Urban Teacher Bibliogrpahy

Bibliogrpahy

The Urban Teacher

McLaughlin, Milbrey W. and Joan E. Talbert, Professional Communities and the Work of Teaching High School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

The authors, Stanford University researchers, conducted detailed examinations of seven school districts to determine why a high school teacher was able or inspired to excel. They chose both urban and suburban districts in California, which is state-standards-oriented, and Michigan, which is highly decentralized.

They examined a number of factors and found that the key was to establish relevance for students. Moreover, schools had a shared responsibility with students to create this relevance, with both words receiving independent emphasis: schools had to hold themselves responsible and accountable for relevancy, while at the same time recognizing that this was impossible unless they partnered with students to do so.

The authors found that the key organizational implication was that teachers needed to take the initiative to form professional communities that oversaw the delivery of peer coaching, mentoring, equitable division of the work load, and designing curricula that was student-centered rather than constructed in the silo of a single subject department.

McLaughlin and Talbert identified a special opportunity for subject department heads to bring distinction to themselves in both organizing the above tasks and deflecting “district toxicity” from teachers.

The bottom line was that, in successful sub/urban schools, the team’s the thing; individual contributors are increasingly unable to accomplish the necessary and complex organizational tasks required.

Reviewers somewhat predictably acknowledged the validity of the authors’ observations, but groaned under the weight of yet-one-more burden teachers are expected to shoulder at their own initiative. (See, e.g., Karen Ferris-Fearnside, The History Teacher, 36, 3 (May, 2003), 419-20.)

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Tredway, Lynda, “The Art of Juggling: Preparing Preservice Teachers for Urban Schools,” The Journal of Negro Education, 68, 3 (Summer, 1999), 382-396.

This upbeat essay describes a university-school partnership that prepares teachers for careers in Washington, DC’s urban high schools. The author, the project’s former director, likens the urban teacher challenge to that faced by a juggler. A curriculum that includes readings to develop a philosophical core, community experiences, and professional role-modeling is described. A guide to selecting interns with a high probability of success is provided. Particularly interesting for the students, faculty, administrators, and urban partners of Montclair State’s UTA.

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Scappini, Robert A., “Teaching High School in the Context of Performance-Based Standards: An Innovative Approach for Urban Schools,” The History Teacher, 37, 2 (February, 2004), 183-91.

The author teaches History in an impoverished urban school in Rhode Island, a state that is moving toward a more standards-based environment. He has found success in reorienting his pedagogy from textbook-based to project-based. Projects provide opportunities to observe six successful pedagogical strategies: frequently informing students where they are in the overall lesson plan, breaking the lesson plan into manageable chunks, publicly displaying student work, bringing in guest experts, keeping student journals, and repeating the standards of historical thinking (chronological thinking, historical comprehension, historical issues, and analysis & interpretation, in support of decision-making.) A must for urban high school Social Studies teachers.

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Green, Robert L. and Bradley R. Carl, “A Reform for Troubled Times: Takeovers of Urban Schools,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 569 (May, 2000), 56-70.

The authors begin by identifying pros and cons in the strategy of a state takeover of an urban school. Those in favor point to the clarification of responsibility and accountability, the streamlining of the budgeting process, and the depoliticizing of school governance. Those opposed see takeovers as a racist denial of self-governance to minorities, and a process that rarely has either clearly identified rationales or strategies for returning control to the local community. Green and Carl examined two dozen takeovers and concluded that there is conflicting evidence about whether the schools improved. They identify the need for more comprehensive and objective data that relates to clear objectives in order to assess whether takeovers are an effective strategy. Particularly recommended for teachers in Newark, Jersey City, and other districts that have been “taken over by” the state.

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Hughes-Hassell, Sandra and Pradnya Rodge, “The Leisure Reading Habits of Urban Adolescents,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 51, 1 (September, 2007), 22-34.

The authors establish two direct links between urban students’ leisure reading and success in high school: students who read on their own initiative are more likely to do well in school; and knowing what students read in their leisure time provides teachers with insights into how to construct engaging lesson plans. The detailed analysis performed by the authors suggest that urban students read more than we probably realize, but this is less likely to be books than magazines and websites relating to personal interests.