Teaching in the Elementary School: A Reflective Action Approach

What are the behaviors or actions that teachers take to create high quality original curricula and programs for their students?  The authors have searched out the most creative and adventurous teachers they could find and have weaved their real-life stories into the text.  The text shows how teachers can inspire their students while still meeting the federal, state, and local guidelines and testing standards required in today’s classrooms. 

 

Adrienne Herrell received her Ph.D. from Florida State University in early childhood educa-tion/early literacy. She retired from California State University, Fresno, where she was a profes-sor in the department of Literacy and Early Education. She taught classes in early literacy and teaching second-language learners before she retired and moved back to Florida in 2004. Adri-enne recently retired again from Florida State University.
Adrienne is author or co-author of 15 other books published by Pearson including the most re-cent: Fifty Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners (4th ed.) with Michael Jordan; Reflective Planning, Teaching and Evaluation K–12 with Judy Eby and Michael Jordan, and Thirty-Five Classroom Management Strategies: Promoting Learning and Building Community with Michael Jordan. Adrienne taught for 23 years in public schools in Florida but considers rais-ing five sons to be her most challenging and valuable life experience.

Michael Jordan has also recently retired from California State University, Fresno, where he was an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and taught classes in curriculum, classroom management, and social foundations. He has taught primary grades through high school in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and California. Dr. Jordan is also an actor, musician, and former B-52 pilot. His work in live theatre is dedicated to providing access to the arts to children and youth. He and Dr. Herrell incorporate many dramatic reenactment strategies into their joint  research working with English learners. This is Dr. Jordan’s ninth book for Pearson.

 

Judy Eby began her teaching career at a Head Start program in Coronado, California. She has been a classroom teacher, a gifted program coordinator, a teacher educator (DePaul University, University of San Diego, and San Diego State University), and a mentor teacher in the Beginning Teacher Support Academy with the San Diego Unified School District. In 1983, she wrote a mas-ter’s thesis on gifted behavior and published two articles on that subject in Educational Leader-ship in 1983 and 1984. One of those articles caught the attention of Benjamin S. Bloom, who corresponded with Judy and wrote, “I think you are on the right track.”
This led to the opportunity to attain her Ph.D. at Northwestern University with Bloom as her dissertation chairman and advisor. In 1986, she wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on gifted behavior as a developmental process rather than an innate and unchanging trait. Essentially, she asked the question, “What are the behaviors that people use to originate and create high-quality original products in the talent area of their choice?” The 10 behaviors that she found to be correlated with this type of success are perceptiveness, active interaction with the environment, reflectiveness, persistence, independence, goal orientation, originality, productivity, self-evaluation, and com-munication of findings.
She published the Gifted Behavior Index and her first book, A Thoughtful Overview of Gifted Education, in 1990.
Turning her attention to teacher education as a professor of education at DePaul University in Chicago, Judy reinterpreted her construct of gifted behavior in terms of teacher education, and called this related construct “reflective actions in teaching.” This time she asked the question, “What are the behaviors or actions that teachers use to create high-quality original school curric-ula and programs to meet the needs of their students?” The answers to this question are contained in this textbook as a model and operational definition of reflective action teaching. Essentially, the process includes the same 10 gifted behaviors she had studied earlier, although they have been transformed into language that teachers can recognize and use to discuss issues related to their profession.
Judy has actively used her own research to make decisions about her own life choices. She feels that using reflective action has benefited her in her marriage, raising her children, friend-ships, and leisure and volunteer activities. She participates in children’s literacy programs on both sides of the San Diego-Tijuana border. Her most treasured project is the Tecolote Centro de Comunidad, a children’s center in Tijuana, where she has created a children’s library for the community. She also participates in before- and after-school programs on both sides of the bor-der.