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Building on students'' experiences in teacher education.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Student-sparked discussions of personal teaching experiences can be one of the most powerful learning experiences offered in teacher education courses. Framing practice-based discussions to provide reflective distance on experience and to encourage making connections to theory and research is often a challenge. This article chronicles and analyzes the use of a process of writing case studies as a structure for focusing and enriching discussion of practice within a graduate course on teaching writing to children.

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Spring 1999, I share the stage in a mini-drama played out again and again in teacher education classes in colleges and universities across the United States. I am teaching "The Teaching of Writing" to prospective and practicing teachers for only the second time. My apprenticeship with my own master teacher is fresh in my mind. My hopes are high. I unveil the ideas, theory and research that underpin current thinking about writing with children and invite students to use them to build a frame for thinking about what happens in elementary school classrooms.

The preservice and inservice teachers work as problem solvers. They are eager to focus on their personal teaching dilemmas in order to make sense of the theory and research that comprise the content of the course. I, like others who work with adult graduate students (Merriam and Caffarella, 1991; Taylor and Marienau, 1995), understand the tremendous value of working from students' own experiences in helping them learn. I am committed to integrating their stories of nitty-gritty classroom life into course work in order to foster the reflective thinking necessary for true learning from experience (Kulb, 1984; Brookfield, 1986). But, my efforts to meld discussion of theory and practice go awry in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For example, when a student introduces a pressing problem, others, sensing the immediacy and import of a colleague's dilemma, jump directly to a problem-solving mode. They throw out suggestions and ideas without stopping to see what might lie behind the problem. With little or no reflective distance, the student who has introduced the problem takes on the role of evaluator. She judges the efficacy of all suggestions and ideas on the spot using standards buried in the unarticulated specifics of her experience.

Then, the students' high estimation of the value of teaching experience establishes an informal hierarchy. Students who have more experience working in classrooms ascend as experts while their preservice counterparts remain silent. The entire class loses the benefit of important questions and critical responses from the fresh perspective of the less experienced. Finally, as students connect to personal experiences loudly, clearly and--from my point of view--inopportunely, I make hurried decisions that give short shrift to the very experience I want to honor. Tension builds. Theory and research appear to stand in opposition to experience...

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