Pam Grossman Stanford University Pam Grossman is a professor of Education at Stanford University.  Her areas of research include policy and practice related to teacher education and professional education more broadly, and the teaching of secondary English.  She also teaches the prospective English teachers in Stanford’s teacher education program, where she first used these materials. In her comments, Professor Grossman explores the potential of these websites for use in teacher education, as well as some of the challenges involved in using web-based representations of teaching.  She draws on her own experience in using the sites of Yvonne Divans Hutchinson and Marsha Pincus in her work with prospective teachers.

One of the challenges facing teacher educators is that teaching is complex work that can look easy.  It is also work that is deeply familiar to people who have spent much of their lives in schools.  How, then, do teacher educators cultivate the perception of novice teachers, enabling them to see the elements that make up this complex work we call teaching?   A second challenge facing teacher educators is that our students do not necessarily have opportunities to see or experience the kinds of practices we are trying to teach them.   For example, as someone who teaches prospective English teachers, I often worry about my students’ opportunities to experience rich, student-centered, text-based discussions of literature.  As the research suggests, such discussions are rare, more often resembling “gentle inquisitions” than lively conversations.  If one of the distinctive pedagogies of the English/Language Arts classrooms involves discussion, how can I provide opportunities—virtual or otherwise—for students to develop richer images of practice?

Representations of teaching, including multimedia representations such as the Exhibition websites, provide unique opportunities for novice teachers to learn from practice. Such representations have the potential of capturing at least some of the complexity of classroom life and provide sites for investigations into practice.  Representations of practice vary in important ways, from comprehensive records of a full year of instruction in a single teacher’s classroom, as represented by Magdalene Lampert and Deborah Ball’s work on multimedia records of the teaching of mathematics (Lampert & Ball, 1998)  to websites that capture a single unit of instruction.  Decisions about what aspects of practice to represent and how to represent them are consequential for what novices are able to learn. What do different representations enable novices to see?  What is made explicit?  What remains implicit?  How do we help novices makes sense of the videos and student work available on such sites?

After encountering an early version of the website of Yvonne Divans Hutchinson as part of a small group of teacher educators who wanted to experiment with using these sites in preservice teacher education, I realized the potential these kinds of websites hold for teaching novice teachers.   I initially focused on Yvonne Divans Hutchinson’s site in large part because it contained examples of the kind of rich discussions I wanted my students to see.  However, the original site contained a single video of a two-hour class late in the year, when students had already internalized many of the norms and practices regarding discussion that Yvonne had taught them.  She made it look easy, when I knew that such discussions are incredibly difficult to orchestrate.   I worried that my students would miss the scaffolding that I knew must have preceded this discussion.

One thing that novices have to learn is the relative difficulty of different practices.  In his work on veterinary medicine, Pinch and his colleagues (Pinch, Collins, & Carbone, 1997) call this a “second order skill” of learning practice.  For novices, most aspects of complex practice can be equally challenging. How do they learn to distinguish between aspects of practice that will become more routine, and less difficult, with time and those that will always demand a high level of skill?  Part of what I wanted my students to learn from Yvonne is the complexity of preparing for rich discussions of text, and the kinds of scaffolding that the teacher needs to provide prior to discussions.  The original website did not include images of the earlier scaffolding; all that was visible was the finished product.

In response to my concerns, Yvonne Hutchinson and Desiree Pointer Mace worked together to document some of the earlier scaffolding, by returning to Yvonne’s classroom the following fall to videotape lessons on annotating text and learning to ask questions of text.  These additional materials provided my students with a much deeper sense of the kinds of work Yvonne did to prepare her students for the successful end-of-year discussion.   Through both videos and hand-outs, my students were able to see how Yvonne taught her students to annotate text and to generate questions about text, a necessary precursor a text-based discussion. 

Learning to See

However, even if these representations include multiple dimensions of practice, the materials do not teach themselves.  Teacher educators need to find ways of helping novices navigate and learn from the materials.  Having these multimedia records of practice represents a huge resource for teacher learning, but like any other resource, it can be used more or less productively.  From the outset, I wanted students not to engage actively with the website, to derive principles of leading discussions from this example.  Inspired by the work of Deborah Ball and Magdalene Lampert on their hypermedia materials, my colleague Christa Compton and I developed an assignment that asked students to investigate the site in pairs looking at question such as:

• What norms does Yvonne establish for discussion? How does she reinforce them throughout the class period?
• How does Yvonne monitor participation in the whole class discussion?  Pay attention to who speaks and for how long.  What does Yvonne do to encourage everyone’s participation?  Identify several strategies she uses and how they work.
  
• How does Yvonne respond to student interpretations about the text?  Identify interpretations students generate about the story.  Which interpretations seem on target, and which seem less substantiated by the text?
• What strategies for reading literature is Yvonne teaching?  How do these appear in the discussion?  How are these strategies introduced early in the year?

(This assignment and several related assignments are documented in the website we created to share our practice.)

Such questions focus students’ attention on particular facets of practice, helping them develop a richer sense of the different elements that go into leading discussions.  The questions also direct students to look at what happens earlier in the school year that might help account for what they see in spring.   The assignment tried as well to maintain an inquiry stance towards teaching, providing a model of how novices might learn from the practice of more experienced practitioners.  After investigating these questions, they then lead a discussion with their peers, using clips from Yvonne’s site to illustrate points or provoke response. 

Student Teachers Lead Discussions in My Course

These investigations depend upon the nature of the representations available to novices.   Without materials from early in the year, my students would not be able to look at the nature of scaffolding across the year.  But the question of how much of the earlier classroom work must be represented to support the learning of novice teachers remains, as do  questions related to the form of representation.  Do novice teachers need actual classroom video of Yvonne teaching students to annotate text?  Would detailed narratives of her practice, along with supporting examples of classroom work suffice?  What are they able to learn from watching Yvonne in actual classroom footage that they could not learn from narrative descriptions of her classroom?  Given the amount of time required to navigate these sites and watch the videos, what must be give up in the existing curriculum?   While my students learn a tremendous amount from these extended observations of Yvonne, they are still only seeing a single example; what might they learn from investigating multiple, but less extensive, representations of teaching?  These are questions that require further research of a comparative nature.

Learning to Do

To learn to teach, novices need more than representations of practice, no matter how detailed and generative.  They also need opportunities to enact new practices in the context of the classroom and then to debrief and learn from their efforts.  For this reason, we developed a second part of the assignment around Yvonne’s materials, in which we asked our students to try out something they had learned from Yvonne in their own classrooms and to use their own practice as a site for learning.  It is only through these cycles of experimentation that students truly learn what it means to establish or reinforce norms for discussion, for example, or to use an anticipation guide.  While the experience was sobering for students, they also learned some important lessons, both about themselves and their students.  As the following clips suggest, they developed both a new appreciation for the complexity and difficulty of what seemed initially to be so straightforward, as well as a new appreciation of their students’ capacities. 

While teacher educators have been using videos of classrooms for many years, these multi-media websites represent the power of richer portrayals of teaching, through the inclusion of interviews with teachers, examples of student work, and classroom artifacts.  Novices have access not only to what teachers do in classrooms, but the thinking behind the action.  Websites that capture practice over time enable novices to track the development of student thinking, not only in classroom interactions but through archives of student work.   The documentation of a unit of instruction, such as Marsha Pincus’s website on the teaching of Macbeth, offers novices a chance to see what holds the disparate components of the language arts together, as well as to develop strategies for using performance in the teaching of Shakespeare.  As we develop more such sites, we will need to get smarter both about how to archive such sites, to make them easily accessible to teachers and teacher educators, among others, and also about what makes sites particularly generative for learning from practice.  But we also need to think carefully about pedagogy accompanying these representations.  Investigating such multi-layered sites takes time, a commodity in extremely short supply among preservice teachers.  Teacher educators face their own pedagogical challenges in selecting and using multi-media materials in their classrooms.  Despite the enormous potential of such sites as resources for teacher learning, simply asking novices to explore these sites on their own may be akin to sending novices off to observe in classrooms; they will undoubtedly learn something along the way, but the experience may be as likely to prove miseducative, to use Dewey’s term, as educative.  The hope is that as more teachers and teacher educators collaborate around the development and use of such sites, we will develop a deeper understanding of how to make the use of these materials a powerful resource for learning to teach.

References

Lampert, M. & Ball, D. L. (1998).  Teaching, multimedia, and mathematics. New York: Teachers College Press (pp. 23-59).

Pinch, T., Collins, H. M., & Carbone, L. (1997).  Cutting up skills: estimating difficulty as an element of surgical and other abilities.  In S. R. Barley & J. E. Orr (Eds.), Between craft and science: Technical work in U. S. settings.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.