TEACHING
Since I have been at Penn I have split my teaching time between graduate courses in the one-year teacher education program and those in the new doctoral program in Teaching, Learning and Curriculum. Within the teacher education program I served as Director of Teacher Education for the first three years of my stay at Penn. During that time I taught a number of graduate courses for prospective elementary and secondary teachers. However, now in my fifth year at Penn, and no longer Director of Teacher Education, I have concentrated on two courses in the secondary/middle school program. In essence these are sequential courses that address learning to teach science in urban high schools. I have made strenuous efforts to build the course around the field experiences so that the content of both courses not only connects visibly with the field placements but derives from those experiences. Over the five year period I have been actively involved in field placement so that we can place all “new” teachers in pairs and triplets with “resident” teachers. I have endeavored to place all science and mathematics teachers in one or at most two schools so that they can build a community of scholars within the school. As Director of Teacher Education I employed the same practice throughout the teacher education program and created interdisciplinary teams within small learning communities within schools. We learned a great deal from this approach and recently I have focused on fine tuning coteaching as a way to learn to teach within science and mathematics. Several recent publications, including a book, describe this process.
In the doctoral program I have taught a new course on Teaching and Learning in the past three years. It is a core course for all doctoral students in Education, Culture and Society, Teaching, Learning and Curriculum, Education Policy and Education Leadership. On both occasions the course has had 20 students. This introductory course in the doctoral program is designed to get students inducted into graduate studies and provide foundational knowledge of teaching and learning. I also wanted students to learn how to use technology as a learning and research tool, how to employ peer review in their writing, and how to write manuscripts for possible publication. After two years of developing the course I cycled out of teaching the core, but now teach this course to doctoral and masters students from across the university.
I have taught two other doctoral courses regularly since I have been at Penn. One is Teacher Learning and Change and the other is Research in Schools. I plan on teaching a core course in the Master’s degree in Chemistry Education– EDUC 636: The teaching and learning of chemistry in the fall/Spring of ‘02/’03. Also in the fall of ‘02 I will teach a section of EDUC 616: Teaching and Learning to master’s students as a core course in the specialization of Teaching, Learning and Curriculum and as an elective for students in the secondary teacher education program and throughout the university.
My approach to teaching is to use methods that are engaging to learners and get them actively involved in reading, writing, research and presenting what they have learned. I do like to use technology in my teaching and presently make extensive use of digital videotape and computer-based editing. All of my courses have an associated field experience in which learners undertake projects that are germane to their interests and the goals of the course. In these projects I encourage students to capture salient phenomena on videotape and or in some other way so that we can build our class around what happens and is learned from the field. I make extensive use of scanned resources, information stored on CDs and employ Blackboard in all courses. Prior to my use of Blackboard I developed an application for offering and accessing courseware on the internet (Connecting Communities of Learners) and undertook research on its uses. I like to promote independence in my students and believe that my role is to mediate in their constructing intellectual tools that will distinguish them as thoughtful and scholarly practitioners who understand the need for recursion between theory and practice.
