Composing a Teaching Life by Ruth Vinz

Composing a Teaching Life by Ruth Vinz

In efforts to reform English education, little attention is given to English teachers' conceptual understanding of their work; the focus instead is on their actions and whether or not those actions lead to effective instruction. With Composing a Teaching Life, Ruth Vinz digs deeper. She refines her ways of remembering and telling and in the process brings meaning to her own twenty-nine years of teaching. She also presents the perspectives of other practitioners--four student teachers, four first-year teachers, and three seasoned teachers--who describe how their knowledge, preparation, and methods of inquiry affect their actions, beliefs, and practice. Her goal is to involve readers in the complexities of teaching and learning so that they will re-search and re-examine their own teaching lives.

Composing a Teaching Life is divided into two sections. Part One covers the ways different representations of teachers as professionals affect their self-identities, major issues in learning to teach, the advantages of reflective inquiry among experienced teachers, and examples of how teachers actualize their beliefs in their practice. In Part Two, teachers offer glimpses into classrooms that serve as vehicles for drawing out, articulating, questioning, and illuminating what's happening at particular schools, making the book ideal for college methods courses and staff development programs.

Fran Claggett taught high school English and humanities for many years. Former department chair and mentor teacher at Alameda High School, Fran was twice named Teacher of the Year in her district and county, where she initiated an achievement and portfolio writing assessment program. Her teaching experience includes college appointments in English, biology, and physical education; she has also been the James Lynch Lecturer in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She has given workshops for teachers across the country, evaluated schools in Guam, and taught in the Bay Area Writing Project Panama and the Virgin Islands summer workshops.

Ruth Vinz is a professor and the Enid and Lester Morse Chair in English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Before becoming a teacher educator, she taught in secondary schools for more than twenty years. Vinz is the author of several Boynton/Cook titles, including Learning the Landscape: Inquiry-Based Activities for Comprehending and Composing, Recasting the Text: Inquiry-Based Activities for Comprehending and Composing (both coauthored with Fran Claggett and Louann Reid, 1996), Inside Out: Developmental Strategies for Teaching Writing, Second Edition (coauthored with Dan Kirby and Tom Liner, 1988), and Composing a Teaching Life, 1996.