Beginning Teachers: Reviewing Disastrous Lessons PDF
Preview Beginning Teachers: Reviewing Disastrous Lessons
Beginning Teachers Beginning Teachers Reviewing Disastrous Lessons Edited by Michael Crowhurst School of Education, RMIT University, Australia A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 978-94-6300-071-0 (paperback) ISBN: 978-94-6300-072-7 (hardback) ISBN: 978-94-6300-073-4 (e-book) Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands https://www.sensepublishers.com/ Cover image: ‘Three legged chair – an accident waiting to happen’, Crowhurst (2012) Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved © 2015 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii 1. Beginning Teachers Reviewing Disastrous Lessons: Some Themes and Responses 1 Michael Crowhurst 2. A Different Reality Check 13 Natalie Vallender 3. A Disaster – ‘Working’ on Our Assessment Task 7C Egypt 17 Kylie Poppins 4. Sideline One – Double Thematic Analysis 25 Michael Crowhurst 5. The Class that Didn’t Quite Work: (Otherwise Known as “The Fan Incident”) 29 Tim Miller 6. English Exam Prep: Of Mice and Men 33 Seetha Ravimandalam 7. Sideline Two – Performativity as Analysis 39 Michael Crowhurst 8. VCAL: Trials and Errors – TAFE VCAL Electrotechnology 43 Amy James 9. Success? Debatable 51 Tim Donovan 10. Critical Refl ection on James Paul Gee 57 Luke Panaccio 11. What to Teach When You’re Not Wearing Black: Teaching or Surviving? 63 Carly Phillips 12. Sideline – Autoethnographic Analysis 71 Michael Crowhurst v TABLE OF CONTENTS 13. The Black Hole 75 Charlie Parkes 14. Refl ecting on Curriculum Design 81 Mia Wotherspoon 15. The Lesson from Hell 87 Catherine Vallence 16. Davis, Sumara and Luce-Kapler’s Engaging Minds: A Refl ection on Literature to Inform Teaching Practice 93 Mia Wotherspoon 17. Limitations and Possibilities – A Fine Line between Success and Chaos 101 Emma Agius 18. Sideline – Assemblage as Analysis 107 Michael Crowhurst 19. Carteret Islands Disastrous Lesson 111 Lisa Eldridge 20. Relevance and Connection – My Disastrous Lesson 117 Ben Anderson 21. Conclusion 121 Michael Crowhurst About the Contributors 123 Note: The ‘Invitations to Dialogue’ sections that follow each narrative have been written by Michael Crowhurst. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge Catherine Vallence and Jane Burnett for great work and attention to detail in proof editing the text at various stages throughout the writing process. I would like to acknowledge Dr. Barbara Chancellor for many useful discussions in relation to the text and for working with me at the very beginning of the project to clarify ideas and the approach taken. Finally, towards the end of the project I approached a group of academics and asked if they would be willing to read and comment on the pieces that comprise this text. I would also like to acknowledge the contribution of this group of critical friends and thank them for their comments and suggestions. The critical friends are: Dr. Barbara Chancellor, Senior Lecturer, School of Education, RMIT University M r. Michael Emslie, Lecturer, Youth Work, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University Dr. Emily Gray, Lecturer, School of Education, RMIT University Dr. Richard Johnson, Senior Lecturer, School of Education, RMIT University Dr. Gloria Latham, Senior Fellow, University of Sydney Dr. Narelle Lemon, Senior Lecturer, School of Education, La Trobe University Dr. Jude Ocean, Lecturer, School of Education, RMIT University Dr. Rachel Patrick, Lecturer, School of Education, RMIT University Dr. Marg Sellers, Lecturer, School of Education, RMIT University Associate Professor, Dr. Geoff Shacklock, School of Education, RMIT University. Dr. Andrew Skourdoumbis, Senior Lecturer, School of Education, Deakin University Cover image ‘Three legged chair – an accident waiting to happen’, Crowhurst 2012 – used with permission of the painter. vii MICHAEL CRO WHURST 1. BEGINNING TEACHERS REVIEWING DISASTROUS LESSONS Some Themes and Responses I currently work in pre-service teacher education and I often share a coffee with a colleague, Dr. Barbara Chancellor. During one of these coffee breaks in 2007 we were discussing tutorial conversations that occurred after beginning teachers had returned to university after professional placements. We both noted that though a number of recurring themes emerged, the key theme was undeniably ‘t he disastrous lesson’ . I t was at this moment I decided that in one of the courses I was teaching in the following semester, I would set an assignment in which beginning teachers might write a reflective practice piece about a ‘disastrous lesson’ that occurred during their professional placement. After the course was completed and results entered, they might try to publish their work in a teacher professional journal. The learning aims of this activity included a desire for beginning teachers to explore and further develop their reflective practitioner skills, in order to critically engage with and enhance their teaching practice (Freire, 1999). Later, I published an article about this assignment in the professional teaching journal E thos (Crowhurst, 2008). In this article, I described the assignment and suggested that not only was it important to reflect on practice individually, it was equally important to engage in dialogue with peers. In semester one of 2010, I discussed the article published in E thos with a new group of students and they asked if they could do a similar assessment task in semester two. So, I set an assessment task option in which beginning teachers were required to document their recollections of a disastrous lesson, discuss this with peers, and then re-draft it. They were required to remember and to write their memories like a story. They were given clear instructions that the narrative was to be about themselves as the teacher, rather than about the class they were teaching. While they might refer in passing to the class, t hey were to be the key focus of the piece. As I was marking the assignments I was struck by how interesting they were and how useful they might be for subsequent students. So I informed the beginning teachers that, after course results had been entered at the end of semester, they would have the opportunity to submit their work for inclusion in a collection of articles and that we would try to publish these. I worked with the participants via email over the following year (after they had finished their Graduate Diplomas in Education and were no longer students) to complete a first draft of this collection of materials and then we started looking for a M. Crowhurst (Ed.), Beginning Teachers, 1–11. © 2015 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.
The list of books you might like
