Concept Development through Practice: Preservice Teachers Learning to Teach Writing

Abstract

This work contributes to an ongoing conversation about how practice-based teacher education might be designed to support preservice teachers’ professional judgment, particularly in the area of writing instruction. By synthesizing research on practice-based teacher education with sociocultural understandings of concept development and work on how writing teachers learn to teach writing, I offer three design conjectures about how preservice teachers might be supported to teach writing in intellectually rigorous and equitable ways. I then used discourse analysis to investigate preservice teachers’ concept development in a methods course which used these design conjectures. Finally, I followed preservice teachers into their student teaching placements, using discourse analysis to understand how they developed concepts about writing instruction through their practice. I found that preservice teachers developed concepts about a core teaching practice, making student thinking visible, in combination with other ideas about writing instruction that arose in the contexts in which preservice teachers taught writing. Thus, teaching concepts develop ecologically—in relation to one another, to the cultural and historical discourses and practices that characterize particular contexts for teaching, and—most importantly—to students. Findings contribute to research on how teachers learn to teach writing, to research on concept development in teaching, and to broader conversations about the potential and limits of practice-based approaches to teacher education.