Re: Mind as Action

Peter Smagorinsky (smago who-is-at peachnet.campus.mci.net)
Mon, 16 Nov 1998 18:36:08 -0500

One more observation--again without the benefit of actually having read
Chapter 4--Honorine cites Jim's use of reciprocal teaching as an
illustration of exemplary practice. Jim may already have covered my
comments in MaA, but one thing we find in our research is that a practice
(e.g., reciprocal teaching) is but a tool that gets understood and
implemented in idiosyncratic ways. And so reciprocal teaching (or
cooperative learning, or portfolio assessment, etc.) has some ideal form,
yet may experience refraction during particular appropriations and get
enacted in ways that don't resemble the practice envisioned by its
originator. To give an example from something I wrote a few years ago: a
student teacher claimed to be engaging her students in cooperative learning
because she had told them to work in groups and to share their work. For
the assignment, however, she provided students with a three-page summary of
a story with blanks provided for students to fill in missing information.
Students were placed in groups of three and told that each student should
do one page independently and when finished, they should read the three
pages consecutively for a whole understanding of the story. The teacher
thus grasped some features of the tool of cooperative learning yet did not
understand the overall concept of cooperative learning's emphasis on
interdependence. And so I think that any instructional practice that's
offered as an exemplar needs to be qualified by the observation that
particular instantiations of its use might vary from its ideal form.

At 08:21 PM 11/16/98 +0100, you wrote:
>At 05.41 -0500 98-11-16, Peter Smagorinsky wrote:
>>And so, to use Leont'ev's term, the *motive* that
>>obtains in the student teaching arena is often one that results in
>>confusion on the part of the developing teacher. Furthermore, the *role*
>>of the student teacher shifts between the two settings of university and
>>school: at the university the role is that of student, while in the school
>>the role is that of teacher, each of which suggests the pursuit of
>>different goals and, as a consequence, the adoption of different sets of
>>practices.
>>
>>There's an additional set of variables that I'd like to add to Honorine's
>>attention to mediating agents, and that's the nested set of social arenas
>>in which teaching is practiced.
>
>Yes, isn't the confusion so often experienced by student teachers due to an
>overlap of the two activities of classroom teaching and preservice teacher
>education, so that there are actually TWO *motives* in play, that do not
>always agree. And, as Peter also notes (and which ties to Honorine's
>questions) the clash between motives is accentuated when university
>supervisors come to visit (gee, this sounds SO much like my own confusions
>as a student teacher 13-14 years ago) so that SOME of the other persons
>present are "in" one activity (oriented towards one motive) and SOME
>persons "in" the other (oriented towards the other motive). I realize this
>needs fleshing out as to WHAT the motives are, and I also realize that
>everybody in the classroom in such a moment is to some extent in BOTH the
>activities (my experience is that kids did their best to help the student
>teacher who was being evaluated) -- but I'm certainly convinced that it is
>in the person of the student teacher that the pull in two different
>directions is the strongest.
>
>Eva
>
>
>