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_ English Teachers: a diverse community of learners Negotiating the sameness and the tensions Connections between professional and student learning communities What are pre-service teachers learning and how are they learning? Teachers learning how to know their students? Professional learning: obligation or accomplishment? school (university) stuff’ and ‘practical stuff’ Writing critically reflexive narratives as a focus for professional learning Critical inquiry as professional learning _ Page 11 _
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professional learning

teachers learning how to know their students?

 

Perhaps teachers knowing their students is just a matter of taking the time to get to know them, or ‘having the knack.’ And yet, if teachers knowing their students is so important in teaching, then perhaps there is more to learn about this part of teaching than spending more time at it or just ‘having the knack.’

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If you are in your pre-service year as you read this, you might like to speculate about the sort of students you believe you will be teaching in schools. Early career and more experienced teachers, you may like to recall your  expectations of the students you were going to teach and the extent to which these expectations were met or not.

 

In the following quote from a reflective narrative written by an experienced teacher about her practice, she speaks about what had seemed to her to be an unusual group of Year 9 students:

The first few days were a learning period as we both had lots to learn about each other. They weren't the usual students to have in class as most of them had definite ideas about what they wanted to do in the workforce after leaving school, and were already well on the way to getting there. They wanted 'practical stuff', they told me, not school stuff that wasn't going to do them any good.

Ruth Graham
Read the whole narrative from the STELLA website at:
URL http://www.stella.org.au/narrative_content.jsp?id=23

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Do you see these students as usual’ in your experience? An vignette or anecdote is often  an effective way to illustrate your view about this.

 

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_ English Teachers: a diverse community of learners Negotiating the sameness and the tensions Connections between professional and student learning communities What are pre-service teachers learning and how are they learning? Teachers learning how to know their students? Professional learning: obligation or accomplishment? school (university) stuff’ and ‘practical stuff’ Writing critically reflexive narratives as a focus for professional learning Critical inquiry as professional learning _ Page 11 _
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