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“YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?” NATIONAL WRITING
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CASE STUDY OF TEACHER RHETORIC

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“YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?” NATIONAL WRITING PROJECT TEACHERS
EXPLAINING THEIR JUDGMENT: A CASE STUDY OF TEACHER RHETORIC

By

James E. Fredricksen

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy

2008

ABSTRACT

“YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?” NATIONAL WRITING PROJECT TEACHERS
EXPLAIN ING THEIR JUDGMENT: A CASE STUDY OF TEACHER RHETORIC

By

James E. Fredricksen

As part of their work as educators, teachers explain their judgment to others,
whether those others be administrators who want to better understand what teachers are
doing to help their students perform well on standardized tests or parents who listen at
back-to-school nights or students who want to know how they could improve their grades
or colleagues who are on the lookout for new strategies and activities to try in their own
classrooms. For many teachers, this explanation of their judgment may seem invisible or
as “just something I have to do.” In this case study of teacher rhetoric, I listen to one
group of teachers explain their judgment to one another in hopes of understanding the
knowledge teachers reveal to one another so that those concerned with teacher knowledge
might be able to create conditions that facilitate teacher learning. More speciﬁcally, as a
participant-observer in a National Writing Project Summer Institute, I describe and
examine the deliberations between a small group of teachers as they collaborate to craft a
response letter to each of the teachers who demonstrate their teaching practices.

This dissertation focuses on what teachers in this response group discuss and
deliberate, as well as how individual teachers craft positions of authority and of trusted
professional peers. That is, this project employs rhetorical concepts to describe the
content of the arguments teachers forward to one another and to describe how those

arguments position each speaker with the other members of the group. By shining a

spotlight on teachers’ arguments in this one type of professional development activity,
this dissertation ﬁnds that teachers in this group primarily turn to their own experiences
in order to justify their positions, and they secondarily refer to their views on learning and
learners as support. In forwarding arguments, teachers in this group reveal their
knowledge about students, teachers and teaching, and about the subject matter of writing.
In addition, the arguments teachers forward serve the social purposes of creating
afﬁliation between group members.

This study suggests that future research on the different kinds of justiﬁcations
teachers employ in a variety of rhetorical situations, as well as on the wide range of ways
teachers use the concept “experience,” has the potential to understand how the arguments
teachers forward reveals their knowledge and serves social purposes. In addition, this
study also suggests that other rhetorical concepts, such as pathos, could also be employed
in future studies as a way to enhance one’s understanding of the social scenes in which

teachers learn with and from one another.

C0pyn'ght by
JAMES E. FREDRICKSEN
2007

Dedicated with deep love and gratitude to my parents, Bill and Cheryl Fredricksen, to my
brother Bill and his family (Julie, Marley, and Makenzie), and to my sister Nicole and her
family (Jake, Wyatt, and Porter) who all continue to ﬁll my life with laughter and love.
Thank you

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

While many people might believe that happiness leads to gratitude, I have long
believed that it is the other way around: being grateful leads to happiness. It is in the
spirit of being grateful, that I must acknowledge and thank the many people who have
made this journey with me.

I must begin by thanking the members of my committee: Lynn Fendler, Mary
J uzwik, Bill Hart-Davidson, and Jeff Grabill. They have asked probing and thoughtﬁil
questions that have guided my thinking in the most generous and compassionate of ways.
Their support, encouragement, and intellect have beneﬁted me in ways that will stay with
me long after this project is complete. The director of this dissertation, Julie Lindquist,
has not only been a strong advocate for me, but she has also managed to instill
conﬁdence, stoke my intellectual curiosity, and provide a model of the kind of
professional colleague I hope to be: one who brings a vision of the big picture, a passion
for working with and understanding others, and a humor that is contagious and puts
others at ease.

I have often thought the graduate school experience is not so much about the title
of a program, the name of the institution, or the series of courses one attends, but it is
much more about the people who sit next to you in courses, who will ask questions and
share their own experiences, who will go out for a coffee or beer or a piece of pie just to
talk about ideas, who will be there to do something fun to remind you that your work is
not who you are. I have been both blessed and inspired by the many, many friends and
colleagues that have been a part of my life during graduate school. In particular, I thank

vi

my writing group — Rob Petrone, Troy Hicks, and Ramona Fruja, as well as my “study”
group - Jackie LaRose, Valerie Struthers, Dave Grueber, and Curtis Walker. Meeting
weekly to share our ideas, our struggles, our questions, our doubts, our hopes, and our
writing is something I will sorely miss.

I would be remiss not to thank the generosity of the real members of the Rust Belt
Writing Project. The faculty leader, Michael, not only granted me access to the 2007
summer institute, but just by being the caring and thoughtful teacher that he is, Michael
also served as a mentor and model for me. The returning fellows and the many teachers
who participated in the 2007 summer institute welcomed me with open arms and a
generous spirit, proving to me once again that being a teacher can be the most rewarding
way to work that I can imagine. In particular, I would like to thank the real Darcy,
Rachel, and Stephanie who I count as colleagues and as friends. I can not believe that I
got to do a research project that was ﬁlled with so much laughter. Thank you for a great
experience, and I hope the pages that follow do you justice.

Finally, I thank my family and ﬁ'iends. While you may be scattered across the

country, you are always with me. Thank you for everything.

vii

PREFACE

“And what is an A?” Rachel, a middle school language arts teacher says to me as
the other teachers in our group arrive. “You know what I mean? Like, realistically, what
is an A? I might give a student an A for something that Steph would never give an A for.
Does that make the student a better writer?”

Across the country each summer, the thousands of teachers who gather in
National Writing Project (NWP) summer institutes have conversations like this one,
conversations that allow them to share their expertise, to explore their doubts and
uncertainties, to listen to the experiences of professional colleagues who work in other
school districts and in different grade levels. Teachers, like Rachel, come to NWP
summer institutes in hopes of having time to write and time to talk with one another
about the teaching of writing as a way to see if other teachers of writers “know what they
mean.”

In the summer of 2007 at a Midwestern university that I will refer to as Rust Belt
University (RBU), I listened to and engaged in conversations as a participant-observer in
the Rust Belt Writing Project (RBWP), serving as “the resident ethnographer,” hoping to
better understand how teachers talked about writing and learning to write. My initial
intent was to employ Ivanic’s (2004) heuristic from her article “Discourses of Writing
and Learning to Write” as a way to capture and categorize the various ways teachers
talked about writing and learning to write in order to help teachers become more strategic
in public discussions of education, discussions which seem to avoid the voices of teachers
while at the same time deﬁning what it means to do the work of teaching well. Like any

viii

qualitative researcher would admit, going into the project with an analytic in mind and
trying to “ﬁt” the words of the participants into the analytic can be frustrating. For me,
the ﬂuid and dynamic exchanges between the three focal participants - Darcy, Rachel,
and Stephanie -— proved too slippery and too nuanced, as they slipped in and out of the six
discourses Ivanic outlines (i.e. writing as skill; as genre; as creative act; as a process; as a
sociopolitical act; and as social practice). That is, I had a difﬁcult time making reliable
and consistent choices as a researcher, because within the span of a conversation,
sentence, or phrase the teachers could have been situated in more than one discourse;
moreover, I quickly saw that I was overly ambitious in trying to tie the words of three
teachers talking to one another to the larger scope of helping teachers become stronger
advocates for themselves and their students in public discussions of education.

A researcher’s difﬁculties, however, provide opportunities. For me and this
project, letting go of Ivanic’s analytic allowed me to slow down to identify some of the
central activities of the summer institute, to listen to my participants, and to ask myself
what was at the heart of my interest in listening to teachers as they talked about their
work of teaching writers. Although I was persistent in my hopes of connecting one type
of professional development conversation to the broader, less speciﬁc public discourse on
education, I had to limit my hope of providing strategic help for other teachers. Instead, I
had to pay attention to the three teachers I came to know, respect, and befriend.

Behind my interest, I discovered, was how writing teachers, like me, explained to
others why they did what they did in their classrooms. That is, how can teachers, through

their words, be trusted to deﬁne and describe what it means to do their work well? Like

ix

most research problems, the origin of my research is rooted in a practical problem. My
personal and practical problem was being a teacher who was dissatisﬁed with his own
responses when he had to explain his judgment to others, such as to a principal who
seemed to only judge my effectiveness in how well my students scored on the annual
state writing test; to the parents and guardians of my students who were used to spelling
and vocabulary tests rather than multiple drafts and the workshop and inquiry-based
writing my students engaged in; to my students who often wondered, rightly so, how their
writing would be translated into grades; to my colleagues who were eager to share their
strategies, stories, successes and failures in their own classrooms; and, even to writers in
the local press whose sons and daughters were in my classroom and who publicly
questioned why teachers did not teach literacy in the same way, in every grade from
kindergarten through senior year in high school. Although the purpose behind each of
these situations ranged from defending my actions to simply making my thinking visible
to help me reﬂect on my own decisions or to share my decisions with others to help them
see students or writing in new ways, the connection between all these situations was the
need to explain my professional judgment to others.

In a moment, I will offer two personal examples that might be familiar to other
teachers as a way to describe the practical problem I faced that motivated my research
questions: What are the teachers’ topoi when they talk to one another in responding to
demonstration lessons? How does their deliberation lead to agreement or disagreement
with one another? How do they use evidence in these discussions? These questions help

to deﬁne the problem I hope to address in this research project, namely trying to

understand how teachers explain their judgment to one another, an act that is central and
vital to a wide range of professional development models which advocate for teachers
talking with one another as a way to change, grow, develop, and/or learn.

Although the audience and purpose of my two personal examples are different, in
both instances I am asked as part of my professional responsibility to explain my
judgment. Here and throughout this project, I refer to the concept of “judgment” as “the
capacity to assess situations or circumstances and draw sound conclusions” (The
American heritage dictionary of the English language, 2000), although I fully recognize
the intellectual history of philosophers who have tried to understand the concept much
more thoroughly than I attempt here (see Leslie Thiele’s The Heart of Judgment:
Practical Wisdom, Neuroscience, and Narrative (2006) for an extended historical
treatment of the concept). The point I make with this deﬁnition, however, is that teachers
make countless decisions and informed opinions as part of their work, not only with
students in their classrooms, but also in their written feedback to students, in their
conversations with colleagues, in their day-to-day living the life as teachers. Clandinin
and Connelly (1996) refer to this as a professional landscape of teachers, and while this
project does not attempt to examine the ways in which teachers explain their judgments
across this landscape, it does focus on one small location, namely one type of
conversation in one kind of professional development experience — the beginning
experience a group of teachers have as they enter and form a teacher network.

Two scenes from my own experience as a teacher speak to the occasions when

teachers are called upon to be rhetoricians. The ﬁrst is in the hallway outside my

xi

classroom at one of the middle schools where I worked as a language arts teacher. The
other is in carpeted and quiet meeting rooms inside the central administration building
where I regularly met with other teachers in my school district for a host of committees
and professional development opportunities.

First, I found myself with an administrator, having a conversation in the hallway
outside my classroom between classes. It was the fall of the one school year when she
approached me to talk about the test results we just received from last year’s students.
The conversation went something like this:

Administrator: I see that we got the 8‘h grade scores ﬁom the State writing
test.

Me: Yeah, we did pretty well. Over 90% of our students met or exceeded
the state’s expectations. ‘

Administrator: That is good, better than the other two middle schools
even, but we need to see if we can move more of those “meets” kids to the

“exceeds” category.

Me: (Speechless, with a blank look on my face and frustration welling up
inside).

Administrator: Let’s talk later about how we might do this.

This moment, though brief, predictable, and even understandable, caught me off guard.
While I stood there speechless, I wanted to relay my surprise that a handﬁrl of hard-
working students had indeed grown as writers over the course of the previous school
year, despite what the test scores captured. I had a movie reel of highlights in my head,
ﬂashes of multiple conversations between me and individual students before, during, and

after class periods. I wished I could have explained the thoughtful ways students had

xii

learned to think like writers, becoming comfortable discovering their ideas as they wrote,
re-organizing their thoughts and descriptions and facts depending on the needs of their
target audiences, establishing small communities of personal readers who could be
trusted to provide valuable feedback. I wanted to tell her -— once again — that I presented
and prepared for the writing test as a “fake writing day” as writer and teacher Barry Lane
suggests. Still, I stood there speechless, unable to explain the complex and nuanced story
that each of my decisions had on each of my students. Moreover, I wanted to reiterate the
absurdity of the test, because in no way would it help me in my work with the students
who were actually tested; instead, the test was just used to provide a general sense of
what happened the previous year. I wished, for example, that I could have sat with her
like I did with parents of my students, going through portfolios of student writing to show
how an individual student grew as a writer and what I saw as areas of needed
improvement.

This speechlessness haunts me.

At the same time I was feeling frustrated about not being able to articulate the
knowledge and reasons behind my pedagogical choices, I met regularly with a variety of
other teachers in my school district as a member of many curriculum committees. These
committees ranged from writing K-12 English / Language Arts standards to summer
meetings with other 6-12 ELA teachers to read and rate writing portfolios to staff
development planning meetings for Dimensions of Learning and First Steps curricular
programs to Literacy Leadership meetings in which 1 represented the 8‘h grade teachers in

our district and the group consisted of only nine teachers — one for each grade level from

xiii

grades K-8. I learned more about teaching and being a teacher in these meetings then I
did in most any other professional experience. It was in these meetings that I heard other
teachers talk about what they did with their students and why they did it. I heard about
successes and failures. I heard about frustrations and possibilities. I heard other teachers,
and they heard me. More importantly, we seemed to understand one another.

This inspires me.

Professionally speaking, then, I have learned that my judgment is both questioned
and valued, while always waiting to be made more visible. While the cost of my practical
problem was me being left speechless when presented with an opportunity to educate my
building principal about what happens with students in my writing classroom, the cost of
not understanding the ways in which teachers explain their judgment to one another as
they respond to demonstration lessons is that models of teacher learning that rely on
teachers talking to one another might be limited in their understanding of how such
learning occurs in those social scenes. Put another way, by listening to and participating
with a group of teachers responding to demonstration lessons I aim to understand how
arguments operate in teacher learning. Developing this rhetorical understanding of
learning can help teacher educators, professional developers, and teachers structure those
occasions when educators have opportunities to talk to one another as part of their work
and leaming.

Certainly, those concerned with the ways in which teachers learn, the ways in
which they develop professionally, hope that teachers make informed decisions in their

curriculum and pedagogy. Indeed, I do not know if I can think of anyone who does not

xiv

want teachers to make informed judgments in their work. What is at play, it seems to me,
is not only how teachers make those decisions, but how they explain those judgments to
others. In fact, those who advocate for teacher networks, like the National Writing Project
who argues for the need for “teachers teaching teachers,” want teachers to share their
experiences with one another, inquiring into and exploring the principles that guide their
decisions as educators. That is, they argue that teacher learning takes place in a social '
scene, a scene in which teachers talk to one another. This project aims to understand one
kind of moment — a case of teachers explaining their professional judgment in which the
purpose is to learn and whose audience is a small group of professional peers. Thus, in
calling this project a “case study of teacher rhetoric” I want to highlight the fact that I am
bounding the focus of this study and to emphasize what rhetorical concepts can

illuminate about a learning situation.

XV

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One _

Explaining Judgment: Where Learning and Rhetoric Meet ........................... 1
The Research Problem Leads to the Research Questions ........................ 6
Learning Theory and Rhetorical Theory Inform One Another .................. 8

Social, Experiential Theories of Learning Include Learners Making
Judgments ...................................................................... 9
Rhetorical Concepts Illuminate How Arguments Operate in Social
Scenes ........................................................................... 16
A Trusted Ethos Helps in Explaining One’s Judgment ......... 21
Phronesis and Topoi Help to Craft a Trusted Ethos ............. 22
Chapter Two

Reviews of Related Literature: Teacher Knowledge, Teacher Networks, and

Rhetoric ....................................................................................... 29
Teacher Knowledge is Revealed in Teachers’ Justiﬁcations and
Explanations of the Decisions They Make in Their Work ........................ 29
Networks of Teachers Provide Opportunities and Purposes for
Teachers to Explain to One Another Their Judgment ............................. 37
The National Writing Project Summer Institute’s Demonstration Lessons
Initiate Deliberations between Teachers ........................................... 48
Rhetorical Concepts Illuminate the Interaction between People in a
Social Scene53

Chapter Three

A Quest of Locating, Deﬁning, and Understanding a Case of Teacher Rhetoric ..57
Access to a Research Site Shapes What and Who is Possible to Study ....... 57
Keeping Up with all the Data to Collect Proved Difﬁcult in the Condensed
Time and Experience of the Summer Institute ..................................... 63
What Does it Mean to Analyze a Case Study of Teacher Rhetoric?. . . . . . . . 67
Introducing the Focal Teachers ....................................................... 74

Darcy Bennett ................................................................... 75

Rachel Ferguson ................................................................ 79

Stephanie ........................................................................ 83

Gaining the Trust of Teachers in the Institute ...................................... 87
Chapter Four

The Demonstration Lesson as Persuasive Act: Deliberations within a

Rhetorical Critique .......................................................................... 94
The Demonstration Lesson as a Persuasive Act .................................... 97

Descriptions, Interpretations, and Judgments Merge ..................... 98

xvi

Arguments about the Performance of and Content in Demonstration

Lessons .......................................................................... 106
“Experience” is the Primary and Dominant Topoi for this Response Group... 108
Experience in the Classroom with Students ............................... 108
Experience in Professional Teaching Contexts ........................... 111
Experience in Professional Development .................................... 114
“Learning” is a Secondary Topoi .................................................... 118
Teachers “Scaffold” Experiences for Their Students ..................... 118
Each Learner is Unique ..................................................... 121
Rhetorical Critiques Initiate Deliberations and Deliberations Reveal
Teachers’ Knowledge .................................................................. 123
Knowledge of Students ...................................................... 123
Knowledge of Teachers and Teaching .................................... 131
Knowledge of the Subject Matter of Writing ............................. 142
Chapter Five
The Social Scene of the Demonstration Lesson Response Group: Arguments,
Authority, and Trust .............................. ' ........................................... 151
Demonstrators and Group Members Craft Positions of Authority ............... 152
Teachers Demonstrate How They “Know Their Stuff” .......................... 164
Issues Facing Teachers of Writing in this Rust Belt State ............... 164
The Specialized Language of Teachers of Writers ....................... 176
Teachers Establish Their Character .................................................. 186
How Students Perceive Them ................................................ 186
Credentials and Experience ................................................... 192
Teachers Achieve Good Will ..................... 194
Understanding Other Teachers’ Experiences .............................. 195
Not Attempting to Convince or Change Other Teachers ................. 197
Chapter Six
Lessons from Bringing Rhetoric into a Learning Environment ..................... 205
Teacher Knowledge in Deliberations with Professional Peers ................... 206
The Justiﬁcations Teachers Employ ................................................. 209
The Relationships Between Rhetorical Concepts ................................... 213
Teachers’ Use of “Experience” ........................................................ 215
Appendices
Appendix A — Initial Participant Email ................................................. 217
Appendix B — Pre—Institute Interview Protocol ........................................ 218
References ......................................................................................... 220

xvii

Chapter One: Explaining Judgment: Where Learning and Rhetoric Meet

At the Rust Belt Writing Project summer institute, the days revolve around
writing: if you close your eyes, you can hear the tapping of keyboards, the turning of
pages, and the chatter of teachers talking about writing. The teachers who volunteer to
spend weeks of their summer “breaks” begin each day with a quick writing prompt,
followed by a 45 minute “sacred writing time.” They then take a short break that leads
into 70 minute demonstration lessons on the teaching of writing, which is promptly
followed with a half hour or so of small groups of teachers writing response letters to the
demonstrators. Then it is time for lunch, a time to share a meal and conversation, a time
to get to know one another. After the hour-long lunch, the afternoons have the teachers
engaged in discussions on the books on the teaching of writing that they are reading or
the teachers might be meeting in their writing groups as they respond to and support one
another in their own writing. The summer institute is a place where teachers from a wide
range of school districts, grade levels, and content areas meet to write and to talk about
writing, and at the same time, they try to ﬁgure out what it might all mean to them as they
return to their work in their own classrooms and school communities.

On the ﬁrst day of the 2007 summer institute, the year in which I was known as
the “resident etlmographer,” Michael, the experienced faculty leader of this summer
institute, asked each of us to introduce ourselves. After the introductions weaved their
way around the horseshoe conﬁguration of the twenty three people in the room, a few
themes stood out to Michael. He tells us of three such themes he has noticed. One, there

seems to be a shared sense of displacement within the group. The room is ﬁlled with

teachers who just became empty nesters, teachers taking on new positions or professional
roles, and teachers who are in the midst of new life situations such as divorce,
engagement, hirings, and ﬁrings. Second, Michael notes a general concern with
conﬁdence, many people suggest they lack self-conﬁdence as writers or as teachers, and
he lets us know that one result of participating in the summer institute is that “you’ll be
more conﬁdent at the end of this experience.” Finally, he senses apprehension about the
demonstration lessons. Michael, in his enthusiastic and certain tone, tells the group that
he views the demonstration lesson as a “work in progress,” and that one way to think
about and frame the demonstrations when presenting them is to share with everyone:
“Here are my successes; here are my questions that I still have about it; here’s what still
bugs me about it.” He continues, “Everybody will appreciate it if you present the
demonstration as a work in progress, rather than as an expert.” That is, Michael hopes
everyone sees the demonstration lessons as an opportunity to make their thinking visible,
or, to put it another way, an opportunity for teachers to explain their professional
judgment to one another.

The next day, the second day of the institute, a teacher from the previous summer
visits the group in order to provide a model of a demonstration lesson. After the teacher
offers her demonstration lesson entitled “Multigenre Projects Foster Rigor and
Relevance,” the entire group in the institute debriefs the lesson. The three focal
participants of this study — Darcy, Rachel, and Stephanie -— each volunteer their
observations, insights, and questions. Despite their differences in the districts they teach,

the grade level or content area of their students, and the number of years they have

experienced as teachers, they share a willingness to share their respective opinions with
everyone: they are unafraid, willing, and generous in sharing their judgments and in
making their thinking visible to others.

While I have many reasons for wanting to listen to a small group of teachers
explain their judgments to others — mainly to do with my dissatisfaction in my own
explanations and with my curiosity in how others think about situations similar to those I
face as a writing teacher — this case study of teacher rhetoric is motivated by the need for
research on a problem that seems to be overlooked in research on teacher learning;
namely, the problem of how teachers explaining their judgment to one another operates in
a situation that aims to have teachers learn. That is, when teachers are asked to talk with
one another in order to develop professionally, they are engaged in a social scene, a scene
in which persuasion is present. This is not to suggest that I equate learning with
persuasion; instead, I point out that in a learning environment that rests its foundation on
teachers explaining why they do what they do in their work, arguments are formed and
shared, and teachers are persuaded or not by those arguments.

In describing this project as “a case study of teacher rhetoric,” I align myself with
those who see rhetoric as more than a way of analyzing, but who see rhetoric as also a
way of “doing,” a way of “making,” such as Kinneavy (1992), Lindquist (2002), Sauer
(2002), Cintron (1997). That is, I see rhetoric, in part, as a way of “making,” which
suggests that orators or writers are strategic in how they present their arguments and

themselves: they make choices based on the situation they ﬁnd themselves in at that

moment. In highlighting some of these choices, I employ rhetorical concepts such as
topoi, ethos, and phronesis to describe what is happening in this particular scene.

Other lines of research share a belief that when teachers make their tacit theories
explicit they will learn, change, develop, and/or produce knowledge. For instance, the
teacher research movement aims to help teachers take the stance of inquiry within their
classrooms to learn about their students, their teaching, and themselves (Cochran-Smith
& Lytle, 1999; Zeichner & Nofﬂce, 2001). Similarly, scholarship on teacher learning
communities aims to have teachers talk to one another about their work as a way to learn
from one another and, in turn, change their practice with students (Cochran-Smith &
Lytle, 2003; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001). More recently, scholars such as Thomas
Hatch (2005) and the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
(CASTL) aim for teachers to go public with their teaching in order to confront the
“simplistic assumptions and representing the complexities of teaching” (p. 2). In short,
many movements afﬁliated with the scholarship of teacher learning start with the
assumption that it is possible for teachers to change when they talk to one another,
because teachers are making their tacit theories explicit for others and for themselves.

In this study I listen to and participate with one group of teachers in order to
document and clarify what happens when these “making explicit” moments occur when
teachers are talking with one another. I choose to focus on one particular group in one
particular type of occasion - speciﬁcally when one group collaborates to write a response
letter to teachers who have just demonstrated a part of their teaching practice — because

the task requires teachers to come to some sort of consensus, which requires the staking

of positions and the presentation of justiﬁcation to support how what they say they know
is indeed true. In drafting a response with other teachers, response groups are asked to
respond with what they know and experience in their work of teaching writers and of
being educators. In calling my study a “case study of teacher rhetoric,” I highlight the
limited scope of my study and, at the same time, shine a spotlight on one particular
phenomenon, namely the phenomenon of teachers explaining their judgment.

In presenting a case study of one group in one local National Writing Project site
engaging in one type of conversation, I also hope to put a mirror up to one of the central
features of NWP summer institutes — the responses to demonstration lessons — and show
how one of the beliefs that guides the NWP model, “teachers teaching teachers,” works
through the arguments teachers forward to one another. That is, I concentrate my focus,
not necessarily on each of the focal participants, but rather on their exchanges, and in
doing so I show how they present themselves and their pedagogical practices in their
individual classrooms to one another. That is, I aim to understand how rhetorical
concepts can help teachers and teacher educators understand how teacher learning occurs
when teachers are asked to explain their judgment to professional peers.

In conceptualizing this as a case study, I am also implicitly arguing that there are
a number of other types of cases in which teachers are asked to talk to others about their
work, including, but not limited to, conversations with the parents and guardians of their
students in parent-teacher conferences and open houses, with their colleagues in
professional development and staff meetings, with administrators and school board

members, and even with the local and national press. These other cases may be fruitful

for future research interested in how teachers represent themselves and their knowledge
to those who are not in the profession, though that pursuit is beyond the scope of this
study.
The research problem leads to the research questions

In pursuing the phenomenon of teachers explaining their judgment to one another,
I focus on each key word within that phenomenon, namely “explaining” and “judgment.”
That is, in this project I want to understand what teachers are making judgments about
when they talk to one another in response to demonstration lessons, and I want to
understand what is happening as they offer those judgments to one another. It is this latter
hope of understanding the “explaining” that I believe is layered and can be informed by
rhetorical theory. The layers, as I understand them, include questions about how the
teachers’ deliberation leads to agreement or disagreement within the group. These
deliberations are social scenes in which teachers establish their authority with one
another, which rhetorical theory labels “ethos,” and in which teachers offer reasons and
evidence they believe is acceptable to the others in the group. The acceptability of
reasons and evidence in this research scene involves the rhetorical concepts of “topoi”
(i.e. where interlocutors turn to for resources for their arguments) and “phronesis” (i.e.
practical wisdom; prudence).

In understanding the professional development activity that the RBWP structures,
namely responding to demonstration lessons in small groups, as a social scene in which
teachers have the opportunity to explain their judgments to one another, this study

pursues the following research questions:

o What do teachers say in demonstration lesson response groups?
0 How does what teachers say position them with one another in the group?

These questions reﬂect what I think rhetorical concepts have to offer learning situations,
namely that rhetorical concepts can highlight the content of deliberations and it can
describe the relationship between the speaker and the audience. The ﬁrst question,
pursued in Chapter 4, will generate a list of sorts. That is, the question requires a sort of
categorization of the subjects under deliberation, and it suggests distinctions between
different types of statements. By mapping out what teachers say to one another, I hope to
identify what teachers say they know, how they know it, and where the group members
seem to agree or not. The second question, pursued in Chapter 5, builds off the ﬁrst
question in that I assume that what teachers say will have social ramiﬁcations in the
group. Because the response groups meet regularly over the course of the summer
institute and because the purpose of the group is to come to consensus in crafting a
response letter to each demonstrator, I suspect that when teachers talk with one another
that they will craft positions which either align themselves with one another or contradict
one another. That is, they will present themselves to one another as particular kinds of
teachers and professional peers.

Moreover, these two questions work together to identify moments when teachers
forward or reveal their professional judgment to one another and to describe how the way
they explain those judgments create particular kinds of positions for themselves within
the group. The deliberations of a small group of teachers responding to other teachers
demonstrating their teaching practices provides opportunities for teachers to share

publicly with professional peers about their own decision-making processes and the

7

principles that guide their thinking. These questions are limited, though, in that it does
not follow teachers into the classroom to see how what they say is similar to what they do
in the classroom, nor do these questions follow individual teacher’s learning over the
course of the summer institute. Instead, it focuses on the exchanges between teachers,
trying to identify the subjects they deliberate and to understand how the arguments they

forward position them within the response group.

Learning theories and rhetorical theory inform one another

Since this study aims to understand how teachers’ explanations of their judgments
to one another operates in a professional development situation, it puts two theoretical
ﬁ'ameworks — social, experiential views of learning, as well as rhetoric — in conversation
with one another. The National Writing Project, like other professional development
models that encourage teachers to collaborate and talk to one another, asserts that
teachers will learn from other teachers. This learning happens, it appears, through the
central activities of the writing project, speciﬁcally the teachers’ own writing, the
teachers’ demonstration lesson, and, in turn, their conversations with one another about
both of those activities. While social, experiential views of learning are varied, one thread
that runs through each of them is the notion that teachers will forward arguments with
one another. That is, teachers will share their expertise and explain their judgments with
one another, and it is through the process of reﬂecting on and articulating their own
positions with one another that the teachers will have opportunities to change. That is,

when teachers talk to one another in professional development situations, such as the

group responses to demonstration lessons, teachers make arguments, which play a role in
teachers’ learning.

Social, experiential theories of learning includelearners making arguments

The National Writing Project outlines ﬁve core principles that guide its model,
and those principles begin to suggest different theories of learning that ground the work
of the NWP, particularly in summer institutes. The ﬁve core principles are as follows:

Teachers at every level are the agents of reform
Writing can and should be taught, not just assigned, at every grade level
Knowledge about the teaching of writing comes ﬁom many sources,
including theory and research, the analysis of practice, and the experience
of writing

0 There is no single right approach to teaching writing; however, some
practices prove to be more effective than others

0 Teachers who are well informed and effective in their practice can be
successful teachers of other teachers (retrieved from
http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/doc/about.csp on June 24, 2008).

Moreover, the NWP’s posits that professional development programs that are effective
“provide ﬁequent and ongoing opportunities for teachers to write and to examine theory,
research, and practice together systematically” (retrieved from

http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/doc/about.csp on June 24, 2008). When teachers

 

systematically work together to “examine theory, research, and practice,” such as when
they respond to demonstration lessons, they forward arguments to one another about why
they do what they do in their work as writing teachers. That is, the hope NWP seems to
have is that teachers make claims to one another about what they know, how they know
it, and why they do it as a way to respond to the theory, research, and practice they are
examining. While the NWP does not explicitly state its views on how teachers learn, their

core principles and position on effective professional development begin to reveal the

9

assumptions about teacher learning that guide the NWP summer institute experiences,
particularly the experience of teachers demonstrating lessons and responding to those
demonstrations. More speciﬁcally, the NWP principles and its position on effective
professional development suggest that learning is rooted in sharing one’s experiences
with others.

Social and experiential theories of learning vary through the different perspectives
they have on the role experience plays in learning. For instance, Fenwick (2003) outlines
ﬁve perspectives on the role experience plays in learning. These perspectives include:

Constructivist theory of learning in which learners reﬂect on concrete experience;

Situative theory of learning in which learning is rooted in the situation in which

the person participates, so that knowing is intertwined with doing, and the goal is

to participate in a community of practice;

0 Psychoanalytic theory of learning in which learners’ become aware of
unconscious desires, which overcomes the interference the unconscious has on the
learners’ conscious experience;

0 Critical cultural theory of learning in which learners resist dominant social norms
of experience; and, _

0 Complexity theory in which learning happens through the interaction of and the
relationship between dynamics, such as consciousness, identity, action and
interaction, objects and structural dynamics of complex system (Merriam et al.,
2007, pp. 160 - 161).

The NWP demonstration lessons and the group responses to demonstration lessons reﬂect
different parts of each of these perspectives, and each of these perspectives, like the NWP
principles and position statement, seem to assume the role arguments -the role of
explaining one’s judgment - plays in the learning situation. For example, the NWP
demonstration lessons, in which teachers offer others demonstrations of their own

teaching, suggest a constructivist view of learning in which the teachers are asked to

reﬂect on their own “concrete” teaching experience. These demonstration lessons are

10

implicit arguments by teachers: that is, teachers argue that the practices they demonstrate
are worthy of being shared with and discussed by colleagues. The summer institute itself
is an initiation into the larger community of practice of the National Writing Project. By
developing a network of teachers and by instituting small groups of teachers within a
summer institute, the RBWP suggests a desire for a community to develop, and
communities share some sense of beliefs, or a set of arguments about the way things
should be. In addition, within the social scene of the response groups teachers might
share their desires and fears, they could question traditional ways of teaching writing, and
by listening to teachers from a wide range of teaching contexts they may begin to
understand the ways in which teachers in different environments navigate those complex
environments and make the pedagogical choices that they do. In each of these cases,
teachers are reﬂecting on and making arguments to others about their work in their own
teaching context.

Undoubtedly, the NWP honors the experience of the teachers, and it seems to rely
on that experience as part of their learning. Despite the important role NWP places on
teachers’ experience, it is the sharing of those experiences that operationalizes how
learning is to occur. That is, teachers’ experience is not enough by itself; instead, it is
when teachers offer an articulation of those experiences that they, and those they talk
with, are susceptible to change. As Thiele (2006), writes, the articulation of judgment
matters:

Only at the moment of voicing a judgment do we, along with our listeners,
discover that an assessment, evaluation, and critical choice have been
made. With its articulation, a judgment is professed and comes to claim
our commitment. Subsequently, we may attempt to defend this judgment,

11

and often do so by mustering rational arguments that rely on general
principles (p. 71)

Unlike other views on learning, I am suggesting that in the social scenes of the
National Writing Project summer institutes in general, and the response groups to
demonstration lessons in particular, positions of authority are taken, and claims are
offered and supported with particular kinds of reasons and evidence that are accepted and
valued by other members of the group. This is different than developmental, cognitive, or
even transformational views of learning, all of which suggest of different ways “change”
occurs, such as when developmentalists suggest that “systematic change within an
individual or a group of individuals that results from a dynamic interaction of heredity
and environmental inﬂuences (Lerner, 1998, as cited in Bee & :Bjorkland, 2004, p 14)”
(Merriam et al., 2007, p. 298), or when cognitivists who share the stance that learning can
be understood by examining “thinking patterns change over time” based primarily on the
“interaction of maturational and environmental variables” (Merriam et al., 2007, p. 325).
Indeed, the desire for NWP summer institutes to bring teachers together to teach one
another suggests that teachers rely on their experiences and that they explain those
experiences with others. In pointing out the obvious, but seemingly overlooked, role that
arguments play in such situations, this study brings in concepts from rhetorical theory in
order to understand what is happening as teachers share their professional judgments with
one another.

To be sure, other theories of learning have been used to explain the phenomena of
teacher learning within NWP summer institutes. For instance, Whitney (2006) points to
transforrnative theories of learning to explore if and how the act of writing in the summer

12

institute changes the teachers in any way. Whitney found that the act of writing was
important in the teachers trying new roles, building conﬁdence and competence, and
examining themselves. The writing groups, she writes, “functioned as ‘audience
workshops’ in which both written compositions and the compositions of self-presentation
were worked out” (p. vii). Even within Whitney’s use of transformational view of
learning, however, teachers are making arguments to one another, though the role of
those arguments is not foregrounded in her study. For example, when teachers share their
writing in “audience workshops,” they “work out” both their writing and the writers’
“self presentations.” In other words, teachers make arguments through their writing about
the kinds of people, or at least the kinds of writers, they want to present to themselves
and others in the group. Whitney’s use of transformational learning theory makes sense in
her project, yet it also suggests that the NWP is not speciﬁc or explicit in the theory of
learning that guides the pedagogy of the summer institutes. Still, the transformational
theory of learning that Whitney forwards involves teachers reﬂecting on their actions in
their writing and sharing with one another their judgments that guided those actions.

In brief, the demonstration lesson response groups seem founded on particular
theories of learning that focus on the fact that change is possible when one shares his or
her experiences with others. In this social and experiential view of learning, the act of
reﬂecting becomes an important practice for learning since teachers need to both think
about their experiences in the classrooms (reﬂection-on-action), while at the same time
think about the experience they ﬁnd themselves in currently in the demonstration

response groups (reﬂection-in-action). Put another way, when responding to

13

demonstration lessons teachers are asked to reﬂect on the experiences in the
demonstration lesson, in their classrooms, in their other professional development
experiences, and in the summer institute with their response group members.

While many have written about the relationship between reﬂection, experience,
and learning, perhaps none has done more than Schon (1983, 1987, 1991), who has
pointed out a distinction between “reﬂection-on—action” and “reﬂection-in-action.” In his
work, Schon argues that professionals incorporate “reﬂection-in-action” (or “thinking on
your feet” or “keeping your wits about you”) as an integral part of professional
development (Merriam et al., 2007). Schiin believes that such reﬂection-in-action is
triggered by moments of surprise, and that when professionals consider their own
thinking that got them into that surprising situation, then there is the possibility for
understanding the situation or actions in new ways. As Merriam (2007) writes of Schon,
when professionals reﬂect-in-action as a regular part of their practice, it “allows
professionals to go beyond the routine application of rules, facts, and procedures and
gives them the freedom to practice more as professional artistry where they create new
ways of thinking and acting about problems of practice” (Merriam et al., 2007, p. 177).
Reﬂecting-in-action seems to not only be a part of the kind of thinking teachers do while
they are working with students, but when asked to explain those experiences with others
in their response groups, it also leads them to reﬂect on that action. That is, the act of
explaining to others their experiences in classrooms seems to lead teachers to think

through those situations after they happened.

14

While there are different models for reﬂection-on—action (Boud et al., 1985; Kolb,
1984; Osterman & Kottkarnp, 2004), they share a general sense of returning to the
experience a person has lived, reevaluating that experience, deciding what could be done
differently, and then trying out whatever she or he decided to do differently (Merriam et
al., 2007). The reﬂection-on-action framework leads to the question of whether or not
there is a gap between what one says she believes (espoused theories) and what one
actually does (teaching practice), and that is an undertaking that Osterman and Kottcamp
(2004) pursue. In doing so, Osterman and Kottcamp situate reﬂection in the space
between espoused theories (beliefs) and theories-in-use (actions), which allows learners
to contrast their beliefs with their actions (Merriam et al., 2007). This contrast sets-up
possible areas of change in either their beliefs, actions, or both.

In the demonstration response groups, teachers are asked to engage in both
reﬂection-in-action and reﬂection-on—action, and they are asked to do so in a particular
social scene, namely a response group within a local site of a larger teacher network. This
social situation, I believe, can not be overlooked, and it points to what one focal teacher
in this study called “a performative reﬂection” when she referred to one demonstrator’s
demonstration lesson. That is, the reﬂections are public, at least in the response group.
This situated view of learning emphasizes that learning involves socialization. For
instance, “scholars who study organizational learning,” Merriam and colleagues (2007)
write, “indicate that knowledge transfer of tacit knowledge (knowledge evident in our
actions but that may not be explicitly articulated), occurs through socialization with

others (Fenwick, 2003)” (p. 179). For the members of a demonstration response group,

15

however, part of the socialization involves critiquing the demonstration lessons and
writing a group response letter to each demonstrator, and these two acts of critiquing and
writing lead individual teachers to reﬂect on their actions with their own students, reﬂect
on their experiences within the demonstration lesson, reﬂect in their actions within the
demonstration response group, and, at the same time, form a group. In this socialization
through their sharing of reﬂections teachers will navigate that space between theory and
practice as they talk about what they did in their classrooms and why they did it. That is,
they will make arguments to one another as they explain their judgments.

I understand these to be rhetorical moments — those moments in which teachers
make arguments. In the next section, I deﬁne, describe, and illustrate how three concepts
from rhetorical theory — topoi, ethos, and phronesis — can be employed as a way to
understand what is happening when teachers are explaining their judgments to one
another in their demonstration lesson response groups.

Rhetorical concepts illuminate how arguments operate in social scenes

Teaching, as Floden and Clark (198 8) have described, is ﬁlled with uncertainty.
They write:

Uncertainty about inﬂuences arises because teachers can never be sure
how student understanding is changing, let alone about whether what they
do will have its desired effect on students. Uncertainty goes beyond doubts
about inﬂuence, however. Teachers also face uncertainties about
instructional content, ranging from difﬁcult choices about what to teach, to
imperfect understandings of difﬁcult concepts, to the fragile foundations
of the academic disciplines themselves. Together, these aspects of
uncertainty undermine teacher authority, creating situations in which they
must always weigh the uncertainty of teaching against the responsibility
for guidance built into the relationship between teacher and student. They
may also wonder about how they can improve their practice, including

how they deal with uncertainty (p. 506).

16

Teachers make many choices amidst all this uncertainty about their effectiveness, their
content, their understanding of concepts, their authority, and their relationships with
students. In their teaching practice, then, teachers make‘decisions about what to do and,
presumably, those decisions are based on particular kinds of reasons. That is, within the
response group conversations, teachers are navigating the space between their practice
and their theory. Rhetorical theory provides concepts that can illustrate what is happening
as teachers engage in these conversations. In particular, I point to the concepts of
phronesis, ethos, and topoi.

Although Porter (1998) is writing about the ethical stance he wants professional
writers to assume, his words reﬂect what can be said about teachers when they make
judgments in their classrooms. The operation of phronesis, Porter writes, is “the quality
of being able to determine what one should do, how one should act, and what one should
be even when the circumstances are murky, the issues complex, and the right action hard
to determine” (p. 150). Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics (1976), describes this procedure
as applying circumpectio (“looking around”) in order to determine options and choices
(J onsen and Toulmin, 198 8). This process of looking around in order to make decisions
not only produces an informed action and it also reveals the character of the decision-
maker. In rhetorical terms, this description of character is referred to as “ethos.”

Another way to think about phronesis is to consider its role with praxis (Freire,
1970/ 1993), a concept traditionally used in educational circles to describe that space

between theory and practice. Schon (1983) describes some professional areas being

17

deﬁned by the activity of praxis. Porter (1998) explains Schon’s position on this activity
of praxis in the professions as:
A kind of thinking that does not start with theoretical knowledge or
abstract models (which are then applied to situations), but that begins with
immersion in local situations and then uses epistemic theory as heuristic
rather than as explanatory or determining (p. 61)

Schon’s description of praxis describes the teachers in the response group who are
responding to the local situation of the concrete experiences of the demonstration lesson
activities. The concept of phronesis adds an extension to his thought, however. That is,
praxis is enabled by phronesis. In the case of the response group conversations, the
phronesis is focused on the interactions within the group, rather than on each teacher’s
actions within the classrooms. That is, teachers need to be prudent in regards to the way
they navigate the space between theory and practice within their conversations with one
another, because what they say to one another helps to position them as certain kinds of
teachers, and certain types of group members. In this way, phronesis informs ethos.

Simultaneously and similarly, teachers in the response group must also display
judgment about what they talk about in their group and how they support the arguments
they forward to one another. In rhetorical terms, the concept of “topoi” is useful, as it
describes the resources that are available to all the group members as they explain their
judgments to one another. Put more simply, to be considered a part of the group,
individual teachers must ﬁgure out how much theory and how much practice is
acceptable to talk about in the group.

In the following sections I describe each of these concepts - phronesis, ethos, and

topoi — more completely. As a tentative framework, however, I see relationships among

18

these concepts. More speciﬁcally, the response group conversations aim, in part, to create
a sense of “groupness” or a community. An essential part of that process is cultivating
trust between the group members, particularly since the. premise supporting this learning
situation is that teachers share their critiques of the demonstration lessons as a way to
launch their own public reﬂections and revelations about what they do in their own
classrooms and why they do it. That is, in order to build trust within the response groups,
the participants in the group must craft an ethos of being a teacher who makes prudent
decisions with her students. In crafting a trusted ethos within the group, teachers must
also display prudence in how they present their “practical reasoning” (phronesis) from the
classroom and in what kinds of resources they turn to for their arguments (topoi), which
means they must navigate that space between theory and practice in a way that reﬂects
what the group deems acceptable and appropriate for the situation.

In short, the demonstration lessons, the rubric describing the desired features of
the demonstration lessons, and the collaboratively written response letter to each
demonstrator work together to trigger deliberations within the demonstration response
groups. In these deliberations, teachers are asked to both reﬂect on their experiences in
their classrooms and to share those experiences with one another. In sharing their
reﬂections publicly, teachers are also reﬂecting—in-action by articulating their judgments
and by providing reasons and justiﬁcations for their decisions made in their classrooms.
The act of explaining their judgment in this particular scene, therefore, reveals the
teachers’ knowledge and understanding of teaching and of the scene itself. The teachers’

justiﬁcation also provides opportunities for teachers to reveal how they understand their

19

teaching practice and their principles or theory that help them make sense or guide their
teaching practice. That is, the justiﬁcation teachers offer one another is an opportunity for
teachers to share how they navigate the space between theory and practice.

The rhetorical concept of ethos, phronesis, and topoi are useful in understanding
how teachers understand their knowledge as teachers who make decisions in the
classroom and how teachers understand the social scene of explaining to professional
peers the judgment they display in the classroom with students. Brieﬂy, crafting one’s
ethos describes the relationship between a speaker and her audience, a relationship in
which speakers can be seen as trusted professional peers. The concept of topoi helps to
describe the knowledge or the resources that are shared by the entire group. In using
appropriate resources, a speaker aligns herself with the others in the group; whereas using
inappropriate resources damages one’s standing with the group. Similarly, the concept of
phronesis also aids or damages ones ethos in that how teachers in the group explain their
judgment in the classroom reveals the kind of teacher they are to others in the group. For
instance, teachers who are responsive to the needs of students or who share the tensions
of dealing with uncertainties in the classroom are more likely to be trusted by the group
than those who do not share experiences in the classroom but, instead, espouse theories or
overly-mention research studies as the sole or dominant reason for making the decisions
they do in the classroom.

A trusted ethos helps in explaining one ’s judgment
In Ancient times, Aristotle deﬁned rhetoric as an ability “ to see the available

means of persuasion in each case” (1991, p. 35). Aristotle described three means of

20

persuasion (pisteis) that are available to orators, namely logos (reasoning), pathos
(emotion), and ethos (character). That is, in thinking about the available means of
persuading an audience, an orator would beneﬁt from considering the logic, emotions,
and believability she or he presents to the immediate audience. While the response groups
in the summer institutes are not situations in which orators give speeches to an audience,
they are situations in which each group member aims to be considered group members
whose judgment is to be trusted and valued. As such, ethos becomes a vital concept in
understanding what is happening in the response group conversations, because it provides
a framework for understanding the verbal moves teachers make as they craft an ethos for
themselves in the group. Ethos is a concept that illustrates a relationship between a
speaker and her colleagues, a relationship that is cultivated largely through language.

The Ancient concept of ethos refers to “proofs that rely on a rhetor’s personality
or reputation” (Crowley & Hawhee, 1999, p. 105). Aristotle distinguished between two
kinds of ethical proof - the invented ethos and the situated ethos. The difference between
the two resides in how others view the speaker. If the speaker already enjoys a good
reputation within the group, then she operates within a situated ethos. If, on the other
hand, the speaker is unknown to the group, then she can invent or create an ethos suitable
for the occasion. Crowley and Hawhee (1999) explain Aristotle’s suggestions for
constructing an ethos when they write:

Rhetors can construct a character that seems intelligent by demonstrating
that they are well-informed about issues they discuss. They project an
appearance of good moral character by describing themselves or others as

moral persons and by refraining from the use of misleading or fallacious
arguments. Rhetors project good will toward an audience by presenting

21

the information and arguments that audiences require in order to
understand the rhetorical situation (p. 112).

I use this sense of invented ethos to examine the process in which teachers construct their
own ethos. That is, I identify the moves teachers make in their conversations as they
position themselves to one another as authorities to be trusted. Since I am examining the
transcripts of conversations as they occur in response groups, I am identifying the ethos-
building as it occurs, rather than as it is in a ﬁnished product. In other words, I am not
examining the ethos of a ﬁnished product, such as a speech or a ﬁnished piece of writing,
rather I am identifying the moves teachers make as they occur.

Since I am examining transcripts, I am undoubtedly missing ethos-building moves
that occur in body language, gestures, silences, attire, and physical proximity; however, I
see these group situations in which teacher learning is the aim as providing an
understanding ethos-building moves that are not typically paired or even considered
ethos-building moves. That is, I understand the concepts of topoi and phronesis to be
related in that their deployment by individuals can signal membership into a group.
Phronesis and topoi help to craft a trusted ethos

In their article “Teachers’ Professional Knowledge Landscapes: Teacher Stories —
Stories of Teachers — School Stories — Stories of Schools,” Clandinin and Connelly
(1996) offer the metaphor of a “landscape” to describe the reality that “teachers spend
part of their time in classrooms and part of their time in other professional, communal
places” (p. 25) and that these two are two distinct places on that landscape. The
classroom spaces on the landscape are “safe places, generally free from scrutiny, where

teachers are ﬂee to live stories of practice” (p. 25). That is, Clandinin and Connelly argue

22

that the classroom is generally a secret place: it is difﬁcult for others to know what
teachers and students are doing in the classroom, because they are generally the only ones
present. When teachers move to the more public place on the professional landscape, they
talk about what they do in their classrooms. Clandinin and Connelly use the concept of
“cover stories” as a way to describe the “stories in which they portray themselves as
experts, certain characters whose teacher stories ﬁt within the acceptable range of the
story of school being lived in the school” (p.25). The cover stories help teachers engage
in conversation with those who are not in the classroom, those who they encounter in the
out-of-classroom place in their professional landscape. To teachers this place on the
landscape is “littered with imposed prescriptions” aimed at altering the classroom life of
teachers and students. For Clandinin and Connelly the metaphor of a “landscape” for the
profession of teaching allows them to see teachers as doing more than working with
students in a classroom. Teachers engage in a host of occasions in which they produce
and demonstrate their knowledge.

When Clandinin and Connelly explore teachers working in these different places
on their professional landscape they explore the stories of and by teachers, as well as the
stories of and by schools. The concept of a professional landscape is a useful one,
because it provides a way to describe the audiences and purposes for these stories. That
is, the metaphor of a landscape helps to describe the literal places where teachers ﬁnd
themselves demonstrating and sharing their knowledge with and to others. In Classical

Rhetorical terms, the metaphor of “place” can ﬁnd its roots back in ancient times. More

23

speciﬁcally, Ancient Rhetoricians used the terms of “topoi” and “commonplaces” to
describe the locations where rhetors could ﬁnd resources for their arguments.

Crowley and Hawhee (1999) offer a brief history of topics or commonplaces. The
Greek “topos” means “place,” while the Latin “locis communis” means “commonplaces.”
For instance, Quintillian described “topics” as “the secret places where arguments reside,
and from which they must be drawn forth (Wx, 20)”(Crowley & Hawhee, 1999, p. 75).
This Classical use of “topics” as a place differs from the more modern use of the term
“topics,” which “exist either in a body of knowledge which must be learned or in a
thinker’s review of her experiences” (Crowley & Hawhee, 1999, p. 76).

For Classical Rhetoricians the concept of topics, or commonplaces, refers to a
shared place where everyone in a community could ﬁnd the resources for an argument.
Crowley and Hawhee (1999)explain, “They were called commonplaces because they
were available to anyone who spoke or wrote the language in which they were couched
and who was reasonably familiar with the ethical and political discussions taking place in
the community” (p. 76). Because speakers in a community shared the places in which
they could ﬁnd the resources for an argument, locating the commonplaces of a
community reveals the shared values, the commonsense, or ideology, of a group.

In Lindquist’s (2002) study of the Smokehouse culture, she also employs “topoi”
as a way to describe the shared beliefs of the Smokehousers. “Topoi,” Lindquist writes,
“structure the commonsense of the community” and let speakers know “where to go” to

ﬁnd resources for a given argument. In other words, one way to be identiﬁed as an

insider, or credible, is to choose resources for arguments that are considered appropriate

24

within the community. Traditionally, topoi might be considered basic categories of
relationships among ideas, Lindquist’s use of the concept links an individual’s use of
particular ideas to membership within a community. Aristotle did divide topoi into
“common topics” which are available to everyone in most situations and “special topics”
which he divides further into judicial, deliberative, and ceremonial purposes. I point to
these different types of topoi because I do not pursue whether or not teachers in the
response group are drawing from common or special topics as resources for their
arguments. Moreover, the response group conversations are not the situation Ancient
Rhetoricians had in mind when they were thinking about more formal situations of
speech-making. Instead, the response group members are participating in a group whose
aims include learning from one another and forming a group together. I believe what
teachers talk about and where they go to support the arguments they make help to
illustrate how their group, in part, becomes a group through their exchanges.

While topoi and phronesis are not typically paired with one “another, I see
phronesis serving a similar function as topoi, namely that it can help illustrate how
arguments operate within the group and in the service of teacher learning. That is, in
responding to demonstration lessons, teachers are making judgments about the
demonstration itself, and they support their judgments based on some sort of reasoning.
This reason-giving demands that teachers navigate both theory and practice, which relies
not on scientiﬁc reasoning (episteme) or technical or productive reasoning (techne) or
intellection (noesis) (Thiele, 2006). Instead, teachers engage in phronesis, referred to

more commonly as prudence, practical wisdom, or practical reasoning. If the teachers

25

engage in a reasoning that is not phronesis, or if the reasoning they provide ﬁ'om their
experience is not considered prudent by the other group members, then the individual’s
ethos within the group will be damaged.

While some, like F ensterrnacher, have focused teachers’ deployment of phronesis
in their decision making in the classroom, in talking to one another in the response
groups, teachers must also deploy phronesis as they judge what is “good action” within
that immediate situation. Fensterrnacher (1994) uses the concept of “phronesis” to
describe the “practical reasoning” teachers engage in while in a discourse of practice. He
describes this discourse as “to what takes place in settings where teachers work. As such
it pertains to the speciﬁc, situational, and particular”(p. 39). That is, phronesis is
displayed when teachers make decisions in the classroom, and as such, phronesis is
“speciﬁc, situational, and particular.” Extending this to the speciﬁc and particular
professional development situation of the demonstration response groups, I see that
teachers make judgments about how they explain their judgments in the classroom.

Dewey (1993) deﬁnes judgment as “a sense of respective or proportionate values”
(p. 106), and it involves more than is more than an intellectual exercise; instead, it
includes engaging in cognitive, perceptual, and emotional faculties (Thiele, 2006, p. 36).
For Dewey judgment leads to human freedom, because one judges one determines what
merits attention, decides what is signiﬁcant, and acts accordingly. Thiele (2006) explains
Dewey’s position:

Social conditions promote the development of judgment, and thereby
safeguard freedom of thought, when they place individuals — both children

and adults — in situations that demand the exercise of judgment. Only the
transformation of thought into action via judgment fosters the stimulation

26

of further thought. Dewey argues that judgment secures freedom of

thought, and subsequently all other freedoms, by stimulating thinking to

change its world (p. 37).
Thus, the social conditions, or scene, of demonstration response groups provide
opportunities for teachers to decide what topics are worth sharing, what is important ﬁ'om
their own experience, and what merits enough attention to be shared with the others. To
be sure, the kind of freedom Dewey talks about could also useful in thinking about the
decisions teachers make in their classrooms, and as teachers share their experiences with
one another they, as future chapters will describe, do talk about the constraints placed on
their ability to be autonomous in their classroom decision-making. Still, the teachers are
also engaged in a social scene within the demonstration response groups, and as such,
they make decisions there as well - decisions about how they aim to craft a credible ethos
within the group. Part of crafting this credible ethos is determined by how the teachers
decide to explain the judgments they make in their classrooms.

In presenting my understanding that the rhetorical concepts of phronesis and topoi
aid in crafting a credible ethos for teachers as they explain their judgments to one another
in demonstration response groups, I hope to point out that explaining judgments matter in
teacher learning, and the rhetorical concepts help to show how that is so. Again, I turn to
Thiele (2006) about the importance of articulating judgment. He writes:

Judgments become available to us, in the sense that we gain awareness of
their (conceptual) import, only with their articulation. Prior to this event,
proto-judgrnents formed experientially already inform our attitudes,
beliefs, and actions in important ways. Consider the common event of
‘discovering’ one’s judgment at the moment of its articulation. Novelist
E.M. Forster captured this phenomenon well when he asked: ‘How do I

know what I think, until I see what I say?’ Before a judgment is put into
words, we have no settled position. At least, we are aware of none. Only at

27

the moment of voicing a judgment do we, along with our listeners,
discover that an assessment, evaluation, and critical choice have been
made. With its articulation, a judgment is professed and comes to claim
our commitment. Subsequently, we may attempt to defend this judgment,
and often do so by mustering rational arguments that rely on general
principles (p. 71) ‘
For the NWP teachers whose aim is to learn from and with one another, the articulation
of their judgment are acts that not only help in their learning, but also help them in the
social aim of becoming credible and trusted members of a response group. In the next
chapter, I review other studies that have examined teacher knowledge, networks of

teachers including the National Writing Project, as well as studies that employ rhetorical

concepts in social scenes like the scene examined in this study.

28

Chapter 2: Reviews of Related Literature: Teacher Knowledge, Teacher Networks,
and Rhetoric

The phenomenon of interest is teachers “explaining judgment,” which I see as a
particular kind of rhetorical practice. With this as the central feature, I see two strands of
educational research that overlap at the point of explaining judgment. First, teacher
knowledge research includes conversations about how teachers explain what it is they say
they know and how that knowledge informs and stems from their judgment. Second, the
research on teacher networks posits that teachers can learn from one another by talking to
one another about their teaching practice, content knowledge, and / or professional
judgment.

Teacher knowledge is revealed in teachers’ justiﬁcations and explanations of the
decisions they make in their work

Since I am interested in observing and understanding the process in which
teachers make their tacit theories explicit, it follows that I untangle all the work related to
what it is teachers know. In other words, I review the literature on “teacher knowledge,”
which is largely a recent line of scholarship whose beginning often coincides with the
work of Lee Shulman (1986; 1987). Shulman’s project aimed to understand what
knowledge is essential for teaching (Fenstennacher, 1994). That is, one purpose for
investigating teacher knowledge is for teacher education. This research program aims to
understand how, according to Fensterrnacher (1994), students learn to teach subjects that
they already know or are in the process of acquiring (see, for instance, (Grossman, 1990;
Grossman et al., 1989; S. Wilson et al., 1987). One of Shulman’s major contributions is
his notion of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), which is a concept used in a host of

29

more recent studies, including those in technology (Mishra & Koehler, 2006), physical
education (Rovegno, 1998), math (Lowery, 2002), and science (Barnett & Hodson, 2001;
Lowery, 2002). In order to describe what teachers should know, Shulman (1986; 1987)
frames this knowledge, in part, by distinguishing between subject matter knowledge,
curricular or pedagogical knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge . Shulman
argues that teachers have a pedagogical understanding of subject matter. He explains:
Within the category of pedagogical content knowledge I include, for the
most regularly taught topics in one’s subject area, the most useful forms of
representation of those ideas, the most powerful analogies, illustrations,
examples, explanations, and demonstrations — in a word, the ways of
representing and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible to
others... Pedagogical content knowledge also includes an understanding
of what makes the learning of speciﬁc topics easy or difﬁcult: the
conceptions and preconceptions that students of different ages and
backgrounds bring with them to the learning of those most frequently
taught topics and lessons. If those preconceptions are misconceptions,
which they so often are, teachers need knowledge of the strategies most
likely to be fruitful in reorganizing the understanding of learners, because
those learners are unlikely to appear before them as blank slates (pp. 9-10)
In categorizing the types of knowledge teachers need in order to do their work as
teachers, Shulman offers a way for teacher educators to organize their work of preparing
future teachers. For instance, Bransford, Darling-Hammond, and LePage (2005) recently
offered a framework in which to understand what teachers know, and their framework
seems to extend and reﬁne Shulman’s notion of PCK in that they categorize teacher
knowledge into three categories - knowledge of learners and their development in social
contexts, knowledge of subject matter and cuniculum goals, and knowledge of teaching —

and they situate these knowledges on two contexts in which teachers work — the context

of the profession of teaching and the context of schools serving the purposes of

30

democracy. Clearly, the notion of what teachers should know is of central import to
teacher educators.

One critique, however, of codifying teacher knowledge - as Shulman and
Bransford, Darling-Hammond, and LePage have done — is that its epistemological
framing is difficult to analyze (Fenstermacher, 1994). That is, naming and classifying
what it is teachers should know tends to foreground formal knowledge and background
practical knowledge. Although Shulman’s concept of PCK does not ignore practical
knowledge — that is, not the knowledge that teachers should have, but knowledge that
teachers already have and act on — it is less visible.

The focus on teachers’ practical knowledge is the focus of the research programs
of those who study what it is teachers already know. In his seminal review on teacher
knowledge in which he argues that teachers’ practical knowledge is a legitimate
epistemological category, Fenstenmacher (1994) outlines two related, but distinct strands
of research on what teachers already know. Although both strands‘seek out a conception
of knowledge that arises out of action or experience that is itself grounded in this same
action or experience, one strand (Clandinin & Connelly, 1996; Elbaz, 1983, 1991)
grapples with teachers’ personal and practical knowledge, while the other strand (Schbn,
1983, 1987, 1991) is interested in how knowledge arises in the context of action and the
consequences of that knowledge for practice.

In the ﬁrst strand, the Clandinin and Connelly strand, researchers do not want to
impose theories and research on teachers; instead, they seek to perform research that

understands how teachers think about their own work and what knowledge they use to

31

base their actions. Clandinin and Connelly (1996) argue that appropriate methods for this
line of inquiry, therefore, would be centered on narratives, images, stories, narrative
writing, and embodied knowledge. Thus, in order to understand teachers’ “personal
practical knowledge,” which they deﬁne as “knowledge that reﬂects the individual’s prior
knowledge and acknowledges the contextual nature of that teacher’s knowledge,”
Connelly and Clandinin believe that when a teacher gives expression to his or her
conception of what took place in a classroom, that expression is deemed teacher
knowledge.

Schon is more guarded in granting the label of “knowledge” to that which
teachers say. Instead, Schon’s approach is to infer teacher knowledge from action that
arises in the course of experience as a teacher. That is, Schiin is arguing for an
“epistemology of practice.” This epistemology argues that there is knowing in our action,
which is methodologically difﬁcult to tease out, especially when compared to analyzing
the narratives, images, or stories teachers share. Instead, Schiin aims to understand what
knowledge is involved in action and how that knowledge is altered in any subsequent
action.

Despite the different approaches to investigating what it is that teachers know, I
situate my work within this line of inquiry. The different methods of inquiry do raise a
theoretical and methodological set of issues that I too must grapple with in the present
study. More speciﬁcally, theoretically I need to take a position on the relationship
between knowledge and action. Methodologically, I must untangle how I will determine

if a teacher has “knowledge,” and how I will know if it is knowledge based on listening

32

to teachers talking with me and others in our group. Again, I turn to Gary F ensterrnacher
(1994), a self-described epistemologist, for assistance. I will also more closely examine a
recent study (Margerum-Leys & Marx, 2004) that engages with both Shulman and
Fenstermacher.

“Knowledge,” as F ensterrnacher (1994) points out, needs to be deﬁned when
engaging in a study about what it is teachers know, or, as is the case in my study, how
teachers explain their judgments to one another. As F eimser-Nemser & F loden (1986) put
it, it does not follow “that everything a teacher believes or is willing to act on merits the
label knowledge, although that view has some support. Such a position makes the
concept of knowledge as justiﬁed beliefs meaningless”(p.515). This theoretical position
has methodological consequences. For instance, in their study of a student teacher and a
mentor teacher engaged in using educational technology, Margerum-Leys and Marx
(2004) wanted to understand what knowledge of educational technology could be
inferred from observing the practice of and the conversation between a student teacher
and mentor teacher. They chose to bound “knowledge” in what F ensterrnacher describes
as a “grouping” sense. By this they mean that they “do not make an epistemic distinction
between knowledge and beliefs, preferring to careﬁrlly describe participants’ practice and
our inferences regarding their tacit knowledge and to allow readers to draw their own
conclusions” (p. 424-425). This is an important theoretical and methodological move
Margerum-Leys and Marx are making, because it positions themselves as observers who
are making inferences about one’s knowledge based on what the observed are saying and

doing. That is, the researchers do not want to make epistemological arguments about

33

whether the two teachers being studied are acting on beliefs or knowledge. For
Fenstermacher, who argues that practical knowledge is an epistemological category,
practical knowledge (such as that knowledge shown when the two teachers in this study
are using or talking about educational technology) can be considered “knowledge” as
long as it has justiﬁcation and warrants attached to it. Margerum—Leys and Marx seem
uninterested in making a distinction between knowledge and beliefs, though it is an
understandable stance to take as the researcher faces methodologically difﬁcult tasks.
Fenstermacher (1994) tackles the difﬁculty researchers have in inferring what it is
people know based on what they say. The difﬁculty has many facets. To begin, there are
many levels of expression and inferences that are occurring. He outlines what he calls six
different levels of discourse. (T= teacher in a Practice discourse; R = researcher in a

Research discourse; k — precursor to a knowledge claim or an outright claim to know

R expresses that T knows that k
R knows that T knows that k (p. 40)

something).
1. T expresses k
2. T knows that k
3. R expresses that T expresses k
4. R knows that T expresses k
5.
6.

In this progression the researcher faces many challenges, particularly the challenge of
providing evidence and justiﬁcation for knowing that a teacher both expresses and
knows. Margerum-Leys and Marx decide to state quite clearly that they are not interested
in making the distinction between knowledge and beliefs. Instead, their approach is to
observe and infer knowledge based on what they see the two teachers doing. If they had
decided to make distinctions between knowledge and beliefs, Fenstermacher might

34

suggest that they would need justiﬁcation and evidence to support the researchers’ claims
of teachers’ knowledge.

Although I share in Margerum-Leys and Marx’sposition in not making epistemic
distinctions between knowledge and beliefs, it is this sense of justiﬁcation that I am
interested in applying in a way that Margerum-Leys did not and that Fenstermacher
begins to address. More precisely, F enstennacher offers an Aristotelian notion of
phronesis, or practical reasoning. Fenstermacher explains with an example using the six
levels of discourse explained above. I quote at length:

Consider the problem posed earlier, that of making a Level 6 claim (R
knows that T knows that k) when the Level 2 claim (T knows that k) is an
instance of tacit knowing (i.e., the researcher “detects” the teacher’s
“knowledge” of k, even though T is unaware of k as something he or she
possesses in the form of knowledge or understanding). So long as this
knowledge or understanding is tacit, it is unavailable to the teacher for
ﬁrrther reﬂection. If the researcher probes, in a manner indicative of trust
and mutual regard, the teacher’s reasons for acting as he or she did, the
performance “knowledge” heretofore tacit may reach a conscious level of
awareness. Once aware of it, the teacher can deliberate or reﬂect on it and,
if it is found meritorious in that teacher’s conception of his or her work,
advance it as a reason to justify acting as he or she did (p.45-46)
While Fenstermacher’s main concern is to argue that practical knowledge is a legitimate
epistemological category, he also sets-up a reason for researchers to examine the
relationship between practical knowledge and practical reasoning. F ensterrnacher cites
Jonsen and Toulmin (1988) who explained how phronesis, or practical reasoning, was
understood in Aristotle’s time: “[Phronesis] ‘concerned situations the nature and
complexity of which were unknown beforehand: it dealt with them not by merely
reapplying predetermined generic techniques but by recognizing what combinations of

actions are appropriate to complex or ambiguous situations’ (p. 65)” (p.45). Thus,

35

theoretically, the concept of phronesis can help to provide the reasons, warrants, or
evidence necessary to justify labeling something a teacher says as knowledge.
Methodologically, however, it also suggests what researchers might look for when
observing teachers in action (whether that action might be working with students or
talking with others about that work), namely the reasons teachers offer for the judgments
that they make. As Fenstermacher points out, the notion of seeking the practical reasons
teachers provide not only has epistemological value, but it also can permit us to consider
moral dimensions of teaching and it can serve as a “means for transforming the tacit
quality of the teacher’s knowing to a level of awareness that opens the possibility for
reﬂective consideration” (p.45).

As I consider my study, I am clearly interested in what it is that teachers already
know, and I assume that they know a great deal based on their training and experience. I
also want to share in Margerurn-Leys and Marx’s willingness to infer what teachers know
based on observing teachers talk to one another; however, I want to differ from them in
that I want to pay particular attention to the reasons teachers offer for their judgments.
That is, I’m less concerned with theoretical debates about classifying something a teacher
says as a “belief” or as “knowledge,” and more concerned with the arguments teachers
forward when talking to others about their work, because it is in explaining themselves
that teachers’ knowledge is revealed. Moreover, this knowledge is shared in a social
scene with professional peers, which creates opportunities for new understandings.

In the next section I want to explore more thoroughly the ways in which I see

teacher networks sharing Fensterrnacher’s notion of phronesis as being embedded within

36

the goals of the networks. That is, I believe that teacher networks argue that teachers
should talk to one another about their work as a way to learn, change, transform, and
improve their teaching practice. One assumption being made in such a stance is that by
talking to one another teachers will engage in conversations that will ask them to reﬂect
on their practice, and in turn, the reﬂection will serve the teachers’ own learning. In other
words, teachers will have to talk to one another about why they do what they do — they
will articulate and share their reasoning for why they do what they do in their classrooms.
In seeing teacher networks in this way, I am trying to answer Fenstermacher’s call:
If the potential of the notion of practical knowledge, knowledge-in-action,
personal practical knowledge, or teacher knowledge is to be realized, all
who would study it face an obligation to take seriously the fact that they
are studying notions of knowledge and, as such, must work through
matters of warrant and justiﬁcation (p. 49)
I aim to “work through matters of warrant and justiﬁcation” as I listen to and participate
with a small group of teachers who are responding teaching demonstration lessons. I
review the literature on teacher networks in order to tease out some of what others have
concluded about teachers talking to one another as an approach to the professional

development of those teachers.

Networks of teachers provide opportunities and purposes for teachers to explain to
one another their judgment

One of the approaches to school reform that has received relatively recent
attention has been networks of teachers talking to one another about their work
(Lieberman & Grolnick, 1996; McDonald & Klein, 2003). More broadly, teacher
networks ﬁt within a movement of school reform that focuses on teacher learning,
though, as McDonald and Klein (2003) point out, some research highlights

37

preprofessional teacher education (Darling-Hammond et al., 1995), some focus on staff
developers where teachers work (Elmore & Burney, 1999), and some focus on cultivating
collaborative communities of practice within schools (Little, 1999; McLaughlin &
Talbert, 2001). Teacher networks are a bit different in that “they network teachers across
schools, offering them access to outside expertise, particularly in content areas
(Lieberman & Grolnick, 1996; Pennell & Firestone, 1996, 1998)” (p. 1607). The notion
of teachers learning by talking to other educators does not emphasize what teachers do in
classrooms, but rather what they know. As Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2003) point out,
“teachers are acknowledged as not just receivers of information or implementers of
teaching methods and cuniculum, but also translators and interpreters of subject matter,
inventors of teaching strategies, and generators of knowledge curriculum, and
instruction” (p. 2461).

Studies of teacher networks seem to fall into two broad categories. The ﬁrst of
these categories are studies of the effects teacher networks seem to have on individual
teachers. These studies (see, for instance, El-Haj, 2003; Weidernann & Humphrey, 2002)
focus on individual networks of teachers, paying particular attention to what happens
with individual teachers over the course of a longer period of time. The second of these
categories are studies of how teacher networks are Structured and organized. These
studies (Lieberman & Grolnick, 1996; McDonald & Klein, 2003) aim to describe the
theories that support and drive the work of teacher networks. As such, this category of
teacher network study identiﬁes and describes the different traits, themes, and tensions of

a variety of individual teacher networks.

38

Both types of teacher network studies reveal that teacher networks envision
teachers as knowledge-producers and meaning-makers. That is, teacher networks seem to
start with the premise that teachers know quite a bit, much of their knowledge is tacit,
and, if teachers are given opportunities to talk with others, that tacit knowledge can
become visible, shared, and learned. As Lieberman and Grolnick (1996) write, network
members

are given opportunities to label, articulate, and share the tacit knowledge

that they have developed through their work. Networks encourage the

sharing of this knowledge, which gives members greater access to ‘just-in-

time-learning’ — learning that is tied to the actual work educators do. This

also has the effect of dignifying and giving shape to the substance of what

teachers share - the dailiness of work that, while often invisible to

outsiders, binds insiders together (p. 40)
The binding of “insiders together” suggests that the social goal of networks, namely
creating afﬁliations with other professional peers, plays a central role in teachers’
learning. Teacher networks aim for teachers to learn through talking with one another,
though it is difficult for researchers to both deﬁne “learning” and to capture that learning
in studies (S. Wilson & Beme, 1999).Despite the methodological challenges facing
researchers, studies of teacher networks have found that teacher networks do provide
opportunities for network members. For instance, in their study of teacher networks,
Lieberman and Grolnick (1996) found in the sixteen educational reform teacher networks
they studied that the networks have powerful effects on its members, including

0 Giving members a chance to label, articulate, and share their tacit

knowledge,
0 Allowing network leaders to be responsive to the needs of the
members, which “provides for a more developmental approach to

member learning... and encourages a more personal and professional
connection to their own learning,” (p. 40)

39

o Conceiving of learning as problem-solving and challenging
involvement, rather than as a prescriptive approach, and

0 Providing multiple opportunities, formal and informal, to take on
leadership roles.

Building off of Lieberman and Grolnick (1996),” McDonald and Klein (2003)
studied seven teacher networks. In their study, McDonald and Klein focused on teacher
networks whose aims were to develop the content knowledge and pedagogical content
knowledge of its members. Moreover, McDonald and Klein limited their study to
networks of teachers situated in the humanities, and as such, the networks they studied
included Foxﬁre, Humanitas, the Bread Loaf Rural Teacher Network, the American
Social History Project, the Empire State Partnerships, Facing History and Ourselves, and
the National Writing Project.

McDonald and Klein (2003) found that these networks shared many common
features, including a focus on the humanities, a focus on developing their members’
content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge, a member initiation through a
summer experience that — in most cases — involved professional risk taking (e. g., sharing
favorite lesson, creating new plans and opening them up to peer critique, sharing one’s
own students’ work), and an invitation to members “to continue their development as
network members through periodic workshops or meetings, online discussions, and
sometimes in-school coaching”(p. 1 609). With these similarities in mind, McDonald and
Klein set out to understand the networks’ “theories of action,” or, in other words, how
each network designs itself and the work of the members. McDonald and Klein found

that networks have to grapple with what they call four “design tensions.” They describe

the tensions in the following ways:

40

1. Knowledge aims. Do the networks put greater emphasis on knowledge
of pedagogy or knowledge of content?

2. Knowledge sources. Do the networks attend more to their own
members’ practice and practical contexts as sources of learning or to
the more generalized or theoretical perspectives of expert others — for
example, authors, consultants, or staff?

3. Learning environments. Are the networks more likely to construct
learning environments on the spot to accommodate members’
perceived needs or contextual circumstance or are they more likely to
deliver preconstructed ones?

4. Intended impact on practice. Do the networks put more emphasis on
adaptation of what they offer or on faithful replication of it? (p. 1609)

They ﬁnd that none of the seven networks they studied have discrete and simple answers
to any of these tensions. Indeed, they hypothesize “that networks focused on teacher
learning of content and pedagogical content knowledge might do well to stay toward the
middle of each of the continua deﬁned by the design tensions” (p.1607). In the end,
McDonald and Klein (2003) do not evaluate the networks; instead, their examination of
the ways in which networks are designed leaves them wondering if subject matter makes
a difference in network design, if and how networks might design themselves to
complement school reform efforts focused on accountability, and if teacher networks
foster the development of communities of practice. These, I believe, are all questions
worthy of pursuit. I am, however, intrigued by one other question that they raise. They
write:
All the questions we raise previously — about optimal design proﬁle, about
the role of content in networking, and about strategic complementarity -
point to serious theoretical gaps. Why so much advocacy and practice of
teacher networking over the last decade or more, and such lingering
theoretical gaps? (p. 1619).
In response to this question, McDonald and Klein, I believe, provide an incomplete,

though helpful, answer. They write:

41

The reasons seem clear. Working on limited soft-money budgets, teacher
networks have worked much harder on doing than on theorizing.
Meanwhile, with the notable exceptions cited throughout this article, few
researchers studying school reform have paid much attention to
networking.
This response seems incomplete in that it does not suggest what it is teacher networks
should be theorizing. I think McDonald and Klein (2003) are interested in how to “scale
up” teacher learning in networks as an approach to educational reform, but it is unclear if

9, 6‘

this means teacher networks be theorizing “learning, communities of practice,”
“effectiveness of networks,” or something else. Still, I think McDonald and Klein provide
a useful suggestion for the study of teacher networks, namely that theorizing should be
part of this research program. I hope to address the gap they perceive by theorizing the
relationship between rhetorical concepts and social theories of learning through the
present study of one small group of teachers talking to one another about the
demonstration lessons shared by other teachers in their teacher network.

Studies on the conversations between teachers face methodological challenges. In
their review of teacher learning and the acquisition of professional knowledge, Wilson
and Beme (1999) organized their review around teachers having “opportunities to talk
about subject matter,” “opportunities to talk about students and learning,” and
“opportunities to talk about teaching.” They note that these categories are not discrete, as
conversations between teachers tend to “shift easily and sensibly” between the different

categories (p. 189). For example, in a study by Rosebery and Warren (1998) that Wilson

and Beme review, the researchers examined the discourse of a group of science teachers

42

who met regularly over the course of a school year in which the teachers were to “do

science” and to learn to “sound scientiﬁc.” Rosebery and Warren write:

The construction of shared meaning does not happen in an orderly, linear
progression, from implicit to explicit meaning. Rather, it has a more
mobile, mutable, improvisational character as meanings are taken up and
elaborated by different participants, each of whom draws on past as well
as ‘already accepted’ perspectives in the conversation. In this way, the
meaning of ‘hypothesis,’ ‘experiment,’ and ‘control’ are in motion for all
the participants — researchers as well as teachers — as they work to
formulate a shared understanding (pp. 10-11).

Rosebery and Warren (1998) pay attention to what is said between the participants talk

with one another about their subject matter, and they note that what is learned goes

beyond words. They write:

This stretch of talk seems to us a good example of how learning scientiﬁc
meanings for particular words is not a matter of learning at the level of the
words themselves but at the level of the discourse or practice. The sense or
resonance that the word ‘hypothesis’ has is strongly a function of the
contexts of its use, of the practices of which it is a part, which crucially
also involve other stances or views of the world, for example, what it
means to do an experiment, what it means to explain a particular behavior,
what is involved in stating a hypothesis, how hypotheses function in
different forms of scientiﬁc inquiry such as observation and
experimentation (p. 13)

Rosebery and Warren’s insight point to one challenge facing researchers of teachers

talking to one another (whether that talk occurs in teacher networks or in other

conﬁgurations of educators), namely that it is difﬁcult to capture what is learned or to

even label what is considered “knowledge.” Wilson and Beme (1999) write of Rosebery

and Warren:

They use the language of ‘stance’ and ‘resonance’ to capture something of
the quality of the teacher developing knowledge, for knowledge goes well
beyond words readily recited at a spelling bee or oral examination.
Knowledge entails skills, ways of talking and interacting, ways of

43

observing and noticing things in the environment, and dispositions toward
action and interpretation. The researchers noticed teachers learning things
that went well beyond their capacity to deﬁne terms. But capturing that
knowledge has proved difﬁcult” (pp. 178-179).
Wilson and Beme (1999) continue to explain that most "studies of teacher learning in
groups tend to be labor intensive, qualitative, and involve a “substantial commitment to
examining teacher talk in interview and group conversations,” mainly through discourse
analysis techniques (p. 195). The discourse analysis techniques, Wilson and Beme
speculate, appeal to researchers because the knowledge developed in these projects is
both individual and collective and because the knowledge in these groups is in motion.
That is, the appeal of the discourse-analytic techniques “might be that they acknowledge
and use that dynamic aspect of socially held knowledge rather than ignore it by
presuming more static conceptions of knowledge” (p. 195). By pursuing a study using
rhetorical concepts to help in the analysis, I am suggesting that a focus on the arguments
teachers make to one another would prove useful, because rhetoric can capture the
intentional decisions teachers make as they talk to peers and as they justify and explain
their judgments which, in turn, leads to revelations about teachers’ knowledge.

Wilson and Beme conclude their review by arguing that “helping teachers to learn
to discuss and think and talk critically about their own practice can be painful and
consumes considerable energy,” and that “groups have to move beyond the politeness
and ‘that’s ﬁne for you’ to Lord’s (1994) critical colleagueship” (200). To get to this
point of creating a “critical colleagueship” Wilson and Beme write:

Ball and Cohen (in press) argue that such work requires shifting the

discourse of teaching from a ‘rhetoric of conclusions’ to a Schwabian
‘narrative of inquiry that focuses on practical reasoning (Fenstermacher &

44

Richardson, 1993), to a discussion of conjectures and possibilities rather
than of deﬁnitive answers and scripts for behavior (p. 200).

In other words, studies of talk between teachers, including the talk between teachers in
teacher networks, need to focus on the purposes and contexts in which that talk is
occurring, as well as on the stances teachers take in their talk. I believe rhetorical
concepts can address these concerns.

One text, a collection of studies focusing on teacher talk edited by Christopher
Clark (2001), Talking Shop: Authentic Conversation and Teacher Learning, illustrates
how discourse analytic techniques is taken up by many researchers. In the ﬁrst piece of
this text, Clark and Florio-Ruane (2001) write that their aim in this collection is to present
studies of Professional Development and Inquiry Groups for teachers, which are
voluntary groups of six to ten teachers who meet regularly to pose and pursue teaching
problems together. “This social and intellectual work,” they write, “is done by means of
conversation that includes personal narratives of teaching experiences. We call this form

3”

of discourse ‘authentic conversation. (p. 6). Some of the groups studied in the collection
included members from the same district, but most groups drew members from different
schools and districts. The aim of the collection, therefore, is to have a cross-synthesis of
“lessons learned about how conversations among teachers can serve continually changing
transforrnative ends for teachers in a postmodern world” Q18). The studies, therefore,
share some common assumptions. First, they share the notion of sociolinguistic dynamics
of groups whose primary aim is learning. That is, the studies seek to understand and

illustrate the ways in which conversation and learning are related. Second, they share the

notion that personal experience narratives are central to the groups. In other words,

45

researchers in this collection focus on the role personal experience narratives play in
group conversations. Clark and Florio-Ruane explain:
The personal experience narrative as social practice is used not only for
the representation of experience and knowledge. It is also a rhetorical
device that group members reﬂexively employ to negotiate personal and
social (group) identities, to persuade each other that what they know, that
what they do, and who they are — as individuals and as a social unit — are
viable and vital (p. 12).
One study from the collection might serve as a useful example of how conversations
between teachers seems to be using discourse-analytic techniques and personal
experience narratives as methodological lenses for many studies of this nature. The study,
Stephen A. Swidler’s (2001) “Heroes of Our Own Tales: Presentation of Self in
Conversation and Story,” is chosen because the focal group includes practicing teachers
from many schools and districts. The topic of conversation of this group, Swidler writes,
“has come to involve conversation and story about what members describe as obstacles
and impediments to their enacting this belief in / aspiration to child-centeredness,” and as
such, most of their conversation does not center on their relationships with students, but
rather their relationships with other “adults in their schools who act, directly or indirectly,
as obstacles and impediments” (p. 124). Swidler points out several rules of and for
conversation and story that seems to exist within the group being studied. That is, the
group developed implicit or local cultural rules that they seemingly had to follow. For
instance, speakers did not criticize children or students directly; speakers had to make an
effort to express ‘concern’ for children; speakers had to not only not criticize others in the
group, but they also had to support other members as they discuss and tell stories of their

struggles (pp. 125-126). While these were not explicitly discussed among the group

46

members, Swidler posits that group members had to have “a sense of the rules in order to
participate competently as discursive members of the group” (p. 126, italics his). Swidler
then goes on to include two sample narratives, each from a different teacher.

After he presents the sample narratives, Swidler’s analysis revolves around the
features of each of the story. For instance, he writes that each of the stories “involve a
depiction, or what Young (1987) calls the narrative ‘reconstitution,’ of school worlds.
These worlds are hostile, to children in Seth’s, and especially to teachers in both” (p.130).
Swidler wonders what kind of stories are being told, and what kinds of heroes are we
asking teachers to be in these narratives. Ultimately, Swidler sees that there are some
psychic beneﬁts for members to tell stories, but he wonders if telling these kinds of
stories in a professional development context helps teachers change or if they just reify
the existing school structure. That is, he sees personal experience narratives as
professional development as having limits for transforming teachers.

I offer Swidler’s chapter as a way to point out the kind of analysis offered by
many researchers of teacher talk. Such analysis focuses on the apparent rules in the
group, the values and knowledge expressed through the narratives teachers share with
one another, and the transforrnative effect stories can (not) have on group members. I
believe this kind of analysis is useful, largely because teachers do share their work
experiences as narratives with one another, and a discourse and narrative analysis makes
sense. However, such analysis does not highlight the reasoning teachers offer for why

they do what they do in their work. That is, a discourse and narrative analysis may only

47

indirectly illustrate what a teacher knows: the narrative may illustrate only part of a
teacher’s explanation of his or her judgment.

Such studies would beneﬁt from an analysis that captures the reasoning for why
teachers make the professional judgments that they do. As I outlined in chapter one, I
believe the conceptual tools from rhetorical theory can be helpful, because rhetoric can be
used to identify the features of an argument and to illustrate the role arguments play in a
social situation between a speaker and his or her community. While narratives are
undoubtedly an important focus of the exchanges between teachers in the National
Writing Project, so too are the occasions when teachers justify the prudence of their
decisions in the classrooms.

The National Writing Project Summer Institute’s demonstration lessons initiate
deliberations between teachers

Because the project is situated in a summer institute of the Rust Belt Writing Project
(RBWP) I examine existing literature on the National Writing Project (NWP), which is
arguably the “most successful educational network in the history of American education”
(Lieberman & Wood, 2003, p. 5). The literature on the NWP is varied, ranging from
work on the history of the NWP to studies of the classroom practices of teachers involved
in the NWP. For this study, I review literature on the NWP that deals most directly with
the summer institute. The summer institute, as Lieberman and Wood (2003) report, is the
“heart of the NWP program” (p. 9). The summer institutes, Lieberman and Wood write
encourage participants to take an interest in their colleagues’ thinking, their
challenges, and their practice, and they promote collegial feedback and

critique. In short, the institutes have a deﬁnite curriculum, shaped both by the
expertise of the institute fellows and by current knowledge in the ﬁeld of

48

literacy. This curriculum stresses learning as a social phenomenon and
teaching as a collective responsibility (p. 15)

For summer institute participants (also called fellows), the teaching demonstrations
provide one entry into the public reﬂections, deliberatiOns, and judgments that are
included in conversations about teaching. “Overall,” Lieberman and Wood write, “as the
demonstrations unfold, fellows recognize collective professional expertise, build
knowledge, and rethink and revise their own practices” (p. 15).

Others have studied the summer institutes though much of that work focused on
how teachers’ teaching changed following their experiences. For instance, Perl and
Wilson (1986), Bishop (1990), Wilson (1994), and Gomez (1990) all examine any
change in the teachers’ practices and beliefs once they return to their classrooms. Other
research on the summer institute is more focused on describing the experiences of
teachers during the summer, most notably Bonnie Sunstein’s (1994) Composing a
Culture: Inside a Summer Writing Program with High School Teachers. In her study,
Sunstein is a participant-observer throughout the summer institute, and she provides a
portrait of three focal teachers. In doing so, Sunstein aims to show how these three
teachers interpret their experience and how they come to understand and participate in the
culture of the NWP. That is, Sunstein wants to understand the relationship between
individual teachers with the larger group of teachers. She ﬁnds that “the program
validates movement inward — to explore the self. But it encourages a parallel movement
outward — toward a community that offers other people a chance to collaborate in the
exploration” (pp. 10-11). Sunstein provides an in-depth portrait of the sum of three
participants’ experiences throughout the entire summer institute experience. “I wanted to

49

listen to their stories,” Sunstein writes, “see them as they worked, watch as they read and
wrote and responded, listen to their complaints and triumphs as they re-thought their own
literacies in the company of other teachers and writers, all teaching and writing” (p. 9).
This sort of in-depth portrait of a few teachers going participating in a range of activities
is useful in that it offers a general sense of what summer institute participants experience
and how they view their experiences.

Whitney (2006) also focuses on a few teachers during their summer institute
experience; however, she focuses her attention on the writing experiences the teachers
experience. In her dissertation, Whitney explores the transforrnative power of writing,
and she directly ties the writing experiences of her seven focal participants to
transformational theories of learning. That is, Whitney interviews, observes, and collects
the written products of her focal participants as a way to understand how the act of
writing helps the teachers to change their self-perceptions as writers and as writing
teachers. I see my study as being parallel to Whitney’s project in that I am interested, not
in the writing that summer institute teachers engage in, but rather in the talking that my
focal participants engage in. More speciﬁcally, I am interested in the arguments teachers
forward to one another as they respond to teaching demonstration lessons.

Unfortunately, not many studies have been conducted on the teaching
demonstrations or on the conversations between teachers that follow the teaching
demonstrations. One notable exception is a monograph written by Janet Swenson, with
Diana Mitchell, (2006) on what they do in their local NWP site, the Red Cedar Writing

Project (RCWP), as a response to the teaching demonstrations. In their piece, Swenson

50

and Mitchell write about the Collaborative Responses to Teaching Demonstrations
(CRTD) in which small groups of teachers meet after each demonstration lesson to work
together to craft a response to the demonstrator. The CRTD arose out of a frustration by
the project leaders and returning fellows when they found that the conversations after
demonstration lessons and the individually written response letters were lacking in depth
or critical thought. They noticed that informal conversations had been much more
thoughtful and the CRTD developed as a way to engage the participants in more
stimulating discussions. Swenson and Mitchell write:
Dialogues in which four or ﬁve colleagues attempted to reach agreement
about what they had just experienced, how it ﬁt into larger educational
contexts, and how best to express it in language, appeared to enable a
more-thoughtful analysis of the teaching demonstrations that either our
whole- group discussions or individual letters had (p. 4).

Thus, the aim of having teachers talk to one another in order to collaboratively
construct a response letter is to help both the demonstrator and the respondents. Swenson
and Mitchell note that negotiation will take place, as will the need to provide reasons for
why they interpreted the demonstration in particular ways. As they talked, RCWP
teachers worked within a framework that Swenson and Mitchell refer to as ﬁve lenses.
These lenses provide a shared understanding for how to start and focus response
conversations. The lenses are described by Swenson and Mitchell as including the
following:

o Describing affect for teachers and learners (l or more strengths

perceived in the demonstration)

o Articulating best practice (deﬁned as “those English language arts
methods, materials, approaches, and contexts that positively affect
learning and productively address problems generally acknowledged

51

by those in the discipline to be at once fundamental and profound” (p.
8)

o The Michigan language Arts Standards and Benchmarks (placing
demonstrated practice within a broader educational context)

0 Extensions and Adaptations (identify the “core” of the teaching
demonstration; analyze the appropriateness of the approach for the
students with whom they work most closely)

0 Questions arisen

These ﬁve lenses provided topics for the teachers to discuss; however, as Swenson and
Mitchell point out, the groups are not constrained by them. That is, the conversations in
the response groups may not follow the format provided by the ﬁve lenses and at other
times groups will “share their struggles or ideological stances” that the demonstrations
provoke. In other words, the conversations in responses to demonstrations provide
opportunities for teachers to talk about what they know, what they do in their classrooms,
and why they do it. Swenson and Mitchell write:
We had teachers develop these responses in groups because we wanted
them to use the opportunity to engage in professional conversations with
their peers and because we understand language, including professional
discourse, to be socially, politically, and culturally constructed.

Given the diverse situations in which RCWP teachers develop their
primary discourses (in families, in communities) and secondary,
professional discourses (in preservice teacher preparation programs and
then in use in particular schools and districts), we felt that public,
‘problematized’ professional conversations had the potential to disrupt
taken-for-granted language used to describe learners, learning, learning
situations, teachers, teaching, and communities in generic terms (p. 21).

This study aims to understand the “public, ‘problematized’ professional
conversations of one demonstration response group. While the NWP literature does not
speciﬁcally address the speciﬁc phenomenon of teachers explaining their judgment, other

studies do employ rhetorical theory and concepts to understand the verbal and non-verbal

exchanges between people in particular kinds of communities.

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Rhetorical concepts illuminate the interaction between people in a social scene

The research on rhetorical practice has not explicitly focused on learning,
although many of the settings in which that research has been conducted are settings in
which something is learned. While the research that employs rhetoric as a theoretical lens
varies in its focus, I aim to extend the line of research in which researchers are employing
research as a way to understand processes of interaction between people. More
speciﬁcally, I refer to Beverly Sauer’s (2002) The Rhetoric of Risk, Ralph Cintron’s
(1997) Angels ' Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday Life, and
Julie Lindquist’s (2002)A Place to Stand: Persuasion and Politics in a Working Class
Bar. At ﬁrst glance, a study of teachers talking to one another about their work might not
seem to have much in common with a study about technical writers working with coal
miners, an ethnography of two Mexican-American men, and an ethnography of the
rhetoric of a working class bar. However, in all of these cases the researchers employ
rhetorical concepts to understand how their participants make sense of their experiences.

Each of these studies begins with Classical notions of rhetoric, speciﬁcally
Aristotle. Sauer, for instance, describes Aristotle as understanding that rhetoric “dealt
with questions of uncertainty in deliberation, judgment, and evaluation” (p. 3). As such,
Aristotle’s rhetoric, Sauer argues, suggests how “individuals might employ a theoretical
framework to discover arguments that might be effective in public deliberation and
judgment” (p. 3). Lindquist and Cintron each pick up on this notion, as they describe the

three types of appeals that Aristotle outlines: pathos (appeals to reason), logos (appeal to

53

reason), and ethos (appeal to the character of the speaker). It is this appeal to the
character of the speaker that both Lindquist and Cintron make central to their studies.
For example, in her aim of documenting the ways in which the Smokehousers, a
group of regulars at a working class bar, use argument as central to their identiy-
forrnation process, Lindquist employs ethos as a starting point to describe how
Smokehousers craft and cultivate positions of authority to, for, and with the community
in the bar. That is, Lindquist uses ethos as a way to illustrate relationships between
individuals in the bar and the rest of the group, and in doing so, she highlights the relation
between the ideology of the group with one’s rights of participation. Ethos is also an
important feature of Cintron’s study of “the rhetorics of everyday life” in a Latino/a
community outside Chicago. In his case, Cintron highlighs the ethos-building process
inherent in the performance people make in their public displays of self in the public
culture. That is, Cintron interprets
the surface of public culture — hairstyles, clothing, car decoration, musical
styles, talk, the geometries of city streets and street names — as
performances, as rhetorical gestures emerging ﬁom the desire to persuade
others of the propriety of certain identiﬁcations and, implicitly, of the
impropriety of other identiﬁcations (pp. x-xi).
Cintron imagines rhetoric as an analytic that can help explain the processes by which
people present who they are to others. The concept of “performance” is central to
Cintron’s project as he sees ethos and logos being inextricably linked. He writes, “ethos
and logos — or character and a rational knowledge claim are linked so that knowing

something of a person’s character helps us to judge that person’s knowledge claims” (p.

3). In both Lindquist and Cintron’s studies, speakers employ strategies in presenting

54

themselves and their knowledge to others, and those strategies reveal something about
how speakers are viewed by others in the community.

Sauer pursues something similar in her study of coal miners sharing with
technical writers, who are charged with writing safety procedures and documents, what it
is they know. Sauer points out the difﬁculty the coal miners have in communicating their
tacit knowledge, as well as the difﬁculty technical writers face in eliciting and
documenting this knowledge. Sauer discovers the important role that gestures play for
coal miners in their explanations, and she traces the process of how those gestures are
interpreted by writers and made into policy documents. That is, the non-verbal
expressions are vital for coal miners in explaining what they know and how they present
themselves to the technical writers.

In short, rhetorical concepts illuminate how people share their knowledge and
present themselves to others in a community. Ethos is a central feature of this kind of
analysis since it suggests the moves people make in relating to others — for Cintron these
moves include hairstyles, clothing, talk, and other features of public culture; for Sauer
these moves include gestures and silences; for Lindquist these moves include arguments
and the resources to support those arguments. These resources in Lindquist’s study are
labeled topoi, and when Smokehousers call upon the topoi, the activate the ideologies of
the community.

In aligning myself with these studies, I also see the central role that ethos and
ethos-building moves people make in groups. Unlike these studies, I will not pursue the

non-verbal features of the scene, though doing so would likely be useful and productive.

55

Unlike these studies, I will also employ the concept of phronesis, because a central
feature of the verbal exchanges between teachers in this scene is an explanation and

justiﬁcation for why they do what they do in their classrooms.

56

Chapter 3: A Quest of Locating, Deﬁning, and Understanding a Case of Teacher

Rhetoric

This project did not begin as a “case study of teacher rhetoric,” at least that is not
how I initially conceived of it. Indeed, this project evolved over time, though it was
always a goal for me to listen to teachers talk to one another about their work. As I
mentioned in the preface, in my own experience, conversations about the decisions and
judgments I made in my work could be both frustrating and inspiring. Although the
research questions for this project ask: “What do teachers say in demonstration lesson
response groups?” and, “How does what teachers say position them with one another in
the group?” the search for answer to these questions meant that this project is also a story
of my own learning. It is a story about learning to navigate the challenges and tensions
researchers face, and about how one makes decisions in the face of those challenges. In
this project, then, I faced challenges and describing my decisionsand how I came to
make them might prove useful to others who decide to pursue other case studies of
teacher rhetoric, a pursuit I believe is worth taking. The challenges and tensions I faced in
this project can best be categorized in the following ways: the challenges of access, of
data collection, and of data analysis. I offer my journey here as a way to both understand
the ﬁndings I present in this study, but also how those ﬁndings came to be.

Access to a research site shapes what and who is possible to study

Although I was a National Writing Project participant seven years earlier in

Illinois, where I was teaching middle school at the time, I did not immediately think of

the NWP summer institutes as potential research sites. At the time I was thinking more

57

about how to study teachers talking to those who were not in their classrooms and who
were not teachers, and so my original focus had been on locating teachers who may have
permitted me access to them having conversations about their work in different moments.
I contacted, for instance, an online group of teachers who were committed to contacting
legislators and whose aim as an organization was to have teachers’ voices more visible
and active in policy discussions. Unfortunately, that group was re-organizing and re-
designing its website. Alternatively, I also considered contacting the few teachers in the
area who I knew well who would allow me to do a case study of them in their work day,
following them into the many different kinds of conversations they had with others about
their work, such as in department meetings, meetings with parents or guardians, union
meetings, open house nights, etc. I still believe these are worthy kinds of studies and they
would be different kinds of case studies — a case study of a politically active group of
teachers or a case study of a teacher not in the classroom, but still at work.

Fortunately, I did have a faculty contact at Rust Belt University who agreed to
meet me to talk about the possibility of a study with its summer institute, a place where
and a time when teachers talk about their work, a place and time not unlike those that
refreshed and reﬁned me in my own experiences in Illinois. Although my contact was
afﬁliated with the Rust Belt Writing Project, the contact was not the faculty leader of the
summer institute, and after a few emails back and forth, Michael, the faculty leader for
the 2007 institute agreed to meet with me about the prospect of conducting a study. We

met on January 18, 2007, six months prior to the summer institute. My ﬁeld notes from

58

that meeting describe what I let him know I was interested in with my project. The notes
read:

0 Providing teachers with some tools / Helping the project and its
mission ‘
0 Understanding how teachers articulate what they know about their
work in different contexts
0 Understanding the tension between the types of analyses that English
teachers value and do with the types of evidence/research that seems to
be valued by those who are holding teachers “accountable” (i.e. the
humanities and social science tensions), which I see as being
connected to the different identities the project asks teachers to
consider (i.e. teacher as writer, teacher as researcher, teacher as
consultant/professional)
Looking at these notes, I see that my purpose was still a bit unclear and that it had to be
difﬁcult for Michael to see what I was actually hoping to capture in concrete ways. In
fact, he responded to these goals by saying that perhaps the summer institute is not the
best site for the study and that maybe the family literacy outreach group within the Rust
Belt Writing Project might be a better ﬁt. By the end of the conversation, Michael said
that “he’d be willing to grant me ‘carte blanche’ access until he felt like it wasn’t
working.” He envisioned me being a participant in the institute, because that would be the
best way to gain the trust of the participating teachers. Michael’s concern was that a
researcher in the group might be too intrusive, and it might take away ﬁ'om the
experience of the teachers participating. We decided, however, that if an important goal
of the summer institute experience is for teachers to reﬂect on his or her own teaching,

then a researcher asking questions and making observations of teachers’ statements might

actually serve or even add a dimension to teachers’ reﬂections.

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Because I was a graduate student who arrived to this Rust Belt State from Illinois,
I did not have a wide professional network in which to tap potential research sites. This
challenge provoked all sorts of anxiety, and it added to the uncertainty about the
phenomenon I was interested in studying. Once Michael agreed to provide me with
access to the Rust Belt Writing Project, the boundaries and focus of my study became
clearer, though not clear quite yet. To be sure, Michael suggested I contact other faculty
members who rotated leadership of the summer institutes every two years, and I sent each
of them emails asking them if they were interested in me learning anything in particular
that might be of beneﬁt to the RBWP. While none of these faculty members responded
with potential subjects or questions, Michael provided four possibilities that interested
him. While this study does not address any of his issues, his concerns helped me to see
some of the tensions he faced as a leader of the summer institute. His questions follow:
0 What apprehensions and expectations do the teachers have because of
the pre-institute meeting in April? _
0 When do “turning points” occur during the summer institute
experience?

0 What do participants hope for in the ﬁve continuity meetings they
attend in the school year following their summer institute experience?

0 How does the institute experience change a teacher’s role within their
school?
Michael’s questions in this initial meeting allowed me to see a before, during, and after
chronology of the summer institute experience. That is, his questions include teachers’
expectations and apprehensions prior to the summer institute, important moments of

change for teachers during the institute, and a potential change in role for teachers in their

schools after the summer institute. Michael’s understanding of and interest in the

60

teachers’ experiences before, during, and after the summer institute inﬂuenced my initial
study design, which I will discuss in the data collection and analysis sections.

In addition to access to the research site itself, I. also had to gain access to and
approval from individual teachers to study. I ﬁrst met the teachers in April of 2007, two
months prior to the summer institute experience, when the Rust Belt Writing Project held
a pre-institute meeting for all of the summer institute participants. It was at this meeting
when I was ﬁrst able to not only meet the teachers, but it was the ﬁrst time they had heard
that a researcher would be participating in the summer institute with them. Michael had
given me ﬁve minutes at this meeting to introduce myself and to introduce my project. I
saw this as a time when I could recruit participants. My ﬁeld notes describe the scene and
how I was feeling about my ﬁve minutes:

I am surprised by the brief feeling of being overwhelmed and ﬁnally
getting to speak to those who I hope to learn from. I feel like I don’t make
eye contact with everyone, but I do make enough eye contact to know that
everyone is listening to me as their faces are overwhelmingly looking at
me. I describe my professional experience (PhD student working with
prospective English teachers and middle school teacher for 11 years and
someone who participated in the NWP in Illinois).

I tell them that I’m interested in listening to them this summer, and
that this means my role is a bit different than everyone else’s because I’m
both a participant and someone who is trying to capture what is
happening. I’m interested, I say, speciﬁcally in hearing what they have to
say about writing and learning to write, and that there’s no better place
than a summer institute to do this. [I see some heads nodding, and I’m
assuming it’s some of the mentors who’ve been through the institute].

I tell them that I have this interest based on personal experience of
having trouble “describing to my principal what in the hell I’m doing in
my class and how I know I’m doing it well.” [I surprise and am
disappointed in myself for using the word ‘hell’ as there is a kindergartner
sitting two people away from me and because it might have offended some
of the people there and because such a choice of word would make me
stick out more so than I already am. Still, I was surprised I said it, but
choosing this word might just show how genuinely frustrated I am in

61

talking about my work with others. I also see the heads of others nodding
as I describe this frustration, so I’m guessing that it’s a challenge many
others have in their work].

I let them know that I’m not interested in evaluating their teaching
or in reading their personal writing, but am truly interested in listening to
what they have to say about writing and the teaching of writing and how
they say it. I’ll be around to answer any questions, and I’m planning on
sending everyone an email, in which I’ll describe my work a bit more.
Essentially, I’m interested in interviewing before and after the institute,
and I’m interested in listening during the institute.

When I ﬁnish, someone starts clapping (which ends up what
happens after each short presentation in the meeting) and I appreciate the
acknowledgement. It feels good to have ﬁnally spoken to the group, and
I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to interview several people.

This presentation of myself and my possible work felt like it was high-stakes, especially
with a dissertation on the line. The rest of this meeting was packed with information,
including an example of a demonstration lesson by an elementary teacher entitled “Using
Picture Books to Teach Punctuation in the Context of Writing,” and afterwards Michael
tells me that the most important thing I did was that I seemed non-threatening. In fact, he
told the entire group that he was willing to let me do my research this summer with them,
because I already understood the National Writing Project as an insider. While it turns
out that my summer institute experience was very different than those who participated in
the Rust Belt Writing Project1 and I’m not sure how much of an “insider” I really was, I
was thrilled to be in a place where teachers talked about teaching. I wrote about this
enthusiasm in my notes:

As the evening went on, I became excited about the work this summer. I

felt like I was back at “home” in many ways, listening to teachers talk the

way they did about their classrooms. They focused on teaching strategies
for reading like writers (later demonstration lesson), they talked about

 

’ For example, the RBWP is far more active in the local community than mine, and past participants of the
summer institute were a vital part of the RBWP, so it appeared that the RBWP has a history and a
“vertical” relationship that spans the number of years teachers participate in the RBWP

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authors (for students and for teachers), they are interested in learning, or
so it seemed to me. I’m not quite sure exactly how I would describe the
difference in feeling with this group vs. say a graduate course, but there is
a difference, and I want to begin ﬁguring it out.
After this meeting, I sent the group an email, recruiting people to interview (see
Appendix A). Fortunately, ﬁve teachers granted me permission to interview them prior to
the summer institute. Of these ﬁve, three were Darcy, Rachel, and Stephanie, who later
became the focal participants of this study.

The challenge of gaining access to a research site and focal participants relies
heavily on the generosity and willingness of others: it was something I did not anticipate
prior to the project. Once the research site of a summer institute and the research
participants became available and clear, what was possible to study became clearer, and
this affected the study design and the data collection.

Keeping up with all the data to collect proved difﬁcult in the condensed time and
experience of the summer institute

While the pre-institute interviews of ﬁve teachers provided me with a sense of the
teachers’ expectations (see Appendix B for protocol) and hopes for the summer institute
and statements about their own teaching and writing, I did not know exactly what I was
looking for, other than instances of teachers talking about writing and learning to write.
Because of this uncertainty, I approached the summer institute with an understanding that
teachers would be giving different kinds of “performances.” After the ﬁrst seven days of

the institute experience, for instance, I wrote a theoretical note in my ﬁeld notes about the

studying performances. I wrote:

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Bauman (1986)writes that, “the ﬁrst task in the study of performance
events is to identify the events themselves in ways consistent with local
understandings and relevant to the analytical problems at hand. Events
may be locally deﬁned in terms of setting (e.g., Bauman 1972a),
institutional context (e.g., Block 1975; Breneis 1978), scheduling or
occasioning principles (e.g., Abraharns "1977), and so on. The structure of
performance events is a product of the systemic interplay of numerous
situational factors, prominently including the following:
1. Participants’ identities and roles (e.g., Bauman 1972b; Stoeltje
1981: 136-9)
2. The expressive means employed in performance (e. g.,
Cosentino 1982: 88-143)
3. Social interactional ground rules, norms, and strategies for
performance and criteria for its interpretation and evaluation
(e.g., Burns 1983:19-24; Darnell 1974)
4. The sequence of actions that make up the scenario of the event
(e.g., Falassi 1980)” (pp. 3-4)

At the time, I was collecting a corpus of data of the focal teachers in different
“performances,” such as performances in the whole-group discussions, in our writing
response groups, in our demonstration response groups, in book discussion groups, in
their interviews and exchanges each of them alone with me, and in their writing
(speciﬁcally the reﬂections they wrote at the end of the summer institute experience).
This range of performances in which they participants take on different “identities and
roles,” interacting under each situations “ground rules, norms, and strategies” seemed like
a way to understand how teachers talked about their work in different rhetorical situations
or as different performances. In fact, I think this is a potential study, even a longitudinal
study of following a teacher in different situations, engaging in different performances.
This simply did not work for me in this project, however, because the amount of data
collected in such a short period of time became too much to keep up with in a meaningful

way.

64

In short, because I was participating in and collecting data in each of the
institute’s activities, I had a difficult time knowing where to begin to focus my attention.
While collecting data about all the institute experiences helped me to gain the trust of all
the participating teachers in the summer institute and helped me to understand the
broader context of my focal participant’s summer institute experience, it proved to
challenge my ability to focus my analysis. In this way, data collection and data analysis
informed one another. That is, because I was collecting so much data, I was unable to
analyze a data set as I was collecting it, and consequently, this trouble of analyzing data
led me to narrow the kind of data I collected. For example, by the second full week of the
institute, I realized that the demonstration lesson and the response groups, both central
features of the summer institute experience, would become the experiences where I
would analyze the exchanges between teachers.

In practical terms, my process for collecting data of the response group
conversations (the demonstration response groups and the writing response groups)
included:

1. Taking notes and making jottings during each demonstration lesson (paying
particular attention to how focal participants responded verbally (i.e. comments
and questions they raised with the whole group or during the lesson) and non-
verbally (i.e. body language, note-taking, head-nodding)

2. During the response group conversations, I initially tried to take notes during our
deliberations, but this kept me from participating in the conversations, which

distanced me and made it difﬁcult to build trust with the group members, so I only

65

jotted down memorable statements or questions I wanted to ask individuals later
on. During the response group conversations, I used a digital audio recorder to use
later on for transcribing the conversations

At the end of each day I went to the Rust Belt University library (or on the
morning of the next day I went to a local coffee shop before the institute began), I
listened to the recording of the demonstration response group conversations.
While I was listening I recorded the ﬂow of the conversation, noting the gist of
what people were saying and how others responded. In addition to this rough
transcription, I also included different kinds of notes, including observational
comments, analytical notes, theoretical notes, personal notes, and methodological
notes.

A rough transcription was useful in helping me make observational,
methodological, and theoretical connections to what I was seeing and hearing in
the conversations, I wanted to make sure I had accurate transcripts of the
conversations since these conversations were going to be a central part of my
study. Indeed, it became one way to put boundaries on my study. The condensed
nature of the summer institute experience made it difficult to transcribe each
demonstration response group and writing response group conversation each day,
though I tried. To cope with this sense of being overwhelmed, I did hire an
undergraduate willing to transcribe these recordings. This turned out to be a
useful, though limited, strategy, since the transcriber could not keep track of

which teacher made which comment, and the transcriber often missed passages or

66

was unable to understand the lingo used by the teachers. Therefore, I went back
and re-transcribed each of the response group conversations after the institute
experience. Still, it helped to have someone else begin the transcriptions, because
the condensed (daily) conversations seemed too overwhelming at the time. All of
the transcriptions of the demonstration and writing response group conversations

were completed by the end of September.

Overall, I listened to each demonstration response group conversation at least four times,
including when I participated in the conversation, when I wrote a rough transcription and
ﬁeld note of each conversation, when I received any transcriptions from the transcriber
and I checked for accuracy, and when I re—transcribed. Transcriptions proved a difﬁcult
challenge in this project, caused by the sheer number of conversations and length of each
conversation and by my initial study design of trying to compare different kinds of
“performances.”

Despite these challenges, I do have a wide range of types of data that was
collected, including pre-institute interviews, ﬁeld notes, artifacts (from the RBWP, ﬁom
each demonstration, and portfolios from almost all of the teachers in the institute),
photos, email exchanges, interviews during the institute, audio recordings of the focal
participants’ demonstration lessons, and transcriptions of the demonstration response
group and the writing response group conversations. While not all of this data is analyzed
for this study, it does provide contextual details of the institute experiences, and it
provides a way to conﬁrm or disconﬁrm any ﬁndings.

What does it mean to analyze a case study of teacher rhetoric?

67

In order to begin to analyze a “case study of teacher rhetoric,” one must ﬁrst make
decision about what is the case and what is the phenomenon being studied in the case.
Dyson and Genishi (2005) write about the distinction between a case and a phenomenon
when they write:

Any detailed ‘case’ (e. g, a studied teacher’s pedagogy, a child’s learning
history) is just that — a case. It is not the phenomenon itself (e. g., effective
teaching, writing development). That phenomenon may look and sound
different in different social and cultural circumstances, that is, in different
cases. This relationship between a grand phenomenon and mundane
particulars suggests key theoretical assumptions of qualitative case
studies, particularly those involving the production of meaning and its
dependence on context (p. 4)
In this study, then, the phenomenon being studied is “teachers explaining their judgment”
and the case is bounded as the “demonstration response group conversations.” Teachers
explaining their judgment, as Dyson and Genishi point out, might be different in different
contexts. In this project, the context of the phenomenon of teachers explaining their
judgment is the demonstration response groups which occurs during a summer institute of
the Rust Belt Writing Project, which is a local afﬁliate of the National Writing Project.

My story of analyzing this data is rife with challenges that took time and failure
for me to learn how to do better. I will share these failures here, because the failures are
instructive and might help those who wish to study other cases of teacher rhetoric,
including those cases when teachers are explaining their judgment.

Because the demonstration response group conversations became the case and the

explanations of teachers’ judgment was the phenomenon of interest, tentative analysis

began as I was collecting data. For instance, after the pre-institute interviews with the ﬁve

68

teachers and prior to the summer institute itself, I had been analyzing the interviews. In
those interviews, I began to be interested in statements teachers made that revealed their
knowledge, their practice, their beliefs, their attitudes/values, and their hopes. I deﬁned
each of these terms and had a tentative plan of collecting data during the summer institute
by each of these categories. For example, I planned on choosing one category (e. g.,
beliefs) and watch for the consistency or inconsistency in what the participants said. I
would then be able to bring those tentative ﬁndings to each of the participants and see
what they thought. Engaging in an analysis/collection strategy would allow me to see if
teachers’ statements changed over time and in different kinds of performances. This
initial plan ultimately failed, largely because teachers’ statements weaved in and out of
the categories and the “unit” of analysis was too slippery to be meaningful. That is, it was
not only difﬁcult to deﬁne and distinguish between the different categories, but it was
difﬁcult to determine ifI was analyzing words, phrases, sentences, exchanges, or
inferences.

. When this strategy and procedure did not work, I tried a strategy of identifying
and classifying the “the statements teachers make,” though that was too general, so I
chose to focus on the different “claims” teachers made in the demonstration response
group conversations. This process meant I had to deﬁne “claim,” which I deﬁned as “an
assertion of something being true” (e. g. “At risk kids beneﬁt from visual images”
“Middle school kids are so concrete”). I organized these claims in different ways,
including by focal participant (e.g., all of Rachel’s claims, all of Darcy’s claims, all of

Stephanie’s claims), by content of claim (e. g., learners/leaming, subject matter,

69

knowledge of teaching, teaching as profession) and by the trait on the demonstration
lesson rubric that was being discussed when the claim was made. This step of identifying
claims and categorizing them was a good start, acting much like “open-coding”(Emerson
et al., 1995), but it did not help me in understanding the back-and—forth exchanges in
which the claims were made, nor did it help me organize a coherent understanding of
what teachers said they knew. Ultimately, this strategy fell short of helping have a clearer
understanding of what it was I was trying to understand in this case. That is, I hadn’t yet
understood that I was interested in teachers’ explaining their judgments or, to put it
another way, I had not yet realized that the phenomenon I was interested in understanding
would lead me to bound the teachers’ exchanges around those moments when they were
justifying their judgments to one another, which are moments in which their knowledge is
revealed.

Although these two approaches to the analysis ultimately fell short, they did help
me in reﬁning my understanding of analysis. I turned to James S’pradley’s (1979) The
Ethnographic Interview for guidance. While my case study of teacher rhetoric is not an
interview or an ethnography, his approach to analysis helped me make sense of the steps I
wanted to take in understanding the data. More speciﬁcally, I borrowed Spradley’s notion
of seeking relationships between concepts people in a culture use. To achieve this aim,
Spradley describes “domain structures,” which include cover terms and included terms.
He understands a domain to be “any symbolic category that includes other categories,”
and the structure of each domain includes a cover term, which is a name “for a category

of cultural knowledge” and included terms, which are “folk terms that belong to the

70

category of knowledge named by the cover term” (p. 100). The idea of searching for
domains and understanding the structure of them would help me as I tried to describe
“What it is teachers have to say in demonstration response groups?” That is, searching for
domains would provide a description of the different “themes” or “categories” of teacher
knowledge, and the cover and included terms would help me understand how teachers
understood the relationships between concepts that fall under that category. Spradley
spoke to my earlier experience of failed analysis when he wrote:
...informants do not talk in domains but in sentences which skip rapidly
from one domain to another. They do not, when speaking, arrange words
in categories based on the relationship of inclusion, but arrange them in a
linear fashion, one word after another. In addition, although informants
know the domains (including cover terms, included terms, and the
relationship of inclusion) of their culture well, this knowledge is tacit,
outside everyday awareness (p. 102).
To search for domains or categories of teacher knowledge, the ﬁrst step is to select a
sample from one of the transcripts of the demonstration response group conversations.
After choosing a small sample, the next step is to look for the names of things, like nouns
that label products or activities. Once underlined in the transcript, it helps to write each
folk term on a separate sheet of paper, though on this initial preliminary search for
domains, I started by jotting down the folk terms, or names of things, that stood out the
most to me. After a small list is generated, the next step is to see if any of the folk terms
might be cover terms. That is, it helped to ask if any of the folk terms are being used for

more than one thing. This step of searching for names of things or practices focuses on

ﬁnding a particular kind of relationship, namely “kinds of things.” For instance, in initial

71

passes through a sample ﬁ'om the ﬁrst transcript, “written products” was a cover term and

3, ‘6

included terms included “persuasive, mysteries,” and “research papers.”
In my search for domains, I found the following categories and labeled them at

the time as “a way of thinking about learning,” “a way of thinking about teaching

’9 6‘ 9, ‘6

contexts, a way of thinking about teaching, a way of thinking about subject matter,”

9, ‘6

“a way of thinking about demonstration lessons,” “deﬁning terms/topics, ways of
thinking about texts,” “references to people.” These categories were formed after an
initial analysis of the ﬁrst two transcripts and then I checked them against the next two
transcripts for any additions or reﬁnements. This process helped me to map the topical
landscape of their discussions, and to begin to understand what they said within each of
those categories I moved forward with what Spradley refers to as a domain analysis.
Analyzing within each of these domains means understanding how participants
make conceptual connections. For teachers in this group who were talked largely about
the work of teaching writing, the most common semantic relationships I found were the
following: X is a kind of Y; X is a way to Y; X is a part of Y; and, X is an attribute of Y.
These relationships between concepts within each domain helped me to see what teachers
had to say about their knowledge. For instance, when talking about writing teachers in
this group listed a whole range of kinds of written products (e. g., emails, text messages,
expository, and so on). By noting the different kinds of writing the teachers mentioned I
was able to see that teachers knew that there were a whole range of products one could

write, but that they had trouble understanding (or seeing the possibilities or beneﬁts) of

having their students produce writing that is not typically assigned in classrooms. This

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became a way for me to go back into the transcripts to ﬁnd the exchanges in which
teachers deliberated, which led me to extend my analysis to the question of “How does
what teachers say position them with one another in the group?” In other words, once I
was able to map what teachers had to say to one another, I was able to see where teachers
deliberated with one another, which were the places where their justiﬁcations and
explanations could be found.

This next step in the analysis is based on the concept of “ethos.” That is, in
understanding how the teachers’ arguments in their deliberations operated socially, I
looked to see how they established their authority and their trust with one another. To be
sure, I could have pursued discourse analyses, such as conversation analysis or critical
discourse analysis, to examine the way in which power circulated or the way in which
body language, pauses, or different grammatical structures operated; however, I was
more interested in the issues of how positions of authority were taken up as a way to
develop trust among the group members.

The practice of rhetorical analysis seems to be wide-ranging and up for debate;
moreover, much of the literature on rhetorical analysis assumes that one is analyzing a
static product, like a speech or a text, rather than verbal exchanges between people. And,
despite Sauer, Lindquist, and Cintron’s examples of them using rhetorical concepts and
theory to understand people’s ways of “doing” and “making,” none of their texts talk
explicitly about the steps they took in their analyses. Thus, I engaged in a two-step
process. First, in examining teachers’ deliberations in which they explained their

judgment, I identiﬁed the observational, interpretive, and judgmental statements. This

73

helped me to see the way they positioned themselves. For instance, when teachers were
critiquing the performance of the demonstration lessons, they largely made statements of
judgment, and, on the other hand, when they might have disagreed with one another, they
would provide alternative interpretations or remark on what they observed either in their
own classrooms or in the demonstration lessons. Second, I wanted to understand the
ethos-building moves the teachers made in their deliberations. I turned to Crowley and
Hawhee’s (1999) textbook as it was mentioned in Lindquist’s text in her discussion of
ethos and topoi operating in the Smokehouse. While Crowley and Hawhee outline three
general ways in which orators can establish ethos (i.e. demonstrating intelligence,
establishing good character, and achieving good will), the ways in which they suggest
orators achieve this is different than what I saw in the conversations or in the transcripts
of the conversations. Therefore, I went into the exchanges in which teachers deliberated
and provided their justiﬁcation to one another to see how they showed their intelligence,
showed they were good colleagues, and showed their good will to others in the group.
While this ethos-building analysis is more interpretive then the steps taken to describe
what teachers said to one another, it does provide a way to understand how teachers
established relationships with one another through their arguments and the way they
present those arguments to one another.
Introducing the focal teachers

Because my data, analysis, and interpretation centers on the experiences,
thoughts, and words of three focal teachers, what follows below is a brief description of

Darcy, Rachel, and Stephanie based on the pre—institute interviews. Certainly, the

74

description will be incomplete in that it can not offer all that the teachers know, believe,
expect, and worry about as teachers of writers who are going to participate in a National
Writing Project summer institute. Despite this limitation, though, I aim to present a
glimpse of their thinking before they participate over the summer as a way to present
some context behind what they say during our conversations in the demo response groups
during the summer institute.
Darcy Bennett

“...1 really want to be a writing teacher that doesn ’t turn my students oﬂ

from writing...1 want them to actually, like, maybe enjoy it...So I guess

like I ’m hoping that maybe, I don ’t know, help them ﬁnd some inspiration

too. ” -— Darcy, interview on June 2, 2007

It was a sunny, bright, and warm day on the second of June when I met Darcy

Bennett at a Borders book store not far from where she just ﬁnished her ﬁrst year of
teaching seventh grade language arts and social studies. We sat at one of the hi-top café
tables surrounded by tables of non-ﬁction paperbacks on sale for half price. Darcy has an
enthusiastic and engaging personality. By that I mean she spoke about her students, her
teaching, and her writing enthusiastically, and she spoke generously about the many
people who were a part of her professional network. This network included her students,
a teaching colleague, a literacy specialist who served as her formal and informal mentor,
a professional reading group with many elementary teachers, her own middle school
ﬁiend who also just became a secondary English / Language Arts teacher, her mom who

was an experienced math teacher, and other teachers throughout her building and district

who was a part of many professional and curricular development meetings with Darcy.

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The professional reading group Darcy participated in was ﬁlled with elementary
teachers who had participated in area Writing Project sites in previous years. Darcy
enjoyed the experience of talking with this reading group about the theme of their
discussions, namely assessing writers. “It was great being in that group,” she said, “cause
they really changed the way I thought about writing and so after they had explained kind
of what they did [as writing project participants], I was really interested” (Darcy,
interview on June 2, 2007, p. 2). More speciﬁcally, Darcy felt that the conversations with
the elementary teachers changed the way she viewed writing. Darcy had worked in the
writing center during her time at university, and she felt she had a more “academic” view
of writing as a secondary teacher.

And so I think this changed a little bit, because at the elementary levels
they have to do so much creative writing, and I think that kind of got me
to think more creatively when I was teaching writing and ways to go about
doing it with my students. But then it also, um, like it was all about
observing the students and what they’re doing and like to teach them to
become writers and then also like for, you know, as a teacher to say, ‘O.K.
I’m a writer too.’ And I had never really had thought about that. (p.3)

Darcy comes into the summer institute already having had professional
experiences in which conversations with teaching colleagues helped her re-think herself,
re-imagine the purposes of writing and teaching writing, and re-invent ways of working
with her students. Her hopes, then, for the summer institute were layered. Darcy looked
forward to having the time to write and share her writing with others, to collect practical
strategies to get students more involved with their writing, and think about how to

cultivate a classroom community, especially in her social studies classes, of students who

approach writing as an opportunity to be creative. “I think the big thing, and I mean, I just

76

like, I just want strategies,” she says. “Like I want things that I can implement tomorrow,
you know (laughs).” Darcy aims to broaden her repertoire of teaching strategies, but she
wants to do so in a way that is consistent with her belief that writing is a chance for
students to voice their opinions on issues that matter to them and that connect with her
curriculum. For example, when describing some of her stronger writers, Darcy pointed
out writers who “put themselves into” their writing, who were “poignant”, and who “put
some thought into it.” One writer who had Darcy as a teacher for both Language Arts and
Social Studies, for instance, used “speciﬁc examples and details” in her piece about the
Three Gorges Dam in China from the perspective of a farmer who did not want the dam
to ruin the farm. Darcy says of the student who wrote this piece, it was “really interesting
to see how it kind of spilled over into social studies, and it was like for her, she kind of
clicked and got it.” Darcy values not only the quality of her students’ writing, but she also
values the approach students take as writers. That is, Darcy hopes her students approach
writing tasks as being valuable opportunities to think about, articulate, and share one’s
opinion. Presenting this opinion in an engaging and “creative” way for the intended
audience is one opportunity she hopes all of her students will take.

In addition to pinpointing some of the traits of her stronger writers, Darcy also
highlights a couple of features of writers who struggle in her class. These struggles
include students who have a difﬁcult time staying on topic throughout an entire piece and
would bounce “around like one thing to another” or who did not see themselves as
writers. She says, “. . .sometimes they think of writers as being like these great writers and

you know and sometime you know and so they don’t understand that they are also

77

writers” (p. 14). One of the things Darcy hoped to learn from the summer institute was
how to help her students who struggle as writers. She points to wanting to improve on
how she embeds grammar instruction, how to provide useful (but not overwhelming)
feedback to students, and how to help students understand what it means to revise - to
really revise — not just to write neater and in pen, but to re-think what it is they are trying
to say and how that message is organized for readers.

As a writer herself, Darcy says that she has not written a great deal, though she
does ﬁnd comfort in writing. For example, she shares that one night during the school
year instead of grading a stack of papers she wrote a piece and shared it with her mom.
“We were laughing so hard, and it was like, you know, it just felt good to kind of go
back. I think that might be more my spin on things is to kind of put like more humorous
side of things (laughs).” Despite ﬁnding joy in this writing moment, Darcy says that she
had never really considered herself someone who wrote for pleasure. “So for me as a
writer, I guess it’s just kind of going in and creating stories that are more than just like
memory, more than just like memories listed, but like kid of create a narrative around
them.” Since Darcy is also taking the summer institute for credit toward her Masters in
the Teaching of Writing, she also mentions that she had researched a peace activist as an
undergraduate, and “I would really like to go back and spend some more time like
looking at those diaries that she had written and doing stuff like that.” Darcy mentions
her interest in research at the beginning of the interview when she mentioned that she had
interviewed Holocaust survivors for a project and again near the end of the interview

when she asks me about my role during the summer institute. She shows a genuine

78

interest in how I am planning my participation and how I’m approaching the interviews.
“I mean I’m happy to help,” she says, “so if, I don’t know, research is interesting to me
(laughs).”

Though Darcy has only one year of teaching experience under her belt, she shows
a professional curiosity about the strategies of teaching and an intellectual curiosity about
wider societal issues. In addition to her curiosity, Darcy’s laughter is probably her
deﬁning trait. She’s quick to laugh, and she seems to value and enjoy the connections that
conversation with colleagues provides.

Rachel Ferguson

“1 think when you stop thinking you have a lot to learn that ’s when you
become a not so great teacher. ” — Rachel, interview on May 29, 2007

I ﬁrst met Rachel Ferguson at a coffee shop in her hometown. It was in late May,
and she had just taught the seventh-to-last day of her school year. She stood maybe 5’7’ ’
with brown hair, an easy smile and laugh, and lots of excitement and energy as she spoke
quickly and thoughtfully. As I would later ﬁnd out in the interview and throughout the
entire summer institute experience, Rachel loves her work as a teacher at a middle school
in what she labels an “urban fringe” district. Racially, socio-economically, and
religiously diverse, Rachel’s classes for the year before the summer institute were large —
28-31 students — and the school was organized around departments, rather than by teams.
That is, Rachel and one other teacher taught all the seventh grade language arts classes in
her school, and in the local culture of her school, this other teacher is commonly referred

to as her “signiﬁcant other.” When Rachel uses this term, she is not referring to her

79

husband, but instead to her colleague who teaches the same subject at the same grade
level.

Rachel entered the Rust Belt Writing Project excited to get to do her own writing
and to talk to other people who love teaching writing. “It looks to me,” she said, “like
we’re going to do a signiﬁcant amount of writing ourselves, and then we’re also going to
be doing a lot of discussing and learning from each other, which is really exciting to me
too, especially with people who love to teach writing.” In addition to exploring her own
writing, Rachel hoped the other teachers in the institute would help her think about how
to organize her writing curriculum in thoughtful and meaningful ways. More speciﬁcally,
seventh grade students in her class wrote four main pieces during the school year —
personal narrative, poetry, research paper, and memoir —- and Rachel felt like that was not
nearly enough writing for her students; therefore, she hoped to hear more about how
others teach those genres and how others organize their curriculum so that writing is
more integrated throughout students’ experiences in the classroom. For instance, Rachel
mentioned that she and the other seventh grade language arts teacher used the Six Plus
One Writing Trait rubric to assess students’ writing, and currently they used all seven
traits for each of the pieces students wrote. Rachel wondered if it would be smarter for
her to focus on one or two traits for particular kinds of writing, and she hoped other
teachers would share their experiences over the summer.

She was excited to talk with me, to share her drinking about writing and the
teaching of writing. In short, Rachel wanted to not only write, but she wanted to talk to

others who were not just interested, but passionate about teaching writing. She noted that

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in her school, Rachel had many conversations about teaching writing with her department
and department chair, her “signiﬁcant other,” and with high school English teachers.
Despite these many conversations, the department chair seemed to be the only person
who Rachel regularly talked with who shared Rachel’s passion for teaching writing.

Part of Rachel’s hopes in her department have to do with reﬁning their focus and
their conversations, moving from conversations solely about reading to more
conversations about writing. She says, “I feel like a lot of our language arts meetings
have really focused on reading and cultivating readers, which obviously is extremely
important but I’m ready to not set that aside, but we’ve got this like ﬁnely-tuned
machine going with this whole reading program, so let’s start having them do more
writing. So I’m hoping that a lot of our conversations will take us in that direction next
year.” The opportunity to talk with other teachers is an important part of her work —
whether it is to reﬁne and revise the curriculum in her school and grade level or whether
it is to learn from other teachers.

I’m hoping from other people’s demonstrations, I’m hoping that they kind
of like do their demonstrations on techniques or strategies that I’ve been
thinking about but haven’t really tried, either because I don’t know how it
would work or that I have questions, sort of what we were talking about
earlier. And I mean, I’m hoping somebody does talk about, you know,
conferencing with students and how that works and what does that look
like. Urn, I’m hoping somebody does talk about, um, focusing in on
certain traits or has an argument against that about why you shouldn’t,
about why you need to focus on the 6 + l. Um, so I’m just hoping just to
get some ideas that I can take back to my classroom an, and try out with
my kids. And hopefully they would be successful. I basically want to just,

I want to be, I want to be better at teaching writing. I have a lot to learn.
(interview 5.29.07, p. 16)

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The summer institute, it seems, is a chance for Rachel to talk about her work as a teacher
of writers and about her own writing. She heads into the institute with the stance of a
learner and as a teacher with questions. Rachel’s curiosity and enthusiasm about writing
and teaching writing guides her throughout the summer institute as she develops and
reﬁnes her sense of what and how to teach writing. She comes to the institute navigating
the many inﬂuences on her thinking. These include the State’s standards and benchmarks
(which Rachel points out is organized by types of writing and which has only one
standard on using language), her experiences as a writer (limited, but praised by people
who know her), and her conversations with teaching colleagues in her school and school
district. When asked about students who are the kind of writers she wishes all her
students could be, Rachel says that she sees strong writers are those who are willing to
take risks and who infuse a sense of his or her own voice into the piece of writing. Rachel
talks about three girls in her class who she considers to be strong writers, and who
happened to read their memoirs aloud in class on the day of our interview.
I think all three of them have something in common, and I think that it’s
that they’re not afraid to write... They’re not afraid to write; they like to
write; they’re not afraid to express themselves in writing. They all have a
strong sense of the language. If I told them to add an adverb they would
know what I was talking about. Urn, they search for knowledge; they
search for words that they don’t normally use. They’re the ﬁrst kids that
are at my shelf getting a thesaurus, you know, to ﬁnd another word for
pretty or another word for good.” (interview, 5.29.2007, p. 9)
When talking about these strong writers, Rachel mentions a disposition toward
taking risks, a knowledge about language, and a willingness to inquire on one’s own.

Similarly, students who she thinks struggle “don’t seem to have a command of the

language.” She explains, “it’s not that they don’t have anything to say, because when you

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converse with them they can express themselves very well verbally. It’s just, I think, the
words on the page don’t make sense to them. It’s hard for them to put what’s in here
[points to her head] on the page.” For Rachel, then, it‘seems as though she enters the
institute juggling different notions about writing, namely writing for discovery versus
writing to demonstrate one’s knowledge. As an example, Rachel says similar things about
her students’ needs and her needs as a writer. About her students, Rachel says, “I notice a
lot of time with seventh graders they want constant reassurance: does this sound good? Is
this ok? Does this sound good? And I always tell them, ‘what do you think?”’ About
herself as a writer Rachel says that many people in her life have told her that she’s a good
writer and have encouraged her to write more and to participate in the summer institute:
Like I want to know if these people who encouraged me to do this and
these people who have read my writing before are just like - they’re just
not very good writers themselves and so they just think that anyone who is
better than them is good. Or, is my writing, do other people think my

writing is as good as they do, cause I haven’t ever, I haven’t ever honestly
thought about it... Cause I just do it [write]. It’s just something that I do.

(p. 17).

In short, Rachel views her participation in the summer institute as a place to share
her writing, her teaching experiences, and her questions and frustrations as both a teacher
and writer. She wants to learn. She is curious to listen to other teachers. She wants to be a
part of a learning community - to be connected with other teachers who share her passion
in teaching writing.

Stephanie

I think a lot of teachers are just afraid to trust themselves, afraid to

have an opinion, afraid to like take that step out and be like wrong or say
something stupid or you know share a rough draft... but like, it takes a lot

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of balls to be able to like admit to your kids that ‘I ’m not perfect. ’ ” —
Stephanie, interview on June 7, 2007

I met Stephanie in her classroom. The high school building is relatively new and leaves a
large footprint among the farms and subdivisions that surround it. The hallways are wide,
classrooms are carpeted, and it’s relatively quiet after the school day ends when I show
up on a sunny June 7th day. Stephanie, I soon discover, already has a strong sense of a
connection with many speech and debate teachers throughout the state, some of whom
she has known since her ﬁrst year of teaching in 1983. In fact, she had wanted to attend
the summer institute several years ago, but circumstances prevented her from doing so.
When the advertisement for this surnmer’s institute arrived in her school mailbox, she put
it in her “think about it” folder, until she decided one night to just answer the application
questions to see what would happened. When the project leaders contact her to set-up an
interview, she thought to herself, “O.k. this was like weird. I don’t really know if I want
. to do this. I don’t know if I want to commit this much time.” As she tapped into her
trusted debate coach fiiends from around the state, many of whom were writing project
veterans, she was convinced that attending the summer institute would be a great
experience. “I’m sure I can learn something,” she says to me, “because get what you get
out — if you put forth the effort you’re going to get something out of it. But, um, I’m not
sure any of it’s going to be very new. I have some things I’d like to explore.”

Unlike Darcy and Rachel who enter the writing project hoping to learn new
strategies and to engage in new conversations, Stephanie enters with an attitude of
exploration. More speciﬁcally, she wants to explore tactics for differentiated instruction,

ways of helping students explore professional writer’s decisions and craft as writers, and

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building on her previous year’s goal of helping students learn to talk to one another as
writers as she looks for ways to assess the conversations students have with one another
about their writing. She says:
In all my classes that include writing, I’m like, “Writers talk to one
another. Writers talk about writing. We are going to create a community of
writers. We are going to be able to say, ‘Hey, did you watch that episode
of something? Wasn’t it well-written? Did it go, you know, wasn’t it
intricately designed? And wasn’t it a neat puzzle by the time, you know
like. And we’re going to talk about things. Did you read that short story?’
You know, and sort of try to talk about writing in that, in that format. And
I don’t think I get to do that in many of their classes. So, some of them are
real excited about it and then others are sort of like — don’t have the
vocabulary to do it. So, it’s really, it’s been a, it’s been a little bit of a
struggle to do that.
Stephanie, who has 21 years of teaching experience, plays an active role in her school.
She is the English department chair, the Debate and Forensics coach, the Senior Class
Advisor, and a member of a host of curriculum and professional development
committees. She is an accomplished and published poet, and she is an active member of
the National Poetry Slam community. Despite this experience, Stephanie values risk-
taking in her teaching and her writing. “A lot of teachers,” she says, “need to be an
authority in front of the room, and they have to be right all the time and they have to be
like secure in that. And you know, sometimes I’ll just be like, ‘I just don’t know that.
Let’s ﬁgure it out.’ And it’s o.k.” This sort of discovery and risk-taking, Stephanie
believes, helps her to learn from her students. She shows me a stack of feedback from her
students about what worked during this school year and what didn’t work. She

summarizes one comment to me.

1 did not know that if you grade the ﬁrst paper harder they’re going to
work harder. I did not know that. I’m never going to give any As on the

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ﬁrst paper. . .They’re like ‘Well, if you had told us, you know, if you had
graded that ﬁrst paper a little harder, um, I probably would have worked a
little harder.’ Why wouldn’t you just work — cause I think you work your
hardest every time But these, some of these kids are like, they were like,
‘Oh, no, yeah, we knew what we could get, what level we could get done
with.’ '
She laughs at what she’s learned, and she likely would not have learned this about her
teaching had the students not trusted her enough to provide such honest feedback. She’s
the kind of teacher who students talk to and who students come back to visit after
graduation. For example, she reads me a poem written by a male athlete who never
viewed himself as a writer or poet. The poem is about Stephanie, and she’s proud that her
students see her as someone who is “crazy” enough to try new things and to take risks in
front of them. “Who knows what goes on inside that head of hers/,” the poem begins,
“It’s just a ball of mass confusion/ Like an atomic bomb of language has exploded inside
her cranium/ Throwing her cerebellum, twisting and twirling endlessly inside her own
skull.” Stephanie, it seems, values how her students see her as a teacher.
Like I’m still an ok teacher,” she says, “Like I’m still not too old to be
considered, you know, like ‘Oh she’s so dumb, she’s old,’ You know, I’m
still like cool enough, in enough, or crazy enough, mostly they use the
word crazy, which scares me. . .Cause I’m going to get older, right? And
I’m going to start to be older, and they’re going to think I’m not in touch,
whether I am or not, it doesn’t matter, cause as they perceive that you’re
not, you’re not (p. 25)

Stephanie’s students are mainly teaches juniors and seniors in courses like
advanced composition, AP English, creative writing, and speech. Though she has taught
speech and has been a debate coach for most of her teaching career, because No Child
Left Behind legislation required teachers to be “highly qualiﬁed,” Stephanie found

herself having to enroll in courses at a local university to be deemed “highly qualiﬁed.”

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Her experience in those courses left her wondering what she might want to do next
professionally - maybe pursue a PhD, maybe work with pre-service or beginning
teachers, or maybe become a school administrator. “Honestly,” she says of her
experience taking the speech methods courses, “we met afterwards outside because we all
lived so far away and everything. We just sat right down on these benches... and they
(other students) would be like, ‘Ok so what if I tried this? Or what ifI did this?’ And so I
had like a mini-class after her classes cause there was no connnunication going on”
(p.26). Stephanie is aware of her natural leadership, and she is cautious about her possible
role as a mentor to less experienced teachers in the summer institute. “I’m very shy,” she
says and then laughs. “You would never believe it in a million years, but I am: I’m very
shy. Um, I think it’ll happen, cause I’ll be like, ‘Oh, well, we tried this.’ I , I don’t know,
I , I have to wait and see how it feels. . .cause I don’t want to be a know-it-all” (p. 26).

Stephanie enters the summer institute wanting to see what happens — she’s
curious, she’s a risk-taker, and she knows that there is potentialito create connections
with other professionals, which has seemed to serve her well throughout her career.
When our interview begins to end, she invites me to visit her classroom anytime. “I have
lots of pre-student teachers from [a university] who come and like sit on my couch and
take notes (she has a couch in her classroom, and you know, people are always curious
(she laughs) about what goes on in that room. So, I, like, you don’t even have to make an
appointment. I’m not going to change anything for you.”

Gaining the trust of teachers in the institute

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Like most groups of people, the teachers in the Rust Belt Writing Project summer
institute experience a host of real-life experiences over the summer and during the next
school year. Teachers in the group recover from divorces, become engaged, become
grandparents, lose a house to a ﬁre, grapple with debilitating illnesses and diseases, move
to other states, get “pink slipped” ﬁ'om current positions, ﬁnd new jobs, struggle to have a
baby, prepare for weddings, and one teacher, sadly, even commits suicide after the
summer and before the ﬁrst continuity meeting (i.e. continuity meetings are the ﬁve
meetings the institute teachers have during the school year following their summer
institute experience). Throughout it all, the teachers talk with one another, share with one
another their experiences, both inside and outside of their classrooms. While many
writing project teachers talk about the writing project as a “life-changing” experience — as
teachers told Stephanie — the teachers in this summer institute experience life together in
many ways. For instance, during the following school year, some teachers visit one
another’s classrooms, some become close friends, some attend professional conferences
together, many meet -—albeit sporadically — to write together, and all participate in an
active email exchange.

The teachers in this group become my colleagues, and many become my ﬁiends
outside of the writing project experience. While only ﬁve teachers volunteered to provide
me with consent before the summer, all but one teacher provide me with consent at the
end of the summer, many providing me with copies of their ﬁnal portfolios and with

invitations to talk and visit with them over the next school year. I ﬁnd these teachers,

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particularly the three focal teachers with whom I worked, to be remarkably generous to
me, and I feel fortunate to have them as professional colleagues and personal friends.
While Darcy, Rachel, and Stephanie got to know me mainly through our small
group conversations, I believe there was one important moment when I revealed myself
to them, and one important moment when I revealed myself to the other teachers in the
institute. The ﬁrst moment, when I revealed myself to the three focal teachers, occurred
on the fourth day of the institute during “The Writing Marathon Day.” The writing
marathon is a day during the summer institute when each group within the summer
institute heads outside of the campus to write in public places. On that morning, I drove
to a coffee shop to write up my ﬁeld notes and to prepare for the day before we meet at
the institute. When I leave the coffee shop, my car has a ﬂat. I quickly change the tire,
and drive to meet my group on campus. Because of the ﬂat, we change our plans for
where we’re going to write so I can drop my car off at a tire shop to replace the tire
during the day. After we drop off my car, we all pile into Stephanie’s van, and we head to
a nearby Panera. Below is what I wrote and shared with the group. I believe because it
was so personal, it brought the group closer and it helped them to learn a little bit about
me. I wrote:
It’s 9:45 and I’ve sat down with (Stephanie), and the other members of the
group have ordered their drinks and treats, and have headed somewhere to
write. We’re meeting at 10:15 to share what we’ve read.
I’m excited to be able to write some ﬁction, and I have this image of a
young boy ﬁshing in the moming before school on a river. I thought about
this image as I drove this morning, but really, my mind is racing
elsewhere. This is the day, the writing marathon day, that I’ve been most

anxious about, and I’m even more anxious as I sit here in this particular
Panera. It’s in my old neighborhood, a neighborhood I haven’t seen in

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over 18 months, not since I left. I ﬁnd myself sitting here, wanting to type,
but my head is on a swivel, peering outside, looking to see if (Heather’s)
car is here. I see a young girl at the counter, dark hair, skinny legs, and she
looks like (Lori), but she’s just a bit too old, and I’m both relieved and
disappointed that it’s not her. Relieved, because I’m not sure how she’d
react, nor am I sure how I’d react. W6uld we hug? Would it confuse her
even more? What would the conversation be like? How much would she
have grown in the year and a half since I’ve seen her? I’m disappointed
too, because despite all those reservations, I miss her laugh and smile and
joy that only a kid can has.

I debate if I should even type these words, knowing that I’m going to be
sharing with the group. I worry if it’s revealing too much, but I know that
I can’t help it. It’s were my head and where my heart is — sad, anxious,
disappointed. It’s been 18 months since my marriage failed. Months of
recovering, months of not talking to (Heather), months of no longer being
a step-father to (Lori), months since the annulment, months and months
and months of healing and gaining more hope. But here I sit, typing with a
mufﬁn half eaten and a hot decaf resting near the laptop, wondering if
today is that day — the day of real healing, of confronting those fears of
that ﬁrst encounter since the day I left. Since the day I started over.

The boy and his river will have to wait.

After I held back tears trying to read this aloud to the group, they are all quiet and unsure,

until Darcy says, “Let’s get out of here.” And we pile back into the van and head to

another spot. One of them, Rachel, breaks the ice on the way back to the van, as she

laughs about what she wrote. Once in the van I tell them I’m sorry if I revealed too much,

but I wouldn’t have shared with them if I didn’t trust them. It was a genuinely tough

moment for me as a person back in a location that held a lot of emotional meaning, and

they treated me with compassion.

Several days later, the second critical moment for me within the summer institute

meeting occurred. It was at the end of the day, and I had asked Michael if it would be ok

for me to share something I had written about why I wanted to study our conversations in

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the writing project. Up until that point I had been relatively quiet within the larger,
whole-group conversations, and I wanted the other institute members to feel comfortable
with me. In short, I felt like I needed to share some of why I was doing what I was doing
in a way that was personal and meaningful. I wanted to share some of my story as a way
to become a participant in the group, as a way to be trusted. Below is what I wrote and
shared with them that afternoon. Luckily, I felt as if it were well-received as we talked for
ﬁfteen minutes or so past the normal ﬁnishing time for the day, which was unusual to do
so as a group. I wrote:

Like most research projects, the story of this project begins long before I
entered the research site, even before entering graduate school. Indeed,
this story has its roots from teaching eighth grade language arts in another
state in the Great Lakes region. This research project begins with an
administrator and me having a conversation in the hallway outside my
classroom in between classes that went something like this.

Administrator: I see that we got the 8th grade scores from
the State writing test.

Me: yeah, we did pretty well. Over 90% of our students
met or exceeded the state’s expectations.

Administrator: That is good, better than the other two
middle schools even, but we need to see if we can move more of
those “meets” kids to the “exceeds” category.

Me: (Speechless, with a blank look on my face and
frustration welling up inside).

Administrator: Let’s talk later about how we might do this.

It’s situations like these, when someone who is not routinely in my
classroom evaluates how well I teach based on the scores of students on a
standardized test, that ﬁ'ustrates me. How can I tell the administrator about
my pedagogy? How do I let him know that this test is just one moment in
time, a snapshot of each students’ performance on one particular day? It’s
easier, for example, when I sit next to a parent of a student, take out her

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daughter’s portfolio, and point out how the student has improved over
time. It’s much more difﬁcult to describe success for my entire roster of
150 students. Admittedly, the administrator is not entirely to blame for
this, and, in fact, has very logical reasons for placing such an emphasis on
more and more students exceed state standards. The administrator is also
evaluated on the performance of the Students in the school, and state test
scores is perhaps the easiest kind of data for the district administrators and
board members to evaluate the performance of students in the various
schools.

Still, it’s this moment of being speechless that troubles and interests me.
How do I as a classroom teacher articulate to others what it is I know,
believe, value, and hope for ﬁ'om my students in my classroom - a
classroom that emphasizes and encourages writing as its curricular focus?
That is, how in the world do I articulate to others how I know I’m doing
well as a teacher? And, how can I do so in a way that a) doesn’t rely solely
on test scores and b) makes sense to whomever I am communicating with.
This haunts me. And, this is my motivation behind this research project of
listening to teachers talk about writing and learning to write to those who
are not in their classrooms.
My story, I had hoped, would be somewhat familiar to their own story, namely the story
of being ﬁ'ustrated trying to talk about why we do what we do in our classrooms to
someone who isn’t in our classroom. I felt I had succeeded when teachers talked to one
another about their struggles of talking with administrators, colleagues, parents, and even
to their students. I had been positioned as a fellow teacher, someone who would listen
and try to learn, someone who wasn’t going to intrude or judge, someone who had a
genuine question he was trying to understand, and they could help me work toward an
answer.
In order to provide some sense of who was participating in the 2007 RBWP

Summer Institute I was able to gather some demographic information. This information,

though incomplete, is offered simply to describe the participants.

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Fifteen Teachers
0 1 ﬁrst year writing (college) teacher
6 high school teachers
3 middle school teachers
3 elementary school teachers
2 literacy specialists for grades 7 -12

I am missing information from four teachers for the information below.

Average yrs teaching experience = 11.63 years (28,12,8,9, 15,14, 21,14,6,1,8)
8 teachers hold masters degrees

2 teachers working on masters degree

6 teachers work in self-described “urban,” “urban ﬁinge,” or “low SES
population” schools

4 teachers work in self-described “suburban” or “becoming suburban” schools
0 4 teachers taking RBWP summer institute for course credit

In all, the teachers participating in this summer institute have a range of experiences in
the length and location of their teaching careers. I would describe them as devoted
teachers, because of their willingness to devote much of their summer to a professional

development experience.

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Chapter 4: The Demonstration Lesson as Persuasive Act: Deliberations within a

Rhetorical Critique

On the third day of the summer institute, the regular routine began. Canisters of
coffee and hot water sat on the back table surrounded by bagels and fruit. Teachers arrive
in the room up to twenty minutes before 9, and they situate themselves in seats at the
tables that were pulled together in the shape of a horseshoe. It’s hot outside, and the wall
of windows facing East need the shades pulled down because the sunlight is bright and
hot. At 9:05 one of the teachers starts the day with a writing prompt. The other teachers
look at the photo she has brought in and a quote from Satchel Paige, a famous baseball
pitcher who pitched late in life. The teacher prompts us, “How old would you be if you
didn’t know how old you are?” Write it down and then let one of the following questions
get you started. Teachers write for ten minutes, and then we transition into “sacred
writing time,” which is a non-negotiable time each morning of the institute when we will
get to write. We have until 10:15 to write and take a break, and then at 10: 1 5 we begin
the ﬁrst demonstration lesson. “This is a key moment,” Michael, the institute leader says,
“because you all will be doing this.”

This ﬁrst demonstration, a demonstration by Madeline, an experienced teacher
and literacy specialist in her school district, is on “visual literacy.” As she begins her
demonstration lesson, the ﬁre alarm buzzes — loudly. Laughter immediately ﬁlls the
room, though it’s hard to hear because the alarm is so loud. “Please disregard the alarm,”

we are told over the PA. “We will be testing the ﬁre alarm all day.” The teachers look

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around at one another and smile. “Just like the classroom,” Madeline says and everyone
agrees.

The demonstration lessons are, as Michael indicates, a “key moment” and a
central activity of the Rust Belt Writing Project summer institutes. Each teacher
participating in the institute will offer her or his own demonstration lesson. When
teachers are not demonstrating, then they meet in small groups after each demonstration
to write response letters to the demonstrators. These activities of demonstrating lessons
and responding to those demonstrations are clearly aligned with those who envision
teacher learning being premised on the notion that teachers can learn from one another
when they talk to one another. More speciﬁcally, the National Writing Project’s position
is that effective professional development is that which “provide frequent and ongoing
opportunities for teachers to write and to examine theory, research, and practice together
systematically” (retrieved from http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/doc/about.esp on
June 24, 2008). The demonstration lessons throughout the summer provide “frequent and
ongoing opportunities” for teachers to examine one another’s teaching practices since
teachers are offering explicit demonstrations of what they do in their classrooms with
students. The response group conversations that follow each of those demonstrations
provide “frequent and ongoing opportunities” for teachers to examine others’ teaching
practices and the possibility of connecting those practices with theory and research. For
instance, in the RBWP the response group conversations are structured around a rubric
that describes the features of effective demonstration lessons. Moreover, as teachers work

with the same small group for each of these response group conversations, the task of

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each group meeting is to write, collaboratively, a letter to each of the demonstrators. This
collaboration suggests that teachers within the group must come to some consensus about
how well each demonstration met the features of the rubric, as well as what kind of
constructive feedback might be useful for the demonstrator, particularly if that
demonstrator intends to share this demonstration with other teachers outside of the
institute experience.

For the response groups, each demonstration lesson acts as a shared experience
that initiates discussion within the group, and since the task of the group involves
collaboration and consensus-making, the conversations provide opportunities for teachers
to share their knowledge with one another and to create shared understandings about that
knowledge. In short, the response group conversations are occasions in which teachers
make arguments to one another about what they know as teachers, and presumably, it is a
time when teachers have opportunities to learn, though it is unclear how that learning
“happens” in these discussions. This chapter aims to address this problem by asking
“What do teachers say in demonstration lesson response groups?”

In asking this question, I aim to describe not only the subjects of teachers’
“ongoing and frequent” discussions, but I also aim to describe where they turn to for
resources to make their respective cases to one another. By describing the verbal
landscape the teachers in this response group traverse throughout one summer institute, I
begin to show the critical role arguments play in the deliberations between teachers.
Arguments, I show, do not necessarily play a critical role in the traditional way of

understanding persuasion. That is, Teacher A does not forward an argument to convince

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Teacher B of her position (though that does happen occasionally). Instead, arguments
play a critical role in helping teachers tease out their tacit knowledge and in helping
teachers stake a position within their group about the subjects they discuss. In other
words, when Teacher A makes an argument, it facilitates Teacher A’s learning. In this
way, the response group conversations provide a social situation that serves a
pedagogical purpose, and, as I show throughout this chapter and the next, arguments are
central to the scene.

The demonstration lesson is seen as a persuasive act and therefore is critiqued
rhetorically

One of the subjects of conversation with teachers in this response group is that
they see the purpose of professional development generally, and the demonstration lesson
more speciﬁcally, as acts of persuasion. That is, teachers in this response group
understood the demonstrators as trying to “convince” the teachers to use particular
activities, lessons, or practices in their classrooms. Early on in the summer, when we ﬁrst
began meeting as a response group, the word “convince” was prominent when we
discussed the purpose of each demonstration lesson. That is, Rachel, Darcy, and
Stephanie viewed the demonstration lessons speciﬁcally (and professional development
more generally) as occasions when a demonstrator was trying to persuade them to engage
in particular kinds of teaching practices or activities.

For example, in the ﬁrst demonstration lesson of the summer, Madeline’s
demonstration about using images as visual prompts, Rachel makes a suggestion when
she says, “I was going to say that could be a suggestion that would have for her like take

those things and write up the ideas instead of...’cause I felt like anyways, she had

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sufficiently convinced me [emphasis mine] that you could use this in several different
subject areas, in several different ways with several different genres before she even
started with all that stuff at the end.” Similarly, in a conversation about another
demonstration early in the summer institute, the response group had a difﬁcult time
ﬁguring out the purpose of the presentation. The teachers could not ﬁgure out how the
demonstrator was trying to persuade them. Their exchange follows:

Rachel: I just want to make sure I’m clear. I was sort of confused what the
focus was, and I don’t know if I

Darcy: Yeah.

Stephanie: It was like - I think she was convincing us to use creative
writing in our classrooms. [emphasis mine] That’s what I thought.

Rachel: Well, I thought that’s what it was, but then I also thought it was
like, um, making kids comfortable with creative writing, but then there
were other things mixed in with it. So I was sort of confused
Darcy: I was too.
Rachel: as to what the focus was.
The teachers see themselves as an audience who is being persuaded, and as such, they
critique each demonstration lesson from the position of whether or not they see

themselves using the activities or practices being presented in their own classrooms.

Rhetorical critiques involve descriptive, interpretive, and judgmental statements,
though all three types of statements merge with one another

In envisioning the demonstration lessons as acts to be critiqued rhetorically,
teachers make different kinds of statements, including descriptions, interpretations, and
judgments. When teachers make these different kinds of statements, I am reminded of

Brock and his colleagues (1990) who view of criticism as “a reason-given activity; it not

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only posits a judgment, the judgment is explained, reasons are given for the judgment,
and known information is marshaled to support the reasons for the judgment” (p. 13).
Similarly, the teachers follow F oss’s (2004) understanding of rhetorical criticism as being
designed to systematically investigate and explain acts and artifacts for the purpose of
understanding rhetorical processes. For the RBWP, this systematic investigation and
analysis involves a rubric with particular features of the demonstrations to discuss (see
Appendix B). The features to be discussed include: theoretical content, organization, pace
and delivery, and relevance.

The exchange below is one extended example in which teachers act as rhetorical
critics. I focus on this exchange from the ﬁrst demonstration lesson, Madeline’s, as a way
to illustrate how this response group began to make sense of what it meant for it to
generate a response to the demonstrator. The following exchange occurs near the last half
of this ﬁrst discussion. We have already talked about each of the traits listed on the
rubric, and we just talked about how as teachers of children, adolescents, and adults we
have to think about how much time we have to keep our students engaged before we need
to change the activity. The statements in bold typeface are my comments on the different
dimensions of rhetorical criticism each of the teachers engage in. These dimensions
include the descriptive, interpretive, and judgmental dimensions of rhetorical criticism.

Stephanie: Is this something? And I don’t even know if this goes in our
write-up. But like, um, one of the things I sort of expected to see but didn’t
and maybe it’s just because of what I teach. She never talked about the
visual images in terms of persuasion and what kind of arguments visual
images can make towards things.[Stephanie describes what she did (not)
observe in the demo lesson] Because I do a big persuasion unit with my

tenth graders and my eleventh graders, and I’ll have some provocative
looking ads not provocative as in sexual, but provocative in terms of like

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what they’re trying to sell...wonder if the kids, do you know if this
advertising? this is, what kind of a message is it saying? And she didn’t
really talk about that kind of aspect and I guess because she’s dealing with
mostly creative writing. But persuasive writing is also [This passage is
interpretive as Stephanie discusses what she does in her classroom as
a way to understand what Madeline presented. More specifically,
Stephanie tries sees the possibility of teaching students about the
arguments visual images make, and she speculates that Madeline did
not offer this because Madeline’s purpose may have been more
concerned with creative writing. At the same time, Stephanie implies a
judgment. She seems disappointed that the demonstration lesson did
not address what she sees as an important use of visual images.]

Rachel: But also it may not hit in her particular GLCEs. [Rachel offers a
potential reason for why Madeline may have done what she did in her
demonstration. More precisely, she speculates that the grade level
content expectations from the State Department of Education do not
include persuasion for Madeline’s grade level. Rachel is interpreting,
trying to understand Madeline’s motive and purposes.]

Stephanie: Oh cause persuasion may not be one of the things they do.

Rachel: Because like I know in seventh grade persuasion is a very minor
thing. There’s like some underlying things but it’s mostly about speaker
bias and stuff. [Rachel provides support for her claim. This support is
based on her own experience teaching seventh graders.]

Judy: Her benchmark could have included it ‘cause a benchmark is to
interpret, synthesize, and evaluate information and various sources
immediate to draw conclusions and implications. So she could have
incorporated that I think, it’s just maybe another area that maybe it’s just,
sort of out there, maybe that is so apparent that it doesn’t even need to be
said, because that was one of the things that even you said when we were
talking. So maybe she was trying to show us other ways.

Stephanie: Oh, so it’s too obvious for us.

Judy: And maybe that’s why she doesn’t address it because it’s such an
obvious thing to do. I don’t know... [In this exchange, Judy and
Stephanie speculate that talking about the persuasive function of
visual images is obvious for the audience. They are trying to
understand why Madeline did not include a discussion about the
arguments images make.]

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Rachel: I think there are a bazillion ways that you could go with this. And
there is no way she could ever cover all the different ways that you could
use it. You know what I mean?

Stephanie: Right. Oh, right, I know.

Rachel: I mean, you could use it in Math, you could use it in Science, you
could use it in Art. You could use it in anything. You know?

Stephanie: So maybe if she were to do this for like, other teachers and
assuming that like, see when, when I was in well, well I’m still in, we
have a literacy, um, committee at our school and it’s made up of three
English teachers, a Science Teacher 3 Science teacher and a Math teacher.
And we, for one-whole school year for every single meeting that we had
like, if it was a PPD or a staff meeting or whatever we always had a mini
lesson that we did at the beginning of the meeting. And um, we presented
different ways, just like techniques and strategies and made a lesson plan
thing. But one of the things that we always had was- we had like a here’s
something you could do, and then we had these situations like “In Social
Studies you could do it this way...in English, this way...” You know like
we had a whole bunch of different ideas so maybe if she does take this out
on the road kind of a deal, she might want to have some kind of a source,
some kind of a resource there. Like if “If you’re doing persuasion you
could...blah” [Stephanie offers both an interpretation and a judgment.
First, she offers her own personal experience as a professional
development leader in her school district, and then she offers a
suggestion of what Madeline might do differently in order to help her
potential audience to imagine how they might use visual images in
their own classrooms. She’s evaluating and judging Madeline’s
demonstration, though Stephanie offers suggestions about what
Madeline might do differently.]

Rachel: Hm.hmm.

Stephanie: Just so that, you know, cause like you have to make sure you’re
trying to get like, all those different teachers who are sitting there. You
know?

Rachel: Almost include it in like her...what do you call it? Bonus packet.
Yea her bonus packet.

Darcy: So I think, yea. I would even say like, you know with Science you
could do something with animals like, for younger kids or what type of
habitat they live in or ecosystem I know we did that. [Darcy builds on

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Stephanie’s idea. Darcy extends the thought into another content
area. She’s interpreting Stephanie’s claim through an extension and
refinement of what Stephanie suggests.]

Jim: So are you talking about how to bring images in order to learn but
parts of an argument. Right? Is that what you mean?

Stephanie: That’s what I, well, yea. That’s what I. I think that that should
be...I think it would be smart to have sort of both lists. Like other ways to
use visuals, or other aware... other uses of visual imagery. I don’t know.
[Stephanie offers a judgment about what should be included and that
she thinks adding lists would be a smart inclusion.]

Rachel: I think she did that.

Darcy: She did have it...

Rachel: She did have that at the end. Cause she showed us a chart.
Stephanie: Oh maybe I didn’t look at that.

Darcy: On the very back. She does have it. But she doesn’t talk about what
you were talking about though.

Rachel: Oh. But maybe she could add it to that.

Darcy: Cause she talks about it. She does have Science actually. So, for
erosion she says you can use it to introduce the concept of erosion you can
show a photo of the Grand Canyon. Or to show the effects of extreme
weather you can use photos of Tsunami or Hurricane aftermath. Or you
know, things like that. [In this part of the exchange, the participants
describe what was or was not included in the resource packet, which
is part of the demonstration.]

Rachel: But I think she didn’t get to spend enough time on that cause it
was towards the end. [An observation of what occurred and an
interpretation of why it happened that way]

Darcy: Yea, so maybe that we can put in there “spend more time on how
to incorporate into other content.” [Darcy agrees with Rachel and then
offers a suggestion for what to write in the response letter.]

Jim: I think you’re right though. That with the, ugh, the stat she puts at the
beginning about how much tv you watch and all that she didn’t talk about

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watching images from commercials or movie clips or things like that. So it
would be interesting to see how you can use that to launch into creative
writing piece and building a main character, but seeing what becomes
common sense because you’ve seen this on tv, or what you think is the
way things should be because of all the images you’re bombarded with.
Judy: Social justice writing is also another thing that some of the writing
project people have really gotten into and that’s a whole other different
kind of...

Darcy: We can say she also though got into the idea of like, a perspective
and bias with the John Brown example. [An interpretation of other
concepts addressed in the demonstration that Madeline did not
highlight]

Rachel and Stephanie: Hmm. Hmm. [agreement]

In this excerpt from the ﬁrst demonstration lesson offered by a colleague in their
cohort, the participants in this group begin to offer their observations, interpretations, and
judgments. Such analytical work serves to not only provide feedback to the demonstrator,
in this case Madeline, but it also serves as ways for the participants to get to know one
another — to position themselves, to build an ethos as individuals and as a group. While I
take on this train of thought in the next chapter, it’s important to note that being a
rhetorical critic serves a social function, such as offering opportunities for people to share
their knowledge, beliefs, and experiences with one another.

In this initial exchange, though, I want to highlight the types of critiques that are
offered by each of the participants, namely Stephanie, Rachel, and Darcy. For Stephanie,
the most experienced of the teachers, she begins the exchange with a description of what
she anticipated being in the demonstration, namely a focus on the arguments that images

make, rather than on Madeline’s focus on using images to help student writers create new

characters. To help her group mates understand where her disappointment comes from,

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Stephanie explains that she does a persuasion unit in which she encourages students to
think about how the image positions them and what the image is arguing should be
different for the readers. Rachel responds with a possible reason for why Madeline chose
this focus, speciﬁcally that the grade level content expectations offered by the state
department of education does not require Madeline to use images in the way that
Stephanie suggests. This move by Rachel previews a move that recurs throughout the
summer, and that is the role of the state’s curricular mandates in shaping what these
teachers feel compelled to teach in their grade level and content areas. That is, to Rachel,
curricular goals are set by the state, and she critiques the demonstration lessons through
the lens of ﬁnding lessons, practices, and activities that will help her and her students
within the framework the state sets forth. Indeed, one of the requirements of the
demonstration lessons is for teachers to highlight which of the state’s standards are being
met at various grade levels (elementary, middle, and high school) for each of the lessons.
Thus, the state standards (the grade level content expectations for K—8 (GLCEs) and high
school content expectations (HSCEs) for secondary classrooms) become a meaningful
interpretive lens, not for the particular practices teachers engage in or for speciﬁc
activities teachers design, but rather for what content each grade level has agreed to focus
on.

Interestingly, Judy follows Rachel’s interpretation with an interpretation of her
own. Judy says that Madeline might have been able to focus on the arguments that
images make, because “a benchmark,” Judy says, “is to interpret, synthesize, and

evaluate information and various sources immediate to draw conclusions and

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implications.” With that said, however, Judy pivots back to Stephanie’s idea, and Judy
suggests that perhaps Stephanie’s idea was too obvious and that Madeline might have
wanted to offer alternatives to images as arguments. Stephanie responds by initially
restating and seemingly agreeing with Judy, but then Stephanie offers an extended
explanation of her suggestion. More speciﬁcally, Stephanie tells the group about her
experience as a leader in professional development in her school. She provides a speciﬁc
way Madeline might be able to ﬂame the demonstration for potential, future audiences in
which Madeline might be presenting this information. That is, Stephanie suggests that
Madeline include some sort of resource that she could provide for future audience
members in which she describes ways in which teachers from a range of content areas
might use images in their classrooms. Darcy and Rachel observe, though, that Madeline
did include a resource with such information.

This section of the exchange interested me at the time, because it felt like it was
an opportunity to talk about what is being taught, rather than how it was performed by
Madeline. That is, Stephanie interpreted that Madeline’s demonstration lesson seemed to
be limited in its scope and depth, though Stephanie does not ﬂame it that way. Instead,
Stephanie moves ﬁom a line of argument about how Madeline might reﬁne and reframe
the content of her demonstration to a line of critique about offering different alternatives
to potential audiences. In other words, Stephanie distances herself from offering a
judgment to offering alternatives. Thus, the critique is blunted as the other group
members speculate on possible reasons for why Madeline chose to demonstrate the use of

images to help student writers create characters. And, while Stephanie’s critique is

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blunted, Rachel and Darcy agree that perhaps Madeline simply was pressed for time and
couldn’t highlight the alternative uses of imagery that she included in her resource
packet.

In this ﬁrst critique of the ﬁrst demonstration lesson, then, Rachel, Darcy, and
Stephanie have collectively focused on the performance of the demonstration. That is, the
topics up for discussion do not center on the principles or beliefs that are behind
Madeline’s demonstration. For example, when Stephanie begins to challenge the idea that
demonstration that includes “visual literacy” in the title does not focus on the arguments
that images make, the group turns its attention to how an audience of other teachers might
ﬁnd the activities Madeline offers as useful and adaptable. Thus, parameters about what

is permissible to critique are being set, albeit it in implicit ways.

Rhetorical critiques are arguments about the performance and the content of the
performance, and as such, require justification and support for those arguments

In the demonstration response group conversations the teachers — Darcy, Rachel,
and Stephanie — explained two different types of critiques. The ﬁrst kind of critique was
about the performance of the demonstration itself. As respondents to the demonstration
lesson they were charged in providing feedback to each of the demonstrators in the form
of a letter. When collaborating in the group, these critiques consisted of descriptions,
interpretations, and judgments. The second kind of critique was about the content in the
demonstrations in which teachers each explained how they envisioned the concepts and
activities offered in the demonstrations as possibly enhancing their work with their own
students. In these critiques, the teachers explain why they do what they do with their

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students; that is, they explain why they think their decisions in working with their
students was prudent at the time. Although the two types of judgments bounce back and
forth from one to the other, oftentimes intermingled with one another, in both cases that
when teachers explain their judgments — either about the performance of or the content in
the demonstrations - they are making arguments.

When explaining their judgments, this response group routinely made arguments
about students, teachers and teaching, and about the subject matter of writing. Moreover,
embedded within these arguments teachers are revealing what they say they know about
students, teachers and teaching, and writing. In the process of explaining judgments and
making arguments about these three subjects, the teachers rely on particular resources for
their arguments (i.e “topoi” or “commonplace”).

In this chapter I map the topoi of teachers in this one response group to
demonstration lessons. In doing so, I aim to identify what the teachers say they know
about students, teaching, and the subject matter of writing. Teachers in this group
regularly turn to the commonplace “experience,” though this commonplace is multi-
faceted in that teachers turn to different kinds of experiences, including their experience
in classrooms with students, their experience in their professional teaching contexts, and
their experiences with professional development (including their shared experiences
within the Rust Belt Writing Project). A secondary commonplace the teachers in this
group turn to as resources for their arguments is “learning” and “learners.” More
speciﬁcally, the teachers share a belief that different kinds of learners exist and that as

teachers they must “scaffold” processes and concepts for their students. I introduce the

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topoi of “experience” and “learning and learners” look like for this response group,
because they will appear and re-appear throughout the excerpts provided in this study.
Experience is the primary and dominant topoi for this response group

When the response group met to discuss and respond to demonstration lessons,
the teachers regularly referred to their own experiences as a way to support the arguments
they made to explain either their critique of the demonstration or their pedagogical
practices with students. More speciﬁcally, the members of the group referred to three
general types of experience, namely

0 experience in classrooms with students,
experience in professional teaching contexts, and

0 experience with professional development (which includes the RBWP
experience).

Experience in the classroom with students is considered a common and valued
resource to support one 's arguments

Undoubtedly, when teachers in this group got together to talk about the
demonstration lessons, they talked about our own experiences with students regularly and
often. As classroom teachers, this experience showed up repeatedly in the reasons for
why teachers did what they did in their classrooms. That is, experience with students
served as a way to explain teachers’ judgment of the content offered in the demonstration
lessons. While there are many examples of this over the course of each day during the
summer institute, I offer one example below. In a later section in this chapter, I will
explicate more thoroughly some of the nuances and subtleties in the differences in the
ways the teachers viewed students, but for now, the important point is that time spent

working with students is a common place for teachers in this group to turn to when

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ﬁnding and explaining reasons for why they do what they do in the classroom and for
why they take the positions they do about the demonstration lessons.

An example of a teacher turning to experiences in classrooms with students
appears below. In this excerpt, the demonstrator, Olivia, a high school special education
teacher, presented a demonstration on using graphic organizers to enhance student
writing. In our conversation that followed I pointed out that Olivia seemed to be
collecting a wide range of graphic organizers, but that she was still searching for ways in
which to use them strategically with her students. Stephanie, Rachel, and Darcy point to
their experiences using graphic organizers with their students, as well as how their
experiences working with “special education students.”

Jim: It’s interesting ‘cause she’s at the point where in kinda her trajectory
she’s collecting all these graphic organizers and she hasn’t ﬁgured out in
her head when, like how to use them strategically yet.

Stephanie: Or how to let the kids-especially since you teach high school-
like, the kids will know, like Emily’s idea of teaching them 8 possible
ways and let them choose the ways that’s gonna help them the most.
Darcy: I like that because they’re able to make a decision with their-
Jim: That’s totally normal.

Stephanie: Yeah. She’ll get there.

Rachel: And special ed kids just give them, maybe, ﬁve instead of
eight...or three.

Darcy: You know I think-
Jim: I focus on one at a time.

Rachel: Yeah. Focus on one at a time.

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Darcy: And I think too, it goes back to-I mean I do this- I think I
underestimate kids who are special ed. You know, they actually, you
know, you have these impressions and stereotypes of what special ed is.
And you know, maybe you can give them ﬁve and teach them at the very
beginning of the year. You know? ‘Cause I mean their writing wasn’t
terrible when she showed the samples.

Rachel: Hm,mm.

Darcy: I mean I didn’t look at it and it wasn’t like, you know, atrocious.
Stephanie: No. It was decent writing-

Darcy: Yeah.

Rachel: It would just depend on how you do it. I don’t think you-like I
don’t think you could give them all ﬁve at one time. I’m not-and I’m and
I’m just saying I don’t think you should give any middle school kid-like
special ed or otherwise.

Darcy: Right! I wouldn’t give ﬁve at one time.

Rachel: Like, we’re going to do ﬁve this week of school and then you get
to pick six. At the end of the year they’ll be like, “I don’t know what the

hell you’re trying to tell me to do! I’m going to do what you tell me to do
and then I’m going to forget all about it.” You know?

In this case, the teachers are in agreement within the group, but are having differences

with Olivia, the demonstrator. In sorting out how they would approach things differently,

the teachers rely on their own experiences working with students. More speciﬁcally, the

teachers, particularly Rachel, turns to her experiences in the importance of graphic

organizers with her students, but that she would see it as counter-productive and

overwhelming to teach all the graphic organizers at once - as Olivia had suggested in the

demonstration. In addition to illustrating how teachers turn to their experiences working

with students as resource for explaining their judgments, this excerpt also demonstrates

that sometimes things are stable within the response group, but unstable between the

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group and the demonstrator. At other times and in other excerpts, the instability occurs
within the group. In either case, one place each teacher turns to as a resource is her
experience working with students.

Experience in different professional teaching contexts provides as a resource for
one ’s arguments illustrates the ways in which teachers navigate their work, including the
decisions they make in their classrooms

Another type of experience that teachers in this response group turn to as a
resource is their experience with particular types of teaching contexts. That is, as they
explain their judgments to one another and/or to the demonstrator, they provide reasons

that are based on their experiences with the various contexts, including

Experience with local community, including parents and guardians
Experience within departments, teams, or signiﬁcant colleagues
Experience with particular grade levels

Experience with state standards

Experience with colleagues in different grade levels (vertical
relationships).

Without question, contextual features of each teacher’s workplaCe factor into the
judgments and the explanations of those judgments these teachers make. These
contextual features and factors will appear throughout the analysis on what these teachers
have to say about students, teaching and teachers, and writing; however, the following
excerpt illustrates the teachers’ use of professional teaching contexts as a commonplace
to ﬁnd resources for their arguments. In the exchange below, Rachel and Stephanie turn
to their experiences within their own schools, as ways to talk about how writing is viewed
within their most immediate professional teaching contexts. More precisely, they turn to
the struggles they face in working with colleagues and explaining to them what it is that

writing teachers teach.

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Rachel: It’s interesting because we have conversations revolving around
benchmarks and stuff and so when you try to do something where you say,
“what concepts are you teaching?”- you’re like is writing an essay a
context cause there are a bazillion skills that you need in order to write an
essay. And a lot of the other departments for a long time- they were like,
“I don’t understand.” And it’s like because with math you say, “I’m
teaching algebraic formulas.” And there’s a right way to do it and a
wrong way to do it. You know, and it’s like, I mean not to teach it to
actually - like it’s very easy for you to assess whether kids understand how
to do it or not, because they work a problem and they either get it right or
they get it wrong. But in English it’s not like that. You know and I’m
like, “Look at my benchmark: ‘Students should be enthusiastic about
writing.’ How would you measure that?” (laughs) You know what I
mean? It’s like, “you can measure it on a test, because ‘I have 90% of my
kids that got a B- or higher on this test, because they passed these skills.”’
I can’t say, “How do you like writing Steph? I like it. Do you love it?”
Great, check. You know what I mean? So, I’m like our subject area is so
much more subjective, you know what I mean, than other things. I mean
obviously there are things that all of us look for, but

Stephanie: I have a problem in my building in my department where I
have teachers who believe themselves to be literature teachers and not
writing teachers. And that’s a very big problem for me, because now the
new standards are requiring them to write in every single English class,
and they’ve been for years just teaching American Lit and “I just want to
talk about the stories and maybe I’ll have them do two literary analyses or
whatever,” and I’m just like, “You gotta change that now.” And they don’t
want to.

In this exchange, Rachel and Stephanie turn to details about their professional teaching
contexts, including their discipline, their colleagues, the course offerings in their school,
and the state’s standards and benchmarks in order to explain what it is the face in
teaching writing in their schools. They continue their discussion, noting more details
about their speciﬁc contexts.
Stephanie: Yeah the comp classes until this past year had always been sent
to the new, inexperienced teacher because no one else wanted to teach
them, because they weren’t that important really. So it was always like the

dumping ground. The dumping ground class and the dumping ground
teacher. You know? It’s always been bad.

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Rachel: High school fascinates me for that very reason, because

Darcy: The hierarchy?

Rachel: Yeah, like this whole thing like who gets this class and who gets
that class and I’m going, “Okay but I have to teach them how to read and
write and speak and listen.”

Darcy: Yeah, it’s English. (Laughter).

Rachel: I don’t get to pick. I want to pick. But it’s the whole thing of like
how it’s so prestigious to have like the AP classes or you know, the
classes that everybody wants.

Stephanie: Well you get paid extra in my district for having them.

Darcy: You do?

Rachel: Really?

Stephanie: If you teach AP you get money.

Darcy: For your classroom?

Rachel: Well no wonder everybody wants them (laughs).

Stephanie: No, your salary is increased. It’s schedule B.

Rachel: AP is a schedule B?

Stephanie: Yes. We think that the lower level classes should be schedule
B, but it’s all the AP classes that are schedule B.

Rachel: That is so just the stigma of your class is more important just
because

Judy: They’re college bound.

Stephanie: Well everyone in our building thinks they’re college bound.
Honestly- 90 something percent, really high. I can’t remember if it was 96
or 98 but it’s really hard.

Darcy: Ours is really high too.

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Stephanie: Plus, because like no one wanted to twenty years ago or how
ever long- no one wanted to teach the AP classes because they were extra
work cause you had to prepare them for that test or whatever. And so they
put it in as a bribe. And now, it’s a sacred cow that causes a lot of political
problems in my building. We have teachers at each other’s throats.
Darcy: I can imagine.
Stephanie: It’s ugly - it’s very ugly. Even within my department- when
we brought in a second AP, cause we had AP Lit- we added AP Language
and Composition. . .oh my God. I had two women who used to be friends
and eat lunch to gether- who won’t speak to each other. And, it’s just
awful.
Rachel: Wow.
Stephanie details what she sees as the working conditions, or the context, of her school
and department. In sharing that teachers in her department vie to teach particular courses,
in part because of increased pay, which, in turn, causes her colleagues to not want to
collaborate with each other, Stephanie illustrates that contextual factors can inform what
is taught and how it is taught in the classrooms of her colleagues. In other words,
Stephanie turns to her teaching context as a way to describe some of what she factors in
her judgment as a teacher. In this case, for example, the courses she teaches and even
some of the concepts and processes she feels as though she has to teach in those courses
are, in part, determined by her colleagues and what her colleagues are teaching.
Experiences with professional development, both as participant and as presenter,
are resources to support teachers ’ arguments about the eﬂectiveness of demonstration
lessons
The last type of experiential category teachers in this group turn to is their

experiences as participants and leaders in professional development. The RBWP institute

leaders view the teachers’ demonstration lessons as potential professional development

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offerings for the local school communities. Because the demonstration lessons are viewed
as having a potential audience with teachers outside the institute, members of this
response group discussed, sometimes at length, about their experiences in professional
development (PD). The experiences they turned to include:
Experience in school and school district professional development
Experience in personal education (e. g. degreed programs, such as
Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees or classes, or to become “highly
qualiﬁed” teachers of a particular content area)
0 Experiences shared in the Rust Belt Writing Project
When turning to these sorts of experiences, teachers in the group often were considering
the positives and the limitations of the demonstration lessons. The teachers turned to their
own experiences, whether as participants in or leaders of professional development, in
order to talk about their own learning and to make suggestions for the demonstrators.
Beyond seeing the purposes of the demonstration lesson as a persuasive occasion,
the teachers also turn to their experiences in professional development as a way to
explain their judgment. Stephanie, in particular, turned to her extensive experience as a
professional developer in her school as a member of a cross-curricular literacy
committee. For instance, during the conversation responding to Madeline’s
demonstration that was excerpted earlier, Stephanie mentions what she expected to see in
the demonstration but did not. In this exchange she turns to her experience as a
professional developer.
Stephanie: So maybe if she were to do this for like, other teachers and
assuming that like, see when, when I was in well, well I’m still in, we
have a literacy, um, committee at our school and it’s made up of three
English teachers, a Science Teacher a Science teacher and a Math teacher.

And we, for one-whole school year for every single meeting that we had
like, if it was a PPD or a staff meeting or whatever we always had a mini

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lesson that we did at the beginning of the meeting. And um, we presented
different ways, just like techniques and strategies and made a lesson plan
thing. But one of the things that we always had was- we had like a here’s
something you could do, and then we had these situations like “In Social
Studies you could do it this way...in English, this way...” You know like
we had a whole bunch of different ideas so maybe if she does take this out
on the road kind of a deal, she might want to have some kind of a source,
some kind of a resource there. Like if “If you’re doing persuasion you
could...blah”
Rachel: Hm.hmm.
Stephanie: Just so that, you know, cause like you have to make sure you’re
trying to get like, all those different teachers who are sitting there. You
know?
In this exchange Stephanie begins by turning to experience working with students, but
then eventually turns to her experience as someone who has led professional development
in her school. She shares her approach of considering the needs of the audience of
professional development, namely that teachers in professional development not only
want to be convinced to try something in their classroom, but that they need resources to
get them started. As Stephanie sees it, the professional developer has to consider the
audience, including what happens in other teachers’ classrooms, how other teachers view
the concepts and processes being discussed in the session, and which resources might be
most useful for each teacher in order to convince them to try the activities and strategies
being offered.
Teachers in the response group also rely on their experiences as participants in

professional development as resources for explaining their arguments. Later in the

summer, for example, Darcy responds to Rachel who had just said that the demonstrator

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had used just the right amount of research and theory to support why she felt the activities
in her demonstration were worthwhile. Darcy says,
That’s what I liked about it too and I was telling Jack (a returning fellow
for the institute)that like this week to me has been a really good week for
demonstrations- not that the other demonstrations weren’t good because
they were all very good but I liked being involved in a demonstration. I
don’t sit and listen very well and so like it gets to a point where okay this
is the third line of research? Okay, I’m done. You know what I mean?
So she had us like engaged. I like being involved in a demonstration
because then I can like see and start to work through how would I do this
with my kids? Rather than this is all theoretical and this is how you would
do it. We don’t really get to do much- you know? I liked that part of it. I
don’t like to be talked to.
Based on her experience as a participant in professional development, Darcy highlights
her beliefs that the demonstration lessons should persuade her to use particular activities,
and the best way to do this is for the demonstrators to have the audience be “engaged”
and to provide chances for the audience to consider how they might use and adapt the
activities and lessons for their own students.

These experiences - of working with students, of working in particular
professional teaching contexts, and of participating in professional development -
function as resources for teachers to help them explain their judgment of both the content
in and the performances of the demonstration lessons. Moreover, these experiences seem
to be valued and shared by everyone in the group. That is, they are considered
appropriate and common places for teachers to turn to as resources. Experience, however,
is not the only commonplace for teachers in the group, although it is the dominant one. In

addition to their experience, teachers also turn to “learning” and “learners” as a

commonplace.

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Views of learning and learners is a secondary topoi

A common, though less prevalent, place for teachers in this response group to turn
to is their conception of learners and learning. At no time during the summer institute did
this response group have explicit conversations about what the group members said they
knew about learning and learners, though there did seem to be an implicit understanding
between the group members in at least two ways. One, all group members seemed to
share in a belief about the need for teachers to “scaffold” experiences for students or, to
put it another way, learners need scaffolded experiences. Two, all teachers in the group
seemed to share a belief that each person - students and teachers included - can be
different types of learners. Thus, when talking about students, teachers and teaching,
and/or writing, teachers in this response group would, at times, turn to scaffolding and/or
different types of learners as ways to explain their judgment.

Teachers scaﬂold experiences for their students, and as such, “scaffolding ”
serves as a resource for explaining the prudence of teachers ’ decisions in the classroom

The concept of “scaffolding,” a term used as short-hand for Vygotskian theories
of learning, is a resource teachers turn to when explaining their judgment in designing a
progression of activities or lessons for students. That is, “scaffolding” is something they
do for students when planning which activities or lessons precede or follow others. The
ﬁrst instance when the word “scaffold” (or “scaffolding”) appears is in the ﬁrst
demonstration lesson, when the teachers in the group are explaining to one another
whether or not they would be using a particular set of questions organized on a sheet for
students, as the demonstrator had illustrated using the questions to help students create

details for ﬁctional characters. The teachers explain to one another how they see what

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different grade level of students would ﬁnd the sheet useful and which would not.
Stephanie, the high school teacher, has just explained that she would not use the sheet,
because her students need more “freedom” in creating their characters. Stephanie says, “I
don’t know if I would make it so limited. I think the high school kids like to have a lot
more freedom with their creative writing...” Moments later, Rachel, Darcy, and Judy
explain how they would use it, and how the demonstrator had suggested a progression
between grade levels in how the set of questions could be used.
Stephanie: And so we create these different characters and then we do
different pictures of them. But I don’t start with pictures. I don’t use
pictures right away because it’s too easy for them. I want them to get and
establish things. So I do some form but I’m not sure if that form would

necessarily work in creative writing.

Rachel: And I think she said too, that she doesn’t use that character
building form with her tenth graders.

Darcy: Right.

Rachel: She basically does kind of what you do she gives them the picture
and then, so I think that was another way she kinda showed... and maybe
she shoulda put more emphasis on it cause I think it was actually a
question that Anthony (another teacher in the summer institute) asked.
You know that, with the fourth graders need the most structure and then
the eighth graders they get a little bit more freedom.

Judy: She presents the scaffolding as they need it.
Stephanie: Hm, hmm.

Rachel: And then the tenth graders get a lot more ﬂexibility or freedom
with it.

Darcy: So, I mean, would you use the form with your seventh graders?
Rachel: Uh, huh.

Darcy: I would absolutely use it too.

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Rachel: Absolutely. Yea.

Darcy: I would have to because if 1....

Rachel: Because in 7th grade and 8th grade you’re still getting “I don’t

know what to write about...l don’t know what you want me to do...I don’t

know...” and you’re like “Gahhh! !”

Darcy: They want like a speciﬁc, like a target.

Rachel: Like “tell me.”

Darcy: Like, “tell me what to do.”
The teachers turn here to the notion of scaffolding, and even mention it explicitly. Still, of
the 14 demonstration lessons, only one demonstrator made visible and explicit the
theories of learning that grounded his demonstration lesson. In that demonstration lesson,
the demonstrator explicitly mentioned “scaffolding,” but the notion of scaffolding was
implicitly present in the discussions within the response group.

In other words, “scaffolding” was a common knowledge, and after these two early
demonstration lessons when the concept of “scaffolding” was explicitly said, the term
never popped up again in our discussions, though the idea never disappeared. For
instance, when discussing the beneﬁts and limitations of teaching the “ﬁve paragraph
essay,” the teachers explain how they see a progression, or scaffolding, needed for
students to learn how to organize pieces of writing. More speciﬁcally, they argue that
middle school students learn organization by explicit instruction in the ﬁve paragraph
essay, and that as those students become more proﬁcient in using that format, they will
learn to organize their written ideas differently. In short, they explain their judgment of
using the ﬁve paragraph essay with middle school students by turning to the common

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place of scaffolding. That is, while the teachers never use the word “scaffold,” they
explain that the ﬁve paragraph essay acts as a sort of scaffold for students in order for
them to learn to write academic essays.
Each learner is unique
In addition to shared thoughts about teachers scaffolding experiences for students,
the teachers in this response group also seemed to share a common knowledge that
different kinds of learners exist. For instance, when talking about participating in
demonstration lessons, the teachers described themselves and other teachers as different
types of learners, such as “visual,” “auditory,” “multi-modal,” “kinesthetic,” and
“musical-rhythmic” learners. They also distinguished different types of learners when
talking about students. For example, some students are ELL (English language learners)
and middle school students are described as “concrete” learners. In responding to
Rachel’s demonstration, Darcy explains what she means by “concrete” learners.
Darcy: H liked it. I mean I think that- I mean and I talked to her before
about this, so maybe it was me knowing where she was coming from and
also teaching seventh grade. She’s very, I this is very in line with- she’s
very in step with the adolescent psychology that says they are concrete
learners still. You know, they really need that sort of step by step by step.
That’s just how their brains are at this age and so, you know, and they’re
kind of in that weird transition place where sometimes they can be non-
con- you know, they don’t-they’re not always concrete. So I thought that
that was really- it seemed like she was basing her rationale too, I think on
knowing her students and like where they’re coming from.
Darcy explains that she ﬁnds Rachel’s demonstration persuasive in that Rachel
demonstrated her sense of knowing how middle school students are as learners, namely
that they are “concrete.” Implicit in this thought is that as students move into higher grade

levels they will become different types of learners, ones who will not need that “sort of

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step by step by step” explanation to tasks and activities that occur in classrooms where
writing occurs.

The commonplaces of “experience” and “learning” act as resources for teachers in
this response group, including when they repeatedly talk about the subjects of students,
teachers and teaching, and writing. In using their experience and their views on learning
and learners as a resource for the arguments the make when they refer to their knowledge
about students, teachers/teaching, and the subject matter of writing, the teachers navigate
that space between theory and practice, sharing what they do with students and justifying
why they do so. These moments of articulating their knowledge include making
arguments, and their experiences and their views of learning and learners serve those
arguments as reasons and evidence to support their claims. As such, in the section that
follows in which I aim to describe how teachers in this group talk about these three
subjects, the commonplaces will appear and re-appear in the excerpts. That is, the
commonplaces of “experience” and “learning” are engaged when teachers are explaining
themselves to one another.

In these deliberations, teachers will, at times, agree with one another, extending
and reﬁning either their own explanations or those just forwarded by one another or by
the demonstrator. At other times, the teachers will disagree with one another or with the
demonstrator. I describe these moments as those in which the teachers are susceptible to
change, because the subjects are “up for grabs,” meaning that the teachers engage in
extended explanations, oftentimes relying on an integrated and layered sense of the

commonplaces. These moments in which teachers are explaining their own judgments or

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responding to the judgments of others seem to provide opportunities to learn from one
another. That is, they are moments and subjects where teachers in this response group are
either having their ideas reinforced or challenged.

Rhetorical critiques initiate deliberations and deliberations reveal teachers’
knowledge

After each of the demonstration lessons this response group continually turned to
its experience to address three general areas of our professional knowledge as teachers,
speciﬁcally our knowledge about students, teaching, and writing. The lessons
demonstrated by each of the RBWP summer institute participants, the rubric designed by
the institute leaders, and the charge of writing a response letter acted as triggers for our
discussions. That is, the lessons, rubric, and response letter provided the purpose for our
conversations. In those conversations the members of this response group shared its
knowledge about students, teaching, and writing. What individuals said she or he knew
about each of these three subjects —— students, teachers and teaching, and writing — were,
at times, challenged, extended, and or reﬁned by other group members. In the remainder
of the chapter, I aim to describe what the teachers said they knew about each of these
three areas of knowledge, paying particular attention to those exchanges in which
teachers explained their judgments as a way to note what knowledge was considered
stable within the group and what knowledge was susceptible to being changed.

Knowledge of students

One repeated subject of discussion within this response group was the subject of
students. More speciﬁcally, while teachers referred to their experiences with students as a

resource to help explain their judgments, they also reveal what they say they know about

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students. Put another way, when teachers say what they know about students, they rely on
their experiences with their students. Teachers in this response group, including me and
the returning fellow named Judy, teach in different grade levels, ranging ﬁ'om elementary
school, middle school, high school, and university. As such, the response group talks at
length about the differences between students at the different levels. This seems to be an
intentional hope of the RBWP leaders since one of the requirements of the demonstration
lessons is to include possible adaptations to different grade levels for demonstrated
activities and lessons. In addition to talking about the differences in students the teachers
found at different grade levels, the group also talked about the importance of recognizing
the role students’ life experiences play in their schooling and in their writing.

All together, these two topics of conversation — the individuality of students and
recognizing the role of students’ life experiences — serve as a way for teachers to talk
about how they would or would not adapt the demonstrated lessons and activities. More
broadly, they also speak to tensions the teachers sort through, namely the tension of
deciding how much “freedom” or “structure” to provide students in writing tasks, as well
as the challenge of helping students to be “engaged” in the experiences the teachers
design. While the next section focuses on what the teachers say they know about
teaching, this section that highlights what the teachers say they know about students is
infused with the teachers’ experience of designing learning experiences for students.

In the following exchange, the demonstrator showed the participants a series of
questions that she had used with a wide range of students. She labeled the series of

questions “KSIC,” (i.e. What do you Know? What do you See? What can you Infer?

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What do you Conclude?) to be used when reading and analyzing images. The
demonstrator discussed how she used the questions with different grade levels of
students. In the excerpt below, the teachers talk about how they would or would not adapt
the series of questions for the students they teach, and in doing so, the teachers reveal
what they say they know about students. For instance, Darcy and Rachel say that students
in middle school can be overwhelmed by having too many questions to answer at once.
Stephanie says that students in high school need more freedom in what they are asked to
do. In the process of this conversation, Rachel and Darcy support one another, while
Stephanie explains why she would choose not to use the KSIC series of questions.

Jim: You mentioned in there that you like the KSIC thing too, why was
that?

Darcy: Oh yea. I loved that. That was - to me that was really well done
cause it was simpliﬁed enough where it wasn’t over simpliﬁed but it was
broken down. Cause there is this whole historical inquiry protocol thing
that I’ve seen that’s just like, “shwoo!” it’s so many questions and it’s
overwhelming for kids. But this was just like the main points that I think
will get them to analyze you know, something like a primary source well.

Rachel: Especially with middle school kids because they are so concrete
Darcy: Yes, that’s exactly what I was going to say.

Rachel: that you they can see this and it’s a way for them to organize their
ideas in a way, like you said, it’s not like dumb down they have to think
about it but it still is pretty easy for them to see.

Darcy: No. They have to think. But it’s like they can take one thing at a
time. Like if I asked them to like, you know, do all these things at once or
just gave them a, you know, a list and I say, “okay answer these
questions.” I think like psychologically they’d feel overwhelmed. But this
- the way it’s broken down they might be able to...

Jim: So the fact that it’s in categories and that there’s a progression to
those categories is helpful?

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Darcy: Yea. Because then maybe like the more the surface stuff and then
they get more interpretation if they get to know more maybe their
conﬁdence will build a little bit.

Rachel: Hm, hmm.

Jim: That, is that along the lines of the kind of things you do at high
school?

Stephanie: Uh, well, in terms of...Yes. I do some things like that with my
kids. Not necessarily in creative writing but in um, in interp..when we try
to like, for example in like a forensics class where I’m trying to have the
kids watch a sample speech and then “What did you see them do?” “What
did you see the speaker do in terms of physically? What did they do
vocally? What did they do in terms for organization?” So I might do
something like that too. I’m not sure if creative writing, I don’t know if I
would make it so limited. I think the high school kids like to have a lot
more freedom with their creative writing so that when I use pictures in my
creative writing class I’ll do a lot more review journals. So the kids will
like all put out a bunch of pictures. I don’t let them select them either. I
pass them out upside down and let them ﬂip them over. And they see
what they have and then we’ll write for a ﬁve minute free write for
creating that character. Like “Who is it?” “What’s that person’s story?”-
kind of thing. And then we’ll just keep it in our notebook and then we’ll
another one and do a ﬁve minute free-write. Like so, so they create, we’ll
have like ﬁfteen-twenty characters and we don’t only do it with pictures
we do it with lots of different ways they’ll have a whole bunch of pictures
or bunch of characters that they might then choose to put into the story or
choose to put into something else later. So, I’m more about giving them a
lot of stuff to use as fodder so they can write. So they can have their own
choices.

Rachel: But I think at your grade level they can hit on that because they
want that and that’s good. Because they want that. And plus they want

more fieedom, they want more choice...

Stephanie: Right. It’s a different thing... and they’re taking a class called
creative writing and that’s what they expect.

Darcy: So you would not use a form like that? You wouldn’t have to
probably.

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Stephanie: I would not. No because those kids for the most part want to do
it anyway.

In this exchange, the teachers’ knowledge about students is based on their experiences of
working with students. Embedded in this experience with students are also implicit
understandings of the different ways in which students learn at different grade levels. For
instance, Darcy and Rachel point to middle school students’ as being “concrete” and
needing a series of questions. At the same time, Stephanie suggests that high school
students “want more freedom, they want more choice.” The teachers’ decisions in their
classrooms reﬂect the knowledge the teachers claim to have about students. For instance,
Stephanie explains how she would use something like the KSIC series of questions in her
Forensic class, but not in the Creative Writing class she teachers. Rachel and Darcy are
persuaded to try the KSIC form, because, as they explain, the form helps to organize
questions students can ask themselves. That is, Rachel and Darcy say they know that
middle school students can be “overwhelmed” by having too many questions at once, and
Darcy even goes so far as to refer to her experience with a “historical inquiry protocol
thing.” In explaining why they would or would not use the demonstrator’s series of
questions, the teachers in this response group reveal what they know about students —
students are different at different levels, and that means some activities are more
appropriate than others depending on the students’ grade level. The teachers see these
differences, at least in this excerpt, as centered on what does or does not overwhelm
students. This issue of what is appropriate for students based on the different grade levels
of students also appears throughout our discussions over the course of the summer,

including differences in attention spans at different grade levels, differences in how much

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choice and when to provide that choice at different grade levels, and differences in what
kind of assessments of writing is most helpful for students at different grade levels.
Oftentimes, when teachers said they knew that students were different at various grade
levels, it was referred to in terms of how to adapt activities. Rachel represents this line of

thinking when she says

Rachel: Which I thought that she did a really good job giving suggestions
of how it can be adapted for 4*, I mean she did 4th, 8"“ and 10th but that
pretty much represents, you know, the grade levels. I think you could
easily kind of see how you could bring it down a notch for younger kids or
even up it for older kids

The knowledge that students have differences illustrates part of the decision-making
process teachers tackle as part of their work in classrooms. Rachel provides a powerful
and dramatic example of how her knowledge of students’ life experiences are unique and
how those experiences present challenges in making prudent decisions in the classroom.

Rachel: We had - during our memoir thing, we had, like I heard stories
that I was just like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” One of my girls like
basically stayed home from school one day. Her mom was like, “Do you
want to stay home ﬁ'om school?” And she was like “Yeah. I want to stay
home from school. Yeah, I’ll stay home from school” you know whatever.
So they dropped the other little kids off, they came home, her dad was
high, and her mom was upset that her dad was high and was like, they go
into this big huge argument, and she ran upstairs and her dad was coming
down the stairs, like she went up the stairs, he was going down the stairs,
and she ran and hid in her closet because the ﬁght was getting really bad
and then she heard her dad shoot her mom thirteen times.

Darcy: (Gasps)

Rachel: She heard it. And she’s like, “I heard thirteen shots and then
nothing.” And she’s READING this to us, the entire class. And I mean,
I’m just like-this is a girl who would not read her research paper at the
beginning of the year because - or her essay at the beginning of the year,
cause she was painﬁrlly shy. She would not-she ﬂatout refused. She’s like

128

“I’m not gonna do it.” And then she’s reading this. She goes in and her
mom’s like, “Don’t come in here.” Cause she waited and then she heard
her dad leave, and then she waited. And she’s like, “I couldn’t hear
anything.” And then she heard her mom calling for her. And she was like,
“Don’t come in here. I don’t want you to see me. Go next door and get the
neighbor. Call 9-1-1.”

Darcy: Did her mom die?

Rachel: No. She lived. She lived through the whole thing. And it’s like,
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” You are twelve years old. This happened
when she was eleven. And it’s like, And I’m just sitting there staring at her
going, “I can’t imagine that.” And it’s not an uncommon story. Like I’ve
had other kids in the past who’ve watched one parent kill another parent.
Like kill them. And it’s like, “How do you even function? Like, how do
you get up every morning and come to school? Because I would be a
basket case. I don’t know. It’s crazy.

Darcy: My teammate and I talked about so much, because we saw that in
some of our kids. I said you know, I had the trauma of parents divorcing
and that was hard and I had an incredibly stable and grounded mother who
really did everything she could to make it as normal as possible. And if it
was hard for me, then can you imagine what this kid goes through?

Rachel: Like the number of kids that are in foster care?
Darcy: See, I don’t see as much of that.

Rachel: We have SO many kids in foster care. Like, some of the foster
parents are wonderful and some of them are like, “That’s not my son,” and
the only reason they have the foster kids is because they get money. And
it’s like you said, it was hard for me to deal with my parents divorce, but
when I went home I knew my mom loved me. Like if she screwed up, if I
screwed up-whatever. Things happened, but I knew that I could go home
and I knew I would be safe at home and I knew that she would take care of
me.

Darcy: Right. And if it was something that she did she would be there to
help you work through it.

Rachel: Yeah.—

Darcy: She was there. She was a presence.

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Rachel: But with these kids, it’s like. I have so many kids that it’s just like,
you know

Darcy: I know.

Rachel: I can’t even say anything to you. I don’t even know what to say
to you. Because they’ve had to deal with so much.

The teachers know that students have life experiences that affect the students’ lives in
the classroom. In the above example, Rachel shares the story of one her students who did
not share her writing in the class during the year, but then when the student wrote about
the shooting incident between her parents, she did read her writing aloud. While Rachel
seems to suggest that students can draw on their life experiences as a way to write
meaningful and moving pieces, she is also illustrating that knowing students’ lives being
unique is a tension that she navigates — and, it is a tension that is not easily resolved or
that she is even certain on how to handle appropriately. In referring to this concrete
experience in order to support her argument that students’ life experiences are each
unique and powerfully inﬂuential in students’ behavior in the classroom, Rachel reveals
that part of what guides her in deciding what is prudent for her to do in the classroom is
centered on responding to the needs of her students. This principle, it seems, is rooted in
her experience with students. That is, her experience shape the principles that guide her
decision-making.

When responding to demonstration lessons the teachers in this response group not
only turn to the resources (or topoi) of their experience and to their notions of learning,
but they also reveal what they say they know about students. More speciﬁcally, they say

that students are each unique as students and as people, and these differences, while

130

important in their judgment as teachers, make decisions as a teacher difﬁcult, because
they can lead to uncertainty and doubt about how to respond to students. Interestingly,
teachers in this group do not challenge one another on their knowledge of students. That
is, knowledge about students seems to be stable and not susceptible to being changed by
others. This is distinctly different than what the teachers say they know about teaching
and about writing, which, at times, includes teachers in the group challenging one
another.
Knowledge of teachers and teaching
Knowing that students are unique provides teachers with challenges in deciding on the
prudent course of action in the classroom, though the teachers argue that effective
teachers are those who listen to and learn from students. That is, one strategy for
navigating the uncertainty the uniqueness of students seems to create is for teachers to
take the stance of a learner, paying attention to and responding to the feedback students
provide. For instance, Rachel talks about one activity that creates opportunities for her to
learn important things about her teaching from her students. The eighth grade teachers in
her building ask students to write a letter to a former teacher who made a difference. In
the excerpt, Rachel makes a distinction between students’ feedback that is helpful and
that which is not.
Rachel: Our 8th grade teachers have at the end of every year- the kids
write a letter to their teacher who made an impact in their life and so you
know it’s really fun to go to your mailbox and get these letters from these
kids or whatever and every year there’s this really unlikely kid that you’re
like, I don’t even know what your voice sounded like, because I never
even talked to you, and they say the most profound things and you just-

like I cried because it was just so sentimental or whatever. But you
always get those kids that are like, “you’re so nice, you’re so sweet, you’re

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so cute”. . .that’s nice of you to say and everything, but like, “What did I
teach you?” You know? So it’s the kids who like say, you made a
difference and a kid this year was like, “I never wanted to work with other
kids. I never wanted to help other people and work with other people until
I had your class and just watching you work with kids and you
encouraging us to work with each other made me want to be more
cooperative”. And I’m like-

Darcy: Wow. That’s really introspective.

Rachel: That’s not something I focused on but woo-hoo! I did something

right! (Laughter)

In this case, the feedback from a student helped Rachel to see something in her

teaching that helped one of her students. Though she hadn’t intended the student to learn

this particular lesson, she is thrilled that the student let her know that she was doing

something well, and it provides her with validation that having students work with one

another is a wise pedagogical choice for her.

In another response group conversation Stephanie mentions that she appreciates

the demonstrator sharing how the research she read had supported what the demonstrator

had been thinking. Stephanie says:

I thought the little speech about validating her intuition was nice at the
end. She’s like, “I read these 3 books and honestly it really validated what
it was I was doing, and it made me feel good that I knew it was the right
thing.” So I thought that it was genuine, and I don’t know, I think that
that’s what a lot of teachers need- a lot of teachers are insecure, and I think
that having that kind of validation is really, really powerful.

A few moments later, the teachers continue their talk about the demonstrator. They point

out how teaching involves reﬂecting and the consideration of how the experiences they

design affects students.

Darcy: ...You know, she had some reﬂection that she was experiencing.

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Rachel: And she said, “You know, this is the ﬁrst time I did it. So, you
know, I tried it and these are things that I’ve thought about.” And think
that that’s a huge part of teaching. I think people that aren’t reﬂective
aren’t really good teachers. You know what I mean? Like you have to
reﬂect. You have to think about what worked, what didn’t work, what do I
need to do. '

Darcy: And it’s not always easy.

Rachel: No.

Darcy: Cause then it goes back to the whole insecurity issues and just
worrying like if I’ve done, “Am I doing the right thing?”(laughter). “Am I
permanently scaring you for life?”

Stephanie: Oh, they’re very, very malleable. They’ll be ﬁne.

Darcy: I know they are. I know I didn’t scar anyone.

Rachel: They’ll bounce back.

This “insecurity” of teachers and the need for “validation” in doing the “right
thing” point to these teachers’ knowledge that the profession of teaching is ﬁlled with
uncertainty. In one conversation, the response group deliberated at length about the work
of teaching, and if what teachers do in their work is considered writing. In the
demonstration lesson that initiated this discussion, an elementary teacher demonstrated a
lesson in which her students researched a topic of interest and were expected to teach
what they learned to their classmates. Part of their requirements was to create lesson
plans, assessments, as well as a reﬂection on their teaching experience. That is, the
students were asked to work in the ways as teachers. The following excerpt is long;
however, it is revealing in that the group explains to one another if the writing that
teachers do “counts” as writing. Most interestingly, though, is that by the end of the

conversation Stephanie appears to be susceptible to having her notions of “writing”

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susceptible to being changed mainly through Darcy’s explanation. The group’s exchange

follows:

Jim: So, sorry to ask this question, but I’m curious. When you guys do
this kind of work as teachers, do you consider yourselves writers when
you’re doing that or is that just part of teaching? I’m a little confused
about how you see- like she had kids doing what we do as teachers. So
you’re saying that it’s a kind of writing, but do you look at yourselves that
way as writers in those moments or is it something different? Do you
know what I mean?

Rachel: Until this experience I’d never thought of myself as a writer
period.

Darcy: Yeah me too. Me too.

Rachel: It didn’t matter what I wrote. I didn’t ever think of myself as a
writer.

Jim: But would you now - like in doing that kind of thing- the different
kind of work she had her students doing?

Rachel: I don’t know. I mean part of me feels like it’d just be something
that I do, but at the same time so is writing something of an essay. That’s
something that I do too, and I don’t see that as writing even though it is.
You know what I’m saying? I think it’s different for middle school kids
because like we know how to process our thoughts. We know how to
organize it, we know how to look at it and say, “Mmm - this isn’t going to
work or...” you know what I mean? We can kind of ﬁnagle those things
and I think middle school kids are still learning how to do that. And I
think just because so many of my kids have struggled with the
organization part of it? You know? I don’t know if that’s making sense.
Like I think for me I wouldn’t go, “I’m a great writer of lesson plans.”
You know what I mean? “I’m so good at this or I can organize this,” but
for a kid I think that’s a higher-level skill. And so to me it still is
something that technically you need to learn how to do, because it would
be like writing directions to something or you know writing a recipe or
you know what I mean? It’s those technical kinds of things but that are
still important. They’re not fun but they’re still important. I don’t know if
that answered your question or not.

Jim: Kind of- I’m just curious. I know that you said that you’re not a great
writer of lesson plans but you probably put together great lessons that you

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didn’t write down, but would that still be— the thinking that goes on or the
process that goes on- is that parallel to writing? Is it the same?

Rachel: Mmhmm.
Jim: Does it intersect at any point?

Rachel: I think it does because you go through a process. You know like
her kids went through like a brainstonning-type thing. And I think
teachers go through that too- like, “What do my kids need to know?” And
then, “How am I going to get them to this?” So even if you don’t write it
down, you still have to think about it. And like when I was reading Take
Joy, I thought it was really interesting because she was talking about the
process of writers and how every writer’s process is different. And that
some people take a notebook with them wherever they go, and so they are
constantly writing. They’re constantly writing things down, but she
doesn’t always do that. Like she has a lot of thoughts, and she’ll spend
months formulating ideas in her head, and to me she’s still writing. She
doesn’t have it on paper, but in her head she’s formulating what is this
going to be like once I put it on the paper. Does that make sense?

Darcy: I was going to add., just from my perspective I worked in an
internship in college and a lot of the students that came to our ofﬁce were
going into the communications world and they were going into business
settings, and when we would go do site visits and it was always kind of
fun, and we would ask questions like “What do you look for in the
students or what do you look for when you hire someone.” And I think
most people would say, “We’re looking for good writers.” And so the
business world I think they view someone who could put together a
presentation that’s articulate. They look at them and say, “You are a good
writer.” And that’s a skill that I think is really valued in the workplace so
I think the work place might view someone that does puts and presents
and conveys ideas as being a good writer. So I don’t know if that kind of
answers -

Jim: So is that what a teacher does? So a good teacher would be a good
writer in that kind of deﬁnition or no?

Darcy: Well I mean if you ask my mom- she’d say, “Oh, I’m a terrible
writer.” She teaches math, but, you know, so but I think that a lot of the
things that she goes through- I mean like she prewrites and says, “Ok, this
is what I need to teach.” then she researches a little of what she’s teaching
and then she actually does the problems that she’s going to be going
showing on the overhead to her kids and then she prepares her materials

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and then she presents it and then I guess she revises by checking and
seeing how her kids are doing. So it’s kind of a similar process.

Stephanie: I think that it almost felt like what she was presenting to us was
sort of like prewriting, outlining, an activity of the presenting of the thing
and then that the writing actually came in their reﬂection that we didn’t
get to see examples of. And that’s where the kids would have like
authentic evidence to write about and so that way she could turn it into a
bigger writing lesson if she wanted to in terms of like giving them some
kind of a speciﬁc, I don’t know, whatever as the prompt for that ﬁnal
reﬂection or maybe a summary whatever it was- whatever genre she wants
it to be in - reﬂective or summary or expository, analysis, I don’t know —
whatever. That could’ve been like the writing aspect that we didn’t really
get to see. That’s how I sort of saw it? Because I think that all those steps
- I agree with you guys - those are steps that it takes to write, but I’m not
sure that an extemporaneous speech is writing. I don’t think
extemporaneous is actually written. I think a script thing would be writing
because you actually have to script a manuscript to be able to speak from
that, but I’m not sure extemporaneous is writing. I think it’s pre-writing
and I think it gets you to that point. It gets you at least an outline. It gets
you at least to like ﬁguring out your sub, you know your sub-categories
(inaudible), but I’m not sure that it’s writing. And I don’t know- it’s my
own totally personal opinion. I don’t really know what experts would say
about that or anything.

Rachel: So it’s more like going through the process. So it’s more like it
goes through the same process as writing but you really wouldn’t consider
it writing, right? Is that what I’m hearing you say?

Stephanie: Well I think it’s like the beginning of writing.
Rachel: And it could turn into writing.

Stephanie: Yeah I think that jotting down what you’re going to do in a
lesson— like I don’t have to make real lesson plans, like no one comes and
(inaudible)

Rachel: That’s true. That’s true.

Stephanie: Like I put things - I use a grid and I use my plan book, but I
just write like blah blah blah. And I would never consider that writing.
But I might consider my reﬂection of that or a summary of what I do when
I type that up for my department for a unit, um, like a pacing guide thing
or something like that- I might consider that writing.

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Rachel: That makes sense.

Darcy: Yeah, and I think it’s all in how you View it too, because our
literacy specialist in our building who went through the writing project,
she’s tells kids, “I’m a writer. I write grocery lists. I write emails. I write
thank you notes.” And so she looks at the everyday stuff even as being
writing. You know, and I think that might even be a broader deﬁnition to
get kids to think of themselves maybe as writers, because they don’t
realize, you know, that they really are even if it’s just like texting or, you
know, an instant message or whatever.

Stephanie: Yeah, I probably have too narrow of a view.

Darcy: So I don’t know. I don’t know maybe you’re thinking more like in
the sense of the academe.

Stephanie: Yeah, English-teacher-“y”. In high school English teacher-“y.”
Oh yeah, that’s where my brain lives. It lives there all the time. (laughter)

This exchange begins with Rachel and Darcy both saying that they did not see
themselves as writers, even if and when they write as part of their work. Rachel, in
particular, explains in detail that even though she writes sample essays and lesson plans
as part of her work that she didn’t see herself as a writer. That is, the argument seems to
be that the act of writing does not wholly constitute one being a writer — something more
is included in her conception of being a writer. Rachel suggests that this something more
is a way of thinking when she says that as teachers “we know how to process our
thoughts” and that processing is a “higher level skill” for “kids.” I press Rachel to explain
what she means when I suggest that the act of teaching as she describes it seems to be
related to the act of writing. Rachel describes the parts of the teaching process in terms
similar to the terms of the writing process. She says, for instance, that teachers do a

“brainstorming-type thing” by asking, “What do my kids need to know?” and “How am I

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going to get them to this?” That is, Rachel understands teaching and writing to each be
about “making” or “designing” in that writers make and design writing products and
teachers make and design experiences for students. However, “making” and “designing”
do not make for the entirety of writers or teachers. Rachel goes on to refer to the book
Take Joy, one of the selections offered by the RBWP, and Rachel refers to what the
author had to say about writing. Rachel says:
And like when I was reading Take Joy, I thought it was really interesting
because she was talking about the process of writers and how every
writer’s process is different. And that some people take a notebook with
them wherever they go, and so they are constantly writing. They’re
constantly writing things down, but she doesn’t always do that. Like she
has a lot of thoughts, and she’ll spend months formulating ideas in her
head, and to me she’s still writing. She doesn’t have it on paper, but in her
head she’s formulating what is this going to be like once I put it on the
paper. Does that make sense?
Rachel implies, though has a hard time naming, that writing and teaching go beyond the
act of creation, but involves some type of thinking behind the creative acts. Darcy
extends and slightly reﬁnes this when she talks of her experiences in college working for
a internship placement ofﬁce in which the “business world” views “good writers” as
those “who could put together a presentation that’s articulate,” someone that “puts and
presents and conveys ideas.” When I ask Darcy if that is what she does as a teacher, she
turns to her mom’s experience as a veteran math teacher. Like Rachel, she uses the terms
usually associated with the writing process in order to describe what she sees as the work
of teaching. Darcy says:
Well I mean if you ask my mom- she’d say, “Oh, I’m a terrible writer.”
She teaches math, but, you know, so but I think that a lot of the things that

she goes through- I mean like she prewrites and says, “Ok, this is what I
need to teach.” then she researches a little of what she’s teaching and then

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she actually does the problems that she’s going to be going showing on the

overhead to her kids and then she prepares her materials and then she

presents it and then I guess she revises by checking and seeing how her

kids are doing. So it’s kind of a similar process.

At this point, Stephanie jumps into the conversation and returns the discussion
back to the demonstration lesson. In doing so, Stephanie argues that the demonstrator did
have students go through the “steps that it takes to write,” but that “extemporaneous
speec ” is not writing. That is, by having the students teach their topics to their peers, the
demonstrator did not have her students create written products. Stephanie does not seem
to share in Rachel and Darcy’s unstated understanding that writing might include
particular types of thinking, or rather, she seems to acknowledge that even though
students and teachers might engage in thinking similar to writers, there also needs to be a
particular type of written product in order for to be considered “writing.” Stephanie
describes her lesson plans as not being considered writing, but a reﬂection on that lesson
or a unit description for her department would be writing.
Darcy challenges Stephanie by turning to her experiences listening to her mentor,

a literacy specialist in her school district, work with students. The literacy specialist,
Darcy reports, tells students that she is a writer because she writes grocery lists, emails,
and thank you notes. Stephanie responds by saying that she likely has “too narrow of a
view” of what it means to be a writer and that her view is too “English teacher-y.”
Certainly, one of the tensions the teachers seem to be facing is if being a writer means
producing texts or is it something more, such as a certain way of thinking as Rachel has
suggested. This tension, it seems, plays out in how the teachers talk about part of their
work as teachers, namely designing experiences for students. That is, it is common

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knowledge among these teachers that teachers design experiences and when engaging in
that activity teachers must face certain tensions by making decisions.

This might be best exempliﬁed in the discussion the teachers have around
teaching by theme or teaching by genre, as the state standards have organized the
curriculum. In one demonstration response conversation about an elementary teacher who
demonstrated a study of mysteries that incorporated reading mysteries in order to help
students write mysteries, Darcy offers a question for the demonstrator to consider.

Darcy: A question maybe for her would be, how do you think the kids
respond to teaching in genre and maybe, urn, how do you, you know, is it
something that you ﬁnd, like, how do you like it as a teacher even? You
know, like, what is your take on it?

Rachel: Hm,mm

Darcy: And, and did you see like improvements in writing? Or did you see
improvement in comprehension? Or knowledge? Or analysis?

Rachel: I deﬁnitely saw an improvement - when I started teaching genre I
saw an improvement of the kids even understanding what a genre is.

Darcy: Yeah.

Rachel: Like my kids come to me, I say the word “genre,” they have no
idea what I’m talking about.

Darcy: I think it’s kind of cool for elementary because when I think about
English classes I was in, analysis was something I don’t really remember
doing until high school. And so it seems like it’s kind of getting the fourth
and ﬁfth graders that she teaches sort of

Rachel: how to think.

Darcy: how to think a little bit better. And then, like you were saying,
Judy, with that highlighting tape that you use in your classroom, that’s in
ﬁrst grade.

Rachel: That’s a great idea.

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Darcy: and that like to me, that strategy of highlighting the different
examples of the text that represented certain elements or certain themes or
certain things whatever: I did that in AP English in 12th grade in high
school. That’s like, and that’s close reading, but you can do it, and you can
even start it in ﬁrst grade. So I think it’s a, I like that.
Rachel responds that in designing experiences for her students, she noticed a change in
students when she chose to focus her design decisions around genre rather than by theme.
A few minutes later in the same discussion Rachel explains what she means a little bit
more.
Rachel: Cause I think it’s easier to get to theme through genre than to start
with theme and try to teach the genre within the theme. That’s my own
personal experience. It was much more difﬁcult for me to teach by a
theme and then have to teach all those individual genres in, in the theme.
Whereas if I just take a genre now, now I can focus on this and that and

you know what I mean?

Jim: Cause it’s more about their, the students’ ideas at that point, rather -
the focus is on student ideas rather

Rachel: The focus, yeah, and the focus is more about like the elements in
recognizing like when you are reading something, because our kids do an
extensive amount of reading outside the classroom.

As teachers, part of the work involves making decisions about how to design
experiences for students. For these teachers, the state standards seem to play a vital role
in suggesting how to organize the focus of the year-long cuniculum, though these
teachers seem to have autonomy in designing daily experiences for students. In the next
chapter I will explain more about the state’s expectations of middle school teachers
organizing their curriculum by genre and high school teachers organizing their

curriculum around themes, but for now, I highlight how these teachers share a common

knowledge that teachers do design experiences for students and that that process involves

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navigating tensions about what counts as writing and what should be the focus of the
instruction in those experiences. Through explaining their judgment and listening to
others’ explanations, these teachers, it seems, are susceptible to having their knowledge
about teaching change, particularly in terms of what they design for their students to do in
their classrooms. Not only is the teachers’ knowledge about teaching susceptible to being
changed when talking about writing, so too is their knowledge about writing susceptible
to change when talking about their choices as teachers.

Knowledge of the subject matter of writing

When talking about writing as a subject to be studied, the teachers typically talk
about what they do with students. That is, subject matter knowledge (ie. knowledge about
writing) is inextricably linked to activities and practices that teachers and students of
writing engage in. Rarely, if ever, do teachers in this response group talk about writing
without talking about the teaching of writers. This, of course, may be due to the fact that
the purpose of the discussions is to respond to demonstrations on the teaching of writing,
but the absence of what counts as the subject matter of writing is noticeable (though they
do talk about “writing” and “being writers” when the group meets as a writing response
group to discuss its own writing). As such, teachers share in their knowledge that writing
is something that can be taught and learned, though what is being taught, how it is being
taught, and how it is assessed and evaluated are all susceptible to being changed.

In addition to the tensions between designing cuniculum around genres or
themes, teachers in this response group talk about writing as a subject matter in terms of

their choices as teachers. The following extended exchange highlights how talk about

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writing is entwined with talk about what it means to teach writing. For example, the
teachers will point to what might be included in course content, as well as what kinds of
questions readers and writers and viewers might askthemselves. In this conversation, the
teachers are responding to a demonstration in which they were asked to create arguments
by ﬁnding three visual images and using no words.

Jim: ...I guess a better question would have been you know, what do you
feel like you want your students to know or be able to do after having
gone in your class? And how does creative writing, how does this kind of
argument stuff help you do that or not do that? Whatever it is you’re
aiming for. Does that make sense? I’m not sure I’m making sense.

Rachel: I’m going to have to think about that. I don’t think I can answer
off the top of my head.

Jim: Well, that’s fair. She just made me think, her presentation made me
think of that today, because she was talking about forming arguments,
visual arguments and-

Rachel: And how she does it in her classroom. Like, she’s English Comp
but most teachers I don’t think will use this kind of literacy thing- I don’t
think of visual literacy when I think of English comp. I didn’t prior to her
demonstration. You know what I’m saying? Like, I didn’t have teachers
that did that; it was like, “No, you’re going to write compositions.” So
this, I think, is very interesting because I think it kind of like pushes the
student to really think about it, because I think there’s a lot of people that
are very articulate and they can articulate in their words what they’re
trying to say, but it forces them to think about it in a different way. And
like what Madeline was saying is, “Our society is very visual.” Like, we
want to see things. We want to look at pictures, there’s constant
movement, there’s constant stimulation, you know visual stimulation
everywhere. So, it’s really important to look at what are the messages that
are being given to us, what are people trying to do, and I think this is
especially important with adolescents. And I’m talking adolescence like
anywhere from 11 to 18 - that they understand the purpose of those
messages. And that they understand that this is being targeted towards
me. Why is it being targeted towards me? What are the messages that
these people are trying to send me? What assumptions are they making
about people in my age group? Because I think that helps them to then
formulate their own arguments, and it goes back to that whole “getting

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kids to think.” Not just like being able to do stuff but to really get them to
think and to understand. And what I was thinking at the start of- and sorry
if I’m rambling too much- but when I was listening to her demonstration I
was thinking, “Wow I think this would really help me because there’s a
lot- at least in the 7th grade mark- about the speaker’s bias and stereotypes
and you know, understanding about the purpose.” You know, listening to a
speaker and being able to identify, do they have a strong bias one way or
the other? What are they trying to do? And I’ve always thought, “How do
I get kids to do that?” There are a lot of ways to do it, but it’s something I
didn’t even try to tackle this year, because I’m like, “I can’t do this.”

Darcy: (laughs) I agree.

Rachel: I don’t know what to do. And I think this type of a lesson is one
way to kind of get at that. I don’t know if that answers your question at all
but-

Darcy: You talked about, um, like assumptions that the audience, you
know that the creators assume, I mean that’s a way to teach audience too
because then you’re fonning— and then it also is a way to teach bias
because then you could see, “Well I’m assuming that people are going to
look at beauty in this way and I’m assuming that they’re going to look at
education or whatever in this way.” So, I think that would deﬁnitely be
good.

Stephanie: Another thing this kind of assignment does- and she talked a
little bit about the focus of Rust Belt University being process, teaching
process,

Rachel: Hm,mm.

Stephanie: I think that the reﬂective process of your- why did I choose
these kinds of pictures?

Darcy: I like that.

Stephanie: Why did I put them together this way? That really helps kids
to sort of formulate that process that they went through, and to identify it—

Rachel: Hm,mm
Stephanie: because that’s one of the things that they have a really hard
time doing is knowing, like explaining why they did something they did

144

Rachel: Hm,mm

Stephanie: And I think that’s a really good-

Rachel: “I don’t know; I just did.” You know.

Stephanie: “It looks right. It seems right.”

Rachel: “But what about it?”

Darcy: Right.

Rachel: You know what I mean? It would help spark a lot of

Stephanie: And help identifying those processes is really important.
Rachel: And that’s a much higher-level skill, you know.

Darcy: I think you could even teach almost revising based on that and talk
about like our writers. We want them to be strategic and how they choose
things in their writing. And so I think you could use this as a venue, you
know like to go and teach about that maybe. That’s kind of what I was

thinking maybe for next year was starting out with something like this and
then doing that reﬂective thinking.

In this exchange, the demonstrator has challenged Rachel’s understanding of writing

through her demonstrated activity of forming arguments with visual images. In doing so,

the demonstrator sparked a discussion in which the teachers view writing as a skill, as

genre, and as a process. Because writing can be conceptualized in these different ways,

teachers are challenged to consider what is being taught when one “teaches writing.” For

instance, near the end of this excerpt Stephanie mentions that teaching writing is teaching

a kind of process in which the composer makes choices. Darcy concurs, saying that she

wants her students to be “strategic.” They each suggest that writers must make choices,

and that an important part of teaching writing is designing experiences in which students

145

can reﬂect on and explain the choices they’ve made in composing a text, like the visual
argument in the demonstration lesson.

A similar discussion takes place in response to a later demonstration. In this
exchange the teachers talk directly about the content of writing courses, particularly when
Rachel and Darcy note that the demonstration lessons and activities can be adapted to
various grade levels.

Rachel: Yeah because the assignment that she did with us could go K-
twelve. I mean you could do it with any level. And I liked that she gave
us time to share with the people sitting next to us because I really liked to
see the way that J eff’s though process compared with mine- I mean they
were completely different but both met the assignments. You know what I
mean? So it was ﬁrn to see that too. What are you thinking compared to
what I’m thinking? How did you tackle this?

Darcy: I think in general- I mean I have to say all the demonstrations even
if they weren’t speciﬁc to middle school- I feel like I can take strategies
ﬁom pretty much everything and use them in my classroom. That is what
I really love about what we’re doing. I don’t know what that says about
teaching writing but. ..

Stephanie: What does that question mean? That question that you just said.

Darcy: Well, you know I’m wondering if since all of these activities could
easily be adapted- it’s like we’re all teaching kids how to write
descriptively- whether it’s fourth grade, seventh grade, 12th grade. . .like
every single writer needs to know. So I don’t know- maybe it’s just
stressing one of those lifelong skills.

Jim: Or like what’s the content of a writing course? What are you actually
teaching?

Stephanie: I was just reading an article in preparation for my presentation
that talked about that whole idea of how like there are some people like us
who strongly believe that writing teachers should not have their own
department but that they should be interspersed throughout all the other
departments so that you’re writing in context all the time and that you
shouldn’t be taught in sort of a vacuum- sort of what we do in our
classrooms. It was an interesting article.

146

Stephanie: So I wonder you know because we all do it.
Rachel: It kind of eliminates the need for any other teacher. (Laughter).

Jim: Well, one of the things that makes it interesting is that you’re
teaching a process not like a series of facts or concepts in other classes so
do you have your own content? You know, and I think that’s one of the
struggles that writing teachers have. Like I always thought of my
classroom as like an art classroom, but it took me a long time to ﬁgure out
what were the principles I was teaching. Like an art teacher thinks about
perspective and repetition and things like that. So as a writing teacher
what is my content?

Stephanie: Right but are they the rhetorical devices that you present to
them to play with in their art that they’re creating? That’s how I look at it.
It’s interesting.

Jim: Mm hmm. It is an interesting question especially when you have to
defend why you do what you do.

Stephanie: Well in the article that I was reading they said that they don’t
believe that looking at writing ﬁom that perspective- that limited
perspective- that that’s the best way. It was really interesting though
because if you only teach writing in some other context, how do you get
those rhetorical devices? Why do they learn that writing hyperboles is
important for this kind of writing or something like that?

The subject matter of writing is in question. It can be conceived of as skill, a process, by

genre or in any combination of them all. As such, teachers are susceptible to having their

notions of writing change when explaining or listening to others explain their practices in

the classroom with students. For example, the teachers in this response group talk about

their practices of using rubrics with students. Most notably, they use rubrics differently

and for different reasons. For instance, Rachel and Darcy, the middle school teachers, use

trait-based rubrics (e.g. 6 + 1 writing trait rubric), because they believe their students

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need a “target,” while Stephanie, the high school teacher, only uses holistic rubrics (e. g.
SAT rubric) because she feels trait-based rubrics would constrain her students.

Darcy offers another example of how she struggles with identifying what she is
teaching when she thinks about the teaching of creative writing. In this excerpt, she says
that she’s unclear about what she is teaching precisely.

Darcy: ... I mean as a ﬁrst year teacher, creative writing really kind of
intimidated me to teach it in my classrooms. I didn’t do creative writing; I
didn’t view myself as being a strong writer and there wasn’t necessary like
formula, that you know unless you look maybe at the plot structure. But
like teaching expository writing I can say, “Okay, you have to have an
introduction, you have to have a body, you have to have a conclusion, and
it’s step 1,2,3.” You know? And the kids, like they can embrace that
almost in some ways easier than the creative writing, because they kind of

had that thing, you know, that trick in their back pocket.

Rachel: See that’s interesting to me, because I think my kids do much
better with creative writing.

Darcy: My kids actually do too.
Rachel: They struggle with [inaudible] type writing but like with creative
writing, because there are less- there aren’t less or fewer parameters; there

are different parameters and so

Darcy: Yeah. Right, and I don’t think I knew how to lay those parameters
out.

A good follow-up question that I should have asked would be to ask Rachel how
she knows her students “do much better with creative writing,” because it might have
revealed more about what she aims for when she is teaching writing. Still, this excerpt
suggests that one’s conception of writing is directly related to one’s practices with
students and vice versa. Darcy, in this instance, explains her judgment to avoid teaching

creative writing, because she was unsure of how to design those experiences for students,

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and in particular, how to assess her students’ performance in those experiences. She
suggests here that to teach writing one needs to consider the “parameters” and know how
to place those “parameters” in some kind of order. This is notable, because in other
previous excerpts Darcy mentions that writing is more than producing a product and that
it includes something to do with thinking in certain ways. Thus, it seems as though her
perceived responsibility of assessing students affects and even constrains her notion of
what is possible to teach when teaching creative writing. In this way, she is susceptible to
having her knowledge of writing change when listening to others explain why they do

what they do in their classrooms with students.

To summarize, when teachers in this group respond to demonstration lessons,
they understand the demonstration lessons to be persuasive acts whose aims are to
convince them to try particular activities or practices as teachers. Because teachers in this
group see the demonstrations as persuasive acts, their critiques of the demonstrations are
rhetorical in that they describe, interpret, and judge both the content in and the
performances of the demonstration lessons. When teachers engage in these critiques, they
turn, primarily, to their experiences, and, secondarily, to their views of learners and on
learning to support their critiques. When critiquing the content of the demonstration
lessons, teachers turn primarily to their experiences with students and in their teaching
contexts, and when critiquing the performances of the demonstrations teachers turn to
their experiences participating in or leading professional development with their
colleagues. The critiques of the demonstration lessons and the explanations of the stances

they take provide opportunities to reveal the knowledge they claim to have about

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students, teachers/teaching, and the subject matter of writing. In this response group, the
teachers rarely challenged one another, though when they did it was more about teaching
and about writing. That is, teachers in this group did. not challenge one another’s
interpretations about the way in which students responded in their classrooms. More
common, however, was the group challenging the content demonstrators presented.

The rarity of challenging one another and the more common move of questioning
or challenging demonstrators suggests that this response group was navigating a social
scene with one another. This makes sense, especially when one considers that the group
was charged with coming to consensus as they collaborated to write a response letter to
each of the demonstrators. While this chapter helped to describe the topical landscape and
to identify possible places on that landscape in which teachers might be susceptible to
being changed (i.e. teaching and writing, and not students), it does not describe what the
arguments, justiﬁcations, or the explanations of judgment do for teachers in terms of their
social interaction with one another. That is, teachers seem to be making choices about
what to challenge or not to challenge one another on. I suspect the teachers’ choices are
based on the possible social implications of doing so. The next chapter takes a closer look
at how teachers’ arguments work as a way to create positions of authority and of trusted,

informed professional peers.

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Chapter Five: The Social Scene of the Demonstration Lesson Response Group:
Arguments, Authority, and Trust

If learning occurs through social interaction, as the NWP and other teacher
networks seem to posit, then it is not enough only to identify the arguments teachers
make. Instead, one must look at what these arguments do for teachers as they interact
with one another. In the case of the demonstration response conversations, one of the
social goals is to reach consensus with group members as the group collaborates to write
a response to each demonstrator. As a part of reaching consensus, teachers in the group
forward their positions about the performance of and the content in each of the
demonstration lessons. In doing so, teachers make decisions about how to present
themselves and their arguments to one another. That is, they craft an ethos within the
group, for the group.

The social scene of the demonstration lesson response group centers on a
rhetorical critique in which the arguments teachers make reveal provide opportunities for
teachers to reveal and share their knowledge. As a site of interaction, then, the
demonstration response group conversations become places and moments when teachers
stake positions of authority. With this in mine, this chapter pursues the question, “What
do arguments do for participants in the response group conversations?”

In asking this question, I expect to describe the rhetorical moves teachers make,
particularly those moves in which teachers position themselves as informed and trusted
colleagues. That is, the teachers are making choices about what they say to one another,

choices which can be understood to be based, in part, on the social implications of

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making the arguments that they do. In short, I want to understand how teachers craft an
ethos for themselves in the group as a way to understand what is happening in this scene
in which learning with and from others is an aim.
Demonstrators and group members craft positions of authority

In addition to being rhetorical critics of the demonstration lessons, teachers in the
response group also take on the role of rhetors within the response group. That is, in
forwarding their arguments explaining their critiques of the demonstration lessons,
teachers craft positions of being authorities and of being informed and trusted colleagues.
I want to describe the particular ethos-building moves teachers make as they explain their
judgments to one another. Since the summer institute and the NWP honor the experiences
of teachers, it is no surprise then that teachers seem to value hearing the practical
reasoning of other educators. At the same time, however, one of the expectations of the
demonstration lessons is for demonstrators to situate their work within professional
literature, such as research or theory. Thus, one of the rhetorical choices for
demonstrators is to decide how much research and theory to include in the demonstration.
Interestingly, the teachers in this response group did not make arguments about the
research and theory in the demonstrations; instead, they had repeated and regular
deliberations about the effect of the presented research and theory. In addition, the
teachers connected the use of research and theory to each demonstrator’s ethos. That is,
present too much research or theory, and a demonstrator risks damaging his or her ethos

with the group.

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For instance, in his demonstration Nate, a literacy coach in a suburban and
secondary school, presents some of the ideas offered by Harry Noden (1999)in his book
Image Grammar. More speciﬁcally, Nate demonstrates Noden’s notions of how to use
particular grammatical structures, which Noden (and Nate) refer to as “brushstrokes.”
These brushstrokes include the appositive, the absolute, participles, adjectives out-of-
order, and active verbs. The central belief that Nate forwards from Noden is that
grammatical structures can be employed by writers to help create speciﬁc images in the
minds of readers. In addition to the brushstrokes, though, Nate also presents his
pedagogical thinking in which he turns to an explicit presentation of the learning theories
that guide his pedagogical decisions. The teachers in the response group note Nate’s
inclusion of this research and theory when they say

Stephanie: Well he certainly had a lot of research to back up what he was
saying.

Rachel: I think it was varied too- like he had a lot of different, it wasn’t
the same person.

Darcy: Yeah and he also, and I think --- too- like isn’t Vy, Vygotsky or
Judy: Vygotsky

Darcy: Vygotsky, isn’t that also psychol, like you know, like ed psych
stuff too, so he kind of

Rachel: Hm,mm
Darcy: he didn’t just focus on like just grammar, he kind of went for a
broader spectrum of like the learner and where they’re at developmentally,

which I thought was really, was good.

Rachel: I agree.

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At this point, the teachers suggest that Nate’s use of extensive and varied research and
theory demonstrates that he is a thoughtful and informed educator. A few moments later,
however, the group seems to contradict itself.
Stephanie: But yeah, I didn’t pay attention, and it just felt like he was just
going on and on and on about all that research- like it was impressive but
maybe over the top.
Darcy: Yeah. Um, yeah.
Rachel: 0k.
Darcy: Maybe, no
Rachel: Well and I can see if this was something that he was going to
present to other teachers in his district, especially those who are not
English people - he will lose them if he does too much of that, because
they’ll be like, “Ok. I got it.”
Stephanie: Like- “okay you know your stuff.”
Rachel: Show us, show us that it’s important and then get us involved.
Like, so maybe get us involved a little bit quicker. Like either via a
prompt or something. I don’t know. .
The teachers note that the demonstration included a lot of research and theory, but that it
was too much and too much at once. This suggests that the rhetorical choice of how much
research and theory (and when to include it) is an important choice for demonstrators.
Stephanie suggests that the role of research is, in one way, evidence that a demonstrator
“knows your stuff.” That is, the inclusion of research and theory functions as a way to

show a demonstrator’s intelligence. Stephanie goes on to make a suggestion.

Stephanie: Well I, I actually had wrote down that maybe he could just like
intertwine it more, wherever my notes are,

Darcy: Yeah, I think that would be good.

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Stephanie: rather than do it all at once like that was too much for me
Several minutes later, the teachers are describing the many strengths of the
demonstration, when they once again return to the amount of research included in the
demonstration.

Darcy: It was very well-read and he comes across and, you know...

Stephanie: Is that impressive to teachers? Like, I don’t know. Like in your

building- are people like, “Oh wow you’ve read like ﬁve different authors

and you just dropped like all their names.” Is that impressive?
Again, Stephanie suggests that a demonstrator who presents research and theory is meant
to be “impressive,” and she suspects that too much research and theory harms the view
the audience has of the demonstrator. A moment later, Stephanie continues

Stephanie: See cause that’s a little worry that I have too. Like whenever

we have an expert that the district pays money for that they bring in and

they drop names, a lot of smack

Rachel: Hm,mm

Stephanie: is talked at lunch about that person. And I don’t know, I don’t
know what the right amount is.

The teachers speak directly about the role of research in terms of crafting an ethos. That
is, when demonstrators or professional developers included the names of researchers or
authors of professional books, that doesn’t impress the teachers. Indeed, it brings ridicule
from the audience of teachers. The teachers go on to explain this in more detail as they
discuss the role of research and theory within professional development more generally.
Rachel mentions that her school district does not employ outside professional developers,

but instead, relies on those educators within the district.

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Rachel: I would rather like listen to somebody who’s not read a piece of
information who can show me things that work, that are fun and
interesting and help kids learn.

Stephanie: I think that’s what my staff would like too.

Darcy: I think that’s how- and it’s very praxis, like you know where
you’re in the classroom and like when we talked before the institute about
things I want to get out of it, it’s like, well, I just want some stuff I can
use. Cause I have a feeling like I need to kind of build up something that
I’m working with or a style, so that I’m not sometimes sitting in front of
my computer trying to compose something that just, banging my head,
you know? I want things that are ready to use, you know. And not that
I’m- I mean I want other things but that’s a big part of, I think, why I’m
here.

Rachel: Hm,mm

Darcy: So, I think that that is really how our building is. We want, I mean,
it’s very

Stephanie: Are teachers mostly practical people do you think?

Rachel: Mostly practical?

Stephanie: Hm,mm.

Rachel: I would say so. They want stuff they can use. No one is going to
sit in an in-service and actually pay attention to something that they cannot
get any use from.

Darcy: And then I

Stephanie: And they’re not going to waste their time reading the books.

Rachel: And middle school teachers are going to sit and pass notes to each
other. That’s what we do.

Stephanie: We just, we just ichat with each other or email.

In this exchange, teachers discuss the role that the rhetorical choice of how much

research and theory to include in professional development. Rachel speaks directly to the

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double-layer of phronesis involved in professional development, when she argues that
one prudent decision for professional developers is to “show me things that work, that are
fun and interesting and help kids learn.” That is, she wants to know what has worked for
other teachers with their students. By doing this, a professional developer establishes
good will with her, because the professional developer is also being prudent by
addressing Rachel’s immediate concerns.

The role of research and theory in demonstration lessons and professional
development pops up regularly through the critiques of demonstration lessons. In some
cases, the teachers note when a demonstrator “has just the right amount of research,”
though it’s never explicitly clear what “the right amount” is ever quantiﬁed. In other
cases, teachers in the group say that they value the honesty of teachers in sharing what
they were thinking or in sharing students’ reactions. For example, in another
demonstration the teachers, particularly Rachel, talk about what counts as “authentic
sources” of information to include in demonstrations. I

Stephanie: We got to really see those kids- like we understood in terms of
what was going on in their heads of what she was doing.

Darcy: Right. Part of her research was kids and what kids do, which

Rachel: And I like that she included some students’ quotes and some
parents’ quotes. And I really liked what she said about like - we are
authentic sources. We have been in the classroom- we’ve have
experiences. The parents have had experience with their kids. The kids
have had experience being in school and they are authentic sources, you
know? And I loved the- “I think direct quotes and indirect quotes are
retarded.” Did you read that? (Laughter). Like this is so a 5th grader.
You know? This is a kid- this is how they think. You know? So I was
glad that she included some of those things.

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Rachel appreciates that the demonstrator includes the voices of students and parents as
“authentic sources,” and Stephanie notes how the professional books the demonstrator
read functioned as validation for the demonstrator. That is, the research the demonstrator
read did not necessarily provide the demonstrator with new information; instead, it served
as a way to support what the teacher felt she was experiencing with her students. In a
demonstration near the end of the summer institute in which the lesson centered on the
power of having students writing up and sharing their family stories, Rachel re-explains
how she views research and theory, namely that it is perceived to be a source of what
teachers should do, whereas teachers’ experiences are a source of what actually works for
students and teachers.

Rachel: But the thing of it is that this is one of those things I feel like, it

doesn’t really need a lot of research. Like it pretty much like you know it

works.

Darcy: It is what it is, yeah.

Rachel: Kids love to write about themselves.

Stephanie: Hm,mm.

Rachel: Like you just know that, you know?

Judy: You’re right, but the research would have been those people that say
that people write about what

Rachel: About what they know, yeah.

Judy: Kind of like what David said this morning. That, “Yeah, we all
know that it works but having something that

Stephanie: Just to justify it, yeah.

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Judy: supports it”- that that wasn’t there. And it wouldn’t have been hard
to ﬁnd probably because there’s lots of research about the fact that kids
write best about what kids do.

Rachel: Hm, mm.

Judy: And you’re asking them to do a story. So, so I think you’re right-
the research wasn’t there but the GLCEs and everything were there.

Rachel: And I guess to me- I guess it’s just because that’s not important to
me. I don’t care. If it works for you in your classroom- like you’re more
of an authentic source than anybody

Darcy: Hm,mm

Rachel: who’s written a book about it, so. I mean unless that person
obviously has experience in the classroom too.

Darcy: Right.

Rachel: But , you know like I don’t, I don’t need a lot of research to
convince me.

The teachers say that research and theory functions as justiﬁcation for why what they do
in their classroom works. Therefore, they perceive that one challenge for demonstrators is
ﬁnding the right amount of justiﬁcation to include in the demonstration. As they critique
the demonstrations, the teachers in this response group, particularly Rachel, want to see
“what works” in other teachers’ classrooms in order to generate new possibilities for
what might work in their own classrooms. Too much research in a demonstration
damages the demonstrator’s ethos not because the research and theory are not useful, but
rather because it short-circuits or skips the step of the demonstrator sharing a public
reﬂection on his or her own experience. Missing this step has the social consequence of
not illustrating how a teacher has navigated the uncertainty or the tension teachers face in

that space between theory and practice. That is, a demonstrator who has too much

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research or theory runs the risk of not illustrating how she or he has made prudent
decisions in the classroom with students. This is also reﬂected within the response group
conversations as teachers rarely, if ever, turn to research and/or theory as topoi. Doing so,
it seems, is not appropriate within the group, perhaps because not all research or theory is
made available to all in the group, whereas each teacher in the group has had experience
working with students.

In addition to knowing the “right balance,” the teachers note that the research and
theory that is offered needs to be helpful for the intended group of teachers. In one
response Rachel says:

Rachel: Again I liked that she didn’t read things to us. You know we could
just peruse the research and stuff. She pointed things out, but didn’t read
her slides (laughs). I cannot stand when people do that.

And, in another response Darcy says:

Darcy: But she, I think her research too was really accessible. And it was
authentic and real and it, it seemed like it was, I don’t know, it just was, I
liked it.

And in yet another response, Darcy and Rachel say:

Rachel: Her, well, you’ve got theoretical, which was all there, because she
had the research that backed -

Darcy: And it seemed like very, uhh, she took and explained a lot of very
dense information, maybe from the research. I think she explained it well.

Jim: I like how she did that. She said, “Here’s the journal I took this from,
but here’s the key idea from it.”

Rachel: Uh, huh

While in yet another demonstration, they say:

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Rachel: I have to say that I really liked that how it was there, but she
didn’t go through every single piece of it.

Darcy: I totally agree.
Rachel: I’m sorry but I don’t want to hear about the data.
Darcy: And that’s how I feel

Rachel: It’s good to know it’s there. It’s good to know it’s based in theory
but-

Darcy: And I think she paraphrased it well. And it was really accessible.

Without question, one of the critical aspects of the demonstration critiques is the
way in which demonstrators handle the research and theory they include in the
demonstration lesson. If demonstrators have just “the right amount,” by not having too
much or too little and by not emphasizing the research and theory, then teachers in this
response group will have a favorable view of the demonstrator. That is, the way in which
demonstrators present their reasoning informs how the teachers in this response group
view the demonstrator him or herself. I

In critiquing the way in which demonstrators use research and theory, the teachers
are making arguments about each demonstrator’s ability to connect with teachers, and
this suggests that there are similar choices for teachers to make within the group as well.
For instance, in understanding the role of research and theory as justiﬁcation or validation
for teachers’ decisions in the classroom, the teachers create room for themselves to agree
with one another. That is, instead of having deliberations about research and theory that
might guide or challenge teachers’ decision-making, teachers position themselves as

authorities on the reality of their own classroom situation. This seems to provide teachers

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with a greater chance of creating a sense of trust with one another, since it foregrounds
the way they interpret and share their own classroom experiences with students, subject
matter, and their teaching context. In short, the arguments teachers forward with one
another in the response group conversations have social consequences. More speciﬁcally
their arguments begin to craft an ethos for and within the response groups.

The teachers note that practical reasoning — reasons grounded in the primary
experiences of students, teachers, and even parents — are more convincing than
explanations heavy in research or theory. While none of the teachers would argue that
practical reasoning should be the sole kind of evidence or that research and theory should
be ignored, it is without question that the teachers are more convinced by demonstrators
who include “authentic” experiences. That is, the types of reasoning demonstrators use to
explain their judgment informs the teachers’ opinion of the kind of teachers the
demonstrators are. In other words, reasoning and ethos inform one another. In the next
section, I examine more carefully the ways in which teachers in this response group craft
positions of authority in order for their judgment to be respected by others.

In Classical Rhetorical terms, this move of speakers establishing their character is
referred to as ethos. More broadly speaking, Aristotle refers to three different types of
proofs, including pathos (emotion), logos (reason), and ethos (character). (Crowley &
Hawhee, 1999). Moreover, when facts and arguments in doubt, Aristotle refers to the
speaker’s character (or ethos) as being the most important, though others such as Cintron
(1997) write about how ethos and logos are intertwined and layered with one another. To

Cintron, logos refers to “reason” or “rational argument.” Cintron writes, “However

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conﬁgured, the central point is that ethos and logos — or character and a rational
knowledge claim — are linked so that knowing something of a person’s character helps us
to judge that person’s knowledge claims. We can say this more enigrnatically, then: logos
is layered with ethos and ethos is layered with logos” (p. 3).

The intertwining of logos and ethos bears out in the discussions between teachers
in the response group. While Cintron uses the broader term of logos to describe
knowledge claims, the two previous chapters lay out a more speciﬁc map of the
knowledge claims teachers make when explaining their judgment as teachers. That is, the
commonplaces refer to the resources of teachers’ arguments and phronesis, or practical
reasoning, operates as a speciﬁc kind of logos. Building on these two notions, this section
examines the ways in which teacher knowledge and teachers’ reasoning behind their
knowledge claims are informed by the ways in which they position themselves within the
group — they ways in which they craft an ethos. Again, Cintron (1997) explains:

The right to make “knowledge claim” is deeply intertwined with the

creation of ethos, an ethos that is acceptable to the Other. One’s credibility

or character is created during miniscule moments of interaction, each

moment interpreted consciously or not so consciously by others. (p.3-4)
As Cintron notes, making knowledge claims and having those claims viewed as being
credible by others is a matter of a speaker’s reasoning and character operating in relation
to one another. That is, it’s difﬁcult to have one without the other.

As the discussion about Nate’s use of research and theory suggests, ethos is
crafted in at least three ways, speciﬁcally by demonstrating intelligence, establishing
good character, and achieving good will (Crowley, 1999). In this remainder of this

chapter 1 illustrate how these three ways look and sound in this small demonstration

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response group. I argue that teachers are indeed creating their own ethos and establishing
their own authority in a range of ways that are intertwined with their reasoning.
Moreover, the topoi of experience encourages teachers to discuss why they believe the
choices they made in the classroom were prudent. That is, topoi and phronesis seem to
serve the similar purpose of providing opportunities for teachers within the response
group to develop trust with one another as they come to consensus about what to include
in its letters to demonstrators.

Teachers demonstrate how they “know their stuff”

When this response group met to respond to demonstration lessons, teachers
demonstrated intelligence largely in two ways. One, teachers demonstrated that they were
aware of the issues facing teachers of writing in this particular Rust Belt State. Two, they
demonstrated their intelligence by using the specialized language of being teachers and
teachers of writing. To put it more bluntly, in crafting their individual ethos teachers in
this response group had to demonstrate that they were a teacher, and were in turn, like
one another.

Issues facing teachers of writers in this Rust Belt State

When deliberating with one another, teachers in this response group helped to
establish their authority as a teacher by discussing the issues facing teachers of writing in
their state. This took the form of discussing the state standards, benchmarks, and
standardized tests. While these standards, benchmarks, and test are present in other states,
these teachers talked about how their state’s expectations affected them. Indeed, the

rubric used to guide our discussion and responses includes a mention of referring to state

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standards. In this particular state, the standards are referred to as “GLCEs” (pronounced
“Glicks” or “Glick-ees”), which refer to the grade level content expectations through
eighth grade, and “HSCEs” (pronounced “Huskies”), which refer to the high school
content expectations. Each set of these standards are organized differently, and the
institute leaders encouraged demonstrators to link demonstration lessons to both set of
standards, seemingly as a way to facilitate teachers’ discussions about how to adapt
activities in the demonstrations for their own teaching. Of the four categories on the
rubric for demonstration lessons (ie. theoretical content; relevance; organization; pace &
delivery), this suggested link is mentioned under the theoretical content category. The
rubric describes theoretical content in the following way:

Theoretical Content

0 Defend an organizing principle or idea that drove the presented
material and explained its importance or relevance for reaching students

0 Utilizes appropriate quotes from research and experts in the ﬁeld
0 Linked the suggested practices or activities to GLCEs or benchmarks

(bold and underline in the original)
Since the rubric suggests that demonstration lessons and the responses to those lessons
encourage institute participants to discuss the state standards it is no surprise that teachers
actually discuss them. Interestingly, however, in the ﬁrst couple of response group
conversations, talk about GLCEs and HSCEs provided opportunities for teachers in our
response group to demonstrate what they do know about the standards, and it provided
opportunities for teachers to ask one another about the standards that they do not work
with. This opportunity seemed to set the tone for many discussions that followed in that
talking about what it is like to work with students at different grade levels. That is,

teachers were able to ask one another how they would adapt the activities in

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demonstration lessons for their own grade levels and students. The following excerpt

comes from the ﬁrst demonstration response group conversation, and I include it here to

highlight how teachers invite one another to share what they do or do not know about the

standards at different grade levels. The teachers in this group clearly start their

discussions with one another sharing the expectation that they can learn from one

another.

Stephanie: I have a question about something completely different than
this topic, but it’s about her-her G L C E’s or Glicks or whatever-

Rachel: Mm hmm.
Stephanie: they’re called.
Rachel: Mm hmm.

Stephanie: What did-I’ve never seen them look like R W S or W- is that
what they look like?

Rachel: Mm hmm.

Stephanie: Where do I ﬁnd that?

Rachel: State department of ed.

J irn: Yeah, she makes it- it’s in the bib- there’s the link.

Stephanie: I only know about the high ones ‘cause like- oh there is? Ok.
Jim: Yeah.

Darcy: Yeah, I also-yeah.

Rachel: Yeah it’s like writing—

Darcy: I have a copy of it, I’m gonna make it.

Rachel: writing recognition and then it will say like, 07 is the grade, or 08,
or 06, and then whichever one it’s listed as-

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Stephanie: 0k.

Rachel: Number one, number two, number three-
Stephanie: 0k.

Rachel: number four.

Stephanie: so that’ll just be listed on- ‘cause I ﬁlled it out on the high
school ones and never even looked at that other stuff.

Rachel: Yeah, so if you go it will say it will say grade level content
expectation like English grade level expectations K through 8.

Stephanie: Ok.

Rachel: You can actually get like, all of that.

Stephanie: So I can ﬁnd that whole thing. 0k. Alright thanks. Yeah, the
HSCEs I know- like those I’m familiar with. I just didn’t know about that
WPR stuff.

Darcy: I don’t anything about the Huskies (HSCEs) though.

Rachel: Yeah because those are—those are written differently.

Stephanie: I’m an expert on those- I can help you whenever you want.
Here they are. We have four strands. It’s a whole different world.

Darcy: Yeah, and yeah. I don’t know anything about that. No experience
with that. (laugh)

As teachers talk about the speciﬁc standards in the different grade levels, they are

able to let one another know what they do and do not know about the standards, and it

provides them with an opportunity to lean on the expertise of others in the group. For

instance, in the above example Stephanie lets the others know that she understands the

concept of standards, but she is unaware of how to ﬁnd and read the standards for

elementary and middle school grades. In turn, Darcy and Rachel explain where to ﬁnd the

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GLCEs and how to read the GLCEs, and then they are able to reciprocate by asking
Stephanie how to read the HSCES. By being able to talk about standards the teachers are
to invite one another to share their knowledge about a part of their work, namely where to
ﬁnd and how to read the state standards documents that they use to help them do their
work. As the summer institute continues, the teachers talk less about where to ﬁnd and
how to read the standards documents, and more and more about how they use the
standards to do their work.

While I was aware that standards and benchmarks are a part of virtually every
teacher’s work, I was surprised to learn how these teachers used their standards. More
speciﬁcally, teachers did not necessarily use the standards as a part of their daily plans,
but rather they used the standards as a way to both frame and envision the focus of their
curriculum. For instance, the GLCEs for writing are organized, in part, around genres, so
that seventh grade teachers such as Darcy and Rachel are asked to focus their writing
instruction on the genres of narrative (eg. memoir, drama, legend, mystery, poetry, or
myth) and research report (and including crafting research questions). Thus, when Darcy
and Rachel talk about their organizational framework for their curriculum in writing, they
talk in terms of students learning the elements of particular genres suggested in the
seventh grade GLCEs. This differs from the high school content expectations that
Stephanie uses, which are organized more around themes in which students are asked to
read and write in multiple genres that revolve a particular theme or issue. Though the
focus for middle school differs from the focus for grades 9-12, the teachers all use the

standards documents to frame their writing curriculum. In the following excerpts taken

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ﬂom a response group conversation about an elementary school teacher’s demonstration
on writing mysteries, the teachers demonstrate how the standards shape how they ﬂame
their courses, and, in doing so, they demonstrate that they “know their stuff” as a teacher.

Jim: I guess I didn’t, I didn’t realize until I came into the institute how
much of the curriculum is driven by having to teach by genre.

Darcy: Hm,mm

Rachel: That’s fairly new, though.

Stephanie: Yeah, that is.

Jim: I mean that seems like a

Rachel: Like within the last three years I think.

J irn: To me for her presentation that should have, like, what’s the beneﬁt
or limits to doing that? You know, like a theoretical, you know, like is it
helpful to teach kids by genre? And what does that allow you to do or not
do? Like what do you have, since it’s new I’m wondering like

Rachel: Hm,mm

Jim: what that leaves out that you used to do. Or, if it makes you have
different kinds of discussions with kids. I don’t know. How new is that?

Rachel: I would say it’s within the last three years.
Darcy: Or maybe

Rachel: Because we used to teach by theme always and then like it was,
you know, and our standards and benchmarks talked about like global
themes and world issues and like we got to do a ton of stuff with like
stereotypes and discrimination and prejudice and all this kind of stuff and
it’s gone now. I mean you have to recognize like a speaker’s bias and stuff
like that, but that chunk is out of the seventh grade benchmarks anyways.
And now they’re like they need to know this genre, this genre, this genre,
this genre, and before they never said anything. They just said they needed
to know narrative and expository texts.

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Jim: Is that true for all you guys? Is all of your writing curriculum
organized by genre, like your units?

Darcy: What about the high school?

Judy: Not, not for, not for ﬁrst grade it’s not.

Jim: It’s not?

Rachel: Ok.

Jim: Ok

Darcy: Now, maybe a question would be

Jim: Not for high school.

Stephanie: No. Now they’re switching us to theme.

Jim: Seriously?

Stephanie: Yeah. Ours are now based on these thematic approaches, like
you’re supposed to have a theme like justice and then you have to read

non-ﬁction and poetry and music and ﬁlm and ﬁction all under this anchor
of this theme.

Rachel: Hm,mm. I think that’s harder to do.

Stephanie: And with an anchor book. That’s what they want us to do.
That’s what the new, um, standards and benchmarks are doing. The ones
that we just got like in the last two years.

Jim: Man, my students, cause I have student teachers who teach in the
middle school and high school and we have them design units. We had
them do, they could choose. But I didn’t’ know that that’s what it was.
Stephanie: Now that’s going to be required.

Jim: Uh,huh

Stephanie: And the way that we used to teach is like, you know, you take

American Lit. Then you take Brit Lit. Then you took, you know, Pop Lit,
whatever.

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Rachel: Hm,mm

Stephanie: But like, or you took creative writing or you took advanced
comp or you took comp, you know it was very divided into those kinds of
like very speciﬁc courses

Rachel: Hm,mm

Stephanie: where the only thing that you did in comp was write expository
essays, you know you didn’t ever look at any other genres. So,

Rachel: Hm,mm

Stephanie: it’s totally different. We have to re-do our entire cuniculum
like this coming year.

Darcy: A question maybe for her would be, how do you think the kids
respond to teaching in genre and maybe, um, how do you, you know, is it
something that you ﬁnd, like, how do you like it as a teacher even? You
know, like, what is your take on it?

Rachel: Hm,mm

Darcy: And, and did you see like improvements in writing? Or did you see
improvement in comprehension? Or knowledge? Or analysis?

Rachel: I deﬁnitely saw an improvement - when I started teaching genre I
saw an improvement of the kids even understanding what a genre is.

Darcy: Yeah.

Rachel: Like my kids come to me, I say the word “genre,” they have no
idea what I’m talking about.

Darcy: I think it’s kind of cool for elementary because when I think about
English classes I was in, analysis was something I don’t really remember
doing until high school. And so it seems like it’s kind of getting the fourth
and ﬁfth graders that she teaches sort of

Rachel: how to think.

Darcy: how to think a little bit better. And then, like you were saying,
Judy, with that highlighting tape that you use in your classroom, that’s in
ﬁrst grade.

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Rachel: That’s a great idea.

Darcy: and that like to me, that strategy of highlighting the different
examples of the text that represented certain elements or certain themes or
certain things whatever: I did that in AP English in 12th grade in high
school. That’s like, and that’s close reading, but you can do it, and you can
even start it in ﬁrst grade. So I think it’s a, I like that

Much is revealed in the above excerpt. For one, middle school and high school
curriculum outlined by the state standards and benchmarks ﬂipped in recent years,
causing the teachers in this state to re-think and adjust how they teach writing. That is,
Rachel points out that middle school teachers used to organize their curriculum around
themes, but in the past couple of years that had changed to where they focus on genres.
The opposite is true for high school teachers who once organized their writing instruction
around genres, but now focus on multi-genre units of study in which students write about
particular themes.

Rachel not only reveals this change in curricular ﬂamework, but she goes further
by claiming that she thinks students’ writing is improved and it is easier for her to teach
when her curriculum is organized by genre. Though she does not reveal precisely what it
is that she saw in her students that improved, Rachel says that she saw an improvement in
their writing, as well as an improvement in “even understanding what a genre is.” In this
instance, Rachel shows that she knows her students and that she has taught long enough
to see differences in student performance based on different foci in curricular
organization. Stephanie reveals something similar when she mentions the ways in which

the change to a theme-driven cuniculum has forced her and her English department to

overhaul the curriculum to the range of English courses offered in the high school where

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she works. Stephanie, for example, points out that courses in her school were organized
around different types of literature courses (e.g., American Literature, British Literature,
Popular Literature) or writing courses (e. g., creative writing, advanced composition,
composition) in which students produced particular kinds of writing depending on the
course. That is, each course suggested a particular kind of written product, such as when
she suggests that in a composition course students were only asked to produce
“expository essays.” The newer organization to the HSCEs requires Stephanie and the
English department she leads “to re-do our entire curriculum like this coming year.” By
sharing how they are adapting to and using the state standards Rachel and Stephanie are
able to demonstrate that they are like the other teachers in the state.

At the same time Rachel and Stephanie craft an ethos by sharing with others how
they are using the state’s standards in their work of teaching writers, Darcy, who has only
one year of teaching experience, demonstrates that she “knows her stuff” in two ways.
One she asks probing questions to both the demonstrator and to others in the group. For
instance, she asks Stephanie how curriculum is organized in high school, and she asks
potential questions to the demonstrator when she asks:

A question maybe for her would be, how do you think the kids respond to
teaching in genre and maybe, um, how do you, you know, is it something
that you ﬁnd, like, how do you like it as a teacher even? You know, like,
what is your take on it? And, and did you see like improvements in
writing? Or did you see improvement in comprehension? Or knowledge?
Or analysis?

In this set of questions, as well as in her question to Stephanie, Darcy positions

herself as someone who is genuinely curious about the experiences of other teachers.

That is, as a less experienced teacher she demonstrates that she knows her stuff not by

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describing a long set of experiences as a teacher; instead, she demonstrates that she
knows how to ask appropriate questions that both honor the experiences of others and
inform her own practice. It is in this way that Darcy’s limited teaching experience of one
year presents her with a different ethos-building challenge than the other two teachers,
but she adapts by demonstrating her intelligence about teaching through the kinds of
questions that she asks of other, more experienced teachers.

In addition to this adjustment, Darcy also demonstrates her intelligence by
focusing on the activity presented in the demonstration and how she admires the way in
which elementary students are doing the kind of reading and writing that she did not do
until she was in 12th grade. In this way Darcy begins to refer to her own experiences,
although they are her experiences as a student rather than as an educator, but she also
shows an awareness and knowledge of how “close reading” might look vertically in the
curriculum (i.e. ﬂom ﬁrst grade through 12th grade). Darcy sees possibilities and
commonality in the ways teachers might teach “close reading” at different grade levels,
and this awareness of the possibilities demonstrates that she sees beyond her own
classroom. That is, Darcy demonstrates that she knows her stuff by sharing what she sees
as possibilities. She begins to craft an ethos of an educator who is willing to learn ﬂom
others through her questioning and through her speculations about what could be possible
throughout a range of grade levels.

In addition to the state standards and benchmarks, teachers in this state face
particular challenges with the state standardized test, which I will refer to as the Rust Belt

Assessment Test (RBAT). This challenge is particular for the middle school teachers,

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Darcy and Rachel, as the high school test Stephanie deals with is not administered by the
state, but is, instead, the SAT. Most speciﬁcally, teachers in this state administer the
RBAT in October, which means that the curriculum at the beginning of the year, in many
schools, focuses on preparing students for the test. This is problematic to the teachers
since they see this as a challenge in building a classroom community of writers when the
year begins and students and teachers are cultivating relationships between one another.
In one conversation, for instance, Rachel mentions how she will begin her school year.

Rachel: I get to start my ﬁrst month of school with a canned RBAT
review. Doesn’t that sound really ﬁrn?

Darcy: Yea!
Rachel: I’m so excited.
Stephanie: The whole month?

In this brief excerpt, Rachel shares her ﬂustration, and, as a fellow seventh grade
teacher, Darcy shares in it. At the same time, Rachel is informing Stephanie about the
particular challenge seventh grade teachers face since the test occurs approximately one
month after the school year begins. From here, the conversation becomes a couple of
different conversations as the members of the group begin to talk about different things;
however, Judy, an elementary teacher and institute returning fellow, and Rachel talk
about who created the RBAT review that Rachel’s district is using. Judy suggests that it
might be a different National Writing Project site in the state, but Rachel says that it is
ﬂom a different county and that her district purchased the review ﬂom that county’s
education department. Again, sharing this particular challenge allows Rachel and Darcy

to demonstrate that they are alike in facing this experience.

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In short, in this response group in this teacher network the state and the challenges
the state presents to its teachers becomes a central and unifying experience, and the
teachers are able to share their experiences with these particular challenges. As I have
shown in other sections, the teachers do talk about speciﬁc challenges in their school and
school district, but in terms of crafting an ethos to teachers ﬂom different districts within
the state, the teachers in this group turn to the issues that all teachers of writing in this
state face. Had these teachers all taught in the same school district or in the same school,
then perhaps they would have turned to the challenges their schools and/or districts
presented. That was not the case, however, in this group. Instead, teachers referred to the
state standards and state assessments as particular types of issues that they faced.

The specialized language of teachers of writers

As with any group of people who share a profession (e. g. teaching writing), the
members of this response group use the specialized language of teaching in general and
of teaching writing in particular. While some of this specialized language might be
familiar with those who are not teachers, or even to those who are teachers but who are
not as focused on teaching writing, these teachers use terms that seem to be shared in
meaning, such as terms like argument (and its parts, including claims, warrants, and
evidence), genres, rubrics, literacy, visual literacy, writing process (and its parts,
including, brainstorming and revision), and more. This specialized language is one way
in which teachers in this group demonstrate that they know their stuff as teachers - that
they are intelligent, which helps them establish a trusted ethos within the group. For

example, one demonstration lesson focused on what the demonstrator labeled “visual

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literacy.” In this demonstration the participants were asked to ﬁnd three images ﬂom the
magazines the demonstrator brought in or online, and then create a visual argument. In
our response group conversation, the terms “argument” and “visual literacy” were
discussed. In the following excerpt the teachers talk not just about the specialized
language of “argument,” but they move beyond it to talk about how the concept is used
(or not) by students and teachers.
Stephanie: Um, I thought it was really interesting - it reminds me a lot
about, um, or a lot of stuff ﬂom this book called Everything ’s an
Argument, that I purchased for my class. Like for my use, we don’t have a
class set or anything, cause they’re really expensive, but, it was a really
interesting book. I saw it at a conference, and I bought one. And I’ve used
some ideas ﬂom it and it sounds like she might have read that too because
some of (inaudible). I think that word “argument” is one that we actually
need to use more. I mean, kids so often just think it means two people
yelling at each other instead of a way to make, to support an idea. And so
we use it in the high school a lot and they’re acting like, “argument,” no

way.

Rachel: And it has like a negative tone to it. You know, they think that
like all arguments are negative.

Stephanie: Or they have to be controversial.
Rachel: Right.
Stephanie: So, I think it’s a really good thing to be aware of, and I wish
that, I wish that we talked about it sooner than I get ‘em in Advanced
Comp in Eleventh grade and they’re like, “Argument? What are you
talking about?” How do you not know this?
In this part of the exchange Stephanie begins to craft an ethos for herself through the use
of the term “argument.” For instance, she mentions that she purchased a professional

book about argument at a conference she attended, and then she speculates that the

demonstrator might also have read the same book. Moreover, she shares how her students

177

use the term, and this is where Rachel is able to support what Stephanie is saying, namely
that students have a misconception or a different conception of what it means to argue.
As the exchange continues when Darcy follows Stephanie, the teachers shift ﬂom talking
about students’ use of the word to the teachers’ own experience in the activity the
demonstrator offered.

Darcy: Was anyone like when they were given the assignment like did

that word, like was that like, “An argument?” Like, I wasn’t that hung up

on it; that didn’t bother me at all.

Stephanie: It didn’t bother me at all; I was happy to hear it.

Darcy: I thought it was cool. I had fun. I like that assignment.

Rachel: Mmhmm. Well, it’s fun to think about well, what are they even

saying? And how can we make these arguments ﬂom pictures with no

words? You know what I mean? I think that’s what I really liked, cause it

was like a challenge.

Darcy: And it’s kind of interesting too- like I kind of had an idea of what I

wanted to do but my argument was totally shaped by that I had a fashion

magazine. I might have had a different argument if I’d picked National

Geographic or Newsweek. So, it’s kind of an interesting thing.
Up until this point in the conversation the teachers seem to agree on what they mean by
argument as they talk in terms about how they personally engaged in the activity offered
by the demonstrator. An interesting thing happens next when Judy, an elementary school
teacher, says that she was uncertain about what the demonstrator wanted each of the
participants to do. That is, she was unsure of what the demonstrator meant by the term
argument.

Judy: I didn’t have an argument until I went to the lntemet looking. And

then I thought is this really an argument or is this just a statement and I’m
trying to support it? Is that what an argument is? So, you know when

178

they were talking about ﬂaming what an argument is, I needed that. I’m
with Madeline.

Darcy: Well, I enjoyed the discussion;
Judy: Oh, absolutely.
Darcy: I thought it was a great discussion.

Judy: Well, I think as a jumping off point, for trying to come up with
what that means to different people; it was an excellent thing to do.

As Judy points out, the term “argument” seems to be a specialized term that is not shared

by everyone in the group. Perhaps this has something to do with Judy teaching in an

elementary school in which “argument” is not privileged or emphasized in the

curriculum, whereas it is much more present in the middle and high schools. A few

minutes later in the discussion, I ask the group a question in order to probe their thinking

about what they see as the parts of an argument, though only Stephanie takes me up with

an answer.

Jim: So, I’m curious what you guys think what are the parts of an
argument and were those represented in you visual images. You know
what I mean?

Stephanie: The warrant was not. Oh, I think it has to have a claim and a
warrant and I don’t think my visual image had a warrant. Like, I don’t
prove- I don’t show the why it takes technology and books to unlock the
world. I think - I want to imply it, but-

Darcy: Right. Oh, I see what you’re saying.

Stephanie: So, I think there’s a claim and a warrant in an argument.

Jim: How do you describe, how are you deﬁning warrant then?

Stephanie: The why, the how, the why and how of an argument.

179

Jim: Ok. I’ve always understand warrant to be kind of like the assumption
that it takes ﬂom getting- the assumption that it takes in how the evidence
is supporting the claim. Is that what you mean?
Stephanie: Yeah, I explained it to one of my kids, when we talk about
argument, I say, “You have to have a claim, and then you have to have the
proof of your claim in the evidence that you’re choosing.” And the
warrant- I use that word to describe how it’s proving the claim. Is that the
same? But I don’t think that I have warrant here. I mean, I’m trying to
but I don’t know if it comes across without-
In this exchange, Stephanie begins to deﬁne what she sees as the parts of an “argument,”
using more specialized language of writing teachers, including “warrant” and “evidence.”
Interestingly, she shares what she knows about the concept of argument and only brieﬂy
mentions how she explains it to one of her students. That is, Stephanie demonstrates her
expertise by using the specialized language in a way that is separate ﬂom what she does
in the classroom with students. As we continue to talk more about argument, Darcy
makes sense of the term by talking in terms of what might be possible to do with
students. That is, she uses the specialized language in the context of what could be done
in the classroom with students, whereas Stephanie separated the concept ﬂom the
classroom context, though she builds on Darcy’s comment by sharing what she does do
in the classroom.
Darcy: Or maybe this is just like a sort of a warm-up activity to get them
thinking about something that they feel impassioned about so that they can
then write an argumentative paper that does and then they can explore
within the paper the warrant- you know when they’re explaining how and
why. Because I’m trying to think- I don’t know if it’s really possible to
visually- I don’t know, maybe you could- but that’s also subject to
interpretation. Like what you may say, well this is that, the warrant in my

thing; I may not even see that when I look at yours.

Stephanie: I’m not sure if I can think of any-

180

Darcy: Ways to visually do it.

Stephanie: -any visual warrant. In the examples I use in my class, I use
single pictures. I don’t do multiple pictures usually. But usually we use
that to establish claim. And then you talk about how you support that
claim and then we talk about well What in the pictures supports that claim.
And then I try to link it to warrant, but it’s not actual warrant at that point
because it’s interpretive.

Jim: So in this assignment that she had us do. The claim that we all had to
guess, the evidence was the three pictures?

Stephanie: How they work together to prove that.

Darcy: Right. So, maybe that’s what she could even think of having her
students respond to in writing when they turn it in. I mean, I always have
my kids when we do visuals analyze or do something with it.

Stephanie: Well she did in the essay.

Darcy: And they wrote these papers, so.

Rachel: Right, so then I can put this in the letter correct me, you guys are

saying you’d like to see her use more technical language of what an
argument is or explain?

I focus on the term “argument” here to act as an extended example of how teachers use

specialized language of writing teachers to craft part of their ethos. “Argument” is an

interesting example in that it is a term that seemed to be shared by everyone, but once

Judy suggested that she could have beneﬁted ﬂom more speciﬁc ﬂaming by the

demonstrator, Darcy and Stephanie begin to talk about what they see as important in

using the term. Stephanie, in particular, advocates that teachers use the term more with

students, and she demonstrates her understanding of the term by having both speciﬁc

deﬁnitions of its constituent parts, but also by being able to extend Darcy’s comments

about how teachers could use the demonstration activity in the classroom with students.

181

Clearly, Stephanie demonstrates that she “knows her stuff” by not only using the
specialized language of “argument,” but also by being able to deﬁne the term and
describe how she uses it with her students.

Other terms are also used throughout our response group conversations. For

,9 “ 9, “

instance, we talked about “literacy, ’ “visual literacy, outcomes, prompts,”

,, “ ,9 “

“progression of assignments, assessments, rubrics,” “holistic scoring,” and more. In

using these terms, teachers are demonstrating that they are aware of what it is that writing
teachers seem to know and do. More speciﬁcally, the terms become sites for teachers to
share what it is they do in their classrooms, which, in turn, begins to create an ethos of
what they are like as teachers to the others in the group. For instance, in the exchange
below we talk about one demonstration lesson in which we were unsure of what it was
the demonstrator was hoping for ﬂom her students, and the group used some specialized

9, “

language (e. g. “outcomes, rubric”) as a way to pivot from the demonstration to talk

about our own teaching. I even jump in with some of the struggles of my English
education students.

Jim: Like, so she wants her students to be creative, but what was that- like,
I couldn’t ﬁgure out what that meant.

Stephanie: I did, like I was kinda like thinking to myself I should ask her
later what her creative writing class is like. You know, I wanted to know
like were there outcomes? Like what were her outcomes? I had the same
kind of question about that ‘cause I teach a creative writing class too, and I
have no idea ﬂom that assignment or that list of things that she did like,
what the goal was or what like, did we move in some kind of sequence?
Like, I didn’t get that either.

Rachel: Cause a lot of her prompts I just saw as like, this is what I would
do on the ﬁrst ten minutes in my class. But I don’t know where I would

182

go ﬂom- I would just use it as way to kind of like get the kids writing in
like a journal type assignment

Stephanie: Right, right.

Rachel: But, I don’t know, maybe I need to look at her-

Jim: I mean creativity is something that everyone values, right-

Darcy: Mm hmm

Jim: But, [-1 was trying to ﬁgure out- and I didn’t even get to the level of
progression like I, like you’re talking about- but H was trying to ﬁgure
out, what it is she was looking for ﬂom her students, and to me, the closest
I could get was that she wanted them to produce particular products that

met this checklist of things that had to be in each one, you know, and, I
think there is more to it.

Stephanie: Well, and her rubrics are kinda like that too. Like, did you
notice that?

Jim: Right, I think there is more- I think there is more to it that she- that
was in her head, but I couldn’t quite ﬁgure out what that was. And this
isn’t really about the demonstration, this is just some additional

Stephanie: Right
Darcy: Mm hmm

Jim: I mean I uh, there’s always something I’m trying to understand, is
what they really want, what teachers really want there students to learn

Darcy: What do you think-
Jim: My students have a hard time articulating that so it’s, it’s hard.

Darcy: I think, well I don’t know- I- as -you-you’re students and mine just
starting like you’ve seen here, I think my, my professors in college really
emphasized rubrics where you had to be very speciﬁc, like you couldn’t
just say “This is how many points this section is,” you know, you had to
say “ok, this is the A range, so you’re gonna-these are the things you are
going to do to get the A”

Rachel: Mm hmm. “This is what I’m looking for.”

183

Darcy: and these are the things- yeah. It was like speciﬁc. So, and I don’t
know like if in high school they have a better sense, maybe if after
working with her then they know what she’s looking for? But, my
students, I think will do better, when they actually have a rubric, at least in
the middle school, where it’s concrete, where they, you know, you, like
one area for social studies is content. You have to, to get an A, you have
to include at least two pieces of additional pieces of information beyond
requirements. Like that was one thing I did ‘cause I was getting bare
minimum work. So, I-I mean it was very speciﬁc. So, I don’t know how-
if that’s something that

Jim: Yeah, I mean look- when you look at-

Stephanie: I don’t like that speciﬁc. I don’t give them that speciﬁc of
rubrics at the high school level because I fear that- that’ll limit them.

Darcy: Mm hmm.
Stephanie: But, I don’t know.
Jim: But there’s a range of performance that you could describe, right?

Darcy: Are you speciﬁc? (to Rachel - Rachel and Darcy talking, while Jim
and Stephanie talk)

Rachel: Mm hmm.

Darcy: I am too.

Stephanie: Yeah, ‘cause I give ‘em- I usually-

Jim: That’s different than what she’s talking about.
Darcy: Yeah, and our writing rubric that’s very speciﬁc.

Stephanie: Yeah, I sort of use like a, SAT kind a like an A paper will blah
bluh blah bluh blah bluh blah bluh blah.

Me: Yeah, right.

Stephanie: And it’s more like a paragraph, but not like a checklist so
much.

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In this extended exchange, the specialized language we use seems to be shared between
us all, though how we use the concepts in our practice seems to be different. For instance,
Darcy and Stephanie each describe how they use “rubrics” with their own students. In
both cases, however, rubrics are used by both of them as a way to describe to students the
teachers’ expectations. Interestingly, the demonstrator also used rubrics, but did so in a
way that differed ﬂom both Darcy and Stephanie. Despite the demonstrator including her
rubrics, our group still seemed unsure of what the demonstrator hoped for her students to
understand and do. This suggests that even though teachers use specialized language such
as “rubrics” and share a general sense of what the term means, there exist distinct
differences. For instance, Rachel and Darcy employ a rubric that breaks down into a
description of different traits (e. g. the Six + 1 Writing Traits Rubric), whereas Stephanie
employs a more holistic-type of a rubric (e. g. SAT rubric). Stephanie begins to explain
why she chooses a holistic rubric (because she fears a more explicit rubric with constrain
her students and the choices they make as writers), though the conversation does not dive
deeper into the principles that guide Stephanie’s (or Rachel and Darcy’s) decision. That
is, the conversation stops short of an explicit discussion on what each teacher’s practice
in using rubrics suggests about their beliefs and values about learning, learning to write,
or students.

Despite the conversation on “rubric” use not going deeper, the teachers use of the
term “rubric” in this conversation helps to create an ethos of expertise for each member.
That is, because each teacher shares a general sense of the term, while, at the same time,

differs in the classroom-practice of that term in-action, each teacher can share in having

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made professional judgments as teachers. By displaying this professional judgment to and
within the group, the sense of solidarity (of being on the same page) works in tandem
with a sense of autonomy in making informed, professional judgments.
Teachers establish their character
In our response group conversations, teachers demonstrated their good character
primarily in two ways. One, they each cited the kinds of relationships they have with
students. That is, each of us mentioned the ways in which we think we are perceived by
our students. Two, teachers shared their credentials and experience as teacher education
students and as teachers.
How students perceive them
One way in which teachers crafted an ethos within this response group was to tell
each other about how they think they appear to those who we most closely work, namely
students. As the examples below will show, teachers choose to reveal particular traits
about themselves to one another, and in doing so, they share the traits they want others to
see. That is, they share personality traits that inform their professional relationships.
Returning to the exchange about the letter Rachel receive ﬂom a student, Rachel,
for example, reveals how she hopes her students relate with her.
Rachel: Our 8‘h grade teachers have at the end of every year- the kids
write a letter to their teacher who made an impact in their life and so you
know it’s really fun to go to your mailbox and get these letters ﬂom these
kids or whatever and every year there’s this really unlikely kid that you’re
like, I don’t even know what your voice sounded like, because I never
even talked to you, and they say the most profound things and you just-
like I cried because it was just so sentimental or whatever. But you
always get those kids that are like, you’re so nice, you’re so sweet, you’re
so cute. . .that’s nice of you to say and everything, but like, “What did I

teach you?” You know? So it’s the kids who like say, you made a

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difference and a kid this year was like, “I never wanted to work with other
kids. I never wanted to help other people and work with other people until
I had your class and just watching you work with kids and you
encouraging us to work with each other made me want to be more
cooperative”. And I’m like-

Darcy: Wow. That’s really introspective.

Rachel: That’s not something I focused on but woo-hooll I did
something right! (Laughter).

Stephanie: That’s funny.

Rachel shares that she enjoys and appreciates receiving letters ﬂom students who surprise
her by thanking her for an impact that she’s made in their lives. She notes that she
particularly values those letters that mention something speciﬁc and something that she
sees as meaningﬁrl, rather than receiving letters that say she was “nice,” “sweet,” or
“cute.” After her comments, Darcy makes a comment about the student being
“introspective.” Rachel follows up by revealing more about herself, namely that she’s
happy that a student let her know that she “did something right,” despite that it wasn’t
something she focused on. In this brief exchange Rachel reveals that at least some of her
students like her, that she aims for them to remember and learn something substantial as
their experiences with her, and that she is willing to share something personal and
humorous about herself to those of us in her group. In sharing this experience and
publicly reﬂecting on it, Rachel is crafting an ethos of a trusted and thoughtful educator
who strives for her students to have meaningful experiences in her classroom.

In two much longer exchanges, the teachers in the group use two elementary
school demonstrators attire as a starting point to reveal traits about themselves and the

personae they think they project as classroom teachers. In the ﬁrst exchange, the teachers

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talk about a demonstrator’s high heels, and in the second exchange they talk about
another demonstrator’s t-shirt. In both cases, teachers reveal how they interact with
students.

In this ﬁrst exchange, the demonstrator wore high heels and worked with an
overhead projector, and the teachers react to how the demonstrator navigated the many
power cords while she wore her shoes. The teachers pivot to revealing details about
themselves in their individual classrooms.

Stephanie: Yeah. Although I’ll probably like trip over all the cords and
actually fall, so, you know, I don’t mean to be critical.

Rachel: Wearing ﬂat shoes, not stilettos heels. (laughs)
Stephanie: This is like my heel. I have no heel.

Rachel: Those shoes are awesome, I have to say.
Darcy: I know.

Stephanie: I can’t even imagine wearing shoes like that.
Judy: I don’t know how she walks in them.

Darcy: Well, I love shoes like that, but those are bar shoes. I would never
wear those to teach in.

Rachel: Yeah.
Darcy: I just think I would die. I would be so uncomfortable.

Stephanie: I wouldn’t even buy a pair like that. Plus it would make me like
six foot seven. Um.

Rachel: I like that. I ﬁnally embraced my height, so I’m like perfectly ﬁne
being like

Stephanie: I haven’t. Forty years old, I haven’t like really accepted the fact
that I’m tall.

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Darcy: I love my heels and (Darcy’s boyfriend) is like six three, so we
have like a foot difference between us.

Rachel: Yeah.

Stephanie: Um pace and delivery?

Rachel: This’ll be a really good stuff for your research. (Laughter).
Darcy: Yeah (laugh)

Rachel: Talking about high heels.

Darcy: “I wouldn’t wear the stilettos to school, but I would wear them to
the bar.” (laughs)

All laughing

Rachel: “Great bar shoes.”

Darcy: (laughing) “And you know, I’m ok with my height now”
All laughing.

Stephanie: We’re funny.

Rachel: “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing for my demonstration
lesson, but I’m good with how tall I am.”

All laughing.

In this excerpt Stephanie reveals that she is gaining more comfort in her height, while

Rachel has already embraced her height. Darcy likes the demonstrator’s shoes, but

despite liking them, Darcy can’t imagine wearing the shoes to teach in. “Those are bar

shoes,” she says, and then she goes on to talk about the difference in height between her

and her boyfriend. This exchange seems informal and off-track ﬂom writing the letter

responding to the demonstrator, and at one point Stephanie attempts to pull us back to the

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rubric to talk about “pace and delivery,” but this exchange about the demonstrator’s shoes
provides an opportunity for teachers to talk about themselves and how they present
themselves to students. Moreover, it also provides an opportunity for the group to see
itself as a group, being engaged as research participants. That is, they laugh at themselves
as a group, and it allows the teachers to feel as though they are a group.

Similarly to the example with shoes, another demonstrator, a fourth and ﬁfth
grade teacher, wears a t-shirt with a ﬁctional phone number on it with the words “Write it
down” on it. The conversation about the shirt begins after there’s a slight pause, and then
the conversation progresses ﬂom explaining to one another what the shirt means to a
point where the teachers can reveal more about their relationships with students.

Stephanie: I liked her weaving the quotes or whatever she used
throughout, rather than sticking them all at the beginning. I thought that
was mce.
Darcy: Yeah, that was cool. (pause) I liked her shirt - that was cute.
Rachel: “Write it down.” Hm,mm '
Darcy: It was like a cute, like funky teacher shirt. Like I would wear that
Rachel: (laughs)

After a few moments of back and forth, they pick up the
conversation again, as they pivot ﬂom talking about the shirt to talking

about their relationships with their students.

Rachel: Write it down. No, it’s a fake phone number. It’s like a 555
number.

Judy: Like here’s my, yep, and here’s my phone number. Write it down.

Stephanie: So, it’s about a phone number.

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Darcy: Oh, I get it. So it’s about the phone number. The kids wouldn’t
have to know.

Stephanie: Oh, it’s not really a (inaudible)

Rachel: Right. And if you just read the ﬂont of the shirt you wouldn’t
know.

Darcy: See, I wouldn’t wear like a teacher shirt, but I would wear that.
Rachel: Yes. Exactly.

Stephanie: Except for that has totally the wrong

Darcy: I know.

Stephanie: information to be giving to students.

Darcy: Also,

Stephanie: It’s like, “Here’s my phone number. Write it down.”
Darcy: (laughs) On my, on my

Rachel: But they - Fourth and ﬁfth graders wouldn’t get that.
Stephanie: No

Rachel: (laughs)

Darcy: I didn’t get it until you explained it to me.

Stephanie: Our kids would get it. My kids would get it.

Rachel: Seventh graders wouldn’t get it.

Darcy: (laughing)

Stephanie: My kids would totally - they would tell me that’s what it
meant. I’d be like, “Oh shit.” (laughs)

All laugh.

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Stephanie: Like I would wear it not knowing, and then they’d tell me and
I’d feel like such an idiot.

These exchanges about high heels and t-shirts provide opportunities for teachers
to share what they believe about how students and teachers interact, and in doing so,
reveal their own personality traits that they see as strengths or weaknesses. In making
these personal revelations to one another, the teachers seem to become more of a group.
That is, they start by talking about attire, move to talking about themselves, progress to
talking about their relationships with students, which, in turn, seems to allow each group
member to feel an afﬁliation with the others in the group. That is, by citing their
relationships with students, particularly in linking their own personality traits and values
with their persona in the classroom, teachers in the response group see to strengthen their
individual and collective ethos.

Credentials and experience

As I mentioned in Chapter 4, teachers in this response group refer to their
experiences as a common place to ﬁnd resources for their arguments. In addition to
providing resources for their claims, the commonplace of experience also seems to have a
role in helping teachers craft an ethos within the group. For instance, Stephanie shares her
experiences of being a department chair and a member of a literacy committee which
provided her opportunities to lead professional development in her school. Rachel shares
her experience of being a middle school teacher in what she calls an “urban ﬂinge”
district. Darcy shares her experiences of teaching both language arts and social studies,

which provides here with a different range of experiences as a teacher of writers. In

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offering these professional experiences within the response group discussions, the
teachers craft an ethos of being curious about how they and other teachers make sense of
their teaching context. At times, these experiences are in conﬂict with the credentials they
do or do not have. By this I mean that these teachers have credentials such as teacher
certiﬁcation, Bachelor’s and Master’s degree, and the No Child Left Behind-mandated
“highly qualiﬁed” teacher status.

For instance, in the exchange that follows, the group responds to one of the
earliest demonstration lessons. The demonstrator, a literacy specialist in a school district,
offers personal examples of teaching a wide range of students ﬂom different grade levels,
and the teachers in the group note their own limited range of teaching particular grade-
levels of students.

Rachel: Which I thought that she did a really good job giving suggestions
of how it can be adapted for 4th, I mean she did 4th, 8th and 10th but that
pretty much represents, you know, the grade levels. I think you could
easily kind of see how you could bring it down a notch for younger kids or

even up it for older kids

Stephanie: It’s cool she has the teaching experience in all those levels. I
mean, not many of us get to deal with little kids.

Rachel and Darcy: Yea

Rachel: Not many of us get to do that.

Stephanie: I don’t want to, but I legally can’t. (others laugh)
At the end of this exchange, Stephanie mentions that she “legally can’t” work with
elementary students. In this nod toward her certiﬁcation status, she positions her expertise

as working with adolescents, like both Darcy and Rachel.

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Because “experience” is a primary commonplace for teachers in this group, it
follows that any mention of one’s experience helps to establish the character of each of
the teachers. That is, using a commonplace indicates membership or insider-status. It is
important to note, too, that more experience does not necessarily mean stronger
membership. For instance, Darcy’s one year of experience does not indicate that she is
less a teacher of writing than Stephanie who has over twenty years of teaching
experience. Still, each of the teachers, including me, talk about our time working with
students, and in doing so, we each begin to have our character sized up by the others.
This sizing up does not necessarily make the content of our arguments stronger or
weaker; instead, the credentials and experience we share seem to be for the purpose of
connecting with one another — or put another way, of developing a network of teachers
who work in communities and contexts different than our own.

Teachers achieve good will

In achieving good will with one another the teachers considered what group
members know and experience, and they explained why they think their ideas are
important. Interestingly, though, individual group members never tried to explicitly
convince others in the group how our ideas would beneﬁt the others. That is, as
individuals, the teachers shared what seemed to work for them in their own context, but
they did not set-out to persuade one another to act or believe in the same way. Indeed,
despite the fact that teachers viewed the demonstration lessons as persuasive acts, it was
bad form to be explicit in convincing others. Instead, to demonstrate goodwill to one

another, the teachers presented what they did, as well as their recollection of student

194

 

reactions, but they did not share with one another what they thought other teachers should
do. That is, the teachers recognized that other teachers would know what would work
best for others by sharing what worked (or not) for them and their students.

Understanding other teachers ’ experiences

A prime example of the teachers trying to achieve good will is through their
attempts to understand what the other teachers know and experience is through the
questions the teachers ask one another. In this response group, these questions tended to
be questions about what one another experienced in their different contexts. For instance,
Stephanie asked questions about teaching middle school, Darcy asked questions about
working in an urban ﬁinge school, and Rachel asked questions about what it was like to
work in high school departments. These questions were not limited within the group
either. Oftentimes, the teachers in the response group would speculate and wonder about
what the demonstrators’ students, classrooms, and school districts were like to work in.
For example, one demonstrator works in an urban district where students often choose to
either not graduate high school or to work in the local factories and plants, rather than
pursue college education. The teachers in this response group speculated how life in that
school district has changed over the years because of the many plant closings, which, in
turn, has created fewer job opportunities for students. In making these speculations, the
teachers begin to understand how teachers in different contexts make the pedagogical
choices and professional development that they do. For instance, the teachers talk about

one of the activities presented in a demonstration lesson. The teachers talk about why

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they think the demonstrator would use the activity, which they determine is primarily
because the demonstrator’s school has a large population of students.

Stephanie: I think that one of the things he said was that he used it as sort
of like a beginning of the school year kind of activity.

Rachel: Yeah.

Stephanie: So, he wanted them to talk to each other to get to know each
other, I guess.

Rachel: Yeah.

Stephanie: So maybe if that was his purpose in that assignment, he needs
to like let us know that more clearly or something so that we understand
that step, like if the point of that step had nothing to do with their writing,
but the point was to get them to know each other, that’s one thing, you
know, and especially in a school as big as (Anthony’s school) where, or
like (another big suburban high school)

Rachel: Hm,mm

Stephanie: or something, like in (Stephanie’s rural school), I would say
like three kids don’t know each other,

Rachel and Darcy (laughter)
Stephanie: but everybody else (laughs)
Rachel: And they just came in June.
Stephanie: And they just moved, but, um, in a big school where, you know
like 30 kids in a classroom and no one knows each other, you really need
something like that. So I guess if it’s part of the writing process that’s
important to the writing process, we’d like to know why, but if it’s for
another reason -

In this example, the teachers, particularly Stephanie, seem uncertain about using the

activity in their own classrooms, and they seem to want to be critical without being

judgmental. That is, they want to understand why the demonstrator chooses use the

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activity in the way that he does, and they wish he would be clearer in his demonstration
about it. That being said, they are able to blunt the critique by speculating that the context
in which he works would demand a different purpose than if they used it in their own
schools. More speciﬁcally, Stephanie speculates that since the demonstrator’s school is
so large using the activity as a way to help students get to know one another makes much
more sense than using it in that way in her school where most all the students know one
another.

Not attempting to convince or change other teachers

The teachers describe educators as being “practical” people, and they note that
professional development opportunities are most helpful when teachers have
opportunities to be engaged in the process. Take, for instance, an exchange ﬂom another
demonstration lesson, in which the teachers in the response group speculate how the
demonstrator could work with the staff in her building. The teachers in this response
group say that the most convincing evidence a demonstratorcan present is based on the
demonstrator’s experiences, particularly by showing examples of what students produced
or thought while engaging in the activity. Research and theory, on the other hand,
functions as a way to support teachers — a validation tool — but not a persuasive proof for
teachers, particularly if the demonstrator relies too heavily on research or theory. When a
demonstrator does include too much research or theory, teachers may indeed lose respect
for the demonstrator. This suggests the way in which a teacher’s explanation for
judgment is best served by including details about experiences with students and how that

explanation of judgment should revolve around what is prudent to do with students. For

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..‘m -—.— .T— V -.— — *

example, in response to one demonstrator who is a leader within her school, the teachers

note the power of being a presenter who allows teachers to identify problems, rather than

being a presenter who comes in to ﬁx problems. The demonstrator had the teachers in the

institute examine student writing, which the teachers in the response group felt was a

strong and persuasive move for the demonstrator to make with her staff, because it

positions the demonstrator, as well as the teachers in her building in particular ways.

They explain:

Stephanie: Then it was a good practice for her. Yea. Actually instead of a
demonstration it’s more like a reﬂection. You know? It was like a
performative reﬂection or something. Because it was like, “Let’s look at
what we’re doing.” In terms of how she gives deals with her staff, “Let’s
look at what we’re doing and let’s talk about what kinds of things we can
do.” You know, like ask them to examine and also reﬂect, which is what
she needs to take it on the road to her staff.

Rachel: And I think...

Judy: So it’s an exercise for reﬂecting and examining current practice, and
then what was the second part you said?

Stephanie: For examining current practice and then reﬂecting on ways to
enhance or improve that practice.

Rachel: And I think what will really work with her staff is that if she does
it the way that she did it with us, they are ﬁnding the problems. She’s not
coming to them as the expert -

Darcy: Right, uh, huh

Rachel: and saying “These are all the problems that we’re seeing in the
kids writing.” She is giving it to them and saying, “Tell me what you
think.”

Stephanie: “Tell me what you see. What are the strengths, what are the
weaknesses?”

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Rachel: And so, in my experience when you let the staff tell you what’s
wrong and then you kind of help them ﬁnd ways to address it, that works
out a lot better then you coming and saying, “The kids can’t form a thesis.
They don’t have any purpose. They don’t...” You know, because then the
teachers feel like, “I’m doing my best and you’re attacking me!” You
know what I mean? '

Darcy: Yea. And I think if they brought samples ﬂom their own classroom
and you know, they chose which samples to include then that might give
them some more sense of comfort.

Rachel: Right.

In this exchange, the teachers value the experience of participating in
conversations with one another about student work. that is, even though this
demonstration lesson did not inform teachers about speciﬁc activities or practices they
could take back to their classroom, they appreciated having the opportunity to examine
student work and to hear how other teachers viewed that work.

In explaining that orators achieve goodwill, in part, by explaining to audiences
why the orator’s ideas are beneﬁcial to the audience, Crowley and Hawhee (1999) helped
me to see that this move is absent in the response group conversations. While teachers
offer suggestions to each demonstrator about ways to improve the demonstration lessons,
they do not try to convince the demonstrators to change their teaching practices, nor do
they challenge the principles behind the demonstrators’ activities or lessons. For
example, in one of the Visual Literacy demonstration lessons, Stephanie is uncertain that
the demonstration is actually visual literacy. Instead of challenging the demonstrator,
however, Stephanie offers possible ways to use the activity without labeling it visual

literacy. While she does raise the issue within the response group, she does so as a way to

hear what the teachers in the group understand as visual literacy. In this way, the group

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members do indeed try to explain their conceptions of visual literacy (and in other cases
concepts such as teaching grammar in context and arguments); however, the lack of
challenge leads me to believe that questioning the. demonstrator would create ill will,
rather than good will.

In the case of one demonstrator, for instance, the teachers could tell the
demonstrator was nervous, and they speculated that she was insecure in her own
knowledge and ability. Rachel had just ﬁnished saying that the demonstrator needs to
acknowledge her strengths, and that one of her strengths is that she is willing to seek out
help when she did not know something, a trait that is not always shared by all people.

Jim: What strengths in particular would we like to point out to her?
Darcy: I wonder what she’s like in her classroom?

Rachel: She understands her kids for one. She knows what her kids need.
1titlpgda'she can adjust her curriculum to meet the needs of her kids and that’s

Stephanie: She has a kindness too that kids will-- you know that I can see
that she really makes good personal connections with them.

Darcy: Uh huh.

Stephanie: So that she wants them to improve or succeed and they can feel
that back. I’m sure.

Judy: Being so willing to say that she doesn’t know something, that she
doesn’t have to be an expert is a big strength.

Rachel: It’s a very endearing quality too.
Stephanie: Perseverance to work this hard-

Rachel: She’s very hard working.

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Darcy: And I think also if I was a student, I would be really drawn to her
because I think she’s so kind, there’s a part of me that would feel like, safe
in her classroom. Like, you know, I could be myself and I’d feel almost
like she’s that mother.
Stephanie: She has that quiet like, One-on-one voice. Whereas I have that
big loud- “I’m going to talk to all of you and if you don’t want to listen to
me, tough! You have to hear me at least.” (laughs)
Darcy: She has a quiet strength.
Despite the fact that the teachers in the response group were not as satisﬁed with the
demonstration itself, they want to support a colleague who faces many challenges,
including the challenge of being uncertain and insecure. To help the demonstrator, the
teachers highlight what they see as the demonstrator’s strengths as a teacher, including

her knowledge, her personality, and their perceptions of what she is like with her

students.

In closing, this chapter set out to understand how arguments operate in response
group conversations. Within the social scene of participating in a response group whose
task is to come to consensus and craft a response letter to each demonstrator, teachers
articulate their judgments to one another, which requires them t both reﬂect on their own
experiences in their work and to reﬂect publicly in the deliberations with one another. As
they forward arguments about both the content in and the performance of demonstrations,
the teachers explain themselves, providing justiﬁcation for their claims. It is in this act of
providing justiﬁcation where crafting ethos comes into play, because teachers make
decisions about what they know about social expectations within the response group

conversations. The act of justiﬁcation also positions teachers in that space between theory

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and practice, because they share what they did in their classrooms, and they are provided
opportunities to share why they believe those choices to be prudent. That is, their
experiences offer a chance for them to share their. practical reasoning (phronesis).

In pursuing an answer to the question, “What do arguments do for participants in
the response group conversations?” the concept of ethos proves useful because it suggests
a relationship between speakers and their community. For teachers in this response group,
then, arguments operate as a way to craft an ethos with the group, for the group. That is,
what teachers decide to talk about (topoi) and what kind of reasoning they offer to
explain themselves (phronesis) help in crafting ethos.

For instance, in this chapter, teachers in the response group craft ethos by
demonstrating their intelligence, establishing good character, and achieving good will.
These ethos-building moves, though, have speciﬁc features for teachers in this
professional development situation. The teachers in this group, for example, point out the
difﬁcult choices demonstrators must make when including research and theory in the
demonstrations: if demonstrators offer too much research and theory, then they run the
risk of damaging their ethos. This suggests that those who design professional
conversations between teachers need to structure speciﬁc opportunities for teachers to
connect research and/or theory with practice, because doing so on their own is risky for
teachers. In short, arguments operate as a way for teachers to take a stance, and in doing
so, they come to present themselves as particular kinds of teachers and colleagues. The
arguments forwarded by teachers have the potential to persuade other teachers in the

group (e. g. Stephanie suggesting that she has too narrow a view of writing because of

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Darcy’s argument about a more expansive view of writing), though it is considered
inappropriate or bad form for teachers to set-out to persuade others to change. Doing so,
it seems, runs counter to achieving good will through understanding and appreciating
teachers’ experiences and expertise. That is, explicit acts of persuasion put teachers on
the defensive, rather than establishing an afﬁliation with one another.

To be sure, the rhetorical concept of ethos is a limited concept and does not
explain all the factors at play in the scene. For instance, gestures, silences, body
language, pauses, and other verbal and non-verbal features of the response group
conversation are absent ﬂom this analysis. Still, this rhetorical analysis illustrates that in
demonstration response group conversations, teachers are taking on the role of both critic
and rhetor. That is, they are analyzing and they are making arguments. Moreover, by
including their justiﬁcations of both their critique of the demonstration lessons and the
content in those demonstrations, the teachers learn and demonstrate the rhetorical moves
that help in afﬁliating with one another as a group who is tasked with coming to
consensus.

It would be useful to see how teachers explain their judgment in different
instances with their professional peers. My suspicion is that unless there is a shared task
or an opportunity for teachers to share an experience with one another, such as sharing
the demonstration lesson experience, then teachers will only have the opportunity to act
as rhetors and not as analysts. The demonstration lesson and the response group
conversations provide opportunities for teachers to act as both rhetorical analysts and as

rhetors, which offers various possibilities for teachers to share their own experiences as

203

 

educators and to share their justiﬁcations for the decisions they made. Similarly, it would
be useful to also examine how teachers explain their judgment to those who are not
professional peers, such as administrators or the guardians of their students. The
rhetorical situation in these cases would, of course, be different in both audience and
purpose, which might provide for different kinds of arguments and justiﬁcations. Both of
these kinds of case studies — studies of teachers with peers in different kinds of
professional development and studies of teachers with those who are not peers — would

likely shed like on the knowledge teachers have about their work.

204

Chapter Six: Lessons from Bringing Rhetoric into a Learning Environment
Although the rhetorical concepts I have employed in this study (Ethos, Topoi, and
Phronesis) present a view of rhetoric and argument that is limited to reasoning, these
concepts help to highlight both the content of the deliberations within one demonstration
response group and to describe the relationship between speakers and other members of
the group. For instance, the concept of topoi revealed that teachers in this group turn
primarily to “experience” and secondarily to “learning and learners” as resources to
support their arguments. In addition, the concept of phronesis revealed that teachers in
this group have to be prudent in what they share within the group, particularly in how
they share why they believed their decisions in their classrooms with students were
prudent. The concepts of topoi and phronesis revealed that teachers in this group what
was discussed and how one presents her decisions as an educator work together to help
create positions of authority as teachers and positions of trusted professional peers. In
short, the rhetorical concepts employed here highlight the social expectations of the
learning environment, and how the arguments teachers forward within the group help
teachers to meet these social demands. To put it another way, teachers in this
demonstration response group not only learned about writing, but they also learned how
to be particular kinds of teachers and how to be a group. As the summer institute
experience acts as a kind of initiation into the National Writing Project network of
teachers, so too does the demonstration lesson and the demonstration lesson response

groups act as a ﬁrst step in one group of teachers becoming a network.

205

 

In answering the two research questions offered in this study, namely “What do
teachers say in demonstration lesson response groups?” and “How does what the teachers
say position them with one another in the group?” I bring together two lines of theory,
speciﬁcally social, experiential views of learning and rhetorical theory. The answer to the
ﬁrst question focuses on the kinds of knowledge teachers share with one another,
including knowledge of students, knowledge of teachers and teaching, and knowledge of
the subject matter of writing. Moreover, this knowledge was embedded in the arguments
teachers forwarded as they explained their judgments of either the content in
demonstration lessons or the performance of the demonstration lesson. That is, teachers
in this response group viewed the demonstration lessons speciﬁcally, and professional
development generally, as persuasive acts whose purpose was to convince them to
employ and adapt the demonstrated teaching practices, strategies, or activities. The
answer to the second question highlights the importance of understanding the
demonstration lesson response group and the summer institute as social scenes.

In tying together the answers to these research questions to the lines of theory
offered as analytics, I point out four areas to discuss for those concerned with teacher
knowledge and/or with rhetorical theory. More speciﬁcally, I point out the nature of
teacher knowledge as it appears in deliberations with professional peers, the nature of the
justiﬁcations teachers forward to one another as they enter this teacher network, the need
to explore and employ the relationships between rhetorical concepts, and the multiple
ways in which teachers in this response group use the concept of “experience.”

Teacher knowledge and deliberations with professional peers

206

 

What constitutes teacher knowledge and how do researchers identify that
knowledge have both been the subjects of debate. Clandinin and Connelly (1996), for
instance, argue that teacher knowledge can be deﬁned when a teacher gives expression to
his or her conception of what took place in the classroom. On the other hand, Schdn
(Schbn, 1983, 1987, 1991) believes one can infer teacher knowledge ﬂom the action of
teachers, which is a kind of “epistemology of practice.” F enstennacher (1994) offers yet
still another conception of teacher knowledge, namely that if a teacher provides
justiﬁcation for the decisions he or she made, then that can be labeled teacher knowledge.
This study conﬁrms some of what F enstennacher (1 994) argues, namely that knowledge
can be located in explanations and justiﬁcations. Despite this conﬁrmation, however, this
study did not examine the narratives, images, or embodied knowledge that Clandinin and
Connelly would argue could also be used to locate teacher knowledge. One possible
direction to take ﬁrture studies would be to understand the relationship between narrative
and reason, particularly in how they relate to teachers’ knowledge.

Still, much of what teachers know, it seems, is tacit, and the idea of articulating
their judgments to peers does seem to help make visible some of what teachers know. In
this study, for example, when explaining their judgments about the performance of
demonstration lessons or about the content in the demonstration, teachers revealed their
knowledge about students, teachers and teaching, and the subject matter of writing.
Teachers shared their experiences as educators, and provided opportunities for others to
challenge, conﬁrm, extend, or reﬁne what each other said they knew. In this particular

response group, the teachers tended to only challenge one another about teaching

207

 

practices or about the nature of the subject matter of writing. Rarely did they challenge
one another about their knowledge of students. In addition, it was difﬁcult for teachers in
this response group to articulate their knowledge about writing without referring to their
teaching practices. Put another way, it was easier for them to talk about their pedagogical
content knowledge than about their content knowledge, though the most experienced
teacher, Stephanie, was more able to do so more often (Shulman, 1987). This suggests
that categorizing the knowledge of teachers might be useful as a heuristic for teachers to
articulate to others what they know or for researchers to use in analysis. At the same time,
it is less clear how teachers in this group understand their subject matter. For instance, in
this demonstration response group, the teachers deliberated about what is considered the
content of teaching writing — is it teaching genre or teaching skills or teaching process or
teaching an identity or all of the above and more? In their deliberations, for example, two
teachers, Darcy and Rachel, said that they do not consider themselves writers despite the
fact that they wrote for their work. That is, the act of writing does not necessarily make
one a writer, at least not to these two teachers at that particular moment. Of course, one
limitation to this ﬁnding is that I only examined the discussions this group had regarding
the demonstration lessons, and it would be useful to see how the same group of teachers
talked about writing when they met to respond to one another’s writing.

The purpose of the demonstration lesson response group was to provide feedback
to each of the demonstrators, and it would also be useful to examine other cases of
teacher deliberating with one another, such as in department meetings or in meetings to

prepare for parent-teacher conferences to discuss an individual student’s’ performance in

208

a range of classes. This study suggests that the knowledge teachers have can be located,
at least in this particular case, in the deliberations between professional peers. Such a
suggestion begs the theoretical question of whether or not knowledge appears in the
articulation or if it exists before the articulation. Much like Dewey (193 8) who suggests
that what happens to you is not an experience until you “reﬂect” on it and like Thiele
(2006) who suggests that a judgment is not really a judgment until a position is
articulated, I also implicate language in knowledge. As this study suggests, those
concerned with teacher knowledge can help teachers elicit their tacit knowledge by
providing shared experiences for groups of teachers to explain their judgment to one
another. Doing so, this study suggests, can elicit what teachers know. One suggestion for
the Rust Belt Writing Project, however, might be for teachers to articulate what they have
learned about writing, teaching, or students after having participated in demonstration
lessons and in demonstration lesson response group conversations. While the
deliberations in the response groups provide opportunities for teachers to articulate what
they know and why they make the decisions in their classroom the way that they do, there
is not a structured opportunity for the group members to periodically share with one
another what they think they have learned ﬂom one another. Adding this layer of
discussion might help teachers understand what it is they know, what it is others know,
and what they might want to learn.
The justifications teachers employ

As an initiation into the National Writing Project, the summer institutes provide

an opportunity to describe teachers’ understandings of their knowledge as they enter into

209

a teacher network. As such, this study provides a characterization of where the summer
institute participants are as learners when they begin their experience as National Writing
Project teachers. In studying this group of teachers, for instance, I was struck by the kinds
of justiﬁcations they valued. More speciﬁcally, teachers in this response group described
a tension they felt in the use of research and theory both within demonstration lessons
and in the demonstration response group conversations.

In critiquing demonstration lessons, the teachers in this response group often
described demonstrators who used “too much” research or who “found just the right
amount” of research. If, however, a demonstrator offered little research in their
demonstration lessons, the teachers in this group often dismissed the problem, saying
things like they would rather listen to a teacher who has tried something with students
rather than to a teacher who mentions a list of theorists or of studies. In addition, the
teachers in this group did not see research and theory as a way to guide their practice;
rather they envision using research and theory as a way to validate what they were seeing
in their classroom.

The concept of topoi illustrates that teachers turn primarily to their experiences as
was to support the arguments they forward. Secondarily, however, teachers turn to a
shared view of learning, speciﬁcally the importance of teachers “scaffolding” experiences
for students. For instance, in arguing for the value of teaching ﬁve paragraph essays,
Rachel justiﬁes her stance by saying that some middle school students need the structure
of a ﬁve paragraph essay and that as they gain more experience in writing such essays,

the need for the structure will dissipate and students will, over time, write more

210

sophisticated pieces. That is, the ﬁve paragraph essay is a scaffold, providing some
structure for students, and it will help them learn. Moreover, Rachel and the other
teachers in the group share their experiences with students who struggled to understand
the expectations of academic essays and who seemed to beneﬁt ﬂom being assigned to
write ﬁve paragraph essays. That is, teaching the ﬁve paragraph essay was a prudent
decision for Rachel and, at the same time, she made a prudent decision within the group
to employ both her experience and her view of learning as resources to demonstrate her
prudence to other group members. By employing the concept of “scaffolding” in her
justiﬁcation, Rachel used a theory of learning to validate her decision to teach the ﬁve
paragraph essay.

Despite this use of theory in her argument, Rachel, like the other teachers in this
group, looks unfavorably at demonstrators who use too much research and theory in the
demonstration lessons. This suggests that when entering a teacher network, teachers are
establishing relationships with one another and that teachers prefer sharing their
experiences with one another over having to explain to one another the principles that
guide their teaching practices. For instance, demonstrators who are believed to have
included too much research or theory in a demonstration lesson are viewed as trying to
seem impressive or as trying to convince others to change their beliefs. In offering too
much research, demonstrators run the risk of damaging their status, or ethos, within the
group. That is, there is a social risk and consequence in choices demonstrators make.
With this in mind, writing project leaders might see their role as creating experiences in

which the use of research and theory gradually becomes acceptable justiﬁcation within

211

 

the summer institute. To be sure, this study does not follow individual teachers as they
move beyond the initiation of the summer institute, and perhaps research and theory do
become more acceptable and expected as teachers continue to be involved in the other
writing project opportunities. A useful study might be to identify how teachers’
justiﬁcations change or are employed as they participate more in the writing project
network of teachers. Still, it is important to note that at the beginning of the writing
project experience, teachers are skeptical of others who employ justiﬁcation that is not
grounded in their experiences in their classroom or that relies too heavily on research and
theories.

On a broader level, this study suggests that there are multiple other cases in which
teachers explain their judgments or justify their explanations, many of which are not with
professional peers. A potential future study would be to compare teachers justiﬁcations
and explanations in different rhetorical situations in order to see what teacher knowledge
is revealed and to see how teachers interpret the assumptions ”and needs of the audience. I
struggled with the administrator I mentioned in the preface, and I wonder if other
teachers do as well. Future cases might include teachers’ open house presentations to
parents and guardians, or responses to local news or politicians’ critiques of teachers’
performance, or discussions between administrators or curriculum coordinators and
teachers. How do teachers justify themselves when they do not share experiences with
those they talk to about their work? For instance, at parent open house nights at the
beginning of the school year, do teachers discuss what they want their students to learn?

Do they discuss their pedagogy with parents and how they believe students learn best?

212

Other cases of teacher rhetoric, cases in which there is a range of audiences and purposes
for teachers to explain the decisions they make in their classroom, seem as though they
would provide a richer understanding of what teachers know.

The relationships between rhetorical concepts

In this study, I present a rhetorical view of teacher learning, a view that arguments
play a role in how teachers learn through deliberations with professional peers. More
speciﬁcally, when teachers are publicly reﬂecting on and sharing their experiences in
their own classrooms, they are in a rhetorical situation when it is possible for them to
justify their decisions, their judgment. In this justiﬁcation, arguments are made, and in
making them, teachers are revealing their knowledge about students, teachers and
teaching, and writing, and just as importantly, they are revealing their understanding of
the social scene. The rhetorical concepts of ethos, topoi, and phronesis help to illuminate
this scene in which teachers are, in explaining themselves to one another, navigating that
space between theory and practice, that space when they describe what they did in their
classrooms and why they did it. This is an uneasy space for them at times, because as
they point out, teaching is ﬁlled with uncertainty and insecurities and a wide range of
dynamic variables.

To be sure, the concepts of ethos, topoi, and phronesis are not typically associated
with one another, (particularly topoi and phronesis) and this study suggests a further
pursuit of understanding their relationship would be helpﬁrl; however, the rhetorical
concepts provide a glimpse of the kinds of decisions teachers have to make as they talk

with one another in a scene where learning or professional development is an aim. More

213

speciﬁcally, the demonstration response group conversations are moments when teachers
are responding to a shared experience, namely the demonstration lessons. Because they
are critiquing and responding to the demonstrations together, teachers are given the
opportunity to be both analysts and rhetors; that is, they both critique and produce, which
provides different layers of judgment that teachers have to explain and justify. This study
suggests that professional developers and teacher educators would serve teachers’
learning if they provided opportunities for teachers to share experiences and to respond to
those experiences in groups that meet regularly. Those shared experiences might be
demonstration lessons, professional readings, student work, video taped experiences in
the classroom, or other moments that provide teachers opportunities to critique the
content of the experience and to justify their critiques by revealing their knowledge
through explanations of their own experiences.

Undoubtedly, this study illustrates the importance ethos plays in the summer
institute. Moreover, this study also illustrates Cintron’s (1997) assertion that ethos is
layered with logos. That is, there is a relationship between the reasoning one shares with
others and the way that individual is viewed by other members of the group. In focusing
on ethos and logos, this study is does not describe the presence of emotion or the effect of
employing pathos as a type of proof. Examining the way in which teachers turn to affect
would, without question, provide a more nuanced and richer understanding of how
teachers in the group relate to one another. For instance, in sharing their experiences in
the classroom with students, teachers in this group told anecdotes of heartbreak, humor,

ﬂustration, and more. I suspect that the appeal to pathos helped to build the ethos of

214

 

teachers within the group, because the range of emotions offered would be shared by
other teachers and, at the same time, would not be challenged by other teachers. That is,
an appeal to emotion is one way to create affiliation within the group, and group
afﬁliation seems to be a central goal of the early summer institute experiences.
Teachers use of “experience”

One surprise in this study is the wide range of ways “experience” is conceived in
the demonstration response group conversations. For instance, “experience” is, at times,
attendance, or something that one undergoes, or as time spent, or as that which occurs to
you outside of professional contexts. In this response group, teachers use “experience” as
a resource to bolster their ethos as professional peers to one another. That is, the use of
“experience” serves to make speakers more credible to one another and to situate
themselves as peers. This social purpose of publicly sharing one’s experience seems to
provide not only affiliation with others, but also opportunities for teachers to reﬂect on
their own experiences. This reminds me of Schbn (1983, 1987) who describes
professionals “thinking on their feet” or what he calls “reﬂecting-in-action.” For the
teachers in this demonstration response group, they reﬂect as they talk with one another.
Moreover, Schbn posits that such reﬂection-in-action is triggered by moments of
surprise. For teachers in this demonstration lesson response group, these moments of
surprise occur as they “piggy back” off of one another’s arguments and anecdotes. In
addition, the reliance of experience as a resource for arguments within the group means
that when teachers are reﬂecting-in-action within the group, they are reﬂecting-on-action

in their classroom. In this way, “experience” has multiple functions. One, “experience” is

215

 

 

what teachers are sharing within the demonstration lesson response group. Two,
“experience” is something they have accrued in their work as teachers, whether it is in
their classroom with students, in particular teaching contexts, or in professional
development. Three, “experience” is a description of the duration of one’s professional
career (e. g. number of years taught). In all of these instances, “experience” becomes a
way for teachers to position themselves with one another. Moreover, those relationships
are cultivated through language, including through the arguments teachers forward to one
another. Much like Dewey (193 8) who writes that “all human experience is ultimately
social” and that “it involves contact and communication” (p. 32), the teachers in this
response group rely on sharing “experiences” not only as resources for their arguments,
but also to present themselves as particular kinds of professional peers and as a particular
kind of group member.

For those with interest in teacher knowledge, it seems that the multiple functions
of “experiences” are a provocative way to help teachers see themselves as rhetors. That
is, teachers working in groups, like the demonstration lesson response group, make
choices about what they discuss, what stance they take in explaining their judgment, and
how they deploy their “experiences” as teachers in the group. Tracking how teachers talk
about experience and how it functions in a range of rhetorical situations seems like a
useful study to pursue, as it might help teachers to better understand how they present
themselves to a range of audiences and how they might learn about themselves as

teachers in a range of professional situations.

216

 

Appendix A: Initial Participant Email

Dear ,

 

My name is Jim Fredricksen and I am a Ph.D candidate in the Teacher Education
program at Michigan State University, and, like you, I am an incoming participant in the
upcoming [Rust Belt] Writing Project (RBWP) summer institute.

While I’m writing with you in the summer institute, I am also working on my
dissertation, in which I hope to help the co-directors of the summer institute better
understand how the experience of the summer institute inﬂuences how teachers think
about writing and learning to write.

To help you know more about this I can send you some information about my project.
I’m currently planning a research project to leam ﬂom teachers by listening to them, and
I write with a request for help. I was given your name by [Michael], the director of the
summer institute this year, who mentioned that you might be willing and interested in
learning more about this project.

Let me know if you’re willing to help. If so, I can send you a short description of the
project and what participating in it would entail.

Thank you for your time.

«Jim Fredricksen

217

Appendix B: Pre-Institute Interview Protocol

How do teachers anticipate the summer institute helping them in their work?

1.
2.
3.

 

What made you want to participate in the summer institute?

What are you looking forward to? What are you anxious or uncertain about?
Based on the pre-institute meeting we attended, what were your impressions of
what we’re going to be doing this surrnner at the institute?

How do teachers describe their students’ learning and their students’ writing?

1.
2.
3.

What kind of writing do your students currently engage in?

What do you hope your students learn when you have them write for your class?
Tell me about a student you’ve taught who you consider to be the kind of writer
you’d like others to be. What did that student know? What was that student able
to do? What role did you play in that students’ learning about writing?

Tell me about a student you’ve taught who you thought really struggled to
improve as a writer. What did that student know? What was that student able to
do? What role did you play with him or her?

What kind of feedback do you typically provide for your students writing and
when do you provide it?

During the demonstration lesson at the meeting, one quote that the presenter
brieﬂy talked about was “Don’t teach the writing, teach the writer.” What do you
think about that quote? How is that like or unlike the way you work with your
students and their writing?

How are teachers preparing for their demonsLation lesson?

1.

DJ

During the pre-institute meeting we watched and participated in the demonstration
lesson on using picture books to help students learn to use punctuation in context,
what were you thinking about during and after the lesson?

What lessons are you considering for the demonstration lesson? Why?

How does your demonstration reﬂect what you believe is important about writing
and learning to write?

In planning for the demonstration lesson, what do you hope to share with and
learn from the other teachers at the institute?

How do teﬁachers see themselves as writers. teachers.pnd learners?

l.

2.
3.

How are you feeling about writing this summer and sharing that writing in a
response group?

What do you hope to learn or to be able to do as a writer this summer?

What kind of writing do you do as part of your work as a teacher? How did you
learn to do that kind of writing?

What do you see as your strengths and weaknesses as a writer?

How do you think those strengths and weaknesses affect your teaching, if at all?

218

 

6.

With whom do you talk about writing or learning to write? Have you ever talked
to any of your colleagues about writing or teaching writing? If so, how? When?
How often? What do you typically talk about?

During the pre-institute meeting we were asked to rank our three top choices of
texts that we would like to read. What books did you choose? Why? What are you
hoping to learn ﬂom them? '

What are the teachers' professiongl situations?

1.
2.

3.
4.

9°

How long have you been teaching?

How long have you been teaching at your current school and in your current
position?

With whom do you talk to about your students and their writing?

What documents have you created to share with others about what happens in
your classroom?

How would others know what you think is important for your students to learn
and to be able to do? How would others know that students have learned what
your aims are for them?

What do you envision as your ideal classroom? (what do you see, feel, and hear
when you walk around?)

What kinds of things are the students learning in your ideal classroom? For
instance, what topics or texts are they working on? Why are those important for
them to learn?

What are you doing in this ideal classroom? What is your role? Why?

How is your ideal classroom like and unlike your current classroom?

Summag
Is there anything else about writing, teaching writing, or participating in the institute that

you’d want to add or clarify?

Conclusion a_nd thatnk you

I really appreciate your taking the time to be interviewed, given your busy schedule. I
have really learned a great deal ﬂom you today. However, if I still have questions or if I
ﬁnd that I wish I had asked you something else, would you be willing to talk with me
again sometime?

Thank you very much for your time

219

 

 

 

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