Tracing the Mediating Contexts of Disciplinary Writing Instruction from Professional Development to Classrooms.

professional development on disciplinary writing instruction;Education;Social Sciences;Educational Studies

Kwok, Michelle MaiMonte-Sano, Chauncey B ;

University of Michigan

关键词: professional development on disciplinary writing instruction;    Education;    Social Sciences;    Educational Studies;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/120738/mmnguyen_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

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

【 摘 要 】

Despite the push towards educational reform for disciplinary writing instruction, attention to the role of professional development in achieving those reforms is poorly understood. To understand the experiences of subject area teachers learning to teach disciplinary writing, I conducted a qualitative study examining a professional development program called the ;;Writing Group” (WG), which was designed to prepare teachers to teach disciplinary writing through collaborative learning experiences. The WG was comprised of a multidisciplinary team of teachers (n participants= 267) that participated in professional development involving three-day trainings and monthly meetings. I studied the context of the professional development and followed four focal teachers into their classrooms to study how teachers enacted what they learned in the professional development. I engaged in constant comparative analysis the professional development and instructional data to find patterns within and across the data sources and to triangulate my findings. Analyses revealed that the contexts of the WG and teachers’ schools mediated teachers’ understandings of disciplinary literacy instruction and how they taught writing. The WG gravitated toward general perspectives on writing in part because teachers conflated interdisciplinary approaches to writing instruction with generic approaches, which did not fully meet the teachers’ instructional needs. Even so, teachers were highly invested in the professional development because they felt a sense of solidarity and ownership of their teaching within the WG community. Furthermore, the general approaches to writing fed into teachers’ instruction, even as the pressures of teaching bolstered teachers’ use of generic writing strategies and their loyalty to the WG. The teachers found solace in the WG as a protected space away from these pressures of teaching, so they remained positive of the WG and did not critique it or its members for fear of jeopardizing the organization, even if teachers enacted strategies with limited success. My findings suggest that disciplinary writing instruction is challenging and requires disciplinary understanding as well as literacy expertise. Further examination of the structures of professional development is necessary to understand how to honor teachers’ expertise while also leaving room for members to productively critique each other and grow.