Shaping Teachers’ Understandings in Writing Through Repertoires of Practice

• In Event: Practice in Writing: The Necessity of Theorizing and Doing

Abstract

Objectives
This paper illustrates how available assessment tools, widely adopted by teachers can shape understandings of writing performance, development and views of writing pedagogy. In a context without mandated programs and testing regimes, where schools are autonomous, alternative means of influence are needed in order to build teacher expertise and to obtain desired outcomes from education (author, 2010). This paper examines how the production and dissemination of assessment smart tools (Spillane, Reiser & Reimer, 2002) play an important role in achieving literacy policy aimed at enhancing the quality of teaching and raise student achievement in literacy.

Theoretical framework
A characteristic of practice as a source of community coherence is the development of shared repertoires. A repertoire is a community’s set of shared resources and includes routines, words, tools or concepts that the community has either produced or adopted (Wenger, 1998). These resources are created to negotiate meaning in the joint pursuit of an enterprise. In the teaching of writing, arguably, this negotiating of meaning through resources centrally concerns the issue of assessing the performance of writers to support teaching and learning.

Methods
The repertoire involves three tools (and associated routines) with overlap : a tool to provide diagnostic assessment of writing for different communicative purposes that also allows normative comparisons; a tool to view progress in writing that describes writing behaviours and features of writing characteristic of particular levels and a tool that describes desired levels of performance at various levels in writing.

Three studies largely inform the argument and illustrate how a resources repertoire has been cumulatively built which shapes how teachers conceive of both development and performance in writing and which influences the teaching of writing. Two studies involve data from teacher self report questionnaire about use of, and learning from, the diagnostic and progression tools and the third data from a test to establish teacher pedagogical and content learning that was built in large part from use of the diagnostic writing tool and the associated routines of moderation and discussion of student writing.

Results
There were clear commonalities in what teachers reported learning from the diagnostic tool; from the tool that described progression in writing and in what teachers demonstrated they knew. They had acquired knowledge of what was expected of writers at different levels; of what to ‘notice’; of how to interpret evidence from both writing products and behaviours, and how to use the information to plan or modify instruction. They had acquired content knowledge to allow them to be more explicit about how text works to achieve its purpose. Further, they saw more clearly what the course of development was and were able to see “where to next” for developing writers.

Significance

The use of this repertoire of tools within the context of evidence-informed professional learning was associated with significant gains in student achievement, a key policy aim. Policy intent in terms of enhancing teacher knowledge and practice from interaction with and around the tools could also claim to be at least partly realised.

Author

• Judy M. Parr, University of Auckland