In this essay, Jessie L. Auger reflects on the practice of Buddy Editing in her first-grade classroom as an opportunity for student and teacher learning. By explicitly revealing her pedagogical approach and sharing transcripts of students’ engagement with her Buddy Editing protocol, Auger presents the dynamics of a learning partnership that exists among teachers and students and between students. She offers a glimpse of what happens in one classroom when the teacher focuses on providing students with the appropriate tools, environment, structure, and access to the subject matter; trusts students to enact their own agency as learners; and takes a reflective stance on improving her practice based on lessons from student practice.
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Jessie L. Auger, a bilingual teacher in Boston, has been an elementary classroom teacher in Watertown, Cambridge, and Boston for twenty-four years. Living in El Salvador and Puerto Rico and collaborating with teachers there for more than a decade helped to form her as an educator. An experienced teacher leader, mentor, and coach in the areas of literacy, math, project-based integrated curriculum design and best practices with English language learners, and bilingual programming, Auger has provided professional development in the form of courses, workshops, and speaking engagements locally, nationally, and internationally. Her essay “Who Do We Hear? The Power of Language in the Mathematics Classroom” appears in the anthology Rethinking Elementary Education (Rethinking Schools, 2012). In 2007 Auger was named Massachusetts Teacher of the Year.