Unique High School-University Collaboration Produces Many Rewards
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This past academic year saw Associate Professor Bob Yagelski, Department of Educational Theory and Practice, and Guilderland High School English teacher Alicia Wein pioneer a new form of multi-level collaboration in their co-teaching of both Dr. Yagelski’s graduate class Perspectives on Teaching Writing in the Secondary School and Ms. Wein’s 12th grade FOCUS English class.
Having met through the Capital District Writing Project, which Yagelski co-directs, both educators realized the benefits they could reap from experience in the other’s educational venue. For Yagelski, it was a return to the high school classroom where he had last taught in 1988. For Wein it was an opportunity to teach in a graduate-level class, while sharing her high school practices with the Secondary Education graduate students who are hungry for classroom experience. As Dr. Yagelski says, “The idea was, we were going to collaborate as a high school teacher and a college teacher to help one another understand each other’s teaching better to bring about a respective expertise to one another’s classroom’s situations and to do it in a way that wouldn’t cost either school a cent.”
Alicia Wein’s English class is a part of the FOCUS program that has been running for twenty-seven years within the Guilderland school system. This program takes students who are at high risk for not graduating within the standard classroom environment. Although there are no ‘standard’ students in FOCUS, these students are not in need of an Individualized Education Program or similar measures that exist to insure an appropriate level of mastery for all students, and instead benefit from the close-knit community formed around their smaller classes, and a program specific tutoring/mentoring model.
One thing that Wein noted in her teaching was the trend for most students to disregard their related skills in writing that do not fit the typical profile of academic writing. As she says, “I’m actually surprised by how many of them love to write, but they think that school writing is different.” One of the central assignments that Wein and Yagelski utilized with their FOCUS students was the creation of a ‘real-life war story’. Inspired by texts such as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the students examined their lives for challenges and trials by fire. As teachers often experience, their students were brutally honest and both Wein and Yagelski were impressed by the scope of emotions and experiences that the students related with bravery and a distinct voice. In terms of their actual techniques, both teachers decided to split some responsibilities and team up on others. For instance, in reviewing student writing, both teachers would provide separate feedback. Yagelski said, “Students were getting two voices…which we found out later the students really appreciated.”
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By incorporating their experiences with the FOCUS students into the instruction of Yagelski’s graduate class, Perspectives on Teaching Writing in the Secondary School, both teachers were able to bridge the perceived gap between theory and practice for a room full of eager graduate students. Many of the techniques that Wein uses in her FOCUS classroom directly involve the application of theories about which the graduate students are just learning. Wein felt that she increasingly sees “the value of this kind of professional collaboration—more and more I run into teachers in the secondary setting who are very distanced from academia, who make a lot of decisions based on what works in the classroom, but they wouldn’t be able to support it with theory, for example.”
In essence, both Yagelski and Wein used their time in both classes to hone their skills in merging and balancing theory and practice, to which end Wein feels, “One foot in both worlds seems to enhance all of our teaching.” For Yagelski, the time in a high school writing class allowed some further reflection on his understanding of writing pedagogy and the methodology he espouses in his classes in the School of Education. “The fundamental philosophy in writing and my beliefs in what constitutes good writing instruction haven’t changed—I think what happened …my sense of how this instruction fits into the larger context of education really shaped the way that I wrestled with problems that all teachers faced.”
For example, both teachers struggled with a central issue facing high school students: motivation and the understanding of process and revision as a tool to increase mastery. Yagelski says that they tried, “somehow or another to convey to them that this isn’t busy work,” but instead wanted to highlight the “ability to produce writing to serve your own needs…to learn about writing as a rhetorical act and as an interaction and engagement with the world.” These ideas were incorporated into Yagelski’s graduate class through a process of modeling and practice that both emulated some of the central tenets of writing at the secondary level and inspired a more complete form of reflection on the graduate students’ experiences that helped them begin to shape their personal pedagogies and ideologies.
Yagelski and Wein will be presenting their experiences and insights from this unique and successful collaboration at the Annual Convention of the National Council of Teachers of English in Nashville this November. Their topic is The Nature of Professional Collaboration as a Way to Deepen Our Understanding of Writing Instruction.
Both Wein and Yagelski can foresee several other projects sprouting up from last year’s experience, including the exploration of a future program where groups of students and teachers could be paired up for similar collaborations.