The Courage to Ask Difficult Questions
MATC Synthesis Paper
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
Master of Arts Degree in Teaching and Curriculum
Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University
Master of Arts Degree in Teaching and Curriculum
Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University
Adam Clements
PID A39593751
Summer, 2017
PID A39593751
Summer, 2017
Introduction
I have been asking questions my entire life. When I was four, I asked if I could have a candy bar from the grocery store checkout line. I didn’t like the answer I got and apparently threw the candy bar three lanes over and hit a cashier in the head. When I was ten, I remember asking why some people were homeless and researching to find out for a school project. When I was in high school, I asked myself what I would enjoy getting up and doing every day, that would make a positive impact, and that I could get paid enough to do so that I didn’t have to live in a cardboard box. When I was twenty-two and had just graduated from MSU’s undergraduate education program, I wondered about what I still didn’t know and what was left to learn as an educator. Some questions are difficult to answer and others are difficult to ask – often of ourselves. My Master of Arts in Teaching and Curriculum program experience challenged me to question my established views of education. It forced me to confront my pedagogy and honestly analyze it to examine its effectiveness towards student learning. Through a Cross-Cultural Teaching Abroad program in Cape Town, South Africa, to a full year internship in Lansing, Michigan, to rigorous and collaborative academic courses, the MATC program has certainly provided ample opportunities to engage with and answer questions in the field of education. Yet what became clear as I progressed through the program was that in order to grow as an educator, there were difficult, uncomfortable, and challenging questions I had to ask of my profession, of my school, and of myself as an educator.
How can I better validate and appreciate the experiences, cultures, and identities of ALL my students?
Growing up in Midland, Michigan in the 1990s didn’t provide me with very many opportunities to engage in critical conversations about diversity. When you look like everyone else around you, not having to think about your identity is a privilege that goes unrecognized and unchallenged. My MSU undergraduate experience certainly helped to provide a safe learning environment for me to begin exploring my identity and the attached privileges that I have been afforded because of it. As a member of the Urban Educators Cohort Program, my introductory education classes built my foundational views and introductory knowledge of education through a lens of diversity and cultural competency. I can vividly remember sitting in one of these freshman year teacher education courses and talking about race and recognizing that there are a thousand questions I now need to ask that I never knew existed before that moment.
We don’t know what we don’t know – and as educators it is our obligation to search out and identify these areas to learn more about them and build our capital of knowledge in order to better inform our practice and the learning of our students. Through opportunities provided in the MATC program I identified areas of my teaching identity and practice that needed to be challenged and questioned. For example, in TE 822 - Issues of Culture in Classroom and Curriculum I struggled with identifying the role that schools should play in affirming student cultures that already exist or helping students to develop a sense of identity and culture that offer access to inhabit other cultures – perhaps those with more access and power. As their teacher, I bring a lot of power that dictates student culture. Through assignments like Artifact 1, I was challenged to reflect on my own culture and think about how it might impact interactions with students. With the goal being to have authentic and culturally relevant discussions with students, the assignment challenged me to attend to the “whole child” and their complete development through giving advice and guidance that was specific to them and consciously validated and supported their identity while simultaneously offering them strategies that would further support their achievement and access to the public world.
Choosing the concentration of Socio-Cultural Perspectives in Teaching and Learning was a direct result of some of my earlier MATC work. I recognized that we as teachers must understand the systems of power that work in and out of education and how different dominant or repressed groups are defined within these systems. We have to examine the question of why some succeed and others don’t. Through my experiences in Cape Town, South Africa as part of the Cross-Cultural Teaching Abroad program and corresponding coursework of TE 815 - Comparative Analysis of Educational Practice, I directly confronted my identity as an American white English-speaking male teacher and was able to better recognize the position of privilege and power I had. Seeing culture so drastically different from my own and appreciating it, valuing it, recognizing its strengths, and momentarily integrating as a part of it, allowed me to understand a perspective I had never truly envisioned before. I had a much greater world-view, I understood the strength of differences and learning opportunities, and understood the celebration and value of new culture.
What best practices must I skillfully engage in to be highly effective as my students’ teacher?
When I declared my major as education with the intent to become a teacher, it was inspired by a love and joy that comes from working with young people. This is most often the impetus for any young person starting their journey of becoming an educator. Yet, with my introductory teacher education classes behind me, and about to start MSU’s full year internship as part of my MATC coursework, the inspiration for why I wanted to become a teacher had shifted. Certainly I was still fueled by the joys of working with young people, but beyond that, was the sophistication, craft, and nuanced ability that is needed to ensure highly effective teaching.
The subject area focused classes of TE 801 / 802 - Professional Roles and Teaching Practice I / II that accompanied the full-year student teaching field placement were some of the most beneficial aspects of my MATC experience. Not only were these learning opportunities extremely significant in my development as a teacher, but upon reflection in later MATC courses, the length and depth of study required proved to be aligned with research on how to positively prepare future teachers. In my TE 801 course, we were asked to choose a literacy focus to build our unit plan around. I choose discussion. Through my research and study, I recognized the powerful impact that discussion could have on students, allowing for individualized learning and validating student thoughts. This was affirmed as a best practice in TE 807 – Professional Development and Inquiry through my careful consideration of what constituted quality teaching. As teachers we must offer learners an avenue to comprehend their own views better and provide them with opportunities to recognize different ideas they couldn't come up with on our own. How to provide consistent opportunities for authentic and meaningful student-led discussions was a question I engaged with deeply in my internship year. I worked closely with my professors and mentor teacher to develop a scaffold approach of teaching talk to my students and provided them with multiple ways of engaging those strategies and ideas through discussion. This manifested in book clubs, math talks, partner paired discussion, group work, debates, and multiple other examples of student talk. By working to identify the properties necessary to have purposeful and meaningful discussions (teamwork, active listening, and respectful responding) I was able to use them to engage in conversations about narrative text that advance student's learning goals of comprehension. In Artifact 3, I chose to identify discussion as a definitive part of my vision of quality education and reflect on its importance to my teaching and my students’ learning.
How do I maintain a continued growth mindset and begin to develop roles of leadership as I grow into the next phase of my profession?
What was encouraging about my undergraduate experience was that with each new article I read, every additional conversation I had, and all the students I interacted with, I was motivated and assured that education was the true subject of my life’s passion. I was a sponge, soaking up every new idea and reflecting on how it applied to me and my teaching. I recognized that there was so much I didn’t know, and so much I wanted to learn to be as prepared as possible for that first day of school. But as my undergraduate classes came to a close, and even after I finished my internship, I still felt that there was so much to learn. The last four years as a professional and certified teacher have been a wealth of learning opportunities. With the help of the MATC program, continuing to challenge myself as a learner allowed me the availability to grow as a teacher. I have recognized that this growth, this freedom to accept that even with experience there is still more to understand and learn, will be crucial to continuing the effectiveness of my teaching and the quality of my student’s learning.
One example of growth is collaboration, which has been a foundational learning tool that I have been given ample opportunities to utilize within the MATC program and my professional career. MATCs positioning of collaboration as a non-negotiable way of communicating and interacting with the responsibilities of the profession has encouraged me to not only seek out others to reflect and problem solve with, but has directly impacted my teaching inside the classroom. In TE 807 – Development and inquiry, I had the opportunity to collaborate within a professional learning community with two other teachers in the course. Together we shared an artifact from our classroom that we wanted to improve through peer-based feedback, critique, and questioning. Artifact 4 illustrates this process of rigorous collaboration and supportive questioning that helped me improve how I structured my online math support on my classroom website for students and parents. Only through sharing and being open to feedback was this authentic and effective learning experience possible.
As my program comes to a close, I have reflected on the growth I have made from when I began. The capstone course of TE 872 - Teachers as Teacher Educators has asked me to think about this growth and what is next. Transitioning from a novice to an experienced teacher will need to be a thoughtful paradigm shift as I am now more confident in my abilities, decisions, and experiences, but do not want to adopt the hubris of believing that I have arrived and have nothing left to learn. As education is an ever changing and adapting field, I am not fully fearful of the later coming to fruition, but it does provide an important realization that as I begin to step into leadership roles, such as possibly mentoring pre-service teachers, I must be mindful that my goal is to continue to grow. Thankfully, MATC has helped instill this philosophy into my reflective routine and given me the strength to ask the challenging questions that will push me to be a better educator for all my future students.
I have been asking questions my entire life. When I was four, I asked if I could have a candy bar from the grocery store checkout line. I didn’t like the answer I got and apparently threw the candy bar three lanes over and hit a cashier in the head. When I was ten, I remember asking why some people were homeless and researching to find out for a school project. When I was in high school, I asked myself what I would enjoy getting up and doing every day, that would make a positive impact, and that I could get paid enough to do so that I didn’t have to live in a cardboard box. When I was twenty-two and had just graduated from MSU’s undergraduate education program, I wondered about what I still didn’t know and what was left to learn as an educator. Some questions are difficult to answer and others are difficult to ask – often of ourselves. My Master of Arts in Teaching and Curriculum program experience challenged me to question my established views of education. It forced me to confront my pedagogy and honestly analyze it to examine its effectiveness towards student learning. Through a Cross-Cultural Teaching Abroad program in Cape Town, South Africa, to a full year internship in Lansing, Michigan, to rigorous and collaborative academic courses, the MATC program has certainly provided ample opportunities to engage with and answer questions in the field of education. Yet what became clear as I progressed through the program was that in order to grow as an educator, there were difficult, uncomfortable, and challenging questions I had to ask of my profession, of my school, and of myself as an educator.
How can I better validate and appreciate the experiences, cultures, and identities of ALL my students?
Growing up in Midland, Michigan in the 1990s didn’t provide me with very many opportunities to engage in critical conversations about diversity. When you look like everyone else around you, not having to think about your identity is a privilege that goes unrecognized and unchallenged. My MSU undergraduate experience certainly helped to provide a safe learning environment for me to begin exploring my identity and the attached privileges that I have been afforded because of it. As a member of the Urban Educators Cohort Program, my introductory education classes built my foundational views and introductory knowledge of education through a lens of diversity and cultural competency. I can vividly remember sitting in one of these freshman year teacher education courses and talking about race and recognizing that there are a thousand questions I now need to ask that I never knew existed before that moment.
We don’t know what we don’t know – and as educators it is our obligation to search out and identify these areas to learn more about them and build our capital of knowledge in order to better inform our practice and the learning of our students. Through opportunities provided in the MATC program I identified areas of my teaching identity and practice that needed to be challenged and questioned. For example, in TE 822 - Issues of Culture in Classroom and Curriculum I struggled with identifying the role that schools should play in affirming student cultures that already exist or helping students to develop a sense of identity and culture that offer access to inhabit other cultures – perhaps those with more access and power. As their teacher, I bring a lot of power that dictates student culture. Through assignments like Artifact 1, I was challenged to reflect on my own culture and think about how it might impact interactions with students. With the goal being to have authentic and culturally relevant discussions with students, the assignment challenged me to attend to the “whole child” and their complete development through giving advice and guidance that was specific to them and consciously validated and supported their identity while simultaneously offering them strategies that would further support their achievement and access to the public world.
Choosing the concentration of Socio-Cultural Perspectives in Teaching and Learning was a direct result of some of my earlier MATC work. I recognized that we as teachers must understand the systems of power that work in and out of education and how different dominant or repressed groups are defined within these systems. We have to examine the question of why some succeed and others don’t. Through my experiences in Cape Town, South Africa as part of the Cross-Cultural Teaching Abroad program and corresponding coursework of TE 815 - Comparative Analysis of Educational Practice, I directly confronted my identity as an American white English-speaking male teacher and was able to better recognize the position of privilege and power I had. Seeing culture so drastically different from my own and appreciating it, valuing it, recognizing its strengths, and momentarily integrating as a part of it, allowed me to understand a perspective I had never truly envisioned before. I had a much greater world-view, I understood the strength of differences and learning opportunities, and understood the celebration and value of new culture.
What best practices must I skillfully engage in to be highly effective as my students’ teacher?
When I declared my major as education with the intent to become a teacher, it was inspired by a love and joy that comes from working with young people. This is most often the impetus for any young person starting their journey of becoming an educator. Yet, with my introductory teacher education classes behind me, and about to start MSU’s full year internship as part of my MATC coursework, the inspiration for why I wanted to become a teacher had shifted. Certainly I was still fueled by the joys of working with young people, but beyond that, was the sophistication, craft, and nuanced ability that is needed to ensure highly effective teaching.
The subject area focused classes of TE 801 / 802 - Professional Roles and Teaching Practice I / II that accompanied the full-year student teaching field placement were some of the most beneficial aspects of my MATC experience. Not only were these learning opportunities extremely significant in my development as a teacher, but upon reflection in later MATC courses, the length and depth of study required proved to be aligned with research on how to positively prepare future teachers. In my TE 801 course, we were asked to choose a literacy focus to build our unit plan around. I choose discussion. Through my research and study, I recognized the powerful impact that discussion could have on students, allowing for individualized learning and validating student thoughts. This was affirmed as a best practice in TE 807 – Professional Development and Inquiry through my careful consideration of what constituted quality teaching. As teachers we must offer learners an avenue to comprehend their own views better and provide them with opportunities to recognize different ideas they couldn't come up with on our own. How to provide consistent opportunities for authentic and meaningful student-led discussions was a question I engaged with deeply in my internship year. I worked closely with my professors and mentor teacher to develop a scaffold approach of teaching talk to my students and provided them with multiple ways of engaging those strategies and ideas through discussion. This manifested in book clubs, math talks, partner paired discussion, group work, debates, and multiple other examples of student talk. By working to identify the properties necessary to have purposeful and meaningful discussions (teamwork, active listening, and respectful responding) I was able to use them to engage in conversations about narrative text that advance student's learning goals of comprehension. In Artifact 3, I chose to identify discussion as a definitive part of my vision of quality education and reflect on its importance to my teaching and my students’ learning.
How do I maintain a continued growth mindset and begin to develop roles of leadership as I grow into the next phase of my profession?
What was encouraging about my undergraduate experience was that with each new article I read, every additional conversation I had, and all the students I interacted with, I was motivated and assured that education was the true subject of my life’s passion. I was a sponge, soaking up every new idea and reflecting on how it applied to me and my teaching. I recognized that there was so much I didn’t know, and so much I wanted to learn to be as prepared as possible for that first day of school. But as my undergraduate classes came to a close, and even after I finished my internship, I still felt that there was so much to learn. The last four years as a professional and certified teacher have been a wealth of learning opportunities. With the help of the MATC program, continuing to challenge myself as a learner allowed me the availability to grow as a teacher. I have recognized that this growth, this freedom to accept that even with experience there is still more to understand and learn, will be crucial to continuing the effectiveness of my teaching and the quality of my student’s learning.
One example of growth is collaboration, which has been a foundational learning tool that I have been given ample opportunities to utilize within the MATC program and my professional career. MATCs positioning of collaboration as a non-negotiable way of communicating and interacting with the responsibilities of the profession has encouraged me to not only seek out others to reflect and problem solve with, but has directly impacted my teaching inside the classroom. In TE 807 – Development and inquiry, I had the opportunity to collaborate within a professional learning community with two other teachers in the course. Together we shared an artifact from our classroom that we wanted to improve through peer-based feedback, critique, and questioning. Artifact 4 illustrates this process of rigorous collaboration and supportive questioning that helped me improve how I structured my online math support on my classroom website for students and parents. Only through sharing and being open to feedback was this authentic and effective learning experience possible.
As my program comes to a close, I have reflected on the growth I have made from when I began. The capstone course of TE 872 - Teachers as Teacher Educators has asked me to think about this growth and what is next. Transitioning from a novice to an experienced teacher will need to be a thoughtful paradigm shift as I am now more confident in my abilities, decisions, and experiences, but do not want to adopt the hubris of believing that I have arrived and have nothing left to learn. As education is an ever changing and adapting field, I am not fully fearful of the later coming to fruition, but it does provide an important realization that as I begin to step into leadership roles, such as possibly mentoring pre-service teachers, I must be mindful that my goal is to continue to grow. Thankfully, MATC has helped instill this philosophy into my reflective routine and given me the strength to ask the challenging questions that will push me to be a better educator for all my future students.