Examining Professional History as a Context for Instructional Meaning

• In Event: Self-Study Researchers Make a Difference for Innovation in Practice

Abstract

Reading Recovery has been an intervention program for early literacy difficulties in the United States for more than three decades. Over the years there has been some controversy over the costs for training and for maintaining professional development for teachers involved in the program (Farrall, 2006; Heibert, 1994), but the outcomes of Reading Recovery have been generally effective in providing growth in reading achievement for struggling young readers (U.S. Department of Education, 2013). Some critics of the program have suggested that Reading Recovery creates an overly-enthusiastic following of its teaching force with little room for critical evaluation of their own practices. As a Reading Recovery teacher, I have seen through my own practice the change in a child’s understanding of how reading works and the increase in a child’s connections across the author’s message, text structure, vocabulary knowledge, and strategic behaviors. My teaching has included both the one to one setting of a classic Reading Recovery intervention as well as small group instructional support for classroom teachers. In thinking about how my practice has evolved over the years, I was intrigued about the ways in which my teaching experiences have influenced how I think about practice. And I was also curious to see how the framework and guidelines for Reading Recovery have influenced how I think about literacy practice and learning.

In this self-study, I examine my practice through the use of a professional history, very much like the self-study research involving personal histories. In this context I used the narrative of my own professional history to examine my language and the meanings within my professional history to understand how I talk about my practice. It is through this examination that I attempt to answer the research question, How are my thinking and understanding about literacy teaching and learning represented in the language within my professional history? The text were analyzed using a constant comparative method (Dye, Schatz, Rosenberg, & Coleman, 2000) by which I coded each phrase or statement within the text to reflect the specific meaning (sometimes assigning multiple codes for the same phrase or statement). In the process, codes were adjusted and reshaped, reflecting the constant comparative process. The resulting 57 categories were then collapsed into larger categories that ultimately reflected three major themes: (1) awareness, (2) literacy (encompassing observation, data, and instruction), and (3) strategic thinking. These themes were then compared to the literature on early literacy and on Reading Recovery (including the training process involved in Reading Recovery). Results suggest that my thinking about literacy instruction has been strongly influenced by the Reading Recovery framework for instruction and the concept of strategy behaviors within reading as instrumental to effective practice. Interestingly, there was no specific discussion of learning within my professional history, suggesting that I focus primarily on teaching about reading and addressing outcomes of assessment.

Authors

• Kristie Beyer

• Deborah L. Tidwell, University of Northern Iowa