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Teacher to teacher: Learning from each other
Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 13, No. 3, 529-532 (1998) ISSN: 0885-2006
© 1998 AblexPublishingCorporation All rights in any form reserved
Book Review Teacher to Teacher: Learning from Each Other, Eleanor Duckworth and The Experienced Teachers Group, 1997, New York: Teachers College Press, 163 pages, $18.95
Reviewed by: Marilyn Johnston, The Ohio State University Teacher to Teacher: Learning from Each Other tracks the development of a yearlong seminar for experienced teachers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The seminar was part of The Experienced Teachers Program designed for teachers who want to become better teachers and has been operating since 1988. This book is rich with teachers' self-reflections and professional dialogue. It follows the discussions in their year-long seminar and benefits from their continued work for two years following. It clearly demonstrates the power of professional discourse over sustained periods of time, and it offers readers an opportunity to use these particular teachers' discussions to examine our own attitudes and beliefs about important issues in education. The book is written by Eleanor Duckworth and the fourteen teachers in her seminar. The teachers are diverse; they are elementary, middle, and high school teachers, some in the early years of their careers while others have taught more than 20 years. Some began their professional careers as teachers while others came to teaching as a second career, and some teach in public or private schools while others work in settings like Outward Bound. The seminar, titled Teaching as Collaborative Inquiry, was a place "to learn from each other and to discuss matters important to them" (p. 3). The collaborative inquiry took place as they worked together to examine issues of teaching in light of their own teaching experiences and perspectives. The seminar was held on alternate Thursdays for three hours throughout the year. Each week, the seminar was led by two teachers and coplanned with Eleanor Duckworth, a visiting faculty member from Bogota, Colombia, and the pair from the previous week's seminar. The leaders set the agenda each week and designed the "homework" that was to be done ahead of time by the seminar participants. While there was input from the group and the professors, the team of two teachers took major responsibility for planning and leading the seminar session. Direct all correspondenceto: Dr. MarilynJohnston,The Ohio State UniversitySchoolof Teaching and Learning,333 Arps Hall, 1945N. High St., Columbus,OH 43210. 529
530
Johnston
Planning for each week's seminar was time consuming; the first week took the coplanners seven or more hours. While the time requirements subsided somewhat as the course progressed, each team spent considerable time and energy getting ready for their session, and was often exhausted when the seminar was over. The seminar leaders (one or both of them) were also eventually responsible for writing the book chapter about each of the sessions. After the seminar was completed, the book was written by continuing to meet every two weeks for two years. By the authors' account, this book is: ...an account of our coming to know each other's thinking and practice, and building our own strengths through each other's. We see it as a presentation of teachers' thinking about central current issues and as a potential model for other groups. (p. 6) This is a good description. Readers of this book will find a wide ranging array of teachers' thinking about many topics of current concern in education. While Eleanor Duckworth sets the stage for the book in the introduction and carefully situates herself in terms of the seminar and her own perspectives, it is the teachers' voices that shape the book. The topics chosen by the leaders are diverse but they address central issues in education, including collaborative inquiry, assessment, the ideal school, the community as classroom, school reform, and multiculturalism. Sometimes these issues get discussed in depth in the chapter, at other times the chapter is more like a summary of the discussion and a portrait of how students reacted to the class itself. The first week's session was led by Eleanor Duckworth and is described by one of the teachers. After introducing the student led structure of the course and getting organized, the group spent most of the three hours responding to the questions: "How did you get into teaching? .... How does it compare with what you expected?" and "What keeps you there?" The issues surrounding these questions weave their way throughout the rest of the book. The format of each chapter is similar, although the individual voices of the chapter authors create nice diversity. The chapters provide insights into the planning decisions, the homework for the session, how the actual seminar evolved, and the reflections of the leaders and participants. The richness of the chapters is in these reflections. They raise issues, connect the seminar topics to classroom practices, and give the reader insights into the professional hves of the participants. As the chapters progress, the reader gets a strong sense of the potential in teacher to teacher talk. The book demonstrates the power of professional sharing, the ways that teachers can learn from talking about their differences, and the value of sustained dialogue. The chapters have a dual focus. One focus is the evolution of the seminar itself, and the struggles that both the instructor and the students had with its open-ended, self-determined format. The authors create a vivid picture of the fluidity and struggle that are necessarily a part of this kind of learning format. There was continuing conversation in the seminar about what was happening, how things were going, and what needed to change. This processing was frustrating to some and yet was
Book Revlew
531
the context of learning for most. Overall, this conversation demonstrates how time consuming yet necessary it is to build the trust that is necessary for open dialogue about important, and often sensitive, issues. The second focus is the issues themselves. The content of the seminar was rich. The leaders rarely got all the way through their plans; there were diversions and things always took longer than expected. There were also the usual tensions between coverage and depth, between exploration and more efficient ways of proceeding, and between teacher expectations and student needs and reactions. The leaders used a rich array of pedagogical strategies to get their colleagues involved in the topics, and the level of learning was high, as reported by the participants. Each of the chapters includes both the process and the content from each session. In most of the chapters, the reflections of the co-leaders are more substantial than those of the participants. The chapter authors write in a more sustained way, while the reflections of the participants come in the form of excerpts from their journals, written after class. The journal writings raise a variety of issues and show the participants' diverse reactions to the seminar as well as to the issues being discussed. While this diversity has value in and of itself, it is also frustrating to read at times. It is hard to keep all the participants straight, and thus their individual points of view are hard to thread together. These reflections read like little chunks of thoughts rather than coherent points of view. Many of them are thought provoking, and in general the writing is strong and readable, but I often wanted to know more. It is apparent that powerful dialogues occurred in the seminar, but the reader is too often left with snippets of afterthoughts. However, the book includes occasional longer stretches of description and reflections in the chapters, and seven times throughout the book the reader encounters individual writings, called interludes. These "interludes" address issues and personal reflections on practice in indepth ways. These often extend the issue raised in the seminar, reflecting both the professional practices and the personal struggles involved in teaching. One issue that had the students' on-going attention was assessment. The topic was first introduced in their December class where they did an extended role play of a school board meeting to discuss whether the school board should switch from traditional "A" through "F" report cards to more narrative descriptions of students' progress. In the role play they debated issues such as the fundamental purposes of assessment, the value and purpose of teacher feedback, objectivity in tests and feedback, the politics of assessment, and the value of different kinds of assessments, including external assessments, The complexity of the issues raised by this role play led to their decision to schedule an additional class session for further discussion. Two teacher authors also wrote interludes related to assessment issues. There is much in this book to provoke the reader's thinking about teaching, regardless of your own teaching field, or whether you are outside education looking in. This book richly describes the uncertainties and complexities of teaching. The seminar at the university does not always run smoothly, and participants have varied reactions to whatever is done or discussed. The teachers in the seminar talk honestly and openly about their teaching. The problems identified in their discussions have few clear answers, and they carefully avoid oversimplifying the issues.
532
Johnston
This is a thought-provoking book that raises more issues than it resolves, but herein lies its value. It is a book appropriate to be read in solitude, but is probably much richer in a professional setting where the ideas can be further connected with one's own context. For teachers, the book offers stimulating food for self-reflection and a wide variety of perspectives against which to compare one's own. For university readers, it suggests the power of long-term engagement in seminars that are not bound by typical institutional time lines. For those outside education, Teacher to Teacher provides a realistic portrayal of the challenges and promises of teachers' professional development through study, self-reflection, and collaborative inquiry into teaching and learning.
© 1998 AblexPublishingCorporation All rights in any form reserved
Book Review Teacher to Teacher: Learning from Each Other, Eleanor Duckworth and The Experienced Teachers Group, 1997, New York: Teachers College Press, 163 pages, $18.95
Reviewed by: Marilyn Johnston, The Ohio State University Teacher to Teacher: Learning from Each Other tracks the development of a yearlong seminar for experienced teachers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The seminar was part of The Experienced Teachers Program designed for teachers who want to become better teachers and has been operating since 1988. This book is rich with teachers' self-reflections and professional dialogue. It follows the discussions in their year-long seminar and benefits from their continued work for two years following. It clearly demonstrates the power of professional discourse over sustained periods of time, and it offers readers an opportunity to use these particular teachers' discussions to examine our own attitudes and beliefs about important issues in education. The book is written by Eleanor Duckworth and the fourteen teachers in her seminar. The teachers are diverse; they are elementary, middle, and high school teachers, some in the early years of their careers while others have taught more than 20 years. Some began their professional careers as teachers while others came to teaching as a second career, and some teach in public or private schools while others work in settings like Outward Bound. The seminar, titled Teaching as Collaborative Inquiry, was a place "to learn from each other and to discuss matters important to them" (p. 3). The collaborative inquiry took place as they worked together to examine issues of teaching in light of their own teaching experiences and perspectives. The seminar was held on alternate Thursdays for three hours throughout the year. Each week, the seminar was led by two teachers and coplanned with Eleanor Duckworth, a visiting faculty member from Bogota, Colombia, and the pair from the previous week's seminar. The leaders set the agenda each week and designed the "homework" that was to be done ahead of time by the seminar participants. While there was input from the group and the professors, the team of two teachers took major responsibility for planning and leading the seminar session. Direct all correspondenceto: Dr. MarilynJohnston,The Ohio State UniversitySchoolof Teaching and Learning,333 Arps Hall, 1945N. High St., Columbus,OH 43210. 529
530
Johnston
Planning for each week's seminar was time consuming; the first week took the coplanners seven or more hours. While the time requirements subsided somewhat as the course progressed, each team spent considerable time and energy getting ready for their session, and was often exhausted when the seminar was over. The seminar leaders (one or both of them) were also eventually responsible for writing the book chapter about each of the sessions. After the seminar was completed, the book was written by continuing to meet every two weeks for two years. By the authors' account, this book is: ...an account of our coming to know each other's thinking and practice, and building our own strengths through each other's. We see it as a presentation of teachers' thinking about central current issues and as a potential model for other groups. (p. 6) This is a good description. Readers of this book will find a wide ranging array of teachers' thinking about many topics of current concern in education. While Eleanor Duckworth sets the stage for the book in the introduction and carefully situates herself in terms of the seminar and her own perspectives, it is the teachers' voices that shape the book. The topics chosen by the leaders are diverse but they address central issues in education, including collaborative inquiry, assessment, the ideal school, the community as classroom, school reform, and multiculturalism. Sometimes these issues get discussed in depth in the chapter, at other times the chapter is more like a summary of the discussion and a portrait of how students reacted to the class itself. The first week's session was led by Eleanor Duckworth and is described by one of the teachers. After introducing the student led structure of the course and getting organized, the group spent most of the three hours responding to the questions: "How did you get into teaching? .... How does it compare with what you expected?" and "What keeps you there?" The issues surrounding these questions weave their way throughout the rest of the book. The format of each chapter is similar, although the individual voices of the chapter authors create nice diversity. The chapters provide insights into the planning decisions, the homework for the session, how the actual seminar evolved, and the reflections of the leaders and participants. The richness of the chapters is in these reflections. They raise issues, connect the seminar topics to classroom practices, and give the reader insights into the professional hves of the participants. As the chapters progress, the reader gets a strong sense of the potential in teacher to teacher talk. The book demonstrates the power of professional sharing, the ways that teachers can learn from talking about their differences, and the value of sustained dialogue. The chapters have a dual focus. One focus is the evolution of the seminar itself, and the struggles that both the instructor and the students had with its open-ended, self-determined format. The authors create a vivid picture of the fluidity and struggle that are necessarily a part of this kind of learning format. There was continuing conversation in the seminar about what was happening, how things were going, and what needed to change. This processing was frustrating to some and yet was
Book Revlew
531
the context of learning for most. Overall, this conversation demonstrates how time consuming yet necessary it is to build the trust that is necessary for open dialogue about important, and often sensitive, issues. The second focus is the issues themselves. The content of the seminar was rich. The leaders rarely got all the way through their plans; there were diversions and things always took longer than expected. There were also the usual tensions between coverage and depth, between exploration and more efficient ways of proceeding, and between teacher expectations and student needs and reactions. The leaders used a rich array of pedagogical strategies to get their colleagues involved in the topics, and the level of learning was high, as reported by the participants. Each of the chapters includes both the process and the content from each session. In most of the chapters, the reflections of the co-leaders are more substantial than those of the participants. The chapter authors write in a more sustained way, while the reflections of the participants come in the form of excerpts from their journals, written after class. The journal writings raise a variety of issues and show the participants' diverse reactions to the seminar as well as to the issues being discussed. While this diversity has value in and of itself, it is also frustrating to read at times. It is hard to keep all the participants straight, and thus their individual points of view are hard to thread together. These reflections read like little chunks of thoughts rather than coherent points of view. Many of them are thought provoking, and in general the writing is strong and readable, but I often wanted to know more. It is apparent that powerful dialogues occurred in the seminar, but the reader is too often left with snippets of afterthoughts. However, the book includes occasional longer stretches of description and reflections in the chapters, and seven times throughout the book the reader encounters individual writings, called interludes. These "interludes" address issues and personal reflections on practice in indepth ways. These often extend the issue raised in the seminar, reflecting both the professional practices and the personal struggles involved in teaching. One issue that had the students' on-going attention was assessment. The topic was first introduced in their December class where they did an extended role play of a school board meeting to discuss whether the school board should switch from traditional "A" through "F" report cards to more narrative descriptions of students' progress. In the role play they debated issues such as the fundamental purposes of assessment, the value and purpose of teacher feedback, objectivity in tests and feedback, the politics of assessment, and the value of different kinds of assessments, including external assessments, The complexity of the issues raised by this role play led to their decision to schedule an additional class session for further discussion. Two teacher authors also wrote interludes related to assessment issues. There is much in this book to provoke the reader's thinking about teaching, regardless of your own teaching field, or whether you are outside education looking in. This book richly describes the uncertainties and complexities of teaching. The seminar at the university does not always run smoothly, and participants have varied reactions to whatever is done or discussed. The teachers in the seminar talk honestly and openly about their teaching. The problems identified in their discussions have few clear answers, and they carefully avoid oversimplifying the issues.
532
Johnston
This is a thought-provoking book that raises more issues than it resolves, but herein lies its value. It is a book appropriate to be read in solitude, but is probably much richer in a professional setting where the ideas can be further connected with one's own context. For teachers, the book offers stimulating food for self-reflection and a wide variety of perspectives against which to compare one's own. For university readers, it suggests the power of long-term engagement in seminars that are not bound by typical institutional time lines. For those outside education, Teacher to Teacher provides a realistic portrayal of the challenges and promises of teachers' professional development through study, self-reflection, and collaborative inquiry into teaching and learning.