Teachers as Partners in Design for Reading, Evidence, and Argumentation in Disciplinary Instruction

• In Event: Reading for Understanding: Initial Studies of Students and Teachers Using Multiple Sources in Content Areas

Abstract

Objectives: This poster examines how engaging teachers in an ongoing R&D partnership informs the design and implementation of viable approaches to evidence-based argumentation in disciplinary classrooms. Additionally, it describes how such partnerships can help identify teacher needs for professional development as well as student needs and promising practices for intervention design.

Theoretical Framework & Approach: Professional development with the capacity to impact student learning engages teachers in sustained, collaborative inquiry into instructional content and student learning (Greenleaf et al., 2011). New approaches to instruction enter the classroom through the deep understanding and ownership of teachers (Coburn, 2003). Drawing on these principles and the framework of design research (Brown, 1992; Cobb, et al., 2004), we engaged a network of middle and high school teachers of literature, history, and science in inquiry into the nature of evidence-based argumentation from disciplinary texts and effective ways to build students’ proficiency in such disciplinary reading and reasoning. The professional development design consisted of collaborative inquiry aimed at deepening teachers’ understandings of the disciplinary nature of argumentation through professional readings, implementing suggested argumentation tasks, analyzing student work, revising scaffolds and supports then trying again with new texts. These activities occurred in recursive cycles over the course of an academic year.

Methods & Analyses: We focus on data collected during four, day-long inquiry sessions with 14 Literature, 6 history, and 3 science teachers, grades 6-12. Data sources included teacher reflections, student work, recorded inquiry discussions, videotaped classroom observations, and observer field notes. We used methods of constant comparison and grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). In our analyses, particular attention was devoted to characterizing teachers’ conceptions of evidence-based argumentation in their specific discipline, the types of instructional scaffolds they proposed, and the use of student work in furthering teacher inquiry and instructional decisions.

Findings: Preliminary analyses suggest that teachers and students have limited experience working across texts simultaneously and with forming arguments supported by textual evidence. Through the collaborative inquiry sessions, teachers investigated how students learn to collect information and build ideas. This led to the development of instructional scaffolds for close reading and support for students to build their own interpretations based on evidence they collected. Teachers tried variations of scaffolds in their classrooms, collecting student work and then as a group analyzing how the scaffolds worked, and for whom and why they produced the results that they did. Over the course of the year, teachers identified the need for active exchange around students’ interpretations and began building into their classroom practice regular opportunities for peer discussion. Teachers reported that their students made progress in strategies for reading multiple sources in their discipline and their skill at supporting their arguments.

Implications: This work offers important lessons for intervention development and informs future design-based and experimental studies of scaffolds for disciplinary reading and argumentation. The R & D partnership model has also proved to be a valuable means of professional development. It can serve as a basis for building capacity in a broader range of teachers.

Authors

• Willard R. Brown, WestEd

• Irisa Charney-Sirott, WestEd

• Gayle Cribb, WestEd

• Rita Jensen, WestEd