The
course context
The Adolescent Development class where
I experimented using the Carnegie materials is a one semester
course at Mills College in Oakland CA. The course falls
during the first semester of a fifth-year credential program. The students
are first year MA students beginning their professional preparation. As the Venn
diagram illustrates, I incorporated the Carnegie materials into the course as
one of three “texts” we considered during the semester. Whenever
possible I created activities that asked students to reflect on the three texts
simultaneously---the readings, the voices of adolescent students and the Carnegie
teachers.
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My
teacher
education dilemma
A dilemma I face in teaching Adolescent Development is how
to make it clear to my students why
learning about adolescent development is so critically important
to secondary school teaching. Whereas it is obvious to most
students that to teach adolescents well one has to know them well,
it is less clear what “knowing them” might mean and/or
look like when it comes to teaching practice. It is also
not so clear how a practicing teacher might accomplish the complex
task of getting to know her students while simultaneously teaching
them. As hard as it is to understand these ideas about teaching,
it has been equally challenging to figure out how to teach these
ideas in my Adolescent Development class. |
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Where the
Carnegie materials fit in
Because
they provide multilayered images of teachers whose practice shows
considerable knowledge of the learners, I had the idea that drawing
on these images of teaching practice in my class might help me address
this dilemma. I decided to check out this hypothesis
by opening my class with a series of guided investigations of several
Carnegie K-12 sites. So that I could learn whether or not
this strategy “worked” for my students I documented
the steps I took in the process. We designed this site to
tell the story of what happened during the 2004-05 school year.
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My
guiding questions
- In
what ways (if at all) might the Carnegie sites help me make clear
to my students the central importance of “knowing the
learner” for successful
secondary school teaching?
- What can my students and
I learn about adolescent development and teaching adolescents
from the studying the practice of our successful veteran
secondary school colleagues?
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