Find two curriculum maps and one lesson plan for each curriculum map. You can use maps and lesson plans used in your current school, in your field experience placement, or found online. Each curriculum map should be from a different content area.
Write a 750-1,000-word essay that addresses:
- Comparing and contrasting different styles for designing curriculum.
- Similarities and differences between the two reviewed curriculum maps.
- Articulation of the connection between curriculum mapping and lesson plans.
- A critique of how each lesson plan is aligned with its corresponding curriculum map.
Include 3-5 scholarly articles to support your critique.
Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. An abstract is not required.
This assignment uses a rubric. Review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.
You are required to submit this assignment to TurnItIn.
Nelson Graff
151
Teacher Education Quarterly, Summer 2011
“An Effective
and Agonizing Way to Learn”:
Backwards Design and New Teachers’
Preparation for Planning Curriculum
By Nelson Graff
The past decade or so has seen increasing emphasis in K-12 schools around
the country on standards and standardized testing, particularly since the advent
of the No Child Left Behind law in 2001. At the same time, our knowledge about
student learning has become increasingly complex, creating a potential conflict for
conscientious teachers—administrators push for the kinds of teaching that translate
directly into better test results, yet teachers also work to engage diverse students in
the kinds of learning and thinking required for our contemporary era. This situation
calls for teachers to have a sophisticated knowledge both of their content and of how
to guide students in learning that content, what Shulman (1986) calls “pedagogical
content knowledge.” Yet some research on new teachers suggests that new teachers
Nelson Graff is an
assistant professor
of English in the
College of Humanities
at San Francisco
State University, San
Francisco, California.
feel “lost at sea” when confronting the complexities
of planning curriculum (Kaufman et al., 2002).
In the tradition of self-study and the Scholarship of
Teaching and Learning (SoTL), this article describes a
pedagogical approach that has met with some success
in my own work with pre-service teachers. Although
I began with a broad inquiry into the effectiveness of
my own preparation of future teachers, I discuss here a
narrow range of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions
“An Effective and Agonizing Way to Learn”
152
related to effective teaching—the ability to design and plan curriculum. I suggest
that using the Wiggins and McTighe “Backwards Design” framework has helped
my former students develop the skills to plan curriculum.
Preparation to Plan on Entering Teaching
Research on new teachers’ transitions into teaching has ranged widely, including
general surveys of new teachers’ sense of their own preparation (California State
University, 2007; Housego, 1992, 1994; Veenman, 1984), longitudinal studies of
individual new teachers’ development (Bickmore et al., 2005; Bullough, 1989;
Bullough et. al., 1992; Bullough & Baughman, 1995; Grossman, et al., 2000),
comparisons of the feelings of preparation or the competence of new teachers who
attended traditional teacher education programs versus those who gained certifica-
tion through alternative means (Darling-Hammond, Chung, & Frelow, 2002; Gross-
man, 1990), and examinations of new teachers’ attempts to practice the conceptual
frameworks—particularly constructivism—they learned in their teacher education
programs (Bickmore, Smagorinsky, & O’Donnell, 2005; Cook et al., 2002; Gross-
man et al., 2000; Smagorinsky, Cook, & Johnson, 2003; Smagorinsky et al, 2004;
Valencia et al., 2006).
Despite this range of studies, and despite the overwhelming sense in a recent
survey of working English teachers that what makes a teacher highly qualified is
knowledge of strategies for teaching literature and writing (Dudley-Marling et al.,
2006), little specific research has been done on new teachers’ ability to plan instruc-
tion. Some of the little research that has been done shows some new teachers feel-
ing confident about curriculum. Other studies show many new teachers struggling
with curriculum either on a basic level—figuring out what and how to teach—or
on a more conceptual level—negotiating the curriculum frameworks, pre-packaged
programs, and district guidelines that they find in their new positions.
A few studies have found that new teachers feel well prepared for planning
curriculum in general terms. For instance, Housego, who found weakness in new
teachers’ comfort “reflect[ing] on various instructional strategies” (1994, p. 369),
nevertheless found that almost half of her respondents identified planning as one of
the areas in which they felt most prepared. Likewise, Darling-Hammond, Chung,
and Frelow (2002) found that teachers who were prepared in traditional teacher-
education programs felt well prepared in “core tasks of teacher such as designing
instruction and curriculum” (p. 290). And two of the four students in the study by
Grossman and her colleagues (2000) were able, because of their knowledge and
sense of their own competence, to adapt the materials in pre-packaged programs
to suit their pedagogical goals. Both Housego and Darling-Hammond, Chung, and
Frelow are reporting results of survey research, which may help to explain their
general results—on average, teachers may well feel fairly well prepared for these
domains of practice. Bullough found, in his longitudinal study of Kerrie (1989), that
Nelson Graff
153
her confidence increased over time, and her understanding of what it meant to plan
curriculum changed as well, “from a concern with activities to time, with purposes
taken for granted. As the year progressed, her thinking changed, however: Activities
were seen in the light of purposes and student ability and interests” (p. 141).
Though the above studies show teachers feeling confident about their prepara-
tion for curriculum and planning in general, other researchers, perhaps most notably
Kauffman and his colleagues (2002), have reported on new teachers’ lack of prepara-
tion for curriculum planning. These authors note that new teachers in Massachusetts
feel “lost at sea” with little sense of what to teach and how to teach it. According to
Kauffmann et al., these new teachers feel the need for more curricular guidance and
structured assistance. Grossman and Thompson (2004) similarly note that “curriculum
materials . . . represent important tools for learning to teach” (p. 7) for new teachers
who “had not yet developed the pedagogical content knowledge to feel confident
making curricular decisions on their own” (p. 5). While other studies have been less
comprehensive in their claims about new teachers’ lack of preparation, they have found
particular areas in which new teachers feel unprepared for designing curriculum; for
instance, Grossman and her colleagues (2000) reported that new teachers struggling
with teaching writing were strongly influenced by pre-packaged curriculum materials
such as Jane Schaffer’s “Teaching the Multiparagraph Essay.” And Housego (1994)
found that new teachers felt unprepared “to evaluate curriculum materials from the
standpoint of current guidelines” (p. 357-358).
Conceptual Framework
Curriculum Planning
So what knowledge and skills are required for teachers to plan curriculum
effectively? It is clear that teachers must be able to negotiate the needs of the stu-
dents in front of them, the institutional requirements and material circumstances
of their contexts, and their knowledge of content to decide what to teach, and how
and when to teach it. Kauffmann and his colleagues (2002) define curriculum in
a way that may clarify this description: “a complete curriculum specifies content,
skills, or topics for teachers to cover; suggests a timeline; and incorporates a par-
ticular approach or offers instructional materials” (p. 274-5), with the implication
that teachers who can create their own curricula are prepared to develop timelines,
plan activities, gather resources, and make decisions about both what and how to
teach. They create “long-term objectives” and develop “a coherent plan to address”
those objectives (p. 278); and decide “which details to emphasize and how much
depth to pursue” (p. 282). Yet this knowledge is not knowledge about content alone.
Drawing from Ball (1996), I recognize that “the enacted curriculum is actually
jointly constructed by teachers, students, and materials in particular contexts” (p.
7), suggesting that the ability to plan goes beyond knowledge of subject matter or
state standards to include knowledge of students and particular institutions.
“An Effective and Agonizing Way to Learn”
154
Creating curricula, or planning, therefore requires knowledge of students
and their learning, what Shulman (1986) calls “general pedagogical knowledge”
and knowledge of the content to be taught, and the ability to analyze institutional
constraints. For the purposes of focusing the discussion on the work I do with my
students in a subject-matter methods class, I will focus on the knowledge and skills
appropriate to that class, thus specific to transforming the content knowledge with
which prospective teachers ostensibly enter the credential program (at San Francisco
State University, candidates for the credential program must demonstrate subject
matter competency before entering the program) into materials for teaching.
In describing the relationship between “content knowledge and general peda-
gogical knowledge,” Shulman (1986) describes “three categories of content knowl-
edge: (a) subject matter content knowledge, (b) pedagogical content knowledge,
and (c) curricular knowledge” (p. 9). As the credential program does not address
subject matter content knowledge, I will focus on pedagogical content knowledge
and curricular knowledge.
I will use Shulman’s own description of pedagogical content knowledge as
having three components:
for the most regularly taught topics in one’s subject area, . . . the ways of represent-
ing and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible to others[;] . . . the
conceptions and preconceptions that students of different ages and backgrounds
bring with them to the learning of those most frequently taught topics and lessons
[and] knowledge of the strategies most likely to be fruitful in reorganizing the
understanding of learners. (pp. 9-10)
And Shulman describes curricular knowledge as both “horizontal,” knowledge of
“the curriculum materials under study by his or her students in other subjects they
are studying at the same time,” and “vertical,” “familiarity with the topics and issues
that have been and will be taught in the same subject area during the preceding and
later years in school” (p. 10).
Helping prospective teachers transform the knowledge of their academic subjects
with which they enter a credential program into pedagogical content knowledge and
curricular knowledge, therefore, means helping them to figure out the topics “most
regularly taught” in their disciplines, useful representations of the ideas that are
central to those topics, and strategies for exploring what students understand and
misunderstand about those topics. This task also involves teaching new content—the
horizontal and vertical curriculum of schools, with which teacher candidates have
varied experiences.
Backwards Design
The backwards design framework as described by Wiggins and McTighe (1995,
2005) provides a structure with which to help prospective teachers in a content
methods course to begin to transform their content knowledge into pedagogical
Nelson Graff
155
content knowledge and to develop sensitivity to both the horizontal and vertical
curriculum as Shulman describes it. It is a framework I have applied to my own
syllabi, using essential questions to guide students’ reading and our discussion
for each week of the class (Graff 2005) and constantly focusing discussions of
pedagogical techniques on questions about transfer of learning, about why the
techniques mattered or had value to students beyond any single instance. In what
follows, I first describe the backwards design framework generally, then contrast it
with traditional teaching, using an example from my work teaching the framework
to demonstrate how it may help teachers develop this knowledge and skill.
In their book, Understanding by Design, and the workshops they lead, Wiggins
and McTighe argue that teachers have for too long favored either disconnected cover-
age of material or hands-on activities that leave open questions about what students
learn from the activities. They claim these approaches result from an overemphasis
on either coverage or activities in planning and recommend, as a cure, designing
instruction “backwards.” Wiggins and McTighe (1998) describe the backwards
design process as follows: “one starts with the end—the desired results . . . –and
then derives the curriculum from the evidence of learning (performances) called
for by the standard and the teaching needed to equip students to perform” (p. 8).
Wiggins and McTighe are hardly the only (or even the first) to define backwards
design in this way; in a general way, their approach matches Taylor (cited in Milner
and Milner, 2008, p. 18), and, in texts for English teachers specifically, Smagorinsky
(2002, 2008). As Milner and Milner (2008) note in their text for pre-service teachers,
the Wiggins and McTighe framework has the benefit of being both systematic and
flexible. It differs from these other approaches, importantly, in its central focus on
what Wiggins and McTighe call “big ideas,” “a concept, theme, or issue that gives
meaning and connection to discrete facts and skills” (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005,
p. 5) and “enduring understandings,” which are “The specific inferences, based
on big ideas, that have lasting value beyond the classroom” (Wiggins & McTighe,
2005, p. 342). Using the backwards design approach involves distinguishing among
three levels of knowledge, what Wiggins and McTighe (2005) discuss as “worth
being familiar with,” “important to know and be able to do,” and “big ideas and
core tasks” (p. 71).
Their emphasis with enduring understandings, big ideas, and core tasks is on
learning that transfers, that students can take beyond a particular lesson into new
learning experiences in school and outside of school (Wiggins, 2009, personal
communication). The quest for these “enduring understandings” forms a central
component of the first stage of unit planning in their model, “Defining ends.” Once
a teacher has defined the ends, she can then “determine what evidence” would
show that students had met those ends, and finally plan activities that would help
students develop the skills and knowledge to produce the evidence. Wiggins and
McTighe have further argued that teachers can approach planning in any order as
long as they aim for coherence of all three components of their units.
“An Effective and Agonizing Way to Learn”
156
Table 1 shows a contrast between the questions a teacher might ask herself in
a traditional model of planning and backwards design. By “traditional planning,”
I mean both the kind of planning I learned to do as a new teacher and the kind my
students—prospective English teachers coming often from English majors—tend
to want to do.
Because of the current widespread concern with state standards, I will further
illustrate this planning approach by beginning with an example from the California
English/Language Arts standards. Take, for instance, this 9th grade standard un-
der the strand “Literary Response and analysis,” a strand of English teaching that
would be familiar to most secondary English teachers: “3.4 Determine characters’
traits by what the characters say about themselves in narration, dialogue, dramatic
monologue, and soliloquy” (Framework, p. 232). This is a standard teachers can
address when we teach almost any work of drama or prose fiction. And while it
seems obvious to English teachers that we should help students develop this skill,
it is easy to teach this skill without attending to the larger domains of meaning it
implies. Thus, we may help students develop charts of character traits for char-
acters in particular works of literature and test them on those character traits. We
may generate test questions that ask students to list or describe character traits, or
Table 1
Traditional Planning Backwards Design
Stage 1 What literature do I want to What enduring understandings about
(or am I required to) teach? literacy and life inform the standards
at this grade level and will engage
my particular students?
Stage 2 What literary terms does What evidence would enable me
this work lend itself to to reliably infer that students have
teaching? uncovered those understandings?
What activities would be
fun/interesting/useful/
engaging with this
literature?
What standards do I
address when I teach
students this work?
Stage 3 How should I test that What skills and knowledge do
students have read and students need to develop in order
understood the literature? to successfully produce that evidence?
What kinds of writing do What resources (e.g. literature)
we have to do? and activities will help students
develop that knowledge
and those skills?
Nelson Graff
157
even to explain the connections between character behavior and inferences about
character traits such as “What does George’s treatment of Lenny (in Of Mice and
Men) reveal about George’s character?”
When I see prospective teachers moving in that direction, I ask them, “What do
you want students to be able to do when they have completely forgotten everything
about Of Mice and Men (or Romeo and Juliet or Song of Solomon)?” Using the
backwards design framework, I ask students to interrogate this (and other) standards
in order to frame their work as English teachers. I ask them to look for connections
among the standards, enduring understandings that inform the standards and that
will help students transfer their learning in particular classes into future classes
and their lives beyond school. In this way, I am implicitly asking them to move
from subject matter knowledge to pedagogical content knowledge and to consider
both the horizontal and vertical curricula into which the standards for their grade
level fit. Some questions I ask my students to consider when interrogating such a
standard are, “Why does this matter? Why is this a standard? What understandings
about literature and life make this important? How will learning this help students
read and write? How do adults (and adolescents) in the world apply this skill/strat-
egy/knowledge in their daily lives?”
My students find these questions challenging. To them, it is obvious that
students should be able to describe George and Lenny, and perhaps only slightly
less obvious that they should be able to infer character traits. These skills matter
because they are important to reading literature, and students should know about
these characters because George and Lenny are important to the novel. So I ask
prospective teachers about the students who do not imagine themselves reading
literature outside of school: How will this help them? How will you justify learning
this to them? How will you help them see its importance?
With some effort, students come to enduring understandings such as Litera-
ture mirrors life or Readers apply the same strategies to understanding stories in
literature as they apply to understanding the stories of their lives. Or they may
prefer questions such as How do we come to know ourselves and others? Notice
that these understandings or questions focus not on the particular work but on big
ideas of literature and life and on connections between the particular work and
other works or students’ lives. Seeing the learning in this way, teachers realize that
a question like “What do we know about George” will not provide good evidence
that students have learned. Instead, teachers may ask students to read a new story
and infer character traits about a character in that story. Or teachers may ask students
to describe a character they have not discussed as a class and explain their process
of inferring character traits. Depending on the wider focus of their instruction,
teachers might even have students write short stories or personal narratives and
explain their choices for representing characters. If teachers ask their students to
do this for autobiographical narratives, they are even helping students to apply the
skills of reading literature to understanding their lives.
“An Effective and Agonizing Way to Learn”
158
And once prospective teachers have thought clearly about what it will look
like for students to demonstrate understanding, as by inferring character traits in
new contexts, they teach differently. They see that they need to draw on students’
everyday practices of inferring personality traits and focus not on George’s or
Lenny’s characteristics as much as on how readers come to know George and
Lenny. In this way, working through this framework in a Curriculum and Instruc-
tion class, prospective teachers deepen understandings of content knowledge that
they experienced as students and consider what it means to teach such knowledge,
transforming it into pedagogical content knowledge.
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and Self-study
Shulman (1999) argues that in order to “take learning seriously,” we must “take
teaching seriously,” making public and available for scholarly critique our pedagogi-
cal practices. By studying our own classrooms and our own students’ learning, he
argues, we not only improve our own teaching but build knowledge of teaching
and learning in a wider community of scholars. In teacher-education research, this
kind of investigation is often called self-study. Cochran-Smith (2005) notes a trend
toward such research in teacher education: “one major development in teacher
education research in the US and in many other countries has been the growth of
research on practice conducted by teacher education practitioners themselves and
disseminated in journals, books, and conferences across the world” (p. 221). While
such research may be criticized as less generalizable or rigorous than larger-scale
experimental studies, these authors and others (e.g., Huber & Hutchings, 2005;
Smith, 2010) argue for its value.
Methods
Data Collection
The results for this inquiry come from a broad and very open-ended consid-
eration of the effectiveness of the Curriculum and Instruction sequence I teach,
guided by the following two research questions:
(1) How do new teachers describe their teaching lives?
(2) How well do they feel that the Curriculum and Instruction (C&I) courses
in their credential program prepared them for those lives?
While these research questions were quite broad, because the backwards design
framework came up frequently in these new teachers’ talk about the program, I
attempt to answer more narrowly constructed questions in this analysis:
(1) To what extent and in what ways has the backwards design framework
been useful to new teachers in negotiating their teaching lives?
Nelson Graff
159
(2) What aspects of the framework and my teaching of the framework
were particularly helpful?
Because my interest was in gathering feedback to understand and improve my
own teaching, I cast a very broad net. I invited, by email, each of the 93 students who
had graduated from the C&I classes I taught between 2004 and 2006 to participate in
focus group discussions about their teaching lives and preparation. Of the 93 gradu-
ates, 8 were excluded because the email addresses I had for them were bad or they
were not teaching. Of those that remained, 25 agreed to participate, and 21 eventually
did participate in focus groups. In order to maximize the amount of feedback I could
gather, and because some of the remaining 60 expressed a willingness to respond
by email, I sent the same questions that the focus groups addressed, in open-ended
form, to 17 of those teachers. Nine of them responded, giving me feedback of some
sort from 30 graduates out of 85 eligible (35%). The breakdown by cohort group
follows: Graduates from Fall 2004—2 (6.7% of graduates), Spring 2005—6 (26%
of graduates), Fall 2005—3 (33.3% of graduates), Spring 2006—13 (38% of gradu-
ates), Fall 2006—6 (66.7% of graduates). Of the teachers who responded, 19 were
women, 11 men; 24 were Caucasian, six people of color. These participants formed
five focus groups, which ranged in size from three participants to seven.
Focus groups made it possible for participants to talk, in a relatively unstructured
manner, about their experiences teaching and their recollections of the credential
program. As Athanases and Martin (2006), citing Fern (2001) note, “because focus
groups use responses and reflections shared in small cohort settings, they can uncover
trends obscured by consensus in surveys and aid theorizing about phenomena” (p.
629). The sessions were divided into two halves, of about an hour each. During
the first segment, I asked teachers simply to discuss their teaching lives—the ups
and downs, the successes and hardships. These discussions happened without
any intervention from me. I hoped, through these discussions, to learn about their
teaching situations and the ways those situations differed from my own secondary
teaching experience. During the second half, I asked candidates to consider their
preparation as teachers, asking both what they felt well prepared to do when they
began teaching and what they felt ill prepared to do, giving them time to discuss
each question before moving on to the next and occasionally following up teacher
comments to ask for clarification. I followed up these questions by presenting teach-
ers with an adaptation of a survey done annually since 2004 by the chancellor’s
office of the California State University system, asking most of the groups simply
to look over the survey and add any insights it inspired. Finally, I asked teachers
to recall activities or readings from their C&I classes and express how connected
those activities or readings seemed to their teaching lives, prompting them with
copies of the syllabi of the courses they took.
While email responses to open-ended questions lacked the depth of the focus-
group discussions, and those teachers did not receive the prompting that colleagues
“An Effective and Agonizing Way to Learn”
160
in a focus group might have offered, providing teachers the option of responding by
email did allow me to gather feedback from teachers from whom I would otherwise
not have heard.
Data Analysis
I began by examining teachers’ answers to the questions, “What did you feel
particularly well prepared to do when you began teaching,” and “What did you
feel particularly ill prepared to do when you began teaching,” coding their answers
using the method of constant comparison (Strauss, 1987) and examining the re-
maining transcripts (more general discussions of participants’ teaching lives) for
corroborating evidence. What emerged from this open coding was an emphasis
across focus groups on planning as an area of strong preparation. For this reason,
and because I was interested in teachers’ preparation in the Curriculum and Instruc-
tion classes in particular, I focused my coding for this analysis on teachers’ discus-
sions of curriculum, “what and how to teach” (Kauffmann et al., 2002). I coded as
“curriculum” any comments about curriculum, lesson or unit planning, lessons,
assignments/homework, or texts. I then coded these as “positive” or “negative” as
regarded the teacher’s sense of preparation to plan.
Because it seemed to me I was hearing backwards design principles mentioned
frequently, I also specifically noted comments teachers made referring explicitly
or implicitly to the backwards design model from Wiggins and McTighe and con-
nections to the contexts in which these new teachers were teaching. Such com-
ments including using the terms from Wiggins and McTighe such as “big ideas”
or “essential questions” or mentioning principles that we discussed related to the
framework, such as beginning with the ends in mind.
Results
Teachers’ comments in the focus groups suggested strongly both that they
felt prepared for planning and curriculum and that learning the backwards design
framework helped them to feel so. Of the 30 teachers who participated either in
focus groups or by email, 26 commented in some way on their preparation for
planning and curriculum. While a minority of teachers (8 of 26, 31%) who made
comments about their preparation for planning suggested they felt ill prepared for it,
most (18 of 26, 69%) discussed feeling prepared for planning. Of these 26 teachers,
a large majority (17/26 65%) referred specifically to the principles of backwards
design in their discussion of their preparation to plan, with some teachers who felt
prepared to plan not mentioning it (5/18, 28%) and others who felt unprepared in
practical terms mentioning it as providing useful principles for planning (4/8, 50%).
Beyond their own individual planning, some teachers (8/26, 31%) discussed their
ability to evaluate the materials they encountered in the schools, largely from their
colleagues, but also their own materials and their own practice.
In the sections that follow, I will discuss what it meant for some teachers
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161
to claim they felt ill prepared for the curriculum and planning they faced in the
schools, what it meant for those teachers who felt well prepared and how they
spoke of the backwards design framework in that regard, and what teachers said
about their abilities to evaluate the materials available to them in schools and their
own practice. In these sections, I quote representative comments from individual
teachers, all of whose names are pseudonyms. Finally, I will draw on teachers’ com-
ments to explore what about my teaching of this framework made it, as Nancy—a
teacher who felt she lacked the practical skills for planning—put it, “an effective
and agonizing way to learn.”
Feeling unprepared to plan—
“Good curricular theoretical know-how,”
but not enough practical advice (8/26=31%)
As has been found fairly often in research on teacher preparation (e.g, Smago-
rinsky et al, 2004), teachers describe a disjunction between the theory and practices
they learned in the credential program and their experiences in student teaching and
in their teaching lives. For example, Nancy commented, “Well, I feel like I got a lot of
like really solid, um, thorough base of how, what good teaching is; however, I didn’t
really. I feel like last year in student teaching I wasn’t practicing those techniques
because I was forced to do other things, but now I’m going back to all those things.”
Others, like Frank, felt keenly the absence of practical strategies. He noted, “I got so
much good curricular theoretical know how here but as far as management and real
practical advice is concerned? I don’t think I got enough of that.”
Some of the comments of teachers also echoed the discoveries made by Ball
(1996, 2000) and Grossman and Thompson (2004) about the importance of district
frameworks and pre-packaged programs for helping new teachers who feel insecure
about curriculum. Nancy, for instance, noted of her school’s insistence on teaching
the Jane Schaffer method, “And I want to learn, I want to learn the method and try
to use it. I don’t think I’m the best writing teacher, so I’m willing to give it a shot.”
And Dorothy discussed using the Shining Star series extensively with her English
Language Learners. In both of these cases, as Grossman suggests, it is teachers’
uncertainty about their own competence in teaching—Nancy in terms of writing,
Dorothy in terms of English Language Learners—that led to their dependence on
the pre-packaged materials.
Those who felt unprepared wanted specific things: a clear sense of grade-level
expectations, more specific than the standards; specific strategies; even concrete
ways to plan and pace their time. One email respondent noted the need for, “Suc-
cessful lesson plans from experienced teachers.” And David noted that “I simply
don’t know what an eighth grade vocabulary list versus a 10th grade vocabulary
list is.” This relates closely with Kauffmann and colleagues’ subjects (2002), who
reported not knowing what to teach at various levels. It also relates to the curricular
“An Effective and Agonizing Way to Learn”
162
knowledge Shulman describes teachers needing, what students should be learning
at any given grade level. Yet David also noted the challenge of such leveled lists
“when you have third grade up to 12th grade reading skills and speaking skills in
your 10th grade class.” He continued after stating this concern, though, with a state-
ment that speaks to how these teachers did feel prepared, in terms of the process
of planning and addressing the needs of their students:
The way I’ve gotten around that is I don’t actually do specific vocab words. I’ve
been pounding the idea of the three steps to contextual vocabulary: step one,
you break the word apart; step two, you break the sentence apart; step three, you
break the paragraph slash whole text apart, and so it’s the idea of this is how you
guess better.
Feeling prepared to plan—
”I can bridge the gap” (18/26 69%)
This sense of having a process by which to figure out what students needed and
plan to meet those needs pervaded the comments of those teachers who felt prepared
to plan. Paula, for instance, discussed adapting her instruction after discovering
that her students did not know how to write an outline: “The first big writing thing
was, OK, you’re just going to write an outline for a paper. You’re not writing the
paper; you’re just writing the outline. And giving them three theses to choose from,
and giving them their sources and saying, OK, work with this stuff; this is a finite
amount of material.” Both she and Alex attributed this notion of planning to meet
students’ needs largely to the backwards design framework. Alex, for instance, said,
“I knew the standards, but now that I know what they want, and what I want, and
what the students need, I can bridge the gap.” When Alex focuses on “what they
[the standards] want, and what I want,” he is addressing ends, the place Wiggins
and McTighe suggest to begin planning.
Most of those who explicitly mentioned the backwards design framework
did so in terms of the process it gave them for planning instruction, noting as one
email respondent did, “I need to know what I want my students to know and why I
want them to know it before I teach it to them.” This focus, on not only what stu-
dents need to know but why they need to know it is at the heart of the backwards
design framework, and it is this knowledge of what is important for students to
know and be able to do that led David, as he claims above, to focus not on specific
vocabulary words but on the process of inferring the meaning of new vocabulary
words encountered in context. David and others also talked about the importance
of students knowing why they were studying English and why they were learning
particular skills or information.
Other teachers commented on the long-term focus that forms a key part of the
backwards design framework. Paula, for instance, noted the usefulness of “This
idea of having a bigger picture that you wanted to get to from a day to day thing.”
Nelson Graff
163
And she explained the consequence of this planning in her classes: “I got positive
feedback from the kids about how organized I seemed and I always seemed to
think I knew where I was going, so they thought that they knew where they were
going.” Likewise, Mary contrasted her ability to plan for the long-term with the
other newcomers at her school: “I felt very confident that I had a good framework
for [unit planning], and a good starting point, whereas I’ve seen other teachers who
are just treading water every day and trying not to drown and don’t really know
what to do tomorrow.” Those other teachers more closely match the teachers with
whom Kauffmann and colleagues (2002) talked. Ella and Amy discussed their
confidence in building units and the impact that had on their teaching. Ella com-
mented, “I spent all of last summer building units, and my year this year has been
so much better.” In contrast to the teachers with whom Kauffman and colleagues
(2002) worked, then, candidates from this program felt generally well prepared to
plan and generate the bulk of their own curriculum.
Feeling prepared to go beyond simply planning—
“It made me think a lot about using assessments in my planning” (8/26 31%)
A skill that goes beyond the basics of planning and leads toward becoming a
reflective educator is the ability to make decisions based on the systematic collec-
tion of evidence. The orientation toward using that skill is central to the backwards
design framework, but only three new teachers—Mike, Anthony, and David—spoke
specifically about assessing their own teaching and using assessment to guide their
teaching. Mike noted, “I feel really well prepared to evaluate my first year after
I’m done with it. I’ve got a lot of really great like strategies for taking a look at
the stuff that I was able to put together and, in a hurry, when I was tired, and make
better for next time,” and he followed this comment with the one above, that tak-
ing a look at his teaching “made [him] think a lot about using assessments in [his]
planning.” Both Anthony and David made similar comments, noting as well that
they realized their teaching was not going as they wanted it to and that they had
the tools—through backwards design—to improve it. Anthony describes making
his judgment about the need to revise his teaching based on student learning: “I
found myself kind of just burning through stories and novels, but then I found that
the students were not picking up on the big ideas that I was hoping that they would
pick up on.”
While others did not discuss using assessments in their planning or evaluating
their own work, they still used what they had learned from the backwards design
framework to evaluate the quality of materials available to them from their colleagues.
David, Charles, Mary, and others also referred to their evaluation of curriculum
materials whether theirs or others in terms of the kinds of teachers they wanted
to be. Mary and Charles framed these comments in terms of evaluating materials
used commonly in their teaching environments as coming from an instructional
“An Effective and Agonizing Way to Learn”
164
paradigm that they saw as ineffective, the transmission model of teaching: Mary
commented, for instance, “I knew what I had to do in order to not be the worksheet
teacher.”
Reflecting on the teaching and learning of backwards design—
”An effective and agonizing way to learn”
The new teachers’ comments above make clear what they took from learning
the backwards design framework into their teaching—the knowledge of a process
for lesson and unit planning, an emphasis on the importance of understanding both
what students would learn and why, and a conceptual framework for evaluating both
their own teaching and the curricular materials they encountered in the schools. Of
all the comments they made, though, the one that has haunted me has been Nancy’s
comment calling backwards design “an effective and agonizing way to learn” be-
cause it so neatly sums up my own sense from teaching the framework, that it has a
tremendous amount to offer and that prospective teachers struggle with it. Although
I did not ask the focus groups to discuss my teaching specifically, I want to reflect
on what about my teaching of the framework may have been effective, and what
parts of it prospective teachers seem to have found challenging. In describing this,
I will be drawing largely on my recollections of the classes, with some reference
both to other research on teacher preparation and to the new teachers’ comments
during the focus groups.
Smagorinsky and his colleagues (2003) describe the importance of program
coherence for prospective teachers’ concept development, referring to the varying
definitions of constructivism that candidates in credential programs experienced.
A similar coherence in the C&I classes helped to make the teaching of backwards
design effective. One teacher noted, “It helped to have you always asking, ‘Why
are you doing this?’” That question, and the focus on the teachers’ goals for student
learning informed discussions of long-term planning, unit planning, and daily les-
son planning. Because we began the semester with this concept, investigating the
“big ideas” behind the California ELA standards and relating those big ideas to
the teaching of literature, reading, writing, and language, candidates had constant
reinforcement of the need to focus on ends and to think about the meaningful
connections among choices of content, activities, and students’ lives. That this
perspective is echoed so widely suggests that this emphasis made its way into new
teachers’ notions of good teaching.
The same teacher who noted the helpfulness of thinking about the question
“Why are you doing this” hinted at one of the reasons new teachers may have
found this way of learning agonizing when she wrote, “I didn’t finish the course
with answers.” Because this approach does not emphasize “best practices” but
instead deciding the best practices for the particular purposes of the teacher in a
particular context, teachers may have felt there were too many questions and not
Nelson Graff
165
enough answers, as suggested by one new teacher’s request for “Successful lesson
plans from experienced teachers.”
From my own memory of teaching the class, though, there is another reason
candidates found this process agonizing. Sal commented, in his focus group, about
his memory of “grappling with so much . . . the central question . . . what the heck
is an essential question.” The kind of thinking this framework asks of teachers
was new to them and requires a deep understanding of their content of a kind not
necessarily emphasized in their previous coursework. This deep understanding
and interrogation is a necessary part of developing what Shulman describes as
“pedagogical content knowledge” (1986, p. 9). Shulman notes, “The teacher need
not only understand that something is so; the teacher must further understand why
it is so” (p. 9). Even candidates who had majored in English as undergraduates
and who had established their subject matter competency through course work
struggled with the deep understanding of literature, reading processes, composing
processes, and language necessary to make decisions about what understandings
and inquiries are central, and many of the candidates had established their subject
matter knowledge by a mostly-multiple-choice examination, so they were missing
this deeper understanding entirely and struggled against their lack of rich experience
with English when they had to wrestle with essential questions and big ideas.
Conclusion
These results must be considered preliminary for any number of reasons. I
was working with a relatively small pool of teachers from a single credential pro-
gram, all in English. Investigations with more teachers in a variety of credential
programs and a variety of disciplines would be necessary to more rigorously sup-
port the value of the backwards design framework. Also, the free-flowing nature of
the focus group discussions left me without the opportunity to closely investigate
teachers’ ideas and experiences. Likewise, despite the connections among teach-
ers’ senses of their own preparation, teacher self-efficacy, and teacher performance
(Darling-Hammond, Chung, & Frelow, 2002), the comments of these teachers
reflect their thoughts about what they do—or those thoughts they were willing to
express among their colleagues and in front of their former teacher. Research that
follows the teachers into the schools and examines not only their practice in the
schools but the consequences of that practice for student learning will provide an
important follow-up to this research.
Despite these flaws, the results and the study itself raise implications for teacher
educators to consider. First, they reflect the value for teacher educators of talking
to our former students and hearing from them what worked and did not work about
our classes. I had my own sense that backwards design was a useful concept for
future teachers. That it remained with graduates of the program into their first years
of teaching reinforces that sense. That these comments about backwards design
“An Effective and Agonizing Way to Learn”
166
arose in general focus group discussions about new teachers’ lives and their sense
of their own preparation suggests the power of the concept in new teachers’ lives.
These results also suggest the value of backwards design—an approach which
has become widespread—in preparing prospective teachers to plan instruction.
They further demonstrate that the emphasis on beginning with desired outcomes
inherent in the backwards design approach is helpful to new teachers in providing a
process both for designing instruction and for evaluating curricula—one’s own and
others’. And the emphasis on interrogating the whys behind what we teach provides
new teachers a way to balance a standards-based curriculum with an emphasis on
the learning that English teachers really value.
Finally, these results suggest an opportunity for teacher educators focused on
improving our preparation of teachers. While it is certainly true that the effects of
individual courses may be magnified or mitigated by programmatic factors, inter-
rogating our individual courses for their potential impact on particularly important
skills for new teachers can be empowering for teachers who want to focus more on
our own curriculum than program structure.
Note
I am very grateful to the teachers who took time out of their busy lives to share their
thoughts about teaching and their preparation and to the anonymous reviewers of this manu-
script for feedback that led to significant revisions.
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INQUIRY UNPACKED An Introduction to
Inquiry-Based Learning
By Barbara A. Jansen
“Inquire, think critically, and gain knowledge.”
“Plan strategies to guide inquiry.”
As our national educational organizations’
standards evolve from students mastering
discrete skills to demonstrating broad learning
behaviors, often referred to as 21st century
learning skills, pedagogy is slowly shifting from
teacher- and textbook-centered dissemination
of facts and information to student-centered
construction of learning and knowledge. In
this environment, students use a wide range
of resources to collaborate with others to solve
authentic problems by thinking critically, actively
create content, and communicate with a wide
audience. The Partnership for 21st Century
Skills succinctly categorizes these participatory
skills into the four Cs: “critical thinking and
problem solving, collaboration, communication,
and creativity and innovation” (P21 mission
statement). Both the American Association of
School Librarians (AASL) and the International
Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE)
1 0 Library Media Connection ® i
“The inquiry process is not linear but occurs
as a cyclical series of actions or events.”
National Educational Technology Standards for
Students 2007 call for students to use an inquiry
approach when engaged in the research process.
The AASL standards refer to inquiry seven times,
including having students “inquire, think critically,
gain knowledge, ” and to “follow an inquiry-
based process in seeking knowledge in curricular
subjects, . . .” and “continue an inquiry-based
research process by applying critical-thinking skills
. . .” in addition to “conclud[ing] an inquiry-based
research process . . .” (AASL). ISTE standards call
tor students to “plan strategies to guide inquiry”
(“NETS for Students”).
But what does it look like for a student to be
engaged in inquiry? What is inquiry-based
research, commonly referred to as inquiry-based
learning or “guided inquiry” (Kuhlthau, Maniotcs,
and Caspari)? A recent post on the AASL email
forum underscores the confusion that school
librarians and educators in general have about
inquiry. A librarian questioned the use of the term
“inquiry-based project” in the standards in lieu
of “research project” and considered whether she
should teach her students the meaning of inquiry.
A search for “inquiry-based research” on Google
results in 102,000 links. “Inquiry-based learning”
returns over 151,000 links. A search for “inquiry-
based learning” offers 101 titles on Amazon.com,
over 8,400 results on Google Books, over 9,760
results on Google Scholar, and over 52,000,000
results on Bing.
March/April 2011
NOT TO BE MISSED READING AND
VIEWING FOR SCHOOL LIBRARIANS
Kuhlthau, Carol C, Leslie K. Maniotes,
and Ann K. Caspari. Guided Inquiry:
Learning in the 21st Century. Libraries
Unlimited, 2007.
Rheingold, Howard. “Librarian 2.0:
Buffy J. Hamilton.” Digital LM Central.
MacArthur Foundation, 3 May 2010.
Web. 10 Oct. 2010. bttp://dmlcentraL
net/blog/howard-rheingold/librarian-
20-buffy-j-hamilton.
Stripling, Barbara. “Teaching Students to
Think in the Digital Environment: Digital
Literacy and Digital Inquiry.” School
Library Monthly 26.8 (2010): 16-18.
EBSCOhost Professional Development
Collection. Web. 16 Sept. 2010.
INQUIRY DEFINED
w h a t is inquiry? What does it look like? What are
its components?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines inquiry a.s
“the action ot seeking, . . . for truth, knowledge,
or information concerning something; search,
research, investigation, examination; a course of
inquiry, an investigation; and the action of asking
or questioning. ‘
Educational organizations explain inquiry as it
relates to learning. In Standards for the English
Language Arts, the National Council of Teachers of
English (NGTE) describes inquiry as “the learners
desire to look deeply into a question or idea that
interests him or her’ (27). AASL’s explanation in
Standards for the 21st-century Learner oiFers inquiry
as a “stance toward learning in which the learners
themselves are engaged in asking questions and
finding answers, not simply accumulating facts
(presented by someone else) that have no relation
to previous learning or new understanding” (17).
Inquiry-based research—or learning—consists of
a “process of learning that is driven by questioning,
investigating, making sense of information, and
developing new understandings, it is a process
of active learning, [and] it is cyclical, not linear ”
(“Chapter 3: Inquiry in Action”) and is deterpiined
“by one’s own curiosity, wonder, interest or passion
to understand an observation or solve a problem”
(“A Description of Inquiry”).
Traditionally, the teacher tells students what to “look
up”‘ during the research phase of a given projea,
which may typically occur after the teaching of the
content as enrichment or a follow-up activity. Inquiry-
March/April 2011
“Inquiry-based research allows the student
to ask questions in which he or she is
interested and use all available resources
to investigate the problenn.”
based research allows the student to ask questions
in which he or she is interested and use all available
resources to investigate the problem. Key components
ot inquiry-based research include “tíaming school
study around questions developed and shaped by
kids,” “handing the brainwork of learning back to
the kids,” and focusing on the “development of kids’
thinking first, foremost, and always” (Harvey and
Daniels 56-57). And, inquiry occurs not at the end
but at the beginning of the study, allowing students
to construct the content knowledge necessary to
understand concepts and make connections.
Inquiry does not necessarily follow a logical or neat
process. Models of inquiry-based learning show
a variety of approaches (see additional resources
below) that librarians and teachers can use to
guide students. All emph.isize that the process is
not linear but occurs as a cyclical series of actions
or events. The six-phase Stripling Inquiry Model
makes good sense for school librarians who seek a
structure for collaborating with teachers (Stripling)
to bring inquiry into the learning process. The
model’s phases—connect, wonder, investigate,
construct, express, and reflect—allow for nonlinear
thinking as illustrated below:
Ideally, the process begins “when the learner
identifies a problem or notices something that
intrigues, surprises, or stimulates a question—
something that is new, or something that may
not make sense in relationship to the learner’s
previous experience or current understanding” (“A
De.scription ot Inquiry”).
INOUIRY PRACTICED
In reality, other than the occasional self-selected
research paper or science tair topic, state- or
school-mandated curriculum standards leave
little time for students to explore their own
interests. By turning the curriculum into engaging
problems for students to solve, students can
participate in inquiry while practicing many
curriculum-mandated skills (i.e., reading, writing,
listening, research) as they investigate subject-
area content (social studies, science, health, math,
etc.). Instead ot teachers dictating the information
students need to locate, allow them to determine
what they know, want to know, and need to know
to solve the intorniation problem. Encourage
students to use a variety of online and otïline
resources, and allow them to show their results by
creating products that go beyond the traditional
report and PowerPoint presentation. Targeting
specific audiences for students’ etTorts raises their
level of concern and provides a focus for their
• Reflect on
own learning
• Ask new
questions
• Apply
understandings
to a new
context, new
situation
• Express new
ideas to share
learning
with others
• Connect to self, previous knowledge
• Gain background and context
1 ^ Connect ^ 1
– Reflect stripling Wonder
À Model of À
* Inquiry T
– Express Investigate
T ^ Construct ^ T
• Construct new understandings
connected to previous knowledge
• Draw conclusions about questions
and hypotheses
• Develop questions
• Make predictions,
hypothesis
• Find and evaluate
information to
answer questions,
test hypotheses
• Think about
information to
illuminate new
questions and
hypotheses
[Used with fjermission.] For more about the Stripling Model, see the additional resources on the next page.
9 Library Media Connection 1 1
writing and knowledge sharing. For example, turn the traditional report into
an article synthesizing important concepts for the general consumption of
Time magazine readers or an editorial for the opinion page of a newspaper.
Multimedia texts combine the important skill of writing along with those
involved in visual and audio production. Students can display these texts on
blogs or wikis for public consumption.
Inquiry is not easily nurtured through standalone library instruction that
occurs once a week. Successful inquiry-based learning involves students
engaging in topics originating in their subject-area courses for extended
periods of time on consecutive days, preferably in collaboration with the
school librarian. Kuhlthau, Maniotes, and Caspari suggest that “inquiry
instructional teams” help students develop competencies in research and
subject knowledge while helping to support essential 21st century skills,
and require “careful planning, close supervision, ongoing assessment, and
targeted intervention . . .” (2-3).
Buffy Hamilton, librarian at Creekview High School in Canton, Georgia,
offers useful insights to the inquiry process through a collaboration with a
tenth grade teacher of literature composition. According to Hamilton,
collaboration with the classroom teacher benefits students in
several ways: scaffolding information literacy skills, introducing
new online tools to students or showing them how to use familiar
ones in effective ways, teaching evaluation of multimedia texts, and
establishing a climate that promotes participation, inquiry, and risk
taking in a safe environment. Students see two or more professionals
working together and learning with them (qtd. in Rheingold).
Through self-selected topics within the greater problem of veteran’s issues,
students in Hamilton’s school engaged in the inquiry process with the
support of these professionals. Students “effectively learn to become their
own information filters, which is the ultimate act of information fluency.
[Using a variety of online resources and presentation tools such as NetVibes]
allows us to privilege multiple forms of literacy and for our students to
engage in transliteracy—the ability to read and write and share information
across a variety of platforms” (Rheingold).
By collaborating with teachers to connect students to subject knowledge,
developing their information fluency, and supporting the vital skills of
collaboration, creation, and communication through inquiry, school librarians
will solidify their place as an essential teaching professional at their schools. *S
WORKS CITED
American Association of” School Librarians. Standards far the 21 st-Century Learner.
American Library Association, 2007. Web. 30 Aug. 2010. http://www.aia.org/ala/mgrps/
divs/aasl/guidelinesandstandards/learningstandards/AASL_LearningStandards .
“Chapter 3; Inquiry in Action.” Supporting Inquiry with Primary Sources.
Library of Congress, n.d. Web. 16 Sept. 2010. http://www.ioc.gov/teachers/
professionaldevelopment/selfdirected/inquiry/index.htmi.
“A Description of Inquiry.” Institute for Inquiry: Examining the Art of Science
Education. Expioratorium, 1998. Web. 16 Sept. 2010. http://www.exploratorium.edu/
ifi/about/inquiry.html.
Harvey, Stephanie and Harvey Daniels. Comprehension and Coltahoration: Inquiry
Circles in Action. Heinemann, 2009. Print.
Internationa) Reading Association and National Council of Teachers of English.
Standards for the English Language Arts. International Reading Association and the
National Council ofTeachers of English, 1996. Web. 3 Sept. 2010. http://www.ncte.
org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Books/Sample/StandardsDoc .
Kuhlthau, Carol C , Leslie K. Maniotes, and Ann K. Caspari. Guided Inquiry:
Learning in the 21st Century. Libraries Unlimited, 2007. Print.
“NETS for Students 2007.” International Society for Technology in Education, 2007.
Web. 17 Sept. 2010. http://www.iste.Org//for-students/student-standards-2007.aspx.
“Our Mission.” Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2004. Web. 1 Oct. 2010. http://
www.p21 .org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id= 188&Itemid= 110.
Rheingold, Howard. “Librarian 2.0: BufïyJ. Hamilton.” Digital LM Central.
MacArthur Foundation, 3 May 2010. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. http://dmlcemral.net/blog/
howard-rheingold/librarian-20-bufiy-j-hamilton.
Standards for the 21st-century Learner in Action. Chicago: American Association of
School Librarians, 2009. Print.
Stripling, Barbara. “Teaching Students to Think in the Digital Environment: Digital
Literacy and Digital Inquiry.” School Library Monthly Id.% (2010): 16-18. EBSCOhost
Professional Development Collection. Web. 16 Sept. 2010.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES FOR THE STRIPLING
INOUIRY MODEL
Supporting inquiry with primary sources (multimedia from the Library of Congress;
with Barbara Stripling, primary sources, and 5th graders):
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/professionaldevelopment/seifdirected/inquiry/index.html
Supporting inquiry learning from the Library of Congress’s Teaching with Primary
Sources Quarterly publication:
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/tps/quarterly/0907/pdf/TPSQuarterlySummer09
“Student Inquiry and Web 2.0” by Pam Berger (includes using Stripling Inquiry Model
with Web 2.0 tools):
http://www.schoollibrarymonthly.com/articles Berger2010-v26n5p 14.html
OTHER MODELS
Historical Inquiry (ABC-CLIO):
As a group, brainstorm a variety of Key
Quest/ons that help illuminate the value of the
primary source.
Use the datat)ase
to research the
facts, opinions
and primary
sources related to
your Dilemma.
HhtoikjHnquiry PncKS
1 ^
Use the ABC-CLIO
databases to find
answers to your
Key Questions
and develop new
Key Questions.
Shape your Key Questions and their answers into a
broader Dilemma that lacks a single answer
Used with permi.ssion from ABC-CLIO.
Tasks of Inquiry (Anna J. Warner and Brian E. Myers, Department of Agricultural
Education and Communication, Florida Cooperative Extension Service, Institute of
Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida):
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/wcO75
8Ws of Information Inquiry (Annette Lamb):
http://virtualinquiry.com/inquiry/ws.htm
Inquiry-based Learning (Paula Sincero):
http://www.inquirylearn.com/Inquirydefhtm
Inquiry Process (The Inquiry Page, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign):
http://inquiry.illinois.edu/inquiry/process.php3
ASSESSMENT
“Enhancing Inquiry through Formative Assessment” by Wynne Harlen (Expioratorium
Institute for Inquiry):
http://www.exploratorium.edu/IFI/docs/harlen_monograph
“How can we assess student learning in an inquiry classroom?” (The Inquiry Page,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign):
http://inquiry.illinois.edu/php/assessment2.php
B a r b a r a A . J a n s e n is the Depanmem chair of
1-12 Educationai Technoiogy and Library Sen/ices and the
Upper School Librarian at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School
in Austin, Texas. She is the author ofseverai titles from
Linworth Publishing.
1 2 Library Media Connection March/April 2011
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