Adaptive Expertise in the Teaching of Argumentative Writing in High School English Language Arts Classrooms

• In Event: Roundtable Session 18
  In Roundtable Session: Disciplinary Literacy Across Teacher Education Contexts

Abstract

In this paper we present both a conceptualization and study of how English Language Arts teachers develop “adaptive expertise” for applying a principled approach grounded in argumentative writing to effectively support their students’ argumentative writing in a range of contexts. We developed three levels of expertise for teaching argumentation: adaptive, transitional, and routinized. During the 2014-2015 school year, to investigate changes in nine teachers’ adaptive expertise, we relied on classroom observations and adaptive expertise interviews based on two instructional scenarios. Our prototype analysis of all nine teachers indicated that four of the teachers were adaptive experts, two teachers were transitional experts, and three were routinized experts. We present three case study teachers representing each of these three levels of expertise.

Authors

• George E. Newell, The Ohio State University

• Tzu-Jung Lin, The Ohio State University

• Eileen Buescher, The Ohio State University

• Brent Goff, The Ohio State University

• Seung Yon Ha, The Ohio State University

• Alan Hirvela, The Ohio State University

• Larkin Weyand, The Ohio State University