Published in the anthology Always Wondering: A Mélange of Eleanor Duckworth and Critical Exploration (Shorr, et al.) in August 2012. I had studied under Eleanor Duckworth for the entirety of my Ed.M. program at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
The following are excerpts from my course journals (T-440 and T-150) that highlight particular observations of Eleanor’s decision-making during class and how they helped me construct my own understandings of her methodology and philosophy.
October 10, 2005
Professor Duckworth entered the room last Friday to see that most of us had placed name cards on the tables in front of us. Someone had come up with the idea a few minutes earlier: since most of us have already created name cards for other classes, and since Professor Duckworth keeps interrupting our comments to ask for our names, it would make sense to allow her (and the rest of us) the benefit of name cards. Yet one of the first things Professor Duckworth said after entering the room is, “I hope these cards don’t prevent me from learning your names!”
Her remark was received with a chuckle, but it emphasizes an important theme of T-440. A key component of this pedagogy involves learning by trial and error. Professor Duckworth’s point, as I interpret it, is that she will learn and internalize our names more effectively that way rather than having us tell her our names through our name cards every time she wishes to call on us. This method often will mean that she gets our names wrong — just as a math student often will arrive at a wrong answer before internalizing a valid formula that works for him, or just as a player of the “Going to the Movies” game will sometimes create repeated rows before she completes all the possible combinations.
At one point early in the period, Professor Duckworth mistakenly referred to one person by the name of the person next to her — because, as she explained afterward, she was viewing the name cards at a tricky angle. This illustrates the danger of didactic teaching: if a teacher messes up in conveying information, the learner will get lost. Better to let the buck stop at the learner, to make them responsible for their own learning. Following this episode, Professor Duckworth continued to get many people’s names wrong even though we had name cards in front of us. I think she might have been consciously trying to ignore them.
March 9, 2006
Abruptly on February 27, Professor Duckworth granted us permission to call her Eleanor.
This had been a topic of curiosity throughout T-440, especially among the participants in my section. When Eleanor visited our section, we asked her directly what she wanted us to call her, and she responded that she did not like to be called by her first name. From that point on, we noticed that some students called her Professor Duckworth while others, apparently oblivious to the professor’s preference, called her Eleanor.
And then all of a sudden, weeks into T-150, the professor announced that we could call her Eleanor, adding humorously (I think) that some people in the room were already calling her Eleanor. I reported back to my T-440 section cohort that I felt I had graduated!
All humor aside, though, this topic causes me to ponder the larger issue of the relationship between teacher and students in a critical exploration, and in a progressive classroom more generally. On one hand, the teacher is separate, distinct, and of a higher status than the learners. Her questions are expected to be addressed whether the learners like it or not, she provides the materials and tasks to explore, and she is considered to be more knowledgeable about the topic. She is “Professor Duckworth.”
Yet on the other hand, in a critical exploration the teacher and her learners are at the same level. They all express wonderings (the learners’ about the topic, the teacher’s about the learners’ understandings), and none of them know for certain where the exploration is headed. In one sense, the learners actually have more control because it is their own understandings that drive the session. The teacher may only listen and react. She is “Eleanor.”
Perhaps Eleanor’s “teacher-as-researcher” concept can be carried over to this question, too. She is “professor-as-person.”
March 25, 2006
Today I volunteered to help set up for Eleanor’s birthday celebration. The first task Candace [Julyan] assigned me was weighting balloons. We had to take the helium-filled balloons, tie heavy strings around their bases, and attach paper clips to the strings to suspend them at different heights off the ground.
I worked on this with a few people, and it ended up being a sort of critical exploration of balloons. For my first balloon, I noticed that after six paper clips it was still rising all the way to the ceiling, but then after only two more it sank almost all the way to the ground. We experimented by adjusting numerous factors, including the number of paper clips, the type of paper clip (plastic or metal), the amount and thickness of string, and the way we tied the string. It was fun!
Then Eleanor walked by, observed what we were doing, and immediately told us that we needed to cut the string above the floor so that the balloons wouldn’t sink so far down to the ground. Or whatever she told us sounded something like that, at least. I wasn’t really paying much attention to the substance of what she told us, but rather to the surprising fact that she was telling us this at all. I had hoped we might eventually figure out more tricks like the string-cutting on our own.
I said to Eleanor, “Why are you telling us this? We’re critically exploring the balloons!” And Eleanor replied, “Yes, but it’s my birthday celebration and I want the balloons to look nice!” We both laughed.
This humorous exchange makes me consider a central idea of critical exploration, one with which I am grappling as I conduct my fieldwork. This central idea is that critical exploration requires that the teacher not have an agenda, a vision of what the learners must understand — only a clear idea of and expertise in the topic being explored.
Here was Eleanor Duckworth, the originator of critical exploration, having no patience for her own methodology when it potentially threatened her agenda, which was to have nice-looking balloons for her birthday celebration.
When Eleanor conducted the “miss rosie” exploration during our fall semester shopping class, she had no interest in telling us anything about the poem because she trusted that we would all notice and puzzle over interesting things. Yet this morning, Eleanor had a very clear interest in having us figure out the string-cutting trick, so when she saw no indication that she could trust us to figure it out on our own, she told us.
May 1, 2006
Tonight Eleanor led our class in a critical exploration. These two or three hours were quite possibly the most valuable of my academic time at HGSE due to the thinking this exercise encouraged me to do. I will go through my notes now and reflect upon some of what I noticed about Eleanor’s teaching. Eleanor herself touched on many of these items during the critical response period, but these are the things I noticed and recorded during the exploration itself.
Eleanor chose to begin the sharing period by asking the two students with the most simplistic theories to approach the board and explain how they were thinking about the problem. (Eleanor later described these theories as the ones she expected the class to eventually disagree with.) After this initial sharing, she asked if others had “other ways of thinking about it.” This move allowed the class to consider more than one theory rather than focus right away on the “right” one.
Once we were grappling with two distinct theories, Eleanor prevented a student from introducing a third theory, “for now.” This is a difficult call for any teacher to make, but I believe it was the right one in this context. Eleanor did, eventually, come back and ask that student about how she was thinking about the problem.
Once a theory had been placed on the table, Eleanor never let it fall by the wayside, even when the entire class appeared to be moving toward agreement with a new theory. She brought us back to revisit the thinking of the initial contributors. This reminded me of her brilliant move in the “Chocolate Bar” video, when she kept going back and asking the child why his earlier idea did not work. As a student who had shared a faulty theory, I felt very motivated to provide closure to my idea and discredit it myself, publicly.
Even though Eleanor had come back to the initial contributors earlier, I felt that in order to discredit my earlier theory I had to raise my hand and ask to do it, because it seemed that she was not about to turn to me and ask for my thinking. In the moment, I was a bit frustrated by Eleanor’s lack of action. Yet during the critical response period, I came to view this instead as a masterful stroke (or lack of stroke) on Eleanor’s part. I chimed in when I was ready; she did not want to force me to confront my wrong idea publicly if I was not ready to do so.
After another classmate explained his own theory, Eleanor said she would “try my hand at saying what I think I heard you say.” This decision to paraphrase intrigued me, as it is something I struggle with a lot in my own teaching and fieldwork. When I asked her about it later, she acknowledged the value of my question and said that she guessed she was “trying to put more crisply” something interesting that had not been articulated as well as it might have been by the student. This explanation makes sense to me.
When Eleanor responded to this classmate’s theory by saying, “I’ve never seen that before,” it made me question whether my own theory, which I had already shared, was a common one and therefore unworthy of special recognition. This is the first live example I have noticed of “the praise problem,” as Alfie Kohn puts it.
I appreciated that no one ever attacked, or was invited by Eleanor to attack, my theory. She simply came back to it after a while and allowed me to grapple with it, with the help of others who also understood my theory. I think many teachers in this situation would invite criticism of such a theory, in the hopes of getting the class to see why it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. This same end point was achieved in our exploration, but through a very different — and more humane and respectful — route, which also happened to nurture our understandings even more effectively.
Eleanor eventually called on a student who hadn’t yet contributed his ideas to the discussion. He ended up sharing a whole other way of thinking about the problem. Eleanor later went around the room and invited all the other students who hadn’t yet shared to share, if they wanted to. Although he had worked his idea through before approaching the board, he later said that he didn’t “figure out” his chart of three groups “until I got up there.” Articulating your ideas for others often helps you see new layers and possibilities in your ideas.
Despite the many nighttime hours we spent in this exploration, I needed no actual coffee to keep me awake. Simply observing Eleanor as she helped us construct our understandings of a mathematical problem involving coffee was enough to keep me caffeinated.