Where There's Wonder and Where There's Not

Abstract

I believe writing personal stories about learning helps prospective teachers develop a more fine-grained understanding of teachers’ work as it relates to supporting student learning. When I meet them, my students are about a year away from student teaching. As is to be expected, their memories of school fuel their motivations. They often declare that they want to emulate or reject a particular teacher. However, the memories that they bring of particular teachers may be under-examined. As they begin storytelling they tend to write more from the perspective of the successful or damaged learner rather than that of the teacher. Because we eventually study the stories, the implicit message is that our stories are legitimate texts in teacher education. Stories become public. We read them aloud; we write about them in personal correspondence. We cite them in subsequent work. Put simply, stories teach. Stories—the telling, writing, reading, and discussion of them—provide openings for studying teaching. Given this belief, I integrate opportunities for stories into nearly every class I teach. In fact I begin courses by asking my students to write a personal learning story. Here is the assignment: