Barbara S. Stengel

Learning to Leverage Student Thinking: What Novice Approximations Teach Us About Ambitious Practice

Central to ambitious teaching is a constellation of practices we have come to call “leveraging student thinking.” In leveraging, teachers position students’ understanding and reasoning as a central means to drive learning forward. While leveraging typically is described as a feature of mature practice, in this article we examine approximations of leveraging as enacted by elementary teachers who are just beginning their careers. In addition to providing an existence proof that novices can leverage when teaching elementary mathematics, the analysis surfaces and illustrates four pressure points—epistemic, academic, developmental, and managerial—that can short-circuit the development of novices’ efforts. Our framing of these pressure points both spotlights the complex dynamics at play, and establishes an agenda for supporting the development of this practice: learning to leverage student thinking is a challenging and long-term endeavor, rather than a routine easily acquired.

After the Laughter

Abstract We humans laugh often and it is not always because something is funny. We laugh in the face of the pathetic or the powerless; sometimes we laugh at our own powerlessness or pathos.In short, we laugh at both the comical and the difficult. Here I am especially interested in the laughter that is sparked by what is difficult and how that laughter—and all laughter—breaks through to mark a range of emotional states: fear, nervousness, shame, confusion and others not viewed as positive, as well as joy, delight, interest, relief and other states that are viewed as positive. I also am interested in understanding what and how laughter reveals and what and how it conceals. As I explore both interests in this article, I make a compound point about laughter in educational settings: that laughter marks a breakdown of experience and that same laughter creates space for reflective listening and thinking, for diffusion of difficult affect, and for the disruption of habit that makes growth possible (and even likely) if that laughter is taken seriously.

Making Sense of Moments

It may seem incongruous to marry Soren Kirkegaard to Barbra Streisand, but I ask you to suspend your skepticism for a moment. The controversy around Streisand’s adaptation of the Isaac Bashevis Singer short story notwithstanding,3 the original story, the Streisand lyric, and the Kirkegaard insight all provide structure for this look back at my presence in the distinctive professional world of practice we call philosophy of education.