Search

Developing knowledge and practice for high-quality K-12 class discussion remains challenging, especially for new teachers juggling other classroom responsibilities. Our study reports the case of a preservice teacher learning to lead discussions while enrolled in a teacher education inquiry course, simultaneous with semester-long supervised practice teaching in a seventh-grade class (12-13-year-olds) in a high-poverty urban community. The work is guided by a complex teacher learning process for developing complex practice of facilitating discussions in culturally and linguistically diverse high school English classes. Countering popular approaches to "talk moves" as useful but often generic facilitation practices, the teacher education pedagogical innovation we describe positions teachers as knowledge-generating, agentive professionals. Our conceptual framework for teacher learning features dialogic teacher inquiry, with three domains. The first domain involves moving beyond methods texts to dialoguing analytically with and among multiple print, online, and mentor resources for supporting development of a dialogic teaching stance. The second domain intentionally guides new teachers to explore classroom data and consider students as knowledge resources in shaping instruction. The third domain sustains dialogue about discussion processes and evolving conceptions of dialogism in small groups of preservice teacher collectives, enabling sharing of inquiry data, emerging findings, and dilemmas of practice. Drawing upon a larger database, we present a case study demonstrating one preservice teacher's inquiry work with deep analysis of student talk, detailed memoing processes featuring challenges and benefits of developing dialogic teaching practices, thoughtful criticism of long-established discussion practices, and discoveries about nuances of dialogic teaching. Our case contributes to the literature by presenting an example of dialogic pedagogy for teacher education, in service of preservice teachers learning to lead classroom discussions. Additional innovative pedagogical designs are needed to assist teachers in gaining complex knowledge and practice for teaching and promoting meaningful and learning-rich talk in K-12 classrooms.

Background: Classroom discourse featuring meaning making supports students achieving discipline-specific learning. However, moving beyond recitation requires developing beliefs, skills, structures, and practices. Any theorizing we do about developing discussion practice must attend to realities of culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. Purpose: Our study offers a teacher education innovation that prepares ELA candidates to facilitate discussion, framed by a set of noticing lenses: noticing for "collaborative communication," "content learning," and "equity." We asked: As they reflected on their first attempts at facilitating discussion in diverse secondary ELA classes, what did preservice teachers (PSTs) notice about their discussion practices and students' engagement and response patterns? Participants: Our study features an inquiry course in a teacher credential program. Participants were 83 PSTs pursuing secondary English credentials, student teaching in diverse classrooms. Three-fifths identified as White, with 39% identifying as PSTs of color. Design: We constructed a database of multipage essays in which PSTs reflected on videotaped discussion tryouts. We developed a coding scheme from research literature and emerging themes from data review to capture what PSTs noticed. We organized themes conceptually using and adapting a multi-lens noticing framework. Additionally, we constructed vignettes to explore ways two PSTs were noticing discussion engagements among their diverse learners. Results: We found evidence of all three noticing lenses in the data. Of the three lenses, collaborative communication was densest. PSTs were preoccupied with "getting students talking." PSTs also reflected on attempts at co-constructing meaning and tracking flow of ideas. Three-fourths documented noticing of crosscontent literacy development. Fewer PSTs demonstrated attending to collaborative interpretation of literary works, an important aspect of ELA-specific discussion. Although PSTs were beginning to leverage cultural and linguistic knowledge, many were not yet responding to or educating about racism and other forms of bias. To demonstrate multi-lens noticing in practice, we present two vignettes of how PSTs interpreted salient moments in classroom discussion. Conclusions: Our research provides a launching for understanding what PSTs notice in early stages of leading discussion and highlights what is needed to jumpstart this process early. Findings underscore the need to build authentic and tangible discussion-leading practice, with deeper attention to ELA disciplinary goals and equity. Our study highlights a framework as an analytical and pedagogical tool to help PSTs organize and reflect on emerging discussion practices. Framework and findings may serve as a heuristic for teacher educators committed to fostering learning about equitable discussion.

Promoting equitable access to the arts may depend on structures that support teachers in integrating arts into core curricula. We describe an arts-integration design that spotlights attention within and beyond one teacher credential program to one arts field--drama--engaging 24 new non-arts teachers across grades and subjects who participated in a drama academy. Our project shines the light on contributions of early-career teachers to generating conceptions derived from immersion in drama and inquiry into classroom practice. We focus on teachers' developing repertoires of drama-based pedagogy (DBP) practices for use among diverse learners, and on engagements in ongoing inquiry and reflective cycles. Drawing upon teachers' reflections and classroom inquiry projects from a multiyear experience, we mapped teachers' drama conceptions and practices in three interactive tiers: "foundational," "core," and "critical literacies." We illustrate themes with teachers' reflections and reports of practice, including a vignette of a Mexican-American/Chicana teacher with children ages 9-10, a number of them native-Spanish speaking emergent bilinguals. The study informs teacher efforts in diverse classrooms to integrate and sustain classroom drama. Drawing upon insights and themes from results, we offer policy implications and recommendations for others wishing to design for and learn from innovative drama integration efforts.

Classroom drama holds promise for student learning across disciplines. When Shakespeare's works are included in diverse classrooms, supported by drama activities, students can embody, voice, and explore themes and societal issues, bringing such themes alive. This study documents challenges and opportunities reported by teachers in their first-year teaching as they participated in an innovative cross-national partnership between Globe Education, Shakespeare's Globe, London and the School of Education, University of California, Davis. Survey results found new teachers' value exceeded their self-confidence in implementing Shakespeare and drama-based practices in their teaching. Teachers managed to infuse drama activities in classrooms, conducted inquiry into students' responses, and reported the need for further preparation to enact program practices. Two vignettes of classroom work further illustrate challenges and possibilities of partnership practices, and highlight needed adaptive work for successfully incorporating drama and Shakespeare in classrooms to explore social, cultural, and historical conflicts, themes, and dilemmas.

All disciplines have particular ways of knowing, common practices, and means of using language that mediate and potentially support engagement with the discipline. For multilingual learners, language demands of a discipline can be a closed door or a facilitated entryway. Drama and theater arts, the focus of our article, are often marginalized in curricula across the grades and therefore receive less attention to relevant disciplinary activities and language demands. In response to this pattern, our paper has several aims. We highlight ways language demands are embedded in drama and theater arts curricula and activities. Second, we describe and analyze ways instruction can attend to these demands and support multilingual learners' engagements with them. Third, we distill a set of principles that can guide teachers, guest artists, and teacher educators in their work on drama and theater arts with multilingual student populations. To accomplish these aims, we draw upon our own and others' teaching and research to frame instructional practices that support multilingual students' engagements with drama and theater activities. Engagements we describe span early childhood through high school years. Tapping our own work in several US states (Illinois, North Carolina, California), as well as in Argentina and the UK, we present data and themes from a high school study featuring drama and theater arts practices used with multilingual learners. We examine how principles from our framework are illustrated in data of the study. We also identify challenges and critical adaptations that may be needed to realize the potential of drama in work with multilingual students. Principles we identify may aid teachers, guest artists, and teacher educators in shaping drama and theater arts activities that spotlight language demands of the discipline(s) of drama and theater and provide supportive and meaningful instruction.

In Bianca's Grade 7 Class: Proclaiming a New Identity in Zoom Class was almost over when I received a Zoom chat message from 'Josh R.' asking if we could speak [...]

Among the greatest challenges of facilitating discussions in English classes is fostering meaningful student cross talk. Exchange and development of ideas is vital to collective meaning-making, yet most teachers experience [...]

This case study of one small urban California high school enrolling predominantly low-socioeconomic status (SES) Latinx youth and many emergent bilinguals found that a college-for-all school culture, guided by leadership and school vision, was enacted in classrooms as caring, safe, productive spaces promoting college-going comportment. However, support exceeded challenge, with routine scaffolds and formulaic activity. There was less evidence of learning opportunities that challenged intellectual capacities and students' analytic processes. Instruction overall maintained a sequential format of support, study skills, and content skills before challenging disciplinary work, with basic and intermediate academic literacies seldom embedded in activity that engaged higher order thinking, creativity, and imagination.

To develop preservice teachers’ (PSTs’) knowledge and practice for complex teaching, a pedagogical innovation featured a design of saturate, situate, and synthesize. Small-group inquiry into English teaching challenges was guided by a course saturated with diverse resources, situated in K-12 classrooms, and supported by visualization tools and reflection for synthesis. A case of one diverse group analyzes how they developed knowledge and practice for facilitating discussion to support critical response to text. Supported by diverse resources and synthesizing tools, discourse analysis into their culturally and linguistically diverse students’ interactions, social dynamics, and perspectives shaped PSTs’ conceptions of students co-constructing discussion.

This department explores how teachers can sustain students’ multilingual literacies and reimagine literacy learning across multiple contexts in conversation with researchers, practitioners, and communities.

For the last several years, teacher-researchers Jessica Jasper, Laura Dvorak, Steven Athanases, and Sergio Sanchez have partnered with a program called Globe Education, Shakespeare's Globe London. Practitioners in the program use teaching practices that engage learners with Shakespeare's works and other complex texts through drama practices. Jess and Laura, whose 7th and 8th grade classrooms are profiled in this article, are teacher affiliates of the Center for Shakespeare in Diverse Classrooms, housed at the University of California, Davis, and Steven and Sergio are the Center's research director and senior graduate research fellow, respectively. In their work, they commit to innovative uses of classroom drama to support engagement and learning for culturally and linguistically diverse students across subjects and grades. Both classrooms featured in this article are heterogeneously grouped, in highly diverse middle schools. They offer vignettes from each setting to demonstrate how access to challenging texts and an arts-oriented approach to learning are fruitful for younger learners. They partnered to develop classroom practices and to conduct inquiry on impacts and challenges of the work.

Within a partnership between a California university and Globe Education (Shakespeare's Globe, London), this study features early-career teachers working to infuse Shakespeare and drama in diverse K-12 classes. Teachers needed links between a five-day immersive London course and new jobs in diverse California schools. A three-day university Institute a year later provided a "structural bridge," featuring unit designs and drama activities for "Julius Caesar." Empathy and perspective-taking provided a "conceptual/thematic bridge," making text and activities timely for democratic, equitable societies. Adaptive teaching provided a "pedagogical bridge," guiding teachers to make partnership practices meaningful. Two first-year teacher cases illustrate challenges and possibilities.

As classrooms grow increasingly diverse internationally, teachers need support to teach diverse students. Bilingual teachers hold particular potential to provide culturally and linguistically responsive instruction. We need to know more about teacher education learning opportunities and ways bilingual teachers leverage these as resources. Drawing on theories of teacher agency and resources for teacher knowledge, we examined two resources that may foster teacher learning and practice. The first was self-reflexive inquiry into language and culture. The second resource was student-learning inquiry into students as language users and learners. Over three years, we followed Alma (a Colombian who immigrated to the US) in an undergraduate Cultural Diversity and Education course, a post-Baccalaureate teacher credential program, and an MA program during her first year teaching kindergarten in a dual-language program. We found that Alma sustained resourcefulness in teaching, leveraging multiple resources for agentive decision-making. Our study highlights contributions of self-reflexive and student-learning inquiries as Alma grounded her teaching in personal experiences as a bilingual, language ideologies, and her students' moments of language learning and meaning-making. We theorize that linking one's experiences with multiple interacting resources can foster needed knowledge and agency in novice teachers as they engage in decision-making in complex teaching contexts.

Many teachers enter teacher education programs expecting to develop tools and ways of thinking necessary to cultivate educational equity in their classrooms. Trends for teacher learning and development show that, while equity gets addressed, there is less evidence of frameworks, tools, and practices that center equity for teacher learning and practice. There also is the added challenge of competing demands on teachers' time and restrictive environments that impede their practice. Our work enters here, with attention to these early years of teaching that are ripe with possibilities for new teacher thinking and practice related to equity. In this conceptual article, we present a framework that draws upon conceptions of noticing for equity. The focus is the micro-moments within fleeting classroom discourse when equity themes and issues arise and warrant redress. In addition, we contribute a multi-lensed framework to surface and map the nuances and complexities of this equity-focused work in real moments of classroom practice. We describe ways we have worked with our teacher partners on this process. Finally, we offer teachers, education leaders, and teacher educators activities to guide equity-informed noticing, reflecting, and action--particularly in the realities of competing priorities of classroom and school life.

Background/Context: Urban public high schools serving low-SES communities historically have underserved nondominant culturally and linguistically diverse students by divesting them of social and cultural resources and delivering impoverished curriculum and instruction. Associated with such subtractive schooling, many Latinx youth have suffered from academic disengagement and limited academic success and futures. Focus of Study: This study investigates one school's efforts to promote Latinx students' academic and intellectual engagement through a schoolwide system of performance-based assessments (PBAs) that featured meaningful, embodied, discourse-rich activities, many of which occurred beyond classrooms during after-school hours. We examine the scope of PBA opportunity across the school and the ways educators enacted PBAs to optimize nondominant students' engagement. We also report the organizational structures that enabled the PBA system and some implementation challenges/tensions. Setting: This study features Mario Molina High, a small urban Title 1 public California school serving 262 students, of whom 90% received free/reduced-price lunches, 76% were Latinx, and 33% were emergent bilinguals. MHS emphasized an explicit social justice mission and had a record of some success with Latinx students, as measured by graduation and college-going rates, course completion for admission to California universities, and standardized achievement tests. Research Design: We treat MHS as a "critical case," holding strategic importance to the problem on which the study focuses. Using qualitative methods, we employed a bi-level design to uncover links between school organization and instruction. Data Collection and Analysis: We drew on 240 hours of school observations, with special attention to PBA enactments. We also drew on 45 interviews with key stakeholders; faculty survey responses; school documents; student work; and email list communications. Our analysis involved thematic coding, memos, metamatrices, and situated/discourse analyses. Findings/Results: MHS's PBAs drew school actors out of the spatial/temporal boundaries of classrooms and fostered serious, spirited, interactive spaces for learning. Three aspects of PBAs--authentic audiences, embodied action, and dialogic argumentation--transformed these assessments into what we call performance-based engagements (PBEs). This shift enhanced students' engagement and contributed to a schoolwide culture of engaged learning. We argue that sustained participation in PBEs encouraged students to experiment with and adopt expanded practice-based identities as critical thinkers and change agents. Conclusions/Recommendations: Our study suggests how the schoolwide implementation of dynamic, innovative, and culturally sustaining forms of assessment can expand and revivify traditional school learning in ways that promote the academic and intellectual engagement of historically underserved students.

With a burgeoning U.S. population of emergent bilingual learners and others who use nondominant language forms, the need for language knowledge among teachers is acute. Beginning from the inside out by examining one's own complex language uses may be a first step toward envisioning and later developing classroom cultures that support diverse language forms for diverse purposes. In all, 262 undergraduate education students used self-reflexive inquiry, documenting ways they and others use language, through language inventories, surveys, and essays. Participants were majority students of color, half bilingual. Students reported awareness of rich diversity and nuances of language uses, purposes, and fluidity across contexts. Although students often used a formal/informal contrast to describe language uses, this distinction was complicated. Understandings of language surfaced in writing as students engaged with linguistically diverse peers and situated their linguistic repertoires in sociopolitical context. Drawing on results and students' reflections on the writings as tools, we offer implications for teacher education.

Thirty seventh-grade students stand face-to face in pairs, dispersed throughout a classroom in a culturally and linguistically diverse school serving a low-SES California community. Each student holds a duologue (stage [...]

With a burgeoning U.S. population of emergent bilingual learners and others who use nondominant language forms, the need for language knowledge among teachers is acute. Beginning from the inside out by examining one's own complex language uses may be a first step toward envisioning and later developing classroom cultures that support diverse language forms for diverse purposes. In all, 262 undergraduate education students used self-reflexive inquiry, documenting ways they and others use language, through language inventories, surveys, and essays. Participants were majority students of color, half bilingual. Students reported awareness of rich diversity and nuances of language uses, purposes, and fluidity across contexts. Although students often used a formal/informal contrast to describe language uses, this distinction was complicated. Understandings of language surfaced in writing as students engaged with linguistically diverse peers and situated their linguistic repertoires in sociopolitical context. Drawing on results and students' reflections on the writings as tools, we offer implications for teacher education. Keywords bilingual/English language learners, multicultural education, multicultural teacher education, diversity, An assumption persists in schools that one academic English variety is acceptable and prerequisite for learning (Franquiz & de la luz Reyes, 1998; Godley, Sweetland, Wheeler, Minnici, & Carpenter, 2006). [...]

One task of Feiman-Nemser's teacher learning model--develop tools and dispositions to study teaching--frames how we organized learning opportunities during teacher preparation. We explored how and to what degree preservice teachers used teacher inquiry to analyze linguistically diverse students' work through an asset-based lens, beyond deficit perspectives, attending to student learning that was present. Preservice teachers reflected on practice and varied in how they integrated knowledge of students and linguistic diversity in inquiry.

This commentary presents a coherent framework that reenvisions instructional scaffolding for linguistically and culturally diverse learners, based on our research, teaching, and collaborations with teachers. We have worked to understand how, why, and when supports work, for whom, and in what ways, as well as tensions and challenges that teachers encounter as they consider supports for an increasingly diverse student population. The framework is organized in three domains: scaffolding for whom, for what purpose(s), and how. Each domain includes guiding questions to help teachers plan, shaped by literacy research. Relevant actions illustrate ways to address the questions and focus on each domain. Practices of three teachers illustrate the framework in action.

The purpose of this study is to strengthen teachers' knowledge of multicultural literature for use with high school students in a highly diverse, high needs urban school district through a university-schools partnership. A core English group of 15-20 members of a university-schools partnership met in monthly department-based and periodic districtwide workshops and summer three-day institutes. This work supported instructional assistance, response to student writing, and development of teaching resources--all to strengthen preparation of African American and Latino youth in an urban low performing California high school district. Several teachers called for the summer institute to read, study, and plan units for multicultural literary works. Institute participants were 17 teachers (14 female) with teaching experience of 1 to over 25 years. Two staff development coordinators, both White (a colleague and the author), facilitated activities, read and discussed with book groups, and documented events. Data included institute observation field notes of activities and audiotapes of discussions later transcribed. As in other studies, this study found teachers used a stance of responding personally to culturally unfamiliar work, noting what in texts felt familiar and universal. However, unlike in most related work, this study also found many instances of teachers adopting a stance of ethical respect for characters. In fact, this study found a "range" of stances seldom occurring in isolation. In work on a single novel, for example, teachers together adopted one stance then used others. In some cases, a teacher adopted a stance different from a group and shifted stances through group discussion. Various versions of the permeable and recursive nature of the response stances are illustrated. (Contains 2 tables.)

This article reports on a case study of an English language arts (ELA) teacher education course that prioritized amplification as a method to decenter whiteness in English teacher preparation. The researchers demonstrate how they engaged in designing a course that aimed to use interactive digital technologies and multimodal texts to amplify racially and ethnically marginalized voices in ELA preservice education. Design principles that facilitated amplification included saturation of the learning environment with mediational resources and tools (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) and the notion of "low floor and wide walls" (Resnick & Silverman, 2005). The analysis revealed ways in which the course design supported engagement with culturally sustaining pedagogies and the amplification of authors, literary characters, and preservice teachers from historically marginalized groups. Concrete examples are provided of intentional design decisions and course features that opened up opportunities for preservice teachers to engage in discourse that foregrounded identities related to race, ethnicity, language, and gender/sexual orientation.

This article presents a 2-year critical case study of an urban high school innovating to enhance the academic performance of low-income Latina/o students, highlighting high-leverage practices that promote boundary crossing between school and community. First, we highlight foundational elements of school logic, mission, and community ethos that enabled boundary crossing. Second, we identify a key set of boundary-crossing practices that tap and build community wealth, and forms of capital that are shared, by bringing community into school and fostering youth engagement in community. We also reveal opportunities afforded and complexities arising from boundary crossing between school and community.

The pedagogical innovation of this study is self-reflexive inquiry into language, culture, and identity. This work was conducted in a course on Cultural Diversity and Education serving 76 culturally and linguistically diverse undergraduate students, many of whom planned to become teachers. Through analysis of a Personal Language Inventory and other assignments and surveys, we surface the range of beliefs these diverse students hold about language, prompted by reflective activities, including the impact of their experiences with linguicism and the tensions and variations they report on dominant language ideologies. We highlight potential openings for transformation and argue that a deep understanding of the often-unexposed language ideologies of potential teachers before and as they enter teacher preparation programs is a necessary first step toward developing coursework and experiences that will help guide them toward more expansive views of language. Such expansive views may impact future teachers' practices and student learning opportunities, particularly important in classrooms of linguistically diverse learners.

Teacher inquiry holds promise in teacher education, but only if student teachers take up inquiry practices as they leave preservice and transition to teaching. As they learn to conduct inquiry during preservice, student teachers may begin to internalize dispositions that promote ongoing inquiry experiences. Through analysis of questionnaires conducted at preservice and inservice, and through a focus group discussion, the authors sought to understand how teachers who had experienced one scaffolded, student-focused, and data-based preservice teacher inquiry model conceptualized the relationship between teaching and inquiry. Analyses revealed that teachers' conceptions cast inquiry overall as a tight fit with teaching in three ways: by fostering a focus on students, by generating metacognitive knowledge about inquiry as a useful classroom process, and by deepening teacher knowledge about ways to respond thoughtfully to diagnosed student need. Analyses suggest program model elements may have seeded these conceptions.

Consensus exists that effective teaching includes capacity to adapt instruction to respond to student learning challenges as they arise. Adaptive teachers may keep pace with rapidly evolving youth literacies and students' increasing cultural and linguistic diversity. Teachers are challenged to critically examine pedagogy when some contexts expect compliance with scripts and testing regimens and impede innovation. Recent research is building cumulative knowledge on adaptive teaching in literacy--its forms, purposes, and values. For preservice teachers (PSTs) still developing curriculum and routines, developing adaptive expertise is particularly challenging. The present study examined how, if at all, a data- based model of teacher inquiry in one teacher education program fostered adaptive teaching in grades 7-12 English language arts placements in mostly high poverty, highly diverse schools. The study examined 96 inquiries collected over seven years, plus PST questionnaires, memos, and discussions. PSTs overall worked with classroom data in ways that discerned patterns in student work and used findings to change the means by which their objectives could be met, through adapting literacy routines, materials, strategies, and activities. Adaptations were complex, not always effective, often challenging as PSTs weighed alternatives, tried to align adaptations with data, and worked to develop data-based rationales for instructional adaptations. Inquiry processes that supported PSTs in adaptive teaching included close examination of data, discovery and reflection, alignment of adaptations with data, and critique of adaptations. A disposition of flexibility supported the work. Findings contribute to literatures on adaptive literacy teaching and preservice teacher inquiry in English language arts.

Bilingual prospective teachers of color may possess experiences and knowledge particularly suitable for teaching linguistically diverse students but may need guidance and support to leverage such resources for teaching. In a class of 76 undergraduates, with a focus on bilingual students of color intending to teach, this study used self-reflexive inquiry to foster reflections on language histories, repertoires, and ideologies. Using surveys, writings, and focal student language profiles, the study surfaced themes and contrasts across profiles and found that self-reflexive inquiry promoted metalinguistic awareness and helped students begin to leverage their linguistic resources in generating ideas for teaching linguistically diverse learners.

Promoting equitable access to the arts may depend on structures that support teachers in integrating arts into core curricula. We describe an arts-integration design that spotlights attention within and beyond one teacher credential program to one arts field–drama–engaging 24 new non-arts teachers across grades and subjects who participated in a drama academy. Our project shines the light on contributions of early-career teachers to generating conceptions derived from immersion in drama and inquiry into classroom practice. We focus on teachers' developing repertoires of drama-based pedagogy (DBP) practices for use among wwdiverse learners, and on engagements in ongoing inquiry and reflective cycles. Drawing upon teachers' reflections and classroom inquiry projects from a multiyear experience, we mapped teachers' drama conceptions and practices in three interactive tiers: foundational, core, and critical literacies. We illustrate themes with teachers' reflections and reports of practice, including a vignette of a Mexican-American/Chicana teacher with children ages 9–10, a number of them native-Spanish speaking emergent bilinguals. The study informs teacher efforts in diverse classrooms to integrate and sustain classroom drama. Drawing upon insights and themes from results, we offer policy implications and recommendations for others wishing to design for and learn from innovative drama integration efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scaffolding is widely referenced in educational literature and practice, in literacy education in particular, but often in reductive ways. Scaffolding is key for diverse youth in high-need settings, but few studies examine complexities and tensions of scaffolding in practice. This study asked how, if at all, teachers at a California high school with a mission to prepare urban, low-income, mostly Latina/o youth for academics and college admission enacted scaffolding to help students, many of them English learners, achieve academic goals. Drawing upon school and classroom data collected over a year and a half, including videorecorded observations, interviews, and student work samples, the study used observation instruments and qualitative analyses to answer questions using two teacher cases. Considering scaffolding for whom, teachers supported students they hoped to see achieve but whom they felt needed many supports, given histories of low test scores and some academic failure. In scaffolding for what purpose(s), much attention was devoted to scaffolding basic and intermediate levels of literacy activity, with less evidence of scaffolding disciplinary literacy and higher-order thinking. For scaffolding how, planned scaffolds of sequenced activities dominated, with promising examples of interactional scaffolds. One teacher case illustrates routine support, while the second illustrates scaffolding aligned with core elements of contingency, fading, and transfer of responsibility and with use of sociocultural dimensions of learning. The study highlights promise and tensions in scaffolding learning for Latino/a students in one urban public high school, with implications for teaching youth of color in low-income settings, teaching English learners, and preparing teachers for this work.

Lower-income students of color in California are often underserved, as evidenced by low-resourced schools, an achievement gap, and low college-going rates. Educators increasingly call for "community schools" that link schools with community members and agencies to promote educational achievement and to access communities as resources for learning. The authors recently studied one such school in California with documented success, where they found examples of powerful practices and strong links between school and community. They sought to understand how the school partnered with local communities to organize for success, and how it fostered meaningful learning.

Writing is central to academic development, permeates content area coursework and serves as both a vehicle for and a display of learning. For English learners (ELs), writing poses challenges, and teachers need preparation in how to understand and respond to these. This study reports 5 teacher inquiry processes that preservice teachers in one teacher education program used to learn more about their ELs and their writing performances, strengths, learning, preferences, and needs. The inquiry processes provided opportunities to develop knowledge of content and students (Ball, Thames, & Phelps, 2008), a key subdomain of the knowledge base of effective teaching.

During the last several years as a teacher educator mentoring new teachers, the author has worked on two programs of research that included ways of focusing early-career teachers on students and their learning. These research programs shed light on needs of new teachers and ways mentor questioning and processes of classroom inquiry can have an impact. Steven Athanases uses findings and examples from studies he and colleagues have conducted, as well as from work of others, to offer ideas for English language arts teachers and leaders to conduct student-learning focused mentoring of new ELA teachers through questioning and inquiry. (Contains 2 figures.)

Data literate educators can generate questions about learning in their classes; collect and analyze classroom data to answer them; and develop inferences and explanations. Two elements may promote data literacy: (a) breadth of classroom-based data collection and (b) depth of analysis. We examined these in inquiries conducted by 80 preservice teachers of secondary English in diverse classrooms over a 6-year period. Analyzing products, processes, and self-reports, we found inquiries evidenced a range in breadth of data collection and depth of analysis. Qualitative themes and two cases illustrate data analysis processes and challenges of pattern finding, initially crude analyses in striving for depth, and the need for data literacy mentoring. (Contains 1 table and 3 figures.)

Background/Context: Learning to meet students' needs challenges new teachers often focused on procedures, management, materials, and curriculum. To avoid this development pattern, student teachers (STs) need opportunities to concentrate especially on needs of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students. Teacher inquiry (TI) holds promise as one such opportunity. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: We sought to understand how STs in a teacher credential program with a history of attention to diverse learners were learning about their CLD students through TI. Research Design: We examined data collected from 80 STs over a 6-year period, including 80 TIs; STs' data analysis field memos; questionnaires with reflections on TI processes and products; and taped ST peer discussions and conferences with instructor. Data also documented TI instruction, classroom culture, and opportunities to develop learning related to conducting TI. Drawing on research and theory, we developed, tested, and used a rubric of 17 indicators of attention to CLD learners as a means to examine the range of ways and the extent to which STs attended to CLD students through TI. Findings/Results: STs took actions of various kinds to learn about diverse students: researching contexts and histories; examining student work and performance at full-class, subgroup, and individual levels; and asking and listening beneath the surface to students' reasoning, attitudes, beliefs, and concerns about school learning and other issues. Various assessment and inquiry tools supported the process, helping STs develop data literacy to attend to CLD learners. However, TI elements were used to varying degrees, in various ways, and with varying levels of success. Two cases illustrate the range of TI tools that STs used to learn about their CLD learners, to generate data and evidence about learning, and to act in ways responsive to what they learned about students. Conclusions/Recommendations: Those interested in studying multiple STs' inquiries for attention to CLD learners may need to develop frames and analytic methods to examine a corpus of cases. This study was grounded in an assumption that such crosscutting analyses accumulate knowledge to disseminate to larger audiences, challenging conceptions that values of TI are purely local, serving only those directly involved.

This study examines four case studies of mentors of new teachers who assumed leadership of teacher induction programmes. Using cycles of action research conducted in a teacher induction leadership network, the case-study authors inquired into the features of the mentor curriculum. Cross-case analyses suggest the need for three elements of mentor curriculum. Tools, scripts, and routines can support the work, but generic scaffolds need to be adapted and tailored to local needs. In a time of standards reform and high-stakes assessment in the US, the needs of new teachers should be tied to students and their learning, the ultimate target of mentor development, particularly in many urban and other high-need districts. Finally, action research and inquiry skills can enable mentors and induction leaders to respond to data about how mentor curriculum must be tailored to the particular needs of mentors, new teachers, and students. (Contains 1 table, 1 figure, and 1 note.)

Using written language of early adolescents at a California middle school, this study investigated seventh grade students' perspectives on the frequency of hearing and using homophobic name-calling, reasons such language gets used, and reactions to hearing others use it. Students reported widespread use of homophobic name-calling but disagreed about what it means. Most saw it as innocuous banter or generic insult, but others cast it as gender-identity putdown, LGBT slur, or speech that injures even when LGBT people are not present. Students rarely challenged the name-calling. Analyses suggest that pre- and early-adolescents may benefit from instruction in language and power; in ways homophobic name-calling injures; and in how to be allies and advocates, confronting injurious speech among peers. (Contains 1 note, 1 figure and 1 table.)

Background/Context: New teachers face an array of challenges in today's schools. Even when teachers leave credential programs with useful preparation, early-career jobs and contexts shape and constrain teachers' goals and practice related to teaching diverse learners. Becoming change agents can be a tall order. Purpose/Objective/research Question/Focus of Study: Considering this context, we sought to understand how graduates of one teacher credential program appear prepared to advocate for educational equity in their new jobs by asking three questions: (1) What challenges do new teachers identify in classes and schools that require advocacy for some youth? (2) In what ways do they respond to such challenges? and (3) What enables these acts of advocacy? Research Design: A total of 38 graduates, all currently teaching, participated in five separate 3-hour focus groups of 5-10 teachers each. We used focus groups as a research tool to triangulate a range of other data, including artifacts and surveys. We sought teachers' deep reflections on practice, on their preparation for advocacy work, and on their professional needs. We transcribed focus group discussions then subjected these to a series of procedures, including analysis of content and themes of teachers' narratives. Findings/Results: Teachers reported actions to address equity in a range of sites, with the classroom as the core site for teachers' advocacy work. In complex narratives, teachers reported trying to meet learning needs of diverse students. English language learners' needs especially prompted acts of advocacy in and beyond the classroom. These included instructional tailoring, out-of-class tutorials, hunts for better texts and tests, a library field trip, creation of a culture/computer club, heightened parent contacts, and launching of a bilingual parent group. Teachers' acts of advocacy shared four crosscutting themes: a goal of equitable access to resources and support, convictions about equity, interceding on behalf of students in need, and engaging coadvocates. Teachers reported that these themes have grounding in their teacher credential program, which featured advocating for equity in its mission, goals, and practices. Those with bilingual education credentials engaged in more acts of advocacy beyond the classroom, and analyses suggest that this may be due to credential program experiences, life experiences, and the larger sociopolitical context for teaching English language learners. Conclusions/Recommendations: Results challenge conventional models of learning to teach, documenting how teachers, even in the throes of the induction period, can focus on student learning and on ways to advocate in and beyond the classroom for those in need of someone interceding on their behalf, particularly when well prepared to do so.

Despite frustration with school constraints, new teachers who graduated from a program focused on advocacy for equity spoke for students in need in school forums and spoke up about issues of equity. Speaking for students, driven by convictions about equitable access to resources and a responsibility to act, often helped garner support and affected attitudes and school practices. However, this did not occur cost-free. Despite apparently strong preparation to advocate for equity, teachers reported that advocacy required persistence and sometimes confrontation with colleagues and administrators, some describing an assessment of risk, often feeling vulnerable in new jobs. A case of one teacher's advocacy for special needs students and for one boy in particular illustrates these issues. Suggestions are offered for ways teacher education can prepare teachers to speak for students in need and speak up and against practices and policies that impede equity. (Contains 1 note.)

Beginning teachers, who graduated from a credential program focused on preparing advocates for equity and with attention to teaching English language learners (ELLs), had reported in surveys being well prepared to teach ELLs and promote equity. Focus groups illuminated teachers' reports of ways they advocated for ELLs. Reported classroom acts included creating and maintaining safe environments for English language use and development, differentiating instruction and designing interventions for ELLs, and responding to sociopolitical issues related to race, language, and class. Reported advocacy beyond the classroom included seeing inequity and addressing it with lunchtime and after-school tutorials and clubs, and with family contacts and home visits. Sometimes, such advocacy also included critiquing institutional practices or policy, and proposing or building alternatives. Three cases illustrate accounts of school challenges in meeting needs of ELLs, and document possibilities for how advocacy for ELLs, even in the first years of teaching, can be pursued.

Drawing on a 5-year program-wide investigation of ways preservice teachers learn to teach to diversity, this study uses focus groups of graduates to illuminate survey results of their feeling well prepared to advocate for equity in classrooms and schools. Offering suggestions for improvement, graduates nonetheless reported two broad categories of program strength. The first was the value of infusion of culture, language, and equity content in coursework. Themes in strong coursework included focus on culturally responsive, equity-focused pedagogy; preparation to teach English language learners; developing cultural knowledge and sensitivity; and learning advocacy beyond the classroom. Faculty taught and modeled these concerns through many means. The second, which extended coursework, was sustained and scaffolded apprenticeships in teaching for equity, including student teaching supervisors as equity mentors, placements that support teaching for equity, and ongoing cohort discussions of equity teaching.

Steven Z. Athanases, a high school English teacher, describes a unit of studying poems through performance where students spend their time looking deeply into a single, chosen poem. The processes of reflection and preparation often result in increased understanding of the poem's meaning.

Examined the practice of experienced teacher induction leaders and mentor-new teacher pairs to determine what mentors needed to know and be able to do to sharpen new teachers' focus on individual student learning and growth. Results found that mentors were able to focus new teachers on individual student learning, particularly among underperforming students. Results suggest that mentors can benefit from knowledge, skills, and dispositions in several areas. (SM)