Making teaching Public - a Digital Exhibition
Making teaching Public - a Digital Exhibition
Friday, February 15, 2008
Tom Hatch: In work with colleagues at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Quest Project, and now at the National Center for Restructuring Education Schools and Teaching (NCREST), I have developed a variety of multimedia websites that document teaching in a variety of contexts, grade levels and subject areas. A digital exhibition of this work, along with an extended discussion in the exhibition “catalog” and in commentaries from invited reviewers can be seen through Teachers College Record where it was published http://www.tcrecord.org/makingteachingpublic/ . In terms of new directions for this work, while these “websites of practice” explore different ways of representing teaching, for the most part, the unit of analysis remains one class or one unit in the work of one teacher, and many questions remain about how to connect these separate sites into networks of practice. In order to address some of these issues, in collaboration with Pam Grossman, I am developing a digital exhibition that focuses on the use of group discussion in the work of both veteran and novice teachers in several High School English classrooms as well as in a teacher education course. I am also exploring the development of exhibitions that document teaching across classrooms in a particularly successful school and among teachers identified as “effective” through “value-added” measures or through the production of exemplary student work. Ultimately, I believe that an exhibition exploring the work, conditions, and contexts of powerful teaching from a number of countries in the developing world would also prove extremely useful in challenging common conceptions of what good teaching looks like and what it takes to carry it out.