Me and My Pals: How We Learned to Teach
By Anthony Cody.
We met this week for what must have been about the 200th time. This group, the Learning to Teach Collaborative, began way back in 1988, when I was in my first year of teaching middle school science in Oakland. For the next dozen years, we met once a month, and over dinner, and with a bit of wine, we learned to teach together.
At the start, most of us were fresh, struggling to cope with the challenges of the classroom. We wrestled with how to make sure all our children could read, how girls could get a fair shake, how our own middle class upbringing might affect how we related to students of different backgrounds, and how racism could be fought, in our own classrooms. We used the simple act of conversation. We shared our experiences and frustrations, and challenged one another to look at things in different ways. We wrote about our work, in our classrooms and with one another, in a book entitled “Teacher Research & Urban Literacy: Conversations in a Feminist Key,” published in 1994.
I was lucky to be invited to join. At the start there were a few more participating. All of us had gone through the teaching credential program at UC Berkeley, and Sandra (Sam) Hollingsworth had been conducting research looking into how teachers learned their craft. She and her assistant, Karen Teel, brought us together for guided discussions to find out how we were teaching students to read. I was a science teacher, but I found it reassuring to have a place to share what was going on in my classroom, even if it was not very focused on my discipline. Over time the degree to which the group was “led” shrank, and we became colleagues.
Leslie Minarik taught second grade in Richmond – she retired two years ago. Mary Dybdahl taught and then became a principal in Vallejo, and now works part time coaching administrators. Sandra Hollingsworth has been an international literacy expert, and retired one year ago. Jennifer Smallwood taught elementary school in Berkeley, ran the farm and garden program there, and now works managing a farm camp in rural Sonoma County. Karen Teel taught middle school history in Richmond, and then became a professor of Education at Holy Names college in Oakland. Robyn Lock joined us about a dozen years ago as Sam’s partner, and was a professor of Physical Education – now retired.
This group helped shaped my understanding of what it meant to be a teacher. We actively reflected on our Me and My Pals: How We Learned to Teach - Living in Dialogue: