Name: Jennifer Suesse

1. Why are you choosing to do portfolio as your final project?

There are four main reasons I would like to do a portfolio to represent my achievements in Bank Street’s Early Adolescence program. First, this is exactly the type of reflective exercise for which I came to Bank Street. I could have taken a teaching job and done my coursework concurrently instead of deciding to enroll in this pre-service program. However, I decided to invest this time and money—before the demands of full-time teaching employment take over my life—to think and learn about educational theory in a concentrated way. I plan to be in this field for the remainder of my career, and I think it is essential to start with a solid foundation. At this formative time, I wanted to be surrounded by colleagues and experts to guide and enrich my learning. Taking the time to review my work and reflect upon the things that have been most important to me in order to assemble a thoughtful portfolio would be an ideal capstone project to mark my first steps along this path toward becoming a master teacher.

Second, I would welcome the opportunity to experience firsthand the rigorous, "non-traditional" academic writing required for the portfolio. In college, I was fortunate to take a year-long senior seminar which required the preparation and presentation of two substantial pieces of academic research. I learned a tremendous amount about critical writing from that process, which I put to good use in my subsequent employment as a researcher and case-writer for Harvard Business School. I am proud of the progress I have made as a writer over the past few years, and I find the ability to wield academic language to be a valuable (and lucrative) skill. I love to write, and learn much from doing so, thus I am sure that I could prepare a well-written independent study or directed essay. However, I am continually seeking the chance to try new kinds of writing, and I think the writing required for the portfolio—namely the chance to prepare captions and artifacts instead of chapters—would stretch my own capabilities as a writer in a wonderful way. I am looking to become more creative in my own work, and this would be a perfect chance to push myself in that direction. Furthermore, it would give me a reason to revisit old projects which had a profound impact on my thinking—something we rarely get to do in school—in the context of considering my professional development. I can hardly imagine a more useful final project.

Third, I would like to experience firsthand this non-standard type of assessment. In this era of standardized tests, I would like to be an educator who can speak about alternative methods of reflection, learning, and assessment from personal experience and the student’s perspective. Perhaps, once I have had a chance to make my own portfolio, I will feel comfortable asking my students to do the same.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I would be honored to have a chance to complete a portfolio in collaboration with my colleagues at the school. The reasons I chose to attend Bank Street centered around my desire to study and work closely with a range of diverse and thoughtful colleagues. As a small-town girl, it was with some trepidation that I accepted the offer to come study in New York City. However, as I thought long and hard about my options, the caliber of Bank Street’s student body and the opportunities to interact with other students in meaningful ways (through activities like supervised fieldwork/advisement and portfolios) not only outweighed my concerns and tipped the scales in Bank Street’s favor, but made me very excited to come here. Bank Street’s small class size, combined with its location (New York City simply has more teachers, doing more types of teaching, than anywhere else I looked), meant I would actually get to know and hear the opinions of people whose experiences were far from my own. Nothing, in my view, is more valuable than that to a classroom. Thus far, my mind has been stretched by people who teach abused children in New Jersey, privileged children in Manhattan, as well as children studying at Catholic schools in the Bronx and at public schools in Brooklyn. There are also parents in my classes who can talk about the challenges inherent in raising adolescents, as well as people who until now have never worked with children. All of these different voices enrich my own learning immeasurably.

If I follow my plan to move to a rural school following graduation, my exposure to progressive, reflective educators will necessarily be limited by my location. Granted, there are always ways to surmount such isolation, but nothing compares to sitting in a room with people on a regular basis, building shared knowledge, and challenging each other’s thoughts. This was what I sought in coming to Bank Street and what I hope to find in my portfolio peer review group. I had the good fortune to study as an undergraduate at Williams College, a small liberal arts school in the Berkshires, and grew to depend upon informal, but attentive, peer reviews to stimulate my thinking and improve my work. Thus, I want to do a portfolio not only because I think this format will help me to synthesize and integrate my graduate work, but because, in my experience, such collaboration in conjunction with individual reflection helps me learn best. I know I will be very busy next year, but the opportunity to do a meaningful, reflective, integrative project, in the company of my peers is the reason I came to this city and this institution. I would like to leave New York City knowing I took every advantage of this rich, diverse environment. Life is too short to miss out on opportunities like these.

So, as you consider my application, and see that yes, I will be student teaching and doing additional coursework next year—in short, that I will be a busy person—please do not underestimate how important this portfolio is to me. I would not waste your time or mine with this application if I did not plan to invest seriously in this project. I earned a GPA of 3.957 last semester while taking five classes (fourteen credits), working in the library as a work/study assistant reference librarian and also as a freelance writer (for Harvard), so I know I have the capacity to do good work across many projects simultaneously. Furthermore, because I do work as a writer, I have an appreciation for the time required as well as my own capacity for reflective writing. I will make time for this project/process, because it is one of the most important things I could possibly do next year. I am looking forward to the chance to share constructive feedback with my peers as an active member of the portfolio cohort. Sharing ideas with other people really fires my imagination and makes me think. I doubt I will ever have another such opportunity to sit with a group of colleagues and reflect on both educational practice and purpose.

In sum, of the three options available to me for a final project, I think the portfolio will enable me best to express what I have learned about education in a cumulative way. It would be an honor and privilege to be chosen to reflect and learn together with a portfolio group.

2. Name two artifacts you might include in your portfolio. Select one of these artifacts and write a potential caption that responds to the following questions:

Two artifacts I might include are (1) my final paper from Child Development called "Wizards, Boggarts, and Growing Up: Harry Potter and the Development of Adolescent Morality," which represents important thinking on that fascinating subject; and (2) a course overview note and curricular summary entitled "Instructor’s Guide to Power and Influence" that I prepared during my first year as a research associate at Harvard Business School. A potential caption for the latter artifact follows:
 

After graduation from college, I had the unusual opportunity to go and work for two years as a researcher and case-writer for the faculty who teach organizational behavior at Harvard Business School. As a research associate (RA) appointed first to Professor Herminia Ibarra and then to Professor Linda A. Hill, my job was to contribute to MBA/executive curriculum development and faculty research. Not only was this my first "real" job—a formative experience which will forever influence the way I approach work—but it was also a chance to join an institution dedicated to the study of how effective organizations work, which profoundly changed the way I think about teaching, about learning, and about institutions dedicated to those purposes. For these reasons and more, I have chosen to include a course overview note that I wrote there while in my first year to represent that important experience.

Together with Professor Ibarra, I wrote the Instructor’s Guide to Power and Influence as an introduction and overview to the course she developed for second year MBA students. This type of document represents a crucial part of a faculty member’s promotion package at Harvard (Prof. Ibarra was awarded tenure after our one year together) and is designed to give reviewers a sense for the conceptual foundations, thematic emphases and specific materials included within an instructor’s course. Due to tight time constraints (Prof. Ibarra was teaching this course almost until the May deadline for tenure package submissions), I was given full responsibility for drafting this guide. To prepare for this project, I participated in one-on-one brainstorming sessions with Prof. Ibarra before the course started, prepared many of the materials under her guidance (including four full-length case-studies), debated and helped to design teaching goals for the whole course as well as plans for individual sessions, and attended all the class meetings. It was an incredible experience—especially as a 23-year-old—to have such a role in the teaching of a graduate level business class. The opportunity to summarize my own learning in this type of overview document was rewarding both intellectually and emotionally. When I finished, it felt great to hand someone this guide and say, "Look, here’s what I did this year." Hence, I chose this particular artifact not only because it was important to my professional development, but also because it presents the type of research and writing I did while at HBS in an accessible way.

When I look back at my time at Harvard, it is very difficult to summarize all the things I learned there. I did not anticipate the extent to which my own thinking would continue to be shaped and guided by the professors with whom I was lucky to work, even after I left. First and foremost, I got to observe and work directly with a team of gifted instructors who care tremendously about their work and whose teaching is incredibly supported by their institution. I spent hours in classrooms listening and watching them teach, as well as hours in their offices discussing curriculum design and lesson-planning. From that experience, I learned how to think through perennial teaching issues including prioritization, sequencing, and delivery and developed an appreciation for the complexity of planning and teaching a good lesson. I had the chance to think about how some abstract concept could be brought into the classroom in an accessible, practical way that would feel important and worthwhile to the greatest possible range of students. Not only that, but I got to write case studies and see whether or not they fostered the discussion I’d hoped with students. This was a phenomenal introduction to the famed case-method. Although I didn’t teach the classes, I got to see if the materials I prepared worked or not. I was also coached on my writing—both creative and analytic—which continues to improve with practice, as I still write cases on a freelance basis. Finally, I learned a lot about the content of what I was researching and writing so much about: organizational behavior, which gave me a framework to think about how individual motivation, group dynamics and organizational structure influences a classroom, a school, and a community.

I consider myself to be an inquisitive, open-minded person, and I think these values shaped this learning. When I arrived at HBS, I felt tremendously ignorant. It was only after nine months, or so, that I realized the reason I felt so stupid at work was that I was working with world experts on these subjects. Of course I couldn’t know as much about these subjects as they did. That realization enabled me to feel even more free to ask questions and invite constructive criticism, which in turn strengthened my relationships with the faculty members and helped me do better work. I also tried to use this opportunity to soak up as much as possible about teaching, learning, and including all students in difficult discussions. My commitment to education remained at the core of my professional approach to this job, and therefore, I think I came away from the experience with a greater accumulation of teaching tips, curriculum development training, and significant developmental relationships than the average RA.

My understanding of theory—which began developing in classrooms at Williams—was extended into a much more practical realm during my tenure at HBS. I can now think about pedagogy through the eyes of the professors and have developed a more sophisticated appreciation for the implications of different teaching decisions than I had before. Working full-time on curriculum development allowed me to accumulate more hours of thinking about the relationships between theory and practice, teaching and learning, which makes me more comfortable talking about them today.

Thus, the implications of my work at HBS for my work with children are many. First, I hope that all this practice with glorified lesson planning means that I will be able to be a better classroom teacher. Second, I hope to bring a different perspective to my classroom and school district by virtue of looking through "corporate eyes" for a few years and having exposure to high-quality thinking about leadership in business; I think cross-pollination of insights can be incredibly stimulating. Many people found my decision to go from the religion department at Williams College to work at the Harvard Business School to be an incongruous transition—however for me, it was very natural, and the connection is essential to my own outlook on life and teaching in general. I became a religion major because I wanted to study how communities dealt with powerful ideas. HBS is an institution dedicated to a very similar purpose. Working with the HBS faculty who teach organizational behavior, I discovered tremendous parallels between today’s corporations and religious institutions throughout history. In both situations, I learned about how ideas can be effectively (or ineffectively) passed on from generation to generation. The most successful communities and enterprises were able to foster leadership, learning, creativity, and compassion from within. My hope is to apply that learning within my own community through the public schools. I hope to employ these values within my classroom, and pass them along to my students. The reason I am deciding to work with adolescents, instead of MBA students, is that I think the potential for real, sustained impact is much greater. I look forward to the challenge.

3. If there is a theme you are considering, please state it.

Although I am not yet sure about this theme which will require substantial development, I am considering a portfolio based on a quotation from B.K.S. Iyengar, a yoga guru whose teachings I have been studying for nearly three years. Almost two years ago now, my own yoga teacher quoted Mr. Iyengar in class when we were fretting about a particularly difficult asana (yoga pose) saying: "The slow way is the fast way." Ever since, I have found myself returning to that nugget of wisdom. It is a touchstone for me, something I repeat—almost like a mantra—in difficult situations. In essence, I am reminding myself that real change happens over time, and that to get overly frustrated or angry or disappointed in one moment is a waste of energy. Too often, I think, we humans look for quick results and instant gratification—as demonstrated by everything from catchy advertising slogans to the latest standardized test craze. Instead, as I reflect on my own learning, it is the lessons that I learn bit by bit—over and over—painfully and repeatedly that last and shape the person I have become. It is these core lessons coupled with patience—a quality I strive ever towards—that I hope will guide my own work with children, so that they may appreciate their own capacity for hard work and clear thinking, as described in this delightful passage:

The fatigue of the climb was great but it is interesting to learn once more how much further one can go on one's second wind. I think that is an important lesson for everyone to learn for it should also be applied to one's mental efforts. Most people go through life without ever discovering the existence of that whole field of endeavor which we describe as second wind. Whether mentally or physically occupied most people give up at the first appearance of exhaustion. Thus they never learn the glory and the exhilaration of genuine effort... -- Agnes Ernst
(Katherine Graham's mother)

I would like to include several media in my portfolio, especially since one of my goals in taking on this project is to push myself creatively. I could imagine including a photo-essay, a collage, a journal, an interview, a HTML presentation, a chart, a poem, or a drawing in addition to more standard writing.