E X E M P L A R Y
A R T I C L E S
Educating Teacher Kelli Funk
This story takes the reader on a journey with University of Pennsylvania student-teacher Kelli Funk, who grew up on a farm in Lancaster County, PA, and details her trials and tribulations in trying to reach a class of inner city students at West Philadelphia High School. Despite her best efforts, and to her great frustration, she fails to teach them much biology, but they teach her volumes about their lives and the shortcomings of their educations. The story is rich with classroom scenes and portraits of Kelli, her students, and her cooperating teacher, a worldly-wise veteran who patiently watches Kelli try her best. Read closely the passage of classroom dialogue and description that can be found about halfway through the article, beginning with: "We're going to try something new today." The punch line of the article: after this experience Kelli still desperately wants to teach in Philadelphia, the district dallies too long offering her a job, and she winds up in a suburban school closer to home. Full Article
Exemplary Journalism
As journalists we can go places our audience cannot—including into classrooms other than our child’s. We bring useful tools with us on our visits: attentiveness, curiosity, questions, knowledge, metaphor, and the language of description and analysis. When we use those tools well we can bring back for audiences word pictures of what is at the heart of all education—teaching and learning.
In the sidebar are exemplary articles about classrooms and teaching: powerful images of skillful teachers hard at work and students deeply engaged in the pursuit of learning.
We want to keep adding to this page. If you write, post, or broadcast education stories that take us into classrooms and show us what goes on there, please send a short note and a link to your story to hechinger@tc.columbia.edu.