Meet the researchers: Theory and practice

Interview with Professor Tom Del Prete and Julia Lau, 2001

With the founding in 1991 of the Jacob Hiatt Center for Urban Education, a unique active-learning environment has been created at Clark for students desiring to pursue a teaching career. We spoke with Hiatt Center director Tom Del Prete and student Julia Lau '00 about teacher education at Clark. Julia Lau earned her B. A. from Clark and is in the fifth-year free MA program in education. As an undergraduate, she majored in math and minored in education.

Tom, describe for us the relationship between Clark's Hiatt Center and the Worcester Public Schools.

The Hiatt Center was established as a partnership between Clark and the Worcester Public Schools to study the kinds of practices and perspectives teachers need to elicit high levels of engagement and achievement from kids of diverse cultural and economic backgrounds in an urban setting. The collaboration takes two forms. Clark education faculty work with Worcester teachers to develop what has come to be known as the teacher-researcher. We show that teachers can take a lead role in education research by showing them how to take a reflective stance on what goes on in their classroom and how to learn from that. Those insights can be formalized and shared with other members of the educational community. Clark helps provide teachers who are already practicing with tools for examining their own teaching practices.

Another mission of the Center is to enlist Worcester teachers in the education of new teachers. Faculty at Clark collaborate with teachers to develop some common ground about what constitutes good teaching and learning.Teachers practicing in the community become key collaborators in Clark's education program. For example, Julia is working with a teacher who has been participating for a number of years on a math curriculum team sponsored by the Hiatt Center that includes Clark faculty and other Worcester teachers.

Julia, can you describe from your personal experience how that collaboration worked for you?

I did my student teaching at Sullivan Middle School here in Worcester, one of the schools that partners with the Hiatt Center. There are 1000 kids at Sullivan, and they're divided into teams of 100 students. Each team is divided into four groups. Each team stays in their own part of the school and each of the four groups rotates between the math teacher, science teacher, history teacher, etc. I worked with the math teacher on one of the teams. This is the part about the undergraduate education program at Clark that I love--they put you in the school right away. As a junior I was already teaching in the classroom. You work with other people but you have a chance immediately to do some teaching. This continues through the first half of senior year. In the final semester you do your practicum. You observe for the first couple weeks, and then you have responsibility for one of the four classes each week. (Each class meets four times per week.) As the semester moves along you pick up more and more classes until you're eventually doing the whole load. It was amazing--you find out early on whether you want to teach or not.

And what happens to the teacher you're replacing?

Julia: He or she takes on the role of observer and mentor. The teacher I worked with and I both kept notebooks and we'd use these to share ideas on curriculum or different ways of doing things. It was wonderful. I loved the collaboration I had.

Tom: Actually, the teacher that Julia was working with was getting her master's in teaching from Clark at the same time and, as I mentioned earlier, had been participating on the math curriculum committee. This year Julia's working with someone else who's already completed her master's through Clark.

In the model Julia described, there's actually a teacher freed up fulltime in the school who works with us as a professional development coordinator to coordinate Clark's program at her school. Julia's professional development coordinator at Sullivan and I co-taught an education course that Julia took. Students then have an opportunity to hear from both a Clark education professor as well as a teaching practitioner. And the courses are held at the participating school so that it can serve immediately as a resource for Julia and her fellow students. That whole process of combining different perspectives--education faculty and teachers so they complement each other and then reflecting on it together begins in Clark's education program very early and carries on through the 5th year master's program. It takes place at the school site as much as possible so there's not a disconnect between theory and practice. The process of translating ideas into practice and then seeing how practice shapes ideas gets started very early in our education program. It encourages students to be reflective and to engage in teacher-research right from the beginning. Clark faculty, Worcester teachers and students-we learn from each other-it's coequal.

Julia, what does teacher-research mean to you?

Figuring out ways to teach better. Investigating some question that interests you--something that's puzzling you, why students are doing something, how they learn best.In the education program we're taught ways to reflect on our teaching.

What's your puzzling question?

Last year I worked in a heterogeneous math classroom (classes combining students of all ability levels). That was different for me because I grew up in a school system where students were grouped into classes according to ability. I was shocked, amazed. There were kids that could barely read combined with kids who had better math aptitude than the teacher. It was amazing to see how these kids could interact with each other, help each other out, and learn from each other. I saw kids who were at the highest level rising to the occasion and working with the other kids. I just loved the dynamics. So I started looking at the process of working in groups, something that happens in a heterogeneous classroom. Usually the smarter kids like to work alone while the slower students prefer to work in groups.I wanted the smarter kids to learn the benefit of group work. There are some situations where thinking as part of a group gives you more perspectives on the problem at hand--a better environment in which to solve it than just working on your own. I query students initially as to their feelings about working in groups versus working alone. Then I can give them situations where they're required to try both ways, and then I can see whether their opinions have changed. Do they now think there are some situations where group work is actually more efficient for problem solving?

Tom: We at Clark can then give a student like Julia a related theoretical base, in her case by talking about the benefits of interaction on children. It appears that kids' ability to talk to each other provides an important context for learning. And the kind of talk they engage in is also important--they have to learn certain habits of talk. Talking, like writing, is a way of developing thinking. At the end of this process Julia will have collected a lot of data, written it up formally and presented it to the community. This is part of our effort to develop students into teacher-researchers who reflect on the process. It's part of a larger effort to develop a community of teachers who create a culture of inquiry and practice.

Right now we're working with teams of teachers from every middle and secondary school in the city. We're looking at structural and organizational issues in large schools, professional culture and how teachers work together. We've developed something called the rounds process, similar to medical rounds in a teaching hospital. You have a team consisting of the school's professional development coordinator, Clark education students, and Clark professors observing the kids in the classroom--they're all there together. The host teacher frames what he or she wants the team to think about that day as they observe. Afterwards, the host teacher will lead the team through a discussion. Multiple perspectives are brought together providing an excellent way to uncover things about teaching practice and student learning.