EDU824

FEEDBACK FROM DR. MAGER - MY MONOLOGUE

"Your opening questions in the monologue and on the outline provide a backdrop to your thinking about teacher learning. In response to the first question - about the reciprocal nature of teaching and learning - I heard you speak with a kind of commitment that I had not heard you express before. While others may have reached the answer easily, I sensed in your comments a deeper commitment to the continuous learning of teachers as a foundation for their practice than I hear from most people. That is, many people say things (or things like it), but fewer really believe or put such a belief into practice. It ends up being a platitude for many. But I sense it is more meaningful for you. I had not heard you express that value quite this way before.

In the second part of your outline, you identify two phases of teacher learning, and you link them by asking whether what occurs in the career phase is a function of what has happened in the preparation phase. This is a very good question. Researchers and teacher educators have answered it in several ways. Some (like Lortie) have said that the preparation phase hasn't a real hope of changing the view of teaching that a preservice teacher brings to the teacher preparation program, based on the "apprenticeship of observation" or similar experiences. Others have argued that the effects of the preparation program are wiped out in the first year in the face of the realities of teaching; thus, if a preservice teacher is required and guided and successfully learns how to use a particular approach to teaching, unless the school in which he/she begins his/her career also supports the approach, it will soon be given up, even if she/she values the approach and wants to use it. Thus, some people have argued that the effects of teacher preparation as very short term.

Of course, this raises important questions for folks like me who invest ourselves in that process. My own view is that much of what preservice teachers learn is less important than the frameworks they build about teaching and schooling and learners and learning and what is to be learned. Good frameworks will serve them well into the early years of their careers, and may well serve them throughout their careers. These frameworks are made up of selected-key-foundational ideas, dispositions, and teaching skills; hopefully, the components of the frameworks are internally congruent, and have a clear relationship to real classrooms and learners. Having such a framework, they can begin a career and further develop it as they gain experience and learn. The details are much less important, I believe. That is why I am more interested in having preservice teachers shape their thinking than in leaning all the details of a given theory, curriculum, instructional method, or school organization. I sometimes say that we prepare teachers for the next few years only, while secretly hoping that what we help them learn lasts their lifetimes. I think it may just be possible that we sometimes do have that effect."

GRADE = A

FEEDBACK FROM DR. MAGER - MY ANALYSIS

"I'm glad that you chose to focus on Hui's monologue for your analysis, in part because I learned from your analysis what I did not hear from her oral presentation.

Your analysis represents the essential (or at least, selected essential) points from her monologue. I don't know - like you don't know - if her views are deeply informed by her cultural background, or if she represents a typical Chinese view of these matter. But the contrast she brought to the question of "how do teachers learn?" was in itself informative. Your comments make this clear.

I am sure that most of how we think in teacher preparation (if not also in inservice educators) is technicist/pragmatist/instrumentalist. By contrast, Hui's ideas are philosophical and open to "emergence." Her comments might be taken to address the question, "what does it mean to be an educated/learned teacher?" This is a very different starting point for discussion.

You use some very different literature to help with your analysis of the monologue. In that way, your approach is "alternative just like Hui's. (Did that occur to you?)

Your section drawing Hui's monologue and your analysis to teacher educations is a bit like walking on stepping stones across a creek: you can get there to the other side, but it is not always the most direct route. That is, I think your analysis alone was the most direct route: The implication that maybe teacher education is more technicist than it should be and maybe we could learn from a more philosophical stance in this work. Connecting Hui's monologue to the recruitment of Asian/Chinese teachers is well worth thinking about - maybe not at the core of her message and your analysis. Do you see what I mean?

You've written this analysis very well. It may be the best piece of writing I've read of yours. (Though I don't claim to remember it all). I am very please to see you write so well - thoughtful, well-worded, engaging and productive on the topic."

GRADE = A