Karen Van Poperin

Final Paper

TE 807

Summer 2019

Part 1 – Reflection on Peer Coaching Cycle

The best learning for all learners (including educator-learners), comes from authentic

and personally meaningful connections. My honest, initial opinion of the Peer Coaching Cycle

assignment was just that- it was an assignment, it seemed likely that it would be removed from

my real teaching, and thus, unable to inform or improve my real practice. I thought it would be

just another assignment hoop to jump through, an activity confined to a class in my Master’s

program and not having real implications in my life as an elementary school teacher. However,

once I invested time and energy into this process, I found myself thinking it was surprisingly

rewarding and educational (and hopefully for my team members too). It reminded me of that old

saying from when I was an elementary student myself: “You get what you put in.”

This was an opportunity to engage with colleagues over an open-ended, interesting,

dynamic, and true assignment. With an online class, having a real conversation with others

was very connecting, and honestly feels more like an academic experience for me than writing

discussion posts, so I enjoyed it.

The biggest struggle for me with this specific assignment is the same general struggle I

have in any class as a student and also in my own class as a teacher: it’s this discouraging and

disheartening word time and the lack of it again and again in education. While we know peer

coaching is a great way for teachers to help each other, we just don’t have the time to do

anything as well as we’d like. Our group ended up being in three different time zones, so
scheduling was a little difficult and we held our meeting 9 pm Michigan time, which after a whole

day of teaching I’m sure was hard for those in the later time zones.

My group consisted of Sarah and Nani and I appreciated their attentive insights about

my artifact and enjoyed the organic discussion we shared with our professor. In the

standardization of schooling, we are surrounded by so many ideas that implicitly and explicitly

state everyone should be doing the same thing all the time, which alienates us from the

personal meaning making process that is learning. This assignment was a nice break from that

expectation and a good reminder that allowing students choice is where engagement lies. I like

that we were able to pick an artifact that was personally meaningful for us. It made this

assignment agency-granting and I feel grateful for it.

The artifact I chose for this assignment was an anchor chart of key themes that

developed from genuine conversations in my class during community circle time this year, after

soliciting student opinions. When we started this anchor chart together, I gave my students a

sentence starter that said, “One thing that would make our days together better is…” It’s

amazing how much children have to share with each other when you give them the opportunity

to talk. I believe this open, honest, and shared endeavor of problem-solving in our community

anchored social-emotional learning for them.

One of my focus questions for this project was how to display care to students, which

connects to a major theme in my Stance on Quality Teaching. My group partner Sarah

encouraged me during our meeting. As an English Language Development teacher, she told me

to continue using sentence frames for scaffolded language during community circle time and

that she saw my care as a teacher in this learner-driven, respectful space for students to share.

Nani also recommended various “care rituals,” that I’d like to look into for next year such as

greetings at the door or a class pledge.

As a peer coach, I reminded Sarah that if there is any option to have her ELD students

pick the subject matter of their readings, that their interest and engagement would increase. I
also connected with Nani’s artifact because I’ve seen discipline protocols like hers in other

teachers’ classrooms, and asked her about how much time at the end of the day is spent on the

communications she sends home daily. I also commended her for keeping her behavior system

positive, by focusing on the “blue star” students.

After completing this Peer Coaching Cycle, I do not feel there is a revision I would make

to this particular artifact because this artifact was tailored to a certain class I had this year and

the personal issues we discussed together. The only change I will make in the future would be

to be cognizant that I’ll have a new class each year, and they will bring themselves to make a

new community with me, in which we will have different conversations and themes from our

meeting times.

While this was a more formal way to approach it, teachers are doing this Peer Coaching

Cycle informally all the time, but never actually given time for it in their school day. I would enjoy

the Peer Coaching Cycle as something we focus on in my school, as opposed to “Data Team”

or “PLC” meetings, which are based on only quantitative data, which can feel demoralizing.

I came away from this experience thinking how important it is that teachers act not as

cogs, but as human beings and personally lead in their schools. We are the ones who

understand our system the best and what is being asked of us on a daily basis. It is up to us to

start where we are. In Teachers as Transformatory Intellectuals, Giroux states, “Viewing

teachers as intellectuals also provides a strong theoretical critique of technocratic and

instrumental ideologies underlying an educational theory that separates the conceptualization,

planning and design of curricula from the processes of implementation and execution. It is

important to stress that teachers must take active responsibility for raising serious questions

about what they teach, how they are to teach, and what the larger goals are for which they are

striving,” (2018, p. 3). We must find each other as peer-leaders, connect, and implement change

by helping and guiding each other as intellectuals and humans in an increasingly

impersonal, systematized institution.

 With all that we are asked to do as teaching professionals in schools, our efforts to

improve our practice is always something that can be pushed to the side. I know I should

prioritize it, but the education system stretches us all so thin. This assignment was another good

reminder that staying engaged in my own passionate inquiry of learning is one of the many

ways I can replenish myself, stay involved, and hopefully not burn out or become disillusioned in

this giant system of public education. Even though a Peer Coaching Cycle at the end of the

school day may take more energy in the short-term, it somehow seems to encourage and

energize me as an educator in the long-term.

Part 2 – Revised Stance on Quality Teaching

As educators, we talk often about the whole child, affirming the idea that inside each of

our students is an entire being, not just a data plot point or even many data plot points. We can

extend this idea to our discussion of anything- about places or ideas as being whole. Or, in the

case this assignment, we can talk about a process (teaching) as a whole. An intricate and

dynamic process like helping to create whole children can’t be meaningfully discussed in

simplistic terms. We can only talk about it in slivers, and hope that by collecting many

meaningful slivers, we can somehow glimpse something close to the whole. This is my attempt

at collecting meaningful slivers about what quality teaching is.

Fensternmacher & Richardson (2005) open their article On Making Determinations of

Quality in Teaching by introducing the main character in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

Maintenance (Pirsig, 1974), “Who is driven insane pursuit of an answer to the question, ‘What is

quality?’ Unable to find solace in Western conceptions of quality, he eventually turns to the

millennia-old Tao Te Ching, which speaks of quality in these terms: ‘Meet it and you do not see

its face/Follow it and you do not see its back,’” (p. 1). Indeed, quality is a nebulous concept, but

just because it doesn’t completely come clean as a definition doesn’t mean we can’t learn
something from just the pursuit of discussing it. From my experience of seven years teaching, I

have some general comments to make first about what quality teaching is and isn’t, then I will

discuss the few specific slivers I’ve collected from this course about what quality teaching

means to me personally.

Generally, it’s useful to focus on what quality is when concerning an individual person

because that is a level where we can implement change and act from, but I also think it’s

beneficial to think about quality in terms of a collective of people. Teachers do not feel

respected in our country. If we want the educational system to be of quality, we have to improve

our recruitment and retention tactics. We need to staff our schools with scholarly, peaceful

people who are creative and enthusiastic. In order to do this, we need to make teaching an

attractive, respected, well-paid job, which requires a lot of research and investment into what

makes life better for teachers. Quality comes from an internal place, a sense of having what

you need. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig writes, “The place to improve

the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there,” (p.

36). We want teachers to be people who are balanced, well-resourced, and fulfilled because

everything they do from their centermost point is going to affect children and ultimately, the

future.

Quality isn’t about control and it isn’t about rules. It isn’t about a baby boomer-

influenced, industrialized view of children and how human development works, as if we all

should do everything in a standardized way. Quality isn’t about systematization. In my

opinion, the industrialization of schools has gotten us caught in an assessment craze of trying

to count everything we can and then comparing everyone like it’s meaningful, when really

it’s a waste of our energy and time as educators. I am not saying there is no place for evidence-

based best practices, because there is, but quality is about creativity and passion, and is

much more magical and numinous than the story of endless amounts of data can tell us.
 Now more specifically, this course has helped me develop a few slivers that I believe

comprise my personal definition of what quality teaching is. For my initial stance on Quality

teaching, I wrote about three main components: being present so students feel as if you and

the others in the classroom are with them, showing care, and time for practice (later I also

extended this to also mean time for replenishment). Finally, I added a fourth component of

ongoing intellectual and reflective process.

First, quality teaching is, in part, an unconscious appraisal I have of how present and

connected the students feel to themselves, to others, to the material, and to the teacher. In On

Making Determinations of Quality in Teaching, Fensternmacher & Richardson state, “We are

aware that certain kinds of behaviors and actions by students are indicative of their substantive

engagement in what the teacher is doing, and when we observe these behaviors we note that

the students are ‘with’ the teacher: They are engaged, motivated, following, excited,

connected…” (2005, p. 194). To me, one important sliver of quality teaching is the ebb and flow

responsiveness of everyone in the room being present.

Being present is only one part of what it means to “be with” a child and being an

educator of quality. In quality teaching interactions, this feeling of “with,” also means does a

student feel cared for or does a student feel all alone? As McBee writes in What it Means to

Care: How Educators Conceptualize and Actualize Caring, “Having a caring adult in students’

lives who takes the time to get to know them, show an interest in their circumstances, just listen

to them and their concerns, and communicate high expectations for them is one factor

consistently reported in the literature on resilience,” (2007, p. 34).

In order for there to be responsive, caring presence of all people in the classroom,

quality also depends on time for practice, which is what Sara Mosle argues for in “Building

Better Teachers.” Mosle discusses the Japanese idea of jugyokenkyu, or lesson plan sudy.

When I taught in Denver, our principal was a proponent for a program called, “Beyond Our Four

Walls,” where we were encouraged to go watch our teaching partners teach the same lessons
we ourselves had taught and can personally speak of how helpful it can be to watch another

teacher’s craft.

Education is a very outcome-based career, with endless learning objectives and as

Mosle states in Building Better Teachers, “In practice, [it] means that most teachers in this

country have zero time to work together on new pedagogical approaches and share

feedback...They rarely have an opportunity to watch other teachers teach, the single best kind

of training, in my experience; they’re too busy in their own classrooms (not to mention outside

them). A big problem with American education, in other words, is how we conceive of the job,”

(2014).

In the last week of this course, I’ve considered that I need to add more nuance to my

component of time in my definition of quality. It is not just time for practice, but also time for

time for replenishment that is important. As teachers, we are bombarded all day by others’

needs. We cannot get something from nothing. We must give ourselves time to replenish our

resources and stay active in our own lives.

I believe that by staying connected to our own relationship to self, we can improve our

quality of teaching. As Kristin Souers writes in Fostering Resilient Learners: Strategies for

Creating a Trauma-Sensitive Classroom, “We have to set a realistic goal of what we can do,

even if we feel like we are always being asked to jump higher, do more, or try harder. The

constant stress of not feeling good enough begins to weigh heavily on our hearts and overall

motivation levels. It is also a quick journey to burnout, a place where no one wants to end up.

So reflect on these questions: what will most likely ensure your ability to stay in this field [of

education]? What will most likely contribute to your health and balance? What can you do to

avoid entering into the dreaded state of burnout? Self-care isn’t just about bubble baths: on a

deeper level, it’s about staying connected to ourselves and being true to who were are and how

we want to be,” (2016, p. 44).

 Finally, when we completed our artifact project, I revised my stance on quality teaching

and added a fourth component of an ongoing intellectual and reflective process: that

teachers must look at what they’ve done and why, and what happened, and what would make it

better. Our education system is a human system, and we must appreciate the human thought

and reflection process in it to understand quality. In Teachers as Transformatory Intellectuals

Giroux writes, “By viewing teachers as intellectuals, we can illuminate the important idea that all

human activity involves some form of thinking. No activity, regardless of how routinized it might

become, can be abstracted from the functioning of the mind in some capacity. This is a crucial

issue, because by arguing that the use of the mind is a general part of all human activity we

dignify the human capacity for integrating thinking and practice, and in doing so highlight the

core of what it means to view teachers as reflective practitioners,” (2018, p. 3-4).

Quality teaching to me isn’t something that can be captured in a still frame because it is

too much of a whole idea. It is more a moving, flowing, living, breathing organism that just

requires us to invest our presence, care, time, and reflection into. Quality is a process that we

imbue with our life energy.

References

Ayers, W. (1993). To teach: The journey of a teacher. New York: Teachers College Press.

Fenstermacher, G. D., & Richardson, V. (2005). On Making Determinations of Quality in

Teaching. Teachers College Record,107(1), 186-213. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9620.2005.00462.x

Giroux, H. A. (2018). Teachers as Transformatory Intellectuals. Thinking About Schools, 183-

189. doi:10.4324/9780429495670-16

Mcbee, R. H. (2007). What it Means to Care: How Educators Conceptualize and Actualize

Caring. Action in Teacher Education,29(3), 33-42. doi:10.1080/01626620.2007.10463458

Mosle, S. (2014, September). Building Better Teachers. The Atlantic.

doi:www.theatlantic.com
Pirsig, R. M. (2014). Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: An inquiry into values. London:

Vintage Books.

Souers, K., & Hall, P. A. (2016). Fostering resilient learners: Strategies for creating a trauma-

sensitive classroom. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.