|
Article Excerpt
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
At first glance, the video tape of one day in Yvonne Hutchinson's classroom showed work that was effortless. Hutchinson calmly moved around among the ninth-grade students while they went over their homework and discussed their reading of A Call to Assembly, an autobiography of the jazz musician and professor Willie Ruff. There was some commotion in the classroom as Hutchinson organized a group discussion, but soon the students began talking, calling on one another, responding to one another, referring to the text they were reading, and making connections to their own lives. Hutchinson casually interjected a comment or a question here or there, but for the most part, the students seemed to be talking about the book among themselves.
From the perspective of the preservice teachers from the Stanford Teacher Education Program who were watching the video, Hutchinson's classroom provided a vision of the possible--an image of what a group discussion could look like. In some ways, however, the video also provided a vision of the impossible: How could these preservice teachers, many of whom had never seen or led a group discussion in their own teaching placements, produce or even approximate the teaching moves that Yvonne Hutchinson had cultivated over a career of more than 30 years?
For teacher educators and the novice teachers they seek to support, these kinds of representations of teaching provide a dual challenge: These viewers need to be able to see what is there and to see what is not; they need to be able to analyze the many elements of teaching and learning that are captured in video and other media, but they also need to have a sense of what those representations fail to capture---crucial details that might be obscured, larger contexts in which work may be situated, overarching purposes, histories, and long-term relationships invisible in daily interactions (Ball & Lampert, 1999).
Part of this challenge involves the difficulty of analyzing the highly complex practice of leading a rich discussion. Leading a classroom discussion involves multiple components, including establishing norms for participation, assisting students in engaging in careful readings of text ahead of time, and modeling features of academic discourse. In other work, Grossman and her colleagues (Grossman et. al., 2009) refer to this as the "decomposition" of practice--breaking down complex practice into its constituent parts for the purposes of teaching and learning. If decomposing practice enables novices to "see" and supports them in enacting practice, how can multimedia records of practice illustrate both the fluid performance and the individual parts that contribute to such fluidity without making teaching seem rote or simplistic?
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
This challenge--to make teaching accessible for analysis while still capturing its complexity--serves as the focus of a digital exhibition that brings together four Web sites that represent teaching using group discussions in four different ways and contexts (A list of Web sites referred to is included at the end of this article).
This overview of the exhibition describes the background of the work on these Web sites, the conceptual framework that guides the development of the Web sites and this digital exhibition, and a discussion of the exhibition and the implications for the development and exchange of these kinds of multimedia representations of teaching, and their use in teacher education, in the future.
Background
This exhibition grows out of work begun at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where Hutchinson was a member of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL). (1) CASTL provided fellowships to faculty in both K-12 and higher education who had been nominated for both their excellence in teaching and their involvement in efforts to study and document their practice. At that same time, staff at the Carnegie Foundation including Thomas Hatch, Toru Iiyoshi, Desiree Pointer-Mace, and others were exploring the use of multimedia and Web-based forms of representation to document the practice of CASTL fellows. One exploration included a brief trip by Pointer-Mace to videotape one day in Hutchinson's class and a subsequent collaborative effort to develop a Web site that represented Hutchinson's teaching in that class.
Although the initial Web sites explored a number of different forms of representation of teaching, for the most part, the Web sites produced fit the general description of "records of practice" (Lampert & Ball, 1998; Le Fevre, 2004). Records of practice consist of "raw" materials (which may include largely unedited video but also curricula, student work, and other materials used in the course of planning, instruction, and assessment) as well as interviews, reflections, notes, and commentaries that relate to the raw materials but were not used in the course of instruction. We see this work as situated between efforts that focus primarily on the generation, exchange, and discussion of raw materials (e.g., Hiebert, Gallimore, & Stigler, 2002) and efforts to produce more polished cases and other products designed specifically to foster discussion of particular practices, problems, or dilemmas (e.g., Abell & Cennamo, 2004; Stephens, 2004).
Records and representations of practice vary considerably in terms of "grain size" (Goldman, 1995; Sherin, 2004) from those that focus on short segments of classroom interaction (like those used in "microteaching" analyses) to those that address entire courses or a year or more of teaching (Lampert & Ball, 1998). Many of the Web sites we produced, including those in this exhibition, focused on documenting the teaching of one teacher during one class period or one instructional unit. We selected this unit of analysis because teachers and researchers are both accustomed to talking about and investigating the work of teaching in this way, and it provided a reasonable boundary for the collection of data and information that would otherwise have been overwhelming (for related approaches, see Fishman, 2004, and Hiebert et al., 2002).
In contrast to approaches that seek to embed video or multimedia representations in particular educational programs or learning platforms, the Web site format was chosen so that these representations could be made freely available over the Internet to anyone who might want to view or use them. In addition, this public Web site format was designed to enable viewers to pass on to others and cite these representations of teaching, just as researchers might refer colleagues to their empirical studies or other publications.
[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]
The work on these Web-based representations of practice was also part of a broader effort to support and stimulate the development of new scholarly genres that might enable and encourage the development and exchange of representations of teaching produced by practicing teachers as well as others (Hatch, 2006). Consistent with these aims, the initial work sought to explore the affordances of different kinds of representations rather than to produce Web sites that would serve one specific purpose or one group of viewers. The point was to develop representations that would foster the analysis and discussion of many different aspects of teaching and learning rather than to promote particular approaches or "best practices." (For further discussion and commentaries on the development and uses of these representations, see Hatch & Pointer-Mace, 2006.)
Although the initial Web sites were not designed to be used in teacher education, Grossman and other colleagues, including Anna Richert, Kathy Schultz, and others, saw opportunities to engage their teacher education students in collaborative examinations of ideas and practices that were central to their courses but that their students did not necessarily have a way to observe in practice. To pursue these opportunities and consider the usefulness of these kinds of Web-based representations in teacher education, the Carnegie Foundation launched the Quest Project. (2) In the Quest Project, Grossman, Schultz, Richert, and other teacher educators incorporated one or more of the CASTL Web sites into a course that they were teaching, and they documented the results in Web sites later made available in an online gallery: Inside Teaching.
[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]
As part of the Quest Project, in fall 2003, Grossman developed a series of assignments in her methods course for secondary English teachers that involved the examination of Hutchinson's Web site. Although Grossman's students found the examination of Hutchinson's Web site productive and useful, their experiences also highlighted the problem that what Hutchinson was doing seemed to be far removed from what many of them felt might be possible in their contexts in the first years of their careers. They lacked examples of "near-peers" trying to enact similar practices in their classrooms. Therefore, when two students from that class in 2003--Travis Bristol and Emily Venson--moved to New York City to teach in public schools there, Thomas Hatch and colleagues at the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching sought to develop Web sites to document the teaching of group discussion of these novice teachers. Bristol and Venson's Web sites were designed primarily for...
|
