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The Creation and Evolution of a Co-teaching Community: How Teachers Learned to
Address Diverse Literacy Learning Needs
Kelly Chandler-Olcott
Janine Nieroda
Syracuse University
It was the last day of the second annual Robinson Summer Writing Institute, just an hour
before family and friends of the rising freshmen who had completed the three-week program
would arrive for a public celebration of student work. Kelly, the institute director and first
author of this paper, had just dismissed the program-wide morning meeting, sending students to
meet one last time with their primary pair of teachers, when Jamilah, a Somali-born girl who
reported speaking three languages, gestured for attention. Politely but forcefully, she asked,
“Why did you only choose kids who were born here to read their stories in front of everyone?”
Jamilah explained that she and several friends, all English language learners, wanted to know
why none of their personal narratives, almost all of which dealt with their immigration
experiences, had been selected for showcasing.
The previous day, each of the three dyads—pairs of teachers working most closely with
one third of the 56 students—had selected one student to read his or her personal narrative at the
celebration, and the representatives had read their narratives to their peers in each dyad group as
extra practice before the guests arrived. Jamilah and her friends had put their heads together
across the three dyads, and they were right: although the featured speakers varied on a number of
dimensions, including gender, race, and their sending middle school, all were native English
speakers, despite ELLs comprising about 25% of the institute enrollment that year.
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Kelly told Jamilah that the team had seen many more fine narratives than could be read
during the celebration and that the teachers did indeed value the hard work she and her friends
had put in. She pointed out that many of the narratives Jamilah referenced had become very
lengthy, making them difficult to read aloud to an audience that might include restless children,
and she noted that all narratives would be available for browsing, as long as students had
provided permission to display them. Jamilah nodded before turning away, but the rest of her
body language spoke loudly: She wasn’t satisfied with Kelly’s answer. Later, when the teaching
team took up Jamilah’s question, we came to realize that she was right to pose it—a realization
that informed subsequent reflection and adjustments to pedagogy within the institute.
This paper reports findings from a four-year formative experiment (Reinking & Bradley,
2008) investigating that summer writing institute. Staffed by both university researchers and
teachers, the program was open to all students who were, like Jamilah, entering ninth grade at
Robinson, an urban high school in the northeast United States. In contrast to traditional summer
school, it was intended as enrichment, not remediation, for a heterogeneous group of students,
and a learning experience, not just a teaching opportunity, for practitioners. It had two sets of
related pedagogical goals. For the rising 9th graders, the goals were to increase writing
engagement and skill while easing the transition to high school. For teachers, the goal was to
build professional capacity to teach writing in diverse, inclusive classrooms, using collaborative
planning and co-teaching (Friend & Cook, 2003) as what formative experiment experts call key
enabling factors (Reinking & Bradley, 2008).
This paper takes a focused look at teachers’ efforts within the institute to support the
writing development of English language learners like Jamilah, who represented 20-30% of the
students each year. Most were students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFEs)
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originally from countries in the Middle East or Africa. We use Jamilah’s question as a
touchstone, what design researchers Gravemeijer and Cobb (2006) call a “pivotal episode,” to
illustrate key aspects of the broader patterns we share in our findings section. As teachers refined
the institute’s model over time, their moves to support full participation by ELL students became
more explicit and more grounded in collective examination of varying kinds of student data. As
teachers learned to work in community with each other, so did their ability to address students’
diverse literacy needs. We theorize this shift using Ubuntu (Swanson, 2007; Venter, 2004), a
community-oriented humanist lens originating in African philosophy, to complement the
multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996) and inclusive schooling (Udvari-Solner, 1997)
perspectives that informed the intervention’s initial conception.
Review of Related Literature
Scholars agree that participation in today's schools, workplaces, and communities requires
sophisticated writing skills, in part because of technology’s significance in most sectors of
everyday life (Graham & Perin, 2007; New London Group, 1996). A key feature of the Common
Core State Standards is an emphasis on writing, both print and digital (Calkins, Ehrenworth, &
Lehman, 2012). Unfortunately, many secondary English teachers are not well equipped to respond
to these trends, with little pre-service training in composition (Finders, Krank, & Kramer, 2013).
Causing additional concern are data from Applebee and Langer (2009) suggesting inequitable
access to high-quality writing instruction, with English language learners (ELLs), students of
color, and students with disabilities writing less in school, receiving less feedback, and earning
lower standardized test scores than their peers.
Research on students' out-of-school literacy practices reveals, however, that youth are often
deeply engaged in writing, particularly when media and technology are involved (Alvermann,
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2010; Lenhart, Arafeh, Smith, & Macgill, 2008). These personal literacies can be tapped in school,
but more often the domains remain separate. The disjuncture has been exacerbated by increased
emphasis on test preparation, particularly on-demand, print-driven writing scored on a large scale
(Hillocks, 2002). Since students of color and ELLs are more likely to attend under-resourced urban
schools under pressure to raise scores (Alston, 2012), they are also more likely to receive testdriven instruction focused on basic skills that fails to acknowledge both their out-of-school
competence and the frequently multimodal nature of contemporary composition (McCarthey &
Mkhize, 2013; New London Group, 1996)
A number of scholars have reported success in improving writing via after-school or
summer programs drawing on youth’s interests and desire to use technology. Hull and Katz (2006)
found that youth's digital storytelling through a community center increased motivation and
agency. Gutierrez (2008) reported that migrant students in a residential summer program learned to
combine home- and community-based language with academic discourse for social critique. But
most programs like these are staffed by pre-service teachers or community activists, not practicing
teachers, and thus provide less insight into how teachers learn to use those approaches.
The National Writing Project, arguably the most influential professional development
provider for teaching writing over the past 35 years, routinely sponsors invitational summer
institutes. These initiatives increase teachers' self-efficacy around both writing and writing
instruction (Whitney, 2008), but they do not typically involve simultaneous work with youth.
Instead, participants must apply insights at a later date in their own contexts.
Evidence suggests that teachers would benefit from working collaboratively through such
implementation complexities, particularly in contexts with high concentrations of under-prepared
students. Studies of urban school reform document the power of teacher collaboration to design
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and implement a shared curriculum (Zavadsky, 2009). Scholarship on co-teaching—Friend and
Cook’s (2003) term for instructional delivery by two or more teachers—suggests that students
benefit from increased attention, greater instructional variety, and a greater sense of belonging,
particularly in diverse, inclusive classrooms (Scruggs, Mastropieri, & McDuffie, 2007; CaustonTheoharis, Theoharis, Bull, Cosier, Dempf-Aldrich, 2011; Udvari-Solner, 1997). Although such
research tends to measure impact on reading more than writing, there is good reason to suspect
collaboration would promote similar growth in student writers.
The institute was designed to build on these bodies of literature. It was intended to generate
insights about how to leverage writing-focused summer initiatives to improve instruction for
adolescent writers, and it was designed from the start to accommodate learner diversity. The
student-teacher ratio was kept low to allow for individualized attention. It blended attention to
print and digital genres, and the main products—personal narratives and digital stories—were
selected because they were seen as “elastic” (Chandler-Olcott, 2003), able to “stretch to
accommodate literacy learners at either end of a developmental continuum, without requiring those
students to be labeled or segregated from each other” (p. 75). It allowed teachers to apply new
insights immediately to practice, and it featured varied opportunities for collaboration, with each
day in July featuring approximately the same amount of time for instruction and for planning,
allowing teachers to make adjustments and document them.
Method
Although formative experiments are not as common in literacy research as quasiexperiments, case studies, or ethnographies, they have attracted interest from scholars seeking to
“understand the components of an instructional intervention that are critical to success, as opposed
to simply determining that one intervention works better than another or that a certain instructional
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move produces desirable results” (Reinking, Colwell, Hall, Fisher, Frey, & Baumann, 2012, 411).
They are goal-directed, adaptive, iterative, and concerned with and interacting variables (Reinking
& Bradley, 2008). The approach has been used to investigate literacy engagement among English
learners (Ivey & Broaddus, 2007), to design and interrogate a school-wide plan for addressing state
accountability targets (Fisher & Frey, 2009), and to explore the impact of vocabulary instruction
on fifth graders’ word knowledge and appreciation (Davis, Baumann, Arner, Quintero, Wade,
Walters, & Watson, 2012), among others. A formative experiment seemed appropriate for this
study because our team saw the institute as an incubator to test and examine promising approaches
to teaching writing for heterogeneous populations.
Background and Context
The writing institute was situated within a larger initiative for teachers, administrators, and
university partners to transform Robinson High School into an early college high school, where
students could earn up to two years of college credit before graduation. The premise behind early
colleges is that acceleration accompanied by support, not remediation, creates motivation for youth
to excel, including those from groups underrepresented in college such as ELLs and students of
color (Rosenbaum & Becker, 2011).
Partners in Robinson's early college initiative identified writing as a school-wide focus
because writing competence is central to postsecondary success. Since the school’s 11 English
teachers were seen as key contributors, professional development began with them. Initial
discussions revealed concerns that existing instruction did not adequately serve ELLs or African
Americans. Next, about half the staff volunteered for a summer book club that read texts on
teaching writing to diverse populations (cf., Fu, 1995). During 2009-2010 and 2010-2011, Kelly
led department-wide professional development. The monthly sessions were grounded in Pearson
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and Gallagher’s (1983) conception of gradual release of responsibility and focused on high-utility
instructional approaches such as think-alouds, use of mentor texts, and one-to-one conferences that
both research and teacher resources (cf., Gallagher, 2006; Graham & Perin, 2007) suggested would
yield results. The summer writing institute was an outgrowth of this work.
Setting and Participants
Located in an urban U.S. district, Robinson High School enrolls about 1300 students. In
2010, the institute’s first year, about two thirds were eligible for free or reduced lunch. Seven
percent were classified as Latino, 10% as Asian, 22% as White, and 60% as African American.
About 20% were identified as ELLs and 20% as students with disabilities. Institute participants
represented similar demographics to those attending during the school year, although the
percentage of ELLs in the summer was often a bit higher, generally due to strong recruiting efforts
by one of the sending middle schools with a very linguistically diverse population.
Between 2010 and 2013, nineteen different adults played an instructional role during the
summer institutes. They included 11 Robinson teachers, mostly from the English department but
also representing special education and social studies; two middle-school English teachers from
one of Robinson’s feeder schools, one of whom eventually moved to teach at Robinson; four
graduate students from the university partner; one retired teacher who had served as both an
English teacher and an instructional coach within the district; and one university professor (Kelly),
who served as the program’s director. Fourteen of the teachers were female and five male. All
teachers were native English speakers; sixteen were White, with the remaining identifying as
African American or Native American. They ranged in experience from newly-certified to veteran
teachers, though most were in the first decade of their careers when they participated.
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University team members played various roles. Kelly designed and directed the institute.
She facilitated planning meetings, typed the group’s plans, took field notes, and conducted
interviews. Janine, a doctoral student in English education, took field notes as a participant
observer during Year 2 and assisted with data analysis and writing about subsequent years. Both
of us identify as White and as native English speakers, and each taught secondary English.
Although some study reports have been collaborative (cf., Chandler-Olcott et al., 2012), this paper
was authored by university researchers alone.
The Intervention
The institute took place at Robinson and was organized around two questions: Why write?
How does writing affect me and the world? Over three weeks, students completed: 1) a writer's
notebook of daily informal writing, 2) a polished personal essay, and 3) a group-authored digital
story representing an inquiry into an aspect of writing (e.g., a time when writing changed history).
Institute teachers began work in May and June when university staff hosted five two-hour
planning meetings to draft the essential questions, design the 15-day curriculum, establish teacher
pairings, and master the digital story software. In July, students attended each day from 9am to
noon. Teachers convened from 8:30 to 9:00am to set up classroom space and fine-tune plans then
spent another 2.5 hours debriefing the morning, analyzing student work, and planning subsequent
lessons. The program ended with a reception at which students shared their work with family,
former teachers, Robinson administrators, local politicians, and university personnel.
Consistent with the literature reviewed above, the essential elements (Colwell, HuntBarron, & Reinking, 2013) of the intervention were: 1) opportunities for students to compose in
both print and digital genres, 2) use of instructional approaches such as think-alouds, conferences,
and consideration of mentor texts that Robinson teachers had explored during professional
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development, and 3) heterogeneous groups of students working with teachers paired in a dyad.
Over time, the staff developed other ways of co-teaching with each other across the larger staff,
including lessons taught to all students simultaneously by rotating groups of teachers in a largegroup instructional space.
Data Sources/Analysis
Each year of the institute yielded the following data: a) agendas, handouts, and field notes
for the five planning sessions in May and June, b) daily plans for 15 days of instruction in July, c)
agendas, and field notes for 15 afternoon planning sessions in July, d) copies of student work,
including interest surveys, writer’s notebook entries, draft and completed personal narratives, and
all artifacts related to digital story construction, and e) field notes, journal entries, and photographs
made by researchers during daily activities. Kelly also conducted semi-structured interviews of 4060 minutes with each teacher several months after each institute. The protocol included questions
such as “Tell me about your experience teaching in the institute this summer” and “What
suggestions for improving the institute for next summer do you have?” These interviews were
taped and transcribed.
As is typical with formative experiments (Reinking & Bradley, 2008), data analysis began
immediately, during each afternoon session. All staff members reviewed various kinds of data,
using collaborative talk and writer’s notebooks to make sense of them, and they offered
suggestions for improvement, both in the midst of the institute and on its final day in anticipation
of next year’s version. Retrospective analysis by researchers (Gravemeijer & Cobb, 2006)
involved coding and discussion of data by pedagogical goal, noting adjustments, enhancing or
inhibiting factors, and outcomes. We stayed close to teachers’ perspectives by relying on their
words from interviews and planning sessions and triangulating those sources with artifacts such as
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daily plans and field notes. The analysis for this particular paper focused on teachers’ efforts to
support writing development by English language learners, particularly those whose formal
schooling in their home countries was truncated or interrupted.
When we selected this focus on ELLs, we adopted an additional theoretical lens to inform
our analysis. As mentioned briefly above, Ubuntu is an African philosophy that “promotes the
common good of society and includes humanness as an essential element in human growth”
(Venter, 2004, p. 150). Communalism and interdependence are key values from such a
perspective, and learners must be understood not merely as individuals but also as members of a
collective. As Swanson (2007) explains, Ubuntu holds that “a person is a person through their
relationship to others” (p. 55). Ubuntu has been applied not only to education but also to political
contexts such as South Africa’s well-known truth and reconciliation work in the post-apartheid era.
In addition to its usefulness in interrupting deficit perspectives about ELLs from many
backgrounds that circulate in individualistic Western schooling contexts, Ubuntu was attractive to
us because African-born students represented a significant majority of the ELLs who participated
in four iterations of the institute.
As we revisited sources such as transcripts, lesson plans, and journal entries, we identified
places where Ubuntu values, as we understood them, might either confirm or challenge our earlier
interpretations of patterns in the data. We were particularly keen to find an extended example to
interrogate because of the parallels between Gravemeijer and Cobb’s (2006) recommendation that
design researchers identify pivotal episodes in their data as tools for meta-analysis of their
“conjectures, confirmations, and refutations” (p. 38) and Swanson’s (2007) argument that
“reflexive narratizing” of an extended example might reflect Ubuntu principles by deconstructing
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hegemonic meanings and pointing to “other possibilities of being in the world” (p. 54). Jamilah’s
challenge seemed to us to be such an episode.
Findings
Our findings are organized around three categories of adjustments that institute teachers
made related to English language learners’ needs. These adjustments sometimes took place within
a given iteration of the institute (e.g., between the beginning and end of Year 2) and sometimes
from one year to the next across the four-year span of the study. Like Colwell et al. (2013), we
see the need to make and document adjustments as a crucial element of formative experiments that
distinguishes them from research designs such as ethnographies, which typically capture the
complexities of an existing intervention but do not seek to influence them. We discuss the three
categories—seating, grouping, and composing support—in turn and then return at the end of the
section to an analysis of the pivotal episode with which we began: Jamilah’s challenge related to
personal narrative sharing at the Year 2 celebration.
Adjustments: Seating
When Kelly and the Year 1 teaching team designed the initial framework for the
intervention, opportunities for co-teaching during large-group instruction, as opposed to within the
dyads, were not explicitly detailed. The team initially assumed it would be easiest to implement
approaches such as conferences and think-alouds—those believed to have the most potential to
accommodate diverse learning needs—in smaller groups. This turned out to be true for
conferences but not for think-alouds. The team increased use of the latter approach, both in
frequency and in duration, when hunches about its effectiveness in making aspects of writing
explicit were corroborated by observations of student behavior and analysis of their drafts. As
Kelly noted part-way through Year 1, students were “better able to actually LEARN in large group
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than any of us expected” (Reflective journal, 7/20/10). And co-teaching the whole group in
rotating pairs had benefits for adults, too. It allowed individual team members with particular
expertise—for example, Cynthia, the Year 2 participant who was most facile with the digital
storytelling tool Photo Story 3 (Lesson plan, 7/27/11)—to model instructional approaches that
other team members could practice more extensively later in the smaller spaces afforded by the
dyads. Co-teaching also permitted teachers who were not in charge of a particular activity to
observe students closely as they engaged in it—data that could then be considered by the whole
teaching team during afternoon planning and debriefing sessions.
Once the team committed to co-teaching all students in the large-group instruction room
during at least part of each day, how that space was used—how bodies were arranged within it
(Leander & Sheehy, 2004)—became an important enhancing factor. During Year 1, we used a
seating chart that placed students in alphabetical order, from front to back, mixing students from
the various sending schools rather than allowing them to cluster with their friends. The chart,
which we copied for all 9 members of the teaching team, helped teachers learn up to 60 student
names quickly—important for a program delivered intensively over three weeks—and it facilitated
quick checks for absences with a population whose attendance could be inconsistent, given the
noncompulsory nature of the experience and the competing attractions of summer. The charts also
served as a useful tool when team members were tasked with taking notes during a particular
instructional event—for example, to keep track of which students asked a question of a guest
presenter from the community. These moves were precursors to meeting individual needs, but they
did not exploit the affordances of deliberate seating enough.
The following year, our team noticed almost immediately that Jarrick, a native speaker of
English with an autism label, struggled to sit still and focus during large-group instruction when he
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felt crowded in the middle of a row. Consequently, we moved his seat to the aisle, allowing him to
stretch his legs. Our conversation about Jarrick during afternoon planning led us to brainstorm a
longer list of students who would benefit from seats in the front, on the aisles, and in the back row,
where teachers could scan their writing in process, re-explain or simplify directions, or provide
other kinds of unobtrusive support. Most of the beneficiaries of these moves were English
language learners. For example, we placed Kaid, a very recent immigrant from Iraq with limited
English proficiency, in the front row on the aisle, where whoever was leading the instruction could
see and interpret his nonverbal cues and where other teachers would have easy access to him to
scaffold his understanding of tasks and his text generation.
During Years 3 and 4, we systematized the seating assignment process for all students, not
just the most obvious candidates for special placement. We used an alphabetical scheme for two
days of instruction, until we had gathered enough data on students to make more purposeful
assignments, and then we devoted part of a planning meeting to articulating priorities for a revised
chart, as this agenda indicates:

Writer’s Notebook Prompt: 5 minutes to capture a moment with a kid that seemed
important or interesting

Share around the table/no interruptions

Quick reports out from rotations: How did each go?

Review baseline samples

Grouping/seating notes

Plan for tomorrow (Fieldnotes, 7/9/13)
At least once more during the remainder of the program, we rearranged the seats to attend to new
insights about student needs that we had developed.
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In addition to facilitating teacher access for support, we sought to build seating charts
ensuring that English language learners, particularly newer speakers of English, had at least one
peer in close proximity with whom they seemed comfortable speaking. Sometimes these seat
partners were also ELLs; sometimes they were native English speakers. When we observed these
partnerships working, we named and praised what we saw. In Year 4, for example, Joanna noted
during the afternoon debriefing of the day’s lesson how impressed she had been with the quality of
conversation between Martin, a native speaker of English, and Caleb, a Kurundi speaker whose
family had arrived in the U.S. seven months before (Field notes, 7/12/13). Martin enthusiastically
shared an idea from their exchange with the large group, attributing it to Caleb by name. Joanna
complimented Martin on this move privately, and Billy, another member of the teaching team,
suggested that other students might consider raising points they appreciated from more reticent
peers, as Martin had done, when Billy next facilitated whole-group sharing. While Caleb never
volunteered to share on his own in the large-group space, his smiling face and positive body
language indicated his pleasure at his ideas being recognized nonetheless. When we revised the
seating chart later in the program, we were careful to keep him and Martin next to each other, even
as we moved other students around them (Lesson plan, 7/22/13).
During Year 3, we also developed the practice of “putting a body” —a phrase reminiscent
of defensive planning in basketball—on students we felt might benefit from targeted adult support.
Many of these students, though not all, were ELLs. About twice a week, we made lists during
planning meetings of students who, for a variety of reasons, we anticipated might struggle with the
following day’s large-group task—drafting three possible narrative leads, for example, or taking
notes during a demonstration lesson. After a pair of teachers had volunteered to facilitate the task
from the front of the room, other teachers would sign up, either through a verbal roll call or in
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writing on the whiteboard, to support a student or, less often, a pair of students from the “body”
list. We began to position a few chairs in the aisles in advance so that teachers with this
assignment could sit comfortably—and less obtrusively—near their designated student rather than
hovering nearby in a standing position. Sometimes, the “body” teacher would observe the
designated student from a distance, intervening only if it appeared to be necessary; other times, he
or she would help the student get started with a task and then move away to help or observe other
learners. The goal, regardless of approach, was to ensure that the student had as much
independence as possible, while reducing the chance that they would, in Rebecca’s words, “fall
through the cracks” in a large group (Interview, 9/20/10).
Adjustments: Groupings
As described more fully in a piece co-authored by the Year 2 teaching team (ChandlerOlcott et al., 2012), the summer institute featured a range of student groupings, ranging from
informal, daily opportunities to think-pair-share with an elbow partner to longer-term, balanced
groupings led by each of the teacher dyads. The most important of these groupings, however, was
arguably those the team made around digital stories. In keeping with the multiliteracies orientation
(New London Group, 1996) of the institute, students spent nearly half the program working on
these texts in small groups, so their careful composition was essential.
Early on in the study, the groupings were driven primarily by student interest in common
topics. After viewing a number of digital story exemplars and engaging in several guided
brainstorming sessions, participants were instructed to list three topic choices on an index card, in
order of preference. Teachers then spent the bulk of an afternoon planning session using this data
to create pairs and trios around topics such as sports writing, spoken word poetry, and fashion
journalism (Digital story group handout, 7/19/10). What the topic-driven document did not reveal
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was a second level of considerations for grouping that played out in teachers’ talk. Teachers
appeared to be most comfortable with groupings that distributed the English language learners,
who tended to be seen as needier than native-speaking peers, across the groups rather than
clustering them together, and they expressed a good deal of optimism about the potential of peer
support to scaffold student success with the task. These assumptions resulted during Year 1 in
about two thirds of the groups being comprised of native English speakers only, with the other
third mixing native speakers with English language learners. Only one of 22 groups that year
included no native English speakers at all (a pair of Bosnian-born boys with a strong command of
English and a shared interest in the history of Google).
In Year 2, the initial whiteboard grouping process yielded a bit more heterogeneity,
including two groups comprised solely of English language learners whom the team did not see as
particularly proficient in English—one with an interest in tennis and another wanting to focus on
famous published diaries. Teachers’ initial reticence to approve these groupings was captured in
this excerpt from Kelly’s journal:
We had an interesting conversation about grouping. The tendency of the group was to go
high/medium/low in a trio, which I can see on some levels. It ignored, however, that we
can scaffold for kids of similar ability (e.g., Akila/Valerie, in their tennis group). . . . In
their case, I really wanted them to be able to do something they were interested in, and to
challenge themselves, rather than be put in a group with a topic they didn’t care about (or
have much prior knowledge about). I was wary of putting an amenable kid with no interest
in their topic with them, just to help them. (Journal entry, 7/20/11)
The tennis players in question, Akila and Valerie, provide an interesting example of a shift
beginning to take place. Both were native speakers of Swahili, though they were originally from
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two different African countries, and they had a strong personal bond with each other. With teacher
help, they were able to secure an email interview with a university tennis coach about how he used
writing in his work, and they incorporated several snippets from his responses into their digital
story. They were not as proficient with academic English as some of their peers in the Year 2
cohort, but they were willing to revise and practice their script many times to ensure that it read
smoothly when they audiotaped the narration. Their digital story was eventually well received by
their peers and by the audience attending the public celebration, despite the teacher team’s initial
concerns that their group did not have an academically strong leader to anchor it.
When we repeated the grouping process in Year 3, concerns were again raised about
grouping students with less English proficiency with each other, rather than in groups representing
more heterogeneous language proficiency (Journal entry, 7/18/12). This time, however, there was
precedent of success from the previous year’s cohort to justify permitting ELLs to work together if
they shared a topic interest, just as native speakers of English would have been. Both Kelly and
Janice, a teacher who had been on the team since Year 1, reminded the other members that both
the tennis group and the diary-focused group from the previous year had created acceptable
products, which was a contributing factor in teachers approving a wider mix of groups than in
either Year 1 or 2.
By Year 4, the team made additional adjustments around digital story grouping. The
majority of students in this cohort were assigned to groups based on topics, without discernible
patterns around language status. For instance, a group exploring writing by children in the
Holocaust had three ELLs as members, another investigating Dr. Seuss’s writing life had two
ELLs and one native English speaker; a third on writing by veterinarians had three monolingual
English speakers (Digital story group handout, 7/19/13). In identifying these groups, teachers
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considered compatibility and skill level, including language proficiency, but language status was
less essentialized than it had been in previous iterations of the institute, and it did not automatically
trump the other variables.
What was different in Year 4 was that a sizable group of students—three girls and three
boys, all English language learners from countries in conflict such as Somalia and Iraq—struggled
to identify researchable topics of interest at all via the brainstorming activities led by the teaching
team. Instead of adding them individually to groups with already-defined topics, as would have
been likely in Year 1, the team grouped these students into two same-gender groups of three
students each (groupings that also took advantage of some existing social relationships). The
teacher dyads to which they were assigned agreed to spend extra time with them to help them
devise meaningful topics that drew on their personal experiences. The group of boys settled on a
digital story comparing writing in school in Burundi and Kenya to writing in U.S. schools; the girls
compared the processes and purposes for writing in English to those in Arabic, the language they
all shared, despite different countries of origin. This approach ensured that all six students were
involved in creating digital stories that could be screened at the final celebration—a key goal for
the team each year, as exclusion from this event would have been very marginalizing for any
participant—but it also provided them with extra practice, using approaches that were
comprehensible and geared to their language-learning needs, with brainstorming and idea
generation that most of their peers in the institute did not need.
Adjustments: Composing Support
In addition to adjustments in seating and grouping, institute staff members made
adjustments over time to the approaches they used to support students’ composing, particularly
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composing by ELLs. In teachers’ view, collective planning was key to making the latter set of
adjustments. According to Arlene, a member of the team in Year 2,
We would look at what kids had produced. . . where we were hitting the mark and
where they needed some support, and we would talk about how to do that, we
would predict what they might need, trouble shoot that ahead of time. . . . So
something that was a little lagging never turned into a big slide, it turned into,
whoop [gestures as if boosting a student], “Let me just get you there.” (Interview,
11/10/11).
How to create those boosts was more the focus in Year 2 than Year 1. During the second
iteration of the institute, we established a practice of brainstorming lists together, several times a
week, of students about whom we had concerns, often after examining notebook entries, drafts, or
storyboards. For instance, after we reviewed a set of draft personal narratives during the afternoon
of Day 12, the Day 13 plan had Kristina and Janice escorting Valerie, a Swahili speaker from
Kenya, and Kaid, an Arabic speaker from Iraq, to the computer lab for extra teacher-supported
composing time during the regular period for snack and independent reading. Although this
decision truncated reading time for Valerie and Kaid, it provided them with more time on task
related to the institute’s main written products. It also helped to ensure that by the time the rest of
their peers arrived in the lab, they already had positive momentum with their writing.
In addition to capturing more teacher-assisted composing time wherever possible, the
group-authored plans became increasingly more explicit about how to structure work during
periods co-taught by dyads of teachers. Individual needs identified on the whiteboard list would
be documented into the plan for the whole team, with a teacher assigned to ensure completion. In
this example from Year 2, two of three students identified for such targeted support were ELLs:
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As kids edit their personal narratives, provide extra support as needed:

Amina—Jake (get her to cut stuff!)

Johnson—Billy (get weird formatting out, make it a little more comprehensible)

Suri—type from notebook as much as she can; give Kristina or Kelly to finish
(Plan, 7/27/11)
Such personalized plans were often not generated by the teacher assigned to execute them. Team
members offered suggestions about meeting the needs of all learners, including those not assigned
to their dyad, and individuals volunteered to carry out adaptations based on relationships with the
student and expertise teaching the needed skill.
With each successive iteration of the institute, addressing the needs of English language
learners became more explicitly a part of teachers’ talk. One example of this trend came from
their professional goal setting. From the first summer, each teacher framed a goal around teaching
writing to work on during the institute. Individuals shared their goals during a June planning
meeting, at which time other members of the team helped to brainstorm an action plan. When the
program ran in July for students, teachers tracked progress toward their goals at least once a week,
usually during the afternoon planning session on Fridays, often with a writer’s notebook prompt to
spark discussion. The Year 1 goals tended to be fairly generic in focus and silent about learner
differences; for instance, Jake wanted to learn to use more creative approaches like a writing
teacher he admired while Janice wanted to learn how to confer with students without taking over
their writing (Field notes, 7/16/10).
Over time, though, as the team made the adjustments described earlier in the paper,
teachers took up questions of cultural and linguistic diversity more squarely. By Year 4, three of
eight Robinson teachers on the team framed their goals with explicit reference to ELLs, with Jake
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and Joanna emphasizing their ability to address student needs directly themselves and Janice, a
special education teacher whose academic-year responsibilities involved a lot of collaborative
teaching and coaching, deciding to work on how to support other professionals in their efforts to
differentiate for learner diversity. The convergence of these three goals kept issues of linguistic
and cultural difference regularly on the table during afternoon planning. When the team developed
adaptations to address the needs of the students newest to English, Jake and Joanna often
volunteered to carry them out. Jake, a four-year member of the team, noted publicly that in prior
years he would have deferred those responsibilities to other team members such as Janice or
Molly, a Robinson teacher with dual certification in social studies and ESL, whom he saw as better
qualified to play them (Reflective journal entry, 7/19/13). Instead, both he and Joanna articulated
these choices as good experience for them, given their goals. They stretched themselves beyond
their current professional competence, in a safe space that allowed them to take risks, where others
would support their endeavors.
Revisiting Jamilah’s Question
At the most literal level, the team attended to Jamilah’s question almost immediately after
she asked it. Kelly raised the issue during the final debriefing with the Year 2 teachers and during
planning meetings in May and June, prior to students’ arrival, with the Year 3 group. She wanted
the team to devise a more equitable approach to showcasing students’ personal narratives, and it
wasn’t long before someone did. Gail was a former English teacher and coach for new teachers
who had retired from the district before being hired by the university to work on its early college
efforts. Although she was not attached to a particular dyad of teachers, she co-taught in the largegroup space, participated in afternoon planning, and conducted one-to-one conferences with
students as needed during Years 1-3, in addition to performing more administrative roles related to
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transportation vouchers and parent communication. Midway through the Year 3 program, as part
of her own professional goal related to improving her technology skills, she offered to make a
program-wide digital story of what came to be called “snippets” from each participant’s personal
narrative. She took a photograph of each student to be inserted into a Photo Story 3 slide
captioned with his or her name, and then each student recorded a favorite sentence or two that she
typed into a second slide for simultaneous display with the voiceover narration. In its entirety, the
digital story ran for about six minutes, with a soft piano music soundtrack running underneath
students’ voices.
In addition to being more equitable and inclusive, Gail’s approach to showcasing the
personal narratives was more useful instructionally than the approach Jamilah had questioned. It
gave students an authentic reason to reread their narratives in search of a snippet that represented
good writing to them, which often led them to consider the overall meanings of their pieces, as
well as to engage in a last round of editing. It gave them valuable practice with audiotaping within
the Photo Story 3 environment, which translated into greater comfort and more fluency when they
audiotaped longer stretches of narration for their digital stories. Unlike an oral reading for a live
audience, the snippets could be recorded multiple times in a low-risk environment. This process
was particularly important for ELLs with less confidence in their English pronunciations, many of
whom redid their narration repeatedly until they were satisfied with its smoothness and clarity.
The celebration audiences during both Years 3 and 4 responded well to students’ work, laughing
appropriately at the funny snippets and audibly sighing at the poignant ones.
Seen from an Ubuntu perspective, however, the redesigned showcase for personal
narratives had even greater benefits. The snippet-driven digital story highlighted every member of
the learning community in the same way—everyone got a few seconds of attention, and no one got
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more. Individuals’ cultural and linguistic assets were visible, through a picture and the projected
written text, and audible, through narration in their own voices, with their variable accents,
inflections, and emphases. In Year 4, eight of 45 students included a title (e.g., “Americanized
Family”) or a narrative snippet (e.g., “I was twelve the day that I climbed that tree in Kenya with
my best friend Ali”) that directly implicated for the audience some aspect of their immigration
stories or their lives in their home countries. The variety of participant experiences was on display
in ways that could not have been facilitated by a small number of students reading full essays, no
matter how representative the selection. The whole-group digital story helped to communicate the
Ubuntu principle articulated by South African archbishop Desmond Tutu: “I am human because I
belong. I participate. I share” (quoted in Swanson, 2007, p. 58).
Considering Jamilah’s question about the personal narrative showcase from an Ubuntu
perspective also nudges us to re-consider the broader categories of adjustments to the institute that
were identified over time. For example, our initial seating practices did not distinguish between
native speakers of English and ELLs. Such an approach did not attend to the very real differences
in how a beginning English learner might experience instruction from a native speaker in shared
space. Over time, the team developed collaborative structures for devising seating and room
arrangements that differentiated for students’ varying needs, although the initial attempts in this
area tended to essentialize ELLs as a category. By Year 4, the team’s seating approaches were
more nuanced, attending to multiple variables beyond English language proficiency, and
considering a wider range of enabling or constraining factors (Reinking & Bradley, 2008) around
participation in the shared space. In a subsequent iteration, we would be sure to frame the question
before the team even more explicitly. Instead of posing the question as “How can we seat students
to support those about whom we are most worried?” we would more likely ask, “How can we seat
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everyone in the large-group instruction space to maximize our team’s ability to address their needs
AND students’ ability to contribute to the learning of the whole community?” Such a framing
would focus attention on ELLs’ needs for support, to be sure, but it would also highlight their
ability to enrich the community, as well as remind the team of potential needs and contributions by
students with varying language profiles.
From the beginning, the institute was designed to accommodate difference. Its explicit
pedagogical goal for teachers was to build capacity to teach writing in diverse, inclusive
classrooms, which at Robinson meant teaching in multilingual classrooms where students’
experience with formal schooling varied widely. The initial framework for the institute included
co-planning and co-teaching, as teachers signed up for the experience understanding that they
would be working closely with another person, in a structure that came to be known as the dyad.
What evolved over time as the intervention was adjusted was the degree to which all teachers on a
given year’s team collaborated to plan various components of the student experience, as well as the
extent to which they co-taught with each other in the large-group space. Some of the refinements
were specific to a particular student or group of students enrolled in one year of the program.
Others, however, resulted in heuristics for working together such as signing up on the group’s
whiteboard to put a “body” on a particular student or tools such as a more explicit brainstorming
form to guide digital story groups’ initial conversations that were then adopted in subsequent
years, freeing up time and cognitive energy for the team to address other pedagogical concerns.
As Janice, a four-year member of the team, explained, co-teaching and co-planning created a
teaching community that was better able to use diversity as a resource than any individual teacher,
however skillful, could be: “All those voices and all of those thoughts on the table together helped
us craft something that was a good fit for all kids—not just a specific kind of kid that aligns with a
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specific type of teacher” (Interview, 9/30/10). Although the institute did not always achieve this
success, at its best, it reflected Ubuntu for teachers working in community with each other, not just
students.
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