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to Spring Innovator Side by Side: Teachers and Researchers Learning Together
Respectful. Friendly. Caring. Reciprocal. Mutually beneficial. These are terms that describe some of the relationships formed between K-12 teachers and University of Michigan School of Education researchers studying classroom teaching and learning in order to improve student achievement.
A newly developed, fourteen-part video series and web-based course developed by CPB/Annenberg, The Learning Classroom: From Theory to Practice, features three outstanding Michigan teachers who have collaborated closely with UM SOE faculty over a number of years: Efrenia Fe MacLean, of Paddock Elementary in Milan, who has worked with Professor Annemarie Palincsar on the Guided Inquiry in Science and Multiple Literacies Project; and Kathleen Hayes-Parvin, of Birney Middle School in Southfield and Peter Shaheen, of Seaholm High School in Birmingham, both of whom have worked with Professors Anne Ruggles Gere and Lesley Rex on the Making American Literatures Project, the Oakland Writing Project, and the Michigan Classroom Discourse Group. Hayes-Parvin and her Birney colleagues have also been involved in an ongoing cross-age project, bringing together sixth grade students and prospective secondary English teachers. The video series includes several segments from an interview with Palincsar, and a brief segment with Rex and her undergraduate students as they engage in the cross-age project with Hayes-Parvin’s sixth graders.
Fe MacLean, a National Board of Professional Teaching Standards-certified teacher currently working with the National Science Foundation as a Teacher Scholar, is featured introducing her first graders to challenging scientific concepts such as momentum and speed. Kathleen Hayes-Parvin is shown in four video segments, which highlight a family history/memoir project that involves parents and children from diverse cultural, linguistic, and socio-economic backgrounds. Peter Shaheen demonstrates some of the nuances of “cognitive apprenticeship”—explicitly modeling and teaching complex thinking processes, then gradually releasing responsibility to his high school writing students, who begin to teach each other.
It’s no accident that, when producers began searching for classrooms across all grade levels and subject areas that exemplified research-based practice, they encountered a number of teachers who collaborated with university faculty. MacLean, Hayes-Parvin, and Shaheen readily acknowledge that their relationships with faculty have enhanced their classroom practice and professional understanding. Kathleen Hayes-Parvin speaks to the longevity and power of the relationship, saying, “We’ve been collaborating with University of Michigan since the fall of 1992. Many, many lives have been touched--not only the Birney students’ lives, but the UM students’. Collaborations have helped me hone my practice, to keep fresh, and to provide authentic audiences for my students. It is so impressive for our parents to come with us to campus and see the kind of work that goes on. I hope our collaboration never ends—it continues to grow and evolve.” Shaheen says he’s learned that “life in the ‘ivory tower’ is not so unlike the politics-laden school in which I struggle. While these times are as challenging as any teachers have faced in the history of American education, my collaboration with Anne Gere has inspired me with a sense of energy, renewal, and commitment toward my profession.”
It is equally true that their faculty collaborators acknowledge they have learned and benefited from relationships with these teachers. Anne Ruggles Gere says, “I see teaching as a continuum that extends across institutional boundaries, and I have a great deal to learn from my secondary school colleagues. In Making American Literatures, for example, I learned how the "school canon" of American literature is shaped by talking with teachers about which texts they use and how they teach them.” Lesley Rex honors Kathleen Hayes-Parvin’s expertise in improving the reading and writing performances of all the students in her classroom, no matter how prepared they are when they arrive. “Kathleen has taught us how to transform all students into confident readers and writers, even those who may be performing well below grade level. She’s a master.”
Tangible, Useable “Products”
Collaborative relationships between classroom teachers and university researchers often result in new, interesting, and more broadly useful “products” that often exist alongside more traditional research articles. Products may include student-friendly software and databases, web-based archives, science and social studies units, new texts for young readers, case studies that can be used in teacher education classrooms or professional development settings, or practitioner-friendly research summaries. Sometimes pre-existing relationships and partnerships are tapped, and drawn upon in new ways, when a group begins to develop a new product. The development of The Learning Classroom series and web-based course is a good example of this phenomenon. The series, which has been played on PBS stations across the country, is not merely a collection of videotapes. Instead, it was designed for use as a web-based course for prospective and practicing teachers, originally based on a Stanford University course for preservice teachers designed and taught by Lee Shulman and Linda Darling-Hammond. By re-imagining the course and bringing to bear the rich resources of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Annenberg Foundation, the producers of the series were able to create materials and design a sequence of activities that could be drawn upon by many institutions of higher education, as well as by individual teachers and school district leaders.
Concretely Reciprocal: Literacy in Action as “Payback”
One UM researcher feels so strongly about reciprocity that she offers her
expertise to address locally identified problems in exchange for the opportunity
to observe classrooms over time. UM ethnographer Lesley Rex joined with
high school English teachers from two Southfield schools to form Literacy in
Action (LIA), a study/action research group that aims to improve curriculum,
instruction and assessment to meet the needs of all students. The problem
teachers identified was preparing students for state assessments while also
satisfying local curricular mandates and their own ideas about literacy needs. District
administrators funded
substitutes so that English teachers from the two departments could meet for five all-day, school-year workshops. The participants began by taking the MEAP test and analyzing its intellectual and literate demands. They examined what they knew and could teach in relation to what was expected, and they developed lists of principles, strategies, and techniques they could easily apply. They tried out the strategies and collected data on the results. Now in its third year, Gail Setter, a reading and professional development consultant from Southfield High School, reports that Literacy in Action is “connecting with UM’s Sweetland Writing Center to create lessons and activities to improve student composition of argumentative and persuasive writing.” Comments from participants include these: “(LIA) helped me to understand how to break down complex tasks into concrete exercises for students. These exercises will help students build bridges to higher levels of thinking,” and “This workshop is taking me places I haven’t been.” Test scores are improving, and members of this group are also presenting their findings to teachers and administrators throughout the region.
With the teachers’ permission, Lesley Rex is also conducting a long-term
study focusing on the discourses of teaching in two district classrooms. 
A Pattern Emerges: Long Term Friendships, Partnerships and Networks
Across discipline areas, across projects, and across levels, new examples continue to emerge. For instance, the Highly Interactive Computing in Education (hi-ce) Project, after years of work in Detroit middle schools focusing on science and technology, is a recognized “name brand” that Detroit teachers rely on for meaningful professional development and high quality web-based resources. History/social studies
education faculty member Bob Bain, working under the hi-ce umbrella in collaboration with the Henry Ford Museum, is in the process of developing the Primary Sources Network, a web-based resource that will be coupled with professional development workshops this summer. And for several years, the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA) sponsored a network of teachers-in residence—teachers who were funded to spend a summer planning and preparing to launch classroom research projects. Some of these teachers have then served as facilitators and presenters for the CIERA Summer Institute, a five-day intensive workshop that brings together researchers and practitioners to study and discuss current research in the teaching of reading.
Similarly, the newly formed Center for Proficiency in Teaching Mathematics is sponsoring a regional study group of community college and university-based teacher educators, which in turn is involved in the design and facilitation of a summer institute for community college and university-based mathematics educators across the nation.
The friendships, networks, and alliances forged through common work on problems of teaching and learning make it possible to expand the impact of research and to create powerful, research-based products and learning opportunities that can be shared widely—ultimately, for the benefit of students, learning, and achievement.
Teacher Research/Action Research Resources
Hubbard, Ruth Shagoury; Brenda Miller Power. Living the Questions: A Guide for Teacher-Researchers. York, Maine: Stenhouse, 1999.
The Looking at Student Work Collaborative Web site: http://www.lasw.org
Networks: An Online Journal for Teacher Research Web site: http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~ctd/networks/links.html
CPB/Annenberg The Learning Classroom: Theory into Practice Web site: http://www.learner.org 1-800-LEARNER
