What Worked Well in the 2002-04 MIT Cycle
Diffendal, Kido, Wiedenhaupt
All of our syllabi, many assignments, important links, reading lists, etc. are still on our MIT
2002-04 website designed and maintained by Sonja and attached to the MIT home page. She has
cleaned up the site and the material there is detailed and up to date. We would be glad to talk
about any part of the program if you have questions or if you want to talk with her about the
design of the site, which worked very well.
Overall structure of one day per week in the schools during Year One.
First quarter observations in the triads/classroom in urban high school, suburban elementary,
and rural middle schools using observation guides was important and a memorable common
experience to refer to. Observation and micro-teaching in third quarter at the grade level they
are each interested in was a good experience. Winter quarter field experience might need to
be rethought.
Year Two shortening of Winter Quarter to eight weeks plus 9th week evaluation, then
starting Spring Placement week 10 and letting them take vacation with their districts and
return to campus two weeks before quarter’s end.
This schedule worked very well. The students were able to be in the schools observing
before the schools’ spring breaks and WASLs. They then had time over break to plan their
teaching and began teaching after the break. Their last two weeks on campus gave them time
to clean up their portfolios, complete their placement files, talk with former MIT alumni
about the first year of teaching, write their Professional Development plans for their
Professional Portfolios, update their web pages, get letters of recommendation, etc.
Posting weekly seminar papers on Web Crossing on Sunday; requiring comments on some
by Monday, prior to Tuesday seminars.
Since many students had not gone to Evergreen before and since Evergreen graduates had
uneven experiences with seminar papers, this gave students a chance to see their colleagues’
takes on readings as well as get ideas about how to write interesting seminar papers. It took
awhile for those who felt self-conscious about their writing to post their papers, and we
didn’t press it. By the end, all but one or two posted, and all responded to their colleagues.
By doing this first quarter, it got students used to using Web Crossing and going to our web
page. It also got them hooked up with the Computer Center and their accounts there.
Initial and continuing community building among the diverse members of the cycle.
In addition to reading and talking about “democratic classrooms” and “diversity,” much
powerful learning resulted from the diverse group of MIT students trying to work together.
This became the daily “praxis” lab. Throughout the two years, students referred to the
importance of the initial several day all-program retreat at Camp Soloman Schechter in
Tumwater. All-program discussions of additions to the program covenant in the first quarter
surfaced differing values and expectations and demonstrated the challenge of democratic
classrooms. Across the two years, all workshops and projects were designed to assure that
everyone had opportunities to work with every person in the program in various ways.
Opportunities to read about and work on small group dynamics in their own groups were
powerful.
Program workshops and assignments that helped them see themselves more clearly.
This opened the program and continued throughout. The initial question was “who are we
and where do our ideas about teaching and learning come from?” There were significant
differences in political, cultural, racial, class, and religious differences in the group and the
initial retreat and many program activities were designed to be a laboratory for students to
grapple with the influences of their own experiences on their attitudes,. Having them write
an ethnic autobiography in the first quarter was a significant and difficult experience for
most. Initial work assessing their own learning styles and working in learning style groups;
identifying life factors that might influence their teaching in the public schools, e.g.,
attending parochial or private school, strong religious beliefs, coming from privilege or
poverty, small town/urban, gay/straight, race/ethnic experiences, etc. and small group
discussions of vignettes of situations from public school classrooms that raised major value
issues and practical issues about how to handle situations; required attendance at Day of
Absence/Day of Presence in both years as a program activity led students to form their own
study circles on race without our prompting and led to the development of an anti-bias
resources webpage.
Thematic program emphasis and continual exploration of Delpit’s notion that teachers are
responsible for teaching “other people’s children.”
This opened the door for the work on the question of “who are the students?” Classroom
observations and readings about the diversity of students—special needs, multilingual,
immigrant cohorts, urban/rural, racial/cultural diversities, class differences, gifted/talented,
military families, GLBT, learning styles, preferred modalities. This also let us work with
recent brain research on how we learn and age-related developmental characteristics.
Being transparent/explicit about our own goals and objectives as we teach, and talking
about how we might assess what they/we are learning? Speaking about the “process” as we
do workshops, etc. . . . surface “metacognitive moments” explicitly as we teach.
One of the most challenging things, again, was getting the students to design concept-based
units in which they had a clear understanding of how to think about their goals for student
learning and how daily objectives related to those learning goals. The same was true for
assessment. Whey the read about it, it becomes reified into some strange “ought to be”
place. In order to make this more easily visible to students we often tried to surface our own
teaching strategies by making explicit what we were doing. We needed to do this even more.
These “metacognitive moments” when we would stop in the middle of something and have
them think about what was happening or what we were doing helped make “real” how they
need to be deliberate in their teaching and authentic in assessment.
Modeling the “best practice” strategies that we want them to experiment with as they
teach.
Our theory here is that we usually teach as we have been taught. Therefore, if we want them
to teach K-12 differently, we need to give them the experience of learning that way. We
gave almost no formal “lectures” in two years. Our longest “talk” was probably the 20
minutes that research has shown meets the attention span of most learners. The rest of the
assignments were interactive; peer teaching; small group projects and presentations; vignette
discussions; Finkel-style workshops; seminars; their own designing and teaching each other;
incorporating a half-hour movement or art workshop each week led by a student; working
from video clips into discussions; computer center workshops in which they learned skills by
looking up their own questions, etc.
What we would do differently
Continue experimenting with ways to help students learn to analyze research.
A consistently thorny issue was how to help students learn to use research. We were
successful in creating workshops for them to learn how to use digital resources to find
research related to their Master’s project question. They even got a handle on the basic
statistical measures that were used in various kinds of research. Where many of them really
floundered…as has been typical…is in the analysis of the “value” of different pieces of
research that they found. I think that, as undergraduates, they are no longer asked to read
“classic” studies in their fields, so very few have ever read a research article or literature
review. As a result, this is really new for them and they don’t know how to analyze what
they find. This seems essential at the graduate level and, especially, as teachers who can be
so easily manipulated by language such as “scientifically based” evidence for x reading
strategy.