Page 17 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 1 Fall 2013

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Candice Dale, a longtime SPS humanities teacher, is a
mentor to second-year fellow Lina Feuerstein. Dale says
that, in the past, the SPS fellows were overworked and
assumed able to adjust to school life with little guidance.
“The intentional support in the classroom and training
outside have never been as explicit and thoughtful as
this,” she says of the PRMT.
Sam Crihfield is a Harvard graduate and a second-year
Penn Fellow. But what differentiates Crihfield from his
nine peers is the year he spent in 2011-12 as an SPS teach-
ing fellow before the formalization of the Penn Program.
Crihfield, who is mentored by humanities teacher George
Chase, says the biggest difference between his first year
and now as a fellow in the PRMT is the support of the
cohort. They commiserate with one another when good
lessons go bad, offer suggestions and feedback, and remind
one another that it’s not “sink or swim,” as Smith put it,
but they are all in the same boat.
“Some of the things we have learned from each other
have transformed the way I think about teaching,” Crih-
field says. “Some of what the St. Paul’s faculty as a whole
is talking about, we fellows got a jump-start on from
Penn – understanding by design, the idea of teaching
from central questions and planning assessments before
you plan units – teaching backwards, differentiated
instruction – how to vary my class and reach different
learners. The framework for planning a class has been
transformational. These are concepts I didn’t even consider
in my first year. It makes me a much better teacher.”
In an article read by the first-year Penn fellows called
“Pedagogy of Freedom,” author Paolo Freire asserts
“there is, in fact, no teaching without learning. One requires
the other…to teach is part of the very fabric of learning
. . . to teach is not to transfer knowledge, but to create
the possibilities for the production or construction of
knowledge.”
While the focus of the PRMT is fundamentally the devel-
opment of young teachers, Crihfield’s experience is proof
of what Hirschfeld and Smith hoped would evolve in
the process of their development. The fellows, students
themselves who are learning the latest on brain research
and varied teaching and learning styles, are sparking the
conversation from the roots – and they are reaching the
higher branches.
“I learned so much from Lina all year long,” says Dale.
“She would bring things to the classroom from Penn or
from what she had learned in college; she inspired me.
It’s always tricky to have someone else in your class-
room – it makes you so self-conscious. But it also makes
me think harder about what I am trying to achieve in
the classroom.”
Leslie Chamberlain has a Ph.D. in astrophysics from
the University of North Carolina. She is also a mentor to
second-year teaching fellow Ishiaka Mansaray. Cham-
berlain concurs with Dale that being a mentor has changed
her teaching for the better, noting that the need to explain
her methodology to Mansaray has allowed her to be more
reflective about her own practice. Mansaray, she says,
has also brought fresh ideas to the physics classroom,
including the idea for students to keep a journal of the
physics they encounter in their daily lives.
“Another cool thing about the program is that the
fellows are spending a lot of time learning – it’s intense
professional development – and Ishi is a filter for me,”
Chamberlain says. “[Last year] he’d read all this stuff
and pull out what was important to our class. He brought
articles to me that were relevant to what we were trying
to do in physics. These are things I wouldn’t otherwise
have time to do.”
It’s not only the mentors who have benefited from the
increased emphasis on teaching and learning spawned
by the Penn program. The School’s new strategic plan, A
JANA F. BROWN
First-year teaching fellow Lester Batiste gives a high five to mentor teacher Alisa Barnard ’94.