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Data Collection

Data Analysis and Findings

Analysis of student work was also ongoing and recursive. We analyzed our student work together and constantly asked ourselves questions as we read their work such as: “What do they say they are learning?” and “What do we perceive that they are learning?” (Cynthia’s meeting notes, 2004)

This process of analysis continued as we wrote the paper. Throughout the research process we re-read the literature on self-study, reflective practice, and theory to practice connections to clarify our understanding of themes we observed and to compare our interpretations with the research of others involved in self-study of teaching and teaching for reflective practice. Several themes emerged as we analyzed our data. These were: challenges for preservice teachers with no classroom experience, the use of PWT as a scaffold for guiding reflective practice, the role of group dialog, and emerging student theories.

Theme: Challenges with Preservice Teachers. One of the first themes that emerged during our weekly meetings was the challenge of helping preservice teachers develop thoughtful understanding of instructional practices (Cochran & Lytle, 1993; Zeichner & Liston, 1996). The major challenge for these students was articulating their “practice” in the PWT. How could they do so if they had never taught before? One solution Patience had to this problem was to modify student assignments. While the inservice teachers were required to observe two teachers and write mini-action research projects, the two students who had no experience teaching were required to observe several teachers of Spanish and French and teach mini-lessons in these classes. This activity, along with the in-class microteaching assignments, seemed to help these two students gain a better sense of how to envision themselves as teachers as well as how to imagine their classrooms. Specifically, Patience noticed they were more actively engaged in classroom activities, their lesson plans improved, and the short assignments building up to the final PWT also improved. Despite the improvements in their understandings of theory and ethics, the final PWT papers of these preservice teachers were the weakest in the class especially in the area of practice.

Cynthia used videos that complemented text readings to help the preservice teachers visualize uses of reading strategies in different elementary and secondary classroom contexts. Also, preservice teachers practiced teaching strategies to peers and created notebooks of useful reading strategies for different purposes. These assignments: video responses, peer-teaching, and the notebooks demonstrated that preservice teachers understood the purposes for different reading strategies and that these activities helped them to imagine their roles in supporting readers in their future classrooms.

Theme: Scaffolding the Professional Working Theory. As we analyzed the data from weekly discussions and our classroom documents, we realized that scaffolding played a prominent role in our work with the PWT. From the beginning of the semester, we intentionally scaffolded our graduate students’ learning about the components of the PWT. We noticed that Dalmau and Gudjonsdottir (2002) had introduced the three components: practice, ethics and theory, incrementally, allowing preservice and inservice teachers to reflect on each one individually. Despite differences in their teaching experiences, we wanted the graduate students to have a sense of ownership in writing their own PWT, and to see it emerge from their own understandings of their work and their professional lives.

In Fundamentals of Literacy Learning, Cynthia used a sequence of papers to scaffold graduate students’ development of professional working theories related to literacy instruction (Samaras, 2002). First, graduate students wrote about their personal experiences in learning to read as children and current uses of reading and writing in their daily lives. Next, they read books and watched videos that demonstrated a variety of reading strategies for different purposes, at different developmental levels, and in different classroom contexts. Classroom discussions focused on connections between what students saw and what they read about theories and practices in reading instruction. In the second PWT paper, graduate students were asked to describe two or three reading strategies they considered to be most important for a particular content area or grade level and to explain why they selected these strategies in terms of theoretical and research support and what they valued for children (ethics).

As a pre-writing activity for the final PWT paper, Cynthia asked her graduate students to bring copies of their earlier papers to class. They all re-visited the PWT framework using questions to guide their discussion about the three components of practice, theory, and ethics. The graduate students re-read their earlier papers and highlighted elements of theory, practice, and ethics using markers in different colors. This was intended to help them recognize how they were already articulating the three elements of PWT in papers written throughout the semester. (Cynthia, meeting notes, lesson plans, 2004). An example of highlighted elements from one student follows:

Practice: Beginning readers can look through a picture book and make predictions about the story based on the illustrations. More advanced readers can make predictions based on the title or headings in chapters.

Theory: If the chosen texts are well suited to the child’s stage of learning, they will predict, analyze, question and infer based on...their zone of actual development…with proper scaffolding the teacher will be encouraging students to consider concepts and analysis within their zone of proximal development.

Ethics: As I said previously, teaching students to be strategic readers is essentially teaching them how to be strategic thinkers and decision makers…to empower students …and to instill within them an appreciation for learning…through strategic thinking. (LB, 11/12/2004)