When Does Literacy Professional Development Work? Understanding How Instructors Learn to Teach Writing in their Disciplinary Classrooms.

disciplinary writing instruction;professional development;teacher learning;literacy;frameworks;English Language and Literature;Education;Humanities;Social Sciences;English and Education

Lillge, Danielle M.Sweeney, Megan L. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: disciplinary writing instruction;    professional development;    teacher learning;    literacy;    frameworks;    English Language and Literature;    Education;    Humanities;    Social Sciences;    English and Education;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/111474/lillged_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation asks how disciplinary literacy professional development (PD) can effectively support instructors’ learning about writing instruction. Common sense and existing research suggest easy answers. For literacy PD to work: Allocate the time necessary for instructors to learn about and try writing pedagogy; rehearse and reflect on literacy practices; and access exemplary PD curricula. Using ethnographic methods, this study reveals the inadequacy of those assumptions. It describes a cross-disciplinary team’s yearlong participation in research-based literacy training. By analyzing their discursive interactions across contexts, it highlights a critical element missing from their PD experiences: framework analysis. Frameworks include the cognitive schemas, which emerge through social interactions bound by cultural norms, that instructors employ to make sense of conversations about writing. Frameworks also include how instructors define and redefine ;;what we are about” through their interactions. The study demonstrates how the frameworks instructors employ and encounter support or impede their ability to make meaning of PD experiences. Instructors followed three paths as they participated and worked to apply PD learning to their writing instruction: discontinuing, negotiating, and integrating. Those who successfully negotiated conflicts found congruence among frameworks and responded to contextual realities at their urban high school. Those who integrated PD learning into their instruction benefited from disciplinary writing experiences and specific kinds of support such as reflective writing, explicit conversations about framework conflicts, and participation in a teacher research inquiry process where they pursued answers to their questions about disciplinary writing.Integrating framework considerations into literacy PD can more effectively support instructors’ learning about disciplinary writing instruction. The study offers practical suggestions for accomplishing this goal, including why and how PD designers and facilitators should: solicit the frameworks for writing instruction that instructors employ; name and articulate the disciplinary writing frameworks that inform the PD curriculum for and with participants; and support instructors’ framework negotiation by responding to their contextual realities and offering them ongoing disciplinary writing experiences that they can draw on as they work to integrate PD learning and improve the quality of writing instruction—and, by extension, student writing—in their disciplinary classrooms.