Beverly Falk

This
website was developed by Beverly Falk as part of the Goldman-Carnegie
Quest Project, and can be accessed at the following URL:

Enter Site

(this link was valid on 9/20/06)

Excerpt:
The
challenge I explore in this website is how to help teacher learners
understand that teaching is problematic rather than a given, that
inquiry is part of everyday practice.

The challenges of
teaching, especially teaching in the unpredictable environments of
urban schools, call on teachers to be problem posers and solvers, to
think and act critically, and to be able to articulate their beliefs
and actions to other colleagues, administrators, families, and the
public.

To prepare for this hard work, my teacher preparation
program tries to help our teacher candidates learn to apply a common
set of inquiry stances and skills to the unanswered questions and
problems that inevitably arise in schools. We thus infuse inquiry
experiences throughout our program and require a two-semester inquiry
course as a culminating experience that provides teacher learners with
an opportunity to generate and explore personally meaningful questions
about their practice. It is our belief that by experiencing first-hand
the messy, non-linear, often confusing nature of the learning process,
this exploration will help teacher learners synthesize the content,
pedagogical, and dispositional knowledge that they have learned
throughout the program and apply it to the ongoing dilemmas of their
daily lives.

As they learn how to collect evidence, analyze
it, and subsequently use data from their practice to inform their
thinking and their teaching, it is our hope that the process of asking
and pursuing generative questions will become a habit they will carry
with them long after completing their teacher preparation. By engaging
in the iterative cycle of questions – questions lead to other questions
and evolve as the pursuit of them unfolds – we want teacher learners to
not only gain competence and confidence in their skills, but also to
learn how to articulate what they know, and to translate their
understanding of powerful learning experiences to the experiences they
structure for their students.