their reflections that week posted to their own blogs were filled with connections they made between Dewey’s work, John Seely Brown’s, and the research report/agenda for Connected Learning

scaffolding between the texts and supportive approaches

Amazing

to highlight things they noticed and that raised questions for them

about the power of annotation

“add up to a sense of mastery—or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life”

Ambiguities, uncertainties, and unpredictably [sic] are the substance of teaching”

“why of teaching: why teaching methods work in particular ways in particular settings”

good teachers, novice and senior, live their class-room lives, maybe out of necessity, in a domain between principle and un-certainty”

That which was once this is moving slowly—at least at first—toward becoming tha

showed more significant gains in their ELA growth than any of the seniors Antero had taught previously

as the art emerges, they may make countless adjustments and new decisions that result in a product they probably didn’t imagine from the start

relaxing the muscles that are stretching and the muscles that do not need to work in the pose.

Figure I.2

address each new teaching experience

He also got permission to provide instructional continuity for his students by “looping” the class the subsequent year. This meant that his AP classes included many seniors whom he had taught the previous year. He was thus able to teach his current juniors for two years in a row—once during their junior year and then again during their senior year when a new group of 11th-graders was encouraged to advocate for participation in AP classes in their senior year.

When wobble occurs, you may feel as if nothing in your teach-er education program has prepared you for this, and you may very well be right.

After years in the profession, shouldn’t teachers eventually figure out how to get it right? Maybe not.

pecial responsibility to teach from a social justice perspective, tack-ling issues of privilege, problems of equity and access, and the possibilities inherent in social and civic action.

In some cases like the one above, it’s possible to work within the system and simultaneously maintain your commitment to a given pose. Some instances, however, call for the more radical approach of “working the system” in-stead. Especially early in your career, when you choose to react to wobble by working the system, it’s essential that you have a very firm rationale that is grounded in theory, research, and/or the recommendations of professional organizations, so that you can justify what you’re doing and why to those in positions of power over you

By using an active pose as a touchstone, you’ve maintained your agency as a “deliberative intellectual” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) capable of posing yourself rather than being posed in the expected ways implicit in a particular constraint within your teaching context.

Ultimately, “this is the way the self grows” (p. 42) because individuals become more capable

The poses you take up in your career will have profound implications for the kind of teacher you intend to be and the impact you and your students will make on the world. The commitment it will take to sustain them will often lead you to wobble.

Although the word pose often has a pejorative connotation (i.e., one poses in an attempt to trick, dissemble, or cloak true intentions),

Like yoga practitioners, teachers who are committed to professional growth also take up stances (or poses) toward their practice, and reflect on areas in which they wobble with the intent of attaining flow—those provisional moments that mark progress in their teaching.

These three terms function in a metaphorical sense that reflects the practice of yoga.

Rather, students have considerable freedom to determine the content and form of their project and to work with others or by themselves.

within

low experiences are so intense that we lose track of time and temporarily escape other everyday concerns

Wobble occurs routinely in the classroom when something unexpected emerges

pose conveys the dimensions of mindfulness

Wobble occurs routinely in the classroom when something unexpected emerges, such as an unpredictable question that neither the students (nor you, for that matter) can adequately address

While wob-ble may initially cause frustration, it also signals a commitment to increased discipline and deepened practice.

not about an endpoint;

centered on re-evaluating the educa-tional needs of all students in order to challenge assumptions of equality in pedagogical design and educational reform.

culturally proactive teaching and the thinking and teaching practices that accompany them.

o teach from a social justice perspective, tack-ling issues of privilege, problems of equity and access, and the possibilities inherent in social and civic action.

remember that react-ing is not the same as being reactionary

In other words, when you wobble, it doesn’t mean that you’re failing. Rather, it signals that you are pursuing worthwhile poses that require learning, reflection, and professional growth.

experienced practitioners not only expect to wobble, they welcome it:

Wobble occurs routinely in the classroom when something unexpected emerges, such as an unpredictable question that neither the students (nor you, for that matter) can adequately address, or a spat that breaks out be-tween students that has absolutely nothing to do with the academic subject at hand. When wobble occurs, you may feel as if nothing in your teach-er education program has prepared you for this, and you may very well be right.

a pose is far more than a “best practice,” which, as we pointed out earlier, is an idea that relies on the myth that some teaching techniques are so foolproof they will work with all students in all contexts for all time.

/W/F cycles most successfully when we collaborate with colleagues who provide moral support and at the same time challenge our thinking.

for the often frustrating feelings of uncertainty inherent in the re-cursive process of improving one’s practice.

But we can say from experience that even teachers whose practice is apparently seamless to the outside eye will continue to wobble in response to changes in their teaching contexts.

we know that though our uncertainties and apprehensions differ from those we experienced in our early years of teaching, we have them all the same. What’s changed is that we don’t view them as liabilities, but as challenges that can further our pro-fessional growth.

teachers have a special responsibility to teach from a social justice perspective, tack-ling issues of privilege, problems of equity and access, and the possibilities inherent in social and civic action

the change in the moral school atmosphere, in the relation of pupils and teachers—of discipline; the introduction of more active, expressive, and self-directing factors—all these are not mere accidents, they are necessities of the larger social evolution.

but that the scientific insight thus gained becomes an indispensable instrument of free and active participation in modern social life

In critical moments we all realize that the only discipline that stands by us, the only training that becomes intuition, is that got through life itself.

A spirit of free communication, of interchange of ideas, suggestions, results, both successes and failures of previous experiences, becomes the dominating note of the recitation.

In all this there was continual training of observation, of ingenuity, constructive imagination, of logical thought, and of the sense of reality acquired through first-hand contact with actualities.

One can hardly believe there has been a revolution in all history so rapid, so extensive, so complete.

So thoroughly is this the prevalent atmosphere that for one child to help another in his task has become a school crime.

It is actively moving in all the currents of society itself.

Verbal memory can be trained in committing tasks, a certain discipline of the reasoning powers can be acquired through lessons in science and mathematics; but, after all, this is somewhat remote and shadowy compared with the training of attention and of judgment that is acquired in having to do things with a real motive behind and a real outcome ahead.

The modification going on in the method and curriculum of education is as much a product of the changed social situation, and as much an effort to meet the needs of the new society that is forming, as are changes in modes of industry and commerce.

The result has been an intellectual revolution. Learning has been put into circulation.

everyone has a calling and occupation, something to do. Some are managers and others are subordinates. But the great thing for one as for the other is that each shall have had the education which enables him to see within his daily work all there is in it of large and human significance.

But if the end in view is the development of a spirit of social coöperation and community life, discipline must grow out of and be relative to this. There is little order of one sort where things are in process of construction; there is a certain disorder in any busy workshop; there is not silence; persons are not engaged in maintaining certain fixed physical postures; their arms are not folded; they are not holding their books thus and so. They are doing a variety of things, and there is the confusion, the bustle, that results from activity.

Where the school work consists in simply learning lessons, mutual assistance, instead of being the most natural form of coöperation and association, becomes a clandestine effort to relieve one’s neighbor of his proper duties. Where active work is going on all this is changed. Helping others, instead of being a form of charity which impoverishes the recipient, is simply an aid in setting free the powers and furthering the impulse of the one helped.

We must conceive of them in their social significance, as types of the processes by which society keeps itself going, as agencies for bringing home to the child some of the primal necessities of community life, and as ways in which these needs have been met by the growing insight and ingenuity of man; in short, as instrumentalities through which the school itself shall be made a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons.

Consciousness of its real import is still so weak that the work is often done in a half-hearted, confused, and unrelated way. The reasons assigned to justify it are painfully inadequate or sometimes even positively wrong.

But the point of view is, upon the whole, unnecessarily narrow.

we cannot overlook the importance for educational purposes of the close and intimate acquaintance got with nature at first hand, with real things and materials, with the actual processes of their manipulation, and the knowledge of their social necessities and uses.

It is our present education which is highly specialized, one-sided and narrow.

Plato somewhere speaks of the slave as one who in his actions does not express his own ideas, but those of some other man

The world without its relationship to human activity is less than a world.

worthy, lovely, and harmonious

The unity of all the sciences is found in geography

It is this liberation from narrow utilities, this openness to the possibilities of the human spirit that makes these practical activities in the school allies of art and centers of science and history.

It gets a chance to be a miniature community, an embryonic society.

The mere absorption of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.

Upon the playground, in game and sport, social organization takes place spontaneously and inevitably. There is something to do, some activity to be carried on, requiring natural divisions of labor, selection of leaders and followers, mutual coöperation and emulation. In the schoolroom the motive and the cement of social organization are alike wanting.

How many of the employed are today mere appendages to the machines which they operate! This may be due in part to the machine itself, or to the régime which lays so much stress upon the products of the machine; but it is certainly due in large part to the fact that the worker has had no opportunity to develop his imagination and his sympathetic insight as to the social and scientific values found in his work.

The common needs and aims demand a growing interchange of thought and growing unity of sympathetic feeling

instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons

It is radical conditions which have changed, and only an equally radical change in education suffices.

educative forces

That this revolution should not affect education in other than formal and superficial fashion is inconceivable.

is the industrial one

But why should I make this labored presentation? The obvious fact is that our social life has undergone a thorough and radical change. If our education is to have any meaning for life, it must pass through an equally complete transformation. This transformation is not something to appear suddenly, to be executed in a day by conscious purpose.

renewed. It has a chance to affiliate itself with life, to become the child’s habitat, where he learns through directed living; instead of being only a place to learn lessons having an abstract and remote reference to some possible living to be done in the future.

The radical reason that the present school cannot organize itself as a natural social unit is because just this element of common and productive activity is absent.

When we turn to the school, we find that one of the most striking tendencies at present is toward the introduction of so-called manual training, shop-work, and the household arts—sewing and cooking.

Indeed, almost the only measure for success is a competitive one, in the bad sense of that term—a comparison of results in the recitation or in the examination to see which child has succeeded in getting ahead of others in storing up, in accumulating the maximum of information. So thoroughly is this the prevalent atmosphere that for one child to help another in his task has become a school crime.

he school itself shall be made a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons

the girls to be more efficient house managers, if not actually cooks and sempstresses; the boys (were our educational system only adequately rounded out into trade schools) for their future vocations.

how shall we retain these advantages, and yet introduce into the school something representing the other side of life—occupations which exact personal responsibilities and which train the child with relation to the physical realities of life?

Verbal memory can be trained in committing tasks, a certain discipline of the reasoning powers can be acquired through lessons in science and mathematics; but, after all, this is somewhat remote and shadowy compared with the training of attention and of judgment that is acquired in having to do things with a real motive behind and a real outcome ahead.

How many of the employed are today mere appendages to the machines which they operate!

It was a matter of immediate and personal concern, even to the point of actual participation.

in shops which were constantly open to inspection and often centers of neighborhood congregation

Let us then ask after the main aspects of the social movement

Can we connect this “New Education” with the general march of events

the separation of theory and practice

Knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied

growing, one former is worth a thousand re-formers,”

Yet the range of the outlook needs to be enlarged. What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children.

www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53910

John Dewey

Note: I have been inspired by colleagues of mine to think more about tools like hypothesis that let us create small private groups in which we can annotate articles together and then you can choose to make those comments public or not.

Now, checking myself here, I realize that ED677 is a graduate class and that one of the “deals” with school, is that we have safe spaces for talking through complicated ideas without always being subject to public scrutiny. And I also know that educators today are under enormous pressure and public spaces are not always safe and supportive (to say the least).

Most recently I have been learning from two new-to-me online communities of practice – Wattpad for Writers and DeviantArt for Artists. Their online designs and supportive networked ways of working prompt me to continue thinking about the power of open ways of working in such communities.