This review has been accessed  times since October 30, 1998
Eleanor Duckworth and the Experienced Teachers Group.
(1997).
Teacher to Teacher: Learning from Each Other. New
York:
Teachers College Press
176 pp.
$18.95 (Paper) 0-8077-3652-X
$42 (Cloth) 0-8077-3653-8
Reviewed by Helen Featherstone,
Michigan State University
October 30, 1998
In the fall of 1993,
Eleanor Duckworth and the 13 veteran teachers in the
Experienced Teacher (ET) Program—a year-long graduate
program for experienced teachers at Harvard—met for the
first time. Many teachers escape their classrooms for
graduate school in order to qualify for careers in school
administration, college teaching, curriculum development
or research. The teachers in the ET program came to
Harvard to become better practitioners. Over the course
of the next 9 months they would take 3 courses together
(and 5 other courses of their own choosing), including 2
with Duckworth. In one of these two, T-322, the
program's integrative seminar, they would meet for 3
hours every other week from September to May.
When the 13 teachers
registered for T-322, all any of them knew about the
course was how the catalogue described it:
This course is required of and limited to students
in the Experienced Teachers Program. It considers
theories and collaborative strategies for inquiring
into and improving school practice. The focus is on
practice-based questions and the use of a variety of
kinds of information that bear on these questions:
for example, case studies, classroom observation,
journals, clinical interviewing, video records,
autobiography. Students will spend time in a school
site. Readings will deal with relationships between
theory and practice, and with specific issues that
arise in the course of the year.
With some trepidation,
Duckworth had decided to follow the lead of Catherine who
had taught the seminar in previous years and turn over to
the seminar's participants responsibility for deciding
what the group would study and how they would do this.
"My own inclination," Duckworth explains, "was always to
plan all the readings, the assignments, the
activities—even if there was wide scope for different people to go
about them in different ways." However, Duckworth had
been impressed by what had happened in previous years
when Krupnick had handed students the reins, so she
overcame her misgivings and invited the teachers to
design the seminar. In Teacher to Teacher: Learning
from Each Other , Duckworth and the other teachers
who gathered in the classroom on September 23, 1993, tell
the story of the course that they created together.
Making it Happen
The group had major
difficulties getting started. For one thing, they found
it hard to find ways to talk specifically about practice.
When the two teachers who planned the second meeting
allotted fifteen minutes for "success stories," their
classmates resisted. Duane Grobman, a teacher of primary
grade children from New Mexico and one of the two
planners of this meeting, recalls:
There was strong consensus among the group that they
did not want to share ‘success stories.' Hence we
did not.... Thinking of the schools in which we
taught, if we shared ‘success stories' with other
teachers we feared being perceived as boastful,
proud, arrogant, or prescriptive, all of which the
culture of teaching (and perhaps our personal
convictions) told us to avoid.
It is tempting to dismiss
the reluctance Grobman describes here as an obstacle to
be overcome, a feature of the culture of teaching that
undercuts efforts to create a healthy culture of
collective inquiry. But Teacher to Teacher also
shows its human basis. Six weeks later, after the
teachers have talked for several hours about strategies
they have used to motivate reluctant students, Kristin
Newton, who teaches physics at Cambridge (Massachusetts)
Rindge and Latin School, writes:
It was ...depressing for me to hear about the
success stories. I don't feel I've had any "success
stories" this year. I didn't get anything out of
hearing about students who suddenly turned around
and became wonderful. (What a selfish thing for me
to say!!)
Newton's feelings (and the
guilt and discomfort she feels in exposing them) make
human sense and they remind us that change is complex
precisely because existing norms and teaching practices
almost always serve real needs.
Setting an agenda for
the year proves to be just as difficult as setting norms
that enable specific and useful talk about practice.
When the October 21 session ends without a decision about
"curriculum" for the course, many teachers feel
discouraged although most seemed to recognize, at least
in retrospect, the impossibility of nailing down a
curriculum for the year in an hour-long discussion.
Although the group does hammer out a kind of agenda two
weeks later, frustrations do not evaporate. In early
February Newton writes in her journal:
Okay, here goes. I'm sick of it, I don't want to
talk any more about what we are going to write, what
we are going to talk about, or any more planning.
We need a leader to make these decisions for us so
that we can get on to whatever we are here to do.
Another teacher struggles to
understand why the seminar "feels weird, " while a third
observes, "I believe in student-driven curriculum, but
am craving a clearer sense of purpose." A fourth teacher
comments on the irony of her frustration: "If I could
have wished for the perfect way to learn, it would be in
a place where the learners are responsible for how that
learning happens. Now that I am in that wishful place, I
wish it were different."
In mid-February the
class turns a corner. Several class members, in the
course of a chance hallway encounter, decide to address
the collective malaise by finding a nicer room for the
Thursday evening meetings. They are amazed to discover
how easy this is—they do not even need the permission of
the instructor to make this change official. To highlight
the potential importance of the change of venue, they
organize a kind of treasure hunt to lead their classmates
and instructor from the old classroom to the new one,
where they have laid out a lavish meal (complete with
wine). "What a great class!" exults a New York City high
school teacher. "I feel good because it seemed like
there was action taken in the class. People were feeling
dissatisfied and they did something about it." Others
echo her sentiments. In addition to celebrating the
charms of the new room and the decisive action of those
who relocated the class, seminar participants write
enthusiastically about the evening's work. Following up
on a decision made at the previous meeting, everyone
spends the first half hour of class conferring with a
partner about a piece of writing they want to share; the
group then continues an earlier conversation about
assessment by reflecting on their own experiences with
grades at Harvard and discussing assessment strategies
they have used as teachers.
The teachers
responsible for the next class capitalize on the momentum
by creating activities that involve their classmates in
exploration and in reflection on that exploration; by
mid-March the journal entries suggest that students are
both enjoying and valuing their time together. At their
next meeting seminar members begin to talk about writing
a book about the work they have been doing together.
They establish norms that seem to allow them to agree
about what to pursue and how to conduct these joint
investigations. The journal entries explore substantive
issues rather than frustrations with the shape of the
collective conversation. A learning community has
apparently emerged from the angst.
And so the chapter
describing the course's last formal meeting brings the
reader up short. Planned as an exploration of
multiculturalism, with a structure that seems to make
good use of the community so laboriously achieved, the
session becomes painfully embarrassing to several of the
seminar's most conscientiously committed members and
leaves others feeling angry, deceived, and manipulated.
When the group gathers at Duckworth's house a week later
to celebrate a year well spent, tensions linger. The way
in which the group address the anger and hurt feelings
that remained reminded this reader how rarely open
discussion of loaded topics is achieved in the staff
rooms of our schools.
Multiple Perspectives
It would be impossible for
any reader of Teacher to Teacher to compose a
narrative summary of the events this book describes
without seeing with inhibiting clarity that hers is but
one possible account of what happened in T-322 between
September 1993 and May 1994 and that each of the 14
teachers—and probably each reader—would construct the
story differently. The book's architecture reminds the
reader continually of this point. Sixteen chapters,
each of which describes and documents one course meeting,
form the narrative backbone of the book. Interleaved
among these chapters are 7 "interludes," each written by
a different teacher (as a part of the work for T-322) and
each focused on the challenges facing a particular
teacher in a particular classroom.
The group parceled out
responsibility for the narrative chapters among its
members: Ten of the 13 teachers are listed as authors of
one or more chapters; in most cases at least one of the
authors facilitated and planned the class the chapter
describes. Because few classes were audio taped the
writers must rely to some extent on memory and notes for
their accounts of what they planned and what actually
happened. Another data source, however, provides
fascinating insight into what I think of as the inaudible
classroom discourse: the unarticulated thoughts and
feelings of participants. Members of the seminar wrote
journal reflections after every class; they gave one copy
of their journal to the classmate who had volunteered to
respond to the journals that week and deposited a second
copy in a folder in the library that others class members
could read before the next class meeting. Authors of the
chapters used these journals both to reconstruct what had
happened in the meetings and to show what classmates made
of these events. Text from the journals comprises more
than two-thirds of most chapters.
The result is both
fascinating and occasionally frustrating. Although these
journals are surely not uncensored records of each
teacher's thoughts, they do provide insights into
responses that were not voiced in class discussions. The
rich documentation of the inner conversation allows us to
understand the frustrations of teachers who long to
accept Duckworth's invitation to tailor a course to their
own burning questions, who believe in this sort of
responsive curriculum, but who have only nine months to
get everything they have dreamed a year at Harvard could
offer them and itch to get started on the probing
investigations of teaching that they hope will enable
them to return to their classrooms equipped to make a new
start at a higher level. The journal reflections show
how differently different people can see the same
conversation. They also highlight the complexities of
the apparently simple acts of speaking and listening.
Here for example, is Doug Jones, a math and Latin
teacher, reflecting on his own effort to step out of the
center of the conversation in order to listen more:
I was intrigued by Mark's attempt to participate
less in class last night, and I decided to follow
his lead. Unfortunately, I was not able to do this
by listening more closely to the rest of the class,
but instead I became distracted and disengaged with
the discussion. I found it difficult to be quiet
without being passive.
The frustration, for a
reader passionately interested in teachers' professional
development and in the challenges and possibilities faced
by teachers who try to organize like-minded colleagues
into groups for studying teaching, is that we get only
glimpses of the conversations the journal writers are
reacting to. Without audiotape of the meetings there can
be no quotes from transcripts and, presumably because
they are writing for others who were present at the
meeting, the journal writers rarely paraphrase remembered
dialogue or synopsize points made. So, for example,
during the February 17 meeting, in an effort to deepen
their understanding of assessment, the teachers discussed
their own experiences of assessment as students at
Harvard, and then talked about assessment strategies they
had used in their own classrooms. About this second
discussion the authors of the chapter tell us only that
"Burry [Gowen] had brought several examples of student
work, and we listened to him explain the assignments and
his assessment of them." They follow this up with two
teachers' journal entries; one (see below) reflects on
the ways in which listening to Gowen's presentation has
enlarged her own understanding assessment; the other
teacher writes about "one assessment topic I wanted to
discuss that was only alluded to": standardized testing.
Both reflections are well-written and thoughtful, but
neither explain what Gowen actually said.
But although we might
wish to hear more about the in-class conversations, the
reliance on the teachers' written journals allows us to
hear the eloquence and insight of these teachers in a way
that transcripts of conversation never would. This is an
accomplishment of considerable importance. In much
writing about education, the quoted words of teachers
come from interview transcripts or taped discussions.
The words on the page are written versions of spoken
texts, and in consequence the teachers almost always
sound less articulate and less logical than the academics
who are writing about them. For it is in the nature of
spoken language to rely on context, on tone and
expression, on gesture, and on unspoken feedback from
listeners to convey meaning; and it is in the nature of
discussion—perhaps it is the defining mark of really
good conversation—that people offer ideas that are still
embryonic. Words that sparkle and inspire in the context
of a conversation may barely make sense when represented
on a transcript, complete with false starts, throat
clearings, and unfinished sentences. But because the
words of the teachers in the Experienced Teacher Group
began life as written text, readers hear their eloquence
clearly.
What Do Teachers Learn from one another?
Because a number of
reformers have suggested that teachers can learn a great
deal from one another, and that groups of teachers
committed to the creation and analysis of new reform
pedagogies may provide answers to the enormous
professional development challenges posed by the current
reform movements, (see, for example, Ball and Cohen, in
press, and Lord, 1994) most readers will hope to learn
more about what teachers in a group like this one
learn. The authors have not provided any simple answers
to this inevitable question. Indeed, Teacher to
Teacher reads in some ways more like a notebook of
data documenting the life of a group than like the sort
of analysis of this data that we might have expected from
an academic press. To me, however, the lack of analysis
makes good sense. The authors are at pains to
communicate the texture of an experience that felt
powerfully transformative to many of them. They are
determined, as well, to convey its multiplicity: there is
no one story of the year, or even of one meeting; there
are 14 individual stories of an experience which, for all
the efforts of participants to speak and write honestly
about their thoughts and feelings, are experienced
individually and privately. If we want to understand
what teachers learn in such a group, we must approach our
question one teacher at a time.
The extensive excerpts
from journal reflections give the reader some help in
doing this sort of thinking. Because they are written
after and in response to each meeting, the journal
entries represent the thoughts prompted by the meeting
rather than its actual content. In some cases these
suggest a good deal about what a particular participant
learned on a particular evening. Consider, for
example, Jane Kays's response to Burry Gowen's
presentation on assessment:
As Burry explained the various kinds of assessment
samples he'd brought to class, I began to associate
assessment with many different classroom activities.
I began to see assessment differently, as a form of
evaluation that follows a continuum from informal
classroom interactions to more serious and planned
testing procedures.
Prior to this revelation, assessment meant "test."
Now, I realize that when I engage my students (grade
4) in a discussion about all the characteristics of
air, I am evaluating their understanding of air.
From that point on we might predict certain outcomes
pertaining to the properties of air. Again, I am
assessing how well they make sense of a particular
problem....
Simultaneously, another form of evaluation
continues....I am wondering what I could have done
differently to improve a lesson, or I reflect about
the success of a lesson.....
Many teachers (myself included) dislike non-teaching
duties such as "yard duty." As I think about
greeting the students as they arrive in the morning,
it is easy to spot a child who did not have as
cheerful a morning as we imagine young children to
have. Here again is a form of assessment.... I
guess the evaluative continuum begins as we enter
the school each day and continues until we leave in
the P.M. On second thought, does it ever end?
Thanks, Burry for opening my eyes.
Gowen's presentation seems
to have helped Kays to rethink her images of assessment
and to formulate some ideas that might well have a
visible impact on her teaching. Readers get a glimpse in
this and certain other journals of what the subtitle,
"Teachers learning from each other," might mean. But
only a glimpse. There is probably more learning going on
than we can see.
Much of what
experienced teachers may learn from open-ended
discussions with colleagues is difficult to define or
describe. Learning about teaching is mostly quite
different from learning to put buttonholes on a shirt, to
compute the quotient of two multi-digit numbers, or to
send a document by Email. This is especially true when
the learners are experienced teachers who already know
how to write a lesson plan and how to stop a conversation
in the back row while continuing to explain an
assignment. One participant in a group of elementary and
middle school teachers who met biweekly for several years
to work on issues related to their mathematics teaching
reported that the group had helped her to improve and
reflect on her practice partly by serving as an audience
for that work. Rewarding as it was to create and
orchestrate lessons in which her students worked together
to make sense of mathematical ideas, she knew that this
satisfaction alone would not compensate her for the toll
taken by ongoing battles with her principal about
coverage of the textbook; from her colleagues in the math
group she got practical help, but also reassurance that
her struggles were important not only to the children in
her classes but also to the wider field of education.
The group connected her to a larger professional
conversation.
Many different voices—
ranging from that of the National Council of Teachers of
Mathematics to those of the school principal and little
boy in the back row—try to influence what a teacher
does in her classroom. Newton's Gravitational Law—which
states that every object in the universe attracts every
other object with a force inversely proportional to the
square of the distance between those objects—explains
the forces acting on educators almost as accurately as it
describes the action of the earth's gravity on the moon.
A teacher is much more likely to be influenced by the
behavior, visible needs, and desires of the students in
her class than by the memos from the district curriculum
committee because students make their wishes felt
forcefully and continually within the confines of a small
classroom. As nearly every commentator since Willard
Waller has pointed out, teachers are isolated from other
professionals. Meeting regularly with a group of
colleagues to discuss ways to improve classroom practice
creates another force field—an audience that raises a
second set of issues. Unlike the children in the
classroom, this audience considers questions drawn from a
larger agenda,. Although such a group wields no political
or practical power, it can influence a teacher's
thinking—and practice—profoundly.
Teacher Narrative as Genre
The final chapters of
Teacher to Teacher caught me oddly off guard; as I
closed the book I realized that it had not ended as I was
expecting it to. The group's last formal meeting trails
off in a tangle of hurt, anger, and confusion. The
"interlude" that follows the account of this meeting,
Jane Kays's "Outsiders Still," echoes its emotional tone
in a way for which I was unprepared. Twenty-five years
ago, before bitter bussing battles divided Boston, Kays
taught in an inner city school; she recalls the warmth
with which neighbors and merchants greeted her, a white
woman, and her mostly African-American charges as they
trooped along the sidewalks to the local library. She
still teaches in Boston, but her current school is in a
neighborhood of "neat single family homes on tidy
streets." She still hopes that a class trip to the
library will help the children to fall in love with books
and to feel comfortable in an intimidating public
building, but she knows that an expedition to the library
a few blocks from the school will not be sufficient: Her
students come from all over the city and are served by
six different branch libraries. Kays decides to visit
all six with her fourth grade class.
Her account of the class's
first venture outside the neighborhood ends on an
unexpectedly wrenching note:
As the children waited at the first crosswalk, I
inched off the crosswalk, instinctively knowing that
the approaching sedan would pause and wave us ahead.
Instead the driver glared and smeared his tires
around the corner in front of us. I'm sure the
children noticed nothing but the freedom of the
autumn air; I felt the sting of a time two decades
ago when whites were forced to send their children
to schools in black neighborhoods and accept others
into their neighborhood schools. Rather than send
their children to a location they did not prefer,
many fled the system and saturated the local
parochial schools. However, they could not deny
black students the right to attend the schools that
they abandoned.
Now, 25 years later, the attitudes that purged the
schools of their whiteness are as strong as they
were when busing was first implemented. I knew the
driver who denied our passing was not harried by
time but irked by the outsiders who continued to
invade his space.
Here the essay ends. My
open-mouthed response to Kays's final paragraphs has made
me think hard about the predictable features of teacher
narratives, the ways in which these stories—from
The Thread that Runs So True (Stuart, 1949) to
The Girl with the Brown Crayon (Paley, 1997)—tend
to resolve tensions in the final pages, creating some
version of a happy ending. Surely the conventions that
led me to expect another chapter in Kays's account of the
library trips shape not only how stories of
teaching get told, but also who tells them. Teachers who
feel simply saddened or confused by their experiences
rarely write their own stories—and may even tell fewer
of them at the dinner table.
A good teacher group
deconstructs these conventions, and invites narratives
that have neither resolutions nor happy endings It makes
room for stories that do not yet make sense to the
tellers. In doing so it breaches the loneliness of
teaching and moves group members and those trying to
listen in on their conversation towards a more complex
understanding of teaching.
References
Ball, D. L. and Cohen, D. K. (in press). Developing
practice, developing practitioners: Toward a practice-
based theory of professional education. In G. Sykes
and L. Darling-Hammond (Eds.), Teaching as the
learning Profession: Handbook of policy and practice.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Lord, B. (1994). In N. Cobb (Ed.), The future of
education: Perspectives on national standards in
America. New York: College Entrance Examination
Board, pp. 175-204.
Paley, V. (1997).The Girl with the Brown Crayon.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Stuart, J. (1949). The thread that runs so true. New
York: Scribners.
About the Reviewer
Helen J. Featherstone
Ed.D., Harvard University
Department of Teacher Education
College of Education
Michigan State University
Email:
feather1@pilot.msu.edu
Helen Featherstone is an Associate Professor of teacher education
who is particularly interested in teachers'
efforts to change their practices. Her research is
concerned with the teaching and learning of mathematics.
She once facilitated a teacher group that met
bi-weekly for 6 years and has, along with other members of the group,
written about aspects of the work of the group.
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