preparation program, is a time during which teacher candidates are socialize d into the profession , since they learn to live with other teachers and children in schools, apart fr om the work in which they are involved with for their graduate level seminars at the University. T he t eacher candidates' learning during the internship year is multifaceted , involving intellectual, psychological, and even physical lessons. Various researchers have studied the nature of the learning that takes place during the internship year (some call it the teaching practicum, st udent teaching, etc. ) , which may vary considerably in nature, purpose , and length from one program to another. There i s general agreement that this time has an enormous impact on novices' learning to teach. Some researchers report how much teacher candidates manage to learn during this extended time in the field (Hollingsworth, 1989), and yet some others report how much they do not manage to learn, and how 18 much they let their assumptions go unexamined . (Feiman - Nemser & Buchmann, 19 87) Others, such as anthropologically - oriented researchers, study the influence of context (i.e. the school) on novices' learning to teach during their extended time in the field. Head (1992), for example, suggested that the "liminal" (threshold) nature of student teaching , because of its rigidity in myths and cultures, may sometimes determine the future of student teachers in the profession: "S ome decide not to teach as a result of their experiences during their student - teaching practicum" (p.97). The bulk of the learning to teach literature, in any case, origin ates mainly from the traditions of cognitive psychology. This literature has been, traditionally, condescending to its participants, hegemonic in its nature, and positivistic in its assumptions. Wideen , at al. (1998) comment ed to that effect: As we indicated earlier, the implicit theory underlying traditional teacher education was based on a training model in which the university provides the theory, methods, and skills; the schools provide the se tting in which that knowledge is practiced; and the beginning teacher provides the individual effort to apply such knowledge . (p. 167) Wideen , et al. (1998), upon reviewing 93 empiric al studies of learning to teach, pointed to the positivistic assumptions underlying this work , and to the condescending manner with which participants were treated. In the se studies, teacher candidates we re portrayed as naive recipients of some sort of an i ntervention. Their prior lives we re treated as incomplete a nd shortchanged, and prior influences on their learning to teach were seen as obstacles ( i.e. Lortie's , 1975, famous "apprenticeship of observation") , and as bad influ ences. These studies , essentially , showcased that whatever the intervention , it will alwa ys be weak, because the change intended is n either as powerful n or as apparent. Studies of learning to teach , in other words, operate from the assumption that the what and the how of learning to teach is , or should be , clear and the same for all teacher candidates, whom they treat and talk about as naive, unintelligent, and monolithic. These studies have portray ed teacher candidates as naive and inexperienced, and they have mad e assumptions 19 about their race, gender , and social class that put them all into one big category: white, middle - class, female. On the contrary, R osaen and Schram's (1998) study of two interns developing a teaching identity through discourse that an inquiry group provided , is a strong counter example to the pessimistic literature rev iewed by Wideen , et al. (1998). In this study, Rosaen and Schram (1998) explore d the process of two interns developing a "language of possibility" in believing, thinking, talking about, and enacting a kind of practice during their b eginning years of teachi ng, which their work environment might not support. Rosaen and Schram (1998) trusted the inquiry group to have a life of its own, and they invested i n the process of learning to talk a langua ge of possibility, rather than i n producing specific products: Wh en we let go of our initial agenda of engaging in action research and were open to the idea that the our plans, the experience evolved into something the interns could value rather than bei ng merely a requirement to meet . (p. 301) Rosaen and Schram (1998) demonstrate d a faith i n interns as capable of mapping the route of their own development, and thinking about teaching practice in much more complicated ways than the previous literature on beginning teacher's concerns has demonstr ated. Veenman (1984), for example, upon reviewing studies of perceived problems of beginning teachers, showed that classroom discipline appeared first on the list. Valli (1992) talked about the problems of imitation, isolation, transfer, and technique as d ominant problems among pre - service teachers. Rogan , et al. (1992) replicated and validated the stages of concern questionnaire first developed by Fuller (1970). In Rogan , pproximately 1,000 participants, ranging from ea rly admits in to a teacher preparat ion program to having two or more years of teaching experience, r esponded to the questionnaire. The re sults supported Fuller's (1970) three - phas e model of concerns that pre - service teachers experience: (a) self - concerns (having to do wi th co ping with kids in the classroom; (b) task 20 concerns (having to do with the logistics of teaching); and (c) impact concerns (having to do with students' learning). Fuller's (1970) model, and other related literature on pre - service and beginning teachers' concerns, is based on linear assumptions regarding the process of novices' learning to teach: Fuller went on to propose that this progression from self to task to impact concerns could serve as a key factor in developing and sequencing rele vant t eacher education programs . (Fuller, 1970 , as quoted in Rogan , et al., 1992) Fuller's model is, like the early literature on learning to teach, deficit - oriented: it presents novices as moving into higher stages of thinking , after having fi rst "graduated" from lower ones; it categorizes a complex process , such as learning to teach , into three nice and neat little categories; and it conveys a message of inattention to students as an inevitable norm during the beginning years of teaching. More r ecent studi es have attempt ed to show that teachers do pay att ention to what students bring to the classroom, and they do so much earlier in their careers than previous literature has suggested. Beck (1998) , for example, studied how Mrs. Z . , a six - year experienced tea cher, used students' questions as an opportunity to think of their potential for learning, hers and her students. Beck's study showed how a teacher skillfully made use of her students questions to help them form better questions, and to understand what stu dents did and did not understand. Beck (1998) wa s quite hopeful and opt imistic for what the future would bring, and recommended that researchers continue research ing along the same lines: As I attend closely to Mrs. Z . and the ways in which she takes students questions seriously, I see a different vision of the future. Mrs. Z . 's practice gives me hope that working with and through student questions is possible for any teacher. Her practice can inform the practice of tea chers, teacher educators, and administrators interested in encouraging education that takes the experience and meanings of students seriously. Mrs. Z . 's case provides significant clues into what researchers may find if they continue to explore the ways in which students' questions are used by teachers . (p. 885) 21 Beck's (1998) work is exemplary, because it systematically studied teachers who paid close attention to students' inp ut. It also created a need for such work across a wider range of teacher develop ment: what might it look like, for example, for teacher candidates to pay attention to students and their thinking, when the literature supports that they are at a stage in their development far away from that? In fact, a recent study by Levin , et al. (200 9) examined how novices (teacher candidates), during their internship year, were able to attend to students´ thinking , given that they were assisted to do so from both their University instructors and their school environment. The authors challenged the traditional stage - based literature on learning to teach (Kagan, 1992; Berliner, 1988; Fuller & Brown, 1975; Fuller, 1969) , which claimed that novices are not able to attend to , et al. (2009) discuss ed more recent literature in the field of teacher learning (Loughran, 2006 ) , which takes into account contextual , et al. (2009), in other words, dispute d the widely estab lished notion of linearity in teacher development: We do not dispute the evidence that novices typically focus on themselves and their behavior. Rather, we dispute the notion that they must focus on themselves before they are rea dy to focus on student thinking . (p.144, emphasis in the o riginal) According to Levin , et al. (2009) (p. 143), focusing on classroom management strategies and developing curriculum units, at the expense of pa pedagogy that teacher education courses need to adopt, such as asking novices to videotape themselves and analyze their teaching , with a focus on how they pay attention to and promote . Eventually, one way to bridge learning to teach and teaching for understanding is to use the notion of paying as early as the pre - service years, a disposition that 22 must guide and drive all o ther program components, and one which should not come last as a capstone experience on a number of other prerequisites. Levin , et al. (2009) went a step further and alerted us to put classroom management skills in order before seriously engaging with students´ thinking): The point is that routines should be learned from within a framing of teachin g as attention to student thinking. We argue that if attention to student thinking is prioritized until after novices begin to construct routines (as suggested by Kagan, 1992), then novices may construct routines that distract from attention to student thi nking . (p. 152) Other researchers (Grossman, 1992; Darling - Hammond & Snyder, 2000; Davis, et al. 2006) have similarly challenged the stage - based views of teacher development , and they have highlighted the importance of studying the surrounding context of the internship year. Understanding context is essential for understanding the way teacher candidates' learning to teach for understanding takes place during the internship year, a time in teacher candidates´ development which can afford them opp ortunities to stop and reflect on their learning to teach. The internship year provides a sophisticated socialization process into the profession, a process that Zeichner and Gore (1989) suggest ed needs more careful and systematic attention: More studies are needed which attend to the complex set of interactions that exist among program features, dimensions of school contexts and individual classrooms as settings for learning to teach, and the characteristics and dispositions that individual students bring to the experience. The currently dominant practice of attempting to explain the socializing role of field experiences in general has not been very productive to date, nor is it likely to become more so in the future . (p. 21) Zeichner and Gore (1989), in other words, are critical that the study of the internship, as a process of socialization into the teaching profession, has virtually neglected the influence of culture, such as the ecological environment of the classroom, and the characteristic localitie s of the surrounding s to the school population. Wideen , et al. (1998), in their review of r esearch on learning to teach, identi fied the same problem: that the surrounding context of pr e - service teachers has not 23 been studied enough, and they recommend ed that "more attention is directed at in - depth study of how other players affect the landscape and process of learning to teach." (p. 169) 24 CHAPTER III : METHODOLOGY Research Questions My research questions evolved out of a need to better understand my practice as a teache r educator of teacher candidates who work with students. Understanding how teacher candidates come to appreciate and understand students' thinking and reasoning constituted the core of what I was interested to understand. Why does paying attention to students' thi nking and reasoning matter ? Because students are intellectual beings with ideas that often go unnoticed. To learn to acknowledge students' ideas and to be committed to their learning are among the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards ( NBPTS , 1994) , which GSU has highly invested in, and which are the start for more democratic practices. T o be consistent with what I preach, I started from the assu mption that teacher candidates do pay attention to students , in ways that I myself needed to pay attention to and understand. I needed them to help me see th ose ways, and so their talk in conversation s with me, as to how they interacted with students, as well as how they perceived their attention to students as having to do with students' thinking and reasoning, mattered. I was also curious as to how talk regarding paying attention to students' thinking and reasoning might be changing over time, as well as how the practice s themselves mi ght look different over time. In my study I used extensiv e videotaping, a method I describ e later in the research design section. Consequently, t he research ques tions , which guided my inquiry , we re the following: 25 I. a )What do elementary teacher cand ida tes pay attention to during th eir interaction with students? b)What do they say about what they pay attention to in their interaction s with students when th ey see themselves on videotape? II. a)What does it look like for el ementary teacher candidates to pay attention to how students think and reason? b)What do they say that has to do with paying attention to studen ts' thinking and reasoning when t hey see themselves on videotape? III. a)How do ways that el ementary teacher candidates pay attention to students ' thinking and reasoning change over time? b) How does their talk a bout their paying attention to students' thi nking and reasoning change over time? The above three questions, eac h one consisting of two parts, we re th e main research questions in this study. They we re not criteria questions ( a more specific level of guiding questions) , nor we re t hey interview questions, which we re yet another, even more specific level of questio ning. Since th e latter questions took the form of conversational interview s , they emerged from the field. GSU teacher candidates, during their internship year in the schools, learn to teach through interactions they develop in the context(s) they continually find themselves negotiating in. These interactions involve multiple players and layers , such as field and c ourse instructors, cooperating teachers and teacher liaisons, cluster leader s and team leaders, 500 and 800 - level seminars, a professional dress code and language, a busing system for children's transportation, and so much more. By bringing together two lines of literature ( teaching for understanding and learning to teach ) I sought to create in order to explore how teacher candida tes learn to 26 listen well to students and to pay attention to t heir thinking and reasoning, as a process which takes place in the context of the internship year . I , thus, condu cted ethnographic research on novices´ learning to teach for understanding during their internship year, the fifth year of a five - year p ost B.A. teacher prepar ation program. I n the following section I give the ra tionale for the methodology Why Qualitative Research Methodology? Sherman and Reid (1994) define d qualitative methods as "p rocedures for identifying the presence or absence of something," and quantitative methods as "those procedures which measure numerically the degree to which some feature is present ." (p.498) Qualitative and quantitative methods differ in their philosophy ( e.g. , phenomenology vs . positivism); in their method of design (e.g. , fieldwork interpretation vs . cause and effect attribution); and in their method of data analysis (e.g. , ethnographic methods vs . statistical measures). They originate, essentially, from two opposing paradigms, one of induction and one of deduction. Simon (1969) supported that each paradigm exists only artificially and not as an independently existing natural entity. Toseland (1994) agreed and talked about how the two approaches to research can enhance one another if viewed as inextricably interwoven. Harrison (1994) considered the integration of the two inevitable. Loneck (1994) viewed this integration as both useful and necessary: "Q ualitative methodology ensures that research is relevant to practice and the quantitative one supports its validity ." (p.445) In this study I engaged in qualitative research methodology only, which took the form of qualitative case study research, the r ationale for which I explain below. But first, what is a case study? Merriam (1998) defined it as "...an intensive, holistic description and analysis of a bounded 27 phenomenon such as a program, an institution, a person, a process , or a social unit" (p. xii i, emphasis added). According to Merriam (1998), case studies can also be quantitative in their methodology, and even set out to test a theory. In education, and in this study in particular, the case - study design is qualitative in that it is: ...employed to gain an in - depth understanding of the situation and meaning for those involved. The interest is in process rather than outcomes, in context rather than a specific variable, in dis covery rather than confirmation . (p. 19) Cronbach (1975) differentiated the case study research design as a particular mode of qualitative research because it offers "interpretation in context ." (p. 123) Yin (1994) observed that a case study is a qualitative research design suitable for situations in whi ch it is impossible (and undesirable) to separate the variables of the phenomenon from their context. The particular context in which the phenomenon under investigation takes place, in other words, is of great importance, and it also is under investigation . In this particular study, teacher candidates' learning to teach for understanding happens within classrooms that have lives of their own; they keep evolving throughout the year; and they differ from grade to grade, from school to school, from district to understanding their evolving learning to teach for understanding in that particular context. Why Engage In Qualitative Case Study Research? According to Sander s (1981), "case studies help us to understand processes of events, projects, and programs and to discover context characteristics that will shed light on an issue or object" (p. 44). In this study, I aimed to understand a process (teacher candidates' learn ing to teach for understanding) as it happens within the particulars of elementary school classrooms, and through nature of a case study research design served the purposes of this study because it "captured" a 28 process in context: "it can examine a specific instance but illuminate a general problem ." (Olson, 1992, p.138) and encounters in their journey of learning to teach for understanding which were very different for each one of them, and quite idiosyncratic due to a combination of factors (different personalities, different learning styles, different contexts). In fac qualitative researchers need to be constantly cultivating. According to Merriam (1998), "I t takes time and patience to search for clues, to follow up leads, to find the missing pieces, to put the puzzle to gether ." (p. 21) The descriptive nature of the case study rese arch design served my purposes of illustrating the complexities of a situation, such as the way this process evolves in context overtime. In qualitative research, it is important that informatio n is presented in a variety of ways and from diff erent points of view. (Olson, 1992) In this study, I made an effort to take into account various players' point of view on the phenomenon under investigation, such as cooperating teachers' accounts of thei r teacher candidates' process of learning to teach for understanding, as well as the accounts on this issue from field and course instructors. I did that by interviewing them, by being a participant observer during their practices, and by having informal c onversations with them during lunch breaks at a local cafeteria, or by talking with them on the phone. While these various players' accounts were not the focus of this study, they did constitute important information that has served both the purposes of "t hick What Is Triangulation, a nd Why Triangulate At All? Knaft and Breimayer (1991) defined triangulation as a navigation technique of plotting the 29 location of an unknown point from two known visible points. Social scientists were the first to use triangulation metaphorically, in order to designat e the use of multiple methods upon measuring a single construct. Mathison (1988) addressed the inadequacies of previous definiti ons of triangulation as a process of gathering data via various independent measures that aim to support a finding. Although she agreed that the above happens, which she referred to as " convergence ,"("data from different sources, methods, investigation...p roviding evidence that will result in a single proposition about some social phenomenon," p.15), she also argued for a more expansive perspective on triangulation, as providing inconsistent and even contradictory results of the same phenomenon under study. Therefore, when a range of perspectives or data does not confirm a single proposition about a social phenomenon, then we have a case of " inconsistency ," which questions the validity of the claims. When several methods of gathering data result in opposing views of the social phenomenon under study, the case is one of " contradiction ," calling the researcher, according to Mathison (1988), to construct meaningful propositions about the social world. In this study, I shadowed teacher candidates during their 50 0 - level and 800 - level seminars might be convergent, inconsistent, or even contradictory to the talk they engaged in during watching with me their videotaped te aching. I knew that my field notes would be a good place to look for such pieces of evidence, and so would my journal (a more personal, more inference - driven source of data collection), both of which served me well during my data analysis. The Site and the Participants My study was si tuated in an urban, K - 5 public elementary school, located in a mid - sized 30 Midwestern city. The student population was quite diverse , consisting of African Americans, Caucasians, Hispanics, and Hmongs. Ordinary Elemen t ary 9 was a Title 1 school, meaning that a high percentage of the student population qualified for receiving federal lunch support. Ordinary Elementary was not a Professional Development School (PDS) , or a school involved in any research project with GSU. It wa s a neighborhood school , j ust like any other, and for that reason I named it At Ordinary Elementary, I systematically shadowed three elementary teacher candidates , Sara, Mai , and Juniper 10 , w ho all gave their consent to participate in my study without any hesitation. Sara , a white, middle - class returning adult in her mid - forties, was placed in a fifth grade classroom. Mai, a middle - class Hmong minority student , was placed in a first grade classroom. And Juniper, a white, middle - class traditional student, was placed in a split fourth and fifth grade classroom (half the students in the classroom were fourth graders and the other half were fifth graders). I spent a year sharing with them their journey in to the internship year, starting from their Teacher Preparation Opening Day (August orientation at their school) , all the way until their exit interview (late June), to understand how they learn ed to pay attention to students' thinking and reasoning. To capture the evolving life of learning to teach in a classroom, I daily videotaped teacher candidates' teaching, and I used that as content for conversations with them. Their videotaped teaching beca dissected daily. Throughout this journey , the teacher candidates and I were involved in a variety of data collection modes: apart from audio and videotaping their teaching ( L evel 1 D at a ) and audio and videotaping their reflections on their teaching ( L evel 2 D ata ), we also dwelt i n journal writing, field notes, examining the work of their students, and debriefing about the 800 - level courses they were 9 10 31 attending at the University , as part of their five - year teacher preparation program. Triangulation of data was equally important to my study, as it is in any good qualitative research. I followed the teacher candidates throughout their 800 - level courses, their 500 - level student - tea - players , instr uctors (I interviewed course and field instructors twice, once a t the beginning and once at the end of the spring semester, apart from also having informal conversations with them). I a lso collected and read some of the teacher candidates´ coursework papers , as well as some of the work they assigned to their students. I asked for and obtained copies of the teacher candidates assessment s which they completed for their mid - term and final three - way conferences 11 . I also At the end of the study , I brought all three teacher candidates together to review their video tapes from the year , and to ask them to s hare with each other and with myself their insights as to how their learning to teach had evolved and taken shape throughout the internship year ( focus group exit interview) 12 . Research Design Videotaping wa s crucial in this study, since both non - verbal and verbal interactions with children are i ndicators of the kind of disco urse that takes place over time . Videotaping, as a tool for examining teaching practice , has become very popular and has been used by various researchers (Merseth & Lacey, 1993; Frederiksen , et al., 1998; Tochon , , 1999; Goldberg & Pesko, 2000; Sherin, 2000; Hiebert , et al., 2002; Sherin & Han, 2003; Voithof er, 200 5; and Wilson & 11 The three - way conferences take place twice during each semester, in which the teacher candidates, along with their cooperating teachers and field i nstructor, meet to discuss the teacher candidates 12 For a comprehensive overview of the various sources/modes of data collection, please refer to the Summary Chart of Data Collection on Appendix I. 32 2006 ). Teaching is a public performance, analysis of which requ ires captu ring it visually. I, thus, videotaped teach er candidates' teaching, in different subject matter areas, in order to provid e variation of the data in context. happened daily) constitute d the "Level 1 Data" of the study. occurred in November, when the teacher candidates embarked on their Lead Teaching 1 p eriod. During that same period, the teacher candidates and I allocated some time during the day (usually during their lu n ch break) to sit and watch what I had videotaped earlier in the day and to reflect upon. The t eacher candidates were not aware of my research questi ons , or what I had set out to investigate. We had a shared understanding that our joint inquiry was about examining their teaching . Consequently , in the fall semester, and during the month of November in particular when Lead Teaching 1 was unfolding , I started view ing segments of these videotaped lessons with each one of the teacher candidates , in or der to understand how they thought and reason ed about their teaching when t hey saw it on videotape . My focus was always on the kind of attention they wer e pay ing to child ren's thinking and reasoning , how that evolved over time, and how eventually learning to teach for understanding during the internship year took place. As each teacher candidate and I watched and talked over the videotaped teaching I recor ded (Level 1 Data ), we also were being videotaped. This second level of videotaping constitute d the "Level 2 Data" for this study, since it wa s a meta - level of data collection. For my videotaping in the classrooms in which the teacher candidates taught, I used a camcorder , which I placed on a tripod . I also used a n external microphone , which I plugged in to my camcorder . I tried to place the external microphone in the middle of the classroom, to be able to capture sound as best as possible. I usually stood wit h my camcorder at the back or in a corner of the classroom (to be as least 33 of life in classrooms , by simply using a button on my camcorder to zoom in and out, every time I thought I saw som happe ning somewhere . could be an intrusive student wa ndering around completely un noticed, or it could be a group of students being deeply engaged with subject matter. During my videotaped talk with each one of the teacher candidates, I also used a microphone, which I plugged in to the audio - recorder , to ensure better sound. T he t eacher candidates and I used a room in the school (usually during lunch hour) to watch video tapes from Level 1 Data (a TV was available in the room) . We used the big table in the room across from the TV to lay out various artifacts that journal writing, course assignments , etc. ). Our conversation s were videotaped by my camcorder , which I had al ready set at an ang le so that a viewer could see both the teacher candid ate and myself talk, as well as what the two of us watched on the TV screen . This second level of videotaping (i.e. videotaping our conversat ions over watching videotape s) wa s , again, Inevitably, Level 2 Data interacted over Level 1 Data, and the other way around, in ways that I discuss later on. The kind s of conversation, in other words, that took place during watching the videotaped teachin g (Level 2 Data) , that is , the teaching which took place earlier in the day (Level 1 Data), affected the way teaching unfolded the following day. My joint inquiry with the teacher candidates relied heavily on these conversations, which constituted the bulk of the research data. These conversations, although systematic, were at times long and rich , and at some other times short and simple. They were at times heavily emotional, at other times less so. They began as less structured and pro thinking and reasoning. In November, during Lead Teaching 1 , for example, the TCs started talking about how they thought in the classroom. During this time, I probed the TCs by asking 34 them to talk about whatever they noticed in their interaction s with students , and whatever they were interested in talk ing about. I wanted to start from where they were, to help surface and articulate their own hidden agendas and vocabu laries. Occasionally , I would ask them to think about what they we re paying attention to during their interaction s with student s, in an attempt to create text which we could use to build from . Wh en it was time for Lead Teaching 2 (eight weeks during spring semester), I gradually direct ed our inquiry a bit more toward their attention to students' thinking and reasoning. I avoid ed doing that right from the beginning , in order not to "contaminate" the inquiry. After Lead Teaching 2 ended, and while the TCs were still in their school placements, I share d with them some of my interpretation as to how I thought they learned to pay attention to st udents' thinking and reasoning , and I aske d them to do the same about themselves: to think about their growth over time in regards to paying attention to students' thinking and reasoning , and to write about it in their journals. At the end of the year, after their portfoli o and other 800 - level pr ojects we re completed, and after the convocation activities were over , I conduct ed a longer "exit" interview with each one of the three interns (as well as a focus group intervie w with all of them in a room) , during which I sought their interpretation of their development over the year, in regards to their learning to tea ch for understanding, and I offer ed my own interpretation of their dev elopment for them to critique . This latter data collection mode aimed to strengthen the study's validity in rega rds to inferences , as well as to indicate that the participants' point of view on their development, for the purposes of this study and as a s tance in qualitative research, wa s very much valued. In all instances, even during dif ficult or intense moments when the TCs revealed complex emotions, I consider ed our conversations to be deeply engaging and highly intellectual. I was not, in other words, there to interview. I was there to build a relationship (a veteran 35 classroom teacher and an experienced field instructor) (a researcher of a process in context) candidates, their learning to teach for underst anding , and teacher education. I was more in need of the TCs tha n they were of me, to help me make the familiar strange. Obtaining Informed Consent a nd Spiraling I nto Data Collection All of this videotaping meant getting involved in a complicated and rather long process of obtaining informed consent f rom both school and University players ( teacher candidates, cooperating teachers, ts, course and field instructors see Appendix II ). Some other instances of data collectio n (i.e. mid - term and final three - way conferences with TCs, CTs and field instructors ), in which I was present as a participant observer, did not call for a need of video recording , and thus only audio recording occur red . During the spring semester, videotaping was intensified , as teacher candidates took the lead in teaching in their classrooms. During the months of February and March, the teach Lead Teaching 2 p eriod, I was in the school videotaping daily . This period was very intense for the teacher candidat es. They were overwhelmed and completely exhausted by the end of the day. It was not always ata with them (watching their videotaped teaching and talk with them about it ). We all agreed that when watch ing videotapes together was not possible, it wo uld be more productive if I ga ve them each a videotape when the day ended , to take home with them and watch. In some instances that happened every few days, in which case I wrote t hem a note as to where to foc us their viewing. We had already watched enough videotapes together, so I was not worried that they might get caught in the 20/20 trap ( thinking they we re 20 years older, 20 pounds heavier) or in other traps. T he t eacher candidates recorded in a journal th eir thoughts about 36 their evolving teaching as they watched it , over a school year, on videotape . T he t eacher candidates brought their journals and quoted from them during our conversations. At the end of the year, they agreed to give me copies of what they had recorded in their journals. T he t journals , then, ended up becoming valuable data for the study. Throughout the year, I was a participant observer at both the s cho ol and the University . Alt hough I was already an experienced field instr uctor at the time (knowing the p rogram and its components , and its expectations quite well), therefore being an i n sider the process of learning to teach. For that reason, I maintained a very detailed journal myself, recording all that puzzled me, wh atever made me wonder about the how and why of things , or anything else that I thought was worthwhile f or further investigation. In a way, I had started a conversation with myself on paper about my on - going sense making of what I was experiencing in the fi eld. Without realizing it at the time, that was already a form of on - going data analysis. Whatever puzzled me at one given time , and whatever I wanted to know more about, became my source of inquiry on the following day. How did I take field notes ? Durin g the day that task was not possible, because I was videotaping in the classrooms. Nor was it possible at a ny other time during the day, because I was shado wing the teacher candidates in the school, and in their courses and seminars. S o, as I left the research participants and the day later in the evening by watching what I had videotaped earlier that day . I developed notebooks for each one of the teacher candidates, in which I kept jott ing down what I saw, by divi di ng the page in two: on the left side of the page I recorded what I saw happening in front of me (i.e. field notes ), and on the right side of the page I reflected on what I thought the data was telling me (or not). This kind of 37 reflection was my comme ntary on the field notes , a ki nd of on - going data analysis which kept informing my inquiry throughout the study . These reflection s (my commentary on the field notes, recorded in my notebook) were different from the reflection s I was recording i n my journal. The latter were more elaborate and theory - driven. All of my reflection s (in my journal, alongside the field notes , or in other places) were ow does this data inform my research questions? This constant interrogation of the data was a form of data analysis, on which I elaborate in the following section. Data Analysis : An On - Going P rocess Data analysis in qualitative research is a process of thinking about how the data collected start s to make sense . T hinking about and around data analysis starts to take form during journal writing, a place in which the researcher tries to make sense of field notes on any given day, reflects after an interview, records puzzles and illuminations on the data as they occur, and starts "seeing" through the data for what they reveal. conversation s w ith the research participants. Our c onversations, apart from generating data, became mental and a platform for data analysis. The r esearch participants and I , in other words, were involved in the process of data analysis before we had even realized such was the case . It was an on - going process, evident in journal writing, during which they and I had already started developing themes and storylines. Throughout my time in the field I had constant debriefings of the data , and of my research experience , with my doc toral dissertation committee members at the University. Each time I had a meeting with each one of my committee member s , I went back to my journal and reflected on what we discussed regarding what the data revealed. They all provided very thoughtful guidance as to 38 how to proceed with further data collection , by giving me more questions to think about. My committee members, like the research participants, were very involved in the process of data analysis and in making sure I remained focused on Analyzing data while th e study is in process, and not at the end of data collection, is a method that was developed by Glazer & Strauss (1967) and came to be known as t he "constant comparative method " : The basic strategy of the method is to do just what its name implies - constant ly compare. The researcher begins with a particular incident from an interview, field notes, or document and compares it with another incident in the same set of data or in another set. These comparisons lead to tentative categories that are then compared to each other and to other instances. Comparisons are constantly made within and between levels of conceptualization u ntil a theory can be formulated . ( Glaser & Strauss, as quoted in Merriam, 1998, p. 159) For the purposes of this dissertation, I chose to focus on one case only, the case of Sara. I explain how and why in the following chapter , and I expand more on how I went about analyzing her case. To present her story, I used Erick , a small vine) aims to portray not only a story but also an atmosphere. According to Erickson (1986), The narrative vignette is a vivid portrayal of the conduct of an event of everyday life, in which the sights and sounds of what was being said and done are described in the natural sequence of their occurrence in real time. The moment - to - moment style of description in a narrative vignette gives the se nse of being there in the scene . (p.150) s daily scenes contained, to use of the multiple players and layers involved in her development. Apart from a number of school and more layer in her busy, daily routi ne. To think, then, that it is possible to convey such tremendous complexity is a delusion, and any attempt to portray it can only be futile. Erickson (1986) explained this reality in detail: 39 Even the most richly detail ed vignette is a reduced account, clearer than life. Some and other features are selected out of the narrative report. Thus the vignette does not represent the original event it self , for this is impossible. The vignette is an abstraction ; an analytic caricature (of a friendly sort) in which some details are sketched in and others are left out ; some features are sharpened and heightened in their portrayal and other features are so ftened, or le ft to merge with the background . (p. 150, emphasis in the original) I t is important , nevertheless , (Erickson, 1986, p.151) , b y providing interpre tive commentary comes alive through a number of vignettes in which concrete particulars intertwine d with meaning making. Apart from describing the scenes and social actions, by drawing from journals and field notes and by using direct quotes from conversations, I also made meaning of social life and its actors (in this case of - going interpretation of the data during and after my time in the field. According to Erickson (19 86), in order to strengthen the interpretive validity of the narrative vignettes, i t is important to continue the interpretive commentary , in the same fashion, in other parts of the report. I engage , then, in more interpretive commentary in both the discu s sion and implications sections of my dissertation , by return ing to the two lines o f literature discuss ed my study. 40 CHAPTER IV : FINDINGS THE CASE OF SARA Who I s and Why Sara? I worked with Sara from the beginning of the school year (late August) until its end (late May ). I spent that y journey during her internship year, starting from her Teacher Preparation Opening Day (August orientation at her school) , all the way until her exit interview (late June). Sara gave her con sent to participate in my s tudy with a lot of enthusiasm. Of medium height and weight, a congenial dark - haired woman, Sara was different from the other two research participants in a number of ways. She was well in to her forties at the time, having childre n already graduating from College, and with some prior work experience in the private sector. She had also served as a "helping mom" in classrooms when her children were attending elementary school. Unlike other teacher candidates in her program, she was q uite experienced in working with other adults in a professional setting, and she carried with her a professional demeanor as well. She was kind, and rather shy, and she was deeply interested in her learning to teach. Although she had spent a lot of time in classrooms being a helping mom, and had seen her own three children go through elementary school, she was still bringing in her inquiry questions that were similar to those that other teacher candidates raised . According to Brown (2005), non - traditional, ducation cohorts is a trend which first appeared in the 1990s , but one which has rece ived very little attention in the teacher education literature. I was, then, right from the start quite pleased that Sara, the non - , was one of the research participants in my study. She was very thoughtful and articulate right from the beginning of the internship yea r, being very explicit 41 about what kids think, how to I want to have good questions to ask kids, so that they start asking more que stions t , initial conversation ) literature on novices suggests, Sara was interested in helping kids develop their thinking, from the very beginning days of her internship year. As I saw her develop throughout the internship year, she was really the most articulate of all the research participants; she wrote more in her journal abo ut her professional journey; and she even theorized about he Sara never gave up her original agenda of helping students think and reason. All three of the research participants in my study worked very hard during their internship year , and even hard er by participating in my study I asked them to do much more than w hat other teacher candidates had to do. I learned many lessons from all three about researching the process of learning to teach for understanding, and about the goodness of qualitative research . I enjoyed our joint inquiry beyond w ords, and I am grateful for all the important lessons all three of the m however, was really the one that informed the findings of my study in deeper and broader ways. In addition, Sara felt more co nfident to share with me other background informatio n regarding her school placement (something that the other two TCs did not do until the end of the year), and in that sense she also served as a k ey informant. So, why Sara? Sara was, indeed, a dream come true as a research participant for my research study! I , thus , went ahead and transcribed word by word every recorded conversation I had with Sara (a total of eleven audiotapes). As I was transcribing her talk, I wrote in another column more commentary with the research questions in mind, essentially providing my on - going interpretation of the data. This was one level /stage of data analysis. Once I completed writing this commentary, I 42 re - read it and grouped it by theme, with the research questions in mind just as before. This was another level /stage of data analysis, which also built on the previous one. I , in other words, began , and building her storyline about learning to teach from the bottom up , utilizing . (Strauss & Corbin , 1990 ) I also started looking at various , her portfolio items ) for both confirm ing and disconfirming evidence. Here rue story, as witnessed, recorded, and interpreted by me. Vignette One Great State University, the day that GSU brings together cooperating teachers and other school personnel with teacher candidates and various key University players. The O pening Day started early and ended in late afternoon. People met in an assembly room in one of the schools. There were round tables around the room , and coffee and donuts in the corner for people to serve themselves. Each school was assigned a roundtable , around which CTs and TCs from that school were seated together. When people took their seats, the Team Leader welcom ed everyone and asked, about how one engages in the process of inquiry, and a lot of document sharing: the GSU Guide for the Internship Year, the GSU Intern Handbook, various coursework guidelines, the agenda for the day, and an evaluation sheet. It did not look like the CTs and TCs knew each other from be fore. They greeted and smiled at each other as they got comfortable around the tables. People seemed excited 43 anticipating the year. Some CTs, however, expressed concern whether the TCs were ready for a year - long internship. One of the 800 - level course in structors seized the opportunity to introduce a poem meant for first graders. He modeled the inquiry he was looking for. Other GSU people reinforced the message that TCs need help to engage in that kind of inquiry. The course instructor elaborated on what conversation strategies while working with kids and from text It was break time already and one of the CTs, who knew me from my previous years as a field ins t r uctor, approached me and expressed a concern: emember how complicated and , and who is one of the best CTs in the GSU t eacher prep aration program. During break ti me , people mingled with each other, with excitement and some anxiety, over coffee and donuts . The Team Leader started the second part of the morning by asking the CTs to think about mentoring as a f hat does it mean to be a teacher of a college student who is learning to teach? How do we develop a visi After watching a videotaped segment of a CT and a TC having a conversation about a lesson taught by a TC, all people in the room discussed at their tables what may be going o n during the internship year. At the table where I was sitting, there was talk about establishing a relationship of trust early on, what may loo k a nd feel like , and how the relat ionship will be negotiated when t he teaching pr actice begins . While these discussions were taking place, I was moving around the tables looking for articulate, thoughtful, insightful, learner - oriented people. Sara and her CT stood out: an unusual couple, since Sara was an older TC. As already mention ed in the previous section, Sara carried with her a congenial and mature demeanor, and yet also communicating a genuine interest in 44 about to mentor a non - traditio nal student. As I was watching them interact, I saw a conversation evolving around two mature adults. Although timid and shy, Sara was more talkative than her peers. Mrs. T., although an experienced teacher, did less talking and more listening than her col leagues. I knew they were a couple I would like to work with . That day I made mention of this wish of mine in my journal. During lunch time , the TCs and CTs started getting to know each other and on building evolved around studying the GSU guidebook and the GSU Program Standards. The Team Leader i ntroduced the Program Standards as a tool for learning during the internship year, and explained how the GSU coursework connects with the intern ship year. I went hom uite a day, eight hours of participant observation, field : Attendi - level course instructors. Paul had a reputation, a good reputation, among TCs and the whole GSU community, of being a professed constructivist. A veteran science teacher himself, he was in charge of the 800 - level science course instructors for elementary TCs. He was interested in pursuing good questions and in helping TCs to do the same. As the fall semester started in early September, so did my shado wing of the TCs every where they went. I started the year by attending the Teacher Preparation Opening Day , and I riods of L ead T eaching. In his 800 - level course, Paul, the science course instructor, gave TCs an assignment 45 early on. T he TCs were to analyze, in three to four pages, a unit they had already taught in their tand? What evidence do Paul, essentially, sent out through his assignment an invitation to TCs to start paying attention to students and their talk. As various TCs were presenting the ir assignment, one TC hen you constantly ask them questions, it feels like it is not going an (field notes, November 6). Paul stepped in and asked a question which created a very heated but question? What i GSU was quite serious about providing opportunities for learning and its assessment. Through coursework , and the ir field instruction seminar, I start ed seeing parallel threads when it came to on - going assessment of That same day I followed the TCs to their other 800 - level course, taught in the afternoon by Eisner. Eisner, an experienced course instructor and a scholar in his field, was in charge of the literacy 800 - level course for elementary TCs. Eisner started the course by laying out his November 6). E isner assigned to TCs a novel ( The Long Winter , by Laura Ingalls Wilder) , along with some questions to think about upon teaching it in their classrooms. One of the questions Eisner asked TCs to think about was assessment. As Eisner was assisting TCs to generate ideas, Sara brought up a wonderful point , concerning the difficulty of paying attention to all students : can you kn 6) 46 I approached Sara at the end of her 800 - level course t hat afternoon. I knew, from her thoughtful questions, that she was someone with whom I wanted to pursue my study . I asked if and when I could come in her classroom to videotape her teaching. She happily accepted , and so I went in for my first videotaping o f her teaching on November 10, during the Lead T eaching 1 per iod. During the fall semester, Lead T eaching 1 is a period which lasts for three weeks in November , and the TCs take the lead in teaching, meaning they teach for most of the day. Getting Our Fe et Wet As I was new in the business of videotaping in classrooms, I, too, along with the TCs , fall I was vide otaping several TCs) was to find (for my camcorder) the right plug , at the right place , at the right time. I was worried I would walk in to a classroom at the wrong moment ; t hat I an d that I would be i in the corner or at the back of the room, for most of the day people barely noticed me. My first videotaped encounter with Sara was on November 10. When I walked in to , she had already started with an editing lesson. She was standing behind an overhead pro jector (OHP), showing to the students a passage with some errors they were to edit. Sara barely moved from the OHP during that lesson. She appeared to be stiff and the OHP. When a student offered an idea, she turned and while students offered ideas, she never asked anyone to clarify or justify what they were 47 alternative input. That same morning Sara also taught some m ath, following the same pattern as before: not asking students to clar if y and/or justify their answers. During lunch break , Sara and I had our first conversation in our designated room. We spent close to one hour talking both about her teaching that I had videotaped earlier that morning and about questions I had prepared for her to intr o duce herself to me . I was worried Sara would get very defensive watching herself on videotape for the first time and talking about her teaching with me, a total stranger. She did not. On the contrary, I f ound her to be very interested i n the t ask, quite courageous to investigate her teaching with a critical eye, even enjoying the experience of analyzing her practice, and very articulate in expressing her surprises and concerns. Vignette Two Sara Entering New F ound Land Upon introducing herself to me , Sara wanted to make sure I knew she was a different, non - traditional Teacher Candidate: S: I am a wife and a mother of three children. I always helped as the room mother and I got interested in. I would li ke to be a teacher, I thought. So after my kids were a little older I went back to work. I had gone to school to be a nurse when I graduated from high s chool but I only went for a couple of years and then I quit. And I got married and had a family and became a room mom , ed in teaching. L: What was it that interested you? S.: I like kids, I really like kids. And I wanted to do some kind of work that I felt was meaningful. I love learning myself. And I want to impart that to children. And I really like 5 th grade. I always just thought that I would enjoy working with 5th grade cause I liked my own 3 child ren all separately at that age. T hey were just so smart and they were thinking, and yet they were able to zip their own coats and button, and do all those things that kindergartners have a hoping to do. L.: I would like to hear some more about this. What is it about this particular age group that you find intere sting? 48 S.: Well, they still respect the ir parents and their teachers. attitude that comes with the hormon es usually a little bit later. And they are soo intelligent and igher - l evel thinking. watch and learn with them and see h ow they think and I enjoy that. Sara gave me the impression of someone who did not have to spend time learning about children of that age. She sounded as though she already knew enough. Despite all the knowledge and prior work and experience with that age group , however, she still was worried about lasting through her internship year. Her concerns were very similar to the ones of other novice teachers. In that respect, she wa s very similar to her fe llow Teacher Candidates in her p rogram. In asking her to share with me her goals for the year, Sara talked about wanting to develop good classroom management skills, to have a strong presence in the classroom like the one of her CT, and to learn how to help students think. I wanted her to look back at the beginning of the internship year in August and to talk about whether she had readjusted her goals since then. I wanted to see if the evolving life in her classroom had an effect on her goals, and how she predicted now her development would evolve as time went by. Sara was very articulate and courageous in unfolding her thinking for me: S.: My main goal for this year is to lear n classroom management skills. And the teacher that I am w orking with is exce llent at classroom management. She is very good at it. That was my main as well. I thought it would just be a natural thing that kids would respect the teacher, just because you are the teacher and I have since learned in the few months that I have been here, that you really have to have strategies, in order to control the class. And then you can go on from there and have learning and fun activities that this is really a lot harder for me than I thought it would be. But working with a handful of kids is a lot easier than 28 , like we have in our room. S.: Um, there are some behavior problems in the room and those at fir st really caught me off guard. going on all sides of the classroom, not just the people that y ou might be helping right now. And t hat is really t ricky. S o I have a new appreciation for teachers that can do that. Because it really th a lot of the little things. But I 49 definitely have a really good person to observe and to learn from. L. : What else would you like to improve on this year? S.: Um, I want to learn how to really help kids think of it will be experience and some of it I think you can learn, you know. Having great questions to ask kids so that they start asking more questions , this , inquiry, I guess is what , I think, the educated word for it is. (em phasis ad ded) Sara was clear from the beginning of our conversations about her learning trajectory: she wanted to learn how to ask good questions to students in order to help them think and to be able to form their own questions. She saw the need for monitoring h e r directions to students and that transitioning from one activity to the next could be very tricky . Thankfully, she realized early on the importance of preparing well for teaching. L.: Have you seen a change so far in you since September and e specially during Lead Teaching 1 S.: Okay. One thing that comes to mind immediately is I give too many directions at one time I mean , I obviously some of these things are habits and I just do it without thinking. But I have to start giving one simple direction. Then , d out , tune you out. They do put the one paper away, get out the next book, get out a pencil, that type of thing. uld take. S.: Right! L.: What about the speed that you are talking with them. Have you discovered anything about that? S.: I think that goes along with too many directions and gett ing it all out really quickly. Yes, L.: Does the day of t he week make any difference? S.: Yes, think that it how to deal with certain situa tions so they still, I still am a little tentative, when I come in the 50 morning . ow I am going to deal with it. Whereas I think in other past jobs t experience , and after a year of doing it you pretty well know. L.: Can you give an example of a day that you were sort of leery, like you said? S.: Ok. Uh, when you see the science tape that I taped. on teaching science that day. But I had not taped a lesson for Paul (the science field instructor). So I asked the really prepared for, so I looked it over really quickly to get ready to do it and I really would, you know , it was not an ideal situation . So, right then I knew it was, you know, there could be a lot of trouble. day that the kids had their Halloween party, so they wer e really exci ted and it was, so When I it was the wrong thing to do. getting more and more restle that set the wrong tone. I should get them doing something and then hand back the tests So , that you know. And to me , my original thought was , the test was from the previous unit so I should do that at the beginning , to see if they had any questions about it. And then move on to the next unit. But I could see It was very courageous of Sara to share with me, a t our very first conversation, the fact that going in the classroom unprepared was not a good idea in the first place. Sara was a hard - working, conscientious teacher candidate who knew all too well what her responsibilities were. She realized how important management skills were for a teacher, and she talked about those S.: A lot of it r ight now is management for me. boys and girls mostly boys in the roo ake place. At least tha thing all the time. But I think when you are new, it probably has to be. And a lot of times my teacher will have to step in and do something for management, to get them under control, and then, you know, like you probably saw this morning, during the morning greeting. Um, you know, she steps in quite a bit. And L.: Sort of sets them up? S.: Right. And, you know, I want to be able to do that on my own. I really, I want to get to that And I feel sort of wishy - washy. That really bugs me. L ike I come across wishy - washy. Like it. 51 There, I have to have a way to present myself that says I mean business (emphasis added). Sara was a mbivalent about a number of issues in the beginning of her internship year. She knew she wanted to be listened to by students the way her CT was, but she was not all that oom management, but she did not want that to dominate her learning to teach during her internship , movement between copying her CT and developing her own teaching self was occupying her thinking a lot. She could not foresee (nor did I) at the time how bad her relationship with her CT would turn out to be. Thankfully, she did mainta in a good relationship with her field and course instructors at GSU , and she was, in fact, one of the most diligent and articulate TCs in the seminars. She had well - developed notions on some key teaching and learning ideas (the importance of lesson plannin g, keeping students engaged, understanding subject matter well and making it accessible to students) but she had less well - developed notions on some other teaching and lea rning ideas, such as how she thought about respect in the classroom , for example . In the following section , Sara reveals this tinkering movement in her thinking and talks about her learning trajectory during her internship year. What Is the Matter w ith Them? Sara entered her internship year expecting that students would just listen to her. Every lack of respect towards her. She was perplexed about it , and she co mmunicated t hat to me early ect was an idea which was 52 , such as classroom discourse, student eng agement, and teaching for understanding. I re membered an activity her field instructor, Rita, had asked them to engage in during a field instruction seminar earlier on in the semester. I framed my inquiry w ith Sara based on that activity: L.: You know , something I wanted to ask you from last time, I thought it was very interesting. A couple of weeks ago when I came to your seminar with Rita, remember she did three columns on our expectations, reality , have, because of the first two being different? And I reme I S.: Right. You have a good memory! o ask for remember what the concern was that you said. Did you say you had a concern? S.: Probably , how to develop that demanding nature somehow. L.: So I w anted to hear more about that. ct, and what exactly it is th at you mean. It also sounds like you had a surprise. S.: Well, I guess from my own experience, I went to Catholic schools when I was a child and there was a lot of discipline and you never, you just went in the classroom automati cally respecting your teac her. And that was a long time ago. Then when my children were in school, it still was sort of an attitude and kids today, and I sort of knew that in a way, but never having seen it in a total class room environment with so many kids. I realized that they just do teacher. You have to earn that res pect, but first of all, I think you have to demand it in a w ay, and that is a certain sta nce th at Rita talks about sometimes. And I see that in my teacher. She has f her attitude. And you have to have that in order to survive, I think, in there. L.: When you say respect, what do you mean? What would they do that shows that they respect you, what would they not do S.: Okay, if they do respect you, I think they will Listening. 53 L.: Paying attention? S.: Um hum, and paying attention, yes, attend to you, th Um, and my t Even at the same, right now, you know. Um, because I think ntern, kids know these things. They definitely know . And my teacher is the one who is in control of that classroom. She has been since day one, and she can I not experienced enough to be able to really do it. S.: I think I have to respect the kids too. But I feel that I do. I, I probably can grow in that, but I, with a respect for them that they are not reciproca ting to me. But, I do believe the experience is part of the problem. year. She thought that she was entitled to re spect from students merely because she was their teacher, and that respect from students meant listening to her when she talked. She thought that her CT was getting more respect than she did because when her CT talked , students always listened. She also th ought that more experience can get someone more respect from students. Sara believed she was respectful enough to students because , in her mind, she listened to them. ay from the students towards her. I found this tinkering stance around respect and the way she related the concept of listening (she to the students and the students to her), to be a good place to r , subject matter. istory (her major was Elementary Education) , and she h ad a particular preference for s oci al studies and literature over mathematics and s cience. Sara, as before, was q uite articulate about her subject matter goals, as well as about her internship journey with a lot of excitement , but also with some agony, using very important teaching and learning threads, like making subject matter meaningful to students, developing a 54 strong teaching stance in the classroom, and finding her place next to her CT. Unlike what the literature on novices suggests, Sara s goals in mind. Learning to Think, to Know, and to Act Like a Teacher The above is terminology borrowed fro Transforming Teacher Educati on: Reflections from the Fi eld. The authors describe d a five - year teacher preparation program in which teacher candidates went through stages of learning to relate with students and their thinking (junior year), of learning to make subject matter accessible to students (senior year) , and of learning to bring together thinking, knowing, and doing in supervised practice (internship year, p. 20). Sara demonstrated the above stance to me during our very first conversation on November 10. She was deeply interested in making subject matter accessible to st udents and keeping them engaged; king and understanding of their ideas; and in gaining a valid presence as a teacher in her classroom placement. She was puzzled early on the subject matter, like you S.: I especially like literature, and writing in those areas. And of course, social s tudies is partly history, so I like that a lot. I l relate it to y our own life. Literature just because I personally love literature, and I learn a lot u can question your own life or your own attitudes and things. L.: When you teach this subject this year to these students, 5 th grade students, what ar e some of your goals for them? subject matter? S.: In social s tudies? ng of the Native American unit. I was really hoping that the children would make connections between the way Native American people li ved in the past, and that they, also to connect that yes they still live today and 55 yeah, they still carry on the same traditions, the same customs, although they live in t he same world that we live in. So they live in both societies really. their people, si nce Columbus has come to the North American continent yet. not to that point yet. But um, how would, that these people are real and that the diversity is to be ar and different and yet that these people are also valid human beings. That type of thing is really important to me. It sounds like you want them to understand something about time. S.: Hm, true. L.: How can we relate with how this group of people used to live back then and how can we understand tha t these people live right now. different from the way we live, and how can we gain an appreciation of different people living in different ways in the , S.: Right, um hum, it is. L.: To understand. How would you know, by the way, if kids understand something? How would Say , in this particular example with Native Americans and time. S And she is a member of a tribe in Canada, and she still, her family and her tribe carry on the same traditions as what they studied about in the long ago day s of the Native Americans. But also, she lives now, and you could tell that, cause I asked how they could tell, when they thought the story took place. the book where the little girl is w , so , of course they knew that wa s now, because it had the 711. And um, at first they, they did snicker at the differences in the story, the y were a little uncomfortable. But, and I was sort of disapp ointed in their r esponse to tell you the truth. So , I told Rita about it and she said that she felt that , that sometimes is the first, um, a wakening of knowing, you know. And then I got thinking about that and I thought that was probably really true. Becau other than the way they kn ow life to be. Well okay that was better So , I felt a little bit better about that. That was about t he only way I really could tie it into the now. L.: It sounds like you follow up with them. You ask them to show you in different ways how it is S.: I am lear ning to do that.You know with literature and w riting, I am just starting to see that you, I was talking with my husband this morning, as a matter of fact, you have to tell kids, you have to express everything to them.. maybe th thinking it to myself. ing to learn about, you know, 56 also pretty exciting too. Sara communicated early on to me that she was someone who would problem solve. She brought a question she had from one of her 800 - level courses to her fi e l d in struction seminar to discuss with Rita, her field instructor. Because Sara was not worried about appearing naïve or inex perienced, she did not hesitate to re veal a stance of not - knowing . In fact, she revealed her emotions of being overwhelmed with the task of teaching: learning to make subject matter accessible to students and to keep them engaged. Sara was very disappointe d that her CT would not sit down with her to help her with planning, a problem Sara could not solve by herself. As we making it an object of study. I wanted her to get familiar and to develop a concrete relationship with her practice early on. My goal, in that first conversation with Sara, was, without imposing it, to help her realize the importance of reflecting in and on action (her practice) , as a way to advance her learning to teach. unless we think about it, sort of examine it, almost dissect it. What has happened, why, what w e would we have done differently? What would have happened i f I had done this different ly? How if I try this next time? In other words, I guess experience alo ne is not going to do the job. Right? S.: Sure. L.: Do you think you look s tiff? any interventions (which she conceived as interruptions) affected her relationship with the class. 57 After a few minutes of watching herself on videotape, she wanted to talk about her physical me. , boys and girls everybody needs to stan hear me. But then , when Mrs. T. talks you can hear her. How can I develop that? A louder voice? L.: You think that is what you need to do? S.: Well, or...maybe not, maybe I just need to ge t their attention. be soft - spoken and still be a teacher that has the class under control. I also po What is happening here? what I am doing. And I thi nk that is important to have that, come across with t hat confidence, that presence. L.: Think about the classroom setting for a minute. You were standing behind the OHP, they were all seated, you were doing editing and talking to them one at a time. Might the kind of setting make a difference in your interaction with them? S.: It might. hat you remain in L.: So , S.: I t hink so. watch how you change. During my initial conversation with Sara (November 10), I aimed at letting her draft her own course of action. I wanted to see, upon watching herself on videotape, what caught her attention. Since she had no prior experience analyzing her teaching over videotape, naturally she wanted to talk about how she sounded and looked and to comment on the many times her CT came into the picture. I gradually introduced q uestions for her to think about regarding the way 58 she interacted with students, as well as which fact ors may come into play for those interaction s . At the same time I tried to help her uncover her many strengths and qualities as a novice, non - traditional teacher. I wanted Sara to start an interaction with watching herself and her practice on videotape that was d eeply reflective and educative: L.: Remember when someone said Can we watch th at again , I changed in the editing lesson. And so I said, And I wonder if I could do that in a kinder way. A comma where it did need a comma , so I just said, h L.: How would you have done it differently? S.: I guess I could that. ried. And plus , she has trouble with English and so, you th. Was this your first time teaching math? S.: Right. I taught it to first graders last year, but t hat was it. L.: Was your presence here different, do you think than wh en you were doing the editing? Do you see you being different? being handed L.: You look very comfortable there, considering this was your first t ime, very comfortable I think. Actually, I think you were more comfort able than before when you were d oing the editing lesson. see with Lead T eaching that will be int eresting, we need to see that. taped me. L.: When you were talking about presence, what was in your mind? S.: Well, I sort of compare it to my teacher, and she definitely has a prese nce. And, when she speaks the kids listen to her, um, sh e can direct their activities. It see ms like very easily, you know. And for me, just getting their attention sometimes is really a big deal. 59 s in, they know it. S.: Well, right. tep in and get it immediately. And I admire it, really, I want to hav e that My personality is very different. t as commanding as a presence. - going, kind of, a nice person. And that gets in my way, at times. It can get i I need to also have that side that has a little bit more demand to it. L entive, especially during math. Remember one had, if he felt threatened. L.: So, I thought that was very, very good to see, and then I thought it was interesting when the paying attention to him and I thought tha t he was sort of shutting dow n. I guess he was trying to Uh, because the time was important and you have to point that out quickly bec just stand up ther And just as I was going to say that, then this other thing came up. L.: Did it bother you that that kid sort of jumped in and corrected you ? S.: No, not at all. At first I thought he was talking about number eight so I looked in the book and , my goodnes , oh I did write it down wrong, you know. L.: Since you talk about presence a lot, let us try to watch you teach on different parts of the day, diff erent subject matters, and see i f that makes any difference. S.: Yes, it would be kind of curious to see. After our first initial conversation , I felt like Sara was very good news: she was articulate, committed to her teaching and her development, and interested to examine her practice. 60 thinking and reasoning (she hard ly asked any student to clarify or justify anything), she was quite receptive to my probes to look towards different dimensions in her practic e other than her teaching presence, and to give alternative interpretations for life in the classroom. Her relationship with her CT was very prevalent in her mind at this point in time, and I was worried that it would dominate her learning to teach during her internship year. Her CT practiced a kind of teaching far away from see modeled in her classroom placement. Furthermore, Sara had a very different personality than ed her CT to be an authoritarian person, which, in her view, made it easier Sara making associations in her h ead (like the more aut horitarian you are , the more students listen to you) that were quick and uninformed. As my goal at this particular point in time was not to lead Sara towards any particular direction, I kept my probes to a minimum. I stayed away from commenting on or interfering with the rel ationship Sara had started forming with her CT. My role as a researcher was not to intervene and make things smoother. I kept following Sara in her field instruction seminar and in her courses at GSU, which gave me a broader perspective on how Sara made se nse of her p rogram and how she negotiated her way in her classroom thinking and reasoning, how that took shape and form, and how i t was likely to change ove rtime. Vignette Three Lead T eaching p eriod 1, which lasted for about three weeks in November , was almost 61 over , and the teacher c andidates went back to their 800 - level courses at GSU: one course was on s cience , which they attended in the morning, and the other was on l iterature , which they attended in the afternoon. Paul, their s cience course instructor, kept introducing the world of constructivism to them, with a lot of emphasis on assessment and who the primar y player is (field notes, N ovember 20). Eisner, their l iterature course instructor, asked them to think about the teaching of persuasive arguments. He gave them an assignment in class on writing a persuasive argument ab out Thanksgiving and Indians s T hanksgiving a good time to teach about Indians or no Eisner, a scholar in the field and a veteran course instructor, wanted them to think about what constitutes evidence and what may count as evidence for a per s uasive argument , as well as about the difference between a fact and a reason. Eisner asked them to teach a picture book in t heir classroom placements and then to reflect on it: hink about what struck you. What surprises did you encoun ter? Think about your questions. W h at questions did you ask that opened things up? What questions did you ask that closed things down? What would you have done differently? To what extent are things coming from you or (field note s, November 20, emphasis added) The above assignment , W hat questions do you ask that open things u p? What questions do you ask that , took a life of its own among the TCs, and even was ose Eisner year, I kept hearing TCs say , ask questions may make a difference in their teaching a they were charged with noticing this difference. Did they get the message, however, that them 62 to how important that was apart from asking good questions, also to listen well to students and to their questions. During that day, when I was observing the TCs in their courses, and as I was moving from one group to the other following their conversations on their assignments, I reali zed that although they were missing some important factual information about the history of Thanksgiving, they had some very good questions to ask about subject matter and how to make it accessible to students . I had expected that they would only be intere sted in talk ing about classroom management and about their confidence level. I was happily surprised to hear how some people were very articulate and thoughtful, and eager to learn about how to think and reason about their teaching in advanced ways. I, of Did TCs, i n their thinking about tea ching in advanced ways, include their listening well to students, and their paying attention to their thinking and reason Sara decided, after her class with Eisner, to t each a social s tudies lesson on Thanksgiving. Her main goal was to help students make connections between how Native Americans lived back then , and how they still carry on their traditions today. Sara, in her initi al conversation with me really help kids think. How to question... Having great questions to ask kids so that they start asking more questions. This kind of thinking , inquiry, I guess, is the educated word for it . (Nove mber 10 conversation with Sara) tudies lesson on Thanksgiving on November 24. She taught social s tudies for about twenty - five minu tes before and for about twenty - f ive minutes after the one - hour lunch break a total of about fift y minutes. For her social studies lesson, Sara 63 decided to use a picture book, fol The First Thanksgiving Feast , by Joan Ande rson. The lesson started at 12: 30 pm t hat day. Sara sat on a stool , and the students sat , some on the floor around her , and some at their desks. She read to students from the picture book for a total of twenty minutes. She held the book so that students could see the pictures, but she looked at the book more than she looked at the students. Although still glued to her posi tion in front of the classroom, Sara appeared a bit less stiff than the last time I videotaped her on November 10. At about 12:51 pm , a bit of conversation started on a ques tion Sara presented to hy do you think they were d The c onversation lasted for about three to four minutes. At about 12:55 pm , it was time for lunch break . (field notes, No vember 24) During lunch break Sara and I had another conversation. We talked for about forty minutes , mainly about her physical presence, ab out the importance of lesson planning, and about what constitutes a good question. I started our November 24 conversation by reminding Sara of her goals for the ye ar, as she shared them with me i n our last conversation on November 10: L.: Remember how you said to me last time, when I asked you what it is you want to concentrate great questions to ask kids so that they start asking more ques You also talked a lot about resp ect, but that is another issue. On the issue of questions, I wou ld like you to talk more about. What do you mean great questions, what is a great question? And maybe later we can go watch how you ask questions and think about that. S.: I L.: Why? S.: Probably because I am thinking too much of what I want the outcome to be, than realizing and listening to you. That took some time, right? And then you st arted asking them qu estions, 64 but then eading from the picture book). st keep going. I get emo tional, reading about the Indians, it makes me sad. L.: Do you think they understood about the Indians and what they say? something later and go, You know, and then s th that idea before, you know. I mean Squanto was a s help, learning how to plant. And yet, he had been a slave. And then he came back when all his people were dead. L.: So, your social s tudie s is more about social issues. All sorts of things can be social studies? Thanksgiving, reading, eco nomics, all of the s e are part of social s tudies then? that could be social s tudies. Then e conomics i s kind of math, but tudies , yes. L.: Notice now how you interact with them, as opposed to the last time we saw you on tape. Do you see an y difference? With everything. Like the way you hold the book, the way you move yourself around, the way you sort of.... S.: A little more conf I feel a little more confident. nt than last time I taped you. We can see that again. I mean the way y ou move your head, your hands. Your whole physical presence, like we ta lked about presence last time. How you keep moving back and forth and picking up thin gs and moving. Even your voice. What do you think? S.: It always amazes me when you find out they really listened to you (she laughs), you know. I like it! I look more comfortable now than before. L.: Do you think what made the change might have been the fact that you went across the hall and saw how other people teach? S.: And maybe it was because the lesson was something t hat I had taken time planning. That probably makes a lot of difference. L.: Do you th ink they listen to you more now? S.: Yes. I think I s ort of, well, they still play. e they going to 65 Now I Upon asking Sara to compare her physical presence between her November 10 and her November 24 lesson, she talked about seeing a difference, becoming more flexible and moving rky movement sort of . mber 24 conversation with Sara) She was more comfortable thinking on her feet, and her questions moved from being recall kind of questions to more inquiry - like questions. Sara was happily surprised to hear me say that to her. We watched the part where she asked the students , hy do you think they were dressed , Sara realized that how she phrases a question makes a difference into how students understand it: probably should have said it that way. you choose to wear these hot clothes that are You have to have good questions to really pull them into what you are talking about . And I missed that, I missed her there, I lost her. Because And of , tha They wore tion with Sara, emphasis added) L.: What did you mean? these N ow , how are th You do not think of all the ways they may perceive your question, you know . (November 2 4 conversation with Sara) The above was the first instance in which I saw Sara thinking hard about why it was that studen ts might be saying what they were saying. I started feeling very excited that this could be hildren reason . ) I asked her to clarify whether she was worried about phrasing her questions in a way so that students would know exactly what she had in mind. Through my probing I tried to make Sara realize that the way she 66 was thinking about answering a question might n ot be the way students would go about it. Not because her question was not clear enough, but because students might not have the prior knowledge that we, as their teachers, do. Having clear questions, in other words, was not enough in getting us to student tanding. I tried repeatedly , early on in our joint inquiry, to help Sara break away from simplistic associations in her thinking about how students understand subject matter. Because lunch break time was limited and rushed, I realized that Sara n eeded time to think about my questions in her own private time at home. I, thus, decided to write to her a letter about what she could start looking for and thinking about when she watched and analyzed her teaching later on by herself at home. I suggested this idea to Sara , and she was very receptive about it. We had to leave the room, since lunch b reak was about to end. Sara, as early as our second conversation , started liking our joint inquiry already , and she was willing even to do The Power of Reflection Sara and I walked back to her class , and she continued her social s tudies lesson on Thanksgiving where she left it before lunch break. She continued asking questions about why the Pilgri ms were dressed the way they were , s assignment for her 800 - level l iterature course was to reflect on this particular social s tudies lesson on Thanksgiving. I prepared some written probes for Sara to think about, which I put in the form of a letter. I gave that letter to Sara three days after our November 24 conversation. Some of these written probes 67 to Sa ra were the following: a) Notice your physical posture/physical presence throughout your lesson that day. Is it the same like the last time I was there? If different, in what ways? (We have already talked a bit about this during lunch break). b) When you r ead to them, you do so from 12:30 until 12:50 pm. I remember you said to me on our way out , would you have changed? c) By 12:50 pm a bit of discussion started. What happene d there, do you think? Compare your discussion. How did you handle the first couple of students, and how did you handle the last couple of them? d) What did it feel like when it was time to go for lunch break? e) At about 1:50 pm, right after lunch break, you started a wonderful discussion with the students. Do you think so too? If yes, can you tell what made it happen? f) At about 1:54 pm Mich elle (a student) responded t o your question , , we have already talked about this during lunch break. Think about that interaction there a bit more and write about it. My goal for giving written probes to Sara was to make her notice educative moments in her teaching that she may had missed. With probe b), for example, I wanted her to notice that she got progressively better in h probe f) , I wanted her to think hard about understanding where students were coming from. For one of her 800 - level courses, Sara prepared a r eflection paper which she handed in on December 11, along with her November 24 social s tudies lesson plan on Thanksgiving. She gave 68 me a copy of both her lesson plan and her reflection paper. I saw that, in her reflection p aper, Sara incorporated a lot of thinking derived from my written probes to her. Throughout her five - page reflection p aper, she wrote about how she could h ave stopped and check ed prior knowledge on the topic of Thanksgiving by asking them some more questions. She discovered factual information about Thanksgivi ng which she was not aware of , and she realized the need to do some research to advanc e her own subject matter knowledge on the topic. Sara may put into planning, on which she elabo rated beautifully in her reflection p aper: There was quite a bit of discussion after lunch about whether or not it is important to study history and why. One student mentioned that we would probably be here even missed the opportuni Europeans when so many Native Americans were already here. I realized anew how important it is to be alert to what is being said by the kids, and to use opportunities for learning that present th emselves . Another student stated that stu dying history helps us understand ourselves better because we can see where we have come from. This is a very profound insight . (Sa aper, emphasis added) It is e vident , aper , that she was interested in preparing on - of subject matter , in order to engage the : Next time, I would like to be prepared with more excellent questions to encourage the thinking of the students. They have so many ideas, and getting them to verbalize their though ts helps them build new concepts and also works to get the other class members thinking about new ideas and making connections they had not thought of before. I find it very interesting also, and their responses make me rethink the way I present informatio n or introduce a lesson or word a question or statement . p aper) Thinking about what different students learn or understand was a big part of the learning culture that Paul (the 800 - level course instructor) aimed to set up among TCs. In his syllabus, 69 which he handed to the TCs early in the fall sem ester, he provided guidelines for the science unit the TCs were expected to plan, assess, and present in class. An important section in the ecting on student learning . - level course on s cience , syllab us, fall semester) Paul wanted the TCs to think about how different students learn in different ways , and that each TC had to be prepared to assess those ways and to plan seriously. In her mind, at this point in time and as it became evident from our conversat ions so Through her writing in her class projects and her thoughtful reflections on watching her videotaped teaching , it also became evident that Sara started on an intellectual journey of learning to te a ch and paying attention to what students were saying, a journey that the learning to teach literature suggests does not start until later on Vignette Four Diving in Deep Waters: Lead Teach ing 2 After the winter break , the Teacher Candidates came back to the University rejuvenated , but also frantic as to how much there was to be done during the spring semester in very little time. This was the semester in which the TCs had to take the lead in teaching in their classrooms (teaching for most of the day) for eight whole weeks (d uring February and March), something that scared them a lot. During the month of January, the TCs kept busy preparing their units in their graduate courses at the Univer sity, as well as observing in their classroom placements, for three of the five days of the week, and co - planning with their CTs for the months to come. Sara kept having a communication problem with her CT. All along , she kept complaining 70 to me about how her CT had a very different view than she did about how students learn. Sara did not like the idea of modeling after her CT, whom she perceived to be an authoritarian person. not want to earn it that way. Mrs. T., management problems which were not improving. Mrs. T. saw it as her role to intervene regularly and to ask the class to be attentive to Sara. What Mrs. T. considered an intervention to save the day, Sara interpreted as an interruption , which messed up her day. Sara was very much he felt her CT could not trust her to work alone with the students. In the beginning of February, Lead Teaching 2 had started , and life at Ordinary Elementary became very hectic. Sara and I could not find the time, like we used to in the fall, to sit and talk over her videotaped teaching. She was teaching practically all day, and she had to stay after school to plan for the following day, most of the time without any help from her CT or from anyone else. Because there was no time for us to sit and talk about her teaching like before, I came up with the idea of the noteb ook . I bought Sara a notebook , which I asked her to use as a journal to record her thoughts and feelings during her Lead Teaching 2 period. At the end of each week, usually on Fridays, I gave Sara a videotape from her teaching that week ( the edited parts that I had put together), asked her to watch it over the weekend, and to reflect on and write about it in her notebook. She was supposed to share her writing and her other reflections with me on Monday afternoon, our set aside time to talk. I asked Sara, in t he beginning of her Lead Teaching 2 period, to observe carefully her interactions with her students , and to record what she noticed she paid attention to. I wrote to her and asked her to look for what it was that students said that caught her attention, and if that 71 varied from one subject matter to another. I wanted her also to notice what she thought got in her way of payin g attention to students, and think about how she woul d pay attention to students The following is a letter I wrote to Sara on Februar y 5, as a cover page on her notebook: Dear Sara, HAPPY LEAD TEACHING 2!!! I am very excited to be working with you, your students, and our lea rning. Thank you, once again, for participating in the study . I got this notebook for you, which I hope you will like. I t is yours to keep. Please, record in it any thoughts and feelings in regards to your interactions with your students. Each Friday, I will be bringing you an edited videotape from your teaching during the week. You are to take it home, look at it at your own time, and record in this notebook anything that comes to mind when you see yourself interacting with your students. What is it that you notice, what do you pay attention to? Who and what gets your attention, who and what does not? What do you do that makes you say you have paid attention to something? What would you have paid attention to now that you see yourself on videotape? Check whether you may be paying attention to different things and to different people at different subject - matters. We will be talking every Monday afternoon about things that you notice and you want us to talk about. We will be talking about your goals for your Lead Teaching 2 period, your lesson plans, your students, and whatever else you would like us to talk about. I am very much looking forward to our co nversations, and I thank you in advance for your time, your effor ts, and our learning together! (Februar y 5 l etter to Sara) Sara was very receptive to my gi ving her a notebook. She wrote i n it regularly, although the length of her writing and the depth of her reflection varied: someti mes she wrote a lot in it, other times she wrote only a few lines. Sometimes she was very deep in her reflectio ns, other times she w as not. During the two very intensive months of Lead Teaching 2, I communicated 72 with Sara in writing, in the form of a letter, a few more times. We kept having recorded conversations over her videotaped teaching, as I kept videotaping her teaching daily. W hen Sara started her Lead Teaching 2 in early February, she was very excited, enthusiastic, and quite committed to understanding studen m athematics, for example, although her CT was teaching long division the traditional way, Sara came up with the i dea of having students write a m ath journal in order to surface their thin king about how they figure out the m ath problems she was g iving them. She introduced the m ath journal activ ity on February 1, during her m ath lesson that day, by saying, will do something different in m ath. This is for me to notice how you thi nk . 1) and returned them to students the following M onday morning, sharing with the whole class how she saw their thinking progressing. Sara presented, on the morning of February 1, a division problem to the class; she asked students to discuss it in their groups, to come up with a solution, and to write about it in their journals. They had to write at least one mathematical sentence to show how they figured out the problem. As I was videotaping and observing in the room that morning, I saw a lot of engagemen t on the part of the students when they were wri ting in their journals. The re was no resistance at all on their part, despite the fact that this was extra work for them , and an activity quite new to them. Sara kept moving from table to table, checking out how students worked in groups , and how they rema ined engaged. As she was moving around the room, I thought of the long way that Sara had come regardi ng her physical presence. H owever, she still had a long way to go regarding her giving directions to students. She started giving directions to them, for e xample, as to how to pro ceed to the next activity, when they were busy discussing the math 73 problem in their groups. Nobody could hea r her, so she started raising he r voice . (field notes, February 1) In her notebook that same day, Sara reflected on the way she gave directions to students, in an astonishingly honest way: Directions unclear. Did not make sure I had attention of class before explaining directions. Katelyn is running around the room. Mike not attending. I am trying to talk over the noise level o f the students ineffective . 1) Math was not what Sara perceived to be her strength. She was, ho wever, always prepared for her m ath lessons, always trying to engage students in mathematics, and always interested in understanding how they thought about it , by systematically asking, th hat first week in February , I ha d videotaped several of ath lessons, which were still about long division and having students write in the i r math journals. Sara kept reflecting in her notebook about the way she was giving directions to ir math journals, as well as on realizing what got her attention and what did not: G reg g ot a lot of my attention and Jim was in need of some direction in the back of the and what they are doing. Facing one direction means my back is turn ed to the r est of the class. Jim and Josh frustrating. Although misbehavi or got my attention, but not Jim and Josh . My directions are still very unclear. I am trying to talk over them k , February 2, emphasis added) Sara Noticing Her Inattention Sara and I started viewing her teaching again in the beginning of February. We had our first post - winter break rec orded conversation on February 8, during her lunch break hour. I asked her to talk about any differences she saw in her teaching in February, compared to her teaching during the fall semester. She found herself to be more relaxed, but did not like her voice still. She 74 realized, and also wrote about it in her no tebook, that she had to be clear er with her directions. She also started opening up her tunnel vision of seeing the classroom, by realizing how she missed paying attention to certain students sitting in the back of the classroom. S.: When I was done watching the tape I felt encouraged. Because I could see change and growth. But I still see a lot of things that I need to work on. I realized I need to make sure I have their attention, and my C T has talked to me about that. But seei ng it is different than hearing it. At first I thought that I looked like an idiot , somewhat. You know, just because I s way too many times. something besides okay. I say it thousands of times. L.: Is it possible that you may be overly critical on yourself? S.: Right, at first I was. feel about watching yourself. notice, I felt really bad at one point. There were two boy s trying to get my attention, they raised their h ands, they were being so good. an d I paid no attention to And that made me feel bad. ve ry angle. here, and not just get done with this one . (emphasis added) L.: Do you find this helpful, watching the tape? S .: I found it so helpful, yes. And I actually looked more confident as t he week went on. se this was my first week with m ath and I, and Friday if you would have seen it, I felt the most organized yet. oticed that too, my directions we re very w , I saw a lot of failure. y or something and come back when I got my courage back up again. Well , But then I, as I watched the last two days, and the day that we thought was terrible, I know that we d if I had just corrected Mike An even pay attention to Mike . (emphasis ad ded) L.: So, the tape makes you see things? S.: Yes! Like explaining things. I saw a lot of problem explaining things. If I would explain ut a lot of the chaos. Very much, like passing out the notebooks, telling th em what to do before I give those to them, instead of passing them out and telling them what to do at the same time. Totally wrong. L.: You start seeing how sequencing makes a difference. Also, I hear you talk a lot about what S.: Katelyn 75 p her mind attend ing to the lesson. I like to know what they think, you see. So I give them as e l y n , and I think she pro bably has a hard time with it. have to think about though. S.: Yes, because I think they get in the habit of asking th e teacher for the information. I want to know what they, how they figure that out, you As I w and reasoning, she found herself comparing her teaching now with her teaching in the fall: as articulate ng. L.: S.: trying to get them to come at m ath, for example, by being able to express how they think. think they ever really discuss m ath. They just do what they think because then it helps me change, go in a different direction or whatever to meet certain needs . (Februa ry 8 conversation with Sara) As busy a nd exhausted Sara was, preparing for and reflecting on her teaching, she could not get over the fact that she had missed some students who were trying to get her attention. She kept ref erring back to her February 2 m ath les son, in which she had missed Jim and Josh , who were sitting in the back of the classroom. Through my probes, I asked her to think about factors that could be affecting her being attentive to some students and not to some others. She talked to me about how the seating arrangement makes a d ifference, about how the loud students can ou got to have eyes in the back of your head. I had my back to the kids that had their hands raised, 76 but I never bothered to turn around just to make sure to see what was going on back there . (Febru ary 8 conversation with Sara) As I was taping Sara on different days of the week teaching different lessons, I noticed reasoning was the same in all subject matter areas, but her wait time and her perseverance in pro bing with deeper questions increased when she was teaching reading and social studies. She was more comfortable in those subjects than she was in math, in whi ch I saw her doing a lot of repeating and paraphrasing of on whether the way she restated their statements was what they actually meant. Sara also tended to think that because students were doing whiche ver activity she asked them to do , in her mind, that the students were making sense of subject matter just fine. Such was the case, for example, when Sara gave the class some math problems to solve, and to use their math journals to express their thinking about how they went about solving the math problems. O another m ath lesson. Sara asked them to read a number of problems from their books, decide in their groups which operation they needed to use, explain their thinking in their math journals, and solve the thinking and work. I walked around some of the tables too, and I asked a student to explain to me , to do division. I wondered if Sara realized that, and whether she could tel l when the students really understood what the problem was about or when the students simply used some buzz word mechanically to do an operation. I wrote a note in my journal to talk about this with Sara later 77 on. Sara also reflected and wrote in her noteb ook that same day about her February 11 m ath lesson: Although having the kids work in groups requires a lot of attention from me, I think the students are very engaged in their math work. I am having them work on problem solving they have to figure out what operations the problems require. This has more real connections in their lives than paper and pencil figuring alone I feel. I love to see them really involved in m ath, and truly thinking about what, why, how they are doing . (Sa Sara sounded content see alone leads to understanding. She was approaching the second week of her Lead Teaching 2 period (an eight - week long period), and I could see th at she was alr eady very tired. She had a lot o n her mind, like getting ready to start teaching a novel during reading time, quite an ambitious endeavor. She had just started realizing how easy it was to miss a whole group of students in personal circumstances and special needs. Each time she and I had a conversation about her teaching, she talked to me about her students by name, and as though she had an individua l learning plan every day for each one of them. Some students occasionally exhib ited disrespect towards her, something that Sara was unprepared for . One student, for example, wrote in his journal that , in her response to lay out his thinking about m bad relationship with her CT kept escalating. At times , the two of them had a confrontation, which made Sara very upset. Thus, keeping the students involved and writing, just as she was expected to do by her p rogram at GSU, ke pt Sara happy enough for now. Vignette Five Figuring Out a New Life By mid - February Sara decided to start with the class, during reading time, the novel Roll 78 of Thunder, Hear My Cry , by Mildred D. Taylor. This was a novel having to do with an African - American family trying to make sense of life in the dee p South during the 1930 s Great Depression period. Sara was not happy with using basal textbooks during reading. She found them to be very boring , e classroom. Sara, as I later found out from her field instructor, was very passionate about racial and social justice issues. Rita, her field instructor, told me that Sara was also very influenced by one of her pr evious instructors at GSU, whose course on Human Diversity she attended as a sophomore . Sara was an older student than the rest of her cohort (in her mid - forties already), and although - diversity and social justice in more sophisticated ways than any o ther typical, traditional Teacher Sara teaching this particular novel in class. They all thought it would be too difficult for students at this age, and that t he time available was not enough. Sara was very determined to go ahead with the novel, despite advice to the contrary. She introduced it that same day, on February 11, when I was in her classroo m videotaping, right after her m ath lesson. She started by ask - down - to - about th is: what if you were a parent and your children were sold away? How do you think that The discussion went on for about forty five minutes. The class was very engaged in discussion, and Sara, interes tingly, did not do a lot of paraphra sing of students input , like she wa s in the habit of doing during m ath. She just let students express themselves. I wrote in my 79 journal later that day how I saw an almost different Sara, very comfortable and relaxed, an d quite enthusiastic about teaching that novel. The way she sustained the inquiry that day was more authentic. She appeared t o be more genuinely interested i let students elaborate themselves , and she did a better job coordinating the class. Sara continued watching her teaching on videotape and writing about it in her notebook throughout her Lead Teaching 2 period. She progressively started noticing students who did not talk much. She probed them more , and she tried to and reasoning as well. In one of our conversations, Sara admitted to me that her focus when watching the videotape shifted from paying attention to herself to paying attention to students: I think I am paying m ore attention to what they are doing than what I am doing, you know, kind of. J do something different? I know, being embarrassed about my voice . (she laughs, Febr uary 18 conversation with Sara) Sara was still h thinking going. As she was preparing for her lessons, she gave a lot of thought to how she formed questions for students. It was important to her to have her questions ready and well - thought through beforehand, as though that would save her from extra work (and unnecessary trouble) later on, almost like a pre - TCs to pay close attention to the hat questions do you ask that open up more questions from kids? What questions do you ask that close down questions from 00 - level course, fall semester) I thought the above could be a useful frame to work with work on her questions by giving her some more questions of my own which were particular to 80 happened when she asked different types of questions, how it affected the way students talked, Sara wrote in her notebook, - ended questions produce more discussion. The best discussion happens when the kids build of each other - what to do when they get off track though? " book, March 11, emphasis added) Any teacher, novice or not, struggles with how much to let the discussion go , as well as hat you are saying is interesting, but I do not real 800 - level course instructors, was someone Sara trusted and respected a lot, and she even met with him outside of class to discuss the novel she chose to teach during reading time. Neither Sara nor Eisner min ded that I was present, so I joined them at a local cafeteria on the afternoon of March 23. I kept quiet for most of the time. Eisner had wonderful probes for Sara , who came very prepared with all the activities she had designed for the novel. S ara admitted, for the first lizing how big and difficult a text it was in the limited Lead Teaching 2 time left. She was preoccupied with sidetracking , and she kept asking Eisner hat Eisner said r field instruction expertise, especially when I was not asked for it. That moment was one of many in which I found myself being caught in the midst of conflicting roles: researcher or field instructor? Student of learning to teach or teacher educator? Exp erienced classroom teacher or 81 junior scholar? I ru shed home and wrote a lot in my journal that same day, as though I was trying to find some asylum from all that haunted me: think her preoccupation is with coming up with good questions to ask kids. At some point she I w many questions we can ask? Is she thinking quantity? Does she think the teacher is the only one responsible for generating questions? What role does she think, if at all, the students play in generating questions for her, for themselves and for each ot he r? (my journal, February 23) I went to sleep that night, hoping there would be no nightmares, and realizing that, in way for her thinking about her question s, and a new trajectory for our upcoming conversations. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry : Hear My Roller Coaster Ride Sara thought long and hard about how to do the novel she chose for her reading time. During our conversations she entertained various idea s as to how to go about the seating arrangement. She figured that when she read to students from the novel , it would be nice to bring them all up front , seated in a semi - circle. When it was time for silent reading or group work , she would do a different se ating arrangement. When it was time for debate , she could do yet another seating arrangement. I alerted Sara about the practicality of things and whether changing the it would make them uneasy and inattentive. Sara was impressively prepared for her reading time unit. She talked to me at length about how she envisioned her group activities to take place over time: comprehending the story by what everybody else is sharing. You know like one person, 82 one group will be writing about summarize the chapter This group will be saying, character map . en amazed at the things they miss. Like we warmed up for the test by g oing over wh at each county did as industry. And then when the question came on the test some of th e kids (Febr uary 18 conversation with Sara) Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the novel Sara chose for reading time, gave her classroom and for about one hour, teaching this particular nov el, which she started in mid - February and went with all the way until mid - April. Sara first introduced the novel on Febru ary 11. She asked the class at that time to do some research on distinguished African - American people, and she kept preparing her lesson plans diligently and thoroughly . She met with her 800 - level course instructor on February 23 to debrief her ideas with him, and then she went back to class on February 26 to start, a bit worried but quite energized, teaching the novel. Sara was very passionate about racial and socia l justice issues, and teaching Ro ll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, by Mildred Taylor, was very important to her. Although rushed for time (the novel consisted of twelve chapters), Sara appeared to be muc h more relaxed during her reading tim e than she was during teaching m ath. I saw tha t she hy er inquiry with students became a joint endeavor, and her wait time increased dramatically. She worried le ss ab out sharing with students what she thought was going on in the novel, and she invested more i n probi ng their thinking and reasoning. S he used as text for further inquiry. Sara was increasingly becoming less of a protagonist and more of a facilitator in classroom discussions. She started 83 asking questions hat , hat do you think might be , the students in many different directions and helped them in building New life in the classroom was evident in many different ways: Sara was different, the students were different, and I could barely catch up with any of them. Sara came to class always prepared and on the top of things, or so she thought. Her carefully planned questions could not always save the day. Because she kept changing the seating arrangements (from circle to group work and back) to serve th e way she had planned for reading, students became uneasy. Sometimes, during movement from one seating arrangement to the other, there was a lot of , situat ion made Mr s Mrs. T. Although comments like the above made Sara uneasy and sometimes very upset, she kept teaching the novel she was passionate about , with the same focus and commitment as when she started it in mid - February. In one of her reading lessons (February 26), she asked the students to take their chairs, go in the fron t of the class, and form a circle so that she could do a simulation with them. Sara first made sure she had good eye - contact with all students in the circle, and she introd nyone who has white color on their shirt cannot atte nd Sara kept the tension going: simulation started off a wonderful and very engaged conversation among st udents, who all had 84 thereby complicated the discussio n even more. Just before reading time was about to come to an end, Sara explained to students that she did this simulation to help them realize what the book was going to be about. She introduced the concepts of depression, segregation, non - violent revolut ion. One of the students talked about how the great depression affected his grandfather. Sara wanted the students to put th hat wonder ful question to end the class, a question which generated a lot of discussion among students, for which , however, there was not much time left. Dave said, ry (an African - American girl) said, se I would know that everybody thinks bad a Sara, during her February 26 reading lesson, demonstrated a kind of teaching not typical of novice teachers: she had indeed prepared wonderful questions for students, she succeeded in getting all students involved in relevant to the topic discussion, and s talk emotionally heated talk masterfully. Sara knew what she wanted students to com e out of class thinking about that day, and she gave the impression that she had a good grasp in her mind of which ideas in the novel were important to teach. Just about when the class was ready to move from the circle seating arrangement back to the ir des ks, one student kicked another and a fight started. Some other students got involved. Sara was caught by surprise and started yelling to notes, February 26) - prepared, 85 scaffolding the activities and having good questions to sparkle students in engaged conversations. The routine was usually to ask all students to take their chairs and f orm a circle in front of the class, and for her to read aloud to them from the novel for about ten minutes. Although each student had a copy of the novel, school policy did not allow students to take books home with them. Sara, therefore, could not assign any reading from the novel for homework. She had to, every day, designate some of her reading time to read a chapter or two in class with students, which made her feel even more rushed for time. The seating arrangement made her anxious and uneasy, and at times even rude: not funny; it is very sad . ld notes, March 1) During her March 1 reading lesson, Sara introd uced to students the 12 - inch versus the 6 - inch voice , and she asked them to think about their noise level as they moved from one activity to the next, and from the circle seating arrangement back to their desks. That same day , Sara also introduced the read ing notebooks which students would use for their novel - related assignments, similar to how they used their math journals. As the week progressed, students started identifying characters from the novel, describi ng them, and developing a story line , which Sa ra had set out for them on the bulletin board. She made sure there was time in the lesson for students to ask clarification questions on words or anything else from the novel that they did no t understand. During her March 5 lesson, Sara appeared calmer and much more relaxed than her lessons earlier in the week. She had prepared , which opene d , and she 86 systematically probed them to elaborate on and to support their answers by going back to the novel. She incorporated productively what students wrote in their re ading notebooks. She made sure that class movement (students going from their desks to present to the OHP and back) . 5) Sara became incr edibly busy during the first week of March, trying to make visibl e progress with the novel, whilst also teaching other subject matters all day, and trying to keep the k. We met at a local cafeteria o n the afternoon of March 7. I gave her some edited segments of her teaching that week, and some guidelines, in the form of a letter, to help guide her inquiry. I warned her that some of the edited segments I had prepared for her to watch might be unpleasant to see. I also mentioned t hat later in the week she had made some b reakthrough progress. My March 7 letter to Sara was the following: Dear Sara, A lot has happened since we talked. We are all keeping busy: you with planning, prepari ng, teaching and exhausting yourself. Me with tap ing, re - taping, editing tapes, and exhausting myself. But let us see, what is there to learn? have got that. Let us, then, look at reading, you, the students, and you r interaction with You are introducing new structures to students. A lot of this is new to them, and it is new ng, journal writing and sharing, changes in seating arrangements) affecting you and your interaction with the students? I would like you to watch carefully the segments I marked for you on the left (a total of 65 minutes). When was it, do you think, that you had to raise your voice and why? What, in your opinion, did not work out and why? What could you have done differently? There is a change between your first few reading lessons this week (3/1, 3/2, 3/3) and your last few (3/4 and 3/ 5). Towards the end of the week you are in a very inquiry - you think happens when you ask those kinds of questions. 87 I am looking forward to our conversation tomorrow. Thanks! (March 7 l etter to Sara) To my big surprise, Sara came to school the next day without having watched her t apes or written anything about t hem in her notebook. At first she said there was no time, but soon the fact that I warned Sara, through my March 7 letter to her, that there would be some unplea sant things to watch this week? Could it be that she already knew about it herself? Could it also be that she was, indeed, one very tired novice teache r who could not take any more watching , analyzing, reflecting , and talking about her teaching? On the af t ernoon of that same day (March 8) , and after teaching for about six long hours, Sara and I had a long conversation, which lasted for about eighty minutes, our longes t one so far. Sara demonstrated in this conversation, some breakthrough progress in talkin g about her paying of her curiosity during classroom discourse. Her passion about racial and social justice issues and he r conscious choice of teaching Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry were the driving force s in how Sara planned for and enacted her teaching during reading time. S.: ou make sure your attitude Have y ou found any secrets for this? How to put your own feelings aside and play the role L.: Like what kinds of feeling s ? S.: Feelings of frustration, or tiredness, or whatever. L.: Th ink about subject matter first. Watch yours elf in different s ubject matters. When you teach m ath versus when you teach social s tudies, versus when you teach reading, is the situation changing? Does time of the day make a difference? Does day of the week make a difference in how they react in how you react, in how all of you interact with each other? Does the activity they are involved in make a difference? How does it change their attention span? The way they are engaged, and therefore how does that change you and the way you interact with them? W hen you give them directions, what does seem to work? For example, when you have someone repeat 88 attention, you know. In other words, acknowledging that they can rep eat the directions for you , is that positive or negative? inforcement. Think about that. W hich is which? S.: you get on a kind of on a roller coaster Why do you become frustrated? S.: reali r ealize it until I get into it. And then, it kind of makes me ang ry at myself, frustrated, you know. that last semester when we read a book. So , again. L.: You give stud ents a lot of different activities than the ones they are used to. Your mock interview is coming up. Say someone is interested to hire you. What do you tell them about you? I am a principal and I tell you that I want a 5 th grade teacher who would give a di fferent kind of experience to kids. What do you say? S.: Well, I would try to plan lessons and units that would give them opportunities to try different types of thinking and to do work on their own, to be responsible for their own work. And I would like them to do a little bit of inquiry with using the i nternet possibly, depending on how the classroom is set up. I would have them come up with a question about someone or something sted, that would relate to our social s tudies curriculu m, for example. First of - word it, I would question them further. present yourself like you do. I think what I hear you say is that you learned that expecting them to come up with a good question is not going to do the job. There are other things you need to be doing as well. S.: Right. L.: So you need to scaffold them . Inform them on a good question. And you do that by walking around, doing an inquir y yourself as a matter of fact. You want them to be involved in inquiry but you also want them to do inquiry themselves as well. S.: Right, because if they have trouble, for example finding a resource, I have to be a resource myself to help them get another avenue, so I need to know where good res ources are for them, like what i nternet sites for example, or what book maybe in the library . (M arch 8 conversation with Sara) 89 Although Sara talked eloquently about inquiry and how she would go about supporting it among students, she had a hard time realizing that her passion about the novel she chose to teach h studen ts. One such instance was would have mentioned Cassie, the main character in the book, who was close to their age , and who and reminded them of another student in their class. Sara became very surprised , realizing that something that obvious to her was not necessarily so to students, and that students have , in fact, ideas of their own, which are equally valid and logical : S.: The only thing they could come up with was making Little Man like somebody . I thought that was interesting, because I thought every kid in there would relate to Cassie. T hat they would I t hink it was that student, R a chel , and what happened then? S.: And then I o ge t more of what she was think ing. Because I really think w hat she meant was his behavior. We wouldn't want the kid to s tomp on the book. But she might have misse d the subtle nuance of the book. (M arch 8 conversation with Sara) As we kept talking and watching some more video tape, Sara realized that she could have held on to her own understanding of how Little Man was r aised , and to probe the student further to see where she was coming from. I noticed that when she was not sure about how to handle a commentary she did not exp In that moment, m y teacher educator side took over and asked Sara: , before those two had the chan ce to explain their thinking and reasoning, about Little Man being raised badly for 90 , some kids get up and wa L.: You keep probing them well and you get them involved in good discussions. Are you aware of that? Do you know it when you are involved in a good discussion? S.: When I have them involved in a good discussion? Ah, I like it when they all want to talk. I mea n, but they are listening. I can tell when they are really listening to the other person too. And L.: When does it happen? And what makes it happen? L.: I can tell you that on Wednesday, for example, I thoug ht you taught an extremely well - thought - through lesson. You ask ed great questions that day. You also picked up from what they were saying, and you built on it . For example, you said something about the word thunder, that the author used it a lot and you wanted them to pay attention to that. anythi So this was an inq hat might the word thunder mean for the way we are understanding the novel? What is the meaning of arch 8 conversation with Sara) and rising during the month of March , and mostly during reading time, I wanted her to pay attention to the way she formed her questions, and what kind s of reactions/r esponses/commentary her different kind s of questions elicited among students: of questions you are asking For example, when you ask a questi for exampl o you kind of significance might this title have , that asks them, o you think th L.: Because the teacher asks so? S.: Because o f the way I said it, yeah. The way I phrased it. 91 L.: So, if I am a student, how could you have asked me that question to sort of give me space to decide for myself? S.: I guess I could say, Roll of Thunder , Hear My Cry ? (M arch 8 conversation with Sara) Sara was clearly interested to learn to ask open - ended questions , and she did. Despite March 11, for example, I happened to be in her cl assroom for another lesson on the novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. The routines were as usual: her reading to students from the book, discussing with st udents and filling in the story line on the bulletin board, and asking the students to support their engagement , and the way she handled their thinking and reasoning and their commentary was, I thought, outstanding. There was a lot of inquiry on her part, and a lot of sincere curiosity a nd genuine interest to listen to students and to probe them to explain their thinking. Sara made a conscious attempt to stay away from leading questions, and she did it with a lot of comfort, not appearing to be rushed for time, although the school p rincip al was in the room observing her. The school p rincipal was there to write an evaluation letter for Sara. The class was very focused and on ta , and she kept drawing connections among various stu When the p rincipal left , I approached Sara and asked, kids talk the lesson. I knew that it also had to do with how much Sara had pract iced in this kind of teaching mode, and with how much thought and reflection she had put in thinking and re - thinking about her teaching, by systematically viewing herself on tape and debriefing about it with me . I saw Sara in the hall the 92 next day on my wa y to her classroom. She was ju p she did not talk much . (emphasis added) In her p a barely talked, and there was not much she could be writing about. Teacher Candidates were hit with conflicting messages, like the one above, regarding what good teaching is about and what it looks like, all the time during their internship year, at least at Ordinary Elementary as I saw it. They were asked to perform a kind of teaching no one modeled for them, a kind of teaching that took time and a lot of effort to reach , and a kind of teaching which was greatly devalued in their classroom placements and school environments. To then, one needs to come to appreciate a lot about the contextual circumstances in which teacher candidates are involved and are surrounded by. hat is it like to others in my study, a question which arose during my extended time in the field. i , and on learning to teach for understanding. I only came to appreciate the importance of understanding contex t, and addressing such a question, after having spent a lot of time with Sara in her classroom placement and so was mine: I was very close to Sara every time she was excited or frustrated when things worked out well or did not, and every time she encountered hostility from her immediate environment, or encountered conflicting messages she did not k now how to interpret, like her p March 11 highly interactive lesson , 93 Sara was not affected very much by the p quickly. She taught an other lesson in which she did most of the talking, one which her p rincipal liked a lot , and for which she gave her a good evaluation. Sara, however, was affected greatly by me Sara felt th ings went well. Other - way through Lead Teaching 2, Sara was virtually exhausted and not sure whether she could carry herself through another month. She planned for her teaching totally by herself, not knowing whether she was going towards the right direction with it or not. Her only opportunity to reflect critically on her practice was by watching herself on videotape and by writing about it in her notebook, which she did by being a participant in my study. Because I was not her field instructor, however, nor was I there to evaluate her in any respect, it was not my r ole to tell Sara what to do to make things better next time, other than to pose que stions for her to think about. In the hectic life of a Teacher Candidate learning to be a teacher in an otherwise ordinary school, where she daily had to put on an act in or der to entertain variou s school players , asking Sara to undertake a part in my st udy was like asking her to race against the wind. During our year together, I asked Sara to do a lot of homework , by watching herself on videotape and by critically reflecting on and writing about her teaching. After a long day at school, teaching virtually every possible subject matter, I asked he r to stay and talk with me, to watch herself on tape, and be videotaped as we talked, at times for as long as two hours of intense c onversation. Sara was always gracious and generous to me with s commitment to improve her learning to teach, and her admirable care for her practice , are 94 inquir y, as well as mine. Vignette Six 13 Lead Teaching 2, a period of two very intensive months for teacher c andidates, was about to end. In the beginning of April, the TCs started going back to their courses at GSU for two days of the week , and they remained in their school placements for the other three. Sara continued to teach Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry at Ordinary Elementary until the end of April. She was preoccupied about preparing her CV, composing he r job hunting cover letter, and putting together her professional portfolio. Sara was more than happy to keep talking with me, and she and I continued our joint inquiry all the way until the end of June. I wanted Sara to examine her practice retrospectivel y, to compare her teaching between the fall and the spring semesters, and to think and talk to me about ho w she thought she changed in paying attention to asoning. We had our first, post - Lead - Te aching 2 conversation on April 8. I a sked her to start by reflecting on the novel she chose to teach and on the new life she created for the classroom. L.: What did you find difficult about doing that book? very impressed the pain and the real hatred, and the feelings. Um, today our discussion was kind of interesting, because I Mr. Jameson, the attorney , the attorney, and they remembered things and they were telling what he was like and who he L.: Good question! 13 Chapter 5 Title, in Carroll et al. (2007) Transforming Teacher Education, Reflections from the Field. 95 And they got into why the author would do that. want them to get out of this. he whites on one side , all bad. L.: It has been very interesting wa tching you teach this novel. What has been exciting about it? S.: Exciting? Just the kids opening up . I love it, I just love it, you know. Realizing that they know a lot . (emphasis added) L.: Talking about things opening up, they were very much into it h ere. Th is is the same lesson that the p rincipal was in to observe you, remember? I thought it was amazing, amazing, because Sara did not even r espond to my comment about her p rincipal. She was wholeheartedly absorbed by watching th e class interact around the bus driver scene. In the novel, a white bus driver was driving white students to school , and he splashed mud on black kids who were walking down the street. There was a lot that discussion on tape with a lot of focus and curiosity, but also with some agony and anxiety. She had a lot to say as she unfolded her thinking to me. For about twenty minutes it was mostly her talking, and me trying to keep up with her body - and - soul kind of talk. She kept questioning u think that if they were discussion both of us were watching on tape had, among her students, the effect in regards to race she was hoping for. Sara, through this particular scene of the white bus driver splashing mud o n the black kids, found herself caught in the serious business of introducing to a very diverse questions during that particular segment were not necessarily open - ended all the way (some of 96 them were even leading questions), I thought she did a very fine job orchestratin around such a difficult matter, an orchestration not characteristic of novice teachers, not even of veteran ones. Racial and social studies issues were very important to Sara. That is why she chose to teach the particular novel that she d id, despite advice from her surrounding environment to the contrary. She chose her own curriculum, based on her moral and intellectual commitments, a stance not characteristic, again, of either novic e or Gives You discussed the case of Greta, an African - American woman, a non - traditional teacher c andidate , returning to her p rogram very much like Sara. Greta struggled to make literature part of her daily choices during her time in the p rogram, as well as later on as a classroom teacher. Accordi ng to Roosevelt (2007), A certain kind of r obust encounter with literature one ; make social and intellectual connections; affirm, challenge, or reject meanings and ways of being, for example can, then, constit real experience as planned or plotted by a teacher but lived by students and teacher together in the classroom, can be h Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry in her classroom was robust or not was not really so much the issue. What mattered was that Sara took, very consciously, the risk of engaging her students (and herself) in ambitious but ambivalent work, oral hazard, a possible threat to her legitimacy. Keeping the conflicts alive, exposing herself to doubt, and recognizing risk, mitigate the risk and in themselves constitute some of the work or earning moral authority (Roosevelt, 2007, p. 104) 97 Sara, then, did claim moral and intellectual authority as a novice teacher, not only by her conscious choice to teach that particular novel, but also by her daily labor with it and with her students. Her moral and intellectual commitments became, in fact, very evident during our April 8 conversation, in which she elaborated on how she cared to make students aware of their immediate, racialized world: You know, they grow up around here, they have no idea. They are unaware for just small things that I thin For example, y ou go in the store and you buy band a ids and they are called flesh color. Well , whose flesh color? I mean , whose flesh are they colored like ? You know what I mean? , that hink about race . But African American people think about race every day . (April 8 conversation with Sara, emphasis added) Clearly, Sara was not, as portrayed in the learning to teach literature, the typi cal whit e, middle - class female teacher c andidate, unaware of the world around her. She had a good grasp of the important ideas in the novel, she cared to make those ideas tacit among her students, and she spoke quite confidently to me, with both breadth and depth, about where she thought her students were at the time and how she planned to move (with) them forward: would just realize that. L.: I t was interesting that Nataly all these issues and not Makeyla for example. S.: Right, because Makeyla L.: Have you se en any patterns as to the story line, as to what they consider important ideas in the chapter? S.: They pretty much get what the important ideas are, they really do. Uh..., just one thing in the early chapters. They mentioned at the beginning that they grow cotton, and that they were all important from the last chapter , I put it up on the bulletin board myself. Sara and I kept talking about her progress throughout the year. Du ring our conversation 98 on April 8, I asked her to think again about the kinds of ques tions she was asking students and on which of her questions she probed them more, in what ways, and why: L.: Well, what do you think? How did you pay attention to them when they were talking, what kinds of questions were you asking? What do you think about that? S.: I kind of, I was trying to get them to clarify by asking, what do you mean by a certain word, or how was that? L.: When do you see that you ask them to clarify? When have you observed yourself that you are doing more of that as opposed to when L.: And when is that the case? Like, when you were talking about how Cassie felt? S.: Right! I was trying to get from them, I wanted to see how t hey thought that she would feel, the way she was treated in the store. L.: Ok, so trying to have them make inferences. Anytime they make inferences then? Because I want them to go deeper than just thinking of the feeling, y S.: Yes! Because the parents want to protect them. What would the y protect them from, you know, k get them to do in their writing Tell me why, how. Like, I this? Where do you see it? L.: And do you want them to write back to you? S.: Well, no, not at this point. But I want them to think about it when they look at what they have written, you kno w, so that maybe next time they will do a little bit more. Now , Greg writing was great. He picked out instances from the book and he has them there for whoever wants to read them. And when I read it , really good the way he did that. 99 udents to clarify their thinking and provide justification for their reasoning, but also by the fact that her talk was informed by specific examples as to how exactly she was expecting students to perform. That was a good time, I thought, to ask Sara a ver y straightforward question regarding her growth throughout the internship year. I wanted her to talk in retrospect about change in her practice: L.: When you see yourself i n this segment, and you compare it with the beginning of the year, what would you ha ve to say? How have you changed, do you th ink, throughout the year, in regards to your interaction with kids? S.: I think I am more confident , for one thing. Second thing is I am not afraid, like, afraid of nd I listen and then I can ask a question about situations where I am like , their thinking, make them more aware of what they are thinking by sort of urging them to think . (A pril 8 conversation with Sara) Sara reflected beautifully on how she had developed in her teaching throughout the year , and on how she grew more mature in paying attention to students. She remembered her stiff movement during the fall semester, and how her talk, when watching herself o n videotape back then, was dominated by what she had missed: not notici ng a student who wanted to talk; not noticing other stud ents wa ndering around the class; not noticing some of them being off task. She progressively became accustomed to letting go of h er lesson plan , and to think and talk less about herself as the protagonist in the teaching and learning scenario unfolding before her eyes. For a long time during her internship year, Sara kept holding on to the idea that only good questions on her part to know her questions beforehand. It was not until mid - way through her Lead Teaching 2 period (towards the end of February) , that Sara made a breakthrough in thinking and reasoning. During reading time, when Sara was teaching the novel she was so 100 passionate about, she exhibited a kind of listening to students talk which was far more mature than the one in the fall semester: both he r physical and mental movements were more focused on s her probing them becam e very systematic and sustained; and what students put on the table was curriculum itself for Sara. It was important to her to explicate talk around the bus driver scene, for instance. She needed to have proof as to how her to have their own questions, which became equally, if not more, important t han her own questions. She admitted she could not always be on the top of their thinking, but that she was comfortable with it. Sara, during Lead Teaching 2, made a conscious and laborious attempt, very culum (Dewey, 1902), and in that respect Sara was well on her way of earning not only moral, but also intellectual authority to teach. When the Possibilities Become the Focus Sara and I continued talking about her teaching past her Teaching 2 p eriod, as I kept videotaping in her classroom all the way until the end of May. As she shared with me on a number of occasions, watching herself on videotape helped her progress in her learning to teach ogy, of having Sara reflect on her videotaped which she could hold still at any point in time , and for as long as she wished. Sara often mentioned that when she saw her teaching on videotape , she realized it was not as bad as she had thought it was. That was very reassuring to Sara, something she was in great need of because of lack e concrete for her; it 101 helped her detach from seeing it as her exclusive, private territory, and it assigned to her a research role of viewing her teaching as an object of study, by exami ning i t and making sense of it process of self - discovery, self - awareness, and self - potential for a researcher to become the audi ence to her own self development, to take the role of the other, allowing a space within which to examine the motivations, understandings, and intentions of their own practice, and to realize the potential for It is cruci , opportunity to engage in meaningful, sustained conversations about their practice in the company of people who m they trust. The fact that Sara talked with me systemat ically about he r on - going sense - making of her practice, helped her develop a kind of tacit knowledge about teaching and learning, which is unlikely to be found among novice teachers, or among more experienced one s for that matter. My role in our conversations was to help Sara see, through my questions to her, good places in her teaching she herself could not see , and to grow from there. I have helped her, in other words, focus on how she could grow by looking at what went well, rather than being stuck on what did not. O n May 3, I gathered all research participants in my study to watch videotapes together , starting from the beginning of the year all the way until the end. Sara, Mai , and Juniper all came , and to talk ab out how they thought their practice had changed throughout their internship year, as well as to talk about what it was like for them to participate in my study. It was an exit interview , in the form of a focus group conversation, during which we also watch ed Level 2 D ata (our videotaped conversations over their videotaped teaching Level 1 D ata). Although our c onversation that day went over some 102 difficult matters, we had an amazing time , accompanied by p opcorn and a lot of laughter. All three TCs realized that although they were placed in very different classrooms, they all had very similar patterns in their learning to teach development. They all progressed, perhaps not to the same degree, from an orientation to self to an orientation towards students. The y all agreed about the power differentials in their classroom placements , and on how difficult it had words (one of their 800 - leve t is hard to be au tonomous around a person the CT who puts you up, and puts up with you, and who has an evaluative role over you . ormal conversation with Eisner) All three TCs talked about how vulnerable they felt , and how much they valued the fact that they had someone to debrief their teaching with, a person who was not there to evaluate them. They laughed at themselves, and at each oth they were like in the beginning of the year. It was as though they saw a picture of them selves from their first grade year. What stood out most, and surprised them, was how their tunnel vision in the beginning of the year eventually gave way to a more mature teaching persona in the cl ow does pa ying d that it is something they knew they care d about from the beginning , but that they could not get to unless they beca me more comfortable with kids. Sara elaborated on her experi ence of systematically analyzing her videotaped teaching, and on reflecting and writing about it. In her words, ideo helps you put pieces together and see more of the whole picture . 3 focus g roup conversation with research parti cipants) Sara, Mai, Juniper , and I had such a good time that day. We enjoyed the goodness of 103 company of critical friends. That was reflection - on - action, of no ordinary scale, and the beginning of forming a professional learning community (PLC), a terminology which appeared much later in the literature. In the w ords of one of my p rofessors at GSU here came time to Coming Full Circle Sara and I met again on May 12 for her exit interview. She was more than happy to come back to my apartment and talk about her progress throughout he r internship year, as well as about how she saw herself developing as a teacher the following year. Sara was busy preparing her professional portfolio and applying for teaching positions. Our conversation was very much informed by her current, at the time, professional activity in her mind. I had prepared a number on them and talk to me about any change in her practice she saw throughout the year: S.: Is this from the morning greeting from the fall? I remember how I felt. I can still remember L.: Scared? S.: Yeah!! Wow, that surprises me. I look very cut and dry. I am not comfortable with my role yet. I know how I felt. I am just tense. uld get down on me if I sai very at ease , am I? I was always think ing that she was watching me. I was not sure what the ex pectation was. or something. L.: Did you think, like, you had to be like her? 104 en gave me mixe d messages. S kno w what to do. . I really look forward t o that A ned how to manage a classroom. in the year? This is now March. What do you think, any changes? S.: Oh, I was so much more confident and more comfortable walking around, you know, instead S.: Well, I think mostly it had to do with feeling more comfortable. to have the time S.: Right! Right. And, lesson plan, you know what I mean? And, I got over that, I mean, you come t o the place where thing. L.: Remember in the fall you did not like your voice? You all paid attention to your voice, you surprises when they hear their voice, but then they get used t o it. I shared with Sara my observations of how she reacted to her watching herself on tape in the fall: she focused on her physical appearance and on the students she had missed. She agreed. We talked about the fact that despite having a lot of prior e xperience in other settings working with children, she still had a lot to learn , here is something about managing a classroom which is really different . (May 12 conversation with Sara) Sara and I also talked igza g g development. I wanted her to elaborate more on that: igzag what do you mean? how you feel things are going and how they might really be going. 105 L.: Your interpretati on of events of what really happened may not necessarily be accurate? S.: Yes. And, I I learned that from watching the tape, becau h, y nd you and then when I depend on how you feel something is going, necessarily. So, that was a great lesson. L.: During Lead Teaching 2 you reached a point, and then at the end of February there was something, almost like a fall. I am not sure how to put it, did you experience something like a rise and fall? S.: Rise and fall is a good way to put it because it is a rise and fall of a million different things, and they are happening at the same time. Like, how much sleep yo things a ffecting, you know that are happening, and sometimes you are gonna be short and ill - L.: Remember at the end of February? You were very tired. S.: Oh, yes! L.: But then you picked it up and you continued, and y hat do asking it. You did not follow up on it. S.: I wou becau se you have to be able to ask really penetrating questions to get at their thinking. Sara had come a long way in her teaching, although at the time, she could not appreciate it as much herself. We watched, again, and with pride, her Mar ch 11 reading lesson, when the p rincipal had come in to observe her. Sara talked to me about the future, of her plans to grow more confident and relaxed in herself, and also to become more alert to students , in order to recogn ize the teachable moment and be able to use it: - ha experience among students and you can use that moment to really have them express their thinking, you know. Like in their journals for reading , they started out writing a couple of sentences. I tried to encourage them to make their thoughts more visible, to express their thinking more, you know? And, one girl wrote me a note, 106 stand, they can tell you that. teacher if they feel they have not been heard or misunderstood . tion with Sara, emphasis added) Sara understood quite well that in the business of understanding it is important to see that d you teacher c andidate who walked into her internship year a few months before, expecting students to listen to her, only to learn, through her precious lived experience, that she too needed to listen istening eye . 14 Sara expected a kind of respect from students, (November 10). Sar a discovered a kind of respect she had not planned for, one which came uninvited, very much like a poem, through her long, laborious work during her year - long internship at Ordinary Elementary. In presenting to me her portfolio, Sara talked with a lot of r espect, pride, and with a lot of love about her students. At Ordinary Elementary, in an otherwise ordinary class, with twenty - eight otherwise ordinary students, Sara came to know respect, the very essence of democracy. Beyond any reasonable doubt, Sara had come full circle, with some flying colors and a lot of humility. 14 David Hawkins (1974 ). The Informed Vision: Essays on Learning and Human Nature. 107 CHAPTER V: DISCUSSION Sara Bridging Two Lines of L iterature : Learning to Teach and Teaching for Understanding Sara grew into earning a lot of love from her students as well. When she came , on May 24, , cerpts ath seem confidence and enth usiasm. As alwa ys, she was articulate as she elaborated on her advanced and comprehensive work. She had philosophy statements for each section of her portfolio, which inc luded , apart from all the subject matters of the school curriculum, sections o n other important matters as well , such as professional development, assessment, and the use of technology in the classroom . On the cover page of her portfolio , she put a stateme nt about her view of democracy, one of her passions , as her FI also indicated in her reference letter for her. Sara cared a lot abou t community involvement , and she had a section about it in her portfolio. She also cared to make parents part of the classroom commu nity. Every week she sent home a newsletter , which she also included in her portfolio, debriefing parents about activities and progress in each subject matter. , concern , and love. During her portfolio session with me , she could not stop t alking about Greg , the child who was growing up with his grandmother. Although when she came to see me she had already left h er classroom, she was sti ll worried about the sense Greg Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry ). Sara talked to me about this particular child , as well as about others, on a number of occasions during our conversations. I saw her concern for him while I was videotaping daily in her classroom: she had one eye on the 108 cl assroom and another eye on Greg . Did she learn to engage students (and herself) around meaningful discussion about important subject matter ideas? Did she learn to employ on - going assessm ent (Pe rro ne, 1994) in her teaching? Did her interaction with students have an analytic/diagnostic na ture (Prawat, 1989)? Did she learn what it 7) Did she learn to form good questions to open up st id she help students generate their own questions and construct their own under standing s ? Did Sara, at the end of the day, learn to teach for understanding ? Sara was a non - traditional teacher education student, being already in her mid - forties upon entering the teacher preparation program at GSU . She was interested in learning to pay attention to many challenges and difficulties which all novices typically face, verifying Brown , findings on non - older first year teachers with more years of life experiences. Still, the reality was harsh as they began teaching , just as younger teachers have noted (p . 646) Despite all that Sara had to overcome (learning to manage a class room as a learning space without any support from her classroom teacher), her commitment to learn to teach for understanding, paired with a teacher preparation program which supported this endeavor, pushed her away from traditional, stage - based models of teacher learning. stage to go to another, like some literature on learning to teach supports. Even CT held a point of view si milar to the literature , that TCs need to have their classroom management skills and subject matter expertise in place before they enter the internship ye ar (June 2 journal notes after 109 Perhaps thinking about stages and phases needs not to occup y our scholarship that much but , rather , and as Levin , et al. (2009) propose d , how we provide TCs with educative experiences , which are framed around attention to student thinking. Sa us move towards that direction. Unlike , then, what the literature indicates about novice teachers learning to teach for understanding , Sara did mak e , during her internship year, a very good start getting down that road , by examining her questions; by being involved in i nquiry ; and by recognizing she needed to continue to look for the teachable moment. She pro gressively stopped focusing at herself and her physical appearance. She never came to like her voice, but she learne d to laugh at herself. She talked in very informed wa ys about how she changed . She was very aware that during the following year she would continue to be a beginning teacher in need of support for systematically studying and improving her practice. , but, to her credit, that was not a preoccupation in her mind. In fact, both school and university players need to rethink a lot about the notion of classroom management: what does it look like to possess it? Wha t language do we use to talk about classroom management ? How do we understand students being on task? How might constructivist inquiry in classrooms generate different experiences, display different images of students working, and r equire different skills around organizing and run ning a classroom? What During her year - long internship, Sara made some baby steps , but also some moral leaps. She could not figure out, for instance, transitions in seating arrangements. Helping students, during reading time, move from the circle arrangement back to group work and then to their 110 desks was a nightmare for Sara. It was a n ightmare for her CT also. Sara and I talked about it a few times, with little progress on her behalf. When it came time to discuss Roll of Thunder , Hear My Cry , Sara put all her troubl es aside and dedicated her full attention towards her very recorded her March 11 lesson about the bus driver scene. Sara was not going to lay that scene to rest. She had set her mind, that day, to s what i t was that took place regarding that scene. She put on a very passionate performance. Sara did not care if the p rincipal was there to evaluate her, or if her CT was going to be on her case, or if I would be asking her later to think about whether she was using leading questions. She cared to invite students to take a moral stance . In that sense, Sara herself had taken a giant moral leap. That day , and at that particular moment, I let my research s class. In the company of young minds, I, , learned about what life was like during those dark times in Amer ican history. Sara , eventually, came to understand classroom discourse and what it take s to start learning to craft on own trade. Lampert (200 1) highlighted the kind of relationship a teacher needs to cultivate in the classroom in order to achieve her professiona teachers who maintain productive, intellectual and social connections with their students are working toward their professional aims. The work that is entailed in maintaining these relationships is not something a teacher does because she has a friendly disposition, but because she is identifying and sharpening the essential tools of her trade Sara invested greatly in practice as zooming in and out, and she used her friendly disposition to her advantage. She did , in fact, thinking and reasoning , and she even showcased what it is like to u npack it: she paid attention to 111 affect , and to their emotional well - being. In several instances during our year - long conversations, I witness ed her anguish about one student who was going to be held back, about another student who was on med ication, and about Greg who was growing up away from parent s. Sara intertwined, in a fugue - like movement 15 , cognition and affect. Her story revealed that paying attention is not merely a cognitive endeavor, but that it also involves and it is informed by affect. Sara enacted, according to Schwartz (2015), the intel lectual virtue of perspective taking and empathy , which is an According to Schwartz (2015), themselves of what they were like before they understood something well, they will be at a loss to explain it to their students. Everyth ing is obvious once you know it . (p. B8) Sara never assumed that her She actively sought out their understandings of subject matter by asking them to write in their journals d aily, both for reading and for m ath. Her writing assignments for student journaling were highly structured a n d well thought - through. Sara collected a nd reviewed journals regularly, and she informed her subsequent instructional decisions accordingly. Sara also took risks when it came to curriculum decisions, like deciding to teach Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry . Taking a risk upon making one curriculum choice over another mea ns that the teacher opens up her classro om to uncertainty and messiness, and to scrutiny and criticism. The novel Sara chose to teach was a difficult text , chronicling an even more difficult story. The author of the book , Mildred D. Taylor, even admitted so herself: I have tried to present a history of my family as well as the effects of racism, n ot only on the victims of racism, but also on the racists themselves. I have recounted events that were painful to write and painful to be read, but I had hope d they brought more underst so there will be those who will be offended by them, but as we all know, racism is offensive . (Taylor, 1976, forward 15 A fugue is a form of musical composition and it originates from the latin 112 pages , emphasis added ) Sara was not afraid of taking risks, she was driven by her passions and hard work , and she had support from her p rogram at GSU , which advocated and modeled constructivist teaching. Furthermore, I believe that our joint inquiry of critically examining her evolving learning to teach, by systematically analyzing her videotaped teaching, served as a catalyst to push her toward more deliberate efforts to want to learn to teach for understanding. Sara and I tailored our joint inquiry around her own needs and le arn ing pace at the time. Brouver and Korthagen (2005), upon analyzing effective strategies that Univers ity clinical supervisors used to help novices integrate theory into practice, refer red to a number of princ iples, the second of which was ividual learning processes According to Brouver and Throughout student teaching, university supervisors and cooperating teachers monitor each student individually as he or she experiences the ups and downs inherent in learning to teach . (Bro uver & Korthagen, 2005, p. 159) Brouver and udy revealed that teacher education can, indeed, make a difference in helping novices start their journey towards learning to teach for understanding, through a complex interplay of various program fea tures, most of them resembling GS characteri stics, such as (a) gradually increasing the complexity of student - teaching tasks and - teachers, cooperating teachers, and university supervisors , which provide consis tency in learning to teach for understanding; and (c)alternating student - teaching placements with University - based courses, so that theory and practice interplay and complement each other. Although Sara did not have a supportive cooperating teacher, nor , for that matter, w as she 113 part of a triad (CT, FI, TC ) with any t heoretical consistency , she did have the mentoring and guidance of her University - based master level courses , in which she was mentored and supported to adopt and enact a reform - minded, constru ctivist oriented, teaching for understanding approach . She ideas, which she incorporated in her teaching. As I was observing and videotaping in her classroom daily, I saw how Sara grew out of being shy and timid and relying too much on the overhead projector, to orchestrating and masterfully conducting classroom discussions around difficult matters, in which most students participated, despite the fact that she still had to work on her classroom management and transition skil ls: her wait time was superb , and it was characteristic of that of an experienced teacher, not of a novice one. Learni ng to teach for understanding is not easy, for neither novice nor experienced teachers. Teaching for understanding has inquiry at its co re, which involves, accor ding to Schultz and Mandzuk (2005) , encouraging students to pursue questions, which generate s even more questions: There is a sense of negotiation and fine balance between what the children bring to the s professional understanding of teaching, learning and young children are enabled to pur sue learning in meaningful ways . (p.319) Learning to teach for understanding requires coordination of various players and multiple layers, namely schools and Universities, and departments across campus, and it requires refocusing uring an evolving id entity and thriving around unce rtainty and ambiguity. Schultz and Mandzuk (2005) underscore d that teacher educators should be the first ones to show the way , and they warn ed us that : If we wish to prepare teachers who are inquiry - minded and who can carry an inquiry stance into their classroom practice, we will need to seek resolutions within our own programs and in collaborative resonance with the schools. This will be complex and messy, fraught with relational problems a nd contested territorial issues . (p. 330) 114 We need more research studies revealing the complexity and messiness of learning to teach for understanding, as highlighted above, not only amo ng t eacher candidates, among both novice and experienced teachers, but also among teacher educators and various teacher education programs. The chall enge before us is confounded by tensions and dilemmas, ambivalences and ambiguities. T he road ahead , although m ore challenging and , , certainly , both promising and beautiful! 115 CHAPTER VI: IMPLICATIONS Implications for Teacher Education How does this kind of reform - minded teaching (in this study , learning to teach for understanding) shape the mission of teacher education programs? How does it affect the role and work of teacher educators, and what cha llenges does it bring with it? How and w hy is, in the first place, the process of learning to teac h for understanding important and worthwhile to understand? According to Duckworth (1987), it is so if we want to take seriously other people's minds and the fact that they construct meaning quite differently from us and from each other: Meaning is not giv en to us in our en counters, but it is given b y us c onstructed by us, each in our own way, according to how our understanding is currently organized. As teachers, we need to respect the meaning our students are giving to the events that we share. In the in terest of making connections betwee n their understanding and ours, we must adopt an insider's view: We must seek to understand their sense as we ll as help them understand ours . (p. 112, emphasis in the original) While Duckworth referred to teachers needing to understand the sense that students make in "the events that we share," a parallel case can be made for teacher educators needing to do the same with teacher candidates. To understand, in other words, what it is like for teacher cand idates to learn to teach for understanding, one needs to "adopt the insider's view," from the teacher educator's side thi s time. Ball (1990) acknowledged that learning to teach for understanding is both complex and uncertain, and she pointed out that to un derstand this learning means studying it as it evolves in its context: Taking teachers seriously as learn ers, considering where they are what they already know and believe and how they reason, in relation to both content and students together with what they are trying to do , is key for those who would recommend changes in the practice of elementary mathematics teaching. Moreover, we need to continue to explore what kinds of experiences, supports, and structures can help teachers de velop and change their practice . (p. 33) 116 Schul t z and Mandzuk (2005) further support ed that while some novices may find supportive environments for this kind of reform - minded teaching, the overwhelming evidence points in the opposit e direction. The authors also urge d that University - based teacher educators examine their - to - day practices , in order to align with reform - minded teaching pedagogies, a task and a stance mo re difficult than it may initia critical reflect ion on our own practice can be discomforting, but it is when we are at the edge of our discomfort zones that we learn The implications of learning to teach for understanding are, then, both practical and theoretical, both programma tic and academ ic. They call f o r inform ing teacher preparation program s , as well as school s working with novices, as to what experiences and factors support and/or hinder which aspects of such learning at any given time during the internship year. The implications also c all for educating a number of players in such programs as to what it means to be a novice; what it is like to learn to ask students partic ular kind s of questions and wait for their answers; and what it is like to try to under stand those answers and figure out more questions. What is it like to learn to pay attention to students' thinking and reasoning, in o ther words? While all players at various levels of teacher edu cation are potential audiences for this study, novices are too. Their struggles, often kep t private, can be validated by reading the stories of other novices, as well as be legitimized as a valuable source of learning. Above all, the implications for this study concern all audiences who live and work with children. These are moral implications, aiming to create a type of moral alertness that Max van Manen (1991) called pedagogical thoughtfulness, which extends itself beyond the classroom walls: An underlying metaphor for teaching suggests that, in order to come to school and learn new things, s tudents need to cross barriers (for example, a street) to get over to the teacher's side (the school)...A tactful educator realizes that it is not the child but the teacher who has to cross the street in order to go to the child's side. The teacher has to 117 how it is that this student has difficulty crossing the street to enter the domains of learning. The teacher has to stand beside the child and help the child locate places to cross over and find means for the child to successfully get to the other side, to these other worlds. In this gesture lies indeed the meaning of educare the world of increased awareness, responsibi lity, growth, and understanding . (p. 156, emphasis added) Sara, the research part icipant in my study, undertook, during her internship yea r at Ordinary Elementary School , a journey far away from ordinary . She was open to her being videotaped , and she took the task seriously right from the beginning. She understood earl y on that watching video was going to be about th e serious business of examining and developing tacit knowledge of it . The fact that our conversations about her practice were being videotaped (Level 2 Data) also conveye d to Sara that our talk , even though more uns tructured in the beginning, was going to be around difficult intellectual work . As Sara classroo m, she as well . She discovered the child in her and she help ed that child, through a focused zooming in and out around her practice For an entire school journey into and through the internship year, a kind of journey far awa y from ordinary. Sara captured very well She patiently dissected her practice, as she watched herself on videotape, in th e company of a stranger (myself) who kept asking unhelpful (to her) questions , was as patient with me as I was with her. Altho ugh she would not understand, at first, why I would not why I could not comment on her lesson, she managed to keep, with her patience and good educar ed for me too! She helped me cross one side of the street of being a field instructor, t of the street to be a researcher of practice . All of these experiences were made possible because I 118 utiliz ed qualitative research methodology, school ethnography, a nd a case study research design during my school year at Ordinary Element ary, a year not ordinary at all . In the following section, I explore some of these affordances, as well as some of the tensions of doing this kind of research. I mplications f or Research I undertook my dissertation study as a Teacher Education doctoral student who had been involved in both field and course instruction in the previous four years , through the University and i n local schools. I had also been involved with various research projects in the local schools, and thus I had already formed an idea of what local el ementary schools were like. I n a way, I had gone to foreigner, and despite my long experience as a classroom teacher in my own country, I fo und that I strange , a familiar environment. For example, as a researcher at the time, I started posing questions about the classroom arrangement, the heavy textbooks, the lockers out in the hall, the lining up of the students every time they went anywhere, the hilarious loud speaker, questions I never had the time, nor was it my role, to pose as a field instructor. The year during which I conducted my about US schooling that I did not have throughout my four years as a field instructor. I had thought long and hard, while I was drafting my dissertation research proposal , as well as throughout the year I conducted my research, about my role towards the research participants. I particularly chose not to be working as a field ins tructor that year in my research site , or in any other school. I wrote extensively in my research proposal ab out separating the two roles, because they we re essentially conflicting: the field instructor has a clear agenda ori ginating from the University, 119 i n assist ing the interns to progress i n their learning to teach and in monitor ing this progress through specific program standards and guidelines. My role as a researcher during my study was quite different fro m that of the field instructor : I was now working with research participants, not interns, in trying to understand their development, as it evolved in their particular context s and situations . I was not there to push them towards one direction or another, nor to evaluate them or intervene in a ny way. In fact, during our conversations over watching their teaching on videotape (which I also video and audio recorded) they d id most of the talking. I only probe d them to elaborate m ore on their thinking. I tried so hard , for that matter, that I questioned my own positionality in a nu mber of instances. Sara , for example, had a problem with her cooperating teacher from the beginning of the internship year, a problem that kept escalating as the year progressed. She felt her CT did not encourage her enough, and that she was even excessively critical of her. In most cases, Sara was right: her CT was not encouraging at all, something that Sara was really in need of . As a researcher, I could not have h her CT, which I would have done had I been her field instructor. Nor could I have taken a stance and say who was right and who was wrong. Not knowing where getting in the middle of the relationship Sara had (or did not have) with her CT would take me, I left that part out: I never pushed her to think about what she could have learned from her CT, d espite the bad relationship the two of them had. In another instance, again, I had videotaped a lesson Sara taught for the school principal , who came in to evaluate her in order to provide her with a reference letter. In my view, Sara was superb in how she orchestrated classroom discussion over a novel. H owever, her principal left disappointed. A ccording to the principal , o , there was nothing for her to evaluate. As much as I had wanted to take a stance, and had I been a field instructor i n that 120 incident I would have had , I decided not to. I was there to research and portray reality as I saw it, and not to take sides or revea l my own convictions about the people who su rrounded Sara. I am still uncertain whether that has helped Sara in the long run; whether it disappointed her that I was not there to tak e sides; in what ways it may have affected our level of trust ; and if, at a ll, my trying to be Not to my surprise, I found myself being much more comfortable using the context from urses at Great State University in directing her to think more deeply about her practice. For ex ample, Eisner, one of Sara's 800 - level course instructors at the University , consistently asked TC s to pay close attention to the questions they ask ed students: "W hat questions do you ask that open up more questions from students? What questions do you ask that close down quest ions from them?" express themselves. I, thus, followed th e institutional culture Sara was coming from and I framed my inquiry around questions I had prepared in advance for her to think about, or around questions that arose during our conversations. My role, then, and my stance, essentially my positionality, wa s that of a researcher, not of a to record and to portray it. However, this research was a joint undertaking. Sara developed in the ways that she did partly becau se of the relationship we had developed in the field, in this case in her classroom and in her school. Had another researcher been there, with no prior field instruction experience, another relationship would have developed, another kind of inquiry would h ave emerged, and Sara would probably have taken a different professional journey. Therefore, all of my claims are eans to be generalized or used 121 to normalize the process of learning to teach or the field of teacher education. Furthermore, the theoretical framework of constructivism, of focusing on the questions and sustaining inquiry, notion s of perceiving various roles as being conflicting or dichotomous. The very essence of constructivism, as a matter of fact, is that it provides a space and the tools for a recurs ive movement between potentially un - matching roles, such as , in this case, the role of a researcher and that of a teacher educator . Constructivi sm encourages uncertainty, allows tentativeness , and forces us to focus on the questions rather than on the answers. Constructivism urges us to remain curious on the how and why , and to be cautious of the what. Sara and I Constructivist inquiry, qualitative research, but also our patience with each other , made that possible. Just as teaching has its predicaments (Cohen, 2011 ) , so does research have its own predicaments: oftentimes TCs (as well as their CTs and field and course instructors) needed to have answers; they wanted me to offer them answers. I wanted them, us, to remain focused on search. Their TE program prepared them to think, to know and to act like a teacher. Their Great State University people I was pushing them to stay close to their not - knowing, to the ir being curious and vulnerable, and I wanted them to not let go o f their paying attention to students, at whichever cost. I was asking them to students reason , and to keep figuring out why might the students be saying what they were saying , but also to pay attention to silence. Implicitly, and without realizing it at the time, I had expected from TCs to give me reason , for remaining silent, without e xplaining to them why. That was, in another more post - structural, feminist 122 reading of research , quite hegemoni c, imposing, and patriarc hical. S o was my judg ing of the school principal, out of one single comment she made , when she we March O n March 18, when I interview ed Mrs. O. in her Office, the p rincipal of Ordinary Elementary, I discovered a woman full of passion, care and concern for her communities the y ca me from. Research does have its goodness, but also its predicaments. In either reading of the research I had undertaken, m y two roles (two of many) as a researcher of practice and as teacher educator, were intertwined , and one was informing the other. I could not be doing this kind of research and asking those kinds of questions to TCs had I not had exper ience with the p rogram and done field and course instruction before. My futur e as a teacher educator was already shaped before I even left the f ield. I learned about what is possible in teacher education (and its predicaments) from this work, which I did not I could not have learn ed as a field or course instructor. Distancing myself from any previous roles, and from th e p rogram, afforded me new wa ys of looking at teacher learning and development. It was , of course, impossible to leave out my many years of experience teaching real children in real classrooms. My veteran - classroom - teacher - baggage influenced both the way I con ducted my research, and the way I went about writing it. After all, I have particular convictions as to how it is that children learn and what constitutes their well - being. The way I went about probing the TCs was, fortunately, informed by my convictions. Any attempt to separate roles in ethnographic work is , in my view, a left over positivistic theatrical act, unhelpful to the story - in - the - making of and about teacher education. 123 EPILOGUE The Story of Teacher Education So, at the end of the day, what really IS the story of teacher education? What IS the story of the internship year and of learning to teach? What IS the story of learning to teach for understanding It is a story about unending tensions and dilemmas, ambivalence and ambiguity, trust and mistrust, rise and fall, progress and regression, fatigue, being overwhelmed , a sense of accomplishment, joy and excitement, and eventually a story about TRIUMPH. Not the kind of triumph one feels after winning a ball game, or scoring high on a test . This is, instead, an ordinary, day - to - day kind of triumph, which accumulates miraculously out of repeated, mundane, daily erable, both fabulous and pitiful, both a success and a failure, both well thought through and accidental, both alone and with company, both orderly and messy, both predictable and unpredictable, both ordinary and extra - ordinary. In fact, because t eaching and learning to teach are so ordinary, that is precisely what makes the craft quite extra - ordinary. These data tell a story, a tale, of how and why something ordinary, such as the process of learning to teach , is, in its very essence, so very extra - ordinar y. Deborah Meier (1995, 2002) compelling account testifies to the above: It was in the hurly - burly complexity of trying to make ordinary schools work that I felt particularly challenged. These schools were, to children at least, the real world. It was within these buildings that the children struggled to make sense of friendships, power relations, and subject matter, and tried to square their new understandings with what they knew of the outside world. Although the world of school was artificial and the values regularities and it was, as all institutions are, connected to t he customs of the outer world . (p. 122, emphasis added ) Sara, the otherwise ordinary, midd le - class , white female teacher candidate , walked every 124 day into her field p lacement at Ordinary Elementary to experience what she thought would be an - ordinary experiences. I, too, wa s under the impression that my year at Ordinary Elementary would be an ordinary experience: after all, I was there to research a process I was familiar with as it took place in context. As a co - habitant in a real school, with real students and real teacher s, researching real teacher candidates learning to teach, I lived and re - lived, both as an insider and as an outsider, the smells, the sounds , and the sights of a school and its children at work. In this recorded some extra - ordinary images: children being engaged with subject matter in various ways; trying to figure out math problems; collecting and displaying information; discussing findings and debating with each other; interacting in literature circles; performing p lays they wrote; chasing after ) thinking and reasoning; and articulating their understandings. In the midst of all this activity, the intern teachers were present and equally curious, puzzled, overwhelmed, and overjoyed by the work along with the children. Work at Ordinary Elementary was not always about joy, however. During my year at Ordinary Elementary, I became part of the lives of a multitude of people who kept agonizing if they would survive, if they would succeed, if they wou ld see light at the end of the tunnel. T he t eacher candidates agonized if they would make it through the year, but so did the cooperating teachers and the principal, and the students and their parents and guardians. This agony kept coming up in the air fro m various players at various layers, in so many shapes and forms , textures , and colors. Next to agony, thankfully, there was triumph , for the little day - to - day victories. Triumph that, eventually, the learning - to - teach - for - understanding story does prevail over agony. A kind of prevalence that follows unusual routes, and maneuvers with precise unpredictability. , a true story, i s about an intern, a teacher c andidate, a novice teacher learning to 125 teach for understanding at Ordina ry Elementary. An ordinary tale , one might think. But was it? David Berliner (2002), commenting on the nature of scientific work i n the field of education, argued : Doing science and implementing scientific findings are so difficult in education because humans in schools are embedded in complex and changing networks of social interaction. The participants in those networks have variable power to affect each other from day to day, and the ordinary events of life (a sick child, a messy divorce, a passionate love affair, mig raine headaches, hot flashes, a birthday party, alcohol abuse, a new principal, a new child in the classroom, rain that keeps the children from a recess outside the school building) all affect doing science in school settings by limiting the generalizabili ty of educational research findings. Compared to designing bridges and circuits or splitting either atoms or genes, the science to help change schools and classrooms is harder to do because context cannot be co ntrolled . (p. 19 ) Evidently, I knew from the beginning of my study that my where she was teaching. That was not my goal in the first place , . I n the words of Alan Peshkin (1993), to start reporting on a piece of qualitative research conveying a In th e non - defensive mood that befits our times, I endorse the declaration of worthy research out removing what the right hand has brought forth. Many types of good results are the fruits of qualitative research. Its generative potential My goal , then, in this study was to understand a proces s (learning to teach for understanding) as it took place within a particular context (the internship year) , which I never aimed about (all of what Berliner so eloquently elaborated on ) i lluminated the complexities of understanding learning to teach for understanding, of understanding constructivism in practice, of understanding the role of videotape in learning to see things, and of understanding the story of teacher education. Jay Featherstone (2007) , in Transforming Teacher Educati on, Reflections from the Field, 126 discussed extensively the tensions and complexities of enacting the story of teacher education in U.S. Universities , and, in particular , the challenges of doing it in the c ontext of a large Research One University, where teacher candidates are many and whe re teacher preparation is often misunderstood and undervalued. Sara, during her internship year and as a participant in my study, e ngaged in serious intellectual work, (Featherstone, 2007, p. 239), weaving an intellectual fabric difficult to weave such a fabric in isolation. As Featherstone (2007) indicated , this work, which is ver shaped, and supported by conver 230). Feat herstone (2007) wa s adamant about the idea that prepari ng teachers to educate children all children and to 219). He called for an orchestrated effort to transform teacher educa tion, , in order to be able to serve this priceless story of democracy: To do teacher education well, a university has to support a complex ecology, not just a research monoculture. Links to practice and schools are central. A good teacher education program has to be field - based and rooted in conversation; teachers and principals need cultivating as key figures in teacher education. Teacher education requires constant reinventing; teacher educ ators require the tacit knowledg e and understanding of practitioners to enact a si te - based program; and because so much remains unknown and forever new, all the people doing teacher education need to become a learning team, a community capable of constant self - educating and development . (p. 219) ry, a true story; it is also about a story of teacher education, the way Jay Featherstone (2007) imagined it. A story that will always keep changing, haunted by its accomplishments and the questions we do not yet know how to ask: a task and a stan ce far away from ordinary. 127 CODA That if real success is to attend the effort to bring a man to a definite position, one must first of all take pains to find HIM where he is and begin there. This is the secret of the entire art of helping others. In order truly to help someone else, I must understand more than he but certainly first and foremost I must understand what h e understands. If I do not do that, then my greater understanding does not help him at all. All true helping begins with a humbling. The helper must first humble himself under the person he wants to help and thereby understand that to help is not to dominate but to serve. All true effort to help does not mean to be a sovereign but to be a servant; that to help does not mean to be the most dominating but the most patient; that to help is the willingness for the time being to put up with being in the wrong, and not understanding what the other understands. To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner, put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and in the way he understands it. Søren Kierkegaard The Point of View 1854 128 APPENDICES 129 A PPENDIX I: Summary Chart of Data Collection 130 Table 1: SUMMARY CHART OF DATA COLLECTION Type of Data From Who Why When Classroom o bservations Teacher Candidates' classrooms To develop a sense of the TCs' context On - going Informal conversations Principals, CTs, Field Instructors, TELs, TCs, Students, Course Instructors To identify key informants, and for Triangulation purposes On - going Field notes and c ommentary Myself "Thick" description of culture (school and classrooms) On - going Journal Myself Reflection on day's observations Memos to myself as to emerging themes/ patterns/contrasts Plans for consequent steps On - going Participant observation 500 and 800 level seminars, Field and Course Instructors To identify themes in TCs' thinking and talking about learning to teach for understanding, and for Triangulation purposes As needed 131 Videotaping of the Teacher Candidates' teaching Teacher Candidates Level 1 Data (documentation of TCs' teaching and interaction with students) During lead teaching periods 1 and 2 Videotaped debriefings of TCs about their videotaped teaching Teacher Candidates and myself Level 2 Data (interpretation of TCs teaching, including their interaction with students) During and after lead teaching periods Audiotaping Mid - term and final three - way conferences of CTs, Teacher Candidates , and Field Instructor To identify themes in TCs' thinking and talking about learning to teach for understanding, and for Triangulation purposes Designated times according to the Team's schedule (during and right after lead teaching periods) Various GSU guidelines and handouts To develop a sense of learning to teach during the internship year, and to identify expectations of key players' roles On - going and as necessary Various internship documents and artifacts (reflective journal, lesson and unit plans, goal statements, 800 - level inquiry projects, portfolios) Teacher Candidates, Course and Field ins tructors To identify themes in TCs' thinking and talking about learning to teach for understanding, and for Triangulation purposes On - going and as necessary 132 APPENDIX II: Consent Forms 133 CONSENT FORM Date Dear Teacher Candidate, My name is Loucia D. Constantinou and I am a doctoral student with the Department of Teacher Education, College of Education. Before coming to MSU , I taught elementary school in my country Cyprus, and developed a great inte rest in how children learn to make sense of their worlds. When I return home I plan to work with teacher candidates like yourself, during their journey of becoming teachers. In order to better assist teacher candidates in their learning to teach, I need t o develop a deeper and more rounded understanding of what this journey is like. That means for me to systematically study the process that you are going through, and for you to allow me to be part of your experience. In this study, then, I would like to i nitiate and sustain, throughout your internship year, conversations that would help me develop such an understanding. These conversations will primarily focus around your teaching and what it is like for you to learn to do it this year. I would like to sta rt videotaping a few of your lessons (about 3 - 4) during your Lead Teaching 1 period. That way, we can sit together later, at a convenient time and place for you, to talk about some segments of your videotaped lessons. This talk should take no more than thi rty minutes for each of your lessons. To keep a record of our conversations and to help my data analysis , I would like to also videotape our talk around your teaching. The se initial conversations will help us identify some features in your teaching that yo u might be more interested in discuss ing with me as we m o ve along . After Lead Teaching 1, I will give you another consent form to sign, to indica te whether you are interested in continuing to work with me in this study during your Lead Teaching 2 period as well. To situate our conversations about your teaching we might also need to look at other sources of your work this year, like your developing portfolio, and some of your 800 - level course projec ts. Please note that giving your consent to participate in this study is voluntary. You also have the right to withdraw from it at any time you wish to do so without any consequences. Although I might be having occasional conversations with your cooperati ng teacher and university supervisor, I do not plan to share data that you provide with either of them or any other person involved in your evaluation. I am not involved in any way in your evaluation, nor do I plan to make public any data that you provide for evaluation purposes. All data you provide will remain confidential with the use of pseudonyms for all people and places involved. Data from this study will be used for the writing of my doctoral dissertation. You are welcome to my analysis of any data you provide at any time you request so. I regret that no financial compensation for your time is available at this point. My hope is that we will both be compensated professionally, by pushing each other's thinking about teaching and learning to teach. 134 Thanking you in advance, Loucia D. Constantinou Department of Teacher Education, College of Education, MSU ------------------------------------------------------------------ Please, check what applies in your situation: [ ] YES , I agree to give my consent to participate in this study. I understand that I reserve the right to withdraw my consent to participate at any point in time. [ ] NO, I do not agree to give my consent to participate in this study. I understand that no consequences will take place because of my choice not to participate. NAME: _____________________________________________ SIGNATURE: _______________________________________ DATE: _____________________________________________ 135 CONSENT FORM Date Dear Field/Course Instructor, My name is Loucia D. Constantinou and I am a doctoral student with the Department of Teacher Education, College of Education. Before coming to MSU I taught elementary school in my country Cyprus, and d eveloped a great interest in how children learn to make sense of their worlds. While at MSU , I worked with teacher candidates and became fascinated with how they learn to help children make sense of their worlds. When I return home I plan to work with teac her candidates there, during their journey of becoming teachers, as well as with practicing teachers who will be mentoring them. In order to better assist teacher candidates in their learning to teach, I need to develop a deeper and more rounded understan ding of what this journey is like. That means for me to systematically study the process that they are going through, and for them to allow me to be part of that experience. In this study, then, I would like to initiate and sustain, throughout the intern ship year, conversations that would help me develop such an understanding. These conversations will primarily focus around their teaching and what it is like for them to learn to do it this year. I would like to start videotaping a few of their lessons (ab out 3 - 4) during their Lead Teaching 1 period. That way , each one of them and I can sit together later, at a convenient time and place for them, to talk about some segments of their videotaped lessons. That should take no more than thirty minutes for each o f their lessons. To keep a record of our conversations and to help my data analysis , I would like to also videotape our talk around their teaching. These initial conversations will help us identify some features in their teaching that they might be more in terested in discuss ing with me as we m o ve along . After Lead Teaching 1, I plan to give teacher candidates another consent form to sign, to indicate whether they are interested in continuing to work with me in this study during their Lead Teaching 2 period as well. To situate our conversations about their teaching , I might also need to look at other sources of their work this year, like their developing portfolio, and some of their 800 - level course projects. For triangulation purposes, I would need to be able to attend a few of your 500 and 800 level seminars, and to also have occasional conversations with you throughout the year (at times and places of your convenience) regarding the goals of your seminars, and the purposes that projects you assign may se rve. Please note that my focus in this study is teacher candidates' learning to teach during the internship year and not the nature of your instruction. Please also note that your consent to participate in this study should not, in any way, influence the teacher candidates' decision to do so or not and, in fact, I plan to give consent forms to them in your absence. Because you are evaluating teacher candidates this year in regards to their learning to teach, I am 136 unable to share with you (or any other per son involved in their evaluation) any data they provide to me that informs their learning to teach process. I, myself, am not involved in any way in their evaluation, nor do I plan to make public any data they provide for evaluation purposes. Any data I ga ther from observing in your seminars and/or I obtain from having conversations with you will not be used for evaluation purposes either. All data you provide will remain confidential with the use of pseudonyms for all people and places involved. Data from this study will be used for the writing of my doctoral dissertation. You are welcome to my analysis of any data you provide at any time you request so. Please note that giving your consent to participate in this study is voluntary. You also have the right to withdraw from it at any time you wish to do so without any consequences. I regret that no financial compensation for your time is available at this point. My hope is that we will both be compensated professionally, by pushing each other's thinking abou t teaching and learning to teach. Thanking you in advance, Loucia D. Constantinou Department of Teacher Education, College of Education, MSU ------------------------------------------------------------------ Please check what applies in your situat ion: [ ] YES, I agree to give my consent to participate in this study. I understand that I reserve the right to withdraw my consent to participate at any point in time. [ ] NO, I do not agree to give my consent to participate in this study. I understand that no consequences will take place because of my choice not to participate. NAME: _____________ _______________________________ SIGNATURE: _______________________________________ DATE: _____________________________________________ 137 CONSENT FORM Date Dear Principal/Cooperating Teacher, My name is Loucia D. Constantinou and I am a doctoral student with the Department of Teacher Education, College of Education. Before coming to MSU I taught elementary school in my country Cy prus, and developed a great interest in how children learn to make sense of their worlds. While at MSU , I worked with teacher candidates and became fascinated with how they learn to help children make sense of their worlds. When I return home I plan to work with teacher candidates there, during their journey of becoming teachers, as well as with practicing teachers who will be mentoring them. In order to better assist teacher candidates in their learning to teach, I need to develop a deeper and more rounded understanding of what this journey is like. That means for me to systematically study the process that they are going through, and for them to allow me to be part of that experience. In this study, then, I would like to initiate and sustain, throughout the internship year, conversations that would help me develop such an understanding. These conversat ions will primarily focus around their teaching and what it is like for them to learn to do it this year. I would like to start videotaping a few of their lessons (about 3 - 4) during their Lead Teaching 1 period. That way , each one of them and I can sit tog ether later, at a c onvenient time and place for them , to talk about some segments of their videotaped lessons. That should take no more than thirty minutes for each of their lessons. To keep a record of our conversations and to help my data analysis I woul d like to also videotape our talk around their teaching. These initial conversations will help us identify some features in their teaching that they might be more interested in discussing with me as we m o ve along . After Lead Teaching 1, I plan to give tea cher candidates another consent form to sign, to indicate whether they are interested in continuing to work with me in this study during their Lead Teaching 2 period as well. To situate our conversations about their teaching I might also need to look at ot her sources of their work this year, like their developing portfolio, and some of their 800 - level course projects. To enrich data for my study I would also need to have occasional conversations with you throughout the year (at times of your convenience) r egarding goals you have for students' learning in your school. Some other information about your school (i.e. demographics, school mission) will also be needed as supporting documents. For triangulation purposes, I also would like to be able to attend so me of your staff meetings while teacher candidates are present, as well as be present at some of the conversations you will be having with teacher candidates as they plan to teach a lesson and as they reflect about it once they taught it. Please note tha t my focus in this study is teacher candidates' learning to teach during the internship year. It is neither about the nature of your mentoring them to learn to teach, nor about the nature of 138 your own teaching. Please also note that your consent to particip ate in this study should not, in any way, influence the teacher candidates' decision to do so or not and, in fact, I plan to give consent forms to them in your absence. Because you are evaluating teacher candidates this year in regards to their learning t o teach, I am unable to share with you (or any other person involved in their evaluation) any data they provide to me that informs their learning to teach process. I, myself, am not involved in any way in their evaluation, nor do I plan to make public any data they provide for evaluation purposes. Any data I gather from observing in your classrooms and/or I obtain from having conversations with you will not be used for evaluation purposes either. All data you provide will remain confidential with the use o f pseudonyms for all people and places involved. Data from this study will be used for the writing of my doctoral dissertation. You are welcome to my analysis of any data you provide at any time you request so. Please note that giving your consent to parti cipate in this study is voluntary. You also have the right to withdraw from it at any time you wish to do so without any consequences. I regret that no financial compensation for your time is available at this point. My hope is that we will both be compens ated professionally, by pushing each other's thinking about teaching and learning to teach. Thanking you in advance, Loucia D. Constantinou Department of Teacher Education, College of Education, MSU 139 Please check what applies in your situation: FOR COOPERATING TEACHER AND PRINCIPAL [ ] YES, I agree to give my consent to participate in this study. I understand that I reserve the right to withdraw my consent to participate at any point in time. [ ] NO, I do not agree to gi ve my consent to participate in this study. I understand that no consequences will take place because of my choice not to participate. NAME: _____________ _______________________________ SIGNATURE: _______________________________________ DATE: _____________________________________________ FOR PRINCIPALS ONLY This study is primarily about investigating the nature of teacher candidates' interaction with children, the way they learn to pay attention to their thinking, and the way that informs t heir teaching. In this study, non - verbal interactions with children are as important as verbal ones, and that is why videotaping is involved, in which children from your school are visible. Although children are not the focus of my study, but rather teache r candidates' interaction with them, they are minors involved in the study, and an adult needs to consent, in place of their parents, to their being videotaped. Please, indicate below whether you are willing to do that or not. [ ] YES, I agree to give m y consent for children in my school to be visible in your study. [ ] NO, I do not agree to give my consent for children in my school to be visible in your study. NAME: ________________________________________ SIGNATURE: _____________________________ ______ SCHOOL: ______________________________________ DATE: _________________________________________ 140 CONSENT FORM Date Dear Parent, Loucia D. Constantinou is a doctoral student with the Department of Teacher Education, at Michigan State University. Before coming to MSU she taught elementary school in her country Cyprus, and developed a great interest in how children learn to make sense of their worlds. While at MSU she worked with interns, like the one placed this year in our classroom, a nd became fascinated with how they learn to help children make sense of their worlds. When she returns home she plans to work with interns there, during their journey of becoming teachers, as well as with practicing teachers who will be mentoring them. In order to better assist them in their learning to teach, she needs to develop a deeper and more rounded understanding of what this journey is like. She is, therefore, conducting her dissertation study on this topic. Ms. Constantinou is interested in videot aping a few of the lessons that interns teach in our classroom in the fall, and a few more which they will teach in the spring. In her videotaping, children from our classroom will be visible. She would also like to occasionally talk with some of our stude nts, as well as take a look at some of their work. In addition to getting your permission, I will also make sure that your child is willing to participate. Participation is voluntary, and both you and your child can withdraw from the study at any time with out penalty. Any child who is not part of the study will remain a full member of my class, able to participate in all of the classroom's activities. If your child does participate in the study, he or she can choose not to answer any particular interview qu estion. If you do not grant your permission for your child to be videotaped, Ms. Constantinou will do everything possible to keep from recording him/her. If she should inadvertently videotape your child, she will not use any segments of the tapes in which your child will be identified. All data from Ms. Constantinou's study will remain confidential with the use of pseudonyms for all people and places involved. Data from this study will be used for the writing of her doctoral dissertation. Your child's nam e will not be used in any reports, and any identifying characteristics of your child will be disguised. On the form below, you can restrict the use the study can make of any material collected that includes your child. Please note that none of Ms. Constant inou's videotaping, in which your child might be identifiable, will be used for public purposes but, rather, for conversations with her dissertation committee. Thank you very much for considering participation for your child in the study and for returning this form promptly. Sincerely, ____________________ Classroom Teacher 141 CONSENT FOR CHILD'S PARTICIPATION I have read the above description and understand the nature of my child's participation in it. I understand that data from the study will remain confidential, to be used by the researcher for the purposes of writing her doctoral dissertation. The data might be used in reports about the study, in published articles, in presentations at conferences, and in teacher education classes at the univ ersity. I have been assured that in any such uses, my child's identity will not be revealed. I do understand that in any videotapes in which my child appears, he or she might be recognizable by those familiar with the situation even though no names will be used. I may choose to have any segment of videotapes in which my child is identifiable not used in the study or in any presentations. I have also been assured that I can deny permission for my child's participation in any or all of the activities listed below, and I can withdraw permission for my child to participate in any or all of these activities at any time, without penalty. My child will also have the opportunity to agree or decline to be involved in the study's various activities. Choosing not to participate will have no impact on my child's right to be a full member of his/her class. I give my permission for my child to participate in the activities I have indicated below (please indicate "yes" or "no" for each category ): You may videotape my child while the teacher candidate is teaching the lesson: [ ] YES [ ] NO You may ask my child questions about the lesson the teacher candidate has taught: [ ] YES [ ] NO You may use some of my child's work in this study, a s long as all identifiable information is removed: [ ] YES [ ] NO CHILD'S NAME: ____________________________________ PARENT/GUARDIAN'S NAME: _______________________ SIGNATURE: _______________________________________ DATE: _____________________________________________ 142 CONSENT FORM Date Dear Teacher Candidate, This is the second stage of my asking for your consent to participate in my dissertation study, which deals with understanding aspects of your learning to teach d uring the internship year. In the fall semester, we initiated conversations about your teaching and your learning to teach. I videotaped some of your teaching (level 1 data) and then we talked about how you made sense of it, while being videotaped at the same time (level 2 data). I also had the opportunity to attend some of your 500 and 800 level seminars, where I learned about the course - related aspects of your career. During your Lead Teaching 2 period, I would like to continue the conversations about your teaching that we started in the fall. In order to situate my understanding of your learning to teach, I need to be able to systematically observe in your classroom, videotape your teaching, and have conversations with you. I would like to be in your classrooms on different days of the week and at different times of the day, videotaping your teaching of different subject matters. I would also like to continue talking with you about your teaching, while being videotaped, for at least one hour per week d uring the eight weeks of your Lead Teaching 2 period. To assist my understanding of our conversations about your teaching, I would also like to have access to your lesson/unit plans. I would like to be able to make copies of some of those, as well as some of your 500/800 level projects. At the end of the year, I will discuss with you my evolving understanding of some aspects of your learning to teach during your internship year. During this "exit" interview, which should last no longer than sixty to ninety minutes, I will ask for your own interpretation of your growth as well. Please note that giving your consent to participate in this study is voluntary. You also have the right to withdraw from it at any time you wish to do so without any consequences. Al though I might be having occasional conversations with your cooperating teacher and university supervisor, I do not plan to share data that you provide with either of them or any other person involved in your evaluation. I am not involved in any way in you r evaluation, nor do I plan to make public any data that you provide for evaluation purposes. All data you provide will remain confidential with the use of pseudonyms for all people and places involved. Data from this study will be used for the writing of my doctoral dissertation. You are welcome to my analysis of any data you provide at any time you request so. I regret that no financial compensation for your time is available at this point. My hope is that we'll both be compensated professionally, by pus hing each other's thinking about teaching and learning to teach. 143 Thanking you in advance, Loucia D. Constantinou Department of Teacher Education, College of Education, MSU ------------------------------------------------------------------ Please, check what applies in your situation: [ ] YES, I agree to give my consent to participate in this study. 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