Celebrating Teaching and Learning:
Striving For What'S Possible

Heidi Mills
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC

Rick DuVall is a fourth grade teacher at a new school in Richland District 2 called the Center for Inquiry. Rick began the year with a solid commitment to the development of a healthy sense of community in his classroom. He wanted to create the kind of community that would promote thoughtful, rigorous and substantive conversations. While he engaged the children in a number of productive and reflective activities that highlighted the importance of collaboration and the value of hearing and learning from multiple perspectives, he still found that many interactions felt contrived. When contemplating his classroom, memories of children stretching, sighing, and groaning for a chance to speak often filled his mind. He said he frequently found himself calling on the child that seemed to be in the most pain from raising his hand. He was pleased that the children wanted to contribute to the class conversation, but the way in which the discussions evolved was very artificial. He also found the children competing for space to talk rather than collaboratively constructing thoughtful conversations. He knew the substance of the classroom talk was valid. He also knew that the strategies for participation in group talks were dysfunctional and that, as the teacher, it would be up to him to alter the group dynamics and, in so doing, enhance the learning potential in the room.

Rick has learned not to blame the children when something goes wrong. He has also learned not to accept blame as a classroom teacher. Blame doesn't move us forward as professionals. Instead, Rick looks to anomalies as learning opportunities. In this case, he turned the focus of the inquiry based classroom he had created within. Rather than investigate the world for the sake of pure intellectual growth, he invited the children to research intentionally and systematically how large groups communicate effectively in the real world. He planned to have them take their newfound knowledge and use it to self-evaluate and revise their class interaction patterns. To do so, he taught the children how to function as ethnographers and sent them home over the Thanksgiving holiday ready to take field notes regarding natural interaction patterns in family and friendship circles. The children gathered the data and returned to school ready for an in-depth analysis.

The children noticed that there are all kinds of signs that a speaker uses to signal transitions or closing statements and that humans use eye contact, gestures, intonation, and then a moment of silence to signify a natural break in the conversation.

After gathering and interpreting these data, Rick DuVall's fourth graders began constructing new rituals and patterns of interacting in large groups. They decided, for instance, that the participants should keep their eyes on the speaker, truly hear, not simply listen, and then, when the moment, is right, "speak into the silence". Now Rick's room is humming in ways that astonish visitors. Pre-service and in-service teachers marvel at the ways in which Rick's children live and learn together.

And then there is Betty Slesinger, who teaches middle school in Lexington District #5 and conducts collaborative research with Beverly Busching, a professor at the University of South Carolina. As they reflect upon the meaning of events, they document through their teacher research, Betty's classroom comes alive. When Betty and Beverly write about the classroom, they too illustrate what is possible when teachers involve children in authentic reading and writing experiences that lead to genuine social action. In Betty's classroom, her children learn to read and write strategically, while also using literacy to revise their understanding of and their stance and action in the world. In their words, they wrote about problems they thought were important in their school, neighborhoods, town, or state. They began bringing articles and sharing them, along with the classroom copy of the newspaper. "I think everyone will be interested in this; it's an article about homelessness," said Lindsay. Issue based discussions actually competed with spirit week.

Several students got hooked on an issue. Irena and Kimberly got their parents to take them to a Ronald McDonald House to learn more about how they serve sick children and their families. They wrote letters about it and created a brochure later in the year. Jillian kept promoting teachers and police officers as role models over arrogant sports stars and entertainers. Richard and Kim were able to question Rosa Parks on-line, and after this personal connection was made, they followed with greater interest news articles and specials featuring Black history. Students began to have identities as concerned citizens, not just athletes or jokesters.

Betty Slesinger is a real teacher who encounters over a hundred real children every day. While the work is often tiring and the children often act their ages (How dare they?), Betty finds promise and possibility in the children's questions, insights and stance in her classroom and their worlds. She is working with Beverly and the children to help us all recognize the role of education in a democratic society. We are better off because she has chosen to teach.

And then there is Tim O'Keefe, a second grade teacher at the Center for Inquiry. He is an important colleague for many reasons. He has helped me and those with whom he works appreciate the importance of being a perceptive kidwatcher. In other words, he is a natural teacher/researcher.

Tim's stance as a kidwatcher opens opportunities to create curriculum with and for children. In so doing, he does not simply "cover" the required curriculum. Instead, he "uncovers" the skills, strategies, and concepts he is expected to teach within the context of integrated units of study that evolve based on children's needs and interests. To appreciate fully the richness, complexity and the natural ways in which he makes instructional decisions, it is useful to track the evolution of a unit of study.

Before Tim joined the faculty at the Center for Inquiry in Richland District 2, he taught second and third grade at Lonnie B. Nelson Elementary. It was there that the intentional and systematic ways in which he planned became visible to me. For instance, he began one year by introducing inquiry strategies through a unit of study on animals. He chose animals to begin with because he knows a great deal about them; he knows children are intrigued with them and that they love to care for his class pets. Additionally, his primary curricular interest at the beginning of the year was on "teaching the skillfulness of inquiry" (Smith, 1996). Tim wanted to help the children learn to read and write while also using reading and writing as tools for learning. He filled the room with books about animals and used reading and writing times to teach the structure and procedures involved in reading and writing workshops. While they explored a diverse range of books in the beginning, the focus soon narrowed to gorillas, which led to books about Koko the gorilla by Penny Patterson. Following the children's lead, Tim introduced the class to sign language and the manual alphabet after exploring how Koko communicated with humans. The class learned an impressive amount of information about gorillas while also learning various strategies for communicating new knowledge. When reflecting on their newfound appreciation of these very special creatures, they listed all of the facts they had learned. Then Tim helped them learn how to take content information and transform it into a song about gorillas. After creating the written text, Tim put it to music. "Be Kind to Gorillas" exemplifies the learning potential of this second grade class.

Be Kind to Gorillas

Be kind to gorillas and they'll be kind to you.
When you go out to study them here's just what you do:
Stay down, be quiet, eat a leaf,
Don't look them in the eye.

(chorus) If you'll be kind to gorillas,
They'll be kind to you.

People used to think that gorillas were fierce as they could be,
Now we know that gorillas wouldn't hurt you or me.
The head male, the silverback,
Only IF he senses danger will he attack. (chorus)

If you could see some baby gorillas, you might think they're cute,
But they're strong and rambunctious and intelligent to boot,
They're as agile as can be;
You might see one swinging in a tree. (chorus)

Koko is a special gorilla; she uses sign language to talk.
She lives with Penny Patterson and she loves to go out for a walk.
She learns new words every day.
She got a little kitten for her birthday. (chorus)

Gorillas are big eaters; they eat pounds of food every day.
They just look around in the forest, they don't even have to pay.
They eat trees and lots of plants,
Certain kinds of roots and maybe even ants. (chorus)

Sometimes it's sad to see gorillas sittin' around in a zoo—
How would you like it if you were in a cage and people were staring at   you?
Gorillas need to be free,
They need to be out walking -JUST LIKE YOU AND ME!
(REPEAT CHORUS 2 TIMES)

Soon after that, another child brought in the academy award winning movie, The Miracle Worker. Given that the movie is quite a stretch for second graders, Tim allowed time over three days to view it. Since the children were eager to discuss various parts, they adopted a "stop and talk" stance when viewing it. Tim had been demonstrating how to use their learning logs to record new ideas, connections and questions, and so he invited the children to use this opportunity to document insights and anomalies they wanted to share during the intermissions.

The unit of study underwent a final transformation during one of the literature study group discussions. In the midst of a passionate conversation about Helen Keller's amazing accomplishments, the teacher highlighted the fact that he noticed that they were growing to appreciate biography as a literary form. Next, they identified qualities of well written biographies, and Tim recommended that the children select someone who intrigued them to investigate and then write their own biographies. For a short period of time, the children in Tim O'Keefe's second grade classroom used writing workshop time to investigate and write biographies on self-selected topics. After all of the children shared, celebrated, and evaluated what they had learned by writing biographies, they returned to the typical writing workshop format with children selecting their own topics and genres that would most successfully convey their intentions. and so it goes.

While stories across disciplines such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, and history have been respected as legitimate forms of knowing for some time, it seems as if our profession is just beginning to acknowledge teacher stories. Yet few of us ever fall asleep at night without telling the stories of our days, of our students' lives, the connections we made, the challenges we met, the ways in which our students surprised us once again. Wise teachers have been perceptive kidwatchers from the beginning. The difference is now we are wise enough to listen to their stories, to tease out the significant lessons that shed light on our understanding of teaching and learning. Tim O'Keefe illustrates this notion as he reflects upon the significance of kidwatching. While the words are his, they capture the essence of Betty and Rick's teaching as well.

• It is a continuous, systematic look at the process of how students learn.
• It is learning to see what's there and turning that knowledge into effective instructional invitations.
• It is reporting to students and parents about authentic learning experiences and growth (concepts and strategies) documented over time.
• It is valuing contributions each child makes within the learning community that is our classroom.
• It is helping the children realize who is an expert and who they can turn to when they need assistance.
• It is giving voice to students who might otherwise be silent.
• It is getting to know each child in as many different contexts as possible; to know each child as a person unique in all the world.
• It is the fuel for our desire to know more about the learning process as well as the continuous refinement of our craft as teachers.

Kidwatching is not something apart from the curriculum but rather it is what holds it together and pushes it forward into new and often unexplored territory (O'Keefe, 1995).

Works Cited

Busching, Beverly, and Betty Slasing. "Third Class is More Than a Cruise Ship Ticket." In Carroll Edelsky, ed., Making Justice Our Project. Urbana, IL: NCTE, in press.

O'Keefe, T. "Kidwatching." Creating Classrooms for Authors and Inquirers. Ed. by Kathy Short, Jerome Harste and Carolyn Burke. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995.

Heidi Mills is a professor of elementary education at the University of South Carolina. She also works extensively at the Center for Inquiry in Richland District #2. She has devoted her career to collaborative inquiry, working closely with teachers interested in expanding their vision of literacy instruction and teacher research.