Learning From the First Years of Classroom Teaching: The ...

Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824-1034

National Center for Research on Teacher LearningNational Center for Research on Teacher Learning July 1992July 1992$5.00$5.00

NCRTL Special Report

Learning From the First Yearsof Classroom Teaching:

The Journey In, the Journey Out

by Helen Featherstoneby Helen Featherstone

Late one afternoon in January, the four members ofmy Beginning Teacher Study Group and I areperched on small chairs around the library table in apublic elementary school that has kindly offered usspace for our meetings every other week. SuzannaTierney,1 who has now been teaching kindergarten intwo city schools (one in the morning and one in theafternoon) for four months, begins to reflect on herpreparation for teaching. In a part of the countrywhere applicants outnumber teaching positions by avery substantial margin, she feels lucky to havegotten a job. She attributes her good fortune to herprevious experience in day care. The personnelofficer, she suspects, assumed that her year and a halfworking with four-year-olds would have prepared herwell for kindergarten teaching. But Tierney has not

found this to be true: "Day care is a whole differentstory than school," she asserts.

"Oh, sure," someone agrees. "Because you can justlet them do what they want."

Tierney nods, "Whatever. Anything that's creative. Anything that's fun. And I never interrupt to say`hurry up.' It's all developmental."

As a kindergarten teacher, she explains, she feels andacts totally differently. She talks about Sophie, whoworks slowly and carefully. Tierney sees herselfconstantly rushing the little girl, urging her to finishup. Absorbed in her task, Sophie doesn't always hearher teacher when she asks for "eyes up here." "And,of course," Tierney concludes, in a voice heavy withself-mockery, "That's when I get mad. Because Iwant them to jump when I blink."

Helen Featherstone, associate professor of teachereducation at Michigan State University, is a seniorresearcher with the National Center for Researchon Teacher Learning. She is at present particularlyinterested in the teaching and learning ofmathematics and the role conversation can play inlearning.

National Center for Research on Teacher Learning

Contrast Between Vision and GoalsAfter a long pause, the young teacher begins to talkabout the contrast between the visions she brought toher classroom in September and the goals she findsherself embracing ambivalently four months later:

Going from day care, where it was all play-related, Icame into kindergarten feeling that I wanted to keepthat, and not be so structured, feeling that kindergartenwas so structured. But, I don't know, my kids walkdown the hall, and I watch other kids walk down thehall, and I really want them to be school-aged kids. You know: The other side of me wants them to beprepared for first grade.

We had an art teacher come in the other day and shewas talking about doing stuff with a brush and dottingthings and all the kids were moving around and theystarted to bump into each other. I started to say "Staywhere you are sitting and don't move around." And shelooked at me and said, "Let them do it. That's justnatural." For me it was just a slap in the face of"Suzanna, you are losing all conception of creativityand natural rhythms."

I go back and forth.

A few days earlier, telling the story in her teachingjournal, she put her feelings even more vividly: "Atthat moment I felt like a drill sergeant."

Tierney seems to see herself learning from theexperience of being part of two rather traditionalschool faculties without quite having decided that shewants to follow this path. When the art teachergently reproves her she realizes that she hasabandoned her vision of a looser, moredevelopmental kindergarten and is now more fullyacculturated than the natives. But identifying theproblem doesn't solve it: If she feels bad when shefaces the extent of her "learning," she still wants herstudents to conform to school norms and succeed bythe standards of the institution. She worries, she says,about "these curriculum things that they have to knowby year end," and about the judgments her colleagueswill make: "I get so nervous that they are going to gointo first grade and the teacher will say, `Uh, oh, that'sanother one of Miss Tierney's kids.'"

The research literature on beginning teachers tells usthat during their first years in the classroom many

teachers experience major difficulties with managingstudent behavior and that they respond by becomingmore authoritarian, more conservative, and less child-centered. Researchers attribute a good part of thischange to the management-custodial orientation ofschools, the overwhelming nature of the beginningteacher's task, and to socialization by other teachers(Bulloughs, 1989; Feiman-Nemser & Floden, 1986;Veenman, 1984).

Self-Knowledge: Main Fruit ofTeaching ExperienceDuring the last few years I have been reading andlistening to the stories beginning teachers tell andthinking about what these novices have to say abouttheir own learning. As a result, I now thinksomewhat differently about the lessons of earlyteaching experience: I have come to feel that self-knowledge is a major fruit¾perhaps the majorfruit¾of early teaching experience, that the loudest ofthe voices urging strict discipline may come frominside the novice's head and that the struggle tomanage the behavior of young people is intimatelybound up with the struggle to understand and changethe self.

The narratives that have led me to these conclusionscome from two places. I have drawn most of mystories from the journals and taped conversations ofsix novice teachers who participated in twoBeginning Teacher Study Groups that I organized andled during 1987-88 and 1988-89. Both of thesegroups met every other Thursday afternoon for themajor part of the academic year; some members of

1The names of teachers participating in the BeginningTeacher Study Group have been changed.


the first group continued to meet with me during theirsecond year of teaching. A smaller but stillsignificant number of stories come from the narrativeliterature on teaching: published nonfiction accountsof teaching written by teachers themselves.

Telling StoriesThese stories will not, of course, give us an objectivepicture of what or how teachers learn from classroomexperience. No one who lives through an experienceas intense and as extended as the first years ofclassroom teaching imagines that she can be objectiveabout it. In addition, teachers' narratives areselective: People learn, as Tierney tells us, withoutrealizing what is happening; they also learn thingsthat they never choose to talk about. In addition,these stories reflect the experiences only of afortunate few who were lucky enough to have thetime and the audience for storytelling. Despite theselimitations, they are useful for the enterprise ofunderstanding the sense teachers make of their ownexperience.

For stories are the product of our efforts to makesome sense of our lives. Often they contain our bestwisdom in its most complex yet most accessibleform. When we distill that wisdom into maxims, welose much of the richness of what we have learned,and often tell readers no more¾or, indeed, less¾thanthey already know. Our story embeds what we havelearned in all its rich complexity; the story changes asour understanding of it changes.

In telling stories we create a space outside of therelentless stream of experience and demands. Werepresent both our understandings and the contextswhich have created them, streamlining a series oflived events, selecting salient details to highlight.Sometimes our "understandings" are no more thanour confusions¾our failure to make sense of what ishappening to us. Sometimes they represent emerginginsights, conjectures, propositions. The stories areboth a means to understanding¾we hear our ownstories with ears made new by the stories themselves

and by the audience's response to it, as JillMcConaghy (1991) demonstrates so magnificently inher account of another teacher group¾and an end, arepresentation of our interpretation of experience.

Stories help us to see the sorts of things that happento beginning teachers and the ways in which theymake sense of the stream of crises and demands. Myexperience with listening to and retelling the storiesof parents with disabilities (Featherstone, 1980),another group of adults receiving an often-painfuleducation at the hands of the young, has convincedme that these stories echo very convincingly in theears of others who share their situation but havefewer opportunities to tell their tales.

Learning From ExperienceI find Tierney's experience particularly poignantbecause I am teaching Exploring Teaching, anintroductory course for undergraduates who areconsidering a career in education. As part of an effortto get these sophomores to look at teaching afreshand to reconsider their assumptions about whatteaching involves, I ask them to think about whatthey will need to know as teachers, and how theymight go about learning it. My students areconscientious; they intend to study hard, to pay closeattention to their methods courses and to attend totheir distribution requirements, but they arefirmly¾and eloquently¾convinced that they willlearn the most important lessons about teaching fromclassroom experience.

For the most part, working teachers agree with them: They say they learned to teach through teaching(Lortie, 1975) and that day-to-day encounters withstudents¾rather than inservice workshops oruniversity courses¾continue to provide them withtheir best opportunities to grow and improve theirskills (Johnson, 1990).

Many teacher educators are a good deal less sanguineabout the lessons of experience. They have workedhard to enlarge the ideas about teaching that their


students have brought with them to theuniversity¾ideas bred from their own experiences asstudents in elementary and secondary schools andfrom years of immersion in the larger culture (Lortie,1975)¾only to see them return to similar schools,either as university students completing the fieldcomponents of teacher education courses or asteachers, and relearn from their experience thatschools are places where students work through theirbasal readers and math texts and where teachersarrange the environment so that the journey is aspleasant, orderly, and predictable as possible(Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1986). "More oftenthan not," write Robert Floden, Margret Buchmann,and John Schwille (1987), "life teaches people thatthey have to fit themselves into the scheme of things"(p. 489).

Pam Grossman's (1989) case studies of three liberalarts graduates suggests that men and women whoenter teaching without education courses may fareeven worse, learning from their classroom encounterswith students only that they do not enjoy teaching.

What Do People Actually Learn?Prospective teachers often speak as though they willlearn to teach in much the same way that B. F.Skinner's pigeons learned to peck at the right place toget grain. They expect to try out approaches toteaching, incorporating those that work into theirrepertoires while abandoning those that do not. Theyhope that the positive and negative reinforcementsprovided by quiet and productively engaged childrenlearning the target information and skills on the onehand, and noisy, bored, ignorant children poking theirneighbors with rulers on the other will show them thepath that "works for them."

Maintaining ControlCertainly people as well as pigeons learn some thingsthis way: I turn the flame low while sautéing garlicbecause I have tried high and medium heat with poorresults. Although we could, in theory, experiment ina classroom in much the same way one does at thestove, in reality the experimentation itself may createso many problems that the beginner learns very littleabout the effect of different approaches. Not longafter her encounter with the art teacher, SuzannaTierney confided in her journal that she was havinggreat difficulty maintaining control of her classroomand keeping her patience:

I've got to sit down and devise a new managementprogram. Up until now, I've been trying a little ofeverything. I haven't really thought of one major plan. I think the kids sense this lack of consistency.

This lack of consistency is my problem with other partsof teaching. I feel as though I'm trying out so manydifferent styles of teaching that I don't have theconsistency of one particular style. I know thatstructure and consistency are the most important factorsin management in a classroom. But I also want to tryout different ways of doing things to make sure I don'tmiss out on anything that might work better. (Jan. 8,1988)

Tierney wanted to learn. She had hoped she wouldn'tneed a formal management system in kindergarten;she abandoned her experimental stance a littlewistfully, but with a conviction that it was workingneither for her nor for her five-year-olds.

But even though Tierney concluded after a fewmonths of teaching that her classroom could not beused as a laboratory, she still believed 12 monthslater, after teaching for a year and a half, that she wasa far better teacher now than she had been when shestarted out, and that experience had made thedifference. The changes seemed immense, global;she tried to make them more concrete for me bytalking about decisions she made each day as shetaught.


"Well, you come in the morning with your plans. Butthings don't go that way, and you have to change yourplans. Like, say I had this really creative art projectplanned. But when the kids came in they were reallyhyper and wired. Now I wouldn't do it. I'd do cutand paste or something."

"And last year you would have just plowed ahead?" Iasked, checking to be sure I understood her point.

Tierney laughed, "Yeah, I probably would have."

I groped towards a clearer understanding of exactlyhow she felt she had changed. "Because you didn'thave enough experience to improvise? Or becauseyou wouldn't have been able to read the kids andknow when it would be a disaster?"

Tierney considered the question for a moment. "Both, probably." She paused thoughtfully, and thenbegan to talk about the previous year:

Last year, every time I taught a lesson, or did a project,it was for the first time.

When I was in college, there was this one teacher, shewas very goodthe best I had, I think. She was alwaysgiving us these hypothetical situations. She'd say,"What if you were doing something, and some kidstarted to do somethingsomething different, youknow? What would you do?"

And I'd say, "I'd go on with the lesson" and she'd say,"What if three kids were doing it?"

"I'd still keep on."

And she'd keep going: "Well, what if everyone did it?"

So I'd say, "Well, I guess I'd stop. I'd do somethingelse."

And she'd say, "And would that be okay?"

And I'd say, "No. No, it wouldn't be."

She was a great one for going with the flow, for doingwhatever got the kids' attention and interest.

At this point, I felt I was beginning to understand abit more about what Tierney saw herself learningfrom her year and a half of teaching: "So it wasn'tjust that you didn't know anything else to do or thatyou couldn't read their signals. You were disposed tocontinue."

"Yes." She nodded emphatically. "Yes, I'm verymuch disposed to finish things I have started. I feltthat if something was planned, we should do it. Andthey should just learn that at reading time we read."

Here Tierney paused for a moment before continuing. "Being spontaneous is a real struggle for me in therest of my life, too. Sometimes on Saturday morningI'll get up and I'll think, `It would be fun to go out tobreakfast.' I'll think about who I might call to go outwith. But then I'll think, `No, I was going to do mylaundry and clean. I should get my work done andplay later.'"

"Only later never comes?"

She grinned, "Or if it does, I don't feel like playingany more."

Tierney, like many other teachers, claims to havelearned "everything" from experience. The exampleshe gives, and the comments she makes about thisexample, point us in interesting directions when webegin to explore the scope and complexity of that"everything." What does Tierney learn, and howdoes she learn it? I want to look briefly at some ofthe themes echoing through her story and thenconsider the way they manifest themselves in thenarratives of other beginning teachers.


Looking InwardWhen we examine Tierney's story, we find that animportant part of what this young teacher sees herselflearning concerns herself and the way her owncharacter affects her teaching. During her first year inthe classroom, Tierney taught hundreds of newlessons. Some of them succeeded. But as shewatched other lessons, which she had prepared withequal care, fall apart, she began to see that herdetermination to brave all adversity in order toproceed with the scheduled activity set her and herstudents up for failure. She learned something aboutteaching¾that it is important to respond flexibly tostudents and to take their moods and preferences intoaccount¾but she learned this in the process oflearning about herself.

Often the most powerful stories of beginningteachers, the ones that suggest that the writer hasmoved a significant way along the road to becominga real educator, are those that involve learning, orverifying, some truth about the self. These storiesusually include some sort of encounter with theoutside world. The real drama, however, is interior.

The Interior DramaTina DeFranco, for example, in a meeting of anotherBeginning Teacher Study Group, described anexperience that had changed her whole feeling abouther job. DeFranco had been struggling along forthree months in virtual isolation. The reputation andrhetoric of her school¾it is in a wealthy Midwesternsuburb where, like Lake Wobegon, "all the childrenare above average"¾ reinforce her loneliness andanxiety. When, in the orientation meeting for newteachers, an administrator explained that the schoolsystem had received over 4,000 applications for 10jobs and had every confidence that this hand-pickedcadre of rookies would become outstanding teachers,DeFranco wanted to sink through the heating vent. Listening between the lines, she heard the principaland the superintendent telling her that she was not tohave any troubles. So, much as she wanted someadvice on curriculum and management, she kept herproblems to herself, afraid of how the principal andother teachers would respond to hints of difficulty.

Early in November the school system sent all its firstyear teachers to a daylong regional conference fornovices. On her way home from the last workshop,DeFranco stopped at school to pick up her students'papers¾she had asked the substitute to leave them onher desk. As she headed back out the door, her armsladen with children's work, she spied a note in hermailbox. The message was brief: Her students hadmissed their scheduled music enrichment class,because when the music teacher came to pick themup, they had already gone outside for recess. Thesubstitute had not known about the music enrichmentclass because DeFranco had failed to put it into herschedule book. "The paper," she told the StudyGroup, "was covered with question marks." It borethe principal's signature.

Wondering how this could have happened, DeFrancoreturned to the classroom to examine her schedulebook; there she found that she had entered "musicenrichment" under the wrong day.


I worried about this all night. I thought "She's reallygoing to be angry with me. I'm going to be in all kindsof trouble because I had it on the wrong date."

So I went in early in the morning and I said, "I'm reallysorry about yesterday."

And she said, "Well, what about yesterday?"

"Well," I said, "about not scheduling it. About nothaving it in my book."

She said, "Having what in your book?" She didn't evenknow.

And I said, "You mean you're not going to fire me oranything?"

She said, "Oh, that. We'll just reschedule it."

And I had just stewed about it all night.

DeFranco had talked repeatedly about her worries,and had told the Study Group that both her husbandand her friends were urging her to relax. She wantedto follow their advice, and yet . . .

This incident brought their point home. She began tosee the ways in which she was magnifying dangers,seeing disapproval where there wasn't any. Shecontinued to put in long hours in preparation, but thecontrast between her fantasy and the humdrum realityconvinced her that she had been blowing theproblems up out of proportion to the reality. "I feel alot more confident." Her problems began to seemmanageable, and when she wanted advice she nowwent to her principal who gave her support and usefulcounsel.

DeFranco had learned about the school, but her mostimportant learnings concerned herself. She nowknew that she was apt to worry unnecessarily. Thefirst lessons had to remain provisional for a while: She could not yet know exactly how forgiving theschool was, nor could she safely generalize what shehad learned to other settings. But the second lessonhelped her to evaluate her perceptions of parents and

other teachers as well as the principal. Indeed, shetold the group with her next breath that herconferences with parents, which had been uniformlypositive, had reinforced her confidence in herself.

Personal WeaknessesAs they assume full responsibility for a class for thefirst time, new teachers identify personal weaknessesto watch for and guard against. Four months ofwatching herself made Tierney worry about her ownjudgment and impartiality. Although guardedlyoptimistic about a new approach to classroommanagement, she worried about whether she wouldbe able to mete out rewards and punishments fairly. "I feel sometimes like I have the power to be sojudgmental in reacting with my kids," she confided toher journal. Reading the entry, I shouted a silentcheer: Experience has given Tierney a valuableinsight. It had shown her that when things wentbadly, she was apt to come down hard on children. Regardless of how she decides to approach theproblem of improving her students' behavior, sheneeds to know this about herself if she is to teachwell.

We know, both from research (Bulloughs, 1989; Ryanet al., 1980; Veenman, 1984) and from first-personaccounts (Decker, 1969; Herndon, 1965; Kohl, 1967;Ryan, 1970), how many problems plague thebeginning teacher. But it is also true that, preciselybecause teaching is an intense experience which isquite different from anything this adult has donebefore, the first year of teaching is, ideally, a voyageof self discovery or "education." Just as we learnabout our tools when we use them, we learn aboutourselves as we watch ourselves attemptingsomething new and difficult. Teaching calls fordifferent spiritual, social, emotional and intellectualqualities than "studenting," and so the attempt toteach shows us ourselves in a somewhat new light.

During my own first year in the classroom I taughtfirst graders in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Iremember thinking, as my six-year-olds and I settledinto some routines and the initial terrors wore off,


"The most difficult thing about this job is that eachday it confronts me with parts of my own personalitythat I do not particularly like and that I havepreviously managed to conceal or ignore." Thethought recurred throughout the year. I was, I found,far less patient than I had previously imagined andconsiderably more controlling. However much Ibelieved in allowing students to explore materials andfind their own ways into reading and math, it wasoften hard for me to give them the freedom to dothese things. I struggled against myself almost ashard as I struggled against the rules and expectationsof a rigid school system..

Combating Personal DispositionsTierney's learning went beyond simple identificationof a personal disposition and an ongoing examinationof the ways in which this attachment to apreconceived plan interfered with her other teachinggoals. It involved a battle to change her behavior andultimately her self. As she became convinced thatwhen she ignored the signals from students shedoomed herself and everyone else to a difficultmorning, she struggled to be more spontaneous andresponsive in the classroom. This battlemirrored¾and perhaps prompted or reinforced¾aneffort to be more open and flexible in her personallife.

Written Narratives of OthersWritten narratives of other beginning teachers provideexamples of other such struggles. In the late 1960sSonny Decker, a young graduate of the University ofPennsylvania, took a job teaching in a high school indowntown Philadelphia (Decker, 1969). The schoolprovided her with all the challenges that descriptionsof inner city secondary schools have led us to expect. Some of her own habits compounded the difficulties: "I'm a talker. It's so easy to rattle on, making terriblyimportant points, and so easy to forget that kids willgive you about ten minutes of that kind of self-indulgence before they shut you off" (p. 38). Thisinsight came coupled with the realization that thelesson plans she had been taught to write in graduateschool but had then rejected as pedantic and not"cool" could help her to discipline her tendency tokeep the spotlight on herself.

It took about a month of blundering before I gave in andwrote a real lesson plan. Funny, how the discipline ofstating your ways and means on paper forces you toreally teach. And if you've written it all out, you canstep back and look at it before show time, to see exactlywhat's going on. That's where you can really save alesson. There's got to be a balance between how muchthe teacher talks, how much kids work alone, and howmuch interaction there is. (p. 18)

Kim Marshall, another Ivy League graduate of thelate 1960s, took a job teaching in an inner city Bostonelementary school. In Law and Order in Grade 6-E(1972), Marshall describes a disastrous anddemoralized year in which children fought, ranaround the classroom, and stole from one another,while he tried to find ways to teach them something. He saw that other teachers could silence the unrulyhordes simply by walking into his classroom, and heattempted "the shouting kind of repression" and theequally time-honored "stream of busywork" (p. 18).

There were still regular explosions and confrontations,but this method took the pressure from outside the classoff me and made the holding action more bearable. Italso made me more ashamed than ever to call myself ateacher. (p. 19)


Eventually Marshall confronted himself: "Clearly Iwasn't cut out to be a conventional, stand-up teacherin this kind of school" (p. 31). But as he struggled tofind a style of teaching that he could manage, he alsobegan to change¾not only his style, but hispersonality.

I was being forced to abandon the luxury of a soft,understated personality by my demanding and oftenthreatening environment, by being front stage for nearlysix hours a day. I slowly developed into more of anactor and a performer, more of an extrovert, and grew athicker skin and a different kind of detachment andhumor. (p. 32)

The language Marshall uses to describe these changessuggests that the outcome is not entirely of his ownchoosing¾he seems less sure than either SonnyDecker or Suzanna Tierney that he is the architect ofhis fate. Many beginning teachers feel as Marshallseems to: They have struggled with themselves andwith their students, their administrators, and theircircumstances. The resulting changes are notnecessarily those they would have chosen at theoutset, but they "work."

The Emotional SphereThese two points¾that self-knowledge is one of themajor fruits of the beginning teacher's experience,and that the learning involves not simply observationbut genuine struggle with portions of yourself¾linkclosely with a third theme: that the learning involveswork that is emotional as well as intellectual.

The foundations of Tierney's learning were laidbefore she entered her first kindergarten classroom,during a course she took for certification. Herprofessor had repeatedly suggested that a goodteacher takes cues from students, capitalizing on theirinterests and inclinations. But examining the meritsof this proposition was not a simple matter ofwatching to see what happened when she abandonedplans for planting seeds in paper cups in order to take

the children outside to look for signs of spring. Itrequired probing dearly held beliefs about how oneought to live and what adults ought to teach childrenabout self-discipline. It meant confronting a feelingthat she would be retreating, displaying cowardice inthe face of the enemy, if she gave in to themomentary impulse to substitute play for work, thesimple for the complex, the attractive for the useful. It meant changing the way she felt as well as the wayshe thought.

Probing BeliefsMimi Gelb, a member of Tierney's BeginningTeacher Study Group, encountered similar demons asshe struggled to find a way to teach second gradewhich seemed both right and satisfying. InSeptember of her second year she described the longmornings of reading instruction¾she had fivegroups¾as tense and unsatisfying: "I feel as thoughI'm on an assembly line." She would work with onegroup, struggling to focus their attention on the taskat hand, to get them to read with expression and tolearn the target vocabulary, only, it seemed, in orderto repeat the process with the next group.

And while she moved through these mechanical andrepetitive tasks, she monitored the rest of the room,making sure that the noise level did not rise too high,and that the groups working at their seats stayed ontask. When children at one table got too noisy¾asthey inevitably did several times each morning¾sherang a bell, called out, "Detention, Group Four," andset a timer for the five minutes of absolute silencenow required of these six children. As a hush fellover the room and she turned back to the group ofseven-year-olds before her, she found herselfwondering, "Is this all there is? Twenty more yearsof `Detention, Group Four'?"

In October, however, Gelb began to feel better abouther teaching. She suspected that part of thisimprovement was physical: She had begun theschool year with a cold which had finally cleared up. But part of it reflected real thought, a successfulattempt to reassess her situation and figure out what


actually needed changing. She made somesubstantive improvements in her teaching, but shealso began to analyze more objectively the noise thatshe had been battling.

I'm thinking it's not so bad for the class to be noisy. . . . Iused to focus on "Oh, the noise, I'm not beingeffective." And I still feel that: When they are quiet Ithink, "Ah, that's nice." But when they do get noisy Ilook around and see what they are doing. If they areinteracting with each other, and it's productive, I'm notgetting all excited about it.

As the weeks went by, Gelb's ability to tolerate¾andeven sometimes celebrate¾what she now termed"busy noise" was fortified by her realization thatbecause she had changed over the 12 months she hadtaught, the meaning of classroom noise had changed. "Before, when they were noisy, I worried that theclass would get out of control. But I realize now thatI have control of the class and that if I want quiet, Ican get it." When she saw that she had control, shedid not need to exercise it as often.

Gelb, like Tierney, needed to change the way she feltas well as the way she thought about her teaching. This meant reanalyzing the meaning of noise in herclassroom. It meant thinking about her experience. But it also meant changing the way she felt aboutwhat was happening¾because as long as she felt asthough she was on an endless treadmill, condemnedto repeat certain dreary routines over and over untilliberated by retirement, she could bring few of hermany strengths to the service of her teaching. Theintellectual and the emotional work went hand inhand.

How It Felt to Lose ControlA story from the classroom of another member of thisBeginning Teacher Study Group sounds the sametheme, with a new twist. Carol Holtz had dreamed ofbecoming a teacher for 20 years, but by the time shefinally got her elementary certification, several of herfour children were in graduate school. She feltfortunate to land a teaching job several months later.

Holtz looks for the bright side in any situation, buther job was a difficult one. She and her first-gradestudents shared an enormous classroom space withthree other classes. Because of the room's acous-tics,the other teachers had decided to keep all theyoungsters working quietly on academics everymorning and to monitor the noise level closely evenin the afternoon. Holtz had more than her share ofslow learners and difficult children; unable to adjustclassroom tempo and activities as she wanted to, shefought frequent brushfires.

In early spring, her daily journal described aparticularly disagreeable confrontation:

At the end of the day, we played a [math] flash cardgamethey did quite well except that Edwin got veryangry and belligerent when he lost. He gave me someunnecessary foul backtalk and raised an inappropriatedigit. I got angry. He had to put his name on the board,head down and he cried. He deserved it! I told himthat if he wanted to survive 1st grade, then he'd betternever do that to me again!

I talked to his mom, told her what happened and shewas very upset that he would do that. She will alsopunish him at home and I'll be getting a written apologytomorrow.

The rest of the kids were shocked and mad at him. Some just looked at him and others wouldn't talk to himeven when school let out. I hoped he learned a lessonfrom this. I know I did. If it happens again I will sendhim to the office for some of [the principal's]conversation; plus some more drastic disciplinaryaction.

A year later, in an interview, Holtz reflected on thejournal entry, and on what she had meant when shesaid that she had learned a lesson. Rereading theentry, she registered shock at the unvarnished anger itso clearly expresses. "Gosh, this brings back somuch. Yick." She drew a deep breath and tried toreconstruct the meaning the event had had for her atthe time: "Even though I had been challenged inother ways, that was my first open very defiantsituation."


Surprised, I reminded her of Brendan, an even moredifficult student than Edwin. She shook her head:

With him I never saw this sort of defiance. It wasdefiant, but [it wasn't nasty]. He would always do it,but you could tell he was upset about having to do it. He would do it at a slower pace than normal. Or whenhe had this little sense of freedom, he would just takeoff to do something else, quick.

Whereas Edwin just openly defied me. In front of thewhole group. So I felt I had to do something right thenand there. I wished I hadn't gotten angry because in asense I let himbecause he got the response he wanted. Had that happened again . . . Well, it did happen again: He hit me. He swung back, and swung around fast likethat [she demonstrated]. And I handled it completelydifferently: I just took him by the shoulder, and sat himdown, and told him, "When you get control of yourself,we'll talk."

And I wished I had done this the first time. Because bymy getting angry and exploding, I think, first of all, itmight have helped me with some of the other kids,because they found out that I could get mad. But itdidn't help the situation with him at all. Because it justallowed him to think, "Ah, ha, I found her breakingpoint."

And then I was upset for the rest of the day. Withmyself and with him. And I knew better than that. Itwas just the straw that broke the camel's back: I hadjust about had it at that point.

Reading Holtz's journal, I had assumed that herlearning was intellectual¾that she had seensomething new about handling explosions, or someother aspect of the situation. But Holtz's commentarytells a different story: She already "knew better." She knew that she did not ever want to display angerin the classroom. That was why, despite months ofprovocation, she had not exploded before. But theconfrontation showed her, in vivid technicolor,exactly how it felt to explode at a child. She rode theemotional roller coaster of her own rage, completewith the bitter aftertaste, and she resolved not to rideit again.

Experience taught Holtz's heart what her head alreadyknew. It taught her how it felt to lose control. Shealready knew that she did not want to do this, but assoon as she exploded at Edwin she knew it in adifferent way. The next time Edwin defied her, shewas prepared emotionally as well as intellectually. She handled the situation quite differently.

The Downward Path to Wisdom?Tierney's story prompts a fourth observation, onewhich, in a sense, brings us back to where we began: The education beginning teachers get fromexperience is often a mixed bag. Tierney has clearlylearned some important things about herself as ateacher, and she has taken arms against dispositionsthat limit her flexibility and responsiveness. She haslearned to "read" and respond to her students. So far,so good. But the particular example she choosessuggests another aspect of the journey, an educationin Henry Adams's ironic sense. For, in the case shedescribes, attending to children's cues meanschoosing the mundane over the adventurous¾ playingit safe.

The "really creative" project is abandoned in favor ofcut-and-paste. A sensible decision, no doubt, if thechildren are "wired," but one that is likely to create, atleast for the moment, a drabber learning environment. The example echoes the story that Tierney told ayear earlier about her encounter with the art teacher;she still sounds very much concerned with meetingthe school's expectations that classes be quiet andorderly. What will become of the more creative artproject? Will Tierney scrap cut and paste anotherday, when she notices the children's serene mood, anddig through her closet for the abandoned materials? Perhaps. But perhaps not.

The discussion from the next to the last meeting ofthe first Beginning Teacher Study Group, three weeksbefore the participants concluded their first year ofclassroom teaching, illustrates the mixed fruits of therookie's experience. Asked what she planned to do


differently next year, Tierney thinks immediatelyabout management:

Next year? I think behavior management would be abiggie for me. . . . I feel that, at this point, my kids haveme pegged. And I'm kind of a wimp. I really believethat. Even now, when I get angry, they'll be good forhalf an hour [she laughs], and then it will turn rightback around and they'll be little pills again. You know,they really have me pegged. Whereas next year Iwould be a lot more structured. Just really not givethem an inch, not give them an inch. Whereas now, likewe talked about at the beginning of the year,consistency is so hard for me.

Consistency Strikes a ChordThe word "consistency" strikes an immediate chordwith Dianne Furlong, who responds to Tierney byanalyzing her own failures in this department:

For a while I'm just a real stickler. And then, some dayswhen I correct papers, I forget to look at penmanship,so it might get messy. Well, then they think that, "I gotaway with it," you know. It gets progressively worse,and today I just said, "Wait." And we started right backover: "Remember how you formed this letter? Remember this?" You know. And it was my fault,because I didn't keep on top of everything. I just felt Icouldn't. It would be impossible.

The first issues to surface, then, concern themanagement of children's behavior. Hard on theirheels comes the issue of managing and discipliningoneself¾for consistency seems to require self-monitoring and restraint that are all but superhuman.

Then slowly the conversation moves toward moreacademic¾and intellectual¾concerns. Furlong,Tierney, and Gelb resolve to plan time better nextyear; they are now rushing through basal readers,trying to finish grade-level books before June. Gelband Holtz debate the importance of handwriting: Gelb asserts that other teachers will overlook a child'sfaults if he or she writes neatly and that employerscare about handwriting: And yet, says Holtz, "If it'slegible and you can read it, there are other things that

are more important than perfect handwriting. It's nota sign of intelligence."

After some further talk about what really does matterto them now as teachers, Furlong decides that nextyear she will give reading a higher priority:

Some days, I would skip reading. You know, to doother things. Reading isn't my favorite subject and Ithink it should be, because it's so important. And I feellike I want to take a couple of courses in reading orsomething, just so I feel like I know more about it. So Ifeel like I'm more, I don't know, a better teacher.

Maybe I would like to do it then.

She is also determined, she says, to change the wayshe teaches spelling, moving away from the spellingbook and emphasizing her students' writing more.

Reexamining PrioritiesHoltz then announces that she intends to revise herreading program for next year. She is not happy withthe basal reader and has been delighted by what herstudents have been able to do with creative writingthroughout the year. Her six-year-olds have writtensome wonderfully imaginative stories; they have alsolearned an astonishing amount about punctuation andthe like. She says that she feels competent in themanagement of time and children's behavior:

But I want to work on reading. I hate teaching reading. I find it extremely boring. And I'd rather teach it indifferent ways. So I'd like to look at what I would likethem to do in creative writing and coordinate thelanguage arts.

All these beginners have learned some things abouthow to fulfill the expectations they perceived fororderly classrooms and tidy handwriting. But theyhave also begun to reexamine priorities, to plan waysto increase their own competence in certain subjectareas, and to work on ways to teach reading that aremore interesting to themselves and their students.


These stories about learning suggest that allbeginning teachers find some sort of answer to theproblems that trouble them, even if the answers arenot the ones that teacher educators would hope for. But of course this is not true. While most beginningteachers certainly learn to manage some of theirproblems, many begin their second year in theclassroom with important questions hanging in theair. Experience has posed the question; it has notprovided any answers.

What Makes Learning FromExperience Likely?What circumstances make it possible or likely that ateacher will learn from experience? The question istoo large and too important to be really answerable,but it seems to me that we can at least shape someworking hypotheses by looking at what beginners sayabout how they have managed to learn what theyhave. And here again Tierney's story echoes some ofthe themes to be found in the narratives of otherteachers.

Suzanna Tierney's StoryTo begin with, Suzanna Tierney reminds us thatoutsiders can play an important role in shaping whatteachers learn from experience. More specifically,she highlights the importance of outsiders whochallenge the obvious or suggest a different way oflooking at something. Without such dissentingvoices, we will tend to learn from experience¾asFloden, Buchmann, and Schwille (1987) warn¾theobvious, the commonplace, the culturally acceptable. More, in short, of what we already know.

Tierney is, she tells us, inclined to be inflexible onceshe has made a plan. Her inflexibility is more thanhabit; it is almost a moral stance: In her bones shefeels that both she and her students ought to stick towhat has been planned, that to change course merelyto accommodate a newly surfaced interest orinclination is to embrace defeat. Dr. Bancroft, whoshe describes as "one of the best professors" she hashad, has challenged Tierney's view that a teacherought to finish a scheduled lesson regardless of

student response. She did not immediately convinceTierney.

Rather she planted the seed of an idea, of a differentway of looking at plans and of the relationshipbetween children's momentary and shifting interestsand classroom activity. In the beginning, Tierneyreports, this idea did not influence her behavior. Butas time went on¾as her repertoire of activities grew,as she learned to read the collective mood of thechildren better, and as she endured failure¾she heardher professor's suggestions again in her mind's ear,and she took from them permission to change herteaching.

Tina DiFranco's StoryTina DiFranco points us down a similar path. DeFranco's husband and at least one close friend havetold her that she worries too much, that she imaginesproblems even when none exist. They have urged herto trust her principal, to seek help and support fromher and her colleagues. DeFranco has not been ableto believe her well-wishers or to take their advice. However, when she finds that she has worriedthrough an entire night for nothing, she revisits theircomments and builds a new interpretation of hersituation around them.

Sonny Decker's StorySimilarly, Sonny Decker, as she confronted the realinadequacies of her spontaneous, off-the-cuffteaching style, found a solution in advice she haddismissed a few months earlier. In each of thesecases the novice teachers learn by connecting apresent experience with advice or admonitions theyhave already heard. They learn from their experiencewhat someone they admire or care about has preparedthem to learn. A look at the testimony of otherbeginning teachers suggest that even when there is no"proposer"¾no advisor, teacher, or friend whoseremembered words give experience some shape andmeaning¾a problem may become educational if thenovice is able to connect it in some useful way to pastexperience.


FoxfireAfter struggling unsuccessfully for several months tointerest 9th and 10th graders in a small Appalachianhigh school in "the disciplines and mysteries ofEnglish," Eliot Wigginton (1986) set himself anassignment he had first given to students: He tried tolist school experiences that had contributed to hislearning, either by making him feel that he couldcontribute to society or by introducing him to contentthat would matter to him as an adult. He wassurprised how few such positive experiences he couldrecollect. However, he did manage to distill from theones he came up with a set of principles forrethinking his teaching. On these insights he beganto build an English curriculum centered around thecreation of a magazine documenting Appalachianfolkways. As his students became more and moredeeply involved in the work of producing Foxfire, theclassroom climate improved and teaching began tomake sense.

Many beginning teachers look in vain for some usefullessons in their own past; why was Wigginton moresuccessful in locating principles that actually helpedhim to teach? His narrative suggests severalconjectures.

First, the crucial insights seem to grow out of hisrealization that he is more like his students than he isdifferent. (Interestingly, he tells his story in a waythat allows his readers to make this discovery alongwith him.) Although he has graduated from aprestigious college, he had been an academic failurefor most of his boarding school career. Although heworked diligently on his courses, his grades were lowenough to terminate his scholarship and to cause hisfather to write, "I am beginning to accept as afact . . . that you have only average or a little belowaverage ability as compared with a selected group ofstudents, even when you work as hard as youpossibly can" (p. 39). His grades¾and his perceptionof himself¾began to change only after the schoolliterary magazine published a story he wrote.

Second, the teaching that grew out of Foxfire mayhave been better partly because it reflectedWigginton's passions more authentically than did theteaching that proceeded it. Wigginton had gone intoteaching partly because he (naively) believed that ateaching career would allow him time to write. Hehad come to Rabun Gap because he was in love withthe region¾including its folklore and traditionalcrafts. Foxfire allowed him to connect his love ofwriting and his love of the disappearing world ofGeorgia country people to his teaching.

Third, his failures and frustrations as a beginningteacher may have prepared him to see the parallelsbetween his own school experiences and those of hisstudents. When he arrived at Rabun Gap, fresh froma successful college career, his school failures werefar behind him. He seemed and felt very differentfrom these unmotivated rural adolescents. But as ayoung teacher whose carefully prepared dittos andcomments lined trash cans, he probably felt more likethe loser many of his students felt themselves to be inschool. Perhaps his confusion and despairreawakened, in a productive way, his own memoriesof school related failures and humiliations.

All these conjectures suggest a complex relation-shipbetween Wigginton's discoveries about himself andthe strategies and experiments that improved histeaching.

How Do They Learn?In the vignettes I have quoted here, Tierney describesfour avenues of learning: she learned by osmosis; shelearned by glimpsing her own behavior through theeyes of a colleague; she learned by juxtaposing oldadvice and new experience; she learned by strugglingwith teaching problems.


Absorbing School Norms by OsmosisTo begin with, she learned by osmosis to fit into theexpectations that she perceived in her newenvironment. Without consciously deciding to do so,she reshaped her vision of kindergarten, her goals forher classroom, to match the expectations that werevisible to her in the two urban schools in which shewas teaching. In doing so, she followed a well-wornand much documented path: Many researchers havedescribed the changes in the perspectives ofbeginning teachers (Veenman, 1984), and manydescribe a similar path away from the progressivevision of the university towards a more restrictedview of what is possible or desirable in school.

Tierney allows us to see how and why this happens. She and her students are part of a small enclosedsociety whose expectations for them appear to beclear and firm. Tierney does not have muchexperience as a revolutionary¾on another occasionshe described her younger self as "a good littleCatholic girl"¾and it is as natural to her to absorbthese goals as it had been a few years earlier to adoptthe looser, more developmental, vision of the daycare center in which she had worked as a student.

Being Confronted With an Unexpected ImageBut the expectations of her colleagues are not, it turnsout, quite as rigid and monolithic as they at firstappear. For when Tierney instinctively moves, duringthe art lesson, to enforce the norms she has absorbedby osmosis, the art teacher gently reproves her,commenting quietly, "It's okay, let them move, it'sonly natural." And at this moment Tierney learnssomething different, and she learns it in a differentway. She learns how much she has changed, and shelearns it by looking into the mirror that the art teacher(perhaps unintentionally) holds before her. Thereflection she glimpses burns itself onto herconsciousness. In her journal that evening, sherevisits her response: "At that moment I felt like adrill sergeant"; three days later she describes it inequally dramatic terms to the other first-year teachersin the Study Group.

The art teacher's comment provides Tierney with achance to learn in a second way: By holding up amirror in this way, the veteran teacher confronts thenovice with an unexpected¾and unwelcome¾imageof herself. Like Tierney, we could view this secondsort of learning as a possible antidote to the first. Having been made conscious of the extent to whichshe has unconsciously absorbed a set of norms sheonce questioned, Tierney now has an opportunity toanalyze her situation and to choose consciouslybetween two different visions of kindergarten. Andeven though she does not make any revolutionarydecisions in consequence of this opportunity, she hasclearly learned something: From now on thedecisions she makes about management and aboutenforcing norms of behavior in her classroom mustreflect a more conscious choice.

The art teacher's comment also serves to remind therest of us that the culture that Tierney and otherbeginners learn by "osmosis" may sometimes besimpler than the one that exists for insiders. Thequiet hallways of the traditional school evoke thehallways of our childhood, reminding us that schoolsare places where children are supposed to be quietand to follow adult orders. As veteran students,beginning teachers may assume that they knowexactly what the silences and straight lines mean. Ifthis happens they are less likely to search for pocketsof dissent and will see more unanimity than actuallyexists. Some of the expectations they learn may bethe ones that they bring with them.


Learning From a Figure in the PastLike the first two paths of learning Tierneydescribes¾absorbing school norms for children'sbehavior by osmosis, confronting the extent of herown "learning" in the wake of the art teacher's chancecomment¾Tierney's third is social in character. Itdevelops from an ongoing conver-sation with a figurefrom her past. By itself, as John Dewey told usalmost a century ago, experience teaches very little. We learn not from having an experience, Deweyclaimed, but from reflecting on it. Tierney's storysuggests that this reflection may be particularly likelyto occur, and particularly instructive, if someone elseprepares us in advance to make sense of it.

Tierney has told us in the most emphatic terms thatshe is temperamentally inclined to finish what she hasstarted and that at the time that she decided tobecome a teacher she felt almost morally impelled toteach her students to feel the same way. During herfirst year of teaching she wrote often in her journalabout children's misbehavior and about a generalconcern with discipline and management. Over andover again, both in the journal and in the StudyGroup, she chided herself for inconsistency andresolved to be less of a "wimp" in the future. Herfirst inclination, it seemed, was to interpret manage-ment and discipline problems as a sign that sheneeded to be stricter, firmer, more unbending.

Yet in the middle of her second year of teaching wehear her saying that she has learned from experienceto attend more closely to the mood of her studentsand to plan her lessons more flexibly, to take accountof what she can feel about the mood of the group asshe implements her plans. Although it is importantnot to exaggerate the magnitude or importance of thechange, to acknowledge that everyone framesproblems somewhat differently on different days, itstill seems important to ask what accounts for thisshift in perspective, this new inclination to seemodification of the task, rather than stricter and moreconsistent discipline, as the key to better teaching. Tierney traces the change to the words of Dr.Bancroft, a professor she respected greatly, in one of

the courses she took in order to get certified. Dr.Bancroft had raised questions about Tierney'sdisposition to continue the activity she had plannedeven when the winds of student interest seemed to beblowing against her.

Dr. Bancroft's view had not held sway at thetime¾Tierney brought her disposition to persevere toher first classroom quite intact. Experience, however,raised questions in Tierney's mind. Often themorning did not go as she wished; childrenmisbehaved and misused materials; they teased oneanother. She tried being stricter and moreconsistent¾this seemed the obvious response, the onedictated by conventional wisdom. But newmanagement schemes did not achieve all that she hadhoped, and she continued to puzzle over herproblems. As she struggled, her personal resourcesas a teacher increased: she learned to read the moodof the class more accurately and her reservoir oflessons and activities grew.

In her first year, she explains, every time she taught alesson, she did so for the first time; by the middle ofthe second year she had a year and a half of lessonsunder her belt. If the one she had planned lookedunpromising, she had some options. We might say,then, that a year of classroom experience hadprepared her to hear Dr. Bancroft's suggestion againand to begin to act on it. Experience had raised thequestion to which Dr. Bancroft's suggestion nowseemed like an answer, and experience had given hersome of the resources she needed in order to act onthat "answer."

Teachers' stories of learning from experience oftenfeature a "proposer" like Dr. Bancroft, someone whosuggests a way of looking at the self or at theproblems of teaching. And often the proposer'sproposition antedates the experience that makes thatproposition palatable or plausible. Tina DeFranco'shusband regularly argued that she was exaggeratingthe perils of her situation and imagining disapprovalwhere there was merely ignorance or indifference. DeFranco, however, could not believe or act on his


version of reality until her experience providedcorroboration. When she saw that she hadcompletely misread her principal's response to themisscheduled music class and that she had imaginedherself into a state of terror and sleeplessness for noreal reason, she heard her husband's reassurancesagain; this time she took them seriously and allowedthem to subdue some of her inner demons.

Learning by Struggling With ConundrumsObviously not all learning from experience grows outof the interaction of experience with the rememberedwords of a "proposer." Both Mimi Gelb and CarolHoltz tell stories of learning that is more solitary, lessobviously mediated by others. And we ought not tooverlook the fourth mode of learning embedded inTierney's second story: learning by struggling withclassroom conundrums. Alone in the kindergartenwith her five-year-olds, Tierney learns to "read theclass," to anticipate what will happen next. Whenshe talks about this development, Tierney echoes thehopes of prospective teachers who seem to be lookingforward to this sort of learning when they talk aboutall that they will "learn from experience." (It's worthnoting, though, that learning to read the class touchesTierney's teaching most powerfully after she hasfound ways to address more personal issues.)

Often the path to learning is difficult to trace. What,for example, prompted Eliot Wigginton (1986) to askhimself the same questions he had asked his students? For his own narrative suggests that it was theanswers to these questions, more than any othersingle thing that happened to him in Rabun Gap, thatsuggested a way out of the dilemmas that werestalling his teaching. Perhaps the political andcultural climate of the late 1960s played a role: At amoment when young people on college campuses andpublic streets all over the country were questioningauthority, it may have felt natural for a teacher to turnthe tables on himself, to pose to himself theassignment he set his students.

What these stories do make clear is that beginningteachers, like the rest of us, learn from experience

what their past experience has prepared them to learn. They get precious little outside help in making senseof what happens to them, in interpreting it in newways¾in ways that have not yet been proposed. Many reflect endlessly, hectically, on theirexperience, but they bring to bear on this experienceonly the resources they have brought to the classroomon the first day, along with the clean new attendancebook.

ConclusionThese narratives do not tell us all about whatbeginning teachers learn from experience. They donot invalidate other versions of this education, otherways of looking at the Herculean task young collegegraduates face as they try to shape themselves intoteachers. But they do remind us how complex andpersonal the learning of beginning teachers is. Just asreaders of a short story construct their own meaningsfrom the text, shaping their version of the author'smeaning from what they already know from the lifeand the self they bring to that encounter with theprinted page, so beginning teachers stitch a personaleducation out of the fabric of a year of teachingexperience. They learn about themselves, especially aboutthemselves as teachers. Often they fight with thesenewly revealed selves and endeavor to change them. They engage in a struggle that is both emotional andintellectual. All this in virtual isolation, armed onlywith the weapons they brought to their firstclassroom¾the images of themselves, of teaching,and of schools, the words of professors, spouses,fiancés, friends, parents, and siblings.

Role of Teacher EducatorsWhere does this leave teacher educators? What rolecan they play in an education that takes place awayfrom the university, after the conclusion of the teacherpreparation program? Several points seem worthmaking.

First, Tierney's story indicates that the voices ofteacher educators sometimes echo forward into these


first years of teaching; the novice sometimes rehears,with a new ear, propositions which have seemed tomake little impact on them at the time they wereoffered. Certainly teacher educators cannot count onthis sort of sleeper effect, but they can comfortthemselves with the thought that their ideas maysometimes resurface as the answers to questionsposed by classroom experience. It happened forTierney, and Sonny Decker tells a parallel story abouther "discovery" of the value of lesson plans.

Second, the learning that seems especially powerfulconnects intimately with the conscious crafting of anidentity, with the discovery and reshaping of the self. This observation connects closely to thecommonplace finding that beginning teacherscomplain more about management and disciplinethan about any other category of difficulty. Learningto manage a classroom is partly a matter of learningto get and to exercise authority. To many who findthemselves in schools where students challenge adultauthority routinely and energetically, getting authoritycan seem more a matter of changing who they arethan of learning different things to do (see, forexample, Marshall, 1972). They are recreatingthemselves even as they learn new skills.

The idea that personal development ought to play arole in the education of prospective teachers has along history. It was central to the design of theUniversity of Texas's Personalized Teacher EducationProgram and also figured in Bank Street College'sadvisement program (Feiman-Nemser, 1989). Theteachers quoted in these pages¾like those surveyedby Arthur Jersild almost 40 years ago (Jersild,1955)¾suggest that the work of teaching (perhapsespecially the challenge of managing the behavior ofothers for six hours a day) creates conditions whereintrospection and struggle are both more likely andmore necessary than they are during the studentyears.

It may be, therefore, that while preservice teachereducators ought to ask themselves what they aredoing to prepare their students to look inward, the

most promising opportunities for helping studentsmake the most of these glimpses of new parts of theirown character will be found in five-year programswhich continue the candidate's connection with auniversity through an internship year. To the extentthat interns function as real teachers, rather thansimply as more experienced student teachers, youngadults in these programs will have more access touniversity educators during a crucial stage of theireducation. In most programs they will alsoparticipate regularly in groups that include otherteachers, either novices like themselves or moreexperienced teachers who are working towardsadvanced degrees. These changes ought to createnew possibilities for learning during the rookie year. (Jill McConaghy [1991] has shown how a group ofteachers who gather regularly to tell stories abouttheir teaching can create new knowledge and newways to interpret experience.)

But it seems to me that this will only happen if wethink more deeply about what is involved inexploring the self and what role others can profitablyplay in this process. And here the narratives ofteacher-writers¾people like Herbert Kohl (1967),Vivian Paley (1974, 1984, 1990), James Herndon(1965), Jesse Stuart (1989), Leo Tolstoy (1967), EliotWigginton (1986), and George Dennison(1969)¾may provide us with invaluable guidance.For all of these teacher-writers describe a complexinterplay between self-discovery and theirexplorations of individual students and subject matter. Perhaps their stories can help us to see aspects of thisjourney more clearly.

References

Bulloughs, R. (1989). First year teacher: A case-study. NewYork: Teachers College Press.

Decker, S. (1969). An empty spoon. New York: Harper & Row.

Dennison, G. (1969). The lives of children: The story of the FirstStreet School. New York: Vintage.

Featherstone, H. (1980). A difference in the family: Life with adisabled child. New York: Penguin.


Feiman-Nemser, S. (1989). Teacher preparation: Structural andconceptual alternatives (Issue Paper 89-5). East Lansing: Michigan State University, National Center for Research onTeacher Education.

Feiman-Nemser, S., & Buchmann, M. (1986). Pitfalls ofexperience in teacher education. Teachers College Record,87, 53-65.

Feiman-Nemser, S., & Floden, R. (1986). The cultures ofteaching. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.). Handbook of research onteaching (pp. 505-526). New York: Macmillan.

Floden, R., Buchmann, M., & Schwille, J. (1987). Breaking witheveryday experience. Teachers College Record, 88, 485-506.

Grossman, P. (1989). Learning to teach without teacher education. Teachers College Record, 91, 191-208.

Herndon, J. (1965). The way it spoze to be. New York: Simon &Schuster.

Jersild, A. (1955). When teachers face themselves. New York:Teachers College Press.

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Kohl, H. (1967). 36 children. New York: New AmericanLibrary.

Lortie, D. (1975). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Marshall, K. (1972). Law and order in Grade 6-E: A story ofchaos and innovation in a ghetto school. Boston: Little,Brown.

McConaghy, J. (1991). Teachers' stories and pedagogicalinsights. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University ofAlberta, Edmonton, Canada.

Paley, V. (1979). White teacher. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press.

Paley, V. (1984). Superheroes in the doll corner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Paley, V. (1990). The boy who would be a helicopter. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press.

Ryan, K. (1970). Don't smile until Christmas: Accounts of thefirst year of teaching. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ryan, K., Newman, K., Mager, G., Applegate, J., Lasley, T., Flora,R., & Johnston, J. (1980). Biting the apple: Accounts of firstyear teachers. New York: Longman.

Stuart, J. (1949). The thread that runs so true. New York: Scribners.

Tolstoy, L. (1967). Tolstoy on education [Translated by LeoWiener]. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Veenman, S. (1984). Perceived problems of beginning teachers.Review of Educational Research, 54, 143-178.

Wigginton, E. (1986). Sometimes a shining moment: The Foxfireexperience. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books/Doubleday.

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