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Methods

The main participants of this study were two teacher educators. We have worked closely together for over four years and have developed a level of trust that sustains our collaboration. We have spent time observing in each other’s classrooms, and we have collaborated on workshop presentations. We have articulated common goals and beliefs about literacy and language instruction. We believe both should be considered as developmental, linguistic processes that have important social and political implications (Freire & Macedo, 1987; Nieto, 2002). Since we have these shared experiences and commitments, we are willing to question each other about specific instructional practices and the reasoning that supports those practices.

The study was conducted over the course of one semester when we were teaching courses at a Midwestern university. Student participants were mostly preservice and some practicing teachers enrolled in either Fundamentals of Literacy Learning or Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages. Fundamentals of Literacy Learning, taught by Cynthia, was a course taken by all graduate students in the Masters of Education program. The course introduces students to thinking about social and cognitive aspects of literacy in their own lives and the significance of literacy in a democratic society. Students learn and practice instructional strategies that promote thoughtful literacy learning across all grade levels and content areas. The class consisted of twenty-one graduate students: two practicing teachers (one elementary, and one high school science teacher), and nineteen preservice teachers (nine preparing for elementary and ten preparing for high school teaching positions).

Patience taught Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages. This course builds on the theoretical and philosophical framework in Fundamentals of Literacy Learning, but it focuses specifically on approaches to teaching foreign languages in kindergarten through twelfth grade. Students in this course also learn about the theories and principles of second language acquisition. The seven students in this class came from various backgrounds; two were American and spoke English as their first language. Four of them spoke Spanish as a first language (L1) and were from Panama, Mexico, and Spain. One of the students was from the Congo: his second language (L2) was French and third language (L3) was English. Five of the students were studying to become teachers of Spanish and two were studying to become French teachers (Table 1).

One of the students had just been employed by a local school district and had been working for 2 weeks. Four of the students had an average of 10 years of teaching experience, while two of them had none at all.

Both courses required students to connect linguistic and educational theories and principles with specific teaching practices and to reflect on the significance of different approaches to literacy and language instruction. Students were expected to evaluate instructional practices in terms of current research and their own personal beliefs about teaching and learning. We hoped the PWT could be used as a framework to help our students begin to develop thoughtful rationales for selecting and reflecting upon different instructional practices. Finally, we believed we could use the PWT framework to avoid what research states is a common problem in teacher education, which is that despite what teachers learn in teacher preparation programs, they teach, “as they were taught” or perhaps teach, “as they believe kids ought to be taught” based on unexamined beliefs and prior experiences (Richardson, 1996). In sum, we hoped our collaboration to implement the PWT would provide support for both our students’ and our own development of professional understandings related to teaching and learning.