Anne Elrod Whitney

Beyond "Is This OK?": High School Writers Building Understandings of Genre.

Understandings about genre govern nearly all of the choices writers make. They make choices about form, persuasive moves, conventions, and even ideas through a sense, whether articulated or tacit, of the social situation from which a piece of writing is arising. In a semester-long high school writing course, the authors engaged students in a series of activities designed to help them develop genre awareness. The goal was to support students in becoming more independent and flexible writers who possess genre analysis skills they can apply anywhere. Through whole-class genre studies, self-selected genre studies, and collaborative analyses of state test materials, students built deeper understandings about genre. Their sense of what is “OK” in a piece of writing shifted from successful evaluation by a teacher to successful navigation of the demands of a given rhetorical situation.

Understanding teachers’ writing: authority in talk and texts

In this article, we explore how teachers who make their work public through talk and texts may find their composing complicated by issues of authority. These public composing acts include drafting articles, preparing workshop presentations, authoring op-ed pieces and letters to the editor, developing book manuscripts – creating any of the spoken and written texts by which educators communicate as a field. We draw from three studies in different contexts to examine the authority concerns that teacher-writers experience during the composing process. Our aim is to draw attention to (a) the struggles in process that teachers face as they develop individual pieces and wrestle with rhetorical decisions, as well as (b) the struggles with people, power, and authority that occur as teachers consider how their words, ideas, and experiences circulate in public venues. We see these as intrinsically linked: The writing process is a site where the wider struggles are played out and become visible.

Taking Stock in 2015

In this issue, Marilyn Cochran-Smith provides the first of two Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) articles based on her chapter in the upcoming fifth edition of the Handbook of Research on Teaching (Cochran-Smith, Villegas, Abrams, Chavez Moreno, Mills, & Stern, in press). Her handbook chapter presents the findings from the review of 1,500 teacher education research studies published between 2000 and 2012. JTE is publishing the review in two parts. The first part, the lead article in this issue, describes the procedures and theoretical/analytical framework used in the literature review and outlines three major trends that have influenced the nature of research programs in teacher education: increased attention to teacher quality and accountability, changes in our conceptions of teacher and student learning, and changing demographics. Part 1 also presents the findings from the first of three major research programs in teacher education identified through the search--teacher preparation accountability, effectiveness, and policies. Part 2, to be published in the next issue of JTE, discusses the findings from the remaining two research programs. The first research program includes studies on alternative certification and pathways, analyses of policy trends and discourses, assessment of preservice teachers (PSTs) and/or teacher preparation programs (TPPs), and program evaluation studies. Cochran-Smiths reference in the article to her JTE editorial 10 years prior (Taking Stock in 2005; Cochran-Smith, 2005) prompted us to reflect on the contributions of JTE to advances in teacher education research in the areas identified in the first program described in the study. We comment briefly on research and issues associated with accountability, effectiveness, and policies in relation to the Cochran-Smith article and previous JTE articles published during our tenure as editors. Advances in Research on Teacher Preparation Accountability The theme of accountability has been widespread and persistent over the past 5 years, and JTE has published theme issues and articles related to the use of value-added models to determine the effectiveness of TPPs (Volume 63:5) and to examine the role of performance assessments in accountability (Volume 65:5). The articles on value-added modeling (VAM) for TPPs in the theme issue provide some support for the potential of the approach to provide feedback to policymakers and educators on the achievement of students taught by teachers in different TPPs (Gansle, Noell, & Burns, 2012; Plecki, Elfers, & Nakamura, 2012). However, the potential of using VAM for teacher preparation is diminished by the complexity and limitations of the choice of variables selected for the VAM models; the nature of the accountability criteria; the unidimensional focus on student standardized tests; decisions made about selection, estimation, and reporting; and the unintended consequences of the approach (see Floden, 2012; Goldhaber & Cowan, 2014; Henry, Kershaw, Zulli, & Smith, 2012; Lincove, Osborne, Dillon, & Mills, 2014.) The pitfalls associated with VAM make it less acceptable to educators as a high-stakes accountability measure and appear to outweigh the potential. On the other hand, performance assessment of teacher candidates (TPA) has been suggested as an alternative or addition to VAM to determine TPP effectiveness (Knight et al., 2014) and was the theme of the previous issue of JTE (Volume 65:5). While performance assessments appear to receive more support from educators as they can be used for program improvement as well as evidence for certification and licensure, problems with validity and reliability as well as questions about conceptualization of teaching and accompanying value assumptions have emerged (see Caughlan & Jiang, 2014; Duckor, Castellano, Tellez, Wihardini, & Wilson, 2014; Sato, 2014). More research is needed to address the concerns of both accountability approaches and to determine the feasibility of using a combination of VAM and TPA for high-stakes TPP accountability. …

When university faculty nurture teacher leadership: ‘horizontal’ practices and values in a professor’s work with teachers

Content-area university faculty can play a critical role in the trajectories of K-12 teachers into leadership. The purpose of this study is to examine the practices and values of one university faculty member with a long record of work with K-12 teachers, with an aim to offer some guiding considerations as to the potential role of university faculty in developing teacher leaders and/or creating supportive systems in which teacher leadership capacity can develop. Case study data were generated over a three-year period, primarily through interviews with 14 informants who had worked with the case study individual in her interactions with a network of teachers. Findings reveal that at the heart of this professor’s influence on teacher leaderships is an inquiry stance and a ‘horizontal’ orientation to relationships with teachers, both of which can mitigate the anti-collaborative effects of the power differences built into work that cuts across the institutional boundaries of the K-12 and university worlds. These findings suggest some concrete practices that other university professors might adopt in their interactions with teachers; further, they have implications both for further research and for the ways professional learning communities might be inspired and nourished.

God’s Giving Me Words for You/Bless This Research: When Prayer Meets Qualitative Inquiry

In a study of the writing practices of Christian pastors, interviewees would often pray with and for me. In this essay, I narrate three such instances in which prayer became provocative. Participants’ prayers for me inspired—literally, breathed into—my writing processes in transformative ways. Specifically, these experiences with prayer altered my conceptions of what counts as data, practices of reflexivity, and the relationships between intellectual and spiritual activities. They also changed the way I pray.

Partners in Loving the Children: Roles and Relationships in Teaching and in Parenting

Abstract The author describes how her perspectives as a teacher educator and as a parent were extended and enriched as her daughter entered school and learned to read. She highlights the importance of prioritizing love in her engagement with her childs teachers and in her professional thinking and actions as a teacher educator.

Five-Year Retrospective

We have just completed 5 years as editors of Journal of Teacher Education (JTE), having published four full volumes (63-66) and part of one (62), and will hand over the privilege and responsibility to a new team from Michigan State University in the next issue. In one of our first editorials (Knight et al., 2012), we reflected on how views of teacher education research from both within and outside the profession influenced our vision for the journal. At that time, we saw our challenge as building on the emerging traditions of diversity and excellence established by previous teams of capable editors with the ultimate goal of further advancing research to establish teacher education as a distinct field with knowledge, histories, research methodologies, and practices that are recognized and recognizable. Furthering the goal would require us to bring together the three dimensions of teacher education--practice, policy, and research--in challenging and productive ways so that considerations of issues or challenges in teacher education would be enriched by careful attention from these multiple frames of reference. We recognized a number of obstacles: the reputation of research in teacher education as lacking rigor and relevance and, relatedly, an incomplete knowledge base that prevents us from connecting findings in meaningful ways to inform practice and policy (e.g., Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Feuer, Towne, & Shavelson, 2002; Kaestle, 1993; Moss et al., 2006; National Research Council, 2002; Wilson, Floden, & Ferrini-Mundy, 2001); a lack of a sense of professional identity among teacher educators (Labaree, 2008); and publication of teacher education research in specialized content journals with limited audiences rather than in broader teacher education research journals. In reflecting on our tenure as JTE editors, we see that putting our rhetoric into reality was challenging. The sheer number of manuscripts--more than 700 per year--was overwhelming even for a relatively large editorial team with diverse expertise and interests. We made concerted efforts to address our goal of improving quality; we devoted editorials (e.g., Knight et al., 2012) to the topic of quality and led interactive sessions at the annual meetings of our sponsoring organization, the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE), to discuss what constitutes rigor in teacher education research. To address our goal of improving relevance, we sponsored major forums at AACTE meetings on current topics and solicited recommendations from teacher educators for theme issues focusing on emerging areas of interest. Teacher Education Research Quality Based on our review of manuscripts from the first year of our editorship (Volume 63), we identified four areas that authors could target to improve the quality of their research (Knight et al., 2013). The first area that we identified, appropriateness for JTE, involves an explicit connection to an important topic or issue related to research and scholarship in teacher education. We initially rejected a large number of articles prior to external review for two primary reasons: They focused on teachers, teaching, or K-12 students without a clear connection to teacher education or they used teacher education students or faculty as their sample but did not connect to relevant theory and previous methodological and empirical work in teacher education. The second and third areas involve intertwined issues related to the nature of the research design and the samples used in the studies. We received a large number of manuscripts describing studies where the researchers were also the teacher educators or program developers and implementers and the samples were their own students. Whereas this relationship is not problematic in and of itself, the genre of many of the manuscripts often appeared to be program evaluation with program improvement or validation as the primary purpose. …