Chapter 3

Combining the Personal and

the Professional in Teaching
An example

LIZ : One of the things I’ve noticed that’s made me not so thrilled with
teaching is that I don’t really like my behavior.
BRAD : What do you mean?
LIZ : I’m doing the things I never thought I’d do.
BRAD : Like what?
LIZ : Just the way I react to kids, the things that piss me off. Getting kind
of, you know, snotty with kids. . . . When I get angry with a class it’s
because I’m trying to hold them to a particular tautness, and they
won’t—it won’t work. Because it’s my feeling that for kids to be on
task they need to be on task, need order. They need to be focused. And
it’s my job to keep them focused. When I can’t keep a class focused,
or when those kids refuse, I can pull, and I can pull in as hard as I
want, but I’m going to break the string before they get it. Before they
straighten up. And so I had to make a decision: Am I going to keep
pulling and kicking kids out and having, you know, what could be
mutiny—and what’s been mutiny? Or do I try and relax a little bit
and hope for as much as I can get?
—Liz, a first-year California high school English teacher

I have argued that it is paramount for every teacher to reflect on his or

her own teacher identity, and I have offered a theoretical justification for
adopting a teacher-identity framework. In this chapter I will demonstrate
what teacher identity actually looks like and, in doing so, narrate some
of the early struggles associated with becoming a teacher. More specifi-
cally, I will use the concept of teacher identity to illuminate how hard
it can be for a new teacher to reconcile his or her prior and personal
experiences with the more professional, technical aspects of teacher edu-
cation. Acknowledging all the influences on one’s teacher learning often
38 The Personal and the Professional

requires the teacher to confront multiple personal and professional con-

flicts. And, although these conflicts over time give the teacher newer and
richer views of himself or herself as a teacher, while he or she is in the pro-
cess of recognizing and working through them they can cause frustration
and anguish. Such is the challenge of early-career teacher development.
Even the most amazing veteran teachers had to go through it in order to
become amazing.
In the late 1990s I spent two years observing, talking with, and learning
from Liz as she became a high school English teacher in California. Our
first year together was during her teacher-education program in a large
public university’s one-year graduate program; our second year together
was her first year as an English teacher working at the same California
school in which she student-taught the year before. Like any teacher—
like any person—Liz herself was a complex bundle of influences, beliefs,
values, features, and perceptions. This bundle of pieces, what we might
call a “self,” appeared on the surface to be categorizable: Liz, a white
woman from a middle-class background in New York City, was in her
late twenties, college-educated, confident, idealistic, able to crack a joke,
naturally self-deprecating, the daughter of two teachers, and someone
who loved rock music. Educational researchers might cast her as the typi-
cal teacher candidate (Calderhead 1988; Wideen et al. 1998). Yet, as I
came to know Liz—analyzing her ways of teaching, thinking, talking,
and acting—I found that she was, of course, unique, clearly possessing
her own distinctive teacher identity.
Some of you may readily identify with details of Liz’s story, and even
those of you who do not should benefit from the chance to hear that
story. You will better understand the concept of teacher identity by way
of a grounded example. Either way, by illuminating teacher identity as a
concrete, visible process, I will use this chapter to set up the second half
of the book: once you understand what teacher identity looks like, then
you’re ready to attend to your own teacher identity.
Liz’s beginning teacher development was largely a story of Liz fashion-
ing a professional teaching identity out of a mix of the facts of her per-
sonal history, what she was learning in her teacher-education program,
and what she experienced during her first two years in the classroom. As
Liz tried to assemble a useful bundle of understandings about teaching
and learning, she was weaving together myriad influences into something
she considered coherent: something that she believed worked for her. Liz
was constructing her teacher identity (although I don’t think she realized
it at the time, and she wouldn’t have used that terminology). She had to
 The Personal and the Professional 39

reconcile competing beliefs about what a teacher is; she had to address
the power that her own biography had over her; she had to integrate her
university’s ideas about education with other teaching influences from
her life; and she had to figure out how to learn from her students at the
same time she was teaching them. It was hard work and often emotionally
taxing, but she felt driven to succeed.
One important lesson from Liz’s experience is a painful one: she was
offered very little professional support in recognizing and navigating her
teacher-identity conflicts. Neither her education program nor her mentors
pointed out how interrelated, deep, and emotionally taxing the process of
becoming a teacher can be. No one talked to her about teacher learning in
terms of identity changes. No one helped her understand that becoming
a teacher is full of contradictions, that conflicts are resolved slowly, that
a person’s teacher identity changes and grows over time—in short, that
she needn’t always be so hard on herself. It’s a difficult process, but, over
time, it gives way to insight, wisdom, and a successful, newly developed
professional identity.
The value of framing Liz’s professional development in terms of
teacher identity is that it acknowledges and celebrates her uniqueness;
Liz brings characteristics, experiences, and talents together in a way
that no one else does. But a teacher-identity frame also highlights the
commonalities inherent in becoming a teacher. Liz may be unique, but
the contours of her beginning teacher development are shared by many
early-career teachers. Yes, the details may be specific to Liz, but the
larger patterns, complexities, and contradictions are probably com-
mon to many. I suspect that learning about Liz’s experience will allow
you to reflect on parts of your own experience of becoming a teacher.
Her story teaches us that the initial tensions and emotional conflicts of
teaching are common (you’re not alone!); that growth happens . . . but
incrementally (be patient!); and that the more a teacher examines his
or her identity processes, the more successful he or she will become (be
self-reflective!). Liz learned through her experience; I share this narra-
tive with you so that you may learn something about yourself as you
embark on a similar journey.

Liz’s Tug-of-War between Student-Centered

and Teacher-Centered Models of Teaching
As I studied Liz for two years while she was learning to teach, it
became clear to me that her process of development was largely about
40 The Personal and the Professional

constructing a teacher identity by experimenting with several models

of teaching:

• The teacher-as-cool-friend model of her own “hippest, jeans-wearing

English teacher” in tenth grade, on whom she “had a crush.”
• The teacher-as-expert model of her English-teacher father, who “believed
in kids sitting in rows facing the teacher” and was “flabbergasted” that
Liz’s credentialing program employed group learning: “But why are you
paying tuition to listen to the kid next to you? He doesn’t know any
more than you do. It’s the professor you’re paying for.”
• The student-centered/cooperative learning teacher model her creden-
tialing program espoused—“It’s the emerging paradigm,” one of her
professors told me, but Liz wasn’t so sure.
• The teacher-as-technician model that her favorite teacher-education
professor embodied and advocated: “Her stuff is so concrete and use-
ful,” Liz said to me.
• The teacher-as-agent-of-social-change model that Liz’s family instilled
in her: “[Teaching] was this noble thing to do in our family,” she
reported.

So, while Liz was struggling with the day-to-day challenges of being a
new teacher, she was also constantly managing which of these five teacher
types she felt she should be for herself, for her students, and for others.
Her sometimes conscious, sometimes automatic manipulation of these
models of teaching made use of the literally dozens of strands of influ-
ence on her teacher-identity development. Liz was organizing, evaluating,
adjusting, and fitting together knowledge from diverse sources—personal
and professional, past and current—into a body of understandings of
what it meant for her to be a teacher.
In order to illustrate this process, I present one central issue that charac-
terized Liz’s development: her ongoing struggle with the competing mod-
els of teaching as student-centered or as teacher-centered. This involves
a century-long debate between constructivism and didactic instruction
(see Textbox 3.1), and it figured prominently in Liz’s teacher-identity
development.

Phase One: Liz Enters Her Credentialing Program

I had an argument this weekend with my father, who’s been an English
teacher for thirty-five years. He asked what kinds of things I’m learn-
ing [in my university program]. I explained that the teaching mod-
els we’re learning are very different from the way he teaches. I told
 The Personal and the Professional 41

him that we’re learning to privilege the student over the teacher, that
teaching now is child-centered. This elicited pretty much the response I
expected from him: “You’ll learn that none of that works. Group work
is nice in the textbook but it’s impossible in the classroom.” You see,
my father believes in kids sitting in rows or perhaps in a horseshoe; in
either form they face the teacher. My father believes that the teacher
has the information. That’s why he’s the teacher. Groups may make
kids less shy, more expressive, but inevitably they collapse into social
discussions. What’s worse, he says, they don’t prepare kids for what
they’ll see in college.
—Liz

By the end of the first month of her teacher-preparation program, Liz

had decided that student-centered teaching and teacher-centered teach-
ing existed at opposite poles of a continuum, and that to lean in one
direction necessarily sacrificed the other. She framed it as a tug-of-war
between the two sides. Much of her prior understanding of teaching had
come from her father, and when she spoke of her father’s teaching, she
often employed the language of the teacher-as-expert model: a concep-
tion that Liz set in direct opposition to the student-centered model she
believed represented her university program’s ideal. She found it difficult
to reconcile for herself these two views of teaching.

Textbox 3.1 The Student-Centered versus Teacher-

Centered Continuum
For more than a century, the tension between these two paradigms
has endured. Indeed, it has factored into almost every debate in
education for succeeding generations, including the debate over the
value of lecturing versus group work, the discussion about phonics
versus the whole-language approach to reading, and work on the
relative merits of computer-aided instruction, among other issues.
On the student-centered side, developmentalists, humanists,
and constructivists emphasize the student as the center of the cur-
riculum and argue that a teacher should discover each individual
child’s own “urgent impulses and habits,” and then, by supplying
the proper environment and encouragement, direct students “in a
fruitful and orderly way” toward self-discovery (Kliebard 1995).
The motivation for learning, it is argued, will take care of itself.
On the teacher-centered—or traditional or didactic—side of the
debate, social-efficiency theorists and direct-instruction advocates
believe that any group of students should be taught mostly in the
42 The Personal and the Professional

same way and to the same extent (anything less is inequitable); they
place emphasis on the teacher delivering standardized information
to students (often in lectures) and leading them in drills to reinforce
internalization of that information (Kliebard 1995).
Of course, in practice the debate is rarely as polarized or simple
as this summary pretends. Most educators conceive of this ten-
sion as a broad space in which effective practice lies somewhere in
between the extremes, and caveats and contradictions abound. But
Liz didn’t know this, and—as we’ll soon see—her teacher-education
program did not help her to make sense of it.

Her father had just retired after teaching English for thirty-five years
in several New York public and private high schools. Liz told me that her
dad had always loved teaching and considered himself to be good at it;
he was known and respected in the field and had published a grammar
book. Discussing her father as a teacher, she tended to use terms reflecting
a cluster of teaching models: the traditional teacher, the teacher as expert,
the teacher who succeeds primarily with academically motivated students
(and disappoints the remainder), and the satisfied professional at the end
of a successful career. Liz told me:

And you know, thinking about it now, or recently as I have, you

know, my dad was a good teacher. And he seemed always to have
been a good teacher. . . . He stuck to the text . . . students were able
to understand [and] enjoy things that they read. I think he was very
good in discussion, kind of doing that switchback with students like,
“What did you mean by . . .?” And making good insights on the fly,
which is something I hope to get better at. I think the thing is, that
he enjoyed it. You know, I think when you’re good at something it’s
fun to do. He liked it.

Here, Liz was conceiving of effective English teaching as (a) adhering

closely to the text, (b) having students enjoy what they read, (c) fashioning
discussions that draw on student comments, (d) making good insights on
the fly, and—most interesting—(e) finding fun in it, because, “when you’re
good at something it’s fun to do.” These are powerful teaching attributes,
and ones that Liz held with her throughout our two years together and
frequently demonstrated in her teaching. They were therefore not only
descriptions of her father’s practice but also influences on her own.
 The Personal and the Professional 43

Liz’s university credentialing program, however, advocated a very dif-

ferent model. It put forward a student-centered approach to teaching
that emphasized cooperative learning, students constructing their own
meanings of the material, and a rejection of both lecturing and the belief
that listening is learning. Given the influence of her father and her own
largely traditional schooling experiences, Liz was initially skeptical of
these cooperative learning and process approaches, even though her pro-
fessors favored them:

I don’t know if the group work thing is good. . . . I don’t think it’s the
best way to teach. I like to feel that the person in charge is an expert
in her subject. It’s kind and empowering of the expert to say, “Well,
what do you think?” That makes me feel strong and intelligent, and
yet, I’d rather have the benefit of her expertise on the subject.

Notice that she is ventriloquizing her dad’s view as her own here. Liz was
concerned that, in its desire to push student-centered teaching, her pro-
gram’s approach failed to recognize any value whatsoever in traditional
methods of teaching.
Additionally, like many new teachers, Liz was implicitly favoring
concrete approaches over abstract perspectives. Though both models—
student-centered and teaching-centered—offered specific instructional
methods, the fact that her program wrapped its teaching methods
around theoretical perspectives and academic articles might have
made them seem less palatable than the “this-is-what-works” imme-
diacy that commonly marks the way practicing teachers talk, and that
characterized her father’s remarks about teaching. At least she knew
her father’s approach had worked for him. Her program was still, to
her, just Theory.
Yet, when Liz began talking about the particulars of her father’s cur-
ricular and pedagogical approaches, she acknowledged that his didactic,
teacher-centered methods were not wholly sufficient either. She under-
stood that her program’s approach—being newer, ostensibly better
researched, focused on the learner instead of the teacher, and legitimized
by virtue of its university status—should be taken seriously. She knew
that it would take time for her to figure it out and really learn to do it
well, but that didn’t make it any easier as she went to school each day.
And she felt anxious that her program was expecting such a sudden, total
identity shift. In the pressurized flow of her teacher learning, it was easier
to rely on what she knew—even if it contradicted her professors—than
to take on an unfamiliar view of teaching and learning.
44 The Personal and the Professional

The tug-of-war continued, and a month or two into her program, Liz
wanted to decrease the level of anxiety she was feeling. She believed the
situation required an either/or decision: that adopting one meant rejecting
the other. She was “trying on” both her dad’s methods and her program’s
philosophies to decide which one felt more reasonable. She felt that she
was being pulled in two directions, and that neither side acknowledged
any validity to the other. She interpreted her program’s preferred peda-
gogy as mostly having students work in groups, share their own under-
standings with each other in discussions, and make use of a teacher who,
in her words, “facilitates” and “scoots [students] around so they hit the
right places.” However, because of her dad she strongly believed that the
teacher—as the disciplinary expert—had an obligation to deliver content
to students, who would learn from the teacher’s knowledge. She viewed
acceptance of the student-centered model as a rejection of the teacher-as-
expert model and therefore as a rejection of her father-as-model.
Further complicating Liz’s dilemma were the personal feelings she
had come to have about two of her three primary university instructors.
Liz did not much care for either her seminar leader or her curriculum
and instruction professor, and her personal, emotional reactions to these
instructors affected her view of the professional ideas they advocated.
I’ve found that such a situation is typical, and it highlights the inter-
connected roles of emotions and interpersonal relationships in teacher
learning. For example, during a first-semester curriculum and instruction
class meeting, Liz felt personally attacked by the instructor for defending
a traditional, lecture-based teacher whom the group had read about the
previous week. Liz had raised her hand and announced that she did not
think all lecturing was bad, that there was value in some of the teach-
ing methods typically ascribed to “traditional” teachers, and that this
teacher was getting an unfair rap in the class. The professor became vis-
ibly annoyed and publicly disagreed with Liz. After class, in the hallway,
Liz said to me, “She scowled at me. Did you see that? I’ll never bring up
that again. I sure wouldn’t want to offend her,” and at this Liz rolled her
eyes in sarcasm and frustration. Liz spoke negatively of this professor for
the rest of the year and disengaged from her course.
I can sympathize with Liz’s struggles. As she was becoming a teacher,
she was being required to choose among competing models of teaching—
and attached to those models were real people, real emotions, and deeply
personal memories of her own experiences in classrooms. Those on each
side of the debate were unforgiving of the opposing side; no one was
talking with Liz about the contradictions and emotional difficulties asso-
ciated with the kind of identity work that was occurring. Liz would have
 The Personal and the Professional 45

benefited from honest, straightforward conversations about the iden-

tity conflicts, emotional roller-coaster rides, and myriad contradictions
involved in authentically and deeply “becoming a teacher.”

Phase Two: Liz Digs Deeper into the Tension

By the end of her first semester in her preparation program, Liz had begun
teasing out the complexities of why she was simultaneously drawn to
and skeptical of each of the two teaching approaches. She had begun
considering the tug-of-war in more nuanced ways. She was also feeling
pressure to make up her mind somehow; she was only weeks away from
her student-teaching practicum. It was fast becoming very real.
She was reluctant to abandon the notion of teacher as expert, believing
that to do so would mean that only the students were experts; she felt
this meant that students would simply share their own half-baked opin-
ions, and that didn’t seem right to her. She agreed with her father that
group work was a cumbersome, inefficient approach that often devolved
into students chatting. Yet, she began for the first time to acknowledge
problems inherent in his traditional approach and started to see some
of the logic of her program’s student-centered view. Liz was beginning
to reject parts of each, accept other parts, and think more deeply about
the kind of teacher she hoped to be. In fact, she had effected a significant
shift: instead of seeing the two approaches as mutually exclusive, she was
beginning to consider how to assemble a hybrid of both.
Though I’m oversimplifying it here, multiple strands of her personal
history were being invoked, reassessed, and employed as active influ-
ences in what was an ongoing construction of her teacher identity. Spe-
cifically, the process was being deepened by reflecting on the opinions of
her girlfriend, memories of her own school experiences and, in particular,
a favorite tenth-grade teacher, and her political and moral reasons for
teaching. These influences deepened Liz’s teacher-identity development
because recognition of them pushed her to reevaluate her father’s teach-
ing and clarify her own interpretation of her program’s model—and they
provided additional teaching models to consider. The process wasn’t easy,
but she was clearly making progress. For her, a large part of the challenge
was being honest with herself about her father as a teaching influence:

LIZ : It’s interesting finding out now and taking classes now and seeing the
new age of teaching and comparing it to the way my dad has taught
for the last thirty-five years and getting real disillusioned with my
dad as a teacher.
46 The Personal and the Professional

BRAD : Why?
LIZ: I’ve seen his lesson plans. I’ve seen the essays and grades, and I know
what he looks for. And it’s like a reality check. In some ways I’m
finding out my dad wasn’t the greatest teacher. What my dad is really
good at is teaching the smart classes. I think the kids who really need
it fall to the back of the room, and that’s a way that my dad is not a
great teacher. My brother who’s in his early thirties now has friends
who are his own age who were my dad’s students. One is bright [and
liked my dad as a teacher]. And another is like, “Oh, your dad’s Mr.
Mason? He made me feel like I was nothing.” She became an expert
in repairing airplanes and writes manuals on how to repair airplanes.
But my dad made her feel like she couldn’t do anything. I want to
teach for people like her too.

Liz’s girlfriend was encouraging her to think about who loses in a teacher-
as-didactic-expert approach like her father’s:

I talk to my girlfriend a bit about it. Partly because I know how much
she hated school as a kid. For her school was a big problem, and it’s
important for me to hear that. My girlfriend has taught me: “Okay,
when that kid comes in late after lunch every day and passes notes,
don’t yell at her. She might be struggling.” I know how much [my
girlfriend’s] insecurities about her language abilities and grammar
and her ability to be articulate were just like a cloud over her. I don’t
know what happened, but for some reason that wasn’t good. So, I
definitely have that in mind now, to keep an eye on that. Understand-
ing that has really made me less of an elitist, to see that and to respect
someone who’s like that. And I think I’ll bring that into the classroom
in a way that I don’t think I would have a few months ago.

From her girlfriend, Liz gained a professional understanding that, as the

teacher, she must never make a student insecure over his or her language
difficulties. What Liz describes as a “cloud over her” is what linguist Ste-
phen Krashen (1987) would call the affective filter, but no matter the
terminology, Liz believed that to engage in this kind of emotional bullying
constituted teacher “elitism.” Stephen Krashen’s affective filter is a barrier
that prevents people from learning because they are tense, angry, or other-
wise emotionally uncomfortable in the classroom. Liz was realizing that
a student’s levels of anxiety and self-esteem are related to motivation and
therefore affect learning. This was a powerful lesson that emerged from
 The Personal and the Professional 47

integrating her girlfriend’s advice with her own deepening views of her
father’s teaching and a reevaluation of her program’s teaching philosophy.
Liz also reconsidered her own secondary school experiences:

In my own experiences in high school, group work—the kind of col-

laborative learning or student-centered thing—was never big. It was
more about sitting in your chair facing the teacher for fifty minutes
until the bell rang. Either you wrote or you read, or the teacher told
you stuff that you were supposed to write down. But that’s not what
school is anymore. And in part I’m glad it’s not that anymore, but it
makes it much more difficult on the teacher.

Academically, Liz had done relatively well in junior high and high school
English. She mostly attributed this success to her English-teacher parents:

I was a lazy student. My parents were English teachers, so somehow

I got by on just having a well-trained ear. I knew, for the most part,
what sounded right. I was in the smart class all through junior high
school. . . . I cheated a bit. I discovered that if I asked my parents general
questions about [Shakespeare plays, for example], I’d leave the dinner
table with specific answers, interpretations, and insights. All I had to do
was remember them long enough to repeat them in class the next day.

Although Liz got by academically, however, she was neither learning nor
happy:

I never felt I was taught vocabulary in any meaningful way in high

school. . . . I think that if I had had fun and satisfying experiences
with vocabulary words in high school, I might have had more facility
and comfort with speaking, reading, and writing than I had during
and after high school.

Five times (twice in conversation with me, three times in writing assign-
ments for her program) she recounted a story of hating school, of feeling
that she did not fit in and that her ideas were not being validated, until
she came across her tenth-grade English teacher. Liz remembers feeling
disenfranchised by the school community that she was a part of: it (and
the traditional teaching that characterized it) made her feel unwanted
and unfulfilled. Liz credits one particular teacher with turning things
around for her: it was her own high school teacher who evidently opened
up the world of academics for her.
48 The Personal and the Professional

As I talked with Liz, I learned that Liz’s own English teacher was
becoming her professional role model. This influence arose as Liz began
to reflect deeply on her own experiences in high school English:

I never completed a book until I was a sophomore in high school.

Finally, I had an English teacher who was fun and funny. For her, I
wanted to read. Thinking back, I probably just had a crush on her
and wanted to prove my intellectual worth. But at least I read. For the
first time, reading didn’t feel like a chore. I had insights of my own to
share in class. From that year on, I was a reader. I became an Honors
English student. I read novels for school and for fun.

A week later, as we were talking about why she wanted to be a teacher,

she returned to this time in her past. After first referencing her dad, she
began to talk again about her own high school experiences:

I didn’t like school when I was a kid. And that’s unfortunate. . . . But
during my sophomore year I had this teacher who was the hippest,
jeans-wearing English teacher. She was tough and funny and inspired
insight and expression in everyone that I didn’t feel I got from other
teachers.
BRAD : What did she do that made the environment such that this
occurred?
LIZ : She was funny . . . and it was a lot about the thing a teacher does
when they’re waiting to say the thing they’re thinking: “Okay.
Good. And let’s see if somebody else can come up with the right
answer. Good, Jimmy.” . . . She may have had a right answer in
her head, but she wasn’t overbearing about it. . . . She made me
feel smart by letting us come up with the answers.

Liz clearly considered having this teacher to be a pivotal point not only
in her own schooling trajectory but also in her decision to teach. This
teaching model—teacher as a hip, jeans-wearing, fun person who makes
students feel that their contributions are valued—emerged from Liz’s
personal history with school. In addition, it appears that, as in the situa-
tion where the animosity she felt toward two of her university professors
had such an impact, Liz’s personal feelings for a teacher had become
inextricably entangled with the professional model the teacher repre-
sented, but this time it was the mirror image of her relationship with the
teacher-education instructors. (And it might not be coincidental that Liz
 The Personal and the Professional 49

often wore denim pants when teaching, even though her seminar leader
strongly discouraged it.)
The link between her positive feelings for the teacher, on the one hand,
and her motivation to work hard in that class, on the other, shaped Liz’s
subsequent conception of an ideal teacher. Liz believed for herself that
a teacher who is liked by students has an additional motivational tool
at her disposal. In a later interview, I asked Liz what qualities she felt a
successful English teacher needed to possess, and she began describing,
almost verbatim, qualities she had used months earlier to describe her
tenth-grade teacher. Eventually, I asked, “So, is it fair to say you want to
be your own tenth-grade English teacher?” She laughed and agreed. And,
finally, memories of this experience offered Liz a ready-made model of
successful teacher as hip friend who attends to students’ needs to have
their ideas validated in class—a counterbalance, in some ways, to what
she found lacking in her father.
Another influence on Liz’s professional identity emerged when she
returned to her reasons for entering teaching, more specifically to her
belief that teaching is a political act:

Why do I want to teach? I saw that there was a need. People were not
getting educated in high school. So the population that I’ve become
interested in is the at-risk, whatever that means. The kids who need to
know how to write a cover letter or a resume. The people who are not
taken seriously in society because they can’t communicate seriously
using academic English. . . . [W]hile we’re so concerned with social
inequality and economic reality and crime and all the complaints in
our country, it seems ironic to deny these populations the best educa-
tion they can have. That’s when it occurred to me that teaching might
be a good direction to go in.

Liz’s moral/political concerns for students in a democratic society and

her reasons for entering teaching acted as a significant influence on her
teaching. In fact, one’s reasons for entering the profession have a lot to
do with the kind of teacher one becomes (Olsen 2008). In Liz’s case,
reflecting on her political reasons for teaching deepened her views about
the teacher-centered versus student-centered tug-of-war she was expe-
riencing. As she recognized who got left out of her father’s approach to
the student population she hoped to serve, she concluded that her dad’s
model might not be the best one for her purposes. Liz intended to teach
a different student population, a student population with more diversity
and more learning challenges, and one that reflected the changing world
50 The Personal and the Professional

around her. Her dad’s teaching might be primarily a professional or

academic endeavor (in her opinion), but she considered hers a political
act, too.
However, employing the model of the teacher as an agent of social
change didn’t offer Liz a way out of the student-centered versus teacher-
centered conflict; it only deepened the existing dilemma. She felt that
student-centered teaching—while admirably focusing on students’ com-
fort levels, their own construction of learning, and the power of stu-
dents learning from each other—was neither rigorous nor content-based
enough to truly give non-culture-of-power students the education they
needed for societal success. Viewing teaching through a social justice lens,
she admired the traditional model’s strict insistence on students learn-
ing academic skills and on students having access to an expert’s content
knowledge. She saw a political importance to ensuring that historically
underserved students learn those skills and content that she believed
would allow them inside the arena of middle-class success. In several
interview passages, she acknowledged that standard English might be a
culturally loaded language, but its mastery was necessary:

[Standard English] is not value-free. I mean, maybe it’s elitist in its

construction or who gets to create it and who gets to decide what is
and is not acceptable. Fine. It is. But that’s not the issue I need to deal
with now. The issue I need to deal with is how I can give students the
most power. And power comes from them knowing the language of
those who hold the power.

She felt strongly that historically underserved students needed access to

the rules and codes of the English language if they were going to succeed
in the United States. It concerned her that the student-centered model
that her credentialing program advocated seemed to lower expectations
in order to make students comfortable:

We’re waiting for kids to feel comfortable with learning, and in the
meantime they don’t know the difference between a subject and a
verb and can’t construct a sentence, which means they can’t commu-
nicate outside the classroom. I think it’s very important for kids to
understand that proper English is the standard code and is valuable.

Yet, she simultaneously feared that traditional, didactic teaching, in its rigid-
ity and its emphasis on product (not process) and transferable knowledge
(not student understandings), precluded many students, especially those she
 The Personal and the Professional 51

expected to teach, from feeling comfortable with learning. Like her girl-
friend, who was made to feel insecure about the things she didn’t know, Liz
appreciated student-centered teaching for accepting that a student’s emo-
tional comfort correlates to learning. She was also warming up to the idea of
students constructing their own knowledge. Liz wanted to adopt a version
of the student-centered model of teaching, but she didn’t believe that her
credentialing program was offering her the right way to do it. She also was
unwilling to drop all of the more traditional, teacher-as-disciplinary-expert
model that her father represented. With this struggle, this set of conflict-
ing teacher models, this in-flux professional identity, Liz began her student
teaching. Grappling with these contradictions would be worked into the
process of her imminent classroom experience on a daily basis.

Phase Three: Liz Teaches

Liz conducted her student-teaching practicum from January until June at a
midsized, mostly urban, public high school in California. In June, she was
offered a full-time position for the next year, which she accepted. Liz’s year
and a half of teaching experience generated a new—and very immediate—
source of professional knowledge that furthered her teacher-identity devel-
opment. Once a beginning teacher enters the classroom, previous ideals
and notions of teaching suddenly change, blend, and shift during the daily
process of working directly with students in the school setting. But answers
to previous dilemmas aren’t necessarily found that quickly.
Liz found that teaching was more difficult than she had expected,
and her views of students changed, too. She felt frustrated that students
respected neither the classroom norms she set nor the lessons she put
forward; in fact, she felt that they took advantage of her student-centered
attention to them. Liz had first believed strongly in individual student
agency, telling me halfway through the first semester of her credentialing
program that “the responsibility to perform always falls directly on the
student,” but now she began to soften this view. By the end of January, she
said, “The motivating factor for a student’s ability or inability to perform
may certainly fall outside his control. I’m taking into consideration where
he’s coming from, but certainly he’s the one that has to perform.” Soon Liz
began positing more and more external factors affecting student success,
and she began to consider that their experiences in immigrant families
made a fundamental difference:

I know that for me, you know, my parents made sure I was in line,
that I did the work I needed to do. They’d find out if I wasn’t doing
52 The Personal and the Professional

my homework. I’d get yelled at. I don’t know that that’s the kind
of guidance that all these kids are getting when 60 percent of that
school is an immigrant population. I certainly think that poor immi-
grant families have a lot more on their minds to deal with, with their
families, than sitting over their kids’ shoulders to make sure they’re
doing their homework.

Notice how Liz still viewed teaching and her students through her own
personal experience, but now she was beginning to differentiate between
her family and their families and the kinds of experiences they would
have had that were different.
As she became familiar with her students, she came to believe that
because their backgrounds were different from her own, she had to find
new ways to connect with them. She couldn’t be the teacher who would
have connected best with herself when she was their age. Her students
weren’t multiple copies of herself; she began to realize that she would
have to become the teacher they needed her to be, not the teacher she had
always thought she would be. It was an important step in her identity
development for her to realize that their needs would have to dictate what
kind of teacher she would be.
She found the quality of students’ skills—their writing, speaking, home-
work, and intellectual analysis—surprisingly low. To explain this vast
distance between their skills and her expectations, she first looked to
the students themselves and blamed them for their failings: they weren’t
working hard enough; they were unwilling to accept that schooling is
important for their own success. But soon she began to locate the blame
in society instead. She placed some responsibility on the students and
their parents, but gently and only indirectly, because she viewed the fami-
lies and children as being shaped by larger forces of social discrimination
and economic disadvantage. The low skills and motivation of the students
were not their fault, she reasoned, and not her fault, but rather the fault
of the system.
Observing her teach, I saw many places where her particular view of stu-
dent efficacy—a fragile mix of student agency and student powerlessness—
emerged in the classroom. It seemed that she made adjustments to her
teaching to lower her own emotional fatigue of expecting too much from
herself and from them. She now allowed students to choose not to read
aloud if they wished (they could say “pass”); at the end of silent, sustained
reading, she no longer asked students to describe their books to the class.
One day I asked her if she knew that during silent, sustained reading, the
 The Personal and the Professional 53

boy next to me simply looked at the back cover of an atlas for twenty
minutes:

Yeah, I don’t care. . . . It doesn’t really matter to me what they’re read-

ing as long as there’s something that they’re looking at. [One student]
has been looking at a legal writing book for, like, two weeks. She says
she wants to be a lawyer. You know, I don’t know if she understands
it or not. Probably not. But there’s something she’s drawn to in it. So
I’m fine with that.

Some days she treated students as if they had significant agency over their
actions and learning. She would tell them that the onus of succeeding in
school, and in life, fell on each of them. Other days she would attribute
student failure to a lack of support from family, from the school cul-
ture, from society—conceiving of students as products of larger forces.
Interestingly, though, she always attributed their successes solely to
themselves. (“He’s just so smart.” “She works hard.” “Because he’s more
mature than the others.”) It appears that her compassion for her students
created an inherent reluctance to blame them for failure yet an instant
willingness to credit them for success—perhaps a logical incongruence
that served as an optimistic, child-centered equilibrium. Trying to make
sense of her own teacher development, she had built a fragile, temporary
mix of individual agency and structural determinism—a teacher-identity
balance that allowed her to believe she was making a difference in the
face of difficult circumstances.

Phase Four: Liz Finishes Her Second Year

Near the end of her first year of full-time teaching, our second year
together, I observed Liz for two consecutive days, and then we talked
in her classroom for two tape-recorded hours. This snapshot (in a scene
that is, of course, forever in progress) of her teacher development revealed
that in some ways Liz’s initial views about teaching had changed, and in
other ways they had not. Both aspects seemed to cause her some anguish
and highlight for us now that the development of one’s teacher identity
never ends.
Her ideas about her father’s teaching model had developed but had not
dramatically changed. Liz concluded that her dad was a good teacher, but
with two important provisos that allowed her to retain pieces of his model
while simultaneously rejecting its philosophical core. First, she decided
54 The Personal and the Professional

that he was an effective teacher only for “higher-end,” older students—

those juniors and seniors who worked hard, succeeded often, and could
learn from a teacher who primarily talked about literature and writing
and challenged students to think hard and write well. (“[His students were
okay with] this kind of very traditional, old-school kind of setting . . . fifty-
minute periods and discussion then reading then lecture. You know, your
basic stuff. . . . [But] I couldn’t pull it off.”) She concluded that these stu-
dents could more or less teach themselves; they needed her father primar-
ily as someone who would provide interesting insights and an intellectual
environment. This type of student still existed, of course, but she was more
interested in the many others who would never thrive under this model.
Yet, she also believed that there were components of her dad’s traditional
model that she could employ. Instead of experiencing a tug-of-war between
her dad’s approach and her program’s philosophy, she now embraced a
hybridization of teacher-centered and student-centered instructional
approaches. She began to believe that she did not have to replace pro-
gressivist approaches with her father’s traditional methods (or vice versa);
instead, she could supplement the progressivist approaches with elements
from her dad’s model. Thus, she would stand at the front of the room and
offer expert interpretations of the text, yet also implement student-centered
activities and remain sensitive to student attitudes and interpretations.
I observed as Liz taught a ninth-grade lesson on the beginning scenes
of Romeo and Juliet that attempted just this kind of blend. She created
a lecturing structure that employed the external framework of a teacher
monologue—teacher informs students of textual meanings, connections,
and contexts—while inside it facilitating a back-and-forth, student-centered
conversation where she asked questions, listened to responses, and tried to
weave student comments into her own comments. She took this dialogue-
within-a-monologue where she wanted it to go, but attempted to use student
answers and comments to arrive there. This student conversation wrapped
inside a teacher lecture emerged as the linguistic structure Liz favored.
Second, she finally accepted that her father’s model succeeded in large
part because he had had decades of practice: “I now think it may have
been easier [for him], or looked easier, because he had been doing it for so
long before I showed up.” Entering teaching, Liz had initially believed she
would immediately be ready to be a perfect teacher; she had conceived of
teaching—owing to her many, often personal sources of knowledge—as
merely knowing one’s subject, being thoughtful, being personable, and
respecting all students. This entering disposition led her to believe that she
would teach well right out of the gate. However, she found the situation
to be otherwise and had to reconceive her ideas about teaching. Now, for
her, effective teaching required a deep intuition about students and proper
 The Personal and the Professional 55

pacing, an ability to explain concepts clearly and “make good insights on

the fly,” a patience that results from confidence, and a firmer hand with
discipline. Interestingly, though, she believed these characteristics came
from experience—not further or better training. She still believed her pro-
gram had not taught her much that was useful.
In addition, Liz had initially believed that an effective teacher must be
expert in his or her subject (a belief deriving from her father’s model):
“Sometimes I feel like a bit of a fraud. I mean I graduated with an English
degree . . . but the list of books I have completed is unbelievably short. I
feel like a phony—that I’ll be found out one of these days.” Yet, by the end
of her first year, she had changed that view, now concluding that subject
expertise emerges with experience and that she shouldn’t feel bad for not
yet knowing her subject well. During her second year, she told me that
“being competent” is enough, and she acknowledged that because of time
constraints she sometimes merely skimmed through the reading assign-
ment the night before. She concluded that she would learn by reflecting
on and improving her own classroom practice, not by adhering more
closely to the knowledge and practices that her program had stressed.
By the end of our two years together, Liz had built a tentative, begin-
ning teacher identity in which neither side (the traditional models from
her past or the progressivist ones from her program) felt fully comfort-
able to her. And she found that her hybrid of the two models didn’t work,
either. Since her program appeared not to acknowledge or support her
through this personal-professional angst in her teacher-identity process,
she often felt alone and confused as a teacher. Over time, Liz would find
her professional footing. And yet, if she had been offered an explicit,
supportive, honest view of these competing, sometimes contradictory fac-
ets of her teacher-identity development, she would have experienced less
anxiety and less confusion and could have more easily constructed teach-
ing approaches that worked for her and her students. Instead, she was left
to carry out these tasks mostly by herself.
Finally, her initial reasons for entry into the profession now appeared
distant, and this saddened her:

The reasons I went into teaching were much more immediate last
year than I think they are now.

BRAD : What were those reasons?

LIZ : Empowerment—empowering students. What good teaching
meant to me as a kid, the change or the effect it had on me.
What I enjoyed, the bits of school I enjoyed and my wanting to
offer that to others. Social change—social change is a big, big
56 The Personal and the Professional

part of that. And I don’t really feel any of that now. I’m not feel-
ing much joy about teaching. I don’t get up in the morning and
say, “Gosh, I love my job.” I generally get up Monday and say,
“Damn,” or, “Okay, I get to come back [home] in x number of
hours,” or, “Only five more days until the weekend.” It’s awful,
just an awful feeling. It’s not what I wanted to feel about it. It’s
not what I wanted this to be. Last year it was something I wanted
to do. This year, it’s not.

As we concluded this final interview, Liz said she looked forward to sum-
mer. She hoped to sleep, reconnect with her friends, sleep more, and play
music. She told me she was definitely going to teach next year and made
no mention of considering an exit from the profession. She simply wanted
to rest and not think about classrooms for a while.

Conclusion
As a teacher educator and education researcher, I find Liz’s experience
both troubling and understandable. Her program had more or less
treated her as a blank slate—as an empty space ready to be filled with
teaching ideas and approaches that would be unproblematically internal-
ized. It neglected to acknowledge that her professional learning was in
fact a complex, often emotional identity process that required excavating
personal memories and role models and figuring out how to reconcile
the new and often competing ideas about teaching with prior ones. Left
unsupported in this endeavor, Liz was inclined to dismiss most of the
newer information or to attempt to fit the familiar teaching models from
her father and her own schooling into her developing professional iden-
tity. Such a move was further encouraged by the blending of personal
and professional relationships in regard to mentors and instructors. The
respect she had for her father and the positive memories she had of her
own English teacher, balanced against her disdain for two of the three
program professors, influenced how she evaluated each person’s advice.
The overriding theme from Liz’s experience seems to be that beginning
teachers simply have to muddle through many of the difficulties of early-
career teaching. There are no easy answers for anyone, nor are there any
shortcuts to expertise. Quite a bit of the identity work of becoming a
teacher is a kind of balancing act: working through dilemmas, reconcil-
ing prior conceptions of teaching with newer ones, adjusting the kind of
teacher you have always wanted to be against the kind of teacher your
students need you to be. It’s a process that takes time, patience, a sense
 The Personal and the Professional 57

of humor, and a gritty persistence. I’m happy to report that indeed things
did improve for Liz: she remained teaching at this school, benefited from
joining a new teacher induction program, and after several years of teach-
ing currently splits her time between teaching and formally mentoring
new teachers at the school.
Maybe I’m overly optimistic because I’ve chosen this profession, but
I think that good educators stay with it because it’s worth the initial
difficulties. Once we muddle through the first year or two and find a
workable balance, sufficient joys do come to make it worthwhile. We see
students grow during their year with us. Our confidence and job satisfac-
tion increase. The growth of professional learning and the refinement of
teacher identity never end, but initial difficulties give way to new kinds
of hopes and new challenges. In the remaining chapters I describe other
dimensions of teacher-identity development to offer support to develop-
ing teachers, so that other beginning educators are not, like Liz, left to
construct their professional identities automatically and independently.

Discussion Questions
1. How would you describe your own beginnings in the classroom as a
teacher? What parts have been (or were) painful? What parts have been
(or were) easy? What specific issues have been most pressing for you?
2. Are there any similarities between your early teaching experience and
Liz’s? How have you attended to them?
3. What are some of the ways in which your own personal history has
helped your teacher development? What are some of the ways in
which your personal history has hindered your development?
4. What are some of the strategies you have employed (or plan to
employ) in order to persevere when your own teacher development
gets difficult?

Further Reading
Grossman, P. 1990. The Making of a Teacher: Teacher Knowledge and Teacher
Education. New York: Teachers College Press.
Johnson, S. M., and the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers. 2004. Finders
and Keepers: Helping New Teachers Survive and Thrive in Our Schools. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Lortie, D. 1975. Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Michie, G. 1999. Holler If You Hear Me: The Education of a Teacher and His
Students. New York: Teachers College Press.