“How Can I Help?” Secondary Education Classrooms as Sites for Service and Learning
discuss both our revisions and the way we built a shared understanding about the assignments with the cooperating, practicing teachers. Service-Learning Projects As of Spring 2011 and with the support of on-campus professional development sessions on service-learning, service-learning projects were enacted in four courses in our English education program. Summaries of the project descriptions are as follows: • Teaching of Reading—Candidates conduct a case-study, or a reader profile, of a student in their fieldwork placement. They assess the students’ oral reading and comprehension skills by facilitating a battery of reading assessments. They then communicate these findings to the teacher and work with the student to address areas of need, evidenced by the reading assessments. • Teaching of Writing—Candidates work one-to-one with middle and high school students on their writing assignments. They provide feedback based on a rubric and write letters to the students, utilizing the skill of descriptive formative assessment. • English Methods—Candidates craft servicelearning projects in collaboration with their cooperating teacher addressing reading, writing, speaking/listening and media literacy in their placement. Candidates’ projects have included: working with small reading groups, assessing student work, and enacting special visual literacy or cooperative learning projects within pre-planned units. • Curriculum Design—Candidates plan and enact two related lessons within a unit that is currently unfolding in a middle or high school English class. They collaborate with the teacher to design instructional experiences that build on students’ prior academic learning and personal and cultural resources. Then, they assess the students’ work and make recommendations for next steps. In each of these projects, teacher candidates provide authentic services to classroom teachers and students, scaffolding English language arts instruction. Because the majority of our fieldwork placements are in underserved New York City public schools with overcrowded classrooms and high numbers of students performing below grade level, the classroom teachers often request service projects that target particular students and areas of reading, writing, and speaking instruction that they struggle to provide on their own. These assignments were created to respond to this need. The clinical experience centered in the English Methods class spotlights how our
expectations for candidates have changed. In 2008, prior to the start of the revision process, the candidates’ work in the field was described in their syllabus as follows: In this class, you are asked to complete 30 hours of fieldwork in a middle or high school English classroom. A variety of class discussions will be based around this experience and you will be asked to “tell the story” of your fieldwork experience in an observation journal. The fieldwork summary sheet (attached to this document) outlines the key experiences that you are required to seek out during your time in the secondary classroom. While it was beneficial that teacher candidates were asked to learn in schools, not just university classrooms, this assignment was lacking in a number of ways. First, the project did not offer any specific guidelines regarding how they were to get involved with classroom life. The “fieldwork summary sheet” listed the following experiences as required—“observe student(s) in a class,” “work with individual students,” “whole group instruction,” “interview teacher(s),” and “observe an exemplary teacher’s class”—and the guidelines ended there. Candidates were left to figure out on their own what their work with students should entail. Theoretically, they might have collaborated with the classroom teacher, but this was not required and no structures were set up to ensure that it happened. Second, the course instructor did not have a specific way to assess what the candidates were doing in the field. There were no structured opportunities for them to converse with the course instructor as a form of formative assessment or about qualities of their fieldwork that would be evaluated in a summative assessment. In retrospect, we view this project as offering little scaffolding for the candidates to apply particular methods in their fieldwork placements. In 2009 and 2010, the fieldwork component of the class was sharpened to include a service-learning project that would be documented through specific “check-ins.” Students were informed of the project through the following text in the syllabus, which shifted slightly from year to year: Working as an active contributor in a functioning classroom can give you an insightful view of classroom life. The service-learning requirement in this class asks you to be proactive and responsive in a classroom while navigating unexpected events that may happen along the way. Service-learning requires you to be reflective about your navigations and decisions
Our servicelearning model counters the concern that preparatory clinical experiences are seen as lacking.
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