Novice Teachers Embracing Wobble in Standardized Schools

Using Dialogue and Inquiry for Self-Reflection and Growth

Bob Fecho, Dawan Coombs, Trevor Thomas Stewart, Todd S. Hawley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000193794
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A critical resource for pre-service and practicing teachers, this book addresses what happens when new teachers try to enact inquiry-based and dialogical pedagogy within standardized schools. Exploring the narratives from beginning ELA and humanities teachers when they encounter challenges and obstructions, this book explores moments of wobble—key events that called attention to practice in the context of inflexible schooling systems—that the teachers shared with their peers via an oral inquiry process (OIP) to help them unpack and understand their experiences.

This book advocates for the continued use and enhancement of mentoring and induction initiatives, particularly those that recognize the expressed concerns of novice teachers, no matter what their pedagogical stance might be. By sharing novice teachers' "wobble stories" and their outcomes, this book provides a pathway for teachers' continued self-reflection and growth for the duration of their careers. The authors offer a reflective, adaptable, and easy-to-use process that places teachers in control of their own professional learning. The beliefs and structures examined in this text support the intentions of all teachers who work from a learning-centered perspective and wish to take some ownership of their professional development.

1

Recognizing Wobble, Uncertainty, and Possibility

I love being a teacher, but sometimes it seems like it’s more than a human with a heart can bear.

Kristen, a high school teacher and cross country coach in a small town in the western mountains of the US, was reflecting on two particularly emotional episodes that happened in quick succession during one week of her first year of teaching. The occasion for this reflection was an opportunity to share wobble moments (Fecho, Graham, & Hudson-Ross, 2005; Fecho, 2011; Fecho & Clifton, 2017; Garcia & O’Donnell-Allen, 2015)—episodes of uncertainty in teaching that serve to call attention to the possibilities for change—with a small group of emerging teachers like herself.

Focusing on a key event, Kristen had written about Jake, a student who was not without some rough edges, but was “a sweet and super misunderstood kid” with whom Kristen was forging a supportive, yet still tentative and fragile relationship. She prefaced her narrative by describing efforts she had made to help Jake see her as his advocate and she shared his responses in kind. Although these efforts didn’t result in an overhaul in his behavior or disposition, Jake’s engagement and participation in Kristen’s class noticeably improved.

Although hardly a relationship that had vigorously been tested, it had progressed to a point that she could trust him to remain in her classroom when she lunched in the faculty room. Kristen picks up the story:

Towards the end of lunch, Jake came into the faculty room to ask if I could let him into my classroom because he accidentally locked his stuff in there. As he was talking to me, a few other teachers sitting at my table suddenly attacked him with accusations and questions like, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THE FACULTY ROOM?” “NO STUDENTS ALLOWED.” “GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT.” The caps lock may seem a bit ridiculous, but that’s because they [the teachers] were acting absolutely ridiculous and straight up mean.

Jake, not being an adolescent who let such verbal attacks pass, made retorts that only served to escalate the teacher response and leave Kristen dangling somewhere between protecting her student and “trying not to talk smack” about the other teachers. She managed to guide Jake from the room, but could only respond with what to her was an inadequate, “I know. I’m sorry.”

When I returned to the faculty lunch, one of the teachers said, “I’m sorry, but Jake is super rude. I had him last year.” I don’t know what I mumbled back, but I know that I was thinking how Jake may be rude at times, but so were YOU and you are the adult. As I sat there, I realized that I was holding back tears and so many different emotions. When the bell rang, that same teacher asked, “So are we okay, Kristen. Are we friends?” And then I tried to explain Jake’s situation and how he has a really tough life, but mostly I just blubbered about how he’s misunderstood and I looked ridiculous doing it. The teacher immediately felt bad and said she’d go find Jake and apologize. The other two teachers felt no regret.

Despite the empathetic response of another colleague who sent her a text affirming that yelling at the student was completely wrong, Kristen remained shaken by the episode. Unable to rationalize what she viewed as insensitivity of her colleagues and frustrated by her own confusion about how best to respond, emotions, most likely pent up across these first few weeks of school, swept through her. Describing herself as being in “no state to teach,” Kristen asked her co-teacher to take over the next class and spent the entire period in the school parking lot crying in her car. As she related …

My heart hurt so bad for Jake and the injustice of it all really angered me. Some things [like what happened in the faculty room] just aren’t that important to me when they can hinder a student’s growth and trust.

It’s often a compounding effect of a variety of seemingly small, but telling encounters that position new teachers in moments when they become especially vulnerable, and thus even less prepared for some larger tragic event.

I was still recovering from this experience [with Jake] while I was on my way [in my position as coach] to our last cross country meet of the year that same day. Later that night, one of our runners was accidentally shot in the chest and died. He was still in his jersey when it happened. His funeral is tomorrow and I’m scared.

Exploring the Landscape of the Issues

Kristen’s wobble moment, despite its relative brevity, calls to the surface a fair range of issues we address in this book: navigating the complexity of teacher/student relationships, interacting with colleagues in professional and personal terms, trying to read the mixed messages sent by the cultures of schools, and constructing a sense of agency within a diverse spectrum of expectations imposed from others. One factor that stands out is the suddenness of it all: one moment Kristen is eating lunch; the next moment she’s verging on chaos.

There is no denying that these two experiences, juxtaposed as they were, struck Kristen to her emotional core. There exists a tension between her wanting to respond on human terms to what she sees as an injustice to Jake and yet wanting to appear professional in front of her colleagues. But what exactly does appear professional mean? Certainly, one cultural construction of professionalism is for teachers to remain somewhat aloof of students, to “not smile until Christmas” as goes the oft-repeated advice to new teachers. Implicit in that remark is that teachers need to maintain distance from nor should they emotionally take up for adolescents in their care.

But the ramifications of the no-smiling adage are even more complex in that they set up “‘us vs them’ categories that put new teachers in the position of having to determine ‘how to survive’ framed primarily in terms of authority and loyalties rather than in the complexities of dynamic and dialogical teachers and students learning, being, and becoming across various contexts, histories and trajectories” (Clifton, J., personal communication, August 6, 2019). Sadly, too, such a dichotomous stance denies the importance of emotional response in terms of learning (Falter, 2016; Rosenblatt, 1994; 1995), especially in a class where content is being addressed through inquiry and dialogue.

To an extent, Kristen is tugged toward a show of solidarity with her colleagues—don’t “talk smack,” as she puts it—while stretching herself empathetically toward the needs of her student. It’s natural for folks to close ranks to protect their own. But solidarity can come with unintended consequences when those who serve others close ranks; inequities can persist. At least two of Kristen’s colleagues saw nothing wrong and most likely felt justified in the harangue they loosed on Jake, and others in the room felt no compulsion to speak up or intervene in support of him.

Being former high school teachers and now engaged teacher educators, we, the authors, know this simple fact: teaching well is hard, undervalued work. So, we understand how negative portrayals in the media and political policy aimed at undermining public schools have left many fine educators feeling distrustful, abandoned, angry, and betrayed. Faced with having to do more with so much less in terms of financial and moral support, many teachers feel abandoned and isolated. But we also argue that yielding to those negative emotions only widens the chasm being created between teachers, parents, the public at large, and, most sadly, students.

Part of what is occurring in this anecdote has to do with context, specifically the faculty room. School structures, both hard (e.g., classrooms, floor plans) and soft (e.g., teaching periods, courses offered), are integral toward determining a teacher’s autonomy. They can be frameworks from which thoughtful and innovative teachers expand and build outwardly or walls that unnecessarily restrict those same teachers. A good number of these structures are deeply entrenched in the historical culture of schools. Faculty lunchrooms are for faculty. Period. Many teachers view these havens much like a release valve on a pressure cooker, a space in which to blow off steam, recalibrate, and regain perspective.

Jake entering the lunchroom was a trespass on what was probably a stated policy, but Kristen coming to his defense was a trespass on an unwritten law. In baseball, batters shouldn’t show up pitchers; in schools, teachers shouldn’t contradict other teachers in front of students. Particularly, less experienced teachers shouldn’t contradict more experienced teachers. Whether overt or unwritten, school structures are often presented as immutable, as “what we’ve always done,” as “we’ve tried other things and they don’t work.”

Right in the middle of the commotion within this structure, Kristen seems to be deliberating between two different “oughts.” On one hand, she’s in the midst of her own tug of war, caught somewhere between the novice she is and the teacher she wants to be. One can easily imagine her thinking: what would my methods instructor do? When you’re a new teacher, everything is new. There’s frequently no past experience on which to fall back. The freshness of these moments may result in a heightened awareness or questioning of issues because all of these “firsts” as a new teacher are raw, wobbly, and perhaps a bit too real. Therefore, at this juncture, one part of Kristen is thinking I just ought to remove Jake from the room and try to carry on.

But a colleague won’t let it go at that. “Jake is super rude,” the woman says when Kristen returns. Interestingly, Kristen’s verbal response is lost to her memory, no doubt outweighed by what she was actually thinking: “But so were YOU [rude] and you are the adult.” This is the second ought, now pulling her in a different direction. We can imagine Kristen thinking This is what I ought to have said. She finds herself tangled within threads of expectations—spun by colleagues, parents, administration, students, media portrayals, the very history of teaching, and Kristen herself—that become a most imperfect weave of frayed ends, mismatched patterns, and indeterminate design.

Where Is Dialogue?

What seems particularly missing from this episode is time—to think, to reflect, to measure response, to call upon past practice, to choose from a range of options, to gain deeper understanding of the stances of others. Mostly, there is little time for dialogue, particularly for dialogue that engages the self and others in genuine efforts to make meaning of and learn from moments of wobble and the range of responses such moments elicit from those involved and others on the periphery. To be engaged in dialogue intended to facilitate learning through self and others, as we will discuss throughout the book, is to move from dialogue to the dialogical. In doing so, participants shift from simply responding to responding with purpose, to hearing and being heard, to efforts to understand and be understood, to acknowledging perspectives and having their perspectives acknowledged.

The best examples of the dialogical in Kristen’s wobble moment occur early on in the text as summary of Jake and her working through the rough spots in their teacher/student relationship. The two of them had dialogued to the point where she had developed insight into his triggers and motivations and he had come to see her as an adult who cared about his world view. Knowing this context, the narrative can be read with a particular poignancy because readers sense a fragility to the in-process connection between Jake and Kristen. Having built it is not enough; what’s done is easily undone if not sustained through ongoing dialogue. What has been constructed with care by both student and teacher can be challenged, bruised or broken when others—in Kristen’s case, her colleagues—insert themselves into a dialogical relationship very much in the early stages of development.

Through the remainder of the narrative, Kristen relates little that aspires to the dialogical. One colleague seeks reconciliation, but it feels perfunctory. Another colleague who observed the scene, but didn’t speak out extended a hand later via text and offered refreshment. However, those involved took no systematic time to engage Kristen on the ramifications of what occurred in the faculty lunch room and, we emphasize, showed little thought or care for the student. No substantive discussion takes place through professional development opportunities. Essentially, Kristen was left to make meaning of the experience on her own. And before she could even proceed in that direction, she was confronted with the tragic death of a student she had just coached in a cross country meet. In 1975, Dan Lortie wrote about the isolation of teachers. Over 40 years later, little has changed. No wonder Kristen was finding the wobble in her practice and the emotional load that accompanied it more than she could bear on her own.

Sharing Questions and Sketching the Study

However, Kristen wasn’t alone. She was one of four novice teachers working with Dawan Coombs at Brigham Young University. Rather than making meaning in solitude—assuming she found the time and energy to do so—Kristen had three peers and a teacher educator with whom to share her wobble moments and from whom to gain multiple perspectives, compassionate regard, and thoughtful insight. In addition, she was able to return the same to the other teachers in the group. Given that they met as a group at least once a month and that they were all expected to both share narratives and provide feedback to the narratives of others, the teachers involved in the group not only set aside time for these transactions, but also began to see them as integral to how they were constructing themselves and being constructed as teachers.

Simultaneously, three other groups—one with Bob Fecho at Teachers College, Columbia University, another with Todd Hawley at Kent State, and a third with Trevor Stewart at Virginia Tech University—were also meeting to share and unpack narratives. The four of us, connected at one time through the University of Georgia, shared deep and committed interests in teacher education that fostered reflective practice, critical stances on sociocultural issues, and teaching from inquiry-based, dialogical perspectives. Concerned by the increasing standardization of curriculum, assessment, pacing, and even dress occurring in too many public schools (Fitchett & Heafner 2010; McNeil, 2011; Meier, 2003; Pignatelli, 2005), we looked to an earlier study Bob had done with four veteran teachers from Georgia (Fecho, Falter, & Hong, 2016). In that study, he and his co-researchers, which included the four teachers, wondered this: what happens when teachers try to teach in dialogical ways in standardized schools? It then seemed obvious to us to insert the word novice in front of teachers and try to better understand the struggles and breakthroughs of teachers relatively new to the profession.

This question was one of practice for us as teacher educators due to the disconnect we were prevalently seeing in student teacher placements and the early years positions of graduates. Within the confines of our college classrooms, preservice teachers were getting to engage with the menu of what we construe as a nourishing diet of teaching approaches that were transactional (Rosenblatt, 1994; 1995), critical (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994), reflective (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Schön, 1987), sensitive to diversity (Delpit, 1995; Emdin, 2016; Nieto, 2015), and steeped in dialogical processes (Bakhtin, 1981; 1986; Fecho, 2011; Matusov, 2009). A unifying thread to these stances is that they position teachers as responsible agents of change who thoughtfully and systematically approach their classrooms as places where students and teachers engage in substantive acts of meaning-making. As such, depth is emphasized over breadth, habits of learning over discrete content, flexibility over rigidity, and multiple perspectives over prescribed interpretations.

Yet out in schools, preservice and first-year teachers were encountering mandated curriculums, expectations of conformity in pacing, and seemingly never-ending imposed assessments. As research has indicated, novice teachers often find themselves confronting the reality of being wedged between two worlds (Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985) that can exacerbate the isolation and doubt they already feel as they work to reconcile what they imagine administration and colleagues expect them to do with what they believe will be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Recognizing Wobble, Uncertainty, and Possibility
• 2 Describing the Process
• 3 Constructing Personal and Professional Identities
• 4 Dialoguing through Tensions between Belief and Practice
• 5 Transacting with School Structures
• 6 Maximizing the Possibilities
• Author Biographies
• Index