It wasn’t hard to persuade me to participate. I consider teaching to be central to my work, an intellectual exercise in pairing insightful questions with historical sources, closely watching and listening to how students learn, and continually rethinking the process for the next semester. But this group essay assignment also provided an opportunity to rethink how faculty engage in our work as writers. In the traditional mode, we submit our individual essays to editors, without necessarily see or having an opportunity to respond to what other authors are crafting for the same section. Yet this time, the HEQ editors accepted a suggested alternative: to encourage all of the contributors to share our drafts-in-progress in a Google Documents digital folder. This arrangement allowed each of our individual essays to benefit with constructive comments by our peers, and it also created more coherent conversation across our collective works. The key was to insert peer commentary into the middle of our writing process, rather than a traditional review of polished pieces at the end stage, to maximize the value of our feedback to one another.
The best way to understand this HEQ draft commentary process is to reveal the behind-the-scenes process, months before we arrived at the finished product. The examples pictured below feature comments that peers posted on different stages of my writing, because I am the “owner” of these digital drafts, and changed the sharing settings from private to public. I emailed my peers to ask if any wished to delete their comments on my public essay, and no one did. But I do not link to other drafts written by my peers, where many more comments appear, because they own their drafts, not me. If other forum participants wish to do so, they also can make their drafts public, share links and/or screenshots online, or ask me to include them in this essay.
The first draft I shared with the group appeared in this June 2015 Google Document. Looking back, my writing was still in the discovery process. I began by describing a case study comparison in my class — an old one that I had written about elsewhere — but was still searching for the best way to express a new idea that had popped into my head. A few paragraphs into the essay, I rhetorically asked, “Do we ever not use case studies in our history teaching?” My inner skeptic had begun to challenge the writing prompt given to us by the editors, by questioning whether it was impossible to teach history without cases of some type. When we began to comment on each other’s drafts in early July, I noted my temptation to develop this theme further. Three other authors — Heather Lewis, Michael Bowman, and Karen Leroux — offered encouragement and constructive feedback, which shifted my approach. If they thought this half-baked idea had merit, perhaps I should frame it into a thesis and restructure the entire essay. Midway through the writing process, my peers inspired me to rethink and revise.
Excerpt of my first draft with peer comments, from my June 2015 Google Doc
A week later I rewrote the essay and shared it with the group in this July 2015 Google Document. This newer version began with a stronger introductory argument and framework for four sections that followed about different types of cases in history teaching. But in this second round of commentary, my colleagues drew attention to some of my uncertain wording in the body of the essay, particularly the fourth section. When historians teach with role-playing scenarios, such as the highly-praised and widely popular “Reacting to the Past” series, does it favor conflict and competition over empathy and understanding? But that question wasn’t fully developed at the time. In this draft, authors Jon Hale, Ansley Erickson, and Isaac Gottesman posted comments that nudged me to clarify my not-yet-formed internal thoughts into clearer prose that others would understand. For authors who are stuck inside our own heads — something that happens to me quite often — their feedback allowed me to re-read my essay through their eyes, and re-word sentences to communicate more clearly.
Excerpt of my second draft with peer comments, from this July 2015 Google Doc
No doubt, the last draft that I submitted in this final August 2015 Google Document is much stronger than what initially appeared months earlier on my computer screen. But the difference is that I received substantive peer feedback during my writing process, rather than solely at the end, when it’s often too late to significantly restructure and revise. Moreover, my essay became more refined and interconnected with the thinking of other authors because they shared their drafts and welcomed comments at the same time when I was writing and revising mine.
Memo to academic journal editors: If you want scholars to break out of our individual silos and communicate beyond our areas of specialization, then create more interdependent writing and commenting forums such as this one. Also, a memo to historians and other scholars: If the idea of sharing your drafts-in-progress with many colleagues sounds strange to you, then you need to get out of your office more often. Visit more classrooms, from kindergarten through college, that emphasize collaborative writing and peer editing. Read some of the ideas, examples, and tutorials featured in an open-access volume of essays I co-edited with Tennyson O’Donnell, Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning (University of Michigan Press, 2015), or a related volume Writing History in the Digital Age, co-edited with Kristen Nawrotzki (University of Michigan Press, 2013). Try teaching by assigning short essays where students have compelling reasons to share drafts and peer edit one another. Remember that technology is not the end goal, but rather, a tool that can help to restructure our traditionally isolated ways of writing in both teaching and scholarship.
If you want to read the full set of Teaching Forum essays, you’ll need to go to the February 2016 issue of the History of Education Quarterly. Unfortunately, HEQ is published through a proprietary press with a subscriber-only site. At my campus, readers may need to log in through this HEQ ezproxy.trincoll.edu link, which requires a Trinity College username and password. Alas, HEQ does not yet belong to the growing number of open-access scholarly journals. Although my colleagues and I performed the bulk of the labor by writing and commenting on each other’s essays, the proprietary press makes a profit by selling our words, primarily back to our own non-profit academic institutions and our financially struggling libraries. But that’s a different rant, which I’ll save for another time . . .
]]>This week we wrapped up one of the most meaningful writing exercises this semester in my Cities Suburbs and Schools seminar. Rather than typing up a traditional paper to be read only by their professor, Trinity students composed essays on the public web, received feedback on early drafts from our “sister seminar” at Yale University, and final evaluations from a panel of three guest evaluators. Based on similar assignments over the past several years, students work harder on improving their prose — and find the experience to be more intrinsically rewarding — when real audiences are involved in the writing process.
Earlier this month, students carved out their topics and digitized source materials from a list of topics on the recent history of education and activism in the Hartford region. The assignment was to tell a compelling story, with analytical insight and supporting evidence, of no more than 2,500 words, for audiences who may be unfamiliar with the issue. Topics included the 1960s Project Concern city-suburban integration program, the 1969 Hartford documentary film interviews, the 1970s Lumpkin school desegregation case, the 1985 Bloomfield school residency case, and plaintiffs’ perspectives in the 1989 Sheff integration case. This seminar had the advantage of drawing on source materials that previous students had already collected and digitized, so that we could focus more of our energy on the analysis and storytelling. See the students’ web essays at: http://commons.trincoll.edu/cssp/web-essays/. Also, to learn more about the philosophy and planning behind this pedagogical approach, see my essays on related examples in the Web Writing book and a recent Connecticut History Review article.
Many thanks to Mira Debs for teaching her Yale University “sister seminar” on a similar topic for her students who exchanged drafts and peer comments with us via Google Docs this semester. Also, a special thanks to our three guest evaluators — Jasmin Agosto (Trinity ’10), Glenn Mitoma (UConn), and Susan Campbell (U of New Haven) — who recognized the strengths of the students’ work and recommended ways to further revise it for potential publication in the On The Line book that I’m currently writing with several contributors.
Although this specific class assignment has concluded, one way to judge the depth of student learning is to follow how many choose to revise their drafts again — without grades as a motivator — to improve our telling of these important civil rights education stories with broader audiences.
]]>Inevitably, at the start of every semester, a professor will introduce themselves and ask the class to call them by their first name. I was raised to believe that elders, especially teachers, deserve respect, and that addressing them by their first name is very rude.
As a result, I am uncomfortable doing this, and I tend to just address them as “Um.” Should I just put my discomfort aside and use first names, or should I stick to calling them Mr./Ms., regardless of what they asked to be called?
What these professors intend to convey puzzles Miss Manners. That you are all equals? Hardly. Equals cannot flunk one another. And although professors should be open to informed challenges from students, they are presumably more knowledgeable about the subject. (Otherwise, the students are wasting their tuition.)
Perhaps it is to assert that they are young and, to use the old-fashioned expression, “with it.” Can they be sure that the students are not snickering at that claim? Anyway, voluntarily forgoing respect is not a youthful attribute.
But your question is how to deal with it. Try just saying “professor,” but without the surname, so it is descriptive rather than a title. Or if you really want to make the point, you could use “sir” or “madam.”
Dear Miss Manners:
Since your column conveys that you wish to be addressed formally, that is how I will address you.
When meeting students on our first day of class, I always instruct them to address other faculty by the more formal title “Professor” unless specifically told otherwise.
As one of those professors who welcomes students to call me by my first name, I disagree with your advice. Perhaps you overlook that in our classrooms of many cultures, there are multiple ways to show respect for one another, and it begins with listening to other people and how they prefer to be named.
Why do I prefer for students to call me by my first name? The answer is a mix of personal tradition and treating young people as the adults that we expect them to become. Looking back at my own undergraduate education, many faculty who genuinely listened and taught me how to think more clearly also invited me to address them by their first names. Not all did this, of course, but remembering those who did and how it made me feel as an adult, I wish to respect and continue that tradition.
Furthermore, if I was trying to be with it, as you say, I probably would not have assigned a 20+ page syllabus with weekly quizzes and demanding standards for academic assignments. But that’s what learning looks like in my classroom: a combination of high expectations, authentic learning, and addressing each other on a first-name basis.
If we can respect why people prefer to be addressed with they/them pronouns, it’s not too hard to understand why some prefer to be called by their first name. Time to get with it, Miss Manners, and no one is asking you to change your name.
Glad to hear about your interest in open-access (OA) academic book publishing for your proposed anthology. So far I have published three OA books with two different publishers:
For the first two books, which are edited volumes, U of Michigan Press sells print copies and also freely distributes OA digital copies. When you click the DOI links below, the book may be available on different OA platforms, but the first link points to Handle or UMich’s Fulcrum OA edition.
1) Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, eds., Writing History in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.3998/dh.12230987.0001.001.
2) Jack Dougherty and Tennyson O’Donnell, eds., Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.3998/dh.13396229.0001.001.
For the third book (which looks more like a textbook), O’Reilly sells print and digital copies, and we agreed to publish with them because they granted us permission to distribute our own OA edition.
3) Jack Dougherty and Ilya Ilyankou, Hands-On Data Visualization: Interactive Storytelling from Spreadsheets to Code (O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2021), https://HandsOnDataViz.org.
To clarify, I am still working on my fourth OA book, which has been under contract for several years with OA publisher Amherst College Press, which gave me permission to publicly share the OA draft on my Trinity website. But it’s still not yet done.
4) Jack Dougherty and contributors, On the Line: How Schooling, Housing, and Civil Rights Shaped Hartford and Its Suburbs (Amherst College Press, book in-progress and under contract), https://OnTheLine.trincoll.edu.
Also, I worked very closely with my friend Tracey Wilson on a fifth book, a compilation of her historical essays. My job was to set up the software to produce the book in two formats: a digital OA version on the web, and PDFs for the print version that was printed locally and sold by the WH historical society.
5) Tracey M. Wilson, Life in West Hartford (West Hartford, CT: West Hartford Historical Society and Noah Webster House, 2018), https://LifeInWestHartford.org.
I highly recommend OA publishing, but it requires authors to make thoughtful decisions about choosing a publisher that shares your goals. For example, if you want to give away a book AND sell print copies, you need to figure out how that works financially for the publisher. If you also need a publisher’s support for peer review or copyright permissions or copyediting, then you need to work with a publisher that provides those services. Some OA publishers charge up-front fees for services, but I have always worked with OA publishers that did not charge me fees. In fact, I have been offered royalties for books 1-4 above, but always donated them to others.
As you know, I tend to be a do-it-yourself technology person, so I found or modified digital tools to create all five books above in collaboration with the publisher’s workflows. But most authors are looking for an OA publisher who will accept traditional word-processing files and produce the book for them, in both OA digital and print-for-sale editions, and that’s more normal now than it was a decade ago.
So if you want to publish an OA book, how do you go about it?
For a broad approach, look at the Directory of Open Access Books and browse by publisher. Then go to individual publisher OA sites and look for details, fees, etc. For example, see the U Michigan Press OA guide for authors.
Some academic libraries now offer support for faculty authors to create OA books, which shows how some are broadening their mission and changing the definition of what it means to be the “publisher.” For example, Lever Press is an OA book publishing coalition funded by 50+ liberal arts colleges (but Trinity College did not agree to join, sigh…). I’m not aware if the CSCU system library or even the UConn library system offers this service. Ask them!
Then there’s always the DIY method. For your proposed anthology, you could create your own: a) identify out-of-copyright works in the public domain – see Cornell Univ Lib copyright guide b) request publishers of copyrighted works to grant you permission to include excerpts c) compile text and images in original PDFs, or edit in word-processor files and convert those to PDFs d) compile those PDFs into a digital book format and also a print-ready format e) optionally, pay someone to design you a book cover, purchase an ISBN code, etc. f) optionally, print and sell your own copies, or arrange for someone else to print and sell copies g) host the digital book on your own website and/or upload it to a host site
Consider this semi-DIY example: Two decades ago, Hartford author David Radcliffe published a local history book about the Charter Oak Terrace public housing project with a local printer, and wisely kept the copyright. I met him a few years ago and asked him for permission to upload digitized pages of his book to the Internet Archive, under his name and copyright, where nearly 2,000 users have read it:
Hope that helps you to get started.
]]>In Spring 2023 I had the opportunity to offer one of my favorite courses with Trinity undergraduates, Educ 350: Teaching and Learning. While many of my more conventional courses require students to analyze schools and systems through syllabus readings and participant-observation, in Educ 350 students advance their higher-order thinking by designing, teaching, and creating web portfolios of three inquiry-based math or science workshops requested by Grade 3-7 teachers at two partnering Hartford public schools: Expeditional Learning Academy at Moylan School (ELAMS) and Environmental Science Magnet at Mary Hooker School (ESM).
The last time I taught Educ 350 was in Spring 2019, and the Covid pandemic and prolonged recovery made it more challenging than usual to set up the course. Many thanks to our Hartford school coordinators Jennifer Doherty (ELAMS) and Kellie Wagner (ESM) for kindly agreeing to recruit classroom teachers, especially during this period of increased stress and high turnover. I’m very grateful to all who made time and space available to help my students learn how to develop their skills as novice educators, especially since Trinity has no official teacher preparation program (this is a standalone elective course) and our Ed Studies budget has very limited resources to offer (about $200 per coordinator and a $20 gift card for each teacher). I’m intentionally including the dollar amount here to reveal – with embarrassment – how little of Trinity’s $140 million budget is allocated to support this course. But the educational benefits to Trinity students are tremendous, in my view. This essay will highlight three themes that stand out when reflecting on what I’ve learned as an educator this semester: 1) Building Pedagogical Thinking through Public Web Portfolios; 2) From Traditional to Inquiry-Based Teaching and Learning; 3) Strong Peer-to-Peer Reviewing Shifted My Teaching Role.
Readers who already know me will recognize that I’m a strong believer in students sharing their writing on the public web, with protections for individual student privacy, a theme previously discussed in my chapter in Web Writing (U of Michigan Press, 2015). In this course, students created web portfolios to document their intellectual work as teachers, including lesson plans, images and videos of classroom learning, and their reflections on what worked and what they might do differently next time.
This semester I discovered a deeper analogy in one of our new syllabus readings, Peter Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics (Corwin 2021). Liljedahl advances fourteen teaching practices that enhance learning, based on his extensive classroom research. One example is using vertical non-permanent writing surfaces (aka whiteboards) to make students’ mathematical thinking more visible for classroom discussion and contrasting different ways to approach problems. Now I realize that assigning my Trinity students to create public web portfolios of their teaching, and enriching drafts through peer review, makes their pedagogical thinking more visible, not just in our classroom, but to anyone on the web.
In addition, this semester I have emphasized to my students that their teaching portfolios are highly valuable evidence of their teaching work, especially for future employers or graduate programs. Teaching skills are not easily captured in a traditional essay or recommendation letter, but their web portfolios do far better because they are enriched with their lesson plans, images and excerpts from sample student assessments, short video clips of classroom learning in action, and the wisdom accumulated through reflection. Realizing the value of their web portfolios, I incorporated a new final assignment this semester, where students write their own “Teaching Reflection” introduction to their web portfolio and present it to a pair of guest expert evaluators.
Highlights from each of my nine Trinity students’ portfolios:
Jessica Cruz designed and led a series of mathematics workshops on adding and subtracting decimals with 5th grade students. In Jess’s final workshop, her class played two different math games, each using word problems written by students, to compare differences between the games and to evaluate which most helped to improve their learning.
Alberlis Hernandez created and taught three hands-on inquiry-based 5th grade science lessons about forces and motion. In her final lesson, students experimented with the force of static electricity by rubbing balloons to create a charge and testing whether it was strong enough to move different types of materials: paper dots, crispy rice cereal, and styrofoam peanuts.
Sloane Latimer designed and led 7th grade science workshops on multiple topics. In Sloane’s final lesson on renewable energy, she led her students in comparing renewable energy collected from mini solar panels to power a small motor versus non-renewable energy stored inside a battery.
Sonia Lau created and taught three hands-on science lessons with different 5th grade classrooms. In Sonia’s second lesson on phases of the Moon, students moved spheres in their orbits around a bright light, representing the Sun, to simulate how we on Earth perceive light to create different phases: new moon to half moon to full moon.
Maria Markosyan designed and led hands-on workshops that emphasized scientific thinking with 4th grade students. In their first lesson on creating energy with renewable resources, students compared the pros and cons of powering small bulbs and motors with hand-crank generators, batteries, and mini solar cells.
Xavier Mercado innovated with different strategies to help 4th grade students add and multiple fractions greater than one. In Xavier’s final lesson based on the Fortnite video game, students needed to maximize their purchase of quantities of game materials (such as wood and shields) using a price list written in fractions.
Marie Naka created three different hands-on science lessons to promote deeper scientific thinking with 4th grade students. In Marie’s final lesson on the Eggciting Eggsperiment, students tested different strategies to reduce the effect of gravity on a falling egg, using materials such as cotton balls and popsicle sticks.
Maria Vicuña innovated with strategies for teaching mathematical thinking with 4th grade students. In Maria’s second lesson on equivalent fractions, she created color-coded fraction bars to help students visualize equal proportions of fractions with different numerators and denominators.
Shelley Xia created and taught three different workshops to promote deeper scientific thinking with 4th grade students. In Shelley’s final lesson on earthquakes, she led students through an activity to design, build, and test earthquake-resistant structures using model buildings they constructed and experimented with on a “shake table.”
Newer educators often mimic behaviors – positive or negative – that their own teachers have ingrained into their minds through continuous repetition during twelve or more years of schooling. Since many “traditional” teaching methods do not necessarily spark thinking classrooms (Liljedahl 2021), I consciously try to model different inquiry-based approaches and identify exemplary math and science teaching resources during the first few weeks in our Educ 350 syllabus, when students are preparing their first lessons. For example, at the start of each of the first three classes, we did inquiry-based lessons with guiding questions, such as: 1) Can you light up a light bulb? (about electrical circuits); 2) How much did the temperature drop? (about negative and positive numbers); 3) Growing Shapes (adapted from Jo Boaler, Mathematical Mindsets).
But making the transition from traditional instruction to “inquiry-based learning” or “building thinking classrooms” was not easy for several Trinity students. It’s still surprising to me how strongly many still identify with launching lessons by giving mini lectures, or designing individual worksheets, even when they criticize these traditional approaches during class discussions. I’m still pondering ways to challenge these dominant views. My belief is that novice teachers are more likely to adopt inquiry-based methods if they see and experience rich examples, both in our college classroom and in real K-12 school classrooms. One idea I tried this semester was to arrange for our entire class to visit another school where the new principal (a former math coach) regularly shares rich examples of inquiry-based mathematical thinking by her students and teachers. But my effort failed because we could not arrange a date and time that worked with the school’s already stressed-out teaching staff. The principal encouraged me to try to schedule a visit again next fall, and perhaps I’ll invite former Educ 350 students and others who have not yet enrolled in the course. One can never begin too early.
During the semester, I observed a growing number of examples of stronger peer-to-peer guidance and reinforcement of richer teaching methods and reflection. I openly praised individual students, small groups, and the entire class when these examples arose, since it’s my best evidence that Trinity students are authentically growing into their roles as newer educators. Most importantly, watching this transition happen allows me more comfortably shift from my role from “professor” to “coach,” which promotes life-long learning agency for everyone. While I attribute the strength of peer-to-peer learning entirely to my students, one contributing factor may have been small changes I made in our Evaluation Criteria for Lesson Plans and Portfolios, which we used continually, with shorter versions for earlier assignments, to reinforce key principles and “habits of mind” in our course.
See Teaching Reflections and Web Portfolios by Trinity students:
Thank you to Trinity Professors Kyle Evans (Mathematics) and Britney Jones (Educational Studies) for serving as guest evaluators for our end-of-semester presentations.
]]>One chapter that immediately grabbed my attention is “How to Conduct a Good Interview.” For years I’ve grown frustrated with traditional how-to methods books that simply “tell” students about this complex skill, but Lareau goes several steps further by “showing” the interview process, as best as one can in a print book. After offering general guidelines, the chapter contrasts two interview transcripts: one conducted by a novice graduate student, and another she conducted as an expert interviewer. Furthermore, Lareau’s commentary is interspersed in shaded boxes in the transcripts to highlight differences and reinforce principles. For example, her commentary points to specific moments when the novice interview could have done a better job by using the participant’s own wording, or by probing further with a follow-up question that digs deeper into the core research question.
Has anyone else ever written a how-to qualitative methods book in this creative format, with rich comparisons of interview transcripts and meta-level commentary? If so, why didn’t someone tell me? For researchers and educators who are frustrated with traditional how-to methods books, Lareau’s approach is both intellectually and pedagogically refreshing.
To be clear, I still don’t believe that good interviewing skills can be acquired solely from reading a book, even one as good as Listening To People. Experiential learning still matters. In my classroom I’ve experimented with inviting community partners to participate as a dual-role narrator for group interview practice sessions. During the first half, our guest responds to practice interview questions posed by individual students as we rotate around the room. In the second half, our guest reflects with us on what they believe worked well during the interview, and what could have been improved in the way we asked questions or followed up on relevant themes. Learn more in this chapter of the On The Line book-in-progress.
Thanks to Lareau’s new book, now my students can read a book that beautifuly illustrates this learning process to improve our interviewing skills. While experiential education still matters, we can also study a text that exemplifies what good interviewing looks like, and how novices can get better, with greater depth and comprehensiveness than I can provide in a one-shot classroom exercise. Looking forward, perhaps Lareau might consider taking one more step: will she someday exercise her copyright option to transform her book into a movie—or at least a short series of streaming videos—to educate the next generation of interviewers? My students and I will definitely be watching.
]]>There’s no one right answer to this question about authorship because the nature of research and writing varies so much across fields, publishing traditions, and every collaboration. For example, some scientific fields have seen a dramatic increase in publishing papers with 1000+ authors! And then there’s the related issue of the order of authors, which also varies across fields and sends different signals about workload, status, and seniority.
So it’s probably best to ask yourselves questions about your core principles:
Most people want authorship to reward “work” toward the final publication? But what kind(s) of work do you value? Is “writing work” the only kind that should earn authorship credit? Or if other kinds of work also matter, how do you define them?
Is one of your project goals to intentionally disrupt existing norms of scholarly credit and status?
Speaking for myself, I go back and forth on these questions all of the time, depending on the type of project and publication.
For example, when I published articles with Diane Zannoni and students, I often did most of the writing, but would have had nothing to write about without their econometric analyses, which I could not do. Also, some students made key contributions to data collection and analysis that I could not do or did not come up with on my own. In those articles, key student contributors are listed as co-authors. But in my On The Line book-in-progress, I’m using “Jack Dougherty and contributors” on the title page, and am only listing people as co-authors for chapters if they actually wrote at least a paragraph or more. Otherwise, I quote a sentence about their work and cite them, or list them as additional contributors or in the notes for research support.
Whatever you decide about listing authors and order, I strongly recommend that you follow up by writing a paragraph at the end of the publication that clearly defines people’s roles and contributions, to spell things out more clearly than whatever will appear in the author list.
Here’s the author list for a collaborative research project that resulted in a book chapter:
by Jack Dougherty, Diane Zannoni, Maham Chowhan, Courteney Coyne, Benjamin Dawson, Tehani Guruge, and Begaeta Nukic
Here’s the paragraph about collaboration, which describes roles for everyone listed above, but also mentions more people whose work was important, but we did not list as authors:
This chapter represents a collaborative effort by faculty and student co-authors at Trinity College. Jack Dougherty, Associate Professor of Educational Studies, coordinated the website design, research methods, data collection, and wrote the final draft. Diane Zannoni, Professor of Economics, advised on the research design and supervised the quantitative analysis. Begaeta Nukic trained and organized student researchers; Courteney Coyne translated, transcribed, and coded parent interviews; and Maham Chowhan, Benjamin Dawson, and Tehani Guruge conducted the quantitative analysis. The authors thank Jean-Pierre Haeberly and David Tatem (who created the SmartChoices web application and provided GIS support), Jesse Wanzer and Nick Bacon (who digitized school attendance boundaries), Joel Caron, Chris Hunt, Rachael Barlow and J. Hughes (who assisted with data analysis), and all of the Trinity students and staff from ConnCAN, Achieve Hartford, Voices of Women of Color, Hartford Public Schools, Regional School Choice Office, and most importantly, the parents and guardians who participated in our workshops. SmartChoices is a partnership between the Cities, Suburbs, and Schools Project at Trinity College, the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now (ConnCAN), and Achieve Hartford (which funded this study). The findings are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the partner organizations. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the American Educational Research Association meeting in May 2010, where we received valuable feedback from commentator Jeff Henig.
Feedback is welcome. Tag me at @DoughertyJack on Twitter.
]]>I first taught Educ 350: Teaching and Learning in Fall 2007, so this is only my second time (or perhaps the third, if you count a 3-student independent study I supervised in Spring 2016). If often tell colleagues that it takes me at least three times to teach a new course before it begins to feel like it’s working, so this one is still in the adjustment phase. How has my teaching changed, and what have I learned about myself and my students in this journey? This essay offers a closer look at these elements:
When I teach students about curriculum design, my advice boils down to: “Align your student objectives with your learning activities with your assessment strategy.” In other words, make sure that you’re actually assessing what you originally planned students should learn. So my first step in this reflective essay is to test whether or not I followed my own teaching advice. Back in December/January, before our class began, Kyle and I identified three primary student learning objectives:
Looking back, these three goals seem satisfactory, and certainly represent what Kyle and I believed what we reasonably could achieve during one semester with students who in general had no prior experience leading a classroom. But when applying the same standards to myself as I do to my students’ work, I now realize that the 3rd learning goal is actually a learning activity, not an objective that emphasizes higher-level thinking. Next time I would replace it with language that emphasizes something more like this: “3. Students will construct web portfolios that illustrate their teaching plans and actual experiences, evaluate their decisions, and reflect on their personal learning.”
Regarding the learning activities that Kyle and I designed for our Educ 350 class, I’m proud of some decisions we made, but would revise others in the future. Overall, the best learning activity was the Community Learning component. We partnered with teachers/coordinators in 4 Hartford classrooms or after-school programs, who allowed our Trinity students to design and lead math and/or science workshops for their 4th thru 8th grade students. Many thanks to Kristen Crawford (math teacher at ELAMS elementary school), Amy Dougan (science teacher at McDonough Middle School), Adam Smith (math teacher at Environmental Science Magnet School), and Beatrice Alicea (program manager at the J-Z Academic Mentoring Program with Hartford Magnet Trinity College Academy). Organizing these placements was more challenging than in prior years, as my first round of email invitations did not succeed. My second round of door-to-door recruiting worked better, perhaps because we reframed our request as “leading workshops” rather than teaching classes (which are novice students were not yet qualified to do), and perhaps because we personified the request by including photos and descriptors of our Trinity students in the handouts.
Our Trinity students grew as educators during the semester, and documented their transformations in web portfolios that featured their lesson plans, video clips from their classrooms, and reflections on what they would change next time. Originally, Kyle and I planned for our students to design and teach two sessions of about 45-60 minutes each. Fortunately, we juggled the schedule to extend this to three sessions from February through April, to provide more opportunity for growth and reflection. Kyle and I also emphasized inquiry-based learning, which we consciously taught by modeling sample math and science lessons with our students at the beginning of the semester. Several students embraced and applied these concepts to their workshops, which they explain in more detail on their individual web portfolios in the links below.
Joseph Orosco ‘19 and Allie Reifler ‘21 built connections between food webs, population ecology, and biodiversity for Ms. Amy Dougan’s 7th grade science class at McDonough Middle School. See Joseph’s web portfolio for his lesson that drew parallels between population ecology and computer games that require users to manage scarce resources. See Allie’s web portfolio for her lesson that made biodiversity networks in the faraway Galapagos Islands more tangible by using yarn to “string” together students to represent interdependent relationships between different species.
Lexi Zanger ‘19, Julia Burdulis ‘21, and Todd Kawahara ‘22 invented geometry lessons for Mr. Adam Smith’s 6th grade math class at Environmental Science Magnet at Mary Hooker School. See Lexi’s web portfolio for her lesson on measuring surface area to “prank” Mr. Smith and cover his desk in wrapping paper. See Julia’s web portfolio for her lesson on calculating the area of triangles and parallelograms for students to create their own imaginary zoos. See Todd’s web portfolio for his lesson on estimating the volume of the Traveler’s Tower in downtown Hartford.
Anne Valbrune ‘21 and Jess Semblante ‘21 paired up to lead a series of math workshops for Ms. Kristen Crawford’s 4th grade class at the Expeditionary Learning Academy at Moylan School (ELAMS). See Anne’s web portfolio for her lesson on representing fractions and decimals in numerical and pictorial formats (which led students to debate whether 0.8 and 0.80 were the same or different). See Jess’s web portfolio for her lesson about acute/obtuse angles, shapes, and symmetry across three hands-on learning stations.
Rafael Villa ‘21 and Gisselle Hernandez ‘22 created math and science workshops for the JZ-Academic Mentoring Program with 8th grade students from Hartford Magnet Trinity College Academy, led by Beatrice Alicea. See Rafael’s web portfolio for their lesson about designing water rockets, which asked students to build different fins and nosecones to test how these variables affected the height reached by their rockets. See Gisselle’s web portfolio for their math and art lesson that taught concepts of rotation and translation to create tessellations.
During the semester, Kyle and I made changes to our syllabus to address what we felt students were not learning as fully as we had hoped during their first two teaching sessions. Teaching Trinity students how to meaningfully assess their student learning was challenging, as it is for any new teacher. In the final weeks of the course, we emphasized a new theme: “Show Us the Learning” (which I adopted from Mills Kelly at George Mason University). First, we encouraged students to think more creatively about how to quickly capture examples of student work, or to reconstruct dialogue about questions that students asked or concepts they grappled with in their workshops. Second, we introduced more techniques for quickly capturing what students learn through short individualized formative assessments that are directly tied to the lesson objectives. While I’m glad that our syllabus was flexible enough to add these extra activities, it also shows that our initial activities on assessment may not have been sufficient, since many of our Trinity students did not fully incorporate these into their first or second workshops. So next time I teach this class, it’s an area for improvement.
Mid-way through the semester, Georgina Rivera from Bristol Public Schools visited our seminar and led a workshop on teaching about mathematics and equity. She led us through an inquiry-based lesson, “The File Cabinet Problem: A Three-Act Task” (and definitely check out the last slide for extensive links to other curriculum materials). But I was equally impressed by how she emphasized the importance of building relationships with students, and demonstrated this by having us stand together in the front of the room for a group activity. I fully agree that meaningful learning and teaching is built on a foundation of relationships between students and teachers. But I’ve never found a good way to teach that concept in a classroom like Educ 350. Simply telling people that “relationships matter” so easily becomes empty words. In my experience, educators need to continually show students how we care about their learning.
So I’m still reflecting on Georgina Rivera’s visit and what it means for my personal trajectory. Teaching – when you really put your heart into it – is hard work, both intellectually and emotionally. When I work with new teachers, I tend to focus primarily on the intellectual side, such as planning a well-designed lesson and aligning your objectives – activities – assessments. Furthermore, newer teachers tend to focus on the “performance” of teaching at the front of a classroom, and when they get past those first-day jitters, my aim is to help them focus on student learning, hence the “show us the learning”.
But I need to find better ways to focus on the less-visible aspects of teaching. Most college students have been socialized for over a dozen years to focus on their own individual learning: finishing your homework, taking your test, improving your grades. But when they step into their new roles as educators, their success depends on caring about the learning of other people. In other words, teaching requires us to be less self-oriented, and more attuned to the needs, differences, and growth of people around us. This work can be both emotionally draining (as you pay more attention and devote more of your time to other people) and deeply fulfilling (as your sense of purpose grows to become larger than just you). That’s the primary reason why I teach Educ 350 to Trinity College students: to help them redefine ‘education’ beyond simply raising their individual GPA, to the broader realm of caring and taking appropriate actions to help other people grow.
A second reason why I teach Educ 350 is the difference between analysis and synthesis, or to put it into simpler terms, breaking and building. Most of the courses I teach at Trinity focus on analyzing education, or intellectually breaking it down into different parts to better understand the relationships between them. For example, my Ed Studies colleagues and I named our introductory course Educ 200: Analyzing Schools because we take apart the classroom education process, layer by layer, to ask questions that theorists have long asked, such as: How does the organization of schools shape interactions? How does learning happen? What causes educational inequalities? By contrast, the Educ 350 seminar works in the opposite direction by synthesizing, or bringing together different pieces of the teaching and learning process to create something new. In Educ 350, we ask our students questions such as: How can you construct a lesson that builds on students’ prior knowledge and leads them to make new discoveries? What meaningful learning experiences can you co-create with your students in their Hartford classroom? How can you show us that learning happened in your web portfolios? Of course, Educ 350 does not entirely leave behind the act of analysis. For instance, when we ask Trinity students to better align their objectives, activities, and assessment in their lessons, that requires them to mentally take apart their lessons and adjust the pieces to better fit together. But overall, teaching Educ 350 motivates me because it places me in a different role, to help students become pedagogically creative, and synthesize new lessons, rather than only analyzing and taking ideas apart.
Three quick lessons I learned from co-teaching this course with Kyle Evans, a first-year faculty member in Trinity’s Mathematics Department:
My response drew on lessons learned from working on two books-in-progress: On The Line and Data Visualization for All. Here’s a summary of my argument, which I plan to integrate into the latter book:
Data visualizations allow educational researchers to illustrate evidence in at least three dimensions:
And here’s the visualized version of that argument in Google Slides:
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