Modeling Adaptive Expertise Together

In this piece, we reflect on our pedagogical responses during the Covid-19 semester as we taught many of the same students in two different undergraduate courses in our English teaching program, namely Teaching Writers in Secondary ELA Classrooms and Assessing Readers and Writers in Secondary Classrooms. We apply the adaptive expertise framework to guide our reflections

SpeakUP: The Power of Writing and Turning Toward Trouble with Young People

When a group of rural teens meet regularly out-of-school to write for social change in their communities, they inquire into those recent moments when they did or did not choose to speak up. This article describes some of the conceptual tools and practical classroom implications for three teachers who participate with SpeakUP. In particular, this piece argues that when young people turn toward trouble together, specifically when they do or do not decide to speak up, they can identify their assumptions and expectations, notice how power is working in both visible and invisible ways, and consider multiple possibilities for future responses in similar situations

Participation and Collaboration in Digital Spaces: Connecting High School and College Writing Experiences

As literacy educators, we\u27re particularly mindful of two different and current conversations about digital literacies that directly inform our experiences in the classroom. The first conversation stems from the development and initial implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for high school instruction (Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSSO] and National Governors Association [NGA] 2010) and the work informing the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (Framework), a statement that outlines expectations for incoming college students (Council of Writing Program Administrators [CWPA], National Council of Teachers of English [NCTE], and the National Writing Project [NWP] 2011). These documents directly affect our curricular decisions in a host of ways. The second conversation that informs our experiences in the classroom is a larger cultural conversation about the implications of digital literacy practices and opportunities. Together, these twin conversations highlight the unsettled, ever-shifting landscape in which the authors of this chapter (Rachel Bear, a high school English teacher; Heidi Estrem and Dawn Shepherd, college professors and writing program administrators; and James E. Fredricksen, a college English education professor) work

Forum: Teacher-Writers: Then, Now, and Next

In this article, the authors reflect upon “the teacher as writer” and describe how they see this concept and movement developing. They articulate a view of the teacher-writer as empowered advocate. Using examples from their scholarship, they illustrate how this powerful idea can transform research conducted about and with teachers. Finally, they draw attention to the potential of the teacher-writer stance as a means of resistance to current reform efforts that disempower teachers

Building Conscious Competence: Reading Our Students, Sharing Our Practice

When I first began teaching middle school students in the early 1990s, it took at least three years and multiple readings of Nancie Atwell\u27s (1987) In the Middle for me to finally muster the courage to change my classroom culture to one of a reading and writing workshop. Looking back on it now, I can see that it was not just fear that held me back, but also a lack of vision and collegiality. That is, I did not have access or opportunity or time to watch writing workshops conducted by other teachers, largely because I did not know anyone, other than Atwell and Linda Rief (1992), who were leading and organizing classrooms in this way. Once I took the leap, though, there was certainly tweaking and revising and reframing to do, but there was no turning back - because creating a classroom culture where reading and writing and talking about reading and writing allowed me to listen to and learn from my students. It is this listening to and learning from students that changed my conversations with my colleagues from one in which we had talked about what students could not do to a conversation about what students could do. Moreover, a reading and writing workshop provided my students and me with opportunities to talk about the choices we made when we read and wrote. We had to articulate our logic and reasoning, and articulating the thinking behind my pedagogical choices was something that my conversations with colleagues sorely lacked

Talking About Teaching: Establishing Trust Amidst Uncertainty

Faced with a day-to-day job that is filled with uncertainty, teachers have to make countless decisions and judgments (Floden & Clark, 1988). Increasingly, it seems, we teachers are asked to not only make those decisions amidst uncertainty, but we are asked to explain and justify those decisions to others. For instance, within our profession we are asked to explain to our colleagues why we do what we do as a way to learn from one another; this may involve such approaches as Teacher Research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Zeichner & Noffke, 2001), Teacher Learning Communities (Lieberman & Miller, 2008; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2003; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001), and more public teaching, which confronts some oft-held simplistic assumptions and represent[s] the complexities of teaching (Hatch, 2005, p. 2)

Resources Preservice Teachers Use to Think about Student Writing

This article identifies five categories of resources that preservice teachers drew on as they considered student writing and planned their own approaches to assessing and teaching writing. Identifying these resources helps us better understand how beginning writing teachers think about student writing—and better understand mismatches that commonly occur between what teacher educators teach and what new teachers actually do. Our study builds on literature that considers how writing teachers are prepared, extends research about how preservice teachers use what they learn,and adds layers of detail to literature about the resources that beginning teachers draw upon to aid and support them in their work. The pedagogical and research projects described in this study stem from a communities-of-practice framework. Our methods surfaced preservice teachers’claims about writing and the resources they drew upon to support those claims. Drawing upon our rhetorical view of writing, we worked inductively to identify these claims and resources, using grounded analysis of transcripts from preservice teachers’ VoiceThread conversations to develop a taxonomy of 15 resources grouped into 5 categories: understanding of students and student writing; knowledge of context; colleagues; roles; and writing. This research has implications for educators and researchers working in teacher preparation. Scaffolded instruction is essential to help beginning teachers use particular resources—and to employ resources in ways connected with rhetorical conceptual frameworks. To that end, the taxonomy of resources can be used as a tool for individual and programmatic assessment, as well as to facilitate scaffolded instruction

Censored Young Adult Sports Novels: Entry Points for Understanding Issues of Identities and Equity

In early 2018, first-year high school student Ny’Shira Lundy challenged the banning of Angie Thomas’s (2017) young adult novel The Hate U Give, which for reasons of vulgarity, was temporarily removed from shelves in Katy, Texas. In February 2018, the more public and privileged National Basketball Association (NBA) players, LeBron James and Kevin Durant, were also challenged, this time by political talk show host Laura Ingraham, who reacted to the players’ unfavorable public comments about the President of the United States. “Must they run their mouths like that?” Ingraham (ingrahamangle, 2018) asked. “Unfortunately, a lot of kids—and some adults—take these ignorant comments seriously. And it’s always unwise to seek political advice from someone who gets paid a hundred million dollars a year to bounce a ball” (Bonesteel & Bieler, 2018). On social media, the hashtag #ShutUpAndDribble exploded

So, What\u27s the Story?: Teaching Narrative to Understand Ourselves, Others, and the World

https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/fac_books/1314/thumbnail.jp

Experience Over All: Preservice Teachers and the Prizing of the \u27Practical\u27

Anyone who has worked with preservice teachers has occasionally felt the vehemence of their desire for more “practical” material and less (or, sometimes, no) material they deem “theory.” By “theory” they seem to mean not only theory in the classic sense but also any evidence from research, discussion of ethics or socioeconomic issues or policy, or other aspects of the context for teaching. By “practical” they seem to mean concrete activities that they can use in the classroom the next day with little or no modification or reflection. Tensions between theory and practice permeate the work of English teacher education, reaching into every area of our work all the way down to course organization and the methods texts we choose (Barrell, 1996; Smagorinsky & Whiting, 1995). “Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it,” we have heard a preservice teacher remark to her classmate. These attitudes are ones we notice most as students enter our programs, most likely inherited from a wider prejudice against “over-theoretical” education programs spread via mass media reporting on education issues and at times by teachers themselves, and as students begin to engage their coursework in earnest these attitudes do soften. Yet as they approach their first field experiences, preservice teachers do seem hungry to know exactly how to teach—and if we know how, they seem to plead, why won’t we just tell them