When Challenge Brings Change

All teachers face challenges—from the daunting and unexpected, like teaching during a pandemic, to nagging doubts about daily interactions and teaching practices. If there were ever a time for sharing teacher personal and professional breakthroughs—the ways teachers have successfully and courageously turned a corner—that time is now. In this collection of compelling narratives, high school and college teachers show us how they have taken on issues such as faculty and student relationships; struggles over personal identity in the classroom; the joys and complexities of working with emergent bilinguals, developing writers, and first-year college students; and the forever question of how to engage students. This is a book about breaking rules, caring about students, navigating systems, and taking chances. It’s an uplifting journey and along the way, teachers do what they always do: They share the reading and writing assignments that have worked for them during the best and worst of times. The matchless part, however, is teacher wisdom. Where would we be without it?

Book Features:

• Brings together narratives by veteran teachers who describe recognizable challenges and what happens when new understandings trump old ways of doing things.
• Provides ideas for teaching that arise from the breakthroughs of college, community college, and secondary teachers and are applicable to all grade levels.
• Celebrates teachers—their voices and practices, their intelligent and empathetic approaches to solving problems and making change.
• Illustrates the transformative power of writing about breakthroughs and encourages all teachers to share their stories.
• Includes an appendix with sample materials for school and writing group leaders who want to initiate similar breakthrough projects for teachers.

Sandra Murphy is professor emerita at the University of California, Davis and a former secondary teacher of English and journalism. Mary Ann Smith directed the Bay Area and California Writing Projects, served as the director of Government Relations and Public Affairs for the National Writing Project, and is a former secondary teacher of English and journalism. They are coauthors of Writing to Make an Impact: Expanding the Vision of Writing in the Secondary Classroom and Uncommonly Good Ideas—Teaching Writing in the Common Core Era.

“Murphy and Smith present teachers, in their own words, working to understand challenges to their work and to embrace transformative breakthroughs leading to potentially lasting and effective changes.”

—Teachers College Record

“In this volume, editors Sandra Murphy and Mary Ann Smith have gathered 11 accomplished teachers to tell stories of transformative learning, learning that earns the label ‘breakthrough.’… I take this book as inspiration that challenges us all to create environments where teachers can pursue the new knowledge and understandings that constitute meaningful breakthroughs.”
—From the Foreword by Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, executive director, National Writing Project

“In the forest, a stream may alternate between pool and rivulet, stillness and flow. This book shows how teachers stalled in ‘what used to work’ restore classroom fluency and joy.”
—Kim Stafford, professor emeritus, Lewis & Clark College; author, Singer Come from Afar

“Teachers and teacher educators at all levels will find enormous value in this collection, which accomplishes the extraordinary task of contributing richly to both the practical knowledge of teaching and our scholarly understanding of professional reflection, in the tradition of Dewey, Polanyi, Vygotsky, Schön, and Yancey. The spirited—and extremely well-written—accounts of teacher transformation in the book touch upon numerous elements of classroom pedagogy in generative ways that can be adapted to diverse classroom contexts, but they also make visible the ways of thinking that lead to professional breakthroughs, even in the face of extreme challenges.”
—Paul Rogers, associate professor of writing studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

Contents

Foreword Elyse Eidman-Aadahl  ix

Acknowledgments  xi

1.  Introduction  1
Sandra Murphy and Mary Ann Smith

About Chapter 2  9

2.  Breaking Through Writing Anxiety: Confessions of a Recovering Basic Writer  11
Cheryl Hogue Smith

About Chapter 3  23

3.  Taking Research Public: Participatory Communities and Student Authority Through Wikipedia  25
Anne Kingsley

About Chapter 4  38

4.  Looking Backward: How the “Fly on the Wall” Changed My History Instruction  39
Stan Pesick

About Chapter 5  52

5.  Teach What You Love: How Carving Out Space for Joy Transforms a Composition Class  53
Kristin Land

About Chapter 6  65

6.  Trainer/Collaborator/Coach: Helping Faculty Navigate the Pandemic Pivot to Remote Instruction  67
Lisa Orta
Contents

About Chapter 7  77

7.  Lessons From Moldova: From Language Learner to Language Teacher  79
Beth Daly

About Chapter 8  86

8.  Changing Perspectives on Written Feedback  87
Kelly Crosby

About Chapter 9  93

9.  Personal and Confidential: What the Pandemic Taught Me About My Relationship With Students  95
Rob Rogers

About Chapter 10  101

10.  Becoming Somebody: Queering the Classroom and Resisting “Neutral”  103
James Andrew Wilson

About Chapter 11  115

11.  Teacher as Disrupter: When Critical Thinking Gets Personal  117
John Levine

About Chapter 12  128

12.  From Breakthroughs to Through Lines: Navigating the Crosswinds of Practice  129
Rebekah Caplan

13.  Conclusion  143
Sandra Murphy and Mary Ann Smith

References  147

Index  155

About the Editors and Contributors  161

Download appendix in PDF format