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Transforming Teacher Learning Through Design Activity:
Creating a Web-based Professional Development Support
System for Video Case-based Professional Learning
LeAnne Sawyers
The University of Chicago Center for Urban School Improvement
Anthony S. Bryk
Stanford University
Irene Fountas
Lesley University
Gay Su Pinnell
The Ohio State University
Patricia L. Scharer
The Ohio State University
Lisa Walker
The University of Chicago Center for Urban School Improvement
Paper presented at the Conference of the American Educational Research Association
Chicago, Illinois
April, 2007
The work described here has been supported by a Teacher Quality Grant from the Institute of Education Sciences, R305M040086, “Can Literacy Professional Development be improved with Web-Based Collaborative Learning tools: A Randomized Field Trial.” We are appreciative
of this support from IES. All errors of fact, omission and/or interpretation are solely the responsibility of the authors.
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The educational reform movement has set rigorous standards for student learning that emphasize “much more complex forms of thinking
and reasoning (e.g. high-level reasoning, critical interpretation of texts, problem solving, and thoughtful discourse)” (Stein & Spillane, 2003,
p.3). This press for ambitious learning for all students has brought with it a need to “revolutionize” teacher practice (Ball & Cohen, 1999).
As early as 1993, Judith Little noted:
These reforms constitute a departure from canonical views of curriculum and from textbook-centered or recitation-style teaching. They demand a greater facility among teachers for integrating subject content and for organizing students’ opportunities
to learn. They represent, on the whole, a substantial departure from teachers’ prior experience, established beliefs, and present
practice. Indeed, they hold out an image of conditions of learning for children that their teachers have themselves rarely experienced. (Little 1993, p.130)
Little continues, arguing that there is a “problem of fit between the task of reform and the prevailing models of professional development—
in particular, the dominance of a training paradigm built on knowledge consumption, and the lesser support for an inquiry and problemsolving paradigm built around knowledge production” (p. 139). Since the publication of Little’s essay there has been growing evidence that
teacher quality is the key factor in the equation to improve student learning, but access to sustained, in-depth professional learning opportunities aligned with student and teacher needs continues to be a chronic problem (Darling-Hammond, 2004). The demand for improved
resources, tools, methods, and infrastructure to support teachers’ professional learning has become even more acute in the current climate
of accountability.
In this paper we report on a project to design and implement a web-based professional development support system ( PDS²). PDS² is a
product of a multi-university research and development effort, the Information Infrastructure System (IIS), at the University of Chicago
Center for Urban School Improvement (USI). The design of PDS² is a joint effort that has brought together the expertise and capacity of IIS
designers and researchers; Literacy Collaborative, a research-based model for improving literacy instruction through school-based professional developers; and Teachscape, a commercial entity that specializes in providing professional development services through technology.
The intent behind PDS² is to support video case-based professional learning by teacher educators and teachers engaged in the process of
transforming their literacy practices. PDS² targets several outcomes of the IIS activity theory framework, including more reflective instructional practices in classrooms, teachers with stronger analytic capacities, and school organizations where a shared professional language
guides instruction. Our paper begins with an illustration and analysis of evidence-based literacy instruction and the implications of this
kind of practice for the professional development of teachers. PDS² is a response to calls for new forms of professional development that
hold promise for preparing teachers to be reflective in their practice.
The heart of the paper is a discussion of the iterative design processes we employed around PDS² first to create the video case-based professional development resources housed in PDS² and then to engineer the use of these resources in a range of professional development
contexts. We focus on issues and tensions that arose when design decisions and events challenged established beliefs and existing practices. Debate over these issues resulted in a deep consideration of what it takes to align professional development with the demands of ambitious reform through evidence-based practices. We conclude with a discussion of how this design project, which was originally undertaken
to extend and enhance an existing professional development model, may have a more transformative effect on the model than anticipated.
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Implementing academically rigorous, evidence-based literacy instruction is a complex activity that greatly increases the teacher’s instructional decision-making responsibilities. Instead of following a prescribed scope and sequence of instruction and using the same instructional materials, pedagogical approaches, and pacing for all students, evidence-based educators must become adept at collecting and
analyzing informal and formal data on student learning on an ongoing basis and then using this data to design instruction to meet the
differentiated needs of their students.
Illustration of Evidence-based Literacy Instruction
The complexity of evidence-based practice is illustrated in the following scenario describing a sampling of the instructional events that
make up one day’s two and one-half-hour block of literacy instruction in a third-grade classroom—an interactive read-aloud, reading workshop and small-group guided reading lessons.
As students arrive in Ms. Frank’s classroom each morning, they gather in a “community circle” for a brief morning greeting and
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information-sharing time. Ms. Frank uses this time to take an informal reading on her students—do they appear to be well
rested and ready for the day or have some of them arrived with baggage that could interfere with their learning? She wraps up
circle time with a description of the morning’s agenda which includes an interactive read-aloud, reading workshop, small group
guided reading, a word study lesson, and writing workshop.
Interactive read-aloud. From “community circle” Ms. Frank moves right into a whole-group interactive read-aloud. There are two
overall goals for this activity: to enable students to discuss and think critically about texts that are of a level of difficulty beyond
their ability to read and understand independently, and to model reading behaviors and strategies that students can employ when
they are reading independently.
Planning an appropriate level of teacher support for this activity requires a number of instructional decisions. In selecting the
text, for example, Ms. Frank carefully chooses a picture book which, through the interplay of the writer’s figurative language and
the illustrator’s interpretive craft, will engage her students’ interest and present rich learning opportunities that are within her
students’ range of abilities as learners. Through her own close analysis of the text and consideration of her students’ knowledge,
she designs critical-thinking questions for students to discuss periodically throughout the reading that will support a deeper
understanding of the story and the craft of the author and illustrator. She also anticipates where points of difficulty may occur
and how she might help her students work through any confusions that may arise as students respond to the text.
Even with this careful planning successful enactment of the read-aloud will require yet another set of in-the-moment teacher
decisions based on students’ responses. Ms. Frank begins the read-aloud with a brief introduction that is designed to draw
the children into the story and activate their thinking. As she reads she models fluent and expressive reading and pauses occasionally to think aloud about how she makes sense of something she doesn’t understand. As the story continues she monitors
the attention level of students and poses discussion questions based on her observations. If student comments or questions
reflect confusions, she asks questions to gauge their level of understanding and follows up with teaching points to support
their comprehension. Rather than simply supply answers to her students’ questions she facilitates a discussion that helps the
children make sense of the text collectively.
After reading the text Ms. Frank poses a question that requires students to draw inferences from the text and illustrations, and
instructs her students to turn and talk about this to their partners. While this brief discussion goes on Ms. Frank listens in and
takes note of her students’ thinking which she will immediately incorporate into the final whole-group discussion of the text.
To wrap up the interactive read-aloud she asks several strategically selected partners to share what they had discussed and
invites the rest of the class to respond to their ideas.
To conclude the lesson Ms. Frank recaps the various strategies the class has used to make sense of the read-aloud text and
encourages them to use these same strategies in their independent work. Through the teacher/student and student/student
interactions built into this activity Ms. Frank has gathered a great deal of data on her students that she will take into account as
she plans future interactive read-aloud lessons, designs reading workshop minilessons, and confers with individual students.
Reading workshop. From the read-aloud, the class transitions into reading workshop, which includes a brief whole-group minilesson, small-group guided reading, independent reading time, and a wrap-up sharing time. Advance planning for this series of
instructional events is considerably more complex than the read-aloud process.
First Ms. Frank must identify a focus for the minilesson that will be most appropriate for the class as a whole and decide how
she wants to frame the lesson. While she is conducting a series of small-group guided reading lessons (described below) the
rest of the students will be reading texts they have selected from the classroom library as “just right for them” and writing
responses to their reading that will enable Ms. Frank to monitor and assess their independent work. This requires a well organized classroom library and established routines for selecting appropriate books.
Based on an analysis of routinely collected formal assessment data on students’ reading behaviors Ms. Frank is currently working with five guided reading groups: a group of three students reading level-G books, a group of five students reading level-L
books, a groups of six students at level M, six students at level O and four students at level P. These groups will change periodically as students’ needs change. Ms. Frank must select appropriate leveled texts for each of the three guided reading groups
she will meet on this particular day. She will plan a book introduction for each text, formulate questions for facilitating a comprehension conversation at the end of each guided reading lesson, and design a word work activity for her struggling readers’
group.
Just before wrapping up the reading workshop with a sharing time Ms. Frank will conduct brief individual reading conferences
with several students. This means she needs to decide with whom to check in and what to discuss with them. To prepare for
these conferences she reviews her students’ reading journals and her conference notes from the last several weeks and notices
that very few of her students are selecting nonfiction books for their independent reading. She knows that reading and comprehending informational texts in the content areas will be increasingly important for these students, so she decides to focus
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on the nonfiction genre in her upcoming reading workshop lessons and to incorporate more nonfiction texts into her interactive
read-alouds and guided reading lessons where appropriate.
Minilesson. Ms. Frank opens the reading workshop minilesson by inviting the students to describe the difference between the
genres of fiction and nonfiction. She follows this with a “book talk” about three nonfiction texts found in their classroom library
that she has selected to pique their interest in the nonfiction genre. To clarify some confusion about genre that surfaced in the
opening discussion she uses these three books to illustrate some of the features that distinguish fiction from nonfiction. She
wraps up the minilesson by encouraging students to consider a nonfiction text for their next independent reading selection.
Guided reading. The class then transitions into independent reading time at their desks, and Ms. Frank calls her first group to
the guided reading table. This level P group is made up of fluent readers who are reading chapter books and who have good independent control over a repertoire of reading strategies. The group is near the end of a chapter book and has been engaged in
an ongoing discussion about the main character and what motivates him to act the way he does. After a brief discussion of what
has transpired in the book since the last time they met, Ms. Frank poses a question that opens up a debate about the virtues
and shortcomings of the main character. Taking the lead from her students she decides to capitalize on this difference of opinion. She sends the group back to their seats with the assignment of finishing the last chapters and writing an opinion statement
about the main character. She instructs them to back up their opinions with evidence from the book, and to come prepared to
discuss this when the group meets again later in the week.
The second group Ms. Frank calls to the guided reading table is her level-G group of struggling readers who are performing significantly below the benchmark for third grade. She has selected a text that she has judged to be matched to their needs. She
has prepared a very supportive book introduction that she hopes will enable new learning without overwhelming the students
with the demands of the text, but her experience with this level of reader is limited and she is a little unsure about her decisions.
While they are each reading the text to themselves, she samples each child’s reading by asking them to read a page or two in a
whisper voice, and notes where they experience difficulty. She then provides prompts to help students self-monitor and problem-solve words. After each child has read the text at least once she prompts them to recall the events of the story and to share
anything they found interesting or confusing, and why. They briefly discuss one student’s observation that this story reminded
him of another story they had read previously. When another child mentions the difficulty he had figuring out a particular word,
Ms. Frank asks him to share his strategy for figuring out the word.
Ms. Frank. had planned a word work activity to do at the end of the guided reading lesson, but she decides to alter her plan
based on what she observed as the children were reading. She noticed that all three students had stumbled over a particular
compound word so she decides to focus on this. She writes this word on a white board and demonstrates how to identify words
they already know to help them figure out the compound word. She writes several more compound words on the white board
and they practice this word-solving strategy.
Ms. Frank then dismisses two of the children back to their desks and asks one to stay so that she can collect a running record
of her reading behaviors. This is data she routinely collects for all students and analyzes at the individual and classroom level
to inform her decisions about guided reading text selection, word study lesson foci, and when and how to reorganize her guided
reading groups. After completing the running record Ms. Frank jots down observations of the guided reading lesson, including
a question to herself: by providing such a supportive book introduction is she doing too much of the work for these students?
She wonders if she should step back a little in future lessons. She decides to ask her literacy coach to focus her next classroom
observations on her work with this group and to give her feedback on how successfully she is matching her level of support to
the needs of these students.
The third guided reading group Ms. Frank convenes for the day is her level-L group. The structure for this guided reading lesson
is similar to the previous group’s minus the word work. Readers in this group appear to read fluently and accurately and have
made fairly rapid progress from level-J to level-L books. Ms. Frank has noticed, however, that several of the students’ comprehension at this level has dropped off. For this reason Ms. Frank has been focusing on the comprehension conversation at the
end of each lesson. She is particularly concerned that the students struggling with comprehension skills have stalled while the
others have made progress and may soon be ready to move to level-M books. She feels as if she has exhausted her ideas for
supporting the stalled readers, and after the lesson she makes a note to herself to bring this dilemma to her grade-level study
group to see if her colleagues can help her analyze the formative assessment data on these students and devise a plan for addressing the problem.
Individual student conferences. After these three guided reading lessons and just before wrapping up reading workshop with
a sharing time, Ms. Frank walks around the classroom taking a quick survey of how students are reading and writing independently, pausing to have brief one-on-one conferences with select students. Prior to this lesson she has examined her previous
conference notes and several artifacts of student work that all children have created in their reader’s notebooks in order to
determine with which students she should confer and what to focus on with them. Artifacts of student work include: reading
logs where they record the title, genre, date completed, and student designations of books as “easy,” “just right,” or “difficult”;
and various written documents in which students record information about their reading interests and their thoughts about the
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texts they are reading.
Based on the information she gathers Ms. Frank had decided to conference with three students, but adjusts her plan to include
a student not on her initial list so that she can address a situation she has noticed unfolding throughout the morning. At “community circle” she had made a mental note of the sullen behavior of a normally engaged student, and noticed that this student
continued to be distracted throughout the rest of the morning. Her first conference is with this child so that she can gently
probe what the problem is, and, she hopes, help the child focus on reading.
The second conference is with a student who Ms. Frank worries is consistently selecting books that are too difficult for her to
read and make sense of independently. In this conference she talks with the student about how she is enjoying the books she
has selected and asks her what the book she is currently reading is about. Then asks her to read a brief selection out loud to
her and notes that her reading is halting and that she is not self-monitoring her understanding of the book. Ms. Frank reminds
her about an earlier reading workshop minilesson in which they talked about strategies for selecting “just right” books and they
go together to the classroom library to select more appropriate books to put into her collection of independent reading books.
The last conference is with a child that Ms. Frank knows loves nonfiction texts. She talks with her about her interests in this
genre and what she has learned from the books she has read, and asks if during sharing time she would like to do her own impromptu “book talk” about the nonfiction book she is reading.
Sharing. Sharing time begins with this student’s “book talk” which Ms. Frank hopes will stimulate more interest in the genre.
Ms. Frank encourages students to ask questions about or respond to the student’s “book talk,” and after some conversation, she
wraps up by thanking the student for sharing her enthusiasm about the books she is reading.
Analysis of Evidence-based Instruction
To plan and execute the type of instruction occurring in Ms. Frank’s classroom teachers must have an impressive array of knowledge and
skills. They need to have a deep understanding of the reading and writing processes, familiarity with the standards their students will be
expected to meet, and an awareness of the various pathways children take along a developmental continuum. They must also possess a
sophisticated knowledge of quality children’s books in all genres, the ability to discuss books with students in various contexts, a repertoire
of instructional approaches to employ for whole group, small-group and individualized learning, and the organizational and management
skills to orchestrate these complex events. By knowing and being able to do all this teachers may display a certain level of understanding
and technical competency, but to develop from competent teacher to accomplished professional requires more.
Researchers studying math and science reform and professional development have noted that “it is fairly common [for teachers] to get
a great deal right and still miss the point,” with the point being to “provoke, provide opportunities for, and support thinking by students”
(Thompson & Zeuli, 1999, p. 349). Their argument continues:
That students must think in order to learn may seem blatantly obvious. But if it is so obvious why do so many teachers—in fact,
nearly all teachers—fail to see it? They fail to see it in part because, as Cohen (1998) has pointed out, the notion that students
must think in order to learn contradicts some of our most deep-seated ideas about teaching and learning. The idea that students must create their own understanding by thinking their way through to satisfactory resolutions of puzzles and contradictions runs counter to conceptions of knowledge as facts, teaching as telling, and learning as memorizing...We may think that we
have shucked off such outmoded ideas, but such deeply ingrained schemas do not go easily. (p. 349)
These same observations can be made in classrooms where teachers are in the process of transforming their literacy practices.
Learning how to “perform” something as seemingly simple as an interactive read-aloud—which counters the traditional notion that when
being read to children should be quiet and listen—is actually far from simple. As numerous researchers have observed, and as we will describe in more detail later in this paper, teachers and professional developers tend to focus on getting the structural and procedural aspects
of new practices under control in the early stages of instructional change (Cohen, 2004; Franke et al., 2001; Franke & Kazemi, 2001; Schifter
& Fosnot, 1993; Spillane & Zeuli, 1997; Thompson & Zueli, 1999). Reaching this stage of technical proficiency is an important benchmark,
but teachers’ professional growth may also stall at a point where they appear to have the moves down “but are missing the point.” Alternatively, they may have gained the confidence and motivation to take on the more intellectually challenging but often risky work of deepening
and refining their practice.
We can find evidence of this intellectually challenging and risky work in Ms. Frank’s practice. In planning her lessons, she thinks deeply
about texts and selects those that will help her build a bridge between what her students already know and where they need to go. She
formulates provocative questions to stimulate her students’ thinking and problem solving, and is willing to entertain unpredictability by giving her students abundant opportunities to “think out loud.” She is finely attuned to what her students say and do and has developed the
agility to take in this “in-the-moment” evidence and use it to help them incrementally build their knowledge and understanding. Ms. Frank
is, in other words, accomplished at “conceptually guided improvisation” (Thompson & Zueli, p.356). In addition, Mrs. Frank reflects on her
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own practice, thinks of herself as a learner, and is prepared to open her practice to others for analysis and collaborative problem solving
Implications of Evidence-based Instruction for Professional Learning
Teachers cannot deeply transform their practice by simply being told how to teach like Ms. Frank, or by being shown her work as a model
of best practices for replication. The observation, analysis, and decision-making skills she employs cannot be captured and written up in
lesson plans for others to follow; there can be no facilitator’s guide for the type of discourse she has with her students, and her reflective
processes cannot be prescribed. Developing the kinds of knowledge, skills, habits of mind and dispositions held by teachers like Ms. Frank
requires a great deal of professional leaning. And just as it is necessary for students to think in order to learn, teachers must also think to
learn. However, as Little (1993) and a host of others have noted, the predominant modes of professional development are inadequate or
inappropriate for the task and there is a clear need to design alternative approaches to professional learning that are “more fully compatible
with the complex demands of reform and the equally complex contexts of teaching” (p. 129). She goes on to argue that:
Much staff development or in-service communicates a relatively impoverished view of teachers, teaching, and teacher development. Compared with the complexity, subtlety, and uncertainties of the classroom, professional development is often a remarkably low-intensity enterprise. It requires little in the way of intellectual struggle or emotional engagement and takes only
superficial account of teachers’ histories or circumstances. Compared with the complexity and ambiguity of the most ambitious
reforms, professional development is often substantively weak and politically marginal.
Professional development must be constructed in ways that deepen the discussion, open up the debates and enrich the array
of possibilities for action. (p. 148)
Efforts to forge a new paradigm for professional learning have resulted in a consensus on the principles that should guide the design of
high-quality professional development. Hawley and Valli report, “this new consensus calls for providing collegial opportunities to learn that
are linked to solving problems defined by gaps between goals for student achievement and actual student performance” (1999, p.127). In
addition, they note that effective professional development should be ongoing, school-based, and directly linked to improving and assessing daily practice; it should be “information rich” and supported by external sources with access to ideas and resources that are beyond
those available in any particular school; and it should challenge teachers to reexamine their beliefs, experiences, and habits as well as support their need to adapt their learning to their own students and context (1999).
Sharing a commitment to these principles, Lampert, Ball, and Cohen have proposed a “pedagogy and curriculum of professional development” that advanced “new ways to understand and use practice as a site for professional learning, as well as ways to cultivate the sorts of
inquiry into practice from which many teachers could learn” (Ball & Cohen, 1999, p.6; Lampert and Ball, 1998). Specifically they advocated
the creation of new tools and practices to facilitate the investigation and analysis of teaching and learning including videotapes of classroom lessons, curriculum materials, student work artifacts, and teachers’ notes. Beyond the creation of these new resources they also
called for the creation of:
...new venues, norms, and conditions for teachers to inquire collectively into problems of teaching and learning and to participate in communities of practice. Leadership would be required for such arrangements, which opens up questions about who
would provide it, what such roles would entail, and what leaders would need to know. (Ball & Cohen, 1999 p.20)
Having advanced these proposals they acknowledged the difficulties inherent in the plan, beginning with the enormity of the task of building a rich multimedia database and designing ways to make it accessible and educative to users, but also including the challenges involved
in supporting teacher educators to use these resources in productive ways. Tackling these two major challenges is essentially the task we
set for ourselves as we undertook the design of PDS².
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Three Domains of Design Activity
Our development work on PDS² began with a broadly defined goal. We wanted to design a web-based system that would support the efforts
of literacy professional developers to provide high-quality onsite professional development for in-service teachers on an ongoing basis. Design activities for PDS² were conducted in three domains—technical, content development, and social practices of use. Work in the technical domain was undertaken in collaboration with Teachscape, a leading developer of web-based professional development for teachers
(http://www.teachscape.com). Teachscape applied its extensive technical expertise to build a web-based platform to meet the demanding
technical requirements specified by the PDS² design team. This platform integrates a searchable multimedia database; authoring tools for
archiving and customizing PDS² resources for particularized needs; and a networking and collaboration space to support online learning
groups. Content development design work involved collecting, selecting, and preparing videotaped lessons and associated records of prac-
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tice for inclusion in the multimedia database, and designing and authoring additional in-system tools and resources to support the use of
these records of practice. Finally, the design team has undertaken several PDS² implementation trials in order to design and test a set of
social practices around the use of the system with a range of audiences and in a variety of professional development contexts.
In the remainder of this paper we will focus on our work in the content development and social practices domains. We will describe the
iterative design processes we employed in both these domains paying particular attention to how key events in the design process brought
to light evidence of teacher and teacher educator learning and performance that challenged the designers and participants to reexamine
the effectiveness of their own professional development tools and practices and stimulated experimentation with new approaches.
Design Team
The initial content design team was a small group of three principle members. Two members possessed deep literacy and professionaldevelopment expertise and were closely affiliated with the Literacy Collaborative¨ at The Ohio State University, a nationally recognized
and proven initiative to improve K–6 grade literacy instruction (http://www.literacycollaborative.org). The third member, the task leader for
the PDS² design project, came to the team with multimedia production expertise and extensive experience collaborating with math and
literacy professional developers to codesign learning opportunities for in-service teachers using videotaped records of classroom practice.
This team’s creation was a natural outgrowth of a long-standing collaboration between the Literacy Collaborative and the Center for Urban
School Improvement, and was predicated on a shared commitment to promote ambitious, evidence-based literacy instruction for all children.
Problems of Practice
The design team identified several problems of practice that the design of a video-based system for learning could address:
Professional development of the classroom teacher. Every classroom teacher, for example, is faced with the challenge of assessing and
understanding the needs of a diverse group of students and then devising appropriate instruction based on this knowledge. A pervasive
problem for teachers is having limited or no access to the type of professional development that addresses their particular needs and the
needs of their students, when they could most benefit from it. In addition, the norm of working in isolation with few opportunities to observe
and discuss teaching and learning with peers and more capable others blocks potential avenues to professional growth. Professional developers responsible for opening up those avenues and engineering schoolwide improvement in teaching and learning encounter numerous
obstacles including a lack of access to a coherent set of quality professional-development materials and resources and insufficient time to
observe classrooms, conduct face-to-face coaching sessions, and follow-up with all teachers on a regular basis.
Professional development of the professional developers. Once the design process was underway the team also came to recognize the
potential PDS² held for extending and enhancing the capacity of the Literacy Collaborative and similar balanced or comprehensive literacy
initiatives to prepare professional developers to assume leadership roles in the improvement of literacy instruction. The Literacy Collaborative, for example, has a highly elaborated professional-development model for these professional developers, which they call literacy coordinators. In the first year this model integrates seven weeks of intensive face-to-face training designed to build a strong base of content,
pedagogical and adult learning knowledge; a clinical component with periodic onsite observation and coaching as they establish demonstration classrooms and perfect their own practice; and supplementary exercises in self-reflective analysis and feedback on video records
of their practice. After successfully completing a full year of preparation, the literacy coordinators continue to teach in their demonstration
classrooms half time and assume responsibility for professional development of teachers in their school for the other half of their time.
Each year they are also required to participate in periodic follow-up personal professional development.
This model has proven to be very effective for training literacy coordinators, but also requires a heavy investment in time, money and human
resources—an investment that many schools and districts cannot afford. Faced with this reality, the team was motivated to explore ways
in which technology might be employed to render the model more feasible without compromising its effectiveness.
The pursuit of this goal seemed particularly worthwhile in light of the fact that a rapidly growing number school districts have adopted a
model of professional development that calls for site-based literacy professional developers and coaches, but lack the infrastructure for
adequately preparing them for this complex role. As Ball & Cohen have noted:
Ironically, while the role of the teacher educator is critical to any effort to change the landscape of professional development, it
is a role for which few people have any preparation and in which there are few opportunities of continued learning: there is little
professional development for professional developers...like the teachers with whom they work, teacher developers would need
to seek and create opportunities for learning grounded in practice (1999, p. 28).
With this set of school-based and larger institutional level problems of practice in mind the team made a set of initial technical and content
design decisions, negotiated a set of content components to develop, jointly authored a set of prototype components, outlined a process for
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further content development, and recruited additional personnel to assist in the content development work.
* * *
In the next sections we describe the iterative design processes we employed in the content and social practices domains of our work. The
content development design work involved collecting, selecting, and preparing videotaped lessons and associated records of practice for
inclusion in the multimedia database. It also involved designing and authoring additional tools and resources for the system to support the
use of these records of practice. In the social practices domain, the design team undertook several PDS² implementation trials in order to
design and test a set of social practices around the use of the system with a range of audiences and in a variety of professional development contexts.
We pay particular attention to how key events in the design process problematized the practice of using video cases in professional learning. These events raised critical questions about teacher and teacher educator learning and performance. The design teams’ negotiation of
these questions of learning shaped the design of PDS². The events further challenged the designers and other participants in the design
process to reexamine the effectiveness of their professional-development tools and practices and stimulated them to experiment with and
begin to learn new approaches.
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Design Parameters
Initial design decisions about use contexts and audience. One of the first decisions the team agreed upon was that we were designing
a system that would support a blended learning approach—combining resources and tools to be used in both face-to-face and on-line
learning experiences—and that our primary users were comprehensive or balanced literacy professional developers for grades K–3. This
concept stood in contrast to more traditional online sequenced courses designed for individual teacher use. It was consistent with a view
that although the technology tool could provide access to valuable resources, an “expert other” was needed to mediate the use of the
resources for learning. Thus, professional developers would have full access to all PDS² features and functions, and would decide when
and how to share the resources with the teachers they were coaching and when and how to integrate them into their formal professional
development activities. PDS² features and functions that would be made available to professional developers included search tools using
multiple criteria; authoring tools to create and customize portfolios of resources; and online learning groups to share PDS² resources and
facilitate online discussions and collaborative work.
Content component decisions. Another set of early decisions dealt with defining the types of content components we wanted to develop.
We agreed to make videotaped lessons the core component of the PDS² multimedia database and develop associated components to support the use of these lessons as tools for interrogating teaching and learning. For each videotaped lesson we would also collect associated
records of practice including student work examples, documentation of the physical classroom environment, reflective commentary by
teachers, and, when possible, coaching sessions.
Based on years of collective experience designing and using videotaped records of practice for professional development the team shared
the belief that these can be particularly effective tools for teacher development if they are carefully selected to match a learning objective
and if their use is thoughtfully and skillfully facilitated. Experimentation with the use of written and video case-based methods for the professional development of teachers—based on effective models from the business, medical and legal fields—has demonstrated the value
this approach holds for the improvement of teaching and learning (St. John & Stokes, 2003; Sherin, 2004). More specifically, this experimentation has defined three ways in which cases can be used effectively: as exemplars of best practices, as tools with which to practice
analysis and decision making, and as catalysts to self-reflection (Merseth, 1996). The design team kept these uses in mind as we began to
define the criteria for selecting video records to include in the database.
Taking into account the fact that the professional developers who would use PDS² would come with a range of expertise, differing previous
experiences using video, and have a variety of learning objectives in mind, we carefully deliberated over what kind of video records to include
in the database and what additional components we would need to develop in order to optimize their value as learning tools. We set a clear
goal of including video records of classrooms that displayed geographic and demographic diversity and that captured a range of teaching
styles and levels of experience from novice to veteran.
Decisions about how to represent classroom practice. A key design decision, and one that would be vigorously debated throughout the
iterative design process, was to include but not limit our selection to records that might fall into the category of exemplars of best practices.
We decided to make a deliberate effort to include records that captured authentic, everyday practice in all its complexity, and included real
problems of practice as they unfolded. This decision was guided in part by our own observations that teachers respond to the credibility
of these kinds of records and because the dilemmas they present can be particularly provocative tools for learning. Our rationale for this
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decision was also informed by the work of educators who have pioneered the use of problem-centered cases to stimulate analysis, decision
making, and reflection (Laframboise & Griffith, 1997). Proponents of the use of cases, particularly problem cases, caution that whatever
benefit can be derived from the use of cases depends on the knowledge and skill of a moderator and on the methods they use to facilitate
group deliberation.
Decisions about authoring associated educative materials. The design team speculated that while some potential users of PDS² may
have had experience using video records of practice in a reflective way, the more common use was probably to present best- practices
examples as models for emulation. This assumption guided our decisions regarding the type of educative materials we would develop to
support a reflective use of PDS² resources. In particular, we decided to develop components we initially called “expert commentary” and
“professional development ideas.” In the initial iteration, we thought of the expert commentary as the place where users could tap into the
knowledge and analysis that “more expert others” bring to the interpretation of the record of practice. In the “professional development
ideas” component we decided to include “questions for reflection” and “suggestions for professional development activities.” Just as teachers need to formulate critical-thinking questions for texts they use with their students, facilitators of case discussions must come up with
questions and prompts to stimulate their students’ thinking. We decided to include example questions that we hoped would promote the
adoption of a “stance of inquiry” around the use of PDS² resources.
As an added layer of scaffolding we decided to develop more elaborated plans for embedding the use of PDS² resources into workshop and
study group activities. This could include, for example, the suggestion that a professional developer start a session by having participants
analyze the guided reading text that would be used in the selected videotaped lesson. Participants could then watch and discuss the lesson, and finally collaboratively plan a follow-up guided reading lesson based on their analysis of the appropriate next steps for the students
in the videotaped lesson.
Additional components the team decided to develop included contextual information about the classroom, an annotated reference section,
and frequently asked questions. These components, together with the various records of practice, would constitute a video case. With this
blueprint for video cases the team jointly authored examples of all the components to serve as templates for an expanded authoring team,
and outlined a development process.[1]
Design Process
For a number of years before the PDS² design project started the task leader had developed a library of videotaped lessons that professional developers affiliated with the Center for Urban School Improvement had used in a variety of professional development contexts in
the Chicago Public Schools. These lessons had been captured in classrooms where teachers were implementing balanced literacy and
were being coached by a Literacy Collaborative-trained professional developer. The team decided to initially mine this existing library for
lesson to develop into PDS² video cases. The team set up the following process for developing these cases:
Screening. The task leader selects unedited video footage from the existing library that seems the most appropriate for inclusion in the PDS 2 library, based on what had already been successfully used in the Center’s work. She sends the footage to
screeners affiliated with the Literacy Collaborative and who had recent experience as school-based literacy coaches. Their
direct experience in roles that matched our primary users, we felt, made them particularly qualified to make recommendations
about which lessons would be most useful to our audience.
Authoring. The selected footage is minimally edited and technically prepared for inclusion in the library and sent to a content
specialist who authors the associated support components. We recruited three additional members for the content development team to help author these components, including two Literacy Collaborative instructors who had direct responsibility for
training and coaching new cohorts of literacy coordinators, and the director of the Literacy Collaborative initiative at Lesley
University.
Reviewing. Completed components are uploaded into a shareware application where authors could, in theory, review each
other’s work. (In actuality, this rarely occurred due to time factors.) Finally, as part of the editing and proofing process, the task
leader reads all the authored components for final approval prior to inclusion in the PDS² library.
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Design Tension: Best Practices vs. Everyday Practices
Revisiting the decision of how to represent practice. As the team initiated the design process a number of issues began to emerge that
would have significant design implications. The first issue was a lack of consensus on which lessons were appropriate for inclusion in the
PDS² database. A number of the classroom lessons that the screeners had selected for development were deemed “too problematic” by
some of the authors, particularly by the instructors who had direct responsibility for training new cohorts of literacy coordinators.
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These instructors had a passionate commitment to the Literacy Collaborative’s model and its framework for literacy instruction, and had
dedicated their careers to ensuring the fidelity of this model. They had years of experience designing and conducting high-quality professional development, including creating tools for teacher educators. One of these tools was a library of videotape modules capturing
best-practices enactments of all the instructional components in the Literacy Collaborative framework. The instructors had successfully
incorporated the use of these modules into their training sessions and distributed them to their literacy coordinators to be used to support
their school-based work. In addition they had extensive experience using videotapes of their students’ own practice as tools for reflecting
on and perfecting the implementation of the instructional framework in their own demonstration classrooms. With this background, these
authors brought a uniquely valuable set of eyes and knowledge to the project. The introduction of their perspective initiated a collegial debate—which was sometimes tense but ultimately productive—into the content design process.
The debate began with a number of authors asserting that teachers, especially those just being introduced to new instructional approaches, benefit most from access to exemplars of best practices to help build a foundation. For this reason they began advocating that certain
lessons that had been selected for development be either rejected or sanitized. If, for example, a lesson did not strictly comply with certain
prescriptions—e.g., if an alphabet and classroom name chart were not in evidence next to the easel where an interactive writing lesson
was being conducted—then that lesson should be rejected. Or if an otherwise solid lesson had a few troublesome elements—e.g., if the
teacher kept using the phrase “picture walk” during a guided reading book introduction—those elements should be edited out. The authors
were applying these stringent standards because all too often they had seen that aspects of a lesson that they felt should not be replicated
could spread widely among teachers because of their surface appeal.
Sharpening purposes by surfacing tensions around video selection. Discussion, debate, and negotiation around the problems found in
certain videotapes, usually taking place between the task leader and an author, led to several outcomes. When, for example, the task leader
pointed out that out of hundreds of hours of videotape lessons, very few if any could be found that would comply with such stringent standards, a general agreement was reached that lessons would not be rejected simply because they did not comply with rigid structural or
procedural criteria. In addition, some of the more problematic elements would be edited out of lessons where possible. The authors agreed
to this compromise, perhaps a bit reluctantly. They also began to identify and recommend classrooms where future taping might yield lessons that would come closer to meeting their expectations. At various stages in the development work the authors also floated the idea
of coming up with a rating system for the cases that would give users guidance about which were the more exemplary cases suitable for
introducing the framework and which might be better suited for the problem-solving contexts. Ultimately, this idea was rejected because
it seemed antithetical to our learning purposes. Another proposal for capturing more of the best-practices exemplars was to “direct” the
videotaping so that if something “problematic” cropped up, we could stop taping, coach the teacher on what should be done, and then reshoot the scene. This was a technique several of the team had employed to produce exemplars to accompany their professional texts. The
task leader, who was also the videographer for the project, strongly opposed this approach and was able to argue that this process was too
manipulative and intrusive to yield really believable results and was not respectful of the participating teachers.
Our early design decision to represent “everyday” practice posed a challenge to a training model that valued best practices, but that also
valued coaching teachers in their classrooms—that is, building on everyday existing practice to achieve best practice. This challenge only
became apparent when the authors examined and responded to videotaped classroom lessons for inclusion in PDS². The desire to provide
exemplars of practice in the system to mitigate sub-par practice, as perceived by the authors, was strong. However, the arguments for the
value of using videotapes of “real” practice in teacher learning were also strong and were consistent with the vision that PDS² would provide
multiple cases of teaching practice for flexible use by staff developers and to promote reflective learning. The design process also revealed
that naturally occurring classroom practices that all the authors could agree were exemplary were uncommon, calling into question the
notion of “best practice” itself.
The significance of the debate for the design team was that it allowed us to understand and begin to come to terms with the implications
of our early design decision to focus on everyday practice. It was an early signal of an important problem we would need to continue to work
on. How could we promote the use of video cases not just as “how to” demonstrations of effective teaching, but as tools for helping teachers
interrogate diverse teaching situations in order to develop their habits of mind of analysis and professional judgment? The challenge before
the authors as they composed their commentary and formulated questions around “problem cases” was this: What do you say about the
practice and how do you say it in such a way that it will foster the development of what Lord has called “critical colleagueship” (1999, p.184)?
The authors were confronting the issue that learning from constructive criticism, although an expectation in other professions, is not the
norm in the teaching profession. Lord writes:
Unfortunately, most teachers simply do not have the tools, background, preparation, or appropriate opportunities for developing or exercising the traits of critical colleagueship. At few points in their professional preparation and seldom in their classroom work do teachers have the opportunities to observe other teachers teach, to be observed as they teach, to engage in open
and constructively critical discussion about what they observe and what they do, or to reflect on new ideas, practices, and policies that influence teaching. (1999, p.193)
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Testing our design decisions. Once we had developed an initial collection of video cases we decided it would be important to test out our
work. Would professional developers find the lessons we had selected and the associated educative materials we had developed valuable
to their work? Would these materials effectively promote learning through constructive criticism? We assembled a diverse focus group of
experienced professional developers to view and discuss the videotaped lessons and read and critique each of the associated components.
The professional developers validated our selection of lessons. They appreciated that these were real classrooms and real situations. As
one participant put it, “Teachers don’t want to see a staged lesson. They want to see a real lesson, like a window into someone else’s classroom” (Focus group discussion, 11-7-05). The professional developers also appreciated the variety of lessons available and speculated that
access to the database would make it possible for them differentiate their professional development in much the same way they were asking teachers to differentiate instruction for their students. The group also found the associated materials valuable and informative.
Design tension: Nature of Written Commentary
Challenges of writing commentary. At the same time the focus group confirmed our decisions concerning video selection, it provided an
important critique of the expert commentary that further problematized the use of video for the teacher professional development, and
therefore our design work. Focus group participants observed that much of the commentary was descriptive and did little more than summarize what had gone on in the lesson. They pushed us to take a more analytical approach in the commentary. They were, in effect, asking
authors to build the language and methods of “critical colleagueship” into their commentary.
The feedback of the focus group deepened the debate among the authors about the proper content, tone of the commentary and even
the label to apply to the commentary. One concern was that if we were going to make the commentary more analytical and call it “expert
commentary,” the branding would limit the users’ potential to construct their own understandings through engagement with these tools.
The reasoning was that professional developers would take the analysis provided by the “experts” as gospel and this would, in effect, shut
down discussion, debate, and the development of multiple perspectives. On the other hand, the authors agreed that it would be valuable to
include the perspective of “a more expert other.” The team decided to work on developing a more analytic perspective in the commentary.
However, this component would not be referred to as “expert” but would be presented as one person’s perspective and would be labeled
“commentary by (author’s name).”
Authoring commentary that took a more analytic stance revealed to the team how difficult it is to “model” critical colleagueship. The authors
struggled with how to provide constructive criticism of a lesson, particularly a lesson taught by a teacher they knew and had worked with,
while being sensitive to the vulnerable position of the teacher and properly respectful of her contributions to the profession.
Various authors came up with different strategies for dealing with the dilemma of being critical. One strategy was to include an analysis
of the strengths of the lesson in the commentary, but refrain from directly commenting on any problems of practice that may have been in
evidence. Instead they would obliquely draw attention to these “messier” more controversial issues by composing somewhat loaded “questions for reflection” such as:
Did the teacher’s decisions about book selection and book introduction support the students’ first reading of the new book?
What comments does the teacher make at the end of the lesson? What might she emphasize to the readers instead? Why?
What was the pattern for the teacher’s conferences with the children?
What else might she have pursued in teaching writers?
Another strategy was to step out of the actual lesson and adopt a more didactic approach, outlining in the abstract what should be done
with little reference back to the particulars of the lesson itself. An example of this is:
You will observe the students’ reading behaviors as they read the new book. At some points, you will intervene to support individual problem solving. Here are some questions to guide your thinking: Do the students understand what they are reading? Do
they detect and self-correct their errors? What do they do at the point of difficulty? Fluency and phrasing?
Make sure you observe all the students in the group as well as the group as a whole. Are the students engaged? Do some
students finish reading before others? What routines for guided reading need to be taught or re-taught? Are they reading too
loudly?
At other times the authors would attempt to “fill in the gaps” by slipping in their own suggestions. For example:
In other interactive read-aloud lessons, she helps students think deeply. She may:
š Explain a concept or word
š Answer students’ questions
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š Encourage students to express opinions
š Help the students integrate new knowledge with prior knowledge
Sharpening learning purposes by surfacing problems in the commentary. As the task leader reviewed the newly authored commentary
she noticed that these individual attempts to find the right framing and tone were resulting in commentary that was not only inconsistent
across cases but also still seemed to miss opportunities to activate critical thinking and discussion of the teaching and learning captured
in the cases. To address this problem the task leader convened a content-development team retreat. This retreat was the first time that
all the team members were able to come together to view, discuss and debate a selection of cases and the associated materials we had
developed. The retreat started with a discussion of several scholarly articles on the research base for the use of cases and case methods.
This prompted the group to formulate an explicit list of the learning purposes for the design and use of PDS² including:
1) To establish a stance of inquiry and reflective habits of mind
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2) To develop pedagogical and content knowledge
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understanding beyond the “how to” stage to an understanding of the “why”
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With this list of learning purposes in mind we then viewed and discussed several cases that had been specifically selected to open up the
debate about lesson selection and to bring to light some of the inconsistencies and shortcomings of our authoring efforts to date.
Experiencing video-case learning at the content development team retreat. The design team engaged in two particularly lively and illuminating debates. The first debate centered on the appropriateness of including a particular interactive read-aloud in the PDS² library. The
lesson was taught by a teacher who was in an early phase of implementing this instructional strategy. Although the group felt there were a
number of strengths to the lesson, some members felt that the teacher did not provide enough opportunities for interaction, and when she
did, it was too much in a question/answer mode rather than conversational. They argued that this put it in a category far enough from the
exemplary end of the spectrum that it should be excluded from the PDS² library. Others felt that even though it was not an exemplar it was
just the type of lesson that could be a good entry point for teachers who still subscribed to the “old school” silent-listening model of readalouds. As one participant who had recently been a full-time literacy coordinator put it:
This video would have been very good to show the teachers that I worked with...because it was a controlled, yet simple step toward conversation during a read-aloud. I would fear that if I were to show those teachers who don’t believe that children should
talk during these books an interactive read-aloud that had so much interaction and so much conversation and so many interruptions that they would go “Whoa, I can never handle that! For me, this video showed a step toward allowing the kids maybe to
talk a little through the book and then the teacher might be able to stomach that and actually give it a whirl in her classroom
the next week (February, 2006).
As the debate concerning this case unfolded the team began to analyze the opportunities the text offered for activating student thinking.
We also talked about how the children’s questions and comments presented opportunities to extend their understanding, and hypothesized
how one might take advantage of these opportunities and what the consequences for student learning might have been if these alternatives had been tried. In other words, this case had been an effective tool for stimulating exactly the kind of analysis and critical thinking we
were after.
Learning how to achieve analytic depth with video cases. A second provocative case was an interactive writing lesson. At first glance, the
teacher in this lesson made all the right moves and it appeared to present a pretty good example of how to do interactive writing. However,
when one member of the group began to shift the group’s focus away from the teacher moves to the students’ behavior the analysis took a
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deeper turn. The group pulled out specific evidence of what the students were demonstrating they already knew, and then analyzed the demands of the writing task they were engaged in. Then we considered the instructional decision making in light of the time of year the lesson
occurred and our knowledge of the benchmark standards, and it became clear that this case captured a common problem of practice: the
teacher was going through the paces without adequately considering what her students already knew and what they needed next.
The team’s discussion of this case, which went from an initial surface analysis to a deeper analysis, was prompted by one member’s probing
questions about what new learning the students had gotten from this lesson. Our own case discussion and analysis seemed to suggest
that, with proper facilitation, this case could be a tool for stimulating teacher thinking about evidence-based instructional decision making.
This experience also stimulated new thinking about how to engineer the same kind of analysis, debate, discussion, and problem solving the
group had engaged in for PDS² users.
Articulating a new design for commentary. We discussed a number of design ideas and evaluated them next to the learning purposes we
had articulated at the beginning of the retreat. By the end of the retreat we had outlined new directions for our authoring tasks. First, we
agreed that because one of our primary goals was to establish a stance of inquiry and analytic habits of mind we needed to reflect this in
the tools we were authoring. If we wanted these cases to be valuable in helping teachers learn not just the “how to” but the “why” of their
practice we needed to “provoke, provide opportunities for, and support” their thinking just as they were being asked to do with their students
(Thompson & Zueli, p.349). This meant that we needed to encourage teachers to make their own observations and to construct and defend
their own analyses based on evidence, rather than assuming a didactic stance and telling them what to think. One way we thought we could
accomplish this was to draw more attention to the student learning in evidence in the lessons instead of going first and primarily to the
teaching moves. Another way we thought we could support this was by embedding more background and theoretical information about the
reading and writing process into the commentary and prompting teachers to use this information as a frame of reference for observing and
analyzing the cases.
Several members of the group agreed to draft examples of new commentary, questions for reflection, and suggestions for professional development activities for a common lesson based on this new thinking. We would then share these examples among the group and use the
best ideas from this collection to draft exemplars to guide our future development.[2] Excerpts from the resulting exemplar illustrate the
contrast between the earlier example of the didactic style of commentary and the new commentary:
Talking About the Experience
Consider the role of talk in the writing process. Read the section on Supporting the Process through Conversation (p. 11–12
in Interactive Writing, McCarrier, Pinnell, & Fountas, 2000). As you observe, think about the teaching, considering each aspect.
When talk surrounds the writing experience it enables the children to share their thinking with others, and expand their understandings. It serves as an important element in the writing process as it helps children learn how to put their thoughts together
in a way that readers will understand.
A trip to the zoo is exciting for children. First, think about how having a real experience like this one can help them expand oral
language. Talk would surround the entire experience. With this experience, what are the opportunities to help children shape
their talk so that it can be written down?
Reviewing the Writing Rubric
The key elements listed on the writing rubric provide important conventions first graders should be able to apply in their writing. As you continue to watch, think about how the children were able to bring their understanding from the rubric to the writing
experience that follows. Also be thinking about what they might learn in order to apply elements independently (which is the
ultimate goal of interactive writing).
Reflecting
After watching the lesson, think about what children have learned that will be useful to them in their independent writing. What
do you think the children already knew, and what were some very important understandings that they needed to develop and
use in their independent writing? Are there any priorities that you might, upon reflection, establish for a lesson like this one? If
you have to decrease the time, what would you keep and what would you omit?
Testing our design decisions. After this exercise we returned to our focus group of professional developers with the new commentary and
solicited their feedback. We created an exercise for them to analyze the videotape of the lesson for which the new commentary was written.
We then asked them to review the commentary. Their response provided a strong validation of our design decisions. They commented in
particular on the ways in which the commentary supported deeper analysis of the lesson and its relationship to theory:
Leslie: I thought the questions and the revision and things to think about were much better. I think they would help get you to
that deeper level much more than what was initially there...And I thought it told you some things to consider in the commentary.
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Nicole: Even more rationale. Building those understandings.
Leslie: And to get your thinking going in the direction they would like it to go.
Cindy: Because the first draft gave you everything. Whereas the second draft got your juices flowing as far as what do you think
about this? Or think about that?
Feedback also confirmed the design decision to support staff developers and teachers in developing their interpretation of
videotaped lessons, rather than providing an interpretation labeled “expert:”
LeAnne: Do you think there needs to be another layer that’s a bit more of the “answers” to these questions?
Sarah: No, I think you either gave the resources, or you gave a statement to build on, that if I didn’t quite understand the rationale, I would have at least the foundation on which to go research...I think as much as we can enable people to become decision makers based on their understanding of reading and writing, to do it that way. Even if it [was commentary by an expert] it
becomes troublesome because, it becomes a right way and a not-right way.
Leslie: And the rationale is because [the expert] said to do it that way. They’re not owning anything –it’s because [the expert]
said...Part of my experience is I’m constantly having teachers say to me—Is it OK if I do this? We’ve got to get them to be thinkers
and be problem solvers themselves. (February, 2006)
After the team had gone through the process of creating and soliciting feedback on these exemplars they decided that instead of labeling
the commentary “Commentary by (author)” it should now be titled “Analyzing the Teaching and Learning.” While it may seem trivial, the iterative change in title for the commentary from “Expert Commentary” to “Commentary by (author)” to “Analyzing the Teaching and Learning”
actually reflects a significant shift in the team’s thinking about professional development. The team was moving away from more traditional knowledge transmission and implementation paradigms and closer to Ball & Cohen’s idea of a practice and inquiry-based pedagogy
of professional development (1999). The process of design not only surfaced problems in the use of video cases for professional learning,
it also allowed the group to discuss and learn for themselves the value of everyday records of practice for gaining insight into the complex
decision making and matters of judgment involved in evidence-based instruction. This in turn provided the authors with the understandings they needed to write educative commentary to accompany video.
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The design team’s thinking about professional learning for teacher educators and teachers continued to evolve as it engaged in a variety
of implementation trials for PDS² use. A fully functional prototype of PDS² was launched in August 2005. By this time the content design
team had created eighty video cases of K–3 literacy instruction. Except for a few gaps, multiple lessons represented all the instructional
components at each grade level in the initial system database.[3] The content design team continued to develop additional cases to fill in
the gaps and build the library.
Meanwhile, a subset of the group turned their attention to implementing the use of the system in a variety of contexts. The design team
undertook the implementation trials because we believed that the successful use of the system would require a new set of social practices
for many, if not most, teacher educators and teachers. We considered the design of these social practices an essential part of our work. We
also approached this as an iterative process and sought out a variety of user groups to participate in the work. Our goal at the end of this
process was to produce what we referred to as an “implementation curriculum” or curricula to initiate teacher educators into the practice
of using PDS² to design and facilitate the kind of professional learning we were trying to support. In this section we will describe our work
with two groups and how these trials have prompted the design team to experiment with a new approach for preparing literacy coordinators
that represents a fairly substantial departure from the original model.
Designing Professional Development to Support Novice Staff Developers
Novice group. We first introduced the working system to a cohort of Literacy Collaborative-trained coordinators who had just completed
their initial year of training. The project had secured a four-year federal grant to research the effectiveness of Literacy Collaborative and
to determine what effect access to PDS² would have on the efficacy of literacy coordinators. This cohort of nine novice coordinators is the
treatment group for this research.
Constraints on design. The original five-year design for the study called for incorporating the use of PDS² into the training year curriculum
for the treatment group, but due to a four-year cap on the grant this training year was dropped from the design. Instead, this group participated in a one-week intensive training on the use of PDS² at the end of the summer just before they began their school-based work.
We knew that this limited initiation was problematic, but we also felt we could safely assume that they already had a strong foundation in
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literacy content, pedagogy and aspects of coaching from their training year. For this reason we made a strategic decision to concentrate
on getting this cohort comfortable with the basic technical aspects of learning how to find PDS² resources, customize them for their own
purposes and contexts, and share and discuss these resources with their teachers in an online learning group. We tried to accomplish this
by embedding the technical learning in professional learning activities that would resemble ones they might do with their own teachers.
By the end of the training week they were technically prepared to use the system to start planning some of their own school-based work.
Engaging the instructors of the staff developers. To compensate for our lack of face-to-face time with these coordinators we hoped to
supplement their PDS² training with support through their online learning group using the PDS² networking and collaboration tools. The
most logical people to provide this kind of support were the instructors they had worked with during their training year and would continue
to work with for the next two years. Two of these instructors, who were on the content-development team, were familiar with PDS² but
all the others had very limited knowledge of the system. Earlier attempts to invite these instructors into our work had been unsuccessful
largely due to already over-committed schedules. They were, however, able to join the group for the full PDS² training week, learning the
technical aspects of using PDS² alongside the coordinators they were mentoring. Toward the end of the training week the coordinators and
instructors began to collaboratively plan some initial school-based professional development activities using PDS² resources. This collaborative work brought to light a number of issues that would have significant design implications.
Despite the fact that a majority of the participants’ experience and comfort with technology ranged from what might be described as phobic
to limited, their ability to learn the technical aspects of PDS² use very quickly seemed to validate the intuitiveness of the system’s technical
design. As the collaborative planning work unfolded, however, the design team began to notice potentially problematic issues arising from
some of our design decisions and assumptions around content and social practices.
Identifying Problems of Practice for Social Practice Design
The first issue surfaced as the participants began to search the PDS² database for resources to use in their school-based workshops.
When the instructors noticed that some of the coordinators were selecting cases they did not believe were the most appropriate for the
purposes of introducing teachers to new instructional components, they cautioned the coordinators to be very selective in their choices.
They specifically recommended the use of a very limited set of cases, all of which they had previously identified as the more exemplary
cases. Instructors also strongly encouraged them to make use of the Literacy Collaborative-produced modules they had used in their own
training. This case selection issue, which preceded the best practices vs. everyday practices debate among the authoring team described
above, was an “early-warning” signal that there were deeper tensions between existing beliefs and practices and the PDS² design than the
design team had originally anticipated.
Users’ skills as analytic observers of practice. The design team had to some extent operated under the assumption that these coordinators had developed a certain disposition toward and skills in the analysis of teaching and learning during their training year—particularly
through the exercises of reflecting on their own videotaped lessons and discussing these with their mentor—and that this disposition and
these skills would transfer to the activity of reflecting on, analyzing and discussing the practice of others. Similarly we assumed that with
the extensive experience the instructors had had analyzing their students’ practice and providing constructive feedback they would value
and be inclined toward the open and constructively critical discussion of PDS² records of practice. We came to realize that these were not
safe assumptions. Being able to analyze and talk about practice within the still relatively private and privileged mentor/student relationship did not necessarily prepare people to engage in the kind of critical colleagueship we had envisioned for PDS² use. This realization reinforced our earlier instincts that it would be important for new users to have increased opportunities to engage in skillfully facilitated case
analyses and discussions as learners before they would be prepared or motivated to facilitate this kind of professional learning for others.
Users’ orientation toward their work in the first year. This case selection issue also led the design team to speculate that, even with increased opportunities for their own learning, novice coordinators may not find PDS² to be the right tool for their work during the first year of
school-based work. During this first year they are responsible for initiating the schoolwide implementation of the literacy framework. They
must design and facilitate biweekly workshops for their faculty, observe and coach in all classrooms, and teach a full literacy block in their
demonstration classrooms. Given the high demands on their time and pressure to show results it is not surprising that they would seek
expeditious ways to accomplish their goals. Much of their training year focused on perfecting their own practice so that they could model
best practices in their demonstration classrooms and in the classrooms of their teachers. With this emphasis on demonstration it is not
surprising that, if they were inclined to use video as a tool, they would most likely look to the best-practices modules they had used in their
training as the quickest and safest way to introduce new practices.
Responding with More Extensive Supports for Use
As we monitored this group’s system-use patterns and collected other data through surveys and interviews we were therefore not surprised
to see and get reports of fairly limited use of PDS². This prompted the designers to think about how we could provide more support to this
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group of users. Two ideas emerged: one longer term plan was to create a bank of pre-built modules that focus on issues commonly encountered by literacy coordinators, and a second idea was to build more work with PDS² into the ongoing professional development sessions
scheduled for this cohort.
The first of these daylong sessions took place last fall. For this session we were able to take advantage of lessons learned from our other
implementation trials to plan a sequence of learning activities for this group which gave them multiple opportunities to engage in facilitated case analyses and discussions as learners. This added experience has expanded these professional developers’ understanding of
and appreciation for the value of analyzing and discussing a range of cases for their own and their teacher’s professional learning. As one
participant explained:
Jennifer: Some of the recent professional development I’ve had has really helped me think more about how to use that. So
for a long time, I felt like I was looking at videos on the website and I was, “these aren’t very good. We can do better, we can do
better”. And so I felt conflicted in how am I going to show teachers with, quite frankly very mediocre if not just horrible practice,
anything that’s not stellar? And then [the instructor] really helped me think about – helped our group think about – how to use
any video and how to make it applicable, how to make it relevant, beyond sort of analysis of like how the teacher’s dressed, what
the teacher’s...you know what I mean? We often go right there. So she’s helped me think about that. I then sometimes get bogged
down in just finding the time to download a PDS² video to have it ready to go when the group, when we meet. But that’s one of
my year goals.
Int: What is one of your year goals.
Jennifer: Just using that website more, the videos in particular....
Int: Now you said that [the instructor] helped you think about working with videos that don’t show practice that’s stellar. So
what did you take away from your work with her, or what are you insights now.
Jennifer: ...basically it was couched in how we would coach this teacher that we were watching. And basically she broke it down
for us. “Let’s remember”– and she brings it back to the professional book, to the big idea – what is the reading process, what is
the writing process, what are we asking our writers to do, what were her teaching goals in this video? And she just made it so
explicit that it was a framework you could apply to almost any video. So then it was like “oh, okay. I get how you would start the
conversation, guide the conversation around this clip”.
Int: So do you think there’s value in having teachers, who don’t really know the practice yet, watching video that’s not...
Jennifer: I do, I do. And I think the part of our initial training, I think they’re working on giving more coaching training during the
initial year. So that is something that would be more helpful is to practice, actually, and especially with PDS². We didn’t get time
built into the initial training year to – we got a little bit of time, a little bit, a couple days here and there. But I think more time
devoted to that would have been very helpful on a number of scales.
Int: So you finally got some of that, just a couple of weeks ago.
Jennifer: Yeah, it was 2 or 3 weeks ago ... It was unbelievable! And you could see how “oh gosh. I get how to use this”. It would be
SO helpful to do with teachers (March, 2007).
As these coordinators become more established in their roles, and as their schools’ framework implementation matures, we will be investigating if and how PDS² adds value to their work.
Designing Professional Development to Support Experienced Staff Developers
Experienced user group. As described in the section on content design, during the R & D phase of PDS² development we assembled a
focus group of experienced literacy professional developers to give us feedback on our content design. Many of the focus group members
found this opportunity to analyze and discuss teaching and learning with their peers valuable for their own professional development and
requested that we not only continue to meet with them as a learning group, but also that we make PDS² available for them to use in their
schools and districts. Because he designers saw this as a rich opportunity to learn more about how to support the use of PDS² for and by
professional developers working in a variety of contexts, we decided to continue and expand on this work.
This group included teams from four districts in Ohio. All of these districts had balanced literacy instruction in place in their schools and
two of the districts were part of the Literacy Collaborative network. All nine of the elementary school literacy coordinators and the district
trainer from one of the districts participated in the group. This district had worked with Literacy Collaborative since the mid-1990s. The
other Literacy Collaborative district was represented primarily by district-level personnel, although two school-based coordinators participated as well. The two districts not affiliated with Literacy Collaborative both had four people participate in the group. One district had just
recently created the role of coach for its elementary schools and hired four people with strong literacy backgrounds to be coordinators. In
the other district, leadership for improvement of literacy practices was a group effort of the district’s curriculum coordinator, a principal,
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and two reading teachers.
Although we continued to solicit feedback on ongoing content development from this group, our primary purpose for working with them
shifted to studying their use of the system to inform our social practices design work. In contrast to our novice user group, the majority of
the participants in this group were experienced literacy professional developers working in schools or districts where, in most cases, the
literacy framework had been in place for a number of years. This presented an opportunity to learn more about the value of PDS² for addressing a very different set of problems of practice.
Design for learning group sessions. The challenges facing this group were not those of initiating new practices but of deepening their faculties’ understanding of why they were doing the things they were doing. As they explained, the majority of their teachers were routinely “doing”
the components of the literacy framework in their classrooms, but they were not yet making instructional decisions rooted in student learning.
They had procedurally and structurally reached a comfortable cruising altitude and speed and their professional growth had leveled off. Based
on their own previous experience with PDS² resources, these coordinators were hopeful that PDS² would be a valuable tool for helping their
teachers advance along a developmental continuum from competent technicians to accomplished instructional decision makers.
With this broad framing of their needs, the design team began helping this group think through how to use PDS² in their own contexts. We
did this in a series of five fullday face-to-face meetings over the course of the academic year. The general agenda for these meetings included: a focus group session in which designers collected use data as the participants shared details about the in-the-field experiences they
had had using PDS² between meetings, time when the two PDS² designers shared ideas and resources from sessions they had facilitated
with other PDS² users, and team planning time for groups to work on their own professional-development plans using PDS².
The objective behind the designers’ sharing of previously facilitated sessions was to increase participants’ familiarity with resources in the
database and to walk them through plans for professional-development sessions that were designed to model a reflective use of PDS²
resources. We adopted this abbreviated “walk through” approach, as opposed to a full facilitation of the sessions, with the thought that this
would allow us to cover more territory in our limited time together and under the assumption that this would provide sufficient support for
these very experienced professional developers. Between face-to-face sessions we charged this group with the assignment of facilitating
some sort of professional development event in their own contexts based on the plans they brainstormed during their team planning time.
In addition, we asked them to post their plans for and reflections on their facilitation of these sessions to the online learning group.
Identifying Problems of Practice through Social Practice Design
Digging below the surface. From their reports from the field it became clear that the group was finding it a challenge to facilitate deep case
discussions. For example, participants reported:
Lori: When we used videos... there tends to be a lot of surface level “that was great, wonderful” but there’s not always been the
deeper discussion of “well, this area here could have been a little better”...
Amy: We actually use some of the videotapes to look a little deeper, and it’s been uncomfortable, really for us all. We framed
it around core questions. What are you doing? Why are you doing it? How are you going to do it? How are you going to check for
understanding? And watching these video clips forced them to think “If you put yourself in this teacher’s shoes, how would you
check for understanding? Where might you check for understanding? And those have been very uncomfortable, especially getting to, Why are you doing what you’re doing? Because it’s opened up a whole new level of understanding emerging at this point
because we just did it because it was part of the content standards or somebody said to do it or I know it’s part of the framework
and I’ve seen how it’s done so I’m just going to go through the motions but not necessarily know why I’m actually doing what I’m
doing...It’s a stretch. There’s a dissonance. But that’s a good thing (February, 2006).
Despite the recognition that creating dissonance was a good thing, even these experienced coordinators felt on shaky ground when it came
to facilitating this kind of critical dialogue about practice. After two rounds of trying their hand at it they asked the designers to back up a
step in future sessions and take them through some cases discussions as learners.
Developing additional supports for reflection. Building on their own learning from the case discussions that had taken place during the
authors’ retreat, the designers carefully planned a series of prompts and questions for one of the retreat cases that they hoped would illicit
a similar in-depth analysis, discussion, and reflection. We also developed a taxonomy of questions to help guide participants through a
similar planning process in the next face-to-face session.[4] This session began with the design team’s case facilitation. After this discussion the group stepped back again and debriefed the sequence of questions and resulting discussion. Following this the group watched
another case together and small groups prepared their own sequence of questions to guide discussion. Each group then shared and critiqued their questions, checking them against the taxonomy of questions the designers had developed. This process was a breakthrough
event for this group, not only because they found it so difficult but also because it revealed a bias in what they saw in cases and how they
chose to talk about them:
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Linda: I will tell you that it was a very difficult assignment you gave us watching the video. The reason is because we’re so used
to looking more at the small little things—looking at the lesson as a coach. I need to look at the big picture and to think about
the decisions she was making...
Barbara: I think the prompts that we use have to be with a larger picture and to help them get beyond the procedural.
Leslie: We run up against a lot of people thinking that it’s the right or wrong way of doing things. We’re almost backtracking
ourselves doing some damage control as such to really build the understanding behind the decisions. That’s where the commentaries help and those kinds of things—pulling your lens our to a wider and not just the actual moves they’re making...We’ve
discovered that we’ve done a lot more talking about the what but we’re not talking about the why. So even using this frame to
look at the video, as a discussion point, why. What were the decisions that were behind this move or that move?...We’ve discovered that we’ve still been leaving out the why and the check (February, 2006).
Reflecting on the “reflectiveness” of their practices. When the experienced group subjected their own questions for reflection to critical
analysis they realized that they had a tendency to narrowly train their sights on the teaching moves without taking particular notice of the
learning. This prompted them to conclude that if their goal was to help teachers use evidence of student learning to guide their instructional
decision making they were going to need to shift the attention first to student learning and then use these observations to frame discussions so that they were more about teacher decision making and less about technical compliance. They also reflected that this needed to
happen not just when they were facilitating video case discussions, but also when they were observing classrooms and having coaching
conversations.
Further Advancing the Design
Teacher Commentary. Working through this process with this group also provided important insights for the designers. First, it helped
specify more clearly what kinds of resources and tools were the most valuable for stimulating and supporting productive case discussions.
Several participants, for example, reported how their use of the student work artifacts and the teacher reflections associated with some
of the cases helped set the focus on student learning, invited hypothesizing about instructional decision making, and stimulated selfreflection. Commenting on the value of the teacher commentary in particular one participant reported:
[In] my most recent training class we used [a writing workshop case]. The interesting thing that happened for that video is that
there’s a teacher video where she comments on her teaching...so they can hear her thinking about it. I thought it was a really
good way for them to say, here’s a real life experience with a teacher telling her rationale for making the decisions that she made.
And it’s so funny, after that training class, the next day, one of my kindergarten teachers went back in and it made her think
about how she can approach a situation that was going on in her classroom and her minilesson, and she changed it a little bit.
Her children took off based on the conversation that she had. And for three days afterwards she would come up to me saying
she can’t believe what they did. I’ve seen some of those kinds of things happen as a result of using these assets (May, 2006).
Based on this feedback the designers decided to make an effort to develop these components more fully for future cases. Borrowing from
the precedent of “dilemma cases” written by teachers about their own practice, we decided to try to include more of the teacher’s voice and
analysis, either in written or taped format, to help frame the problems of practice captured in their lessons. We also decided to include
longitudinal collections of student work artifacts and additional student information, including running records and other formative assessment data when available.
Supports for facilitation. The second insight was the need to develop more specific guidelines for case facilitation, including the guidelines for designing discussion questions already mentioned but also several additional steps. For example, left to their own devices, most
viewers of the cases watched the lessons rather passively, each coming away from the experience with different impressionistic pictures
of what actually took place. To encourage more active and focused observations the designers began recommending that facilitators articulate a clear focus for viewing the cases materials and that they give viewers explicit instructions to take detailed observational notes
on the teaching and the learning in the case, capturing the teacher and student talk as close to verbatim as possible. Then, in the course of
the case analysis and discussion the facilitator prompts the participants to refer to their notes and use this evidence as the basis for their
claims and interpretations. Finally, the designers encourage facilitators to follow up case discussions with explicit prompts and “homework” assignments designed to stimulate teachers to take action based on an assessment of their own students needs.
Transforming Professional Development for Professional Developers
Working with these two user groups in the ways we have described has been and continues to be a key phase in our design process. It has
enabled us to refine our content development goals and develop and test out specific guidelines for social practices of use. In addition,
because this work provided very concrete evidence that the participating coordinators felt ill-equipped, and therefore reluctant to engage
in or facilitate critical dialogue about teaching and learning, it has motivated the designers to experiment with a new model for preparing
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coordinators to build Lord’s “critical colleagueship” into their learning and their practice (1994).
An initial pilot of this model is currently underway which includes four weeks of face-to-face meetings over the course of a year with ongoing learning and collaboration through an online learning group. Unlike the traditional coordinators preparation program in which the
members concentrate much of their energy on perfecting their own classroom literacy practice, these sessions place much more emphasis
on the coaching aspects of the job and makes extensive use of PDS² cases to develop participants’ observation, critical analysis, case
facilitation, and coaching skills. This shift in what and how these individuals learn also suggests a shift in their approach as professional
developers—placing less emphasis on knowledge transmission through demonstration and modeling of desirable practices for replication
and more emphasis on “provoking, providing opportunities for, and supporting thinking” by teachers, to once again paraphrase Thompson
and Zueli (1999).
Although this pilot was originally conceptualized as an “advanced coaching” complement to the existing literacy coordinator professional
development model, the designers also recognize that with further elaboration this model could be developed as an alternative avenue of
professional development for a wider audience. Plans are currently underway to develop and test this alternative “coaches’ academy” with
three cohorts during the next academic year.
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The press for rigorous standards for student learning and the accompanying spotlight on teacher quality has generated new and increased
demands for professional learning for teachers and teacher educators—learning that is “not merely additive learning (the addition of new
skills to an existing repertoire) but transformative learning (thoroughgoing changes in deeply held beliefs, knowledge, and habits of practice)” (Thompson & Zueli, 1999, p. 342). This project to design a technology-assisted video case-based professional development support
system described in this paper was initiated with the goal of extending and enhancing a professional development model that had proven
effective for helping teachers implement ambitious evidence-based literacy instruction. In the iterative design process the design team
was, however, confronted with certain evidence of professional development and teacher practice that exposed and challenged certain
beliefs and habits of practice inherent in this model, and triggered a reassessment of its strengths and limitations. This reassessment has,
in turn, motivated the designers to experiment with the creation of new tools and social practices that we hope will stimulate more transformative learning for teacher educators and teachers.
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Search & Retrieval Functions
A fine-grained, multi-criteria search and retrieval function allows users to quickly locate the system resources most relevant to their particular needs or interests. Thumbnail descriptions and content maps are provided for each item returned by a search, making it easy for
users to quickly browse through and select materials for use.
Authoring Functions
PDS² also provides easy-to-use functions for customizing and archiving personally created collections of professional development materials. Users can drag and drop items from the multimedia database into folders they have created in their own libraries. These items can
then be annotated, ordered, edited and saved.
Tools for Networking and Collaborating
Authorized users of PDS² are able to set up their own school-based, on-line learning groups through which members can share resources,
participate in discussions, and engage in collaborative work on an on-going basis. PDS² subscribers also have access to a public discussion area where they can monitor and participate in threaded-discussion groups that are open to the larger professional community. Participation in this community allows users to tap into expertise that might be beyond what is available in their local context.
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Classroom Context
Grade: 3
Teacher: Jennifer Piediscalzo
School: Darby Woods Elementary
District: South-Western City School District
Taping Date: 11/12/03
This writing workshop lesson is the first in a two-part series of lessons on writing about favorite keepsakes. There are three parts to this
lesson: a craft minilesson, independent writing and conferring, and sharing.
The class has been working on this piece of writing for several days. In previous lessons, students brainstormed ideas and then worked on
organizing these thoughts using a graphic organizer. Over the past several weeks, students were introduced to the six stages of the writing
process: explore, discovery draft, revise, edit, final draft conference, and publish.
This lesson takes place in a third-grade classroom in an Ohio public school in mid-November. There are 21 children in the class. Ann Cameron, Jennifer’s literacy coach, is observing the lesson.
Expert Commentary
Increasing Student Involvement During the Minilesson
Jennifer’s minilesson is a good example of ways to increase the level of student involvement to facilitate learning. First, she clearly tells
students that she has been looking closely at their work and has planned this lesson to help them learn how to do something that will help
them as writers. This lets children know that they are accountable for quality in their writing. Then, she demonstrates what she has noticed
in their work through a large chart of her own writing and asks them to help her revise. Jennifer expects each child to generate questions
as readers in their notebooks and to participate in the discussion of how to use those questions to enhance the writing. This part of the
minilesson gives each child the opportunity to fully participate in the revision, which should support their independent efforts with their
own writing. Finally, she explicitly tells the children that she expects each of them to use the green pen and find at least one place in their
writing to add more detail, so that the children will be able to practice the principle learned in the minilesson by applying it to their writing.
In a future lesson, Jennifer could also do a shared writing with the group to create a text based on the graphic organizer and new ideas they
have generated. This would effectively model how to use notes on an organizer to create a well-developed paragraph or two. The class might
also discuss how to use individual words and phrases to capture their thoughts on the graphic organizers, rather than whole sentences.
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Teacher’s Language
Jennifer uses very clear and concise language as she explains the writing workshop procedures to her students. She explains, “I want you
to write two to three things that you want to know more about,” when she directs them to write in their notebooks about the questions they
have about her writing. She also celebrates each student’s contribution to the discussion about ways to make her writing more detailed. (“I
like that, Austin!”) Jennifer’s minilesson models what she wants her students to do as writers, and she provides a clear purpose, saying, “So,
adding detail leaves the reader with fewer questions and helps them understand your message on a deeper level.”
At the end of the minilesson, she carefully explains her expectations about using the green pen and finding at least one place in their writing
where they can add more detail.
Use of Graphic Organizers
You’ll want to be cautious in using graphic organizers like the one in this lesson. Jennifer has made a decision that the organizer will help
these third-graders who are just beginning to learn the procedures for writing workshop. Graphic organizers are temporary tools. They can
be useful in making brief notes-phrases, words, short sentences-as a prelude to producing a discovery draft. These notes are helpful in
keeping the organization of the piece in the writer’s head. As adult writers, we often jot down key words or outlines to help in organizing writing and keeping it going, so graphic organizers can build valuable skill. Overuse of these tools could result in dependence and could actually
confine writers, not allowing the flexibility to let their writing take shape. Another problem of overuse is that students come to see them as
“worksheets” that they have to fill out. You would not want your students to “fill out” organizers and then simply copy them into a narrative,
because that would make their writing formulaic. Jennifer is providing this strong structural support on a temporary basis so that students
can give attention to learning the procedures for writing workshop and at the same time produce a piece of writing that is satisfying to them.
Types of Writing Conferences
While her class is writing, Jennifer supports their efforts through both individual and small group conferences. Her individual conferences
are both teacher-initiated and student-initiated. Her conferences also benefit other students sitting nearby, sometimes through Jennifer’s
invitation to one student to note what she has said to another.
Based on her observations, she decided that working in a small group would best support three of the children and make efficient use of
her time. So, her conferencing flows back and forth between individuals and working with the small group. By meeting with the small group
early in the workshop, she can get them started with their tasks and explain expectations before returning to work with individuals. Later,
she returns to note their progress and provide further support.
Sharing
Jennifer’s sharing session was brief, but it provided an opportunity for three children to share their work and one to share her confusions.
By asking, “How did it go today?” Jennifer had a chance to hear one child’s confusions, which confirmed the teacher’s observations that the
students were having some trouble understanding the writing process. This set the stage for working on that the next day. This is a good
example of the curriculum emerging from the students as Jennifer closely observes their work and plans lessons to move them ahead as
writers.
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Questions for Reflection
š What are the ways in which the teacher’s classroom organization facilitates student writing in terms of both physical organization
and routines she has established?
š Discuss your insights into why Jennifer planned this lesson and how she prepared. What worked? What might you do differently?
š What are the specific goals of this lesson? How does she help children understand what they are going to learn?
š How do the routines and organizational ideas support learning during this lesson?
š Look closely at Jennifer’s actions to see how she models important behaviors for students in terms of both craft and procedures.
For inexperienced writers, it is important to provide explicit modeling of the writing process. How was this goal accomplished in this
minilesson? How did the teacher?s language assist their understanding?
š How does Jennifer encourage student involvement? Note her comments, questions, suggestions, demeanor, and language.
š How does Jennifer make the task clear to the students? How does she turn the task over to the children, setting the scene for inde
pendent writing?
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š How does Jennifer move back and forth between individual and small group teaching? What are the advantages of this
organization? What does a teacher need to do to facilitate this organization? What do students need to know how to do?
š Examine her conferences and discuss the various purposes of each conference. How do these conferences meet students? needs?
š What are the characteristics of the small group instruction during this writing workshop?
š How does Jennifer interact with children during conferences? What are the characteristics of their talk? Discuss how the
conversation supports individual writers. What do you notice about the way she lets children know what is expected?
š How does the physical arrangement during sharing support learning?
š What are the ways in which Jennifer’s observations during the workshop time influence the sharing?
š What evidence do you see that the children know the routine of sharing?
š What are Jennifer’s expectations for students during sharing? How does she establish an atmosphere of respect for writers?
š Why do you think she chose those students for sharing?
Suggestions for Professional Development Activities:
š Examine the pictures of the classroom environment and footage of the minilesson and sharing to discuss how routines and the
classroom organization facilitate student writing. Make a list of the clear language a teacher could use to help students understand
their behavior during writing workshop.
š Distribute this and other graphic organizers and work in small groups to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each. How
and when would you use each one?
š Review several of the writing samples from this lesson and examine the writer’s process from drafting using the graphic organizer to
the final copy. Discuss the ways the graphic organizer supported the children as writers. What similarities do you notice about the
writing samples? What else does the teacher need to teach to ensure that the writers use graphic organizers to support their own voice?
š Examine the writing samples from the three children in the small group (Eli, Jordan, and Yesenia). What do you notice? What would be
your objective for the next time you work with that group?
š If you were working with this group tomorrow, what would you focus on during your minilesson?
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The Nuts and Bolts of Teaching Writing
Calkins, Lucy (2003). The Nuts and Bolts of Teaching Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann (Firsthand).
The text is one of a series including units of study for teaching K–2 writers.
Writing Workshop: The Essential Guide
Fletcher, Ralph, & Portalupi, Joann (2001). Writing Workshop: The Essential Guide. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
This is a basic guide for teachers just beginning writing workshop.
Guiding Readers and Writers, Grades 3–6
Fountas, Irene, & Pinnell, Gay Su (2001). Guiding Readers and Writers, Grades 3–6. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
The authors provide a comprehensive and practical guide for planning and managing writing workshop for intermediate-grade students.
<7GI
Increasing Student Involvement During the Minilesson
Topics for minilessons typically emerge from ongoing classroom practice, and they are also related to the writing curriculum and expectations for children at the particular grade level. Analyzing the children’s work is an important part of planning. You might try looking over children’s writing folders at regularly scheduled intervals and asking yourself: “What do they need to know to help them as writers?” Minilessons
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may also emerge based on notes taken during conferences with students or observations of individuals, small groups, or the entire class
during writing workshop.
Minilessons may be procedural, which means that you are teaching children classroom routines for the particular area of the framework.
You might also be reminding children of procedures that they are not following correctly. In other words, any problem related to classroom
routines may become a procedural minilesson. Early in the year, you will be teaching a great many procedural minilessons, but they will also
occur throughout the year as needed.
A second kind of minilesson may focus on the conventions of writing. These lessons might include attention to punctuation, grammar, spelling, or format. A third kind of minilesson focuses on the craft of writing. In a craft minilesson, you will be teaching children something about
important aspects of quality writing-organization, word selection, figurative language, good “leads,” and so on.
Should I use graphic organizers during writing workshop?
You’ll want to be cautious in using graphic organizers. Some teachers use graphic organizers to support children as they are beginning to learn
something new-writing nonfiction using “compare and contrast,” getting a piece started, or collecting descriptive words they may use in their
writing. It’s important to remember that graphic organizers are temporary tools. They can be useful in making brief notes—phrases, words, and
short sentences—as a prelude to producing a discovery draft. These notes are helpful in keeping the organization of the piece in the writer’s
head. As adult writers, we often jot down key words or outlines to help in organizing writing and keeping it going, so graphic organizers can
build valuable skills. However, overuse of these tools could result in dependence and could actually confine writers, not allowing the flexibility
to let their writing take shape. Another problem area of overuse is that students come to see them as “worksheets” that they have to fill out.
You would not want your students to “fill out” organizers and then simply copy them into a narrative, because that would make their writing
formulaic.
Are conferences only with individual students?
When a teacher notices that several children have similar needs, a small group can be formed to work together during the workshop. This is
a more efficient use of the teacher’s time than working with each child individually. At the beginning of the workshop time, the teacher can
call the child to the guided reading table for the first part of the conference. This may involve having each child briefly share part of their
writing, and the teacher can work with each in ways that benefit all. Next, the teacher explains what the children are to work on while she
confers with other children, and the small group stays at the table to work. This minimizes time wasted moving about the room. Later, the
teacher returns to the group, observes their progress, and provides additional support as needed. Children often comment on each other’s
work and benefit from the teacher’s instruction to other members of the group.
How do I set up the sharing time?
Your first consideration should be establishing the physical arrangement for sharing. Many teachers prefer to have children gathered on a
rug or sitting in a circle around the edge of the carpet so each student is a part of the discussion. Sometimes, teachers will have a sharing
time while students are still in their seats at the end of the workshop time. This is particularly effective if transitions are difficult or timeconsuming. Next, an atmosphere of thoughtful respect should be established during sharing time, so writers feel comfortable sharing their
writing and all benefit from discussion. Students may be selected that day by the teacher to share, particularly if their work illustrates the
minilesson of the day. Keep track of who shares to ensure that everyone has a turn.
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Analyzing the Teaching and Learning
General Commentary
The teacher engages a group of first grade students in reflecting on their field trip and learning how to share their experience with others
in the school through photographs and writing. The sentence will serve as a label to tell others what they did. Reflect for a moment on the
context for this writing. What has the teacher done to help children learn that writing has authentic purposes?
Talking About the Experience
Consider the role of talk in the writing process. Read the section on Supporting the Process through Conversation (p. 11-12 in Interactive
Writing, McCarrier, Pinnell, & Fountas, 2000). As you observe, think about the teaching, considering each aspect. When talk surrounds the
writing experience it enables the children to share their thinking with others, and expand their understandings. It serves as an important
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element in the writing process as it helps children learn how to put their thoughts together in a way that readers will understand.
A trip to the zoo is exciting for children. First, think about how having a real experience like this one can help them expand oral language.
Talk would surround the entire experience. With this experience, what are the opportunities to help children shape their talk so that it can
be written down?
Composing the Sentence
Read page 12 in Interactive Writing, Creating a Common Text, and think about how the teacher supports the composing process. The tension
lies in guiding children towards a statement that is succinct and clear enough to put into writing; in the case of interactive writing, it must
be readable for the group of children. As you observe the composition of one sentence, reflect on how the teacher balances the twin goals of
helping children use their own language and also helping them understand the constraints that written language requires.
Once the sentence is constructed, the teacher thinks quickly about the learning opportunities it offers the particular group of writers.
Before you watch the actual writing, think quickly about the learning opportunities in the sentence to be written in this lesson. There will
always be more than you have time for, so teaching is a selective process.
Often, in interactive writing, children repeat the sentences several times before beginning to write it. What would be the value of repeating
the sentence by the children prior to writing the text?
Refer to pages 84–86 in Interactive Writing. Look at the bullets related to both composing and negotiating and use them as a basis for discussion of movement from oral to written composition.
Reviewing the Writing Rubric
The key elements listed on the writing rubric provide important conventions first graders should be able to apply in their writing. As you continue to watch, think about how the children were able to bring their understanding from the rubric to the writing experience that follows.
Also be thinking about what they might learn in order to apply elements independently (which is the ultimate goal of interactive writing).
Constructing the Sentence
Once the decision is made to construct the sentence, “the kids were standing in front of the reindeer,” the teacher begins to consider decision-making regarding its construction. As you compose sentences with your students in interactive writing, think about:
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behaviors such as saying words slowly, using word parts and using analogy.
Of the three bullets above, which would be important to select as teaching points, especially if you are trying to keep the lesson at about ten
minutes? You would want to consider the instructional value of each, as well as what children already knows. What words might you simply
want to write yourself to move the lesson along, leaving time to involve children in writing the words that have most potential for learning?
As you view the lesson, notice the strategies the teacher helps the children use. Think about three important ones and watch for evidence
that the children are actually taking them on for themselves.
š Saying words slowly. (For example, Danny writes the word the quickly and easily and the teacher proceeds to say the words kids
slowly, encouraging the children to do the same. With the teacher’s help the children produce the four sounds in kids.) If you
can help the children do this for themselves, they will have an important technique to use in their independent writing. What
would need to happen in future lessons to help the children learn this strategy? Take a look at pages 114–115 of Interactive
Writing (McCarrier, Pinnell, & Fountas, 2000) for some specific descriptions of how to help children hear sounds in words.
š Notice the parts of words. (For example, in a variety of ways the teacher helps the children think about the parts in standing.)
What is helpful and what is probably not so helpful? What strategies will children be able to use in their own writing?
š Rereading. Reading is also important to writers because it helps them internalize the structure of the sentence and anticipate
the next words. Think about how the children can learn to engage in rereading as an automatic part of their own writing.
See page 190–191 of Interactive Writing for a discussion of turn-taking. Consider the advantages and disadvantages of the teacher’s decisions about turn-taking.
Reflecting
After watching the lesson, think about what children have learned that will be useful to them in their independent writing. What do you think
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the children already knew, and what were some very important understandings that they needed to develop and use in their independent
writing? Are there any priorities that you might, upon reflection, establish for a lesson like this one? If you have to decrease the time, what
would you keep and what would you omit?
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Questions for Reflection
General
How did the lesson contribute to children’s independent writing abilities?
Talking About the Experience
How complex was the sentence the children composed? What were the different ways the children composed their thoughts?
Constructing the Text
What would be your decisions for teaching opportunities in the sentence? What words might you have written quickly yourself? How did the
teacher’s decisions contribute to the children’s independent writing strategies? How might the teacher help the children get more writing
accomplished in the time period? How might the teacher help children become more independent in saying words slowly to hear sounds?
Rereading the Text
What other opportunities for learning were in the rereading of the text?
What will help these children internalize the technique so that they automatically use it when writing independently?
Suggestions for Professional Development Activities
General
Revisit Chapter 5 in Interactive Writing (McCarrier, Pinnell and Fountas) to review essential elements in the interactive writing process. Talk
with colleagues about elements that may have been helpful to these children.
Read the section on Supporting the Process through Conversation (p. 11–12 in Interactive Writing McCarrier, Pinnell, & Fountas, 2000).
Refer to pages 84–86 in Interactive Writing (McCarrier, Pinnell, & Fountas, 2000). Look at the bullets related to both composing and negotiating and use them as a basis for discussion of movement from oral to written composition.
Refer to pages 114–115 of Interactive Writing (McCarrier, Pinnell, & Fountas, 2000) for some specific descriptions of how to help children
hear sounds in words.
[1] These example components may be found in Appendix 2.
[2] The full text of these exemplars may be found in Appendix 3.
[3] Since the launch an additional twenty-five cases have been completed and uploaded in to the PDS² database. Content development
work for the K–3 cases is ongoing and there are hopes of expanding this work to upper grades in literacy as well as in the math content area.
[4] A Taxonomy of Questions to Facilitate Literacy Video Case Inquiry
1) Questions to solicit what observers noticed about the teaching and learning.
2) Questions to prompt the observer to analyze the teaching and learning based on their theoretical/background knowledge of
the reading and writing process.
3) Questions that focus attention on a “problem of practice” or issue that arises in a video case and prompt debate, articulation
of multiple perspectives, practice decision making and collaborative problem solving.
4) Questions/prompts that ask observers to reflect on their own practice/students in light of what they have learned/noticed in
the process of analyzing and discussing the video case.
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