Teaching Education

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Bringing a 'Whole Adolescent' Perspective to Secondary Teacher Education: a case study of the use of an adolescent case study Robert W. Roeser Online Publication Date: 01 August 2002 To cite this Article: Roeser, Robert W. (2002) 'Bringing a 'Whole Adolescent' Perspective to Secondary Teacher Education: a case study of the use of an adolescent case study', Teaching Education, 13:2, 155 — 178 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/1047621022000007567 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1047621022000007567

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Teaching Education, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2002

Bringing a ‘Whole Adolescent’ Perspective to Secondary Teacher Education: a case study of the use of an adolescent case study ROBERT W. ROESER Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-3096, USA

An on-going challenge in teacher education programs is how best to support new teachers in connecting their university coursework with their professional identity development and pedagogical practice in the schools. The reading and writing of case studies is one promising strategy teacher educators have explored as a means of assisting teachers in developing and cultivating a self-re ective, theory and practice re exive, style of learning in the teacher education classroom and beyond. In the present paper, I present a case study of my own journey as a developmental and educational psychologist responsible for co-teaching a secondary teacher education course called “Adolescent Development for Teachers”, in which having student-teachers research and write-up a case study of a single adolescent became the focus of the course and our pedagogy. I describe events that brought about the use of the case study in the course, the in uence the use of the case study had on myself as an instructor as well as the students, and what students say are the educational bene ts and dif culties of completing the adolescent case study. Implications for infusing a developmental focus into teacher education programs are discussed. ABSTRACT

An on-going challenge in teacher education programs is how best to support new teachers in connecting their university coursework with their professional identity development and pedagogical practice in the schools. As teacher educators, we hold as a professional and pedagogical virtue that student-teachers develop a habit of re ecting on their evolving practice in relation to profession-wide theory and research; and also on theory and research in relation to their practical experiences in the classroom (Hammerness & Darling-Hammond, 2001). The reading and writing of case studies is one promising strategy teacher educators have explored as a means of assisting teachers in developing and cultivating such a self-re ective, theory and practice re exive, style of learning in the teacher education classroom and beyond (LaBoskey, 1992). In the present paper, I describe my own journey as a developmental and educaISSN 1047-6210 (print)/ISSN 1470-1286 (online)/02/020155-24 Ó 2002 School of Education, The University of Queensland DOI: 10.1080/1047621022000007567


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tional psychologist responsible for co-teaching a secondary teacher education course called “Adolescent Development for Teachers” during the past ve years. During these years, my colleagues and I introduced many classroom reforms in an effort to make the course more motivating, intellectually challenging, and practically relevant to our student-teachers.1 A central reform we implemented halfway through this time period was a case study assignment in which the student-teachers were responsible for researching and writing up a case study of a single adolescent. In the present paper, I describe how my colleagues and I came to choose this particular pedagogical strategy for this particular course, how student-teachers’ experience of the course changed during these ve years of reform, and how performing an adolescent case may assist prospective teachers in connecting the developmental theory and research of the adolescence course with their professional identity development, and perhaps someday, their pedagogical practice in the schools. Thus, this paper represents a case study of the use of an adolescent case study in a course on adolescent development for prospective secondary school teachers. The purposes of this case study are twofold. First, despite the growing use of cases in teacher education programs, convincing evidence as to their educational bene ts, costs, and dilemmas for student-teachers is not yet established (Darling-Hammond & Snyder, 2000; Grossman, 1992; Whitcomb, 1997). Toward this end, I present student-teacher perspectives on what they learned from performing a case study of a single adolescent. Second, it seems important for us as teacher educators to practice what we preach by re ecting on our own practice in the classroom. Toward that end, I take this opportunity to offer my own re ections on the reforms we made in the course over time and on what we were trying to accomplish educationally and professionally with our students by using case methods in the course. Such re ections are meant to offer food for thought for other teacher educators who may wish to infuse a developmental perspective into their own teacher education programs through the use of an adolescent case study. History and Context The use of case methods in teacher education, like any other method, requires a consideration of how well such methods support desired pedagogical ends (LaBoskey, 1992; Shulman, 1992). Thus, I begin this case study by providing a brief sketch of the embedded contexts in which we have implemented the adolescent case study, and by making explicit what our pedagogical purposes were in doing so. The embedded contexts in which the case study of an adolescent is assigned include the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP) and its mission, the adolescent development course and its goals, and the speci c objectives of the case study assignment itself. The STEP The STEP is a 12-month, four academic quarter course of post-baccalaureate study for prospective secondary teachers.2 The program combines a full year of student


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teaching with 45 credits of graduate coursework leading to a Master of Arts in Education and a single-subject state teaching credential.3 The program is small in size, averaging between 60 and 80 students each year. STEP students are placed in year-long clinical placements with cooperating teachers in local secondary schools where they gradually move from observing to co-teaching to fully independent student-teaching. The intellectual agenda of the STEP includes a programmatic focus on knowledge and professional development in three interdependent spheres: the pedagogical, the developmental, and the disciplinary. This intellectual agenda is consistent with Dewey’s (1902/1990) notion that good subject-matter teaching involves teachers’ ability to coordinate these three domains in such a way that is pedagogically effective, developmentally appropriate, and intellectually challenging in terms of the characteristics of students at a particular age (e.g., the “psychologizing of the curriculum”). The Adolescent Development Course The adolescent development course for teachers, within which the adolescent case study is assigned, occurs in the second (autumn) quarter of the students’ four-quarter long program in STEP. All of the teachers are in classrooms at this point of their program and most are co-teaching. Within STEP, the adolescent development course plays a central role in providing students with a grounding in theory and research concerning adolescent development—theory and research that is psychological, sociological, cultural, and historical in nature. It is well known that secondary teachers, more so than their elementary counterparts, tend to be educated as subject-matter specialists, often to the neglect of developing their understanding of the “whole adolescents” with whom they work each day (McPartland, 1990). The adolescent development course is meant to counter the status quo in this regard. We under-emphasize issues of subject matter in this course (which are emphasized in other curriculum and instruction classes) in an effort to foreground the importance of developmental knowledge in informing teachers’ identity development and, ultimately, their pedagogical decisions and actions in the classroom. In terms of content, the course addresses these key concepts: (a) that the adolescent-as-student is not synonymous with their whole being—that youths’ lives extend beyond the classroom and such “extra-school lives” are important for understanding the “whole adolescent” in the classroom; (b) that identity formation is the “work” or core developmental task of adolescence and involves many different dimensions (e.g., scholastic, romantic, occupational, ethnic, gender); (c) that adolescent development occurs across different lines of functioning—the physical, the cognitive, the social, the emotional, and the moral (and that these lines can be congruent or discrepant in terms of level of maturity); (d) that adolescents’ motivation to learn and development is situated within and inextricably linked to characteristics of the multiple contexts in which they are developing (e.g., home, school, peers, culture); (e) that adolescents with different types of minority status face unique challenges in forming an identity in a society characterized by structural


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inequalities and discrimination that is predicated on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, language, and so on (and, concomitantly, that middle class, white, male, and/or heterosexual Americans enjoy implicit privileges as a function of their social status); and (f) that many persistent stereotypes about adolescents—raging hormones, storm and stress, rebellion against parents, and so on, need to be examined carefully and, more often than not, challenged. These six content goals are the “stuff” out of which we attempt to teach the major process-oriented goal of the course—the promotion of a principled understanding of the developmental needs, capacities, and vulnerabilities of adolescents that can inform student-teachers’ evolving professional identities and pedagogy. Figure 1 presents my conceptualization of this over-arching process-oriented goal of the course that I have evolved from my own experience teaching the course during the past ve years. Essentially, I see the goals of the course as moving student-teachers along two simultaneous trajectories—trajectories that move students from a way of understanding predicated on their autobiographies to one predicated on a principled view of adolescent development or the profession of teaching. In essence, we want to move our student-teachers from an autobiographical understanding of “my adolescence” to a more principled, re ective understanding of “my adolescent students”; and, at the same time, we want them to move from autobiographical recollections of “my teachers” to a more principled, re ective perspective on “me as a teacher”. I believe that these two types of professional identity development, seeing students in less self-referential terms, and teachers in more self-referential terms, probably co-arise and co-evolve. Furthermore, it is my working hypothesis as a teacher educator that both lines of professional identity development are necessary if we are to inculcate in our teachers a view of pedagogy that is simultaneously grounded in pedagogical content, developmental, and subject matter knowledge. These trajectories of developmental and professional self-knowledge are characteristics of rather universal trends in the development of re ective self-knowledge in general in which a movement is made from the concrete to the more abstract, from the egocentric to the multiperspectival, from the individual instance to the class of hypothetical instances (Keating, 1990). The Adolescent Case Study Over time, my co-instructors and I have come to believe that the use of an adolescent case study is an effective way of assisting student-teachers in moving along the trajectory from a more personal to a more principled way of understanding adolescents (see Figure 1). Just as the observation of a master teacher is meant to press student-teachers to a more principled view of teaching, the observation of a single student, we reasoned, might also press them toward a more principled way of understanding their adolescent students. The major goals of the case study were synonymous with and extended the over-arching goals for the course: (a) to promote student-teachers’ learning of developmental content knowledge; (b) to promote their ability to build relationships with a student who was different than they were as adolescents; (c) to provide them



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FIGURE 1. Forms of re ection and lines of professional identity development.

with a context of application for the course material; (d) to allow them to learn and practice the use of inquiry skills such as non-judgmental observation, shadowing, interviewing, cognitive assessments, and analysis of student work; and (e) to promote development from personal to more principled forms of understanding adolescents through perspective taking, inquiry, and re ection. The process of conducting the case study is laid out in advance for student-teachers in the course syllabus. An overview of the case study assignment and its scoring rubric are handed out during the rst week of class. In addition, the overall assignment is scaffolded in multiple ways throughout the quarter: through instruction on different kinds of inquiry skills; through the choice of weekly readings and a set of weekly journals or logs in which students are directed to relate readings to their case study assignment and student; through opportunities for instructor and peer feedback and rewriting of the case study; and so on. These elements are described chronologically in Figure 2. Brie y, at the beginning of the adolescent development course we ask students to pick a student who may be different than they were when they were adolescents, in terms of ethnicity, immigration or language status, classroom participation, achievement level, or on any other criteria they deem as relevant. Parental consent is then obtained. Student-teachers then begin to receive instruction in certain inquiry techniques (e.g., non-judgmental observation) and topics related to adolescent development (e.g., identity development), and they begin to establish a relationship with the student who is the focus of their study.4 Each week, through required

FIGURE 2. Architecture of performing a case study.


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course logs, student-teachers are instructed to apply aspects of the course readings to their data collection or data interpretation efforts. For instance, during the week on identity development, we read Susan Harter’s (1990) work on the changes in self-understanding during adolescence and Beverly Tatum’s (1997) work on racial identity development. During this week, we assist students in developing interview questions for assessing aspects of their case study student’s psychosocial identity. Students then conduct interviews with their students and re ect on them in their logs in relation to the readings. We also have students read previously completed case studies and offer model case study outlines to assist them in the process of reducing their data and organizing their case. We eventually have students complete a rst draft of the case that is then read by a couple of their peers and their instructor, and they are given extensive feedback from both sources and asked to prepare a revised case study. Additional readings speci c to the issues of their case study are suggested by instructors at this time, and cycles of revision continue until the completion of the case study at the end of the quarter. We eventually assist the student-teachers in providing some sort of “closing ritual” with their case study student and have created a forum where STEP students present their cases to one another. The case study then becomes an important part of the portfolio that STEP students create at the end of their program as a means of re ecting on what they have accomplished during their graduate training. A more speci c look at the architecture of the case study in Figure 2 reveals some of the nuances of how it unfolds in discrete phases. These phases include: student selection and joining (phase 1); data collection (phase 2); re ecting on, reducing and synthesizing the data (phase 3); and writing, reviewing, and revising the case (phase 4). The pedagogical supports we provide at each phase are depicted along the bottom of the gure. Such supports are essential for scaffolding student-teachers’ learning during each phase. For instance, because case studies are the conjoint result of the student-teacher, the case study student, and the pedagogical supports for the assignment on our part, providing feedback and helping student-teachers manage their subjectivity in the inquiry and interpretation process is essential. Our experience suggests that different forms of learning can occur at these different phases of the assignment—learning that includes how to relate to young people, how to collect data in a systematic way, how to interpret data in terms of theory and research, how to come to some principled understandings about the life of an adolescent that will support effective teaching, and how to provide and respond to critical and constructive feedback from peers and instructors. Examples of these various forms of learning are provided later. Tinkering Toward Utopia: evolution of course reforms 1996–2000 The re-introduction of the adolescent case study in 1998 was part of an on-going series of reforms in the adolescent development class, and in STEP more generally, that occurred over the past ve years. Using data from STEP students’ course evaluations, post-course re ections, and interviews that I conducted with a subset of


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STEP students, I sketch out how the case study assignment has changed students’ and my experience of the course over time. Afterwards, I move on to discuss student-teachers’ perspective on the educational bene ts and costs associated with performing the adolescent case study. The “Hazing Years”: 1996–1997 The years 1996 and 1997 were my rst two years at Stanford and my rst two years teaching the adolescent development course. I refer to them facetiously as my “hazing years”. In 1996, another rst-year junior colleague and myself were asked to teach the adolescent development course in the STEP. We were inexperienced and were provided with little preparation for the class. Rather, we were assigned the course that met once a week for three hours with the full cohort of 60 1 students and left on our own. Our subsequent attempts at using whole class discussions, lectures, and lms would leave both ourselves and our students feeling frustrated with the outcome. Looking back now from afar, it is clear that our pedagogical approach revealed our lack of experience insofar as it failed to meet the needs of the STEP students. Typical student comments from end-of-the-quarter course evaluations during 1996 and 1997 included statements such as: The course has the potential to affect the lives of adolescents in the classroom. Unfortunately, the teaching style was not intellectually challenging—combining theory with practice would be useful. I didn’t feel like the papers were very relevant—I wasn’t very MOTIVATED. Less theory, more case studies. More youth voices. This course could have been good. It had so much potential. Come on! Adolescent development! But, you killed a good topic. The course was boring, unengaging, and I dreaded coming every time. If the truth be told, by the end of the course my rst year I dreaded coming to class as well! The students were searching for challenge, relevance, and the voices and experiences of young people; and I was searching for a pedagogy that would address such needs. It was clear that our use of lectures, discussions, and lms with the full cohort of STEP students in one classroom were not the kinds of instructional practices that satisfactorily addressed their needs. Reform was in the air. The “Reform Years”: 1998–2000 Spurred on by disappointing educational results, low teacher satisfaction (my own!), and dismal course ratings, my Stanford colleagues and myself embarked on a series of incremental, cumulative reforms aimed at revitalizing the course. The rst set of changes involved teaching personnel and planning. In 1997, a more seasoned colleague came on board to co-teach as a means of providing me with a vital mentoring function as a junior faculty member. We continued to meet weekly and



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co-plan for teaching the course, and we revised the curriculum to bring in more readings with a practitioner focus that included adolescent voices. We decided to maintain the class as a meeting of 60 1 students in the STEP cohort for the 1997 school year. In 1998, we made major changes to the adolescent development course. First, we divided the course up into three smaller sections of about 20 students each and brought in three faculty members to teach the course (one section per faculty member). Second, we implemented the adolescent case study as the core assignment of the course. Third, we coordinated the adolescent development course with a concurrently running practicum class in STEP. In addition, the practicum class also became the locus for teaching STEP students the inquiry skills they needed to complete the adolescent case study—skills such as non-judgmental observation, interviewing techniques, means of assessing adolescents’ cognitive and moral development, and so on. Finally, we continued our annual ritual of co-planning and revising readings and the overall curriculum. The major innovations of 1998, however, were the creation of smaller sections, use of the adolescent case study as the centerpiece of the adolescent development course, and coordination with practicum. In 1999, we made further changes to re ect our commitment to infusing a developmental focus into the course by breaking up the subject-matter cohorts that so dominate the classroom lives of student-teachers in STEP. That is, we mixed prospective teachers whose specialty areas were English, social studies, mathematics, science, and foreign language into each of the three sections for the adolescent development course. This change, we reasoned, would make subject matter less salient and the developmental foci of the class more salient. By autumn 2000, we focused our efforts on tinkering with the mechanics of the case study. In particular, we instituted a renewed series of weekly journals that scaffolded student-teachers’ progressive work on the various subcomponents of the case study. That is, weekly assignments, called “logs” or journal entries, were designed to become the rudimentary building blocks of the nal case study, and also to insure that students were reading and applying readings to the case study assignment throughout the duration of the course. Assessing Changes in Students’ Course Experience How did students experience the course as we progressively implemented these changes, including the adolescent case study? To address this question, I examined data from students’ quantitative and qualitative course ratings over the course of the 1996–2000 school years.5 Figure 3 presents a time-series plot of three quantitative measures of STEP students’ end-of-the-quarter course evaluations for the adolescent development course from 1996 to 2000. These measures include an overall rating for the quality of the course, a mean of items assessing students’ perceptions of the instructor’s interaction with students (e.g., inspired and motivated students in course content, demonstrated concern about whether students were learning), and a mean of items assessing students’ perceptions of the course organization, content,


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and system of evaluation (e.g., topics worthwhile, assignments solidi ed understanding, designed and used fair grading procedures). The data show that students rated the course much more favorably on these indicators from 1998 to the present than they had in 1996 or 1997. In fact, there is a rather dramatic discontinuity in their course ratings from 1997 to 1998 in particular. To suggest how course reforms may have affected such changes in ratings, I have annotated on Figure 3 the implementation of the various reforms at different time points during these years. As one can see, in 1998 when ratings improved, we had just implemented smaller sections (about 22 students each), the adolescent case study assignment, and the coordination of the class with practicum to provide scaffolding for the inquiry skills needed to carry out the case study. It seems reasonable to assume such changes contributed to students’ improving experience of the course. There are alternative explanations, however. It could be that the cohorts of student-teachers during these years were vastly different and that our ability to teach the course improved with time and experience, thus leading to such changes. While I believe experience probably was an important factor, I do not believe our students were very different over these years. In addition, my own impression as one of the co-instructors of the course was that the implementation of the case study assignment as the centerpiece of the course, in the context of the reforms implemented to support it—team planning, smaller classes, coordination with the practicum class, and a revised curriculum contributed in a major way to the improvements in students’ experience of the course. What, speci cally, were students saying about the course from 1998 onward? The call for improvements were no longer about making the curriculum relevant, challenging, or more representative of students’ voices—these goals seemed to have been accomplished, as least well enough, for students. Rather, comments about course improvements were often about how we could better support students’ completion of the case study. For instance: Excellent nal case study—need more deadlines along the way to complete case study. Would have liked more opportunity to discuss case study. The case study seems to be an effective way for us to incorporate what we’ve learned. In summary, this narrative of course reforms and changes in student-teachers’ experience of the course sets the backdrop for trying to better understand the educational impact that performing an adolescent case study may have on studentteachers. Students became more satis ed with the course over time. Additionally, the faculty who taught the course were feeling the effects of the course reforms as well—we felt our students were becoming more motivated, engaged, and satis ed with the course and, as a consequence, we felt more motivation for and satisfaction in teaching it. In addition, we all came to feel that performing the case study provided a crucible into and around which we could teach the kinds of concepts and theories that are central to the course. Still, the question remained, what were our

FIGURE 3. Adolescent development for teachers. Course ratings for the 1996–2000 school years.


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students learning from the course generally and the case study assignment in particular? Did the completion of a case study of a single adolescent provide an effective way for student-teachers to learn material on adolescent development? Did it provide a bridge between theory and practice—an “authentic context of application” in which the developmental ideas presented in the class were assimilated? Did it assist student-teachers in pressing beyond autobiographical to more principled ways of understanding adolescents as whole persons? Student Voices and Educational Ends In an effort to understand student-teachers’ perspectives on the case study assignment, and to ascertain whether it was serving the pedagogical ends we desired, we asked our students at the end of the course in 1999 and 2000 to write a re ective essay on what and how they learned in the course, what worked and did not work for them in the course, and what they felt re ected their best work in the course.6 In addition, during the 2000–2001 school year, I interviewed a subset of the full class of 60 student-teachers. From the 21 students who volunteered to participate in these interviews, single interviews were eventually conducted with 10 of these students, and multiple interviews with four students. In the next section, I present some selected excerpts from student-teachers’ post-course re ections and interviews that bear on their experiences of the educational bene ts of performing the case study. This is followed by a section on some of the dif culties and challenges of the assignment that student-teachers reported. Student Re ections on Learning Outcomes: 1999–2000 Advocates of case methods in teacher education courses suggest that such methods can promote motivational, social, and cognitive learning outcomes (Shulman, 1992). Thus, a content analysis of students’ post-course re ections and the interviews was conducted using these three categories—motivational, social, and cognitive outcomes—as a general a priori scheme for coding responses. In the rst instance, I looked for evidence that the case study made the course more relevant and developmental knowledge more central to student-teachers’ notions of what it meant to be a teacher (motivational outcomes). In the second case, I looked for evidence that knowledge of how to interact with students and knowledge of others who were “different” from oneself were developed through the case study assignment (social outcomes). In the third case, I looked for instances in which studentteachers’ developed a new understanding of principles of adolescent development and of themselves as teachers by re ecting on theory, research, and the data of the case study simultaneously (cognitive outcomes). Although it is clear from studentteachers’ voices that these outcomes co-arise and are interdependent with one another, I attempt to isolate phenomena that are generally re ective of each speci c kind of outcome. These results should necessarily be treated as preliminary, and represent my rst attempts at describing phenomena that re ect “what is possibly learned” from researching and writing an adolescent case study. I did not attend as



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much to what is not learned, although this is critical as well. Thus, the results presented below represent optimal outcomes, perhaps approaching the modal, but certainly not the universal or the only student outcomes of the case study assignment. Motivation to Learn. One of our aims in implementing the case study was to increase students’ engagement with and perceived relevance of the course material. Several students commented on these issues, and some even spoke of a continuing motivation to learn and to apply developmental knowledge in their teaching.7 For instance, a rather outspoken student, Carrie, commented: The majority of the readings I felt were certainly worth my time … This class is incredibly relevant, and I don’t think anyone can deny that. And, the fact that we were given an opportunity to do a case study at the same time was very rewarding, in that we were directly applying what we were reading and learning. It helped a tremendous amount to write a weekly log that asked us to connect the readings to our case study student. Not only did this help for writing the case study itself, but it also served as a weekly reminder of how crucial the class is, since we should all want to properly understand our students. This student-teacher re ection highlights not only her perception of the relevance of course material, but also the relevance of developmental knowledge for her developing professional identity (e.g., “since we should all want to properly understand our students”). Others also seemed to be motivated by the course and the case study to incorporate developmental knowledge into their evolving identities as teachers. As another student noted, “We can only begin to teach our students the skills that will help them succeed in life and in school after we understand their particular needs at this stage in their lives”. Finally, some students found the act of conducting research itself motivating and rewarding: Liz: My greatest learning experience, and where I think that my best work was done, was while I was collecting the data for my case study. I really enjoyed interviewing, shadowing, and getting to know my case study student and put a lot of effort into analyzing this information. I got to see high school through the eyes of a student, which gave me insight not only into students but into teachers as well. Thus, one outcome of performing the case study seems to be that some studentteachers develop a sense that developmental knowledge is an important aspect of their evolving professional identities as teachers. Social Outcomes. Student-teachers also wrote about how the case study afforded them opportunities to practice interacting with and getting to know a student in depth, a student who often lived a life that was different in signi cant respects than their own as an adolescent. That the case study provided a sort of apprenticeship


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experience for student-teachers to get to know students was not an insigni cant affordance of the assignment for some. For instance, a young social studies teacher, Ted, felt that his ability to get to know in some depth his female case study student was the best work he had completed during the quarter. As a somewhat shy person, it was clear that the case study was more than an intellectual learning experience for him, but rather one in which he gained skill at forging relationships across gender and age lines, something he knew he needed to do to be an effective teacher who could understand what his adolescents were experiencing. In his post-course re ection, Ted wrote: The piece of work that I feel re ects my best work is something that isn’t quite work and isn’t quite tangible. I think that the relationship that I developed with my case study student is the thing that I am most proud of this quarter. From rst choosing a student that I thought would be dif cult to study to nally getting to know the student as a person, the case study has developed into more than just a project or an assignment, at least for me … Actually getting to know a student and obtaining a brief glimpse of adolescence today was invaluable. I know that I bene ted greatly, both as a teacher and a learner, from the informal talks with my case study student. Several other students made similar comments about the relationship they formed with their case study student, and I think about such comments as re ecting an “apprenticeship in bonding with students” phenomenon that is afforded by this assignment. In one interview conducted ve months after the completion of the case study, Ken, an older business man who had returned to school to teach mathematics and who had chosen a high school senior who was pregnant as the subject of his case study, described learning about the importance of developing relationships with students: I think the case study caused me to be much more conscious about sort of who she was and how she was doing as a person. And, I think that this has actually had a positive bene t because I think that I have become aware of just how important that is, not just in this particular case, but for other kids as well. That, you know, being sensitive not just to are you passing or failing math but how are you doing as a person? It is important to know that Ken actively assisted his case study student in navigating the social welfare system outside of school as she prepared to have her child. I think about this example as re ecting a “realization of students as whole, three-dimensional human beings” phenomenon, which can prove important for student-teachers’ subsequent actions with students. For instance, Ken goes on later in the interview to say he’s learned that these relationships can make a difference for a child: So the other day I get this letter in my box, you know, this thing for this kid in my class that says: left school and then down where it says what



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school is he going to it says “county jail”. I don’t think that before having done the case study and having worked through this that I would have had the reaction that I did when I started thinking about that a couple days later and saying, “You know, maybe I should just give Brandon a call … And I actually tried to call him the other day, he had apparently been discharged because I went to nd out from the school of ce. I don’t even think that I would have thought to do that if I hadn’t done the case study. I mean, I think it has sort of made me aware of how much of a difference, you know, something that may only be a phone call or a conversation can make for some kids. Another student, Liz, whom I had interviewed two months after the completion of the case study, re ected on her own experience of this realization of students as more than “just” students. She had chosen a troubled but strong and intelligent African-American high school senior for her case study student. We had this exchange: Interviewer: Maybe I can ask you, do you feel like the case study was a learning experience for you? Liz: DEFINITELY … I think in some ways it helps me stop and consider, and think about students as just whole and real people with lives and stresses and happiness and pain and whatever … Liz also went on in a later part of the interview to discuss how attending to her students as “whole persons” might someday prove useful in her own pedagogical practice: … teenagers are people with real experiences and real feelings and they come to you with a life history and that life history re ects who they are, what they like, their behaviors in the classroom, how they‘re gonna react to you, what reactions they need, what reactions they don’t like, you know like what sort of communications they do like and what communications they don’t like … It doesn’t mean I’m not going to have boundaries or deadlines or guidelines or whatever or a certain amount of respect I ask for in the classroom or whatever, but maybe I just approach my students with “let me rst try to understand where they’re coming from”. Referring back to Figure 1, Liz is providing evidence of perspective-taking, wherein she is coming to the awareness that it is important to see life from the adolescents’ perspective (“where they‘re coming from”), and to see their lives as bigger than their in-school personas. What seems to have been a particularly powerful learning experience for her was her ability to connect her understanding of her students’ perspective as a troubled young woman who was having dif culty coping with multiple experiences of loss with her observations of how her cooperating teacher worked with this young woman in the classroom. I ask her whether her case study student ever shared her emotions when they talked given that the girl had experienced multiple family losses during the year:

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Interviewer: Did she show her emotions to you when you worked together? Liz: … most of the time she would just say things matter of fact, like this is just how it is. And, and when she would show emotion in class, because her grandmother died rst semester, it would come out in different sorts of actions, like she just got up and started walking around the room, like for no apparent reason … or she‘d be really, umm, moody like UMMM! You know, like really vocal and … that was how she expressed it. Interviewer: Yes, I remember in our rst interview you mentioned that your CT [co-operating teacher] had a way of giving her a lot of space that if she felt that way she didn’t have to leave or act out … Liz: Yeah, exactly. So, he didn’t stop her from walking around, so I asked him after class why and he said “well, her grandmother just died so …”. Interviewer: So he’s pretty good with kids would you say … Liz: Very good … He always tries to gure out the reasons behind the behavior before he‘ll react real quick. He doesn’t react real … he never yells. And when he does ask, cause you know, there is a line you need to draw, any teacher would need to draw—whatever they feel comfortable with, and he would just not do it in a very confrontational way. He would just go up to them one on one and say “I need you to do this, thank you”. In this dialogue, I see evidence of how the case study assignment, in conjunction with observations of one’s cooperating teacher, come together to provide Liz with a powerful learning experience that connects the importance of: (a) considering where the student is coming from; (b) looking for reasons behind disruptive behavior before reacting (e.g., the student is in pain); and (c) approaching such students in a non-confrontational way. Given that disruptive behavior is one of the foremost concerns of new teachers, it is understandable why Liz remembered and re ected on this particular episode in our interview concerning what she learned from her case study assignment. Another type of social-developmental knowledge that is gained through the case study is student-teachers’ exposure to life paths that they themselves had never known—single parents, poverty, the experience of multiple losses, growing up as a gay young man or as an immigrant, and so on. I think of this as the “educated in the diversity of life paths” phenomenon. Many students report having their eyes opened by the case study experience to life paths that they never necessarily experienced themselves growing up. The injunction to pick a student that was “not like you were as an adolescent” is our attempt to scaffold this type of knowledge development. For instance, for Ken, who was introduced earlier, the experience of working with a pregnant teen was important for him personally, since he had raised two sons and no daughters, and also professionally because he learned about both the psychosocial and family precursors of teenage pregnancy, and also the presence and absence of social welfare system supports for a pregnant teen at 18 who gets thrown out of



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her home as a consequence of becoming pregnant: “for me it was a real window into a whole lifestyle that I was basically ignorant of, I mean, you know, the disadvantaged, single parent, no support kind of environment. I also learned a lot about the support structures that exist”. Interestingly enough, I believe that the injunction to choose a student “not like you” often leads students to nd commonalities in difference. Many STEP students choose adolescents with different ethnic, family history (e.g., immigration history), and sexual orientations than themselves and use the case study as an opportunity to broaden their own understanding of the varieties of experiences and life circumstances that characterize adolescents today. As one student related to me in an informal discussion during of ce hours, some students come to the realization that despite what initially appeared as a student who was “different from themselves as an adolescent”, common needs and issues such as the need to belong, to feel autonomous, and to feel competent are concerns that unite them with a student who at rst appeared so different from themselves as adolescents. One nal social outcome of the adolescent case study is the working through and revising of fears and beliefs that students have about adolescents that may not be necessary or accurate. For instance, Liz, a young white woman who was an ethnic studies major in college and who was very conscious of and committed to issues of social justice, chose the African-American woman described earlier on purpose. She consciously used the case study as an opportunity to cultivate her own comfort level in interacting with a student of color, an act of courage and dedication to her profession and social justice at the most basic level from my perspective. Liz explained that she chose the student because she “intimidated” her in a way, yet through the case study she learned that she had some “preconceived notions about her”: “like, my assumptions that she was going to be a dif cult student to have … and she actually wound up, [she] was really willing to do the case study and just owed with talking … she, she liked it I think”. Others come to see through the class and the case study that they have other kinds of preconceived notions about adolescents that require re ection. As Carrie noted in her post-course re ection: This class has been good for me because I often have very high expectations for my students and often expect them to behave as adults. Adolescents will often behave like adults at some moments and then behave like teenagers or children the next, and they should. I often expect my students to behave as adults, and I’ve had to remind myself that they are just kids who are learning appropriate behaviors for certain situations, testing their boundaries, trying out new things, etc. These latter phenomena I think about as “encountering preconceived notions”—a kind of experience in which prior beliefs about adolescents are examined, worked through, and sometimes revised through authentic person to person contact. In summary, it appears that much of the learning that comes from the case study assignment has to do with the nature of the relationship that the student-teacher and the student develop together, and with student-teachers’ experience of encountering


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someone who is “different” than they themselves were as adolescents. In some cases, this difference is itself informative; and in others, it is a prelude to appreciating deeper underlying similarities. In still other cases, the experience allows students to go beyond into and through their fears and preconceived notions of what certain adolescents are like. Cognitive Outcomes: re ection and integration. Perhaps of greatest interest to teacher educators are the kinds of re ection and the level of integration of theory, research, and practice that can be accomplished through the use of case methods. Recall that the two major learning goals we aimed to achieve in our implementation of the case study in the adolescent course were: (a) to provide a context of application for course readings, and thereby a bridge between theory, research, and practice; and (b) to promote principled re ection on adolescents that went beyond students’ own autobiographies. Many students did, in their re ections and interviews with me, talk about how the case study fostered these two educational ends. As the voices of student-teachers below make self-evident, it did appear that they were able to use the construction of a narrative of an adolescent life in progress to make connections between theory, research, and the realities of being an adolescent and a student today. That is, the case study seems to have been a bridge between the more abstract and decontextualized ways of knowing of the theory and research of the course with the more practical ways of knowing adolescents that is characteristic of teachers (Shulman, 1992). For example, several STEP students in their post-course re ection essays and interviews discussed how the case study provided a context for applying the theory and research of the adolescent development course: Anne: [Doing the case study] connected me to a real person with a voice to bring the experience of an adolescent to life, a voice to share emotions I could hear, visualize, and almost feel for myself. Thus, one of my favorite aspects of this class was actually interviewing and getting to know the intimate life details of my case study. I realized that even a small piece of data was rich with information about who my case study is. So most often those moments I sat listening to my interviews over and over while looking for connections to theory were the times where most of my learning took place. John: These many ideas [in the course] would be worthless without the adolescent case study. The case study brings the ideas to life as I am encouraged to re ect upon them in an authentic environment. Although I have very limited knowledge about my case study and about adolescent development in general, the case study provides the opportunity to integrate cognitive, emotional, and social theories in a down-to-earth manner. Several comments made by student-teachers also indicated that they had made progress along the continua of re ection depicted in Figure 1. For instance, in an interview several months after the course, Jill, a white teacher in her early thirties



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who had chosen a third-generation Mexican-American student who was resistant to learning and disruptive in class as her case study student, noted: “[the case] … prevented me from thinking like a teacher on the defensive against students’ behavior; behavior that I feel re ects negatively on my capacity to teach. And it made me instead think like a student and give the student the constant bene t of the doubt”. With feedback from her instructor, Jill gradually began to take her case study students’ perspective on events that happened to him at school more and more, a process that she says was only worked out gradually over time. Interestingly enough, as she learned to do this with him, she discovered some interesting changes in his behavior in class over time: “I really got his trust and he stopped being a behavior problem at all”. Student Re ections on Dif culties and Dilemmas: 1999–2000 Although students reported on a diversity of bene ts—motivational, social, and intellectual in nature—that arose from completing the case study assignment, not all students immediately appreciated the assignment or completed it easily. Here, I want to brie y mention the essence of their comments about some of the dif culties and challenges they encountered in completing the case study assignment. Probably the most frequent challenge that students noted about the case study assignment, in a variety of ways, was that it was simply a dif cult assignment. Performing a case study of an adolescent is hard—as one woman said—“This is de nitely my most challenging course!”. It is hard because it takes a lot of time emotionally and cognitively—time to get the student to trust and open up, time to collect data, time to reduce it, and time to synthesize it into a meaningful narrative. Some students also reported experiencing role con icts in completing the assignment. These students felt that, by singling out a student for study, they undermined their role as an impartial teacher by signaling differential treatment of students. This was not widespread, but did tend to be mentioned by those students who were already taking substantial responsibility in their student teaching placements and who picked a student in that class. Many students teach or observe in more than one class where they have differing levels of responsibility. Thus, we have instructed them to choose a student in a class in which their teaching role is less prominent or even to choose a student from another class entirely. Some students also reported feeling somewhat overwhelmed because they picked extremely troubled adolescents for their case study. To counteract the intensity of such encounters, we connect such students with graduate students in our counseling psychology program in the School of Education who offer them advice, resources, and support. Finally, students who come to the program without a social science background sometimes require more support in thinking contextually, psychologically, and sociologically about their case study student. This process can feel like an unnatural, even an unnecessary, act for some prospective teachers, especially if their love of the subject matter and not necessarily their love of adolescents was their motivation for entering the teaching profession. Thus, resistance to taking a developmental rather


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than a subject-matter approach to teaching remains a challenge for some students as they encounter the case study assignment. Personal Re ections on On-going Challenges with the Case Study Islands of Understanding. Several challenges remain in the use of the case study from my perspective as one of the course instructors. First, the 10-week quarter necessitates that we cover a wide ranges of topics in a short period of time. My impression is that, in terms of actual content learned, the case studies often are characterized by “islands of understanding”. That is, it is very dif cult to promote the synthesis of ideas from across the disparate areas of the case study: assessments of cognitive, social-emotional, and moral development; characterization of the major life contexts in which adolescents are developing; the salient life events around which identities are being formed and re ned; and the disparate elements that indeed make-up that elusive concept of “identity”. That “islands of understanding” characterize the case studies is really not surprising, given that both our self-understanding as well as our capacity to understanding others, even among the most seasoned of social scientists or clinicians, is always partial and incomplete. Nonetheless, it would be bene cial to have the case study assignment revisited over the course of the year as student-teachers grow in the professional experiences. But, alas, time does not usually permit it. What student-teachers do seem to learn are certain guiding principles that can foster understanding of adolescents in the future: the need to take the adolescents’ perspective, the need to think about their students as whole human beings, and the importance of searching for underlying motivations for problematic manifest behavior that may in fact be more benign than the behavior itself (e.g., acting out as a call for attention). They also learn things about families, culture, adolescents’ goals and needs, and so on that inform their general understandings of their adolescent students. A Labor of Love. Time is a challenge not only for student-teachers, but also for instructors who work with case methods such as this. It is clear that the improvements my colleagues and I have made in our adolescent development course over time have come at the cost of sustained hard work and an increasing amount of time we invest in teaching the course each year. Reading logs each week takes time; reading case studies that are 40 pages in length, once, twice, sometimes three times for all students to allow for cycles of revision and to model the utility of formative assessments, takes tremendous amounts of time. Is the investment worth it? We think it is, but I want to be clear that it is a labor of love, a labor that requires substantial increases in instructional time out of the classroom. Veiling and Revealing. As noted by other workers (for example, Shulman, 1992), one danger of case studies is that they are prone to over-generalization—that is, the case study comes to represent the truth instead of partial, local, contextualized truths about an adolescent life in progress. In my experience, these issues come up in ways more subtle than pronouncements that over-generalize the ndings of a case to



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“adolescents” generally. First, there is a reverse process in which students under-utilize or even discard theory that they do not immediately see as relevant to their particular case study student. Helping student-teachers to explicitly see that the particulars of their case are not necessarily applicable generally to adolescents, and also that some but not all general theories are applicable to a particular case is an on-going challenge. Another subtle form of over-generalization concerns the process by which student-teachers extend their own memories of their adolescence in an effort to interpret the data of their case study. The extension of personal memory can reveal subtle aspects of the case study student’s life when resonances between that student and the student-teacher’s own life path are present (e.g., the dif culties of being a minority in a culture with discrimination; the vicissitudes of being an early maturing female). On the contrary, the extension of personal memory also can veil a studentteachers’ wider appreciation for the uniqueness of the adolescent whose life history may in fact diverge in signi cant ways from their own, despite surface similarities. Instructor feedback on logs and case study drafts is an essential corrective to each of these potential stumbling blocks. Bridges are for Crossing Over. There is a Zen saying that “bridges are for crossing over, not for building houses on”. There is a danger, eluded to in the statements of the young woman Jill earlier, that students rst under-identify, then over-identify with the perspectives of their students. Many beginning teachers want more than anything, especially if they are close in age to their students, to bond with them and be accepted by them. This process can in some instances hinder their own assumption of the mantle of responsibility for not just relating to, but also teaching and leading their student charges to desirable educational ends. The adolescent case study is a bridge, just as the cooperating teacher is a bridge, between autobiographical and the professional ways of understanding adolescents and what it means to be their teacher, respectively (see Figure 1). Helping student-teachers appreciate both student and teacher perspectives is a rst step. Helping them cross-over these bridges so that they can integrate their understanding of adolescents’ needs with their teaching strategies and skills is that rare bird of a re ective, multiperspective, teacher identity we are trying to cultivate. The example from Liz earlier, in which she has intimate knowledge of her case study student and observes the particularly effective ways her cooperating teacher makes affordances for this student in the classroom, is perhaps one of the most valuable events that can come out of the case study assignment in this regard. Such experiences provide a powerful bridge between what student-teachers see as possible in the present and what they hope to be able to accomplish themselves as a teacher in the own right in the future. Two Conclusions In summary, I want to offer two tentative, simple conclusions to the present case study of the use of a case study in an adolescent development course for teachers. First, I am of the opinion that the case study assignment has yielded signi cant


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bene ts for those of us who teach the class. My own satisfaction with teaching the course tended to increase with that of the students, and this has also been true for my co-instructors. The reason for this is rather obvious but perhaps bears stating: as students began to see the course as more relevant and as they engage more deeply with the material, they provide “food” to their instructors in the form of class engagement that nourishes their own desires to teach. In addition, I have found that the case study provides me with an anchor and an orient around which I plan my instruction—something I felt was missing from my approach to the course when I rst began co-teaching it in 1996. As one of my students wrote, and I corroborate her insight: Whole class discussions were de nitely the opportunities for the greatest learning for me. I felt lost, confused, and overwhelmed often times during explanations of overheads and lectures, but when we discussed the readings and concepts as a class, and applied the theories to our respective case study students, it was easier to develop more complex ideas for my own work. Thus, my second tentative conclusion is that the changes in pedagogical practice we enacted seem to have affected, in reciprocal fashion, not only we instructors, but also the students we instructed. Many of the educational ends we are seeking to promote in our teacher education courses, especially the interweaving of theory, research, and practice, seem to become realizable through the use of an adolescent case study. Students are clearly getting more out of the course than they were prior to the case study assignment. What is most exciting for me as a developmental psychologist is that there is evidence that student-teachers internalize the notion that developmental knowledge is critical to their role as an effective secondary school teacher. Can I state unequivocally that they have learned more about adolescent development than they did before we used the adolescent case study? No. Can I state unequivocally that they learned more about what it means to be a teacher of adolescents than they did before the use of the case study? I cannot. Is this method superior to others in weaving together theory, research, and practice for perspective teachers? I do not fully know. What I can conclude is that the present article represents a rst, not a nal, step in evaluating the educational outcomes that seem possible through the use of a case study of a single adolescent in a developmental psychology course designed for prospective secondary teachers. More than attempting to prove speci c points, I have attempted to point out existence proofs of the speci c kinds of learning that can accompany the completion of an adolescent case study. If I have provided some evidence of learning outcomes, and some food for thought for other teacher educators who wish to use such methods, then I would gauge that my twin goals in writing this case study of my own teaching have been accomplished. I want to conclude this paper with a student-teacher’s voice once again. It comes from the conclusion of a case study I nished grading one day before I originally presented this paper at the American Educational Research Association conference in Seattle in April 2001. This particular student struggled all quarter with the researching and writing up of the case study. He eventually took an ‘incomplete’ but continued to work on the case study for months. The result was a case study that



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was light years beyond where the rst draft had been. So much improvement had occurred that I want to honor this student’s perseverance and accomplishments here. His conclusion seemed to capture the kinds of goals my co-instructors and I aspire to attain with students by using the case study in our adolescence course: an explication of content knowledge and themes discussed in the class; a compassion for adolescents; a reiteration of the ethic of service that is often behind teachers’ commitment to the profession and their students; and an implicit commitment to understanding and nurturing the development of adolescents as one of the core goals of the secondary school teacher. The case was about a 15-year old boy, Carl, who was a drum major at school, who felt like an outsider, and who was struggling to feel like he was a good and worthy person. The case was written by Peter, a prospective high school chemistry teacher. The rest is the verbatim conclusion of his case study, a section with a heading that reads “What’s Learned”. Understanding adolescents’ choices, their behaviors in the classroom, their goals and life aspirations, requires an understanding of the places in which they are living and growing (Roeser, 2000, personal communication). Carl is an intelligent and sensitive adolescent. Together, the social contexts of school, peers, and home have all impacted in shaping the psychology of this young man. What hope I have for Carl is that he resolves within himself the struggle to accept who he is, and nds within himself a person who is capable of loving and being loved. Society may change, but the basic needs of adolescents do not. Facilitation of learning relies on factors that are largely interpersonal in nature, and like all adolescents, Carl needs af rmation and recognition for who he is from adults in his community (Ryan & Powelson, 1991). During this tumultuous time of personal de nition, adolescents on the road to adulthood could bene t from the positive in uence of committed teachers. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his “The Drum Major Instinct” speech, proclaimed that if one wants to be recognized for his or her greatness or signi cance, then they ought to be rst in love and generosity. “Jesus gave a new de nition of greatness” says Dr. King, “He who is greatest, shall serve. Therefore everyone can be great, you only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love.” In this ever changing world out tted with all its new technology, the common denominator remains our connection to one another. Students are young people in search of discovering and de ning who they are. Who better to lend them a guiding hand, than a teacher? Notes 1. Dr Linda Darling-Hammond, Dr Denis Phillips, Dr Brigid Barron and Dr Amado Padilla, graduate students Kris Gowen, Karen Strobel, Rosemary Gonzalez, and Cary Watson, and myself have all worked collaboratively on reforming and teaching the course over the past ve years. The improvements in the course over these years that I discuss in the present paper are


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a re ection of the teamwork and collaboration we all actualized together. Thus, throughout this manuscript, I tend to use “we” and “our” to re ect this collective effort and our collective investment in “our” students in the Stanford Teacher Education Program. The STEP runs for four continuous academic quarters, beginning in the summer. Speci cally, students receive a California Professional Clear Single Subject Teaching Credential with Crosscultural, Language, and Academic Development (CLAD) certi cation. The selection and joining phase of the case study is critical insofar as a poor relationship with the case study student results in poor data and an inability of the student-teacher to understand their case study student. The number of students that the course ratings were based on in Figure 3 varied from year to year. In 1996–1997, course ratings reported here were collected from the full cohort of STEP students (n 5 55 in 1996, n 5 46 in 1997). From 1998 to 2000, these ratings represent the students in my section alone (n 5 21, n 5 17, n 5 20, respectively). However, personal communications with my co-instructors, Dr Linda Darling-Hammond and Dr Amado Padilla, con rmed that course ratings for each of us, the three instructors for the course 1998–2000, are very similar. Students were also encouraged to provide such information anonymously if they wished so as to protect them in the event they felt particularly critical about aspects of the course. The STEP atmosphere is as such, however, that open dialogue is more the norm, even if that dialogue is rather critical of the program. Pseudonyms are used throughout.

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