Teaching English Education and Lurching Forward.

ob, a student in an undergraduate Methods of Teaching Literature class, was a shoulder-shrueeer whose seeminelv neeative reaction to ■ % class, was a shoulder-shrugger whose see ingly negative reaction to class threw me off my stride. His response to class escalated throughout the semester from harely noticeable to completely distracting, and I responded with a curious form of tunnel vision. Eventually an office-hour interaction with Rob caused me to lurch forward and confront, yet again, a hidden bias in my teaching. The years I have spent teaching English in both high school and college classrooms have led me to a personally applied but tacit theory-in-use that echoes Schon's 1983 discussion in The Reflective Practitioner. When one's theory-in-use is different from one's espoused theory, he posits, "it may be difficult to detect and correct one's errors" (p. 305); when some critical inci dent in my teaching startles me into unearthing this incongruity, I find that my theory-in-use is flawed. Rob's classroom behavior—and my perceptions of it—was just such a critical incident. One of the consequences was that I began to understand that my aspiration to be a "learner centered" teacher was not necessarily reflected in some of my "teacher centered" practices. The classroom setting in Methods of Teaching Literature was not unusual for this required class for English education majors. There were