Getting Real

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Getting Real: Exploring the perceived disconnect between education theoryand practice in teacher educationJean Kettera; Brian Stoffelb

a Grinnell College, USA b Hope Charter School, USA

To cite this Article Ketter, Jean and Stoffel, Brian(2008) 'Getting Real: Exploring the perceived disconnect betweeneducation theory and practice in teacher education', Studying Teacher Education, 4: 2, 129 — 142To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/17425960802433611URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17425960802433611

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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Getting Real: Exploring the perceived disconnect between educationtheory and practice in teacher education

Jean Kettera* and Brian Stoffelb

aGrinnell College, USA; bHope Charter School, USA

This article, inspired in part by the Levine report that criticizes teacher education programs inthe United States for being out of touch with practices that work in real classrooms, is aself-study that explores the rift between educational theory, particularly theory that pushes forsocial constructionist, child-centered approaches to teaching, and teaching practices inmajority African-American, inner-city schools. The authors conducted this year-longself-study to answer the question: What could the college’s education program do to improvepreparation for teaching in inner-city schools? Through their year-long collaboration in amiddle-school writing classroom in an inner-city charter school, the authors examined what aprospective teacher learned in his education program that helped and hindered him and thenexplored how the successful approaches he developed as a new teacher could be incorporatedinto the college’s preservice program.

Keywords: educational theory; real teaching practices; inner-city schools; first-year teacher;theory-practice connections; social justice

Aware that poor students of color are often disadvantaged because of an inequitable education

system, most education professors in the U.S. want to do something to remedy the problem.

Unfortunately, survey results published in the recent Levine report, Educating School Teachers,

state: “More than three out of five teacher education alumni surveyed report that schools of

education do not prepare their graduates to cope with the realities of today’s classrooms”

(Levine, 2006). This report describes what many practicing teachers perceive as a gap between

over-idealized theory and the real-world practice of the K-12 classroom. Contributing to the idea

of the research–practice gap, college or university work is often described as coming from an

ivory tower while K-12 teachers’ work is said to occur “in the trenches.” This unfortunate

conceptualization of teacher educators’ and teachers’ work can inhibit communication between

university/college and K-12 teachers. Describing college professors as working in an ivory

tower posits a sort of class warfare between college faculty and K-12 teachers by depicting those

in the ivory tower as privileged dreamers hopelessly out of touch with what real teaching is like.

When the popular press depicts K-12 teachers as being in the trenches, the language creates a

divide that implies a power difference between teacher educators and K-12 teachers that can

make speaking to one another difficult. The phrase in the trenches brings to mind the divide between

officers and enlisted soldiers, implying that the foot soldiers are taking the risks and doing the

grunt work that the officers, with their education and skill, escape. Discourse that deprofessionalizes

K-12 teaching leads policy-makers to advocate for reductive accountability measures, such as those

ISSN 1742-5964 print/ISSN 1742-5972 online

q 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17425960802433611

http://www.informaworld.com

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Studying Teacher Education

Vol. 4, No. 2, November 2008, 129–142

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reflected in No Child Left Behind legislation, and pushes school district administrators to buy

pre-packaged, teacher-proof programs that devalue the expertise teachers bring to the classroom.

In addition, teacher educators sometimes add to the deprofessionalization of K-12 teachers by

depicting research in K-12 classrooms as getting into the field. Using anthropological terms, teacher

educators perhaps inadvertently objectify K-12 classrooms as foreign cultures where the researcher

expects to encounter the Other. We in teacher education need to be aware of this perceived

disconnect between the research-based teaching practices education professors recommend and the

common-sense approaches that seem realistic to classroom teachers. Teacher educators must be

willing to listen to the honest critiques practicing teachers offer without becoming defensive or

dismissive and must be willing to engage in the sort of self-study that reveals our education

programs’ weaknesses and illuminates ineffective approaches.

A teacher researcher may conduct a self-study to articulate a philosophy of practice and to

discover inconsistencies between what one believes and how one teaches; thus a self-study

grows out of a teacher-researcher’s desire to “better align theory and practice” and to build on

what one learns through some public means (Loughran, 2007, p. 14). Our self-study is a

self-evaluation of the teaching of teachers from the viewpoints of Brian, a practicing teacher and

recent graduate of a liberal arts teacher certification program, and Jean, a teacher educator from

whom Brian took a methods course. The study was conducted during the 2006–2007 school year

in a highly acclaimed inner-city charter school. Jean sought out Brian because she hoped to learn

what her college education program in a small, highly selective liberal arts college could do to

better prepare students to teach in under-resourced and over-burdened, high-need urban schools.

The college Brian attended, where Jean currently teaches, states that it exists to graduate students

“who are prepared in life and work to use their knowledge and their abilities to serve the

common good” (Grinnell College, 2001). The college also affirms social responsibility as a core

value, with a particular focus on developing a “strong tradition of social responsibility, action,

and personal responsibility” (Grinnell College, 2001). The college’s education department

echoes this dedication to social justice, asserting in its mission statement that “educational

leaders must be equipped to provide all students, particularly those whose knowledge and

experiences have been denigrated and marginalized, with opportunities to practice the critical

thinking skills that will enable them to act as effective and ethical citizens” (Grinnell College,

2002). In this self-study, we describe the practices that seem to have been effective in the inner-

city charter school where Brian was teaching and investigate which of these practices are

incorporated already into the college’s education program, and which should be added or

strengthened to help it achieve its social justice aims.

Few of our graduates choose to teach in inner-city, high-need schools. For this reason, we

fear that our college falls short of its self-proclaimed social justice mission. We know that

America’s schools are resegregating, and this resegregation exacerbates the divide between the

haves and the have-nots in schooling. Evidence of school resegregation comes from a Harvard

Civil Rights Project report (Orfield and Chungmei, 2004), which found that students in today’s

schools, especially in large urban districts, are likely to be isolated into racial groups and to have

little exposure to students of different ethnicities or cultures. Moreover, the schools that enroll

majorities of Black or Latino students tend to have fewer resources than the majority White

schools. Another study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project (Orfield and Chungmei, 2005) found

that schools with high concentrations of non-White and poor students tended to have

less-experienced and less-qualified teachers. We believe that these students deserve the

well-prepared teachers that matter most in improving students’ opportunities to learn (Darling-

Hammond, 2000). Thus, we believe it is crucial that we encourage licensed teachers graduating

from the education program at our highly selective college to choose to teach in America’s most

under-resourced schools.

130 J. Ketter and B. Stoffel


During our self-study, Brian worked at a charter school that we here refer to by the

pseudonym Hope Charter School (HCS). The school, which enrolled students in fifth through

eighth graders, was located in a blighted metropolitan area and had a stated aim to address the

unequal education opportunity that students experience. Charter schools are sectarian public

schools allowed to operate free of many federal and state regulations imposed on traditional

public schools. Charter schools are particularly popular in this city because they are able to

employ innovative approaches that might not be supported in traditional public school settings.

At Brian’s school, for example, teachers are not required to have a teaching license and they

are not protected by a teachers’ union. They could therefore be expected to teach longer hours

and to supervise activities that a union contract might have prohibited. They could also be fired

at the principal’s will. We note that Brian was the only member of this school’s faculty who had

earned a teaching license in a traditional program; most of the others were Teach for America

volunteers who had acquired several years of teaching experience before joining the faculty at

HCS. Many have earned licensure through the Teach for America program or are currently

seeking licensure from Master of Arts in Teaching programs. Brian was hired at this school

directly from his preservice program at Grinnell College.

Students at HCS come from elementary schools all across the city. Many of the feeder

schools for HCS do not meet the annual yearly progress demands of No Child Left Behind.

District wide, African-American students perform on average 30% lower than White students on

the proficiency standard. For the students entering HCS, the percentage scores for proficiency

were even lower. For example, one of the neighborhood schools currently experiencing

restructuring had only 14.5% of its students testing as proficient readers and only 6.1% testing as

proficient in mathematics. Much research demonstrates that African-American students come to

school less well-prepared then their White counterparts (Farkas, Lleras, & Maczyga, 2002).

Charter schools like HCS were founded to help address this disparity, and this school employed

teaching and curricular approaches that had been successful in other charter schools in helping

students catch up with and surpass their suburban counterparts.

To identify and analyze this charter school’s recommended teaching approaches, Jean

observed two classes a day, two or three times a week, for nine months. She kept dual-entry

observation notes in which she recorded details, snippets of conversation, and descriptions on the

left side and later analyzed what she had observed on the right side. Jean observed regularly in

Brian’s class and occasionally observed in other classes, including a sixth grade reading class, a

seventh grade science class, and a seventh grade Spanish class. Brian and Jean talked between

classes and during Brian’s planning period, time permitting, to discuss what they saw, to ask each

other questions, and, in many cases, to work out alternatives for approaching a lesson differently.

Brian shared all of his teaching materials with Jean, sometimes in advance via email, both to solicit

advice and as a way to illustrate what he was hoping to accomplish with his students. Over the

school year, Jean and Brian also met for four extended periods outside of the school to identify the

theories underpinning the teaching strategies his school was employing and to understand why

certain approaches worked and others did not. In all of their conversations, they considered how

what they discovered could improve their shared teacher education program.

We have structured this article as a conversation, attempting to echo the process Jean and

Brian engaged in as the year passed. We will begin first with Jean’s description of the education

program Brian had recently completed, which she and her colleagues believed would prepare

students to teach in schools like the one where Brian taught. Then, Brian will respond with his

analysis of what was missing from his preparation, explanations of the sort of preparation he

received through HSC, and insights he has gained from his early years of teaching experience.

Jean will then respond to his comments with her observations and analysis of the match and

mismatch between the college’s education program’s approach and Brian’s and his school’s

Studying Teacher Education 131


approach. Finally, we will complete the conversation with the conclusions that we have come to

as a result of this shared journey and address the original question of this self-study.

Grinnell College’s Education Program

The education program at Grinnell College is quite streamlined, requiring only five courses

before students spend their ninth semester in a 14-week teaching practicum and attending a

weekly seminar. At Grinnell, students begin their work in the program with a course titled

Educational Principles in a Pluralistic Society. This foundation course introduces our students to

the notion of institutionalized racism that has pervaded our schooling practices since our

country’s founding. The course description includes this statement:

We will devote a significant portion of the course to philosophies informing multicultural educationand in doing so will explore how issues of race, class, sexuality, gender and ableness intersect inschools to determine the privileges one is able to claim. (EDU 101 Syllabus, Personalcommunication, 2006, p. 1)

In all subsequent courses in our program, students read texts that challenge racist assumptions

that may underlie explanations for low achievement in urban schools. While we explore how

inequities based on race and class are perpetuated in our schools, and examine the complex mix

of historical, social, institutional, and cultural factors that create such inequities, we also study

approaches that we believe can interrupt the replication of race, class, and gender inequity in

schools. Brian took the capstone course for students seeking a teaching license in

English/language arts in 2003. This syllabus begins with these words:

The course is aimed at helping you develop a personal theory of teaching as an intellectual as well asa highly moral profession/vocation that can be transformative for students and teachers. Throughoutour program, we argue that teachers should view themselves as public intellectuals committed to thepractice of social justice, and I hope you will leave the course more clearly envisioning how teachingcan be a way to work toward justice and equity for all people. Thus, I want you to leave the courseable to imagine what sorts of approaches will help you achieve those ends as an English/languagearts teacher. (EDU 341 Syllabus, Personal communication, 2003, p. 1)

In this methods course, I emphasize that students recognize how the discourse of school matches

middle-class White discourse and disadvantages poor and non-standard English speakers

(Anyon, 1997; Delpit, 1996; Finn, 1999; Lareau, 2003). Students read arguments by those who

argue that we can attack this disadvantage by celebrating and reinforcing the home discourses of

the children; but we also emphasize approaches championed by others, like Delpit (1996), who

argue that non-standard English speaking children need to be explicitly taught school discourse.

She calls this the discourse of power, and Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) call it the rules of the

game. Our program acknowledges that these discourse practices reproduce class and race

divisions in schools and, in order to give all students access to the economic and political

advantages denied them, we urge our students to demystify the rules.

Students in the education program also observe a minimum of 60 hours in area school no

more than 30 miles from the college, conduct research projects, and prepare units and lesson

plans before they embark on their student teaching practica. Our program is highly theoretical

and is structured to encourage teachers to see themselves as teacher researchers who use

classroom data to improve their own practice. We do not focus on developing classroom tricks

such as de-contextualized behavior management strategies. I believe that a classroom is a

democratic community and I encourage teachers to view themselves as co-learners with their

students. In surveys of our alumni, we occasionally have been criticized for our lack of

“practical” coursework or preparation for first-year management issues by some graduates of the

program, Brian included. For example, one particularly critical responder wrote in a recent



survey: “The ‘classroom community’ idea is pretty useless without detailed strategies” (Grinnell

College Education Department Alumni Survey, Fall 2007).

Brian’s Response

Jean is correct in saying that I was often wary of the highly theoretical, socio-cultural slant that

I received in my time at my alma mater. I just had a gut feeling that there was something much

more natural, more integral to human nature, more related to character beyond what a book

could ever teach that would play a role in whether or not I would survive as a teacher in a

low-income school. I was right.

Armed with enough educational theory to justify the cost of a private school’s tuition, I found

it fitting that my greatest worries going into teaching were never covered in depth in any of my

classes. In fact, they were quite simple. What would/should I do when the class enters my room?

What if I never developed “the look” and the kids never respected me as an authority figure?

Or, the one I most commonly asked, how am I going to teach something as complex as writing to

a class I may or may not have any control over? These questions, as unacademic as they may

seem, are the real ones that form knots in beginning teachers’ stomachs as they break out into a

cold sweat in the middle of an already sleepless night. Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theories do not,

I’m afraid, consume our thoughts in quite the same way.

Five minutes into teaching my first class at HSC, I realized how completely in over my head

I was. Teachers who were able to raise student achievement to the point that it got national

attention on an almost weekly basis surrounded me. I had somehow landed a job with this skilled

crew, feeling like the 12th man on the basketball team that should just be shooting around during

warm-ups, but never see any playing time. Except in education, there is no “12th man”; we all

teach. This cruel caveat did not work in my favor. At the end of this first class, a male fifth grade

student came up to me and asked, “Why do you let the kids get away with being bad when the

other teachers don’t?” I felt as though I had been punched in the stomach.

For the first time in my life, I was faced with the very real prospect of either sinking or

swimming. If I was going to learn how to swim, I was going to have to ask for help. My kids were

perilously behind in their schooling, and I was doing them no favors by standing in front of them

like I knew what I was doing. After my first week of teaching, I asked every sixth grade teacher

in the building to come and observe. I swallowed my pride, and asked them to tear apart my

classroom. With tact, they did.

I tried just about every suggestion that was offered. Some worked, some didn’t, but I was

slowly building up a repertoire of strategies that were effective. I started using a “Do Now” in

class that gave the students a writing task to work on as soon as they came in. I set up procedures

for getting supplies instead of taking every question that came up for a pencil or a trip to the

bathroom. And instead of introducing a classroom procedure once and expecting the students to

automatically understand, I was encouraged by other teachers to take the time to devote a whole

class period to one simple task. I was taught the importance of occasionally calling a student out

for their misbehavior. The other teachers even taught me a way to clap that could instantly get all

of the students’ attention. Most importantly, if I wanted things to happen in my classroom,

I learned that it was more important to be seen as serious teacher rather than as nice teacher by

the students. By the end of the year, I felt I was acceptable for a first-year teacher, although

I would not yet call myself a good teacher. Somehow, I became a finalist for a First-Year Teacher

of the Year award in the city I was teaching in. My progress was painfully slow and incremental.

Behavior management was my major concern, so it makes sense to think back on how my

college prepared me for behavior management issues. I certainly do remember discussing the

importance of procedures and routines during my courses, but that was as far as it went:



discussion. It is one thing to say that engaging lessons that build on students’ interests and lives

is all the classroom needs to avoid most behavior management problems; it is quite another to

actually do it. The problem is that during many of our practice teaching sessions, we taught our

peers as if they were students, and during our student-teaching experience, the co-teacher was

usually in the room and already had systems, procedures and expectations set up before we

entered the school. At no time were we ever expected to set up our own authentic systems,

procedures or expectations. While it might be difficult to imagine a situation where we could set

up such authentic experiences, I have always thought that if one were successful at creating

systems for very young children, one could then extrapolate from those experiences and apply

them to teaching at any level. The college’s approach to investigating behavior management was

an example of theory not necessarily fitting together with practice.

Davis (2007) wrote in Phi Delta Kappan about the disconnect that exists between teacher

educators and those who are teaching in K-12 schools. When I read this during my second year

of teaching, I thought it shed some light on the huge obstacles (especially behavioral) that I faced

in my classroom. Davis argues that academics have lost touch with the day-to-day complexity of

human interaction in schools and accuses them of hit-and-run research that focuses on narrow

topics and requires only a short stay in any one school. He concludes his critique of academics

and the ineffectiveness of their research by stating that “comparatively little of what is written

and thought about by scholars and policy makers actually has any appreciable impact on

classrooms or drives durable system-wide reform efforts” (Davis, p. 569).

Davis (2007) also points out that administrators and teachers reach too quickly for easy,

simplistic solutions to complex problems and engage in wishful thinking about the universality

of reforms because they are under pressure to get results. In their desire to fix the problems

quickly, administrators and practicing teachers sometimes seek a one-size-fits-all solution.

In reality, a positive change in a school is likely due to a variety of contextual factors that may

not be possible to replicate in another setting. Davis gives some advice to K-12 teachers for

applying the research they may have encountered either in their academic careers or in

professional development. He advises teachers to view research “as a road map, not a

destination,” arguing that teachers should learn to “trust [their] gut” (p. 571).

In our discussions during the year, Jean and I continually returned to the tension between my

distrust of what I saw as the often impractical, research-based practices Davis (2007) describes

and Jean’s skepticism about simply trusting one’s gut. In our discussions, Jean and I kept coming

back to an essential question: What can a school of education prepare you for, and for what is

there no substitute but the real thing – especially if a key component is learning how to trust your

gut? Davis starts to answer this question by talking about research as a road map, but from my

experience, I think it can be taken a step further. Although education departments certainly have

a duty to expose students to current research and theories, I think that they have a far greater

duty. If a school of education wants to guarantee that every teacher graduating from its program

will be successful, it needs to cultivate within that student a healthy appreciation of the growth

made possible through genuine failure.

Every first-year teacher, especially those working with traditionally underserved

populations, is going to fail and fail often. Those who succeed in their first year do not

possess superior intelligence, charisma, or even empathy. They are able to swallow their pride

and squeeze every ounce of wisdom out of the countless failures that one will unavoidably have

in the classroom. In other words, learning to teach at a school such as HCS requires that a teacher

becomes really good at failing.

I got to practice this skill as the other teachers came into my room and tore apart my

practices. After two years in teaching, I thought I had it all figured out. To survive as a teacher



in a low-income area, you had to have certain character skills, not book skills. You had to accept

failure as one of life’s natural teachers and become its number one student.

Jean’s Experiences at HCS

When I first arrived at HCS, I was a bit shocked by what I perceived to be a military school

approach to discipline in the school. Students were expected to be totally silent in the hall ways,

were told to line up on a certain square on the floor with their shoulders touching the wall, were

constantly reminded to tuck in the shirts of their uniforms, and were taught hand signals to use in

class to indicate their requests as a way of avoiding unnecessary interruptions. Table 1 is an early

excerpt from the dual-entry journal I kept during the first semester of my time at HCS that

captures my concern about these approaches.

As this excerpt illustrates, I noted that Brian’s having aims on the board and essential

questions in the classroom reflected the approaches recommended in Understanding by Design

(Wiggins & McTighe, 1995), a book that Brian and his classmates read in our methods class

together. I had concerns about the classroom management program enacted at the school

because it relied on a token economy. I believe that behaviorist approaches can be unethical and

ultimately, ineffective, so I questioned the token economy set up in the school. Students earned

“dollars” that could be exchanged for possible prizes but that were also tallied to determine the

top 50% of students who would be allowed to participate in the end-of-year trip. Each class

visited a different city, and trips always included a trip to a college or university campus. In this

excerpt from my journal on that same day I react to this system of paying students with points

and possible prizes for doing homework and following rules:

I’m not comfortable with this sort of token economy. Especially since it determines who will be ableto attend the year-end trip. I will keep talking to Brian about how he feels about this. He explainedthat they couldn’t afford to take everyone on the trip. Which is understandable, but I wonder whathappens to students who are so far behind the others by mid-year that they can see no hope incatching up. Do the rewards and punishments quit working? (If one person loses points, that meansI move closer to the top?) It sets up a zero-sum game. In general I think establishing a system ofextrinsic reward is attractive because it’s likely to work fairly quickly, but I don’t have a lot of faith

Table 1. Excerpt from Jean’s dual-entry journal.

Sept. 6, 2006/1:40 Class-Citadel Reminds me of McTighe and Wiggins and Under-standingby Design.

Agenda on board with learninggoals/Aim for the day. Classroom hasessential questions posted on the walls.1:40 class has no break between scienceand writing class; students move seats,but don’t leave the classroom.

Routines or rituals:Do it Now – a small review of

grammar/standard English.Hand raising with signals so the teacher

knows what they want:Bathroom: A closed fistPencil: Crossed FingersWater: Three fingersGenuine Question: Open hand

Brian explained that the hand-raising signals preventthe students from interrupting class as much with arequest for something rather than an actual responseto a question. I can see this, but it is very distractingfor me to see all these closed fists up while Brian istalking. (I see shades of Black Power). It is weird andit seems more like a military training video to me.



in its working for a long time. Whatever is offered as a reward (after-school store, pizza, etc) soonloses its reinforcing nature and the negative reinforces or punishments are too abstract to be verypowerful. I know that most behaviorists have found punishment doesn’t work well at all (unless it’sswift and severe), and that rewards work for only a short time. And rewards can be counterproductiveif what you’re rewarding is already intrinsically rewarding in the first place, you can extinguish thebehavior. I wonder if HCS people have studied behaviorism in all its complexity. Brian explainedthat the school works to move toward intrinsic reward by eight grade, but I don’t see much emphasison intrinsic rewards for the seventh graders. (September 6, 2006)

One other example from my observations shows my reaction to hearing a teacher saying to a

group of students who were chatting quietly in the hallway: “It’s good to see you, but NOT to

hear you.”

I know that HCS’s credo insists that the teachers respect the students, but I’m not sure how the schoolis defining respect. Is it respectful to assume these students have so little self-control that you cannotallow them any freedom at all? I am not sure what this means, but it’s a bit disturbing to me. It soundsa little like the old saw “Children should be seen but not heard.” Very Victorian! I do understand thatthe school is trying to cut down on chaos and contact in the halls, and I can see why that’s important.I know from my experience that hallways are where fights get started (and finished.) However, itseems this insistence on silence might be a bit much. I need to talk to Brian about this more becauseI wonder if it’s coming from the assumption that students cannot distinguish between a little talk andtoo much talk. Or is it assumed that there will be some talk (which there is), but the prohibition keepsit at a “safe” level. As I asked Brian earlier in the month, is this Discipline or Domestication?(October 9, 2006)

One strong tenet of this school’s mission was teaching the game of school and the language

of power. I am sympathetic to the idea that school is a sort of game with rules some children

(usually White and middle-class) seem to know intuitively while others (poor students of color)

need to be taught the game explicitly. In her sociological study of parenting, Lareau (2003)

argues that middle-class children, regardless of their race, are better prepared to negotiate school

because of parenting practices that cultivate a sense of entitlement and an ability to negotiate

with adults in order to make the system work for them. I agree that middle-class White discourse

is one of the tools students need to learn to be successful in school, but as I explained earlier,

I believe that students also should learn explicitly that school discourse is not inherently superior

to children’s home discourses.

I know that Brian did not believe that the language students spoke with their friends or their

families was inferior, but I was afraid that the school was communicating that idea to students

indirectly. And because I see a strong connection between culture and language, I was afraid

children were learning that their culture also was inferior. Repeated references by staff about

their hopes that students could get out of the ghetto and “escape” the inner-city schools they

would ultimately attend if they did not score well on standardized tests and get good grades

reinforced this concern. I am not arguing that poverty, drug use, and violence did not plague

these children’s communities, but I think it is important to recognize the positive aspects of their

lives as well, aspects that Lareau (2003) argues are unacknowledged by teachers and education

experts.

One story stands out as an example of what I feared students were learning due to this

emphasis on teaching the discourse of school, and through inference, the superiority of this

discourse and culture it embodied. A student (Jasmine) was writing a narrative about how her

mother tried to surprise her by getting her a kitten. The surprise was spoiled, though, when

Jasmine inadvertently discovered a note about the kitten when she was looking for something

in her mother’s purse. As they were driving to get the kitten, Jasmine, seated in the back seat of

the car, admitted to her mother that she knew where they were going and how she’d found out.

Then, the mother turned her head as she was driving and said, “I gon pop you!” The student had



written the mother’s words exactly as she had spoken them, without the “am” or the “ing” verb

ending. She called me over to ask if this was all right. I asked her what she meant by all right, and

she explained that it was exactly what her mother said, but she knew it wasn’t “proper” English.

I told her that it was dialogue and that it was good to quote directly because it made the narrative

seem more real. She responded, “But I don’t want to make my mother sound stupid.”

I understand that students need to catch up and learn academic discourse. However, I would

like to have seen more acknowledgement of the structural racism students experience and more

opportunity for students to bring their own lives into the curriculum at HCS. Students did read

books by authors of color and they did discuss these books in their classes, but based on my

limited observations, the discussions focused on the theme of individual choice and avoided

discussion of institutional racism that often disempowers and oppresses students, rendering

“making good choices” a luxury many do not have. As Delpit (1996) warns, students’ own lives

and experiences need to be at the center of the curriculum, and, at least in the classes I observed,

teachers appeared to focus almost exclusively on helping students adopt the academic discourse

they will need to succeed in the elite schools where HCS aims to place them. I did not see what

I consider to be a place for the “glorification of their students and their forbears” (p. 164) that

Delpit demands.

It is clear that I was not sympathetic to many of the approaches used at this school to

maintain order and create an atmosphere where students could learn. However, as I continued

my observations at HCS, I saw that many teachers, including Brian, were doing wonderful things

as well. For example, Brian was using a modified workshop approach to teaching writing,

allowing students some choice in topic and giving them opportunities to revise after teacher

feedback. He consistently modeled in his own writing what he expected of students, and in his

writing, he shared his life with students, demonstrating his trust in them and allowing them to see

him as a real, complex, flawed human being.

Also, I observed a sixth grade reading teacher who impressed me both with her care and

concern for her students and her pedagogy. In fact, watching her teach brought tears to my eyes,

and after I had observed her, I felt I had to tell students how lucky they were to have her as a

teacher. Here is an excerpt from my journal describing my reaction to her approach to teaching:

These students clearly have a script for responding, but their answers are thoughtful and they doseem to be listening to each other and building on one another’s responses. They seem to be referringto a chart on the wall that provides a sort of template for fashioning their responses. When someonesimply states an opinion, the teacher requires that they restate it by including the question, and, whenapplicable, refer to another peer’s previous response. (October 24, 2006)

During my time with Brian, I was struck by the high energy and idealism that drove all the

teachers in his school. I was also impressed with the amount of autonomy afforded them. They

had a great deal of freedom in designing curricula. The science teacher, for example, did not use

a textbook. Instead, she set up simple laboratories in her classroom and emphasized the process

of doing science rather than the “facts” of science. Brian, too, had almost complete freedom in

designing his writing class, and I believe this freedom was both a blessing and a burden. Here is

an excerpt from my journal written in early December:

For this writing class, the school has not given Brian a script to follow or a textbook with pre-setlessons to constrain him, which is great. He does have some large goals (I believe developed by theentire seventh grade faculty) but he also has no outline or overall structure for the course. It is all his.It’s not surprising that he relies on what I see as a formulaic approach suggested in a school-sponsored workshop he attended. As far as I could tell, he isn’t getting a lot of help about curriculafrom his peers or the principal. I have tried to suggest that students might be more motivated if theyare writing for authentic purposes, and that form should follow function, but I think the structureoffered by this approach appeals to him, and he sincerely believes it provides students withscaffolding they need to be successful. My take on it is that it’s constraining them too much and they



could be writing better than they are. I think he may be underestimating them, and I suspect they areacting out because this work isn’t challenging them. But, I could be wrong. I’ll keep thinking aboutthis. (December 6, 2006)

Another aspect of the program at HCS that impressed me was how teachers at HCS use

informal and formative assessments to check on their students’ learning and then adapt their

curricula accordingly. After all, they know that their job depends on how well they are preparing

students. One example from my observations will clarify:

Last week Brian gave students a sort of quiz on the elements of a narrative. When he discovered thatthey still seem confused about certain aspects of the difference between an expository summary anda retelling of a fictional narrative, he remarked to me that he needed to figure out what he could do tohelp them understand. He did not blame the students or fault them in any way. He clearly saw this asa teaching failure. I was really impressed with his willingness to admit that something hadn’t workedand his desire to figure out what he might do differently. (October 3, 2006)

Early in the first semester of my observing, Brian and I met to discuss pedagogical

approaches I saw Brian using that I thought were emphasized in methods courses at Grinnell.

I generated the following list:

I see now that the list was a bit defensive, but I believe I was trying to show Brian that we had

prepared him well, and Brian agreed that most of what I had listed was true. He also remarked

that when we were reading about backward planning and establishing routines or rituals in the

classroom, he had not believed these ideas were all that practical or useful. This inability to see

the connection between the abstract practices recommended in a text by experts and what one

would eventually be doing in a classroom was not unique to Brian. Many alumni from the

program return to tell me that they were not really convinced by some of the recommended

pedagogy in our classes because it seemed either too idealized or too obvious. I see this as a

significant failure of our program.

Brian’s Response

Our discussions and visits with one another have continued into my third year of teaching. Due

in large part to Jean’s time with me, I have come to certain realizations about the disconnect

Table 2. Comparing Brian’s approaches to what is taught at Grinnell College.

What we teach at Grinnell What we do not teach at GrinnellBackward planning – Using assessment to inform

instructionBehaviorist approaches to classroom

managementExplicitness in giving directions Grading each other’s homework and announcing

scores to classStrategic Approaches Emphasis on daily homework

ModelingGuided PracticeBuilding on prior knowledge

Classroom routines (rituals)ConsistencyIgnoring negatives when possibleNot arguing with teensWait TimeConsequences as immediate and

logical as possibleFast pacingWriting with students



between theory and practice. In my first response to Jean, I wrote, “I just had a gut feeling that

there was something much more natural, more integral to human nature, more related to

character beyond what a book could ever teach that would play a role in whether or not I would

survive as a teacher in a low-income school.” I purposely decided to bold the word survive this

time, because I think it deals with what direction one’s teaching career can take. If my only goal

is to survive, and not thrive, then what am I doing with my time once I figured out how to

“control” my students?

In Robert Redford’s 1972 film, The Candidate, a young, idealistic lawyer agrees to enter an

almost impossible race for California’s senate seat. As the race continues, the focus becomes

more and more about winning, and less and less about the issues. When Redford’s character

does, in fact, pull off the improbable win, in an attack of disillusionment, he pulls his campaign

manager to the side and asks, “What do we do now?” The movie ends before the question can be

answered, presumably because it was never considered in depth. Surviving at an inner-city

school really is about character. But if growth as a teacher ends with surviving, then I’m afraid

that once I have conquered the almost impossible task of gaining control of my classroom,

I would be left at the end of the day asking the very same question: “What do I do now?”

At the start of my third year of teaching, people within the national school network, of which

HCS was a part, began to ask the same question. As graduates of our middle schools went off to

high school and then to college, a pattern of deficit began to surface. Students from HCS schools

were top-notch in math, they could read for comprehension well, and they were excellent test

takers. Their writing was not as good as it should have been.

A group of teachers within HCS got together to investigate the reasons behind our students’

poor writing skills. An anecdotal story from their research gets to the heart of the matter: During

the course of their study, these teachers spent the first half of a day at an HCS school with an

education professor. What they saw was excellent. Students were on task for the majority of the

time, learning in very structured, well-planned and well-executed lessons. It was clear that the

bar had been set high and both teachers and students were up to the task. After that, the group of

teachers, along with the education professor, went to a prestigious, upper-class private school

just outside of the city for the second half of the day. When they got in, what they saw made their

skin crawl. Students were running around and shouting in the hall. They chewed bubble gum.

Their shirts were untucked. “This is chaos,” they thought. “None of this would be allowed at an

HCS school!”

A funny thing happened when the bell rang and the classes after lunch began: the halls

cleared, and the classes started. The teachers sat in on many classes. They noted how the students

interacted with their teachers as if they were peers. They looked at their writing. It was

impressive. When the group of teachers left the school, they conferred together, and all of a

sudden, a light bulb went on. The kids at the private school were simply better critical thinkers

than the HCS students, and that was reflected in their writing. At almost the same moment of

exuberance for discovering their “silver bullet,” the teachers realized what a daunting task that

was. “How do we make our kids better critical thinkers?”

When I was attending an HSC conference on this topic, it became clear to me why Jean had

been so against some of the practices that I employed. She said, “Behaviorist approaches can be

unethical and ultimately ineffective.” Apparently, the full-fledged implementation of

behaviorism can strip away a student’s ability to develop critical thinking skills.

At the start of my third year, it became clear to me that I had gained a level of confidence and

respect in the school, as well as developed systems and routines that were effective in my

classroom. I could do just about everything so that my students would at least look like they were

doing something. As I sat in my classroom after the first week, happily realizing that many of the

problems that vexed me before were not going to be as much of a nuisance anymore, and



thinking back about what I’d heard at the conference, I was able to think about “What next?”

And thoughts of Vygotsky, and Piaget and socio-culturalism came flooding to me – the first time

they had done so naturally since graduation.

Teaching writing has become far less formulaic for my students. Instead of giving my

students very basic, almost fill-in-the-blank type papers to write, we pull from a large pool of

writings to examine, dissect, and model from. My students have learned how to code switch

from what we call the “Language of College” (Standard American English) to the “Language of

Friends” (one’s home dialect, whatever one’s ethnicity) in a way that is both natural, and values

neither above another. More than anything, I have adopted the motto that HSC has in light of the

recent research: “Make yourself obsolete.” In other words, set your students up for success and

provide them with all of the tools they need in the front end, so that by the end of the year, the

students should be able to run the class themselves. Unless they learn how to do that, how can we

ever expect students to survive in the real world where a teacher isn’t there with them all of the

time to provide help?

Jean’s Epilogue

Since I have worked with Brian, I see justification for the concerns Brian expresses, and

I understand how students would deem my ideal of creating an egalitarian classroom community

naı̈ve and uninformed, particularly to a new teacher in an inner-city classroom. Like many

education professors, it has been many years since I have conducted my own class or had the

responsibility for planning a curriculum or managing a classroom of young people. My teaching

experience was in a mid-sized town in Kansas, and although our population was fairly diverse,

I have never taught in an inner city, and my high-school teaching experience is now over 15 years

old. My students sometimes understandably suspect that our program’s lack of focus on

classroom management reflects our misunderstanding of today’s schools and today’s challenges

because we professors are out of touch. Therefore, I know it is essential that all of our faculty

continue to seek out experiences where we are responsible for a classroom, if not for an entire

year, at least for long enough to renew our credibility with our students and to test our beliefs

about how to best prepare teachers.

Brian’s concerns have convinced me that I should emphasize practical concerns in my

methods courses more than I have in the past, particularly the importance of establishing

routines for getting students into the classroom, getting them to settle on a task, transitioning

from one task to another, and participating in small and large groups effectively. Since Brian

began his first teaching experience thinking, “What do I do now?” I see that it is essential for

beginning teachers to have practiced planning that includes explicit strategies for dealing with

the inevitable behavioral challenges they will face and to understand that they need to be explicit

about the game of school with these students. Although I believe that teachers should develop

routines and other management approaches based on their own teaching philosophies,

developing a store of principled strategies will help them avoid some of the typical difficulties

new teachers face and, perhaps, help them respond to failure positively. Routines like those

Brian describes in this article can be adapted to many contexts and will help establish the sort of

classroom atmosphere where students feel safe to express themselves and to commit themselves

to the high-quality work expected of them.

Since spending time with Brian, however, I realize that talking about these classroom

management approaches and having student write papers about them is not enough. This

problem of practice raises another question that I am certain concerns many teacher educators.

Of course, we want to place student teachers with competent, experienced cooperating teachers

as mentors. But, as Brian notes, with such experienced cooperating teachers, the student teacher



inherits a classroom where classroom management issues are taken care of, even invisible, and

the student teacher seldom gets real practice in establishing him or herself as an authority or in

deciding what to do when students don’t comply with requests. In the future, we can emphasize

to our cooperating teachers that our student teachers need to establish their own classroom

procedures, and perhaps the cooperating teachers should be counseled to take a more hands-off

approach with student teachers, allowing them to make more mistakes and figure out how to

correct them or overcome errors in judgment.

My work with Brian has reinforced my commitment to prepare teachers who believe in

challenging all students to be critical readers of their own experiences and active agents in their

own educations while also providing students with access to the discourses of power that will

allow them to succeed academically. In the past, I think I have overemphasized a need for

opening a space for student voices and underemphasized the need for students to acquire the

discourses of power. My interactions and observations at HCS have convinced me that I need to

challenge my education students to address the balance Delpit calls for. Students need to be

learning the discourses of power, but they also need to learn about the cultural and political

contexts of these discourses.

This self-study with Brian has energized and challenged me. Our discussions have helped me

trace more clearly the connections between theory and practice, and I have returned to my own

classes with a better understanding of how to help my students make those connections. My

discussions with Brian have revealed to me how theory can seem irrelevant and impractical.

I have been challenged to articulate the practical value of the theories underpinning our program

and to reevaluate those theories in light of Brian’s practice.

Brian’s Epilogue

As I stated before, it wasn’t until my third year of teaching that I had established the routines and

systems necessary to help a class run smoothly. It wasn’t until then that I could ask myself,

“What next?” and honestly start thinking in depth about what I was taught in college. Oddly, it

was at this moment that I finally was able to appreciate all of the teaching that Jean and her

counterparts had put forth during my college years. Many of my classmates from college

probably came to this realization far earlier than I did, but many of them were in situations where

the populations they were working with presented problems that they were far better equipped to

deal with.

It is now clear to me that student-run, democratic classrooms are possible and necessary.

As Delpit (1996) argues, giving the students direct and explicit access to the discourses of power

is vital, while at the same time respecting the discourse where the students have come from.

The theory that I learned in college really is practical – once I learned how to survive.

Conclusion

Re-entering the classroom as a learner reminded Jean of the day-to-day challenges of teaching,

and it seems obvious that if teacher educators hope to change teachers’ minds about how

educational theory can serve efforts for equity, they must be willing to have their own minds’

changed by listening to the teachers’ critiques and engaging in serious self-critique about how

truly useful their prized theories are in the life of the classroom. Pressures to publish may very

well push busy college faculty to produce superficial research that not only fails to portray

teachers’ lives in their full complexity, but also, because the research can be seen to dismiss the

sorts of challenges teachers face in schools, may reinforce practicing teachers’ beliefs that these

professors from the bubble of academia really do not know what it is like in the trenches of the



classroom. Because education faculty in schools of education are afforded the expertise to make

pronouncements about what teachers should be doing in their classrooms but spend little time

actually teaching in those classrooms, some skepticism about those pronouncements seems

understandable. Until education faculty can devise more effective ways to make the tacit

theory–practice connections more obvious and more powerful to prospective and practicing

teachers who choose this vocation to work for social justice, the communication barriers

between teacher educators and teachers will continue to produce misgivings about the uses of

educational theory and a lack of respect for the work teachers and teacher educators do.

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