Pamela Jewett

Adding Collaborative Peer Coaching to Our Teaching Identities.

Recent research suggests that personal and institutional constraints often limit the degree to which professional development impacts teaching practice. Darling-Hammond suggests that one of those constraints is time in schools for collaborative planning. She cites high performing schools in Europe and Asia that have three to four times more collaborative planning time for teachers than schools in the United States, and she suggests that teachers need to discover ways to collaborate to solve problems and improve practice. One way to create the kinds of collaborative teaching communities that Darling-Hammond proposes is with peer coaching, and this article describes a group of teachers who found ways to work and learn together by adding collaborative peer coaching to their identities as teachers.

A dialogic conception of learning: collaborative peer coaching

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an account of the coaching element that was included in an existing graduate literacy course and to describe the responses of experienced and less‐experienced teachers as they began to add collaborative peer coaching to their teaching identities.Design/methodology/approach – Data collected included teachers’ coaching logs and written reflections on the coaching experience, and field notes taken by a professor. Data were analysed qualitatively through open coding. Initially, the authors read data individually and coded them by what they perceived to be the teachers’ coaching moves. Separately, they developed lists of codes and then reviewed coding lists to work through idiosyncratic data, collapse codes, align their language.Findings – The authors identified three overarching and multi‐faceted moves that the coaching teachers made as they worked with partner teachers. They found that the teachers: used restraint; focused on partner teachers needs; and prov...

Reading Knee-Deep.

Freire told his audience at a seminar at the University of Massachusetts, “You need to read knee-deep in texts, for deeper than surface meanings, and you need to know the words to be able to do it” (quoted in Cleary, 2003). In a childrens literature class, fifteen teachers and I traveled along a path that moved us toward reading knee-deep as we peered beneath the surface of the words on the page and into our personal responses to examine the worlds they each described. To help us along this path, we took two theoretical perspectives, transactional literary theory and critical literacy theory. While many of the students were familiar with transactional literary theory, few were familiar with critical literacy theory. It was not surprising, based on their experience with it, that students readily transacted with childrens literature, living through the story worlds and making personal connections. However, they were hesitant, critical readers of childrens literature and resisted critique, uncomfortable with discussing issues of social justice and equity. I wondered what I could do as a teacher educator to help them redefine their personal responses to include critical responses, to read knee-deep. This question became a persistent one and led me to ask, “As a teacher educator, how can I support students in using transactional literary theory and critical literacy theory as lenses for childrens literature?”

Supporting Critical Dialogue Across Educational Contexts

We dedicate this article to our good friend and colleague, Jennifer Wilson, a person with whom we loved to think and laugh and write. Through an act of violence, her life was taken away from us on August 28th, 2011. This article draws upon five different empirical studies to examine how critical dialogue can be fostered across educational settings and with diverse populations: middle-school students discussing immigration picture books, a teacher study group exploring texts on homelessness, a teacher education class studying critical literacy, working class adults in a culture circle in Brazil interrogating systems of poverty, and teens in youth organizations discussing their photo-essays that challenge negative stereotypes of youth. In this paper, we analyze discursive practices that fostered critical dialogue across these settings. In doing so, we seek to describe practices that can support practitioners as they facilitate critical dialogue with learners and one another in order to become more critically engaged participants in their own communities.

Multiple Literacies Gone Wild

Geocaching is a worldwide game of hiding and seeking, in which participants can place a cache anywhere in the world, pinpoint its location using global positioning system technology, and then share the geocaches existence and location online. This article describes the geocaching adventures the author took with three boys, ages 11, 8, and 6, and the holistic, organic, and authentic learning that occurred as they engaged in a treasure hunt of sorts in the natural world. This article also explores the multiple digital and print literacies in which geocachers engage and how these out-of-school literate experiences relate to what we know about in-school literacy. Finally, the author discusses the implications of geocaching and other digital literacies for teachers, providing links for those who would like to learn more.

Books only got us so far: the need for multi‐genre inquiry

This study examines the instructional steps I took, based on gaps between what was happening in a graduate literacy class I taught and what I had intended to happen. This study describes the ways that I re‐imagined the class and what came about when I created a pedagogical approach that featured multi‐genre inquiry. I define inter‐discursivity as a signal of learning (i.e. when traces of language from one genre spill over into the language of other genres), and I searched for examples of this overlapping language in data. In doing so, I found that the multi‐genre approach led to moments of inter‐discursivity as teachers extended their understandings by appropriating language from one genre into another.

Conflicting Discourses: Navigating the Tensions of Becoming a Literacy Coach

ABSTRACT During recent years, literacy coaching has become a widespread model of professional development for teachers in schools across the United States. However, there is a shortage of research and policy to inform the preparation and ongoing work of literacy coaches. In this article, the researchers use a modified version of Gee’s identity framework to examine teachers’ reflective writing as they learned about and practiced coaching in one school district. Findings show that teachers invoked multiple conflicting discourses of coaching that contributed to tensions in their work. The researchers argue that such tensions can stand in the way of educators constructing coaching identities that allow them to support and sustain meaningful professional development for teachers.

A Whole-School "Read" Creates a Reading Community.

Students and teachers at Hand Middle School in Columbia, South Carolina, were in the midst of a twoyear, comprehensive renovation and construction project in which some sections of their 75-year-old, historic building were being renovated and new sections added. When parts of the school were boarded up and oversized machinery first moved onto campus, approximately half of the students moved into portables. Classrooms and other academic areas were closed, including the school’s media center, which would be unavailable to students while the space for a new, larger media center was being prepared. Amidst the clang of machinery, the buzz of saws, the shouts of workmen, and the high whine of drills, the media specialist, the literacy coach, and a seventh grade English/language arts teacher collaborated to develop a plan that would offset the closing of the media center for a year and would keep books in the hands of students. In this unlikely setting, they created a kind of literary ecosystem in which equilibrium between the community of construction and the community of learning was maintained, creating a balance between bedlam and books, between renovations and reading. Together, these three teachers framed a rich environment where students could talk about books, create art work, craft dramatic productions, write reflections about their experiences, and grow deep community roots. This article recounts the innovative way the school community chose to face potential challenges to their physical environment and to their academic lives and, through a whole-school “read,” influence teachers’ practices, students’ learning, and the involvement of the larger school community.