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Constructing Lifelong Learners One Teacher at a Time

Story by Melissa Steineger, photos by Tony Kneidek

When Lisia Farley's fourth- and fifth-grade students tackled American colonial history they had dozens of free-wheeling questions for their energetic teacher, including: What kind of jobs did colonists have? What did they do for entertainment? What about the Indians?

Good questions, said Farley, scribing them rapid-fire onto a flip chart. Why don't you tell me the answers? For the next several weeks, youngsters pored over materials Farley provided, looked up information in the library, and even pursued the answers outside the requirements of class and homework. Having defined their field of inquiry, they eagerly sought to till it. In the most natural way, they embodied what it means to be a learner.

"We all start out as natural learners, then we get to school and we're turned into students," says Farley, who teaches at Beckman Primary School in Wilsonville, Oregon.

Recapturing a youngster's zeal for learning—the kind of eagerness for knowledge that lasts a lifetime—starts when teachers themselves are excited about learning. But how do you instill excitement and teach the skills needed to create that enthusiasm in others? Lewis & Clark College, a small, private school in Portland, Oregon, with a reputation for producing exemplary teachers like Lisia Farley, seems to have found a way. The college's Master of Arts in Teaching (M.A.T.) program divides into two major strands: one for currently teaching professionals and one for preservice teachers.

Three keys are uniformly cited as critical to Lewis & Clark's M.A.T. program. They are:

The Cohort

"The cohort experience is one of the most important things about the program. I love it. It builds a support group that gave me confidence to speak in the group sessions. We can say things in a very safe community. And this is precisely what we'll develop in our own classrooms—a learning community where everyone can participate." —Linda Mohr

The 100 or so interns in the preservice strand are divided into five groups, or cohorts. Each cohort has its own focus. Interns interested in teaching elementary grades can choose a cohort focused on language and literacy or one focused on teaching real-world problem solving through math, science, and technology.

At the secondary level, two similar cohort programs prepare teachers of social studies, language arts, science, math, art, and foreign languages, with interns from a variety of subject areas in both cohorts. Perhaps the most unusual cohort, developed just two years ago, focuses on teaching integrated curriculum to middle schoolers.

The cohort program was designed to prepare new teachers to be agents of continuing, research-based change in their future jobs. The cohort does this by modeling for interns how to tap into new ideas and discuss them in a collegial way.

Cohort members take all required courses together and meet weekly to share and discuss teaching issues—classroom management techniques, developing appropriate real-world problem-solving curricula, and gender concerns, to name a few. Initially, the weekly sessions are led by a professor designated as cohort leader, but eventually the cohort members are assigned as rotating leaders responsible for fostering a discussion on a topic of interest that they bring to the group.

"We're trying to help them develop an idea of how to be a faculty for each other through the cohort structure," explains Dr. Andra Makler, Associate Professor and Coordinator of Teacher Education Programs. "We're modeling how to have a good conversation about learning, how to draw on other people as resources, ways you can learn to let your colleagues know you have a problem or a question that you need help solving, and how to be friendly critics. We hope that over time they are able to do that in the cohort and to then carry that practice out into the schools."

Linda Mohr, an intern in the elementary cohort focused on math and science, didn't have a problem talking in front of students during her eight years of teaching. But when she moved to Oregon and decided to earn her license through the Lewis & Clark program, she found she was uncomfortable with the idea of speaking before her peers. After several weeks in the cohort group, she found the confidence to express herself before her peers—and found that confidence carried over to other peer-group situations. She looks forward to employing the technique in her own classroom.

"Elementary students, especially, need to feel the classroom is a safe place to participate," says Mohr. "It's the only way to get every child truly involved in learning."

Teachers at every level might agree—especially middle school teachers. Many middle schools are a variation on the junior high school or high school model. Students shuffle from class to class, getting instruction in the teacher's subject specialty—math, science, English. At some buildings, sixth-graders are still in a self-contained classroom. In progressive schools, some curriculum might be integrated in a humanities block.

Lewis & Clark hopes to spread through its graduates the awareness about current best practices in middle school teaching: integrated team planning, integrated (not interdisciplinary) curricula, and support for the whole of a student's concerns, rather than viewing an adolescent as, say, merely a fifth-period math student.

"The cohort model puts the intern at the center of our efforts as a faculty," says Dr. Celeste Brody, Associate Professor and coordinator of the middle school cohort. "And that's what we want our graduates to do in their own classrooms—put each student at the center of their efforts."

A Yearlong Focus

"I wouldn't give up the consistency of the whole-year experience for the advantages of experiencing other teaching styles—which I have the opportunity to see, anyway." —Michelle Pigeon

Lewis & Clark interns experience a yearlong student teaching assignment. Mentor teachers are paired with interns after the cohort leader consults individually with the school principal, mentor teacher, and intern.

Beginning with planning sessions before the school year starts, interns work closely with their mentor teachers. From the first of the school year through Thanksgiving, interns spend two days a week in the classroom with their mentor. From then until mid-, interns are in the classroom full time, and from mid-January through spring break they return to two days a week in the classroom. After spring break, the interns take the teaching reins full time.

Interns choose whether to be placed in a suburban or urban setting. However, each intern is paired with another intern in a dissimilar school. Once a month they visit in each other's school to experience the diversity of other schools and students, and to observe other teaching styles. Interns are often encouraged by their mentors to visit in other classrooms in the school to gain a breadth of experience.

Interns say the benefits of a yearlong placement—of watching one group of students progress through an entire learning and curriculum sequence, of becoming part of the school culture and developing relationships with students—are invaluable.

The Coursework

"The professors demand that we be thinkers, not just practitioners. Most of us have had some life experience, so the class dialogue is very rich. You develop your own teaching philosophy through journal writing, reflection, discussion, your own experience, and the new ideas you're exposed to. So the classes provide us with these tools, but these tools have to be refined by our own experience." —Margaret Wattman-Turner

Courses at Lewis & Clark have several key components: they teach and use a "constructivist" approach, they are steeped in history and philosophy, and they emphasize the need to stay current. All the coursework is oriented toward the intern's future classroom. Classes cover a wide range of subjects, including:

"Many other teacher education programs are simply courses in how to teach, how to organize a curriculum," says Makler. "Teachers can become very good at delivering a particular body of knowledge to students, and people have the feeling that as long as kids are learning and meeting the standards of the district that that's enough. I don't agree. No field is static—to be really informed about your field, you need to develop an internal sense of responsibility toward keeping abreast of change."

Lewis & Clark does this by focusing on a constructivist approach: interns—and in time their own students—construct their own inquiry of a topic. There's very little lecture, and interns aren't given answers—they get help answering questions.

"People don't 'receive' knowledge," says Dr. Jim Wallace. "They construct it. They explore their environment—with guidance—and gradually come to know the current best understanding." Wallace teaches "Social, Historical and Ethical Perspectives on Education," a course that critically analyzes the role of education as a central institution in America—including the effects of diversity on the schools of today.

In Wallace's class, rather than a lecture on, say, equality, students might lead a discussion about discrimination they have observed or experienced, write case studies on discrimination they are familiar with, read about discrimination, and present their case studies to the class for further discussion. Wallace has interns note their responses to class sessions, readings, and other activities in a written "learning log," which is turned in weekly.

The approach—outlining a field of inquiry, then thinking, discussing, reading, and writing about it to form answers, or beliefs—is crucial to developing individuals who are lifelong learners. And it works with any age, especially when the subject has relevance for the learner.

Toward that end, interns also learn to develop an engaging curriculum for a specific group of youngsters. Rather than presenting a unit on the environment, for instance, interns learn to discuss the topic with students to assess their level of understanding and where their interests lie. They would then pull together resources to explore those interests while providing information relevant to the topic.

"We don't teach interns to 'cover a topic,'" explains Dr. Nancy Nagel, a professor and cohort leader. "We want them to uncover a topic."

For one class of fifth-graders interested in how salmon and humans can coexist, the constructivist approach meant researching and writing a newsletter that the young students sent to environmentalists, government agencies, and public officials. When a class of kindergartners observed crows eating leftovers on the playground, they wondered what happened to such scavengers during the summer. A study of urban wildlife resulted.

Real-world problems and observations such as these—issues of interest to the students that have no obvious solution—connect with young learners, just as our own real-world problems engage us in the exploration of a subject.

"I decided to become a teacher," says intern Michelle Pigeon, "because I love to explore ideas and questions and share ideas and hear ideas and facilitate discussions—that's exactly the approach we're learning here."

Lewis & Clark's program is demanding, but it is designed to be that way. "The experience is very intense, and we attract students to whom this is appealing," notes Makler.

"They can be a feisty group to work with—they challenge us. We're always asking them to give us the reasons for why they do what they do, and they do that to us. But as a faculty we welcome that. I think for each of us, the bottom line is, 'Would I want my kid in your class all year?' We have to be able to say, 'Absolutely.'"

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