Negotiating Dilemmas: The Resources Preservice Teachers Use to Assess and Respond to Students’ Writing

• In Event: Learning to Assess and Respond: Cross-Institutional Partnerships for Writing Teacher Education

Abstract

Purpose, Background, and Perspectives: This presentation reports from a study of a cross-institutional partnership between two programs for writing teacher education. For one semester, undergraduates from a large university and a small college teamed to read and respond to compositions by 8th and 9th graders. Using online VoiceThread technology, the teams engaged in written and audio discussions centered on assessing and responding to the younger students’ writing. To guide their assessment and response, the teams used the Collaborative Assessment Conference protocol (Blythe, Allen, & Powell, 1999).

Both the pedagogical project and the research employ a communities of practice framework (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The goal for the cross-institutional partnership was for the preservice teachers to think aloud together about their pedagogical options in the face of dilemmas (Grossman et al., 2000) about assessing and responding to students’ writing. The conversations were both opportunity and catalyst for them to be more explicit in identifying their assumptions, values, and beliefs about learning and teaching writing. The research questions were:
1. What resources did the preservice teachers draw upon as they assessed the 8th and 9th graders’ writing?
2. How did preservice teachers use these resources to negotiate assessment and response dilemmas?

Methods and Data: Data were collected by capturing and transcribing the password-protected written and oral conversations that the 6 cross-institutional teams (totaling 34 preservice teachers) engaged in via voicethread.com. The researchers jointly read all transcripts to develop an initial list of codes and co-analyzed one transcript. Then, we individually analyzed the remaining transcripts, reviewed each other’s coding and analytical memos, and met to develop consensus about coding. We collaborated on further rounds of recursive analysis, continuing the process of inductive coding (Miles & Huberman, 1994) to jointly arrive at our findings.

Results: Preservice teachers used a variety of resources to negotiate assessment and response dilemmas—including their own experiences as writers, observations of teachers, course readings and conversations, examples and patterns from the 8th and 9th graders’ writing, their ideas about teen writers, and their imaginings of themselves as teachers in the future. Some of the preservice teachers drew on a wide and interacting array of resources, and they developed nuanced assessments of and responses to students’ writing. Others drew from a narrower repertoire of resources and were also were more limited in the assessments and responses that they shared.

Significance: This research suggests that the ability to draw upon a wide, interacting array of resources contributes to teachers’ skill in assessing and responding to student writing. By identifying the resources that preservice teachers draw from and examining how they use these resources, we contribute to scholarship about how teachers learn to assess and respond to writing. In particular, this study has implications for how teacher educators can assist writing teachers in expanding and refining the repertoire of resources they use to make decisions about assessment and response.

Author

• James Fredricksen, Boise State University