Enacting Thinking: Supporting Teacher Candidates in Modeling Writing Strategies

ABSTRACT

Instructor modeling of metacognitive processes has been shown to support student learning. Teacher educators have leveraged this research to support teacher candidates in framing, decomposing, and explaining disciplinary thinking and decision-making, particularly in reading development. However, little work has focused on supporting teacher candidates’ use of similar pedagogical moves when teaching writing. This project investigated teacher candidates modeling of writing before and after instruction aimed to support their ability to model. What we noticed was a trajectory of learning to frame, decompose, explain, and highlight writing content using visual and metacognitive representations to make the cognitive processes of writing more visible. However, we noted places for growth in teacher candidates’ knowledge of content and students, so that candidates might more aptly decompose and highlight their disciplinary thinking in ways that are appropriate for the teaching context.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• writing instruction
• modeling
• teacher knowledge

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Pam Grossman, Annemarie Palinscar, Chauncey Monte-Sano, and Mary Schleppegrell for reading and responding to early drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study has been conducted as part of the work of the Core Practices Consortium (corepracticeconsortium.com) and builds on the contributions of its members. This collective work has been supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation under Grant #OPP1089179 and the Spencer Foundation under Grant #201600110.