The Stories of Learning project seeks to promote classroom voices about the development of students as thinkers and learners.  Although the project has finished, we hope the stories here will provide inspiration for others to write their own Stories of Learning. The kind of writing we seek to encourage tends to be:

1. Active, rather than purely reflective, writing that evolves over time and is embedded within a teacher’s ongoing inquiry about his or her students.  Capturing students’ development requires gathering data, analyzing it along the way, and responding to that instructionally. Most of the stories shared here were part of the teacher’s focused inquiry and span the good part of a school year.
   

2. Writing centered on students’ development more than the act of teaching.  Of course there is a dynamic synergy between the opportunities a teacher creates and students’ development.  It is precisely this connection that these stories seek to highlight.  However, pieces that center on the presentation of pedagogical practices or that offer teaching tips or advice can readily be found elsewhere.
   

3. Writing that includes student voices and documentation of their learning and thinking, as opposed to just describing the teaching actions with generic or generalized student responses.
   

4. Writing that takes us into the classroom, showing rather than telling us what goes on there.
   

5. Writing that may raise as many questions as answers.  Teaching is complex and the process of inquiring into teaching is fertile but messy ground.  The stories presented here are not “best practices” to emulate as much as they are core issues for our professional discussion and reflection.
   

6. Writing that focuses on dispositional development more than learning a skill.  We already have many measures of skill development; however, if we consider the development of thinking as dispositional (see Ritchhart, 2002) then these measures are insufficient.  A major goal of these stories is to show that we as teachers can assess dispositional development in students if we change both what we look at and how we look.