Instructional Vignettes

A teacher candidate did an economics lesson in a 5th grade classroom where one third of the students were recent or children of immigrants. She used a bilingual text and asked her native Spanish speakers to serve as language experts for the lesson.

Elementary

Assets

A teacher candidate explains to their supervisor, “I can’t put them in a seminar or in small groups to discuss the book they’re reading. They can’t handle it. Half of them come unprepared because they haven’t done the homework. They just screw off as soon as you let them have any independent work time. They need structure.”

Elementary, Middle School, High School

Assets

Counter Evidence and Blind Spots

The school social worker walks a new student to the 5th grade classroom. She is introduced as Bana from Syria. She speaks little English, the social worker explains, and the school does not have an Arabic-speaking adult to help translate. Once Bana is settled in a student desk, near the teacher’s desk, the teacher hands her a sketchbook and a box   of colored pencils. Then the teacher meets with the three other East African students in the room, asking if any of them can help Bana for a couple weeks, until she is oriented to the school. Two of them promise to accompany Bana to the lunchroom, help her negotiate the lunch line, and teach her about the rules at recess. At her team meeting, the teacher connects with the other teachers on the team and they come up with a plan for Bana that includes finding curriculum materials written in Arabic until her English is stronger, connecting with the local branch of the Center for Victims of Torture for advice on working with refugee children in trauma, and developing an individual assignment for Bana that allows her to tell her story through art. 

Elementary

Assets, Communication & Collaboration, Navigation, Advocacy

A teacher creates a summative assessment that offers her students multiple ways to show what they have learned. Students produce skits, raps, essays, works of art, poetry, songs, and even a proposal for a video game to demonstrate their conceptual and content knowledge.

Elementary, Middle School, and High School

Assets, Imagination and Innovation

In hopes of sparking discussion, a rural middle school social studies teacher opens a 2-week unit on the Dakota Conflict with an image of three American Indians hanged in a public square. The teacher is a white male. The majority of his students present as white. The teacher does not know there are two students in his third hour class who identify as American Indian.

Middle School

Role of Self

Counter Evidence and Blindspots

Following the lead of his cooperating teacher, a teacher candidate only called on a select number of his 6th grade math students. Most were white. Most were the very smart kids who always were at the ready with the right answer. Many of the students of color were not being called on. The supervisor noted it during an observation, pointing out that during a single class observation, only 4 of the 30+ students were called on by the teacher candidate. The teacher candidate was unaware and responded with shock and a bit of defensiveness. “My cooperating teacher has very high expectations, and she would die if she knew we were doing this. She may not even realize it!” The teacher candidate talked with the supervisor about strategies for calling on all students in a more equitable manner and maintaining high expectations.

Elementary, Middle School

Role of Self, Assets

A teacher candidate stands at the back of the classroom each day during practicum. He stands with his arms crossed, silent, while students bound into the room, joke, misbehave, talk to each other. He waits to be told by his cooperating teacher to work with a group of students. As soon as he has accomplished a task that involves interaction with kids, he returns to his spot at the back of the class.

Elementary, Middle School, High School

Role of Self, Care

Counter Evidence and Blind Spots

A first grade classroom has a strict attention-getting mechanism that the cooperating teacher has used for many years. The teacher candidate assigned to the class for student teaching does not feel comfortable with the cooperating teacher’s attention-getting mechanism and wants to try her own. She is hesitant because it would require the cooperating teacher to open up opportunities for trying something new - and possible failure. The teacher candidate asks for the opportunity to introduce other strategies and requests ample time from the cooperating teacher and the university supervisor to attempt them on her own. The teacher candidate tries eight different strategies before one works.

Elementary

Role of Self, Navigation, Advocacy

“[A] parent became upset over a 3rd grade homework assignment given to his son. The homework was an assignment given during the social studies period. The students were learning about slavery in social studies and, to help further cross-curricular policies of the school district, mathematics was used as the subject to integrate with social studies. The homework included numerous questions but there were three questions regarding the issue of slavery that were the focus of concern. The questions were:

1). Frederick had 6 baskets filled with cotton. If each basket held 5 pounds, how many pounds did he have altogether?

2). If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week? Two weeks?

3). Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?

The name Frederick was used because the students were studying Frederick Douglass as a historical figure. The teacher stated that the problems were created to teach about Douglass’ life history from slavery to one of the most prominent Black Americans of his time, a district level objective” (King & Woodson, in press)

Elementary

Role of Self, Navigation

Counter Evidence and Blind Spots

The teacher candidate starts the 7th grade class with the warm up her cooperating teacher has recommended. The questions are on the Smartboard and all of the students are in their seats. Two Latino boys sit in the back of the room near the windows. They are deep in a conversation. The teacher candidate says, “Shhhh, time to do your warm up.” The boys keep talking. They do not have paper or pencil out. One boy still has an earbud in one ear.

The teacher candidate stands next to the Smartboard. “Shhh!” She says again. “Take out your notebooks, please!”

The boys do not respond but, instead, continue to talk.

The teacher candidate stays in place and raises her voice, “If you don’t do the warm up, you won’t get the points for the day.”

When the boys ignore her, she ignores them in return.

They continue with her conversation, and she teaches to the students who are listening and want to learn.

Middle School

Role of Self, Care, Communication & Collaboration

Counter Evidence and Blind Spots

A teacher candidate writes an introductory letter to her students’ families, letting them know about herself, her undergraduate major, and her own education. She tells them about the units they will be covering for the quarter. She offers her email address, along with that of her cooperating teacher, for parents to reach her with questions or concerns. Once she has a draft written, she asks for feedback from her cooperating teacher and her university supervisor. Once she’s made those revisions, she seeks out the school translator and offers to pay her to translate the letter into Spanish for her Spanish speaking families.

Elementary, Middle School, High School

Communication & Collaboration, Navigation

A teacher is frustrated by one of his third grade student’s continuous interruptions in class. The African American student always has a retort, a joke, a comeback, sometimes even a correction for the teacher or a peer. The teacher has removed the student from class discussions, sent him to the ‘buddy chair’ and the hallway for breaks. One day, he finds himself losing his temper and shaming the student with sarcasm. The student cries.

The teacher sends an email to the student’s family. He writes, “Can I get your help? I got frustrated today and I’m afraid I hurt your son’s feelings. I owe him an apology. Your son is incredibly enthusiastic and smart! I need your help in finding ways for him to be a leader in my class, without interrupting others. What do you do at home to teach him this? I would love your advice.”

Elementary

Role of Self, Communication & Collaboration, Assets, Intentional Professional Choices

Every week, teachers are required to send a newsletter home. The teacher candidate confers with her cooperating teacher and together they decide to make this a writing assignment for the fifth grade students in the classroom. Each table of four students is responsible for some portion of the newsletter: the Student Interview, the Highlights of the Week, the Homework News, the Classroom Comic, Newsletter Art, and the Digital version. Students work on their portion of the newsletter for an hour each day. By the end of the day on Thursday, the teacher candidate and cooperating teacher have added their columns and approved the copy. The newsletter goes home with every student in class, and the groups prepare for the following week’s assignment.

Elementary

Communication & Collaboration, Imagination & Innovation

Two students ask a teacher if they can bring their lunches to her classroom. She says yes. This continues daily. She writes them passes, so that they can get through the hall monitors. They clean up after themselves. Over time, the students tell the teacher about their lives. The teacher listens.

Middle School, High School

Care

Fifteen minutes after class has started, a student arrives late to U.S. History.

The teacher says to the student, “You’re late, Ray.”

Ray glares at the teacher and replies, “White Power” and raises his right fist.

The teacher steps in front of Ray, blocking his path to his seat. “I’m sorry Ray, you can’t stay today. Those are hate words. They are not acceptable in our classroom.”

Ray pauses momentarily then shoves an empty desk hard enough that it topples. Ray pivots and walks out of the class without another word.

After class is over, the teacher retells the story to his team in their weekly meeting. He tells his colleagues, “I hate that kid.”

One of his colleagues says, “You need to find something to like about him.”

The teacher sighs, “You’re right. What do you know about his situation? What does he like to do?”

The team spends the next thirty minutes planning for how each of them will work to make positive connections with Ray every day for the next week.

The next day, when Ray enters the room, the teacher points at Ray’s chest, “Hey Ray. I like your sweatshirt. I’m a Nine Inch Nails fan myself. Have you ever seen them in concert?”

Middle School, High School

Care, Communication & Collaboration

A teacher candidate learns that the school where she will student teach in the spring is holding a two-day workshop over the fall break. The focus of the workshop is trauma-informed pedagogy. The teacher candidate contacts the school to see if she can attend for free.

Elementary, Middle School, High School

Care, Advocacy, Intentional Professional Choices

After an observation, a university supervisor asks a teacher candidate to identify two aspects of her teaching where she seems stuck. The teacher candidate talks about how much trouble she has with transitions, especially getting the children to put their coats, boots, and hats on at the end of the day without losing 30 minutes of instructional time. She shakes her head and tells the supervisor that she can’t expect much different until her students are older and require less help. The supervisor says she has a fixed mindset, which makes the teacher candidate feel defensive. But she acknowledges her own ‘stuck-ness’ and asks for help. With the help of the cooperating teacher, the supervisor arranges observations of five other kindergarten and pre-k classrooms at the end of the day, so that the teacher candidate can get ideas for how to strengthen her own teaching.

Elementary

Intentional Professional Choices

A teacher gives a test from the textbook at the end of the unit to see how much his students learned. More than seventy percent of his students earn Ds and Fs on the test. Stunned by his students’ poor grades, the teacher looks back at the test and examines the questions. The next day in class, he puts his students’ desks in a circle and begins a conversation with his students. “I think we need to try again. Most of us didn’t do well on the test yesterday. Let’s put our heads together and figure out why. Once we figure out why we didn’t do so well, we will practice and retake the test. Sound good? OK - so what made this test so hard? Tell me about it.”

Middle School, High School

Intentional Professional Choices, Communication & Collaboration, Assets

A teacher candidate is told by their cooperating teacher that they must use the school’s lesson plan format when writing lessons. The school’s format is different from the one required by the teacher preparation program. The teacher candidate writes their lessons on one lesson plan then writes a second version on the school-required format. By the third week of student teaching, the teacher candidate is getting only a few hours of sleep each night. The teacher candidate starts waking up later, rushing to school and barely making it on time. The teacher candidate is often short with the students and has little patience for their shenanigans.

Elementary, Middle School, High School

Navigation

Counter Evidence

A teacher candidate conducted a unit on community helpers with a class of mostly African American and Native American 2nd graders. The teacher candidate’s first example of a community helper was a police officer. She did not ask the students for their feelings about police officers and made no mention of any conflict between the community and the police.

Elementary

Role of Self, Navigation

A student has been absent for three straight days. The teacher calls the child’s home but the phone is disconnected. The teacher talks with the social worker to see if he has any information as to the student’s whereabouts. The teacher suggests that the two of them try to visit the child’s home, to see if they can get the child back to school.

Elementary, Middle School, High School

Advocacy, Care, Communication & Collaboration, Navigation

A teacher candidate is placed with a cooperating teacher with whom he has little in common. He keeps his thoughts to himself and tries to meet the expectations of the cooperating teacher, despite his feeling that the cooperating teacher’s methods don’t motivate the students. He often eats in silence in the classroom, when the cooperating teacher heads to the staff lounge for lunch.

After two weeks, the teacher candidate asks the teacher next door if he can join her for lunch. Their lunches become a regular meeting, and the teacher candidate asks for feedback that he’s not getting from his cooperating teacher. He also asks if he can observe her as she leads her students through a debate, because he has not seen that pedagogy enacted before.

Elementary, Middle School, High School

Navigation, Intentional Professional Choices

A white teacher is overwhelmed and feels immobilized by the regular and repeated acts of police violence in her city. She feels her students’ disinterest in the canonical works she is required to teach in her high school English class. She troubleshoots her dilemma with a colleague, and decides to replace a unit she has taught for years with one focused on a   new novel about police brutality and racism. She employs literature circles with her students and has students across all hours of the day create desk murals on blank sheets of paper, taped to their desks. Her students effort and motivation increases tenfold and she sees a huge uptick in grades. For the summative assignment, she requires each student to make a quilt square representing what it is to be American. She brings her sewing machine into the classroom and teaches her sophomores how to stitch quilt squares together.

High School

Imagination & Innovation, Care

A teacher candidate working in a third grade classroom attends an after school meeting for all teachers at her student teaching site. The meeting is led by the union representative. At the meeting the teacher candidate  learns that the teachers have been working without a contract for nearly 2 years. The teacher candidate chooses to participate in the walk-in action with the rest of the school’s faculty the following Friday morning. The walk-in action asks every teacher to gather in the front of the school thirty minutes before school starts and walk in together, as a show of solidarity.

Elementary

Advocacy

A teacher candidate noticed their cooperating teacher pronounced one student's name differently than her friends did. The teacher candidate asked the student what she preferred, and created a phonetic key for both herself and the cooperating teacher.

Elementary, Middle School, High School

Advocacy, Care, Navigation

At the beginning of the year, a high school geography teacher receives a list of students identified as needing special education services. The teacher places the list in her desk drawer, electing to wait three weeks to read it until she gets to know her students a bit.

High school

Assets, Navigation, Intentional Professional Choices

Counter evidence and Blindspots

Conflicting evidence

A teacher candidate of color tries to address problematic statements being made in her licensure classes around race. When nothing changes, the teacher candidate stops completing assignments and begins missing classes. When asked, the teacher candidate explains that the courses seemed to be geared to her white, female teacher candidate peers so that they understand race, and that when she spoke up in class, her comments were dismissed and marginalized. The message to her was that she didn’t belong.

Elementary, Middle School, High School

Role of Self, Advocacy, Navigation, Care

Counter Evidence and Blind Spots

Conflicting Evidence