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Purpose The purpose of this study is to understand how preservice teachers (PTs) learn about disciplinary literacy in English language arts (ELA). In mathematics and writing, research has found that teachers’ participation in disciplinary work can support their understanding of domain-specific inquiry, problem-solving and argumentation. Design/methodology/approach This exploratory, qualitative case study of an English methods course extends that work into ELA, asking how PTs’ participation in collaborative literary reasoning (CLR) influences their understanding of ELA as a discipline and their instructional planning processes. Findings Findings indicate that CLR supported PTs to define ELA as a collaborative discipline in which multiple interpretations of literature are valued; to name specific disciplinary literacy practices; to identify a focus and purpose for teachers’ design and revision of lesson plans; and to inform their thinking about text selection and complexity. Originality/value This work highlights the potential of collaborative literary reasoning to support PTs’ learning about disciplinary literacy instruction.

Decorated with a brightly colored book jacket and blurbs, True or False: A CIA Analyst’s Guide to Spotting Fake News targets teenagers and—by extension—their English and social studies teachers. “F...

Nationally published research suggests middle and high school educators are often experts within their respective disciplines, but they may be unprepared to effectively consider literacy needs and ...

Background/ContextThe Core Practice movement continues to gain momentum in teacher education research. Yet critics highlight that equitable teaching cannot be reduced to a set of “core” practices, arguing that such a reduction risks representing teaching as technical work that will be neither culturally responsive nor sustaining. Instead, they argue that preservice teachers need opportunities to develop professional reasoning that takes the specific strengths and needs of students, communities, and subject matter into account.PurposeThis analysis takes up the question of how and whether pedagogies of investigation and enactment can support preservice teachers’ development of the professional reasoning that equitable teaching requires. It conceptualizes two types of professional reasoning: interpretive, in which reasoners decide how to frame instructional problems and make subsequent efforts to solve them, and prescriptive, in which reasoners solve an instructional problem as given.Research DesignThis work is a qualitative, multiple case study, based on design research in which preservice teachers participated in three different cycles of investigation and enactment, which were designed around a teaching practice central to equitable teaching: making student thinking visible. Preservice teachers attended to students’ thinking in the context of the collaborative analysis of students’ writing and also through designed simulations of student-teacher writing conferences.Findings/ResultsPreservice teachers’ collaborative analysis of students’ writing supported prescriptive professional reasoning about disciplinary ideas in ELA and writing instruction (i.e., How do seventh graders use hyperbole? How is hyperbole related to the Six Traits of Writing?), while the simulation of a writing conference supported preservice teachers to reason interpretively about how to balance the need to support students’ affective commitment to writing with their desire to teach academic concepts about writing.Conclusions/RecommendationsThis analysis highlights an important heuristic for the design of pedagogies in teacher education: Teacher educators need to attend to preservice teachers’ opportunities for both interpretive and prescriptive reasoning. Both are essential for teachers, but only interpretive reasoning will support teachers to teach in ways that are both intellectually rigorous and equitable. The article further describes how and why a tempting assumption—that opportunities to role-play student-teacher interactions will support preservice teachers to reason interpretively, while non-interactive work will not—is incomplete and avoidable.

As readers know, The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas for Middle and High School Teachers publishes articles of interest to middle level and high school teacher...

BackgroundLong-standing calls to infuse technical language in teaching—what we call the Professional Language Project—have been revived in recent years along with the core practices movement in teacher education. The Professional Language Project has been identified as a desired outcome of research and a potential benefit to teacher education.ObjectiveDrawing on sociolinguistic studies of teachers’ sensemaking, we critique the Professional Language Project to show its limits in making the intended contribution to teaching and teacher education.Research DesignThis analytic essay uses a practice perspective on both language and teaching to interrogate the premises of the Professional Language Project. Specifically, we hold up its goals against empirical findings about how teachers use language to make sense of instructional decisions in their workplaces.ConclusionsEmpirical studies of teachers’ in situ language use point to two fallacies in the Professional Language Project. First, the presence or absence of technical terms in teachers’ talk does not relate to the depth of their sensemaking or instructional sophistication, indicating that technical terms do not accomplish the conceptual goals that some Professional Language Project advocates suggest. Second, a prevailing common-sense discourse culture in teaching often results in conceptual slippage in the use of technical terms, leading words to be absorbed into existing conceptual systems more than they catalyze new understandings.

Whole-school reform models frequently include instructional coaching, yet instructional coaches typically spend relatively little time working with teachers on instruction. Using survey and interview data from district leaders, school administrators, and instructional coaches in one urban school district, this mixed-methods analysis asks how district- and school-level policies and expectations were related to coaches’ time use. Coaches accountable to district leaders spent more time working with teachers on instruction than their school-hired counterparts, who devoted more time to administrative and teaching duties. However, all coaches had limited opportunities to work with teachers in ongoing ways. Also, as district accountability systems became more robust, all coaches engaged in more administrative work. Implications for school and district policy are discussed.

Although coaching holds great promise for professional development, instructional coaches are often asked to take on responsibilities that are not focused on improving instruction. The authors discuss a quantitative study of four school districts and a qualitative analysis of a single district that, together, reveal how hiring practices and school assignments play a role in coaches’ use of time.

Academic coaching is complex work, requiring pedagogical and content-specific expertise, as well as trust-building skills and an understanding of adult learning. Despite this, little research focuses on the structures through which coaches learn to coach. In this study, we partnered with four mathematics coaches and one district administrator in a public school district to conduct 15 semi-structured, longitudinal interviews focused on coaches’ attributions of their professional learning. Coaches cited 30 distinct attributions of their professional learning, reporting frequent opportunities to learn about pedagogy and content, but fewer opportunities to learn about coaching. Implications for practice and research are discussed.

Increasingly, instructional improvement efforts include teacher communities as part of their overall strategy, yet the relationship between teachers’ talk and professional learning remains underspecified. Using a discourse perspective on learning, this article compares opportunities to learn (OTLs) in the collaborative conversations of 3 mathematics teacher workgroups. We examined the differences in OTLs in 17 hr of videotaped meetings from 3 groups at different levels of instructional accomplishment in secondary mathematics. Using mixed methods, we uncovered differences in the groups’ interactions and found that OTLs were not equally distributed. Instead, teacher groups whose active participants demonstrated the greatest facility with ambitious instruction also had the richest conversational OTLs. We interpret this as an accumulated advantage developmental story: Because collaborative work in teaching involves problem posing and the articulation of practice, teachers’ conceptions get built into the frami...

In the accountability era, educators are pressed to use evidence-based practice. In this comparative case study, we examine the learning opportunities afforded by teachers’ data use conversations. Using situated discourse analysis, we compare two middle school mathematics teacher workgroups interpreting data from the same district assessment. Despite similarities in their contexts, the workgroups invoked different data use logics that shaped teachers’ learning opportunities. The first workgroup’s instructional management logic linked increasing student achievement to individualization. The second workgroup’s instructional improvement logic focused on students’ thinking and linked it to instructional changes but was limited by broader instructional management logics. Evidence-based practice cannot be understood apart from the data use logics in teachers’ communities, which are shaped by policy constraints.