“The best teaching experiences I have had are when I am actively learning. When you reflect on your own pedagogy, you find and discover wondrous and not so wondrous thins, stances, latitudes. This type of inquiry, which I assist students in doing in their own lives, leads to important discoveries that push one into what Vygotsky calls ‘The Zone of Proximal Development’.”

Monica Rowley, 2006

Click here to read more of Monica’s comments about her year in the TEP program.

Inquire

Our teaching and learning community — faculty, students and mentors — believes that ongoing improvement in schools occurs through seeing ourselves as researchers, using our own practice as sites of research.

Throughout the program, students collaborate to develop and respond to each other’s inquiry questions, grounding the inquiry stance in their daily practice.  Over time, students focus on a question of importance to them, deriving from their daily practice, to guide their developing practitioner inquiry and to serve as the structure of their culminating portfolio.

Students have additional opportunities to work with faculty members in their research, which often takes place in neighborhood schools. See the website for more information on specific faculty research activity: http://www.gse.upenn.edu/faculty_research/

We encourage students to present their practitioner research at PennGSE’s Ethnography in Education Forum, which takes place every spring. See the website for more information: http://www.gse.upenn.edu/cue/forum.php

Students are encouraged to submit and review articles for the online Urban Education Journal: http://www.urbanedjournal.org/