Jennifer Lynn Wolf

Jennifer has been teaching English and drama in suburban, rural and urban California high schools for the past 15 years.

For the last 10 of those years, she has also served as a senior research associate with a Stanford-based research group, studying out-of-school learning environments young people choose for themselves. Focusing on what creative, effective youth art programs can teach schools, Jennifer has authored chapters in Handbook for Literacy Educators: Research on Teaching and the Communicative Arts and Building Moral Communities Through Educational Drama. She is co-author (with Jan Mandell) of a book about the theory and practice of creating original plays with adolescents, titled Acting, Learning and Change, due out in the fall of 2000 by Heinemann Press.

Jennifer is also featured in ArtShow, an hour-long documentary film about the creative contexts in which young people learn arts in their communities. This film highlights the establishment of Student Illustrators, a group of student artists whom Jennifer has researched for the past 5 years as part of her study into reluctant gifted and talented students. She is currently at work on a book on this topic, titled Make Me: Learning Teaching from the Reluctant Gifted & Talented Student.

For the past two years, while on maternity leave from the classroom, Jennifer has designed and coordinated the New Teacher Academy at Rancho Cotate High School in Rohnert Park, California, which supports teachers new to the profession through workshops, one-on-one collaboration and academic support groups.

She holds an undergraduate degree in literature, theater and education from Northwestern University and a Masters in the Art of Teaching from Stanford University. She has been accepted to Stanford's doctoral program in Curriculum and Teacher Education for the Fall of 2000.

NEW TEACHER ACADEMY

BOOKS

Acting, Learning and Change examines the philosophy and practice of creating original plays with adolescents. It is a book about the power of acting, about the place of arts in our schools, and about the scholarship of teaching. The text is co-authored by two high school teachers, one a practicing drama teacher and director of 20 years, the other an English teacher and education researcher of 15 years. Together Mandell and Wolf developed a method for examining what happens in the performing arts classroom and then used this method to outline a step-by-step method of creating original performance methods with teen actors.

The book is divided into five chapters, each chapter a stage in the process of performance creation:

The text also offers extensive appendices addressing specific requirements of the performance arts teacher: an annotated bibliography, lesson plans to begin the year and run a playwriting festival, samples of press releases and other necessary marketing devices, and a detailed description of Wolf and Mandell's teacher-to-teacher research methods. The result is a text which is usable from a number of perspectives: from the perspective of the introspective teacher looking for a philosophical change in the classroom, and from the perspective of a teacher looking for immediately useful techniques in the performance classroom and throughout the curriculum.

Make Me: Learning Teaching from the Reluctant Gifted and Talented Student
Jennifer Lynn Wolf

Make Me explores a group of students who often promote their own dismissal within the classroom: the reluctant gifted and talented. Specifically it looks at how these students offer valuable information to their teachers about how to best promote education to students who seem to want it least.

The initial section of the volume discusses features that mark the reluctant gifted and talented. Following this discussion, several chapters illustrate each concept through a case study of a single student. These case studies have been developed on the basis of extensive classroom observations, analysis of students-generated material, and on extensive interviews not only with the students themselves but also their parents and friends. The chapter defining and illustrating these features include:

• Ability to Absorb Information Whole
• Engagement in Forms of Expression Rarely Receiving Classroom Recognition
• Complex Strategies for Hiding Talents
• Complex Strategies for Promoting Talents
• The Introverted and Extroverted Students
• The Intersection Between Learning Difficulties and Learning Gifts
• The Relationship Between Art and Reluctant Talent

For example, many students who show reluctance to indicated their gifts and talents can grasp an assignment in a single unit and move directly to its completion in their minds. However, execution of the intervening steps that most students need to undertake come slowly and unwillingly, and these students often look at breakdown in scope-and-sequence or outline and drafts as a waste of their time. The failure to engage in these intermediate steps puts the students in a discipline situation, engenders boredom and resentment, and teachers face difficult challenges in enabling these students to move beyond the assignment sequence to a full product in an abbreviated period of time.

For each feature discussed and illustrated, there are accompanying discussion of teachers' strategies for handling evidence of these traits, as well as celebrating students' talents within the classroom.