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• W4313150896 abstract "Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s Introduction Learning to Observe, Observing to TeachAndy KaplanAndy KaplanEvanston, Illinois, United States of America Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreI began writing about my experiences as a teacher because I wanted to understand failure, especially those moments when the fabric of classroom life ripped open. A class that goes well is always a great pleasure, but a class that goes poorly is an opportunity, an occasion to learn something about my students, myself, my school. Perhaps one of the reasons I looked at success and failure this way is that for most of my career as a high school English teacher, I engaged students alone. For the first 8 or 10 years of my career, the only time another adult came into in my classroom was the occasional visit of an administrator charged with evaluating me. Although the evaluations were good, they offered few insights to a young teacher striving to improve, aware that some classes worked and others didn’t, unsure what made the difference, and unsure what was in my power to change.It was my students who first showed me a way forward, particularly one student in an upper-level elective course in World Literature. A typical World Literature class would begin with a student reading aloud a passage they had selected from the work we were studying. I assigned one or two students to the task of finding passages that were interesting to begin each class. First, I asked the student to read the passage aloud; then I encouraged the student to highlight why the passage interested them, or to raise a question about what they understood or found confusing. My job was to write key words and phrases on the board, making an effort to sort and connect these keywords with lines, circles, and arrows. Other students joined in with comments, connections, and relevant passages; the conversation was often lively and insightful.One day Chloe stayed after class to talk. She was agitated, but I didn’t know why. Chloe began by telling me she didn’t like this class. There was a long pause. She didn’t look at me and instead stood with arms akimbo staring at the board.“See, this is what I don’t like,” she finally said.I tried to joke, “Yeah, I know, my handwriting is pretty bad.”But Chloe was serious. “I hate that you write down what you think we said. We say a lot more than that, and anyway …” Again a long pause. “So, yeah, you don’t know what’s on our minds, do you?”“No, I don’t. You’re right about that.”“But, but … when you write these things down, and draw those arrows, it’s like you’re pretending that you understand us.” Another pause. “I hate that.” And that was it. Chloe picked up her books and left, leaving me staring at the door, then at the board, and then back to the door. What was that?I pondered that question for some time. The encounter remains vivid after all these years because it showed me a new dimension of my relationship with my students. At first, I thought Chloe was telling me that I misunderstood not just her but also her classmates. And maybe by “pretending,” she meant that I knew I misunderstood but wrote stuff down anyway. But that didn’t square with the lively conversations or the number of times students would correct what I wrote on the board. So maybe this was an isolated complaint, and I should focus on when and how I had misunderstood this young woman. In succeeding classes, I observed two things. First, Chloe joined the conversation pretty regularly, including one or two fairly heated exchanges in our discussions of July’s People, a South African novel about racial strife. Second, she corrected one of the things I wrote on the board. So maybe the misunderstanding was not only personal but temporary. Because the rift seemed to have ended, maybe this was an end to it.But I kept going back to two things that left me uneasy: one was the way Chloe stood in anger, and the other was the phrase she used, “pretending to understand us.” The more I thought about these two things, the connection pointed in a completely new direction. Chloe was not talking about me; she was talking about herself. And the anger was not at any pretense, nor was it at misunderstanding. What made her so angry, it now seemed, was my daily effort to understand. I was showing this young woman that I understood her, and she was angry at me because she didn’t want to be understood. For me, the insight was profound. It explained so much about my relationship with Chloe and with a number of students with whom I struggled and often failed to connect. The irony of this failure is that the more I struggled to understand, include, and connect, the worse I made the relationship. Yes, it’s always important to let students know that you see them, but also watch out! There are many young people who don’t want to be seen. They don’t want to be understood. Showing them that you understand is disruptive and even makes them angry. For this kind of student, understanding is more like invading. Seeking clarity where they find only confusion is not supportive—it’s threatening.Resistance is a powerful dynamic in the teacher-student relationship. Student resistance occurs along a spectrum from active to passive, from outright defiance to sullen submission. It’s never easy to contend with the extremes of this spectrum: the defiant ones can be hostile and arouse defensiveness and anger; the submissive ones are hard to see, and it’s always too easy to misconstrue their quiet avoidance as acceptance or even approval. I wanted help with the dynamics of resistance, first and foremost with being aware of it. I could see the most obvious signs: the student who always took a seat closest to the door, the student who never volunteered an insight or response in whole- or small-group conversations, the student who never revised a paper or a quiz, the student who made sotto voce comments that I could never hear but were often devastating to his peers.I sought counsel in the works of esteemed writers and educators, John Dewey foremost among them. Dewey assigns the educator a complex responsibility: to guide and to organize student activity but not to control or to impose upon the student. Teachers must accept the burden of being the mature person in the room by learning to be responsible for the direction of classroom experience.It is then the business of the educator to see in what direction an experience is heading. There is no point in his being more mature if, instead of using his greater insight to help organize the conditions of the experience of the immature, he throws away his insight. Failure to take the moving force of an experience into account so as to judge and direct it on the ground of what it is moving into means disloyalty to the principle of experience itself … The mature person, to put it in moral terms, has no right to withhold from the young on given occasions whatever capacity for sympathetic understanding his own experience has given him.(Dewey 1938, 38)To educate, in these terms, requires vigilant observation, scrupulous attention, and planning that responds to the possible directions of current activity. Dewey would disdain the cliché of the “teachable moment” because real learning takes place only in connections, not in isolation, connections of people to each other and to existing conditions across time.Beyond the obvious, I knew there were many other ways in which a class, or a project, or an activity failed to engage: I sensed resistance, but I didn’t know how pervasive the feeling was, much less what to do about it. I longed for a disciplined approach to understanding and dealing with the questions and problems I faced as a teacher. I wanted to join forces and share experiences with colleagues to develop that discipline. The articles and reviews in this issue remind me of that longing because the authors write of their practice in such forthright terms, and because so many of them benefited from the collegial conversations that I yearned for.Most of the work in this issue comes from educators profoundly influenced by Pat Carini, who created a discipline of observation, collaboration, and application that she called Descriptive Inquiry. This is a discipline to enhance and inform pedagogy, beginning with developing habits of careful observation that lead not to a judgment (of a child, a work, a practice) but to a question to be raised with peers. The more I learn about this discipline, the more I see in it the tools and the attitude and the conversation that I was seeking. We began a symposium honoring Pat’s legacy in the Spring 2022 issue, and we continue that symposium in “Attending with Care: Continuing Legacy of Patricia Carini” part two in this issue. Appropriately, it is Pat Carini who begins this second part. We republish a lecture Carini delivered to launch the Prospect Spring Seminar in 1983. She begins with the voices of two children who are busy constructing an estate in the block corner of the classroom, and when Carini asks them to tell her about its features, the boys alternate sentences that embellish the block construction with all manner of luxuries, defenses, and resources. The title of the talk is “Childhood in a Time of Unrest,” and while the boys spin tales of imagined wonder about their construction, Carini asks us to observe it more fully as an emblem of the zeitgeist as seen through children’s eyes. A story of block building and fantasy becomes in her treatment an invitation to consider just how powerless children feel in a world that seems so close to chaotic violence. The result is a fascinating blend of gentle interaction with intellectual rigor and social analysis. The articles in part two of this symposium pay tribute to Carini’s approach to teaching as a humanizing art. For these authors, coming to know Carini and the work of Descriptive Inquiry guided and sustained their careers in education.Joan Bradbury and Cara Furman continue to facilitate, oversee, and empower this ongoing symposium as guest editors. It has been both an honor and a privilege to work with Joan and Cara this past year. Their connections to Carini and to Prospect are long, deep, and ardent. They know the contributors well, and they have worked with admirable intelligence and patience to organize and to nurture a wide range of contributions and authors. I am profoundly grateful to Joan and Cara, and I cherish their good humor and comradeship.Although there was no way to preserve the boys’ block construction that Carini describes, thousands of other works created at Prospect do survive. The Prospect Archive of Children’s Work, now housed at the University of Vermont, celebrates the years of inspired learning that occurred under Carini’s guidance. In “Pat Carini and the Prospect Archive of Children’s Work,” Beth Alberty provides a history of the archive as well as a fond memorial to the years of friendship and work she shared with Pat and Lou Carini. In addition to the children’s work, the Prospect Archive also contains myriad examples of the descriptive processes that Pat and her colleagues employed in their various studies of children’s creations. Alberty asks us to consider the archive holdings as products, as witnesses to process, and as embodiments of the quest to do work that creates not only an object but a human self.The wide range and powerful impact of Descriptive Inquiry on school life comes across in the articles selected for this second installment of the symposium in Carini’s honor. These articles demonstrate the ways in which teachers apply descriptive processes in the classroom and in the wider school community to give life and meaning to children’s work. In “Mindful of the Aims: Mathematics as Illustration of a Value Frame,” Diane Mullins focuses on the ways in which children’s interests and habits of mind create more than solutions to problems: children learn through the creation of meaning. Mullins shows us how disciplined attention to children’s activities and interests leads her to create exercises in mathematical inquiry for a group of second- and third-graders. One of the exercises grew out of the happenstance presence of a bag of toothpicks in the classroom. It’s exciting to see a curriculum blossom in this way, and then to see how various, imaginative, and distinctive the children’s work turned out to be.In “Meaning Matters,” Andy Doan credits the processes of Descriptive Inquiry as the foundational tools of a teaching life dedicated to enabling students in the search for meaning. The collaborative dynamic of Descriptive Inquiry encouraged Doan to attend more closely to the details within and the connections among student activities and projects. Learning to attend requires the kind of maturity that Dewey called for: a lesson plan is a schedule of teacher intentions, but in Doan’s teaching practice, the lesson plan engages students in often unpredictable ways, and only when teachers welcome those ways can a lesson plan become an opportunity to create meaning. Doan focuses on his work with a social justice group of middle schoolers who gradually broadened the scope of an initial project to launch a public demonstration outside of the school.Marjorie Larner pays tribute to “An Immeasurable Legacy” that she traces back to working with Carini at the Prospect School and throughout a distinguished career in public schools. Like Mullins and Doan, Larner celebrates the ways in which Carini’s processes honed the skills of observation that make children and children’s work come alive. Presenting those observations to colleagues at a Prospect Summer Institute enriched and deepened her pedagogy and her advocacy of a teaching practice based on encountering students in their human fullness. Against the onslaught of cries for accountability and measurable outcomes that seek to label students, to categorize so many young people by their deficits, and to beleaguer and compromise the classroom practice of so many teachers, Larner strives to carry forward Carini’s commitment to a pedagogy that arises from attending to the strengths of students.María Cioè-Peña explores the ways in which she has adapted Descriptive Inquiry for students and communities far different from the ones in which Carini developed the processes of observation and collaboration. In “Descriptive Inquiry at the Margins,” Cioè-Peña explores the ways in which she has expanded and adapted the descriptive processes in her work with student populations that are outside the mainstream of White America. She found Descriptive Inquiry an invaluable resource and foundation for making changes to support systems for students who were otherwise marginalized. The relentless testing that is at the heart of American public education too often overrode any effort to know student strengths or to honor their individual needs. Using the observational skills of descriptive review permitted Cioè-Peña to see her students more fully, and the observations also helped her grow as a teacher.In “Observation and the Art of Teaching: Personal and Political Lenses for Seeing and Coming to Know,” Jerusha Beckerman begins with the transformative power of Descriptive Inquiry in her professional development. Learning how to observe a student deepened her understanding of that child, but it also broadened Beckerman’s sense of what teaching could mean. Beckerman describes a practice of observation, enriched by collegial conversation that rewards attention with wonder. Although she and her colleagues in New York City public schools faced many pressures and limits, the shared practices of Descriptive Inquiry helped to humanize and expand the possibilities of her classroom. One of the most important elements of the inquiry process is the commitment to continuity and development, to seeing the child grow and change over time. Instead of the snapshot of summative testing that fixes a child in place, Descriptive Inquiry sees the child in motion; instead of a grade or a number, Descriptive Inquiry presents the child as maker of objects, of self, of value. Now a teacher of those processes at Sarah Lawrence College, Beckerman helps her students develop a teaching practice that grows out of observing and valuing.Cara Furman presents a “Meditation on Description,” using sentences from Carini’s own meditation, which we republished in the Spring 2022 issue of Schools, to shape the ways in which the habits and skills of careful observation enable and enliven. Like the other authors in this symposium, Furman uncovers the impact of descriptive processes on her career as a teacher, but Furman goes even further back, to a moment when she was a kindergarten student, to illustrate the enabling power that a child feels when she knows that a teacher has really seen her. This kind of interaction is the living heart of teaching, the connection that opens onto new vistas, new possibilities. Although many teachers, like me, aspire to this kind of connection, and some of us achieve it through persistence and trial and error, Furman shows how Carini’s practices of Descriptive Inquiry provide surer pathways to guide the teacher toward that goal.When I tell people about the methodology of Descriptive Inquiry, one of the frequent responses combines applause for the practices but doubts their efficacy as an alternative to the quantitative evaluations now so securely in place. “Yes, this careful attention and collaboration is admirable,” people say, “but you can’t do it in a public school. For one, there just isn’t time to do it.” Most of the authors in this symposium would dispute such a claim, and they illustrate in their reflections just how powerful Descriptive Inquiry has been in their careers as public school educators. Even more impressive in this regard is the story of the Philadelphia Teachers Learning Collective, a group that has practiced Descriptive Inquiry for 49 years, many of them under Carini’s guidance. Betsy Wice and nine coauthors trace the history of this long-standing commitment to careful observation and shared inquiry in “A Friend from the Near Distance.”In “‘Make It into a Circle’: Attending with Care in Working with Families,” Kirsten Cole explores the ways in which public school teachers in New York City make use of Descriptive Inquiry to work with each other and with the families in their multiracial school community to resist and alter oppressive practices. Although school policy begins any discussion of a student with test scores and deficits, the framework of a Descriptive Review of a Child is a practice of observation that begins with detailed noticing and results in a narrative rather than a number. Cole describes her first exposure to Descriptive Inquiry in the collaborative work of teachers who worked with each other to develop careful scrutiny and understanding of individual students; the teachers invited the families of students under discussion when they met to consider a child’s progress. In her later career as a teacher educator, Cole has made the processes of Descriptive Inquiry central to her work with a new generation of classroom teachers.We conclude this second part of the symposium with Cecelia Traugh’s “Schools as Made Works.” Traugh is a distinguished teacher educator who has helped to shape the work of many classroom teachers. A longtime participant and leader in the Prospect Summer Institutes, Traugh has been dean of the Bank Street College of Education for the past seven years. In this article, Traugh expands the meaning of “made works” from Carini’s focus on the objects that children create: she widens the perspective to take in the shaping of a school. The school as made thing is more than a specific artifact, but in the same way that we might attend to the ways in which an object displays the marks of shaping and intention, so too a school bears the signs of intention, skill, and value that a community has brought into play. The school Traugh uses to illustrate her premise is Bank Street, and the work she describes is the faculty inquiry into race, an inquiry that has been ongoing during Traugh’s tenure as dean.In addition to the symposium on the legacy of Pat Carini, this issue continues with historical and contemporary inquiry into the ways in which educators animate and design educational practice. The historical dimension takes us back to the period of reconstruction that followed World War I, to a remarkable school that opened its doors in Weimar, Germany, in 1919. We present three articles in From the Archives. The first article, “Designing Bauhaus Education,” presents a brief account of the school’s founding and consists primarily of images, artwork created by students at the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s. The next two articles were written by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy in the years after he left his post as a teacher in the original Bauhaus and came to Chicago, where he founded a school he initially called “The New Bauhaus.” The Bauhaus School attempted to reconstruct education by integrating the craft of making with the art of designing.In a final article for this issue, Amanda Swearingen focuses on what she learned from her relationship with one of her students. In “Lessons on Becoming a ‘Critical’ Intercultural Language Teacher Educator,” the lessons are not what Swearingen taught but what Swearingen learned about her teaching. Her intellectual background and commitment to social justice have made Swearingen a teacher educator committed to critical engagement with the values and practices of the status quo. Swearingen has wanted the future teachers of English who are her students to examine the contexts of oppression and inequity that beset so much of language teaching. Swearingen’s university is in a large city with a sizeable population of immigrants, giving her all the more reason to ask her students to learn language teaching with a critical stance toward social and cultural forces. But when one of her students resists looking at issues of criticality and declares that examining barriers and oppressive structures has no place in the language classroom, Swearingen comes to feel that she has failed in this relationship. She then explores what she can learn from this failure about the critical stance in general and herself in particular.Two book reviews close this issue. The two books share a focus on school dynamics, but in one case, the authors fail to consider the outside forces that dictate and direct so much of school life; in the other case, the author describes what happens when a school refuses to consider anything about students except their ability to measure up to school dictates. Melissa Feiger reviews Gender and Education in Kenya, an anthology of essays about the implementation of a governmental policy change during the past 15 years. Feiger praises the emphasis the authors place on changes that have advanced equity within schools, but she sees room for more work in the fact that there is little to no inquiry into the ways that social forces outside the school come into play. Feiger is concerned that until a society unlearns the biases that shape the textbooks, attitudes, and mores of schools, there will be little substantive change. In her review of Joanne Golann’s Scripting the Moves: Culture and Control in a “No-Excuses” Charter School, Kate Phillippo finds a school that embodies a ruthless refusal to consider the humanity of its students. Phillippo praises Golann for the careful detail and intelligence of an extended ethnographic study, but despite the careful tone of this well-written review, there is a sense of repulsion and even horror: without saying it directly, Phillippo asks us to read this book and then wonder how we can permit a school to treat our children this way.ReferenceDewey, John. 1938. Experience and Education. New York: Macmillan.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Schools Volume 19, Number 2Fall 2022 Published in association with the Francis W. Parker School, Chicago Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722006 © 2022 Francis W. Parker School, Chicago. 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