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THE WRITING INSTRUCTION STRATEGIES OF VETERAN HIGH SCHOOL
ENGLISH TEACHERS: A MULTIPLE CASE STUDY
Chapter One: Rationale
Introduction
‘Obest plerumque iss discere volunt authoritas eorum qui docent.’ [For those who
want to learn, the obstacle can often be the authority of those who teach] (de Montaigne
quoting Cicero)
Writing is thinking—a complex cognitive process and concrete evidence of student
learning (Carroll, 2007). Cognitive processes of self-efficacy, motivation, and an individual’s
belief in their ability to write impacts both the teacher’s design of writing curriculum and the
student’s ability to access the material (Bandera, 1993). Additionally, the cognitive process
writing approach concentrates primarily on the individual writer and the cognitive and affective
processes involved in composing text. Few studies have examined the power of teachers’
individual belief systems of what they thought “good” education looked like within their
classroom environments and the impact that instruction had on student achievement.
Teachers receive little, if any, direct instruction on the teaching of writing and therefore
base their instructional designs upon 1) how they learned to write, 2) how they were taught to
write and 3) how they were instructed to write in their methods course (Emig, 1997;
Shaughnessy, 1977). Furthermore, Emig (1997) argued that most English teachers do not have
enough content knowledge to design and facilitate high quality writing instruction. This model of
secondary writing instruction has created a chasm between the teaching of literature and the
teaching of writing, leaving teachers who were strong readers teaching stories with little writing
instruction and, if strong writers, designing curriculum steeped in grammar and rhetoric.
Most education programs require English teachers to complete a minimum of two
English methods courses, a grammar course, and an option to choose between a history of the
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language or linguistics; most select the history of the language course (Flodden & Wllson,
2003). Seldom do education programs require or offer separate “how to teach writing” courses.
If this is the level of instruction for an English teacher, one would not be surprised to discover
that teachers in other domains have even less preparation in the field of writing beyond what
they experienced in their PK-12 and college production. Therefore, a critical first step to making
writing a central and a basic part of daily instruction in every classroom is to understand how
teachers’ attitude and efficacy about writing impacts writing instruction, and ultimately student
achievement in writing.
Beyond teacher preparation programs, another problem uncovered by the research was
that high school English teachers have a narrow conception of college and career writing, which
threatens their ability to prepare students sufficiently for the compositional demands of college
and the workplace. Moreover, high school graduates who fail to learn to write effectively before
graduating weaken their future potential and undermine the nation’s strength as a leader in the
global marketplace. “Writing remediation costs American businesses as much as $3.1 billion
annually” (National Commission on Writing, 2003, as cited in Graham & Perin, 2007. pp. 17).
The 2011 Nation’s Report Card (2012) on writing achievement reported only 3% of
both 8th and 12th grade students ranked at the advanced level representing a superior
performance while 24% performed at a proficient level. The remaining majority of 54% 8th and
52% 12th graders performed at the basic level, indicating only a partial mastery of prerequisite
knowledge and skills. The proficiency level of students in 2011 dropped 11% points for 8th
graders and remained stagnant for the 12th graders in comparison with the 2008 report.
As school-ratings become more contingent upon student academic performance (i.e.,
graduation rates, ACT scores, and percentage of students taking and passing College Board AP
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exams), adolescents have difficulty balancing high school development and learning with college
coursework expectations. High school writing instruction has suffered, leaving graduating
students deficient in necessary writing skills and teachers scrambling to find new ways to meet
the needs of their students for college and workforce readiness demands.
Researcher Subjectivity: Observations and Connections
The researcher’s role in this study was shaped by personal experiences before and during
their 20-year career as a secondary English teacher. Coming to the profession later in life
provided life experiences and funds of knowledge that served the researcher well in the
classroom. Teacher licensure training focused on content knowledge, classroom behavior
management, and designing instructional units aligned with specific state standards.
Although teacher preparation instructors alluded to the need for teachers to build
relationships with their students, they provided none other than “getting to know you” activities,
with no information on how to manage both classroom and professional demands. Methods
courses do not prepare new teachers to navigate instructional time interrupted by students’
erratic attendance practices, school-wide events, field trips, office aide deliveries, and random
safety drills. New teachers enter the profession ill equipped to know how to balance
instructional, professional, and business responsibilities let alone create, build, and maintain
authentic relationships with their students throughout the year.
Education Experience
Beginning a teaching career in 2002, armed with a BA in technical theater and teacher
licensure, the researcher was hired as an at-risk middle school English teacher. During licensure
training, the researcher had opted for an additional student teaching assignment in a middle
school, even though her 3rd grade assignment would have been sufficient for program
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completion. While their elementary teacher-mentor helped them hone skills in classroom
organization, management, and curriculum design, the secondary teacher-mentor was a writer, a
writing project graduate, and a veteran English teacher and focused on writing instruction. It was
in his class that the researcher began to experience writing as a process before becoming aware
of supportive theoretical studies.
Driven to learn more about the craft and content of writing instruction, the researcher
completed a Master of Arts in Teaching focusing their thesis on “Critical Thinking, Reading and
Writing: Transitioning students from casual written responses toward critical analysis of
literature” (Norby, 2009), which addressed college remediation rates in composition. Still not
thinking that they knew enough about the teaching of English and wanting to discover the
research behind how students learned and socially constructed knowledge, a graduate-mentor
encouraged her to pursue a Ph.D. The researcher recognized that a student's lack of performance
was merely a symptom of deeper underlying issues: quality of instruction, lack of a connection
to the school community, and/or not feeling connected to at least one adult role model. While
that seemed to be the heart of education, the mechanization of systematized learning kept a fast
pace fraught with meetings, grade deadlines, testing cycles, and teacher evaluation, often taking
time away from the students.
Writing Experience and Observations
Having participated in a university summer Writing Project Institute three times, once as
a student and twice as a facilitator, the researcher found those immersive writing experiences
transformative, shaping their writing instruction perceptions and attitudes more than any other
methods course. In that situated learning environment the researcher first found their authentic
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writer’s voice, opening them to empathize with the struggles students faced when asked to be
vulnerable in a writing classroom.
Evidence suggests that all students can write given the right tools, scaffolding, and time
to construct their ideas (Graves, 1979, p. 5; Emig, 1971). As an active participant in a writer
workshop professional learning community (PLC), the researcher received support to increase
their ability to teach writing. This collegial group provided an environment conducive for
collaboration, a safe harbor to share struggles, and successes that presented themselves within
the researcher’s own writing instruction; it was there that the researcher began to understand the
relationship with, and trusting of, teaching writing as a process (Emig, 1982).
Creating an environment of trust requires the teacher to be conscious of the subtle
events happening within the learning community. The classroom becomes a crucible of
experiences, a place where the funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) that students and teachers
bring with them intersects with the cognitive processes needed for writing to occur, an
environment that allows teachers and students to develop beliefs in their “confidence and
competence in writing” (Pajares & Johnson, 1994).
Creating a process driven learning space is difficult to manage and maintain, requiring
time for reading, writing, and peer reviewing. In the current system of writing instruction, a
teacher using a writing/reading process design of instruction is more an anomaly than a norm
within many English classrooms. Mandated to navigate instruction from one standardized
assessment to the next, teachers must balance instruction between test taking strategies, close
reading strategies, and structured writing aligned with SAT, PSAT, ACT, AP, and state
assessments. This structured style of learning suffocates the ability to wrestle with text or allow
time for revision.
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In addition to teachers struggling to infuse enough writing instruction into their lessons,
they are faced with too many students who have had at least one teacher, by either a grade or a
conversation, leaving the student with the perception that they are not good at writing. Students’
self-perceptions become their reality and are often defined by an impression of how their
teacher perceives their efforts. Unless a piece of writing is taken through a hierarchical-model
writing process and the writer is allowed to revise with mentor input, the writing experience is
reduced to submission, teacher editing, and essentially a resubmission of the teacher’s paper.
By the time students are in high school, many have figured out that a teacher could not
possibly read one hundred and fifty papers a second time, so they change only what the teacher
red lined or hedge their bets and resubmit clean assignments having only changed the date. The
authenticity of writing has been lost and without relational connections between text, teacher,
and student, work is produced only to meet completion demands. In the words of Paolo Freire
(1970), “If the structure does not permit dialogue, the structure must be changed”.
Model teachers strive to embrace the critical thinking social cultural theories posed in the
works of John Dewey (1916) and Lev Vygotsky (1978) to create writing communities replicative
of Tom Romano's (1995) and Nancie Atwell’s (1991) writing practices. Burgeoning class sizes,
rigorous benchmarks for Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and performance pressures
from administration discourage teachers seeking to create communities of shared learning.
Teachers are bound by national expectations to ground students in content necessary for
creating model citizens for the 21st Century and expected by parents to provide their children
with a strong education supported by community beliefs. Thomas Jefferson’s vision for
education sanctioned the role of public schools as a place to groom citizens with shared
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American ideals, with common literacy abilities to function and participate in a Republic system,
securing a system of Democratic governing.
Before the implementation of Core Curriculum Standards, the traditional English
curriculum was designed around literature units and, because of this, many ELA classrooms
never seemed to fit in enough academic writing. To ensure that all classrooms were engaging in
writing, many states moved teachers to an ELA pacing calendar divided into four major
sections with the goal of addressing one genre of writing each quarter: narrative, descriptive,
expository, and persuasive essay formats, a system of learning aligned with state end of course
benchmark assessments.
Learning these four common essay styles, without allowing for student choice and time
for revision, produced a generation of students requiring post-secondary remediation in writing
before entering their first college English course. Teachers focused solely on quarterly essay
products miss opportunities for other genres of writing (e. g., journaling, diary, short story,
poetry, cartooning, etc.). However, “writing is a multifaceted process that is often portrayed as a
mainly psychological or linguistic activity” (Hayes & Flower, 1980; Bereiter & Scardemalia,
1987) or as a fine motor skill (Christensen, 2009). Fisher (2002) argued that the teaching of
writing should involve interplay between teachers, pupils, and the socio-cultural context in
which it is taught. Essay writing for purposes of passing a standardized test can be reduced to a
template construction, whereas student choice writing requires vulnerability from the student and
openness from the teacher. Freire (2005) reminded educators that classroom dialogue must
“make room for disagreement, questioning, and critique”.
Researchers investigating the composing habits of successful student writers (e.g.,
Beason, 1993; Buechler, 1983; Sommers, 1980), professionals in various fields (e.g., Odell &
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Goswami, 1985; Spilka, 1993b), and paid authors (e.g., Waldrep, 1985) have found writing to be
a non-linear process. In fact, published writers know that quality occurs only after multiple
revisions. In a school environment few students anticipate having to produce more than one
draft of an essay, feeling their first draft to be fully formed (White, 1995, p. 2), and leaving it to
the teacher to find the flaws.
For teachers to engage students in authentic writing, they must first be able to build a
sense of classroom community and a trusting environment that is conducive for both students
and teachers to be vulnerable.
Statement of the Problem
Twenty-first century education legislation [i.e., No Child Left Behind (2002), Carl D.
Perkins Vocational and Applied Technologies (2006), Common Core (2010) and Race to the
Top (2012)] have myopically focused upon the measurement of teacher effectiveness based
primarily on standardized test scores. However, standardardized education mandates seemed to
have ignored the body of work from the 1970s, that had investigated the power of a teacher’s
affective acumen as an attribute of a teachers’ effectiveness as an educator (Brophy, 1974;
Baker, 1999; Crosnoe et al., 2004; Grant & Rothenberg, 1986; Hamre et al., 2012; Leder, 1987;
Gablinske, 2014). Studying the practices of effective teachers, Marzano (2003) determined that
“an effective teacher-student relationship may be the keystone that allows other aspects to work
well” (p. 91).
A one-size-fits-all accountability system based solely on the student as a product and
measured by standardized assessment needs to be broadened to include the relationships that
teachers, students, and student peers build and foster throughout a year of instruction and how
their outcomes impact academic achievement. Teacher relationships developed with their
students provide an important role in the social and cognitive growth of a student supported by
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Perhaps policy makers should consider Hallinan’s (2008) research conclusions that suggest
“Learning is a process that involves cognitive and social psychological dimensions, and both
processes should be considered if academic achievement is to be maximized” instead of
furthering the gaps between research and practice (Hannilan, 1996).
Although policy makers find that simple quantitative data points like test scores can be
used to hold schools accountable for achieving complex educational outcomes, researchers argue
that “through studying student-teacher interactions, our conceptualization of what constitutes
motivation to learn increasingly has involved emotions as essential to learning and teaching”
(Rothstein et al., 2008; Meyer & Turner, 2002).
Current research suggests that more work needs to be done in the study of the
interpersonal relationships developed in the instructional environment and how those
relationships influence academic learning. Mohrman et al. (2003) asserted “lasting change does
not result from plans, blueprints, and events, rather change occurs through interaction of
participants” (p. 321). Intuitively, effective teachers and administrations know that if students
like the teacher and/or the curriculum taught, those students tend to achieve at a higher level.
Purpose of the Study
The purpose of this study was to explore how discipline-specific evaluations,
standardized assessments, and curriculum standards (e.g., district, state, national) impact high
school English teachers’ decisions about writing instruction.
Knowing that teachers receive a new set of students each year, a fresh roster of different
diversities, abilities, and personalities to receive the same standardized expectations of content
knowledge, this study was driven by two overarching exploratory questions:
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R1: What external influences impede or inform English teachers’ design of writing
instruction.
R2: How do veteran English teachers, who have taught for 10+ years and are
between 30-60 years in age, evolve their instructional writing practices over
their career?
These questions were informed by the conceptual framework to be briefly reviewed in this
chapter and then built upon in Chapter 2: Review of the Literature and supported in Chapter
Three: Methodological Approach connections.
Theoretical Framework and Brief Review of Topic Research
When investigating the influences upon teachers’ decisions about writing instruction, one
cannot ignore the students’ role in the teacher’s process. Often, when students reflect upon their
past teachers, gratitude is bestowed upon those teachers who humanly engaged with student
feelings (Midgley et al., 1989; Locke, 1693); whilst wading through fundamental instruction,
those teachers recognized that warmth to the soul of the child (Jung, 1970) was necessary to
grow the mind of the learner. That the meeting of these two personalities is like the contact of
two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed (Jung, 2001).
As students pass through teachers’ classrooms, they take with them learned habits of
thought and tastes (Bruner, 1996), perhaps not so much from the curriculum taught as by the
teacher’s personality, lesson design, and/or classroom climate. Freire (2002) assured teachers
that insignificant gestures on their part can have profound formative effects on the life of a
student. Therefore, teachers in the classroom must ground their instruction with the
understanding that the students they serve are people and not things and that they deserve to
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receive individualized consideration and be embraced with whole-hearted love and attention,
even in personal matters, when in need of such attention (Freire, 1978).
While the Progressives bang the drum for humanistic theories, many other external forces
interrupt intimate teacher-student relationship development. Governmental policy directives,
administrative turnover, and school district initiatives keep novice and veteran teachers alike
scrambling to adjust to “new” school year landscapes of testing, rule changes (usually connected
to teacher evaluations), and re-inventions of the “wheel” of instruction, with increased class
sizes. Veteran teachers scoff, followed by mutterings of “Here we go again” or “Been there,
done that”, and quickly recluse themselves into the sanctuary of their teacher's dens to do what
they have always done. Whether effective or not these teachers will rely on their own personal
content knowledge or career experiences to support what they have deemed works for their
courses of instruction.
English teachers instructed by their teacher training to create “meaningful” relationships
with their students leave college programs armed with a plethora of activities to start the first
week of school– but then what? Beginning teachers receive little direction or mentoring to help
them initiate effective teacher-student relationship building strategies, procedures, or protocols.
Instead, first year teachers immediately start teaching using a survivalist approach to instruction
to meet administrative expectations for end of year accomplishments.
Not understanding the value of first developing interpersonal connections in the
classroom they exhaustedly battle with behaviors that impede effective learning. It is only after
eavesdropping on teacher conversations and hearing students talk about favorite activities from
other classes that teachers begin to build a toolbox of strategies that they add to from year-to-
year throughout their career. The inequity gaps in teacher content knowledge and experience
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keep American education struggling to find the key to a factory-modeled education that ensures
high school graduates all exit with a competitive level of literacy and the same college and career
readiness skills needed to engage in a 21st Century society.
Human Engagement
Several centuries ago, de Montaigne (n. d.) defined our human nature as being “framed
of flaps and patches, and of so shapeless and diverse a contexture, that every piece, and every
moment playeth his part. And there is as much difference found between us and ourselves, as
there is between ourselves and others'' (pp. 196-197). Much later Bakhtin (1929, 1973)
elaborated on our view of “self” by adding “a sense of responsibility and potentiality” in how we
experience or engage with the world, helping us to understand that individualistic perceptions of
ourselves become our reality, causing these self-inflicted perceptions to be more difficult to
augment with external positive reinforcement.
Interpreters of Bakhtin suggest that it is not just the individuals’ responsibility for sense
of self, but instead their interactions within a collective (Wertsch, 1991, 1995, 1998; Burkitt,
1998; Hermans, 2001b) or the “World” (Freire, 1970) that build and shape their I-positions
(Hermans, 2013). Although each “actor” (Vygotsky) in the crucible of a classroom is
individually responsible for choosing, creating, and taking responsibility for self, in their
interactions (teacher-student, peer-peer, individual-collective) they are constantly changing and
reacting to each other. All these aspects of human engagement influence teachers’ decisions
concerning what they will and will not include in their writing instruction.
Role of Self-Efficacy
In the decades since Bandura first introduced the social cultural roles of predictive and
meditational self-efficacy, educational researchers have added to the body of work focusing on
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beliefs and achievement outcomes to conclude that self-efficacy is a consistent predictor of
behavioral outcomes (Graham & Weiner, 1996). Although Bandura’s concepts have been used in
other fields of study, data from educational research conducted by Pintrich and De Groot (1990)
revealed correlations between self-efficacy and academic motivation.
Another area of emerging writing self-efficacy research focuses on teachers’ beliefs
evaluating themselves as writers, as well as teachers of writing. Pre-service teachers receive
little, if any, direct instruction concerning the teaching of writing and therefore base their
instructional designs upon 1) how they learned to write, 2) how they were taught to write and 3)
how they were instructed to write in their methods course (Emig, 1971; Shaughnessy, 1977).
Methodological Rationale
This study employed a qualitative exploratory multiple case study approach. Case study
embraces phenomenon in context (Merriam, 1998). In this study, the phenomenon was how
teachers navigated writing instruction within the dynamics of classroom environment, classroom
relationships, and nationally standardized curriculum. Exploratory research design helps to
determine the nature of a problem; although this approach does not provide conclusive evidence,
it helps to gain a better understanding of the problem (Singh, 2007).
In combination, an exploratory-case study allows for flexible uses of focus groups, open
interviews, collection of artifacts, and observation. Through this method of study, the researcher
discovered the attributes teachable to English teachers to support the value of developing
authentic classroom writing instruction to increase student learning. Through recorded
interviews, this study explored 10 veteran English teachers’ experience with the teaching of
writing, providing decades of content knowledge to be able to discuss and describe the evolution
of their lesson design practices for writing instruction throughout their career.
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Scope and Significance
Assumptions
This study was based on a variety of assumptions. First, it assumed that students possess an
insatiable curiosity and an ability to learn new and difficult material. Another assumption was
that teachers who must teach required curriculum prescribed by national or state standards knew
how to teach all aspects required for effective high school English coursework. Finally, this
study assumed that teachers and students have varying personality types that require behavior
adaptability.
Limitations
This study may be perceived as limited because it focused on a small sample size of eight
to twelve veteran teachers’ personal views of their experiences with the teaching of
writing. Exploratory designs do not provide one solution for a problem, but instead elicit new
perspectives for future studies. However, since previous studies focused on the curriculum
taught, effect sizes of strategies, and product versus process writing approaches, this approach
solicited a base of knowledge from teachers who worked through several decades of educational
pedagogy and reform. Accordingly, the collective years of experiential data this study compiled
serve to establish an insight into English teacher influences on writing instruction and the impact
they have on student learning.
Significance
This study has the potential to influence the current practice of English teachers’
instruction by bridging the void between methodology coursework and building authentic
writing instruction practices within High School English classrooms. The data collected was
used to identify attributes of veteran teachers’ reflections of writing instruction over their career.
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American education has, in a broader sense, the potential to use teachers’ consciousness of
students’ emotional, mental, and physical statuses to create stopgaps to student invisibility -
engaging ALL in a culture of learning and living. Effective writing, our highest form of
communication, can serve to bridge that gap by teaching students how to have their voices heard.
Summary of the Chapter
This chapter introduced a rationale for this study. Within the building of the background,
a problem was defined, the framework of the purpose described, providing the drive behind the
study. It then outlined the significance of the study through the lens of the researcher’s personal
connections and suggested methodological approaches. This chapter concluded with the
potential assumptions, limitations, and significance of the study.
Chapter two reviews the theoretical and empirical literature regarding socio-cultural,
efficacy, and writing instruction theories. The literature review explores each area of the
framework and addresses the gap in the literature for this study. Chapter three discusses the
multiple-case study, qualitative methodological design, and exploratory research approach
to data collection, including ethical considerations and impact for the study.
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Chapter Two: Review of the Literature
Introduction
Chapter one briefly discussed American students’ low performance in writing
achievement and the juxtaposition of writing instruction philosophies of product versus process
writing. In addition, chapter one recognized the powerful relationship teachers have with
students in the classroom and the need for students to have their teacher’s undivided attention.
Finally, chapter one introduced a broad discussion of the theoretical frameworks of human
engagement and the role of self-efficacy.
Chapter two provides background of the human approach to learning in conjunction with
the role systemized education places upon academic expectations for student learning goals.
This chapter also deepens chapter one’s discussion of the influential theoretical frameworks
informing this study by focusing on current literature on the socio-cultural connections needed
for authentic writing to occur, and the power of self-efficacy on both teachers and students when
engaging in the writing process. It is also necessary that this review shares historical background
literature to explain the educational changes and human development impacting students as
writers.
In addition to theoretical frameworks, however, this literature review also focuses on the
conceptual frameworks informing the analysis of data. Zamboni (2020) suggested that scale
explains the difference between theoretical and conceptual frameworks -- referencing big Ideas
versus smaller ones. Conceptual frameworks are sets of specific ideas that can be used within
the larger theoretical framework; whereas, theoretical frameworks may contain many ideas that
are not explored within the paper or experiment structures. While theoretical frameworks refer
to the specific ideas the researcher uses in a study, conceptual frameworks provide a roadmap
from
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which the researcher can draw during analyzing of the data collections (Maxwell & Maxwell,
2005).
The Journey toward Academic Writing
Born to Learn
Shortly after the first breath, a newborn child begins collecting and processing data at a
rapid rate to transform its understanding of the world and its ability to communicate. Freire
(2014) reminded us "knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the
restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the
world, and with each other" (p. 52).
Although encoded with a natural tendency to communicate and visually read the world
(Friere, 1978), humans must work to acquire the skills necessary for written communication.
Neural pathways must be developed to simultaneously engage multiple areas of the brain to
acquire first reading and then writing skills (Kweldju, 2015; Olteanu Bercea, 2013). As
newborns evolve and hone skills of reasoning, they begin to demonstrate complex relationships
between parent and child, teacher and learner, and mentor and mentee. “A small child who sits
in rapt attention on the lap of a beloved adult, listening to the words that pour like water; under
the crook of an arm, in the comfort of a loved one’s lap” (Wolf, 2008. pp. 81-82), experientially
engages in more vocabulary. Children who have developed a nurturing relationship with
writing, enter kindergarten with up to 10,000 words more than a child who has not been
intimately engaged in the act of reading (Wolf, 2008).
This first engagement with the shared written word brings to the forefront the emotional
connections between words and meaning shared between the holder and the held. An emotional
connection that a teacher with a shared experience can use to help students engage in
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understanding difficult texts. However, when deluged with high-stakes testing,
standardized curriculum, and burgeoning class sizes, educators often forget how their own
first relational experiences fostered their love for learning.
Cognitive Maturity
As a child cognitively matures and language develops, more elaborate communication
occurs, requiring them to engage in complex hierarchies within larger communal
groups. Learning a variety of written and spoken words provides opportunities for further
development and an ability to engage in new activities and social groups.
These new social groups require the adoption of new roles, development of new
knowledge and modes of thought, providing a view of the world from a variety of lenses
(Bazerman, 2012). Like sponges, children absorb the world around them acquiring any
knowledge or experience presented before them. As they grow, they become creative in their
ability to solve problems and build relationships with others, but they have also learned fear and
become hesitant in their willingness to try new things.
Education Systems
Upon entering the educational system, children once again must adapt. Outside of their
egocentric ecosystem, they must learn to adjust to new experiences and forms of relational
engagement- a learning renaissance - where they once again must navigate the reading and
experiences of a new world. In this new community of different personalities, ethnicities,
cultural beliefs, and funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992), children begin to measure their
intellectual wealth against that of their peers, developing a self-efficacy of their own abilities.
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Systematized Learning
Recognizing a need for organization, the nineteenth century brought about the National
Education Association Committee, a collective of white men from Harvard University, to
establish English as a necessary curriculum. Committee agreement quickly devolved into
impassioned groups: those believing that instruction should focus on college preparatory skills
and those seeking to create a people’s school, focusing on practical skill sets to develop an
educated voting citizenry (Committee of Ten, 1892).
As English became a codified course, writing instruction became accessible to the
masses; knowledge once held hostage by elite members of society enabled communication
between people across time and space (Bazerman, 2012), but the voice of the organic learner
was lost in a melee of imposed composition constructions laden with linguistically defined style
elements.
To meet the demands of a growing literate culture, the educational institutions organized
to accommodate students spending most of their days in academic activities from kindergarten
through high school (Haswell, 2008; Olsen, 2006). Transitioning children from the informal
design of a familial learning environment required the schools to establish behavior and learning
expectations. Reading and writing literacy and mathematics, paired with ethics and vocational
skills, became the mainstay of American education. This systematized form of learning created a
model of education focused on a student product output that could be easily quantified, while
ignoring the qualitative data educators had already learned from the relationships developed
during that five-year-old’s transition from home to school.
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21st Century Education
As the cultural dynamics of the classroom have changed, the last decades have produced
major shifts in teacher education expectations to address a need for learning strategies that
support a growing minority population. However, most teachers in front of the classroom still do
not culturally mirror the body of students being taught (NCES, 2012). Nationally, school districts
struggle to encourage teachers to use diverse teaching strategies to capture the attention of all
learning styles. Within the confines of a classroom, one is most likely to observe an autonomous
model of literacy education that assumes a set of neutral, de-contextualized, skills applicable to
any situation, and that literacy is something that one either has or does not have; people are
either “literate or illiterate” (Perry, 2012).
In contrast to Freire’s focus on print literacy, Khan & Kellner (2007) broadly defined
and supported an inclusive view of literacy allowing for a wider variety of Perry’s (2012)
descriptions of all “forms of communication/thinking” identifying everything as text (Derrida,
(1973). This multi-media literacy approach connects literacy competence to a body of
knowledge supported by each learner’s socio-cultural background and personal experiences
brought into a classroom.
There has not been a significant study correlating what we know about the human
condition, learning relationships, situated learning expectations, and the roles played out
in secondary writing instruction.
Writing Instruction
Even though English teachers design yearly instruction guided by a standardized
curriculum, they must also navigate a calendar of assessments and district mandates for schools
to earn a “high performance” ranking. While the latest Nation’s Writing Report Card has yet to
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be released, ACT research reported 2015-2016 scores, using the 2-12 scale for writing, as
having 59.18% of a two million plus sample pool scoring a seven or below and the newer 2017-
2018 test version scale of 1-36 scores presenting 58.23% scoring 20 or below; the data remains
similar. These scores should not be a surprise since these are timed tests that require students to
submit their “crappy first drafts” (Lamott, 1994) without emphasis on pre-writing preparation.
As school-ratings become more contingent upon student academic performance (e.g.,
graduation rates, ACT scores, and percentage of students taking and passing College Board AP
exams), adolescents have difficulty balancing high school development and learning with college
coursework expectations. In this systematized crucible of cognitive development, emotional
maturity, and physical well-being, students are cracking under the pressure.
Writing Instruction and Relationships
Learning to write requires explicit instruction from an expert (van de Kamp et al.,
2014); therefore, a critical first step to making writing a central and a basic part of daily
instruction in every classroom is to understand how the dynamics of social perspectives and
their emphasis on power relationships can impact situated learning experiences (Perry, 2012).
Writing as a Process
Intuitively teachers know that when they embed writing in significant social activities,
students perceive value in the topic and therefore work harder on their product (Vu et al.,
2022). An example of this dedicated effort is evidenced when students spend countless hours
writing narrative campaigns for role-playing games, but when the same students are faced with a
classroom assignment, their motivation becomes driven by a grade or task completion (Vu et al,
2022). Bazerman (2012) posited that this lack of connection is not just a matter of pedagogy and
22
motivation, but it is a matter of our fundamental lack of understanding of writing as a social,
psychological, cultural, and economic process (p. 95).
A critical first step to making writing a central and a basic part of daily instruction in
every classroom is to understand how the dynamics of social perspectives and their emphasis on
power relationships can impact situated learning experiences (Perry, 2012). Within the classroom
environment, the teacher and students bring their individualized funds of knowledge, self-
efficacy postures, and writing processes– creating a crucible, fertile for socially constructed
learning. Written words form through three methods: spontaneous production, copying a text, or
writing from dictation (Benson, 1979). The cognitive process writing approach concentrates
primarily on the individual writer and on the cognitive and affective processes involved in
composing text.
Writing as a Relationship
Nearly 90 years ago Lev Vygotsky (1934) began studying the need for change in the
internal structure of the classroom. By 1978, his theory of socio-cultural learning design
and interactions with other progressive researchers, required him to clarify that:
Organizing the social environment in the school is not simply a matter of creating
a constitution of school governance and of summoning children to general
assemblies at regular intervals of time, of making choices and maintaining all
those forms of communal organization that children are so eager to company from
adults. Rather, it means concern for those genuinely social relations that must
permeate this environment. Beginning with intimate and friendly relations that
reach down to the smallest social groups, then moving on to the broadest
associations of comrades, and ending in the broadest and largest forms of
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children’s movements, the school must penetrate and envelop the life of the child
with a myriad of social relations that could assist in the development of moral
character (p. 236).
Vygotsky understood that learning encompassed not just a cognitive process but also
the making of meaning through word units and perezhivanie (a lived emotional
experience). Words connect our human consciousness to thinking with the meaning of a
word anchoring us in either our connotative or denotative view of the word choice.
Discourse provides an opportunity for writers to communicate using an internal
dialogue either to construct ideas or to verbally dialogue ideas with a peer or a group
to help the writer try out material before committing thoughts to paper (Graham,
2019). This pre-writing thinking is often not part of a graded process in a classroom
and therefore does not have a defined value.
Giroux (2001) described a traditional teaching style as self-serving individualism
rooted in logic and the creation of a historically outdated methodology of teaching
practices (p. 3). Vadeboncoeur & Collie (2013) thought that the ways of being and
becoming through schooling are cultural and historical practices woven with meanings,
understandings, expectations, and values that also have a history of valuing intellect and
affect, more or less.
As language teachers, as parents, and as caregivers of children we know that
learning occurs in the experiences of doing. Authentic knowledge construction engages
learners in a cyclical process. When presented with a challenging task, the teacher
expects the learner to elicit Hickson’s (1836) popularized proverb:
24
Tis a lesson you should heed:
Try, try, try again.
If at first you don't succeed,
Try, try, try again.
As educators and researchers, we must continue to seek the connections between
social, cognitive, and emotional education for the well-being and education of the 21st
century student.
Theoretical Framework and Brief Review of Topic Research
The theoretical framework for this study drew from a variety of research supported
by Sociocultural, Efficacy, and Situated Learning theories. Each of these areas is broad,
complex and aligns with multiple fields of study, including education. It is also important to
recognize the external opposing forces that push back against a teacher’s individual ability
to
create, develop, and maintain authentic writing experiences. Administrative obstacles get in the
way of a teacher’s 180-day mapping of curriculum instruction to meet the needs of their specific
students.
Every adolescent is on their own individualized emotional rollercoaster of needs with
classroom instruction interrupted by school-wide events or directives. Teachers, teaching all
their course standards during those 180 days, are often unaware of students’ personal needs not
being met. This leaves the teacher spending time playing detective to figure out why a student is
absent, not engaged, or dealing with grown up problems beyond their adolescent skill set.
A review of the literature reveals an absence of research correlating the external barriers
and influences on secondary English teachers’ design of writing instruction. Behaviorist
educational research adheres to principles and beliefs that knowledge, as taught in a traditional
25
academic discipline, must pass from the teacher to the student to ensure a consistent transfer of
accumulated wisdom of a civilization from one generation to the next.
This philosophical stance positions the teacher as the keeper and dispenser of the
knowledge and the student as an empty vessel needing filling. Therefore, the research for this
project required the researcher to review implied connections blended with supposition to
explore education through a unique analytical lens, to develop a deeper understanding of the
creation, development, and maintenance of relationships among teacher, student, and literacy
development in English instruction.
Influential Theoretical Frameworks
Sociocultural
John Dewey (1916), Jerome Bruner (1996), and Lev S. Vygotsky (1978) comprised a
triad of progressive sociocultural perspectives bridging the divide between Skinner’s behaviorist
theories and the modern connectivist movement, looking beyond the individual and examining
the value of society and culture in the promotion of learning and development (Ormand,
2014). While the Behaviorists believed humans were born with innate knowledge that only
needs to be released by instruction through stimulus and response techniques, the Constructivists
proposed that individuals construct knowledge rather than absorb knowledge from experience.
Expanding upon the Constructivist’s theories, the sociocultural researchers focus on how
the experiences of each individual are impacted by collective learning efforts and how those
interactions alter an individual’s perceived meaning upon his/her world. These theorists viewed
individual learning styles and impacts on the collective from multiple perspectives–
environmental stimuli and effect upon behavior– in addition to cognitive processes involving
stimuli relationships and expectations of future events (Ormand, 2014).
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Bruner (1996), Bronfenbrenner (1998), and Vygotsky’s (1978) research investigated the
significance of the social environment on a child’s learning experience. Bronfenbrenner’s
(1998) work revealed how a child’s development occurs through a process of complex
exchanges between a child and another adult - one who invests unconditional love and support
toward the child. Progressive constructivist researchers agreed that at least one adult should
play an explicit active role in the child’s learning and Dewey (1916) surmised that “education is
a social process; education is growth; education is not preparation for life but is life itself” (p.
239).
Learning Communities
In the domain of writing instruction, although the cognitive struggle to put words to
paper remains individualized, time needs to be given for social engagement. Opportunities
should support an environment that encourages involvement of children with persons both older
and younger than themselves (Motlhaka & Makalela, 2016; Steward & Mcclure, 2013). Within
a socially networked community of two or more members sharing a common activity, the
writing task goal may depend upon the social relationships developed within that community to
reveal new insights for the writer (Rish, 2015). Each writer within the community brings to the
classroom situation their own personal sets of knowledge, skills, strategies, interests, beliefs, and
motivational dispositions that have been acquired from other situations (Behrman, 2002, p.
27). Behrman (2002) defined three orientations for learning communities: experiential, situated,
and anticipatory.
Experiential Orientation. In the new millennium, critical theorists have revealed
injustices among the groups of students entering public education. Their quest has been to give
voice to the voiceless and to empower the disenfranchised in a predominantly white institution
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(Friere, 1981; Moll, 1992; Motlhaka & Makalela, 2016; Mendelsohn, 2017). It is through critical
race theory research that educational systems have begun to investigate strategies to include
multiculturalism and connect communities to schools.
In an ethnographic study, Moll and Greenburg (1990) defined "funds of knowledge" as
skills and knowledge, historically and culturally developed to enable an individual or household
to function within a given culture, postulating that integrating funds of knowledge into classroom
activities creates a richly scaffolded learning experience for students. Since learning is socially
mediated (Gee, 2000; Lave, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991), a classroom full of participants with
varying diversities, personal experiences, and belief systems, when shared, alters individualized
perspectives beyond personal biases and worldviews.
Although teachers are more aware of the inequities within their own classrooms, they still
have difficulties breaking down barriers between school and home. This becomes increasingly
problematic when students are asked to engage in reading and writing tasks that do not allow for
the sharing of personal, authentic experiences within the confines of the classroom setting.
Anticipatory Orientation. Students experience “real world” extensions that connect
and give value to the knowledge previously learned in the classroom necessary to support skills
needed within the world. These may include off-campus job related internships or
apprenticeships where students work with experienced practitioners to help them navigate
learning needed to suit the situation. In this setting, the student’s experiential attributes can add
to the whole of the community; for example, students with skills in computer, art, mechanics, or
other home acquired knowledge create a unique value to the group and set them apart from the
other candidates for that position. Through all three aspects of these community orientations
students become literate assets to the society.
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Classroom Orientation. Unlike the experiential and anticipatory community
orientations where learners are situated within “real life” settings, the classroom orientation
attempts to replicate the roles of mentors and apprentices. However, this contrived situation is
dominated more by the teacher’s instructional design than their students’ desire to take the
knowledge back into their “real world” situations (Behrman, 2002). The impulse to communicate
in writing begins at an early age, as often demonstrated when a toddler decides to “tag” a wall
with a favorite crayon, having little concern with form or function consumed and only with a
desire to leave their individualized mark for their community.
In contrast, Common Core standards-based writing instruction expects that the confines
of a classroom focus on ALL students demonstrating mastery of form and function to provide
evidentiary data to prove that students are on the path to college and career readiness. Within
this setting, motivation is driven by the desire to demonstrate respect for the teacher, to garnish
acceptance from their peers, and to achieve a positive grade [Vu et al, 2022). Further, because
writing requires a high level of cognitive engagement and rarely allows time for ideas to flow in
a 50-minute class session, students fail to understand the purpose or process of composition
(Bazerman, 2012).
Behrman’s classification of three community orientations relied heavily upon Vygotsky’s
idea of “mediation”, defined as indirect connections of incoming stimulation and responses to
stimuli intersect through various links (Vygotsky, 1978). These intersections can be
accomplished using tools or language. With the use of tools, humans can control their behavior,
and with the use of language can create their ideal world, giving them the possibility to regulate
their minds from the inside.
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Learning and thinking are always situated in a cultural setting and are always dependent
on the cultural resources that each group brings to the environment (Bruner, 1996). Through this
dialectical dance between humans, society and their culture, a melting pot of social diversity is
created within a classroom that adds a dimension of learning that cannot be achieved by having
the teacher remain as the keeper of the knowledge. The one who teaches becomes the learner
through the act of teaching and the learner reciprocally teaches in their act of learning (Friere,
1970). As students travel from one situation to the next, past experiences and future expectations
are taken with them and when shared with others, the dialogue between different perspectives
may change the perspectives all engaged in the process.
Authentic learning requires participants to risk failure, allowing for revision and
opportunity to achieve positive feedback. Writing demands that the writer leave personal cultural
biases, intolerable belief systems, and hostile voices beyond the boundaries of the doorway to the
group. Only in this circle of trust can students begin to share and peer review text. The
communal sharing space must be sacred for the writers to connect as “kin”. To most, it seems
reasonable to sense that “purposes”, “relationships”, “exigencies”, and “language” all have an
intersecting role in the construction of a text (Flowers & Hayes, 1980).
Self-Efficacy
Bandura (1997) proposed that a person’s belief in his or her own capabilities to
successfully perform a task might be an indicator of their potential level of achievement. If one
is good at a task, he or she tends to want to repeat the task; but if the task is perceived to be too
difficult, they may experience an avoidance desire (Graham, 2020). Influenced by cognitive,
motivation, affective, and selection process, self-efficacy becomes the centralized mechanism of
agency (Bandura, 1993). While many quantitative studies measure teacher and students’
30
perceptions and attitudes about writing and investigate correlations between aspects within the
domain of self-efficacy (Pajares & Johnson, 1996; Pajares, 2003: Pajares, 1996; Pajares &
Valiante, 2006; Pajares, 2007; McCarthy et al., 1985; Pintrich & De Groot, 1990; Shell et al.,
1995; Shell et al., 1989; Tschannen-Moran et al., 1998; Vu et al., 2022), few qualitative studies
have been conducted to analyze the teacher-student beliefs about content and transformation that
occurs when mentor-student relational exchanges of beliefs evolve during the process of working
together.
Writing within the confines of an academic environment requires mutual trust between
both the teacher and others with whom students share ideas. In the researcher's experience, few
English teachers write with their students exposing their vulnerable writer’s self. Trained to
evaluate student work, teachers correct sentence structures and provide feedback for their
students yet remain unable to be vulnerable enough to receive student feedback on their own
writing.
Brenner (2013) found that undergraduate literacy courses in three states showed more
offerings in reading rather than writing. Sixty-one courses concerning only reading and 75
reading and writing focused, but only five offerings dedicated to writing instruction.
“Unfortunately, this lack of attention to teacher preparation, self-efficacy, and motivation to
teach writing impacts K-12 student motivation to write” (Dismuke & Martin, p. 2).
Beliefs in one’s own ability to successfully engage in a writing can be explored through
theoretical framework(s) of efficacy, reflective of both self and collective attitudes toward
assigned writing performance. When questioned about how students feel about their own writing,
responses focus on surface structures, e.g., grammar, mechanics in connection to a prescribed
rubric (Wolsey et al., 2012). In contrast, teachers look for their students’ ability to make deeper
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connections in academic discourse of the content with examples demonstrating a proficient level
of writing skills appropriate for the assignment.
Teachers’ perceptions of how content knowledge should be communicated for a
prescribed task are anchored in their own beliefs concerning linguistics, pedagogy, culture, and
command of the language structure (Bandara, 1996). This perceived teacher self-efficacy is
defined by Tschannen-Moran et al. (1998) as “the teacher’s belief in his or her capability to
organize and execute courses of action required to successfully accomplish a specific teaching
task in a particular context”. Since Bandura’s (1963) introduction of predictive and meditative
roles of one’s self-efficacy, researchers have continued to examine teacher’s individual belief
systems towards composition (Faigley, 1990/1997), attempting to understand the cognitive
processes underpinning student composition production (Flower & Hayes, 1981) and
correlations between how participants’ efficacy affects writing achievement.
As education researchers moved away from behaviorist views of associationism,
proposing progressive views of social learning, Bandura and Walters (1963) emerged as the
forerunners of an expanding conceptual view of social cognitive theory that embraced a view of
human functioning that emphasized the role of self-relevant beliefs. Under this socio-cognitive
lens, individuals are viewed as proactive self-regulators rather than reactive participants defined
by biological and environmental factors. Bandura and Walters proposed that individuals possess
self-beliefs that guide their thoughts, feelings, and actions defining “self-efficacy beliefs” as
one’s perception of their capability of successfully accomplishing a task.
By 1996, Bandura firmly situated “self-efficacy” within a theory of personal and
collective agency that work in concert with other socio-cognitive factors regulating human
wellbeing and attainment. Within a classroom situation, students ask themselves two questions:
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Is the task worth their time? and what’s in it for them? These questions support Graham and
Weiner’s (1996) notion that students’ self-beliefs become principal components of academic
motivation, grounding assumptions that beliefs students create, develop, and hold truth
about themselves become vital predictors of their success or failure in school.
Self-efficacy perceptions form through a student’s personal interpretations of four
sources surrounding their performance of a task: personal results, observed experience, verbal
messages, and physiological states. Internalized perceptions of ability become the strongest
bonds to a student’s perceived reality of his or her ability to succeed. The most influential
extrinsic reward rates their performance in the form of a grade or awards some other form of
value. A higher grade produces higher self-efficacy beliefs while lower rewards decrease a
participant’s belief in his or her own capabilities – both outcomes impact students’ motivation to
attempt the task again.
The second perception involves the observations of their peers’ performance. These
social comparisons, along with peer modeling, cause the participant to compare their
performance abilities with those whom they observe. If the student does not believe that he or
she can compete within the group, the student may choose not to compete at all (Bandara,
1993). Beliefs can also be forged from verbal messages and/or social pressure from
others. Negative feedback from the teacher or one’s peer group erodes or weakens an
individual’s self-beliefs. Finally, self-belief perceptions can be manifested in the form of
physiological states creating higher levels of stress or anxiety when the perceived task is above
the individual’s belief of their capability of performing well or after performing poorly
previously. Almost two decades after defining self-efficacy, Bandura (1986) observed how the
four forces impacted both individual and community efficacy, and adjusted his theory to include
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self-efficacy as a mediating mechanism of personal agency – mediating between prior influences
that are the sources of its creation and subsequent behavior.
In the decades since Bandura first introduced the social cultural roles of predictive and
meditational self-efficacy, educational researchers have added to the body of work focusing on
beliefs and achievement outcomes to conclude that self-efficacy is a consistent predictor of
behavioral outcomes (Graham & Weiner, 1996). Although Bandura’s concepts have been used in
other fields of study, data from the educational research conducted by Pintrich and De Groot
(1990) revealed correlations between self-efficacy and academic motivation. Other researchers
have focused on three main areas to investigate self-efficacy influences.
The first area examined career choices of individuals, particularly in science and math,
and their relation to individuals’ self-efficacy (Hackett, 1995). Findings in the second area
revealed that self-efficacy of teachers correlated to their instructional practices and academic
progress of their students (Tschannen-Moran et al., 1998). Finally, in the third area of research,
Pajares (1996) reported that students' self-efficacy beliefs correlated between other motivational
constructs and students’ academic achievement and performances. Most of the work focused in
the areas of mathematics, and a minimal amount of research has focused on the self-beliefs about
writing.
Writing Self-Efficacy. Historically, composition researchers have focused mainly on the
complex cognitive aspects (e.g., Flower & Hayes, 1981; Scardamalia et al., 1982) of the writing
process - how students think while composing or in the physical processes students engage while
composing (Faigley, 1997; Hairston, 1982/1994). Researchers discovered the complexity of
relationships between thinking, composing, and the act of writing (Rose, 1989). Students enter a
34
classroom with a self-perceived “can’t” or “can '' response to writing, influenced by previous
experiences of teacher and peer-feedback.
Additionally, unlike other school curricula, writing serves as a punitive response for
negative behavior (e.g., writing “I will not talk in class 500-times, a letter of apology,
handwriting text from a book). Because of all the affective factors influencing writing, twenty-
first century researchers have investigated self-efficacy in writing to inform writing instruction
(Beach, 1989).
Measuring writing self-efficacy proves to be complex as individuals’ beliefs about
writing change between domains of product. In any given domain, there are levels of task
demands to be evaluated. When evaluating self-efficacy for an essay, research goals can range
from the lowest levels (sentences with proper punctuation) to the higher levels (structures to
produce clear ideas). Three types of writing self-efficacy measurements have risen in
popularity: measuring self-efficacy of basic writing skills, measuring confidence that the student
possesses to complete writing tasks, and measuring students rating their scoring confidence.
Pajares (1996), in his article “Self-Efficacy Beliefs in Academic Settings”, argued that
although researchers continued to build upon Bandura’s theoretical framework, the studies
lacked interconnections between self-efficacies and impacts upon expectancy constructs. Many
of the instruments used included questions that were too broad in scope, lacking “task and
situation specific” assessment of an individual’s belief in their ability to be successful in
completing a goal (Pajares, 1996). These Omnibus style tests focused on individuals’ general
sense of self-confidence (Bandura, 1996); however, Pajares (1996) cautioned researchers to
select specific domain-focused approaches to acquire more explanatory and predictive results,
such as, “asking students to report their confidence to learn mathematics or writing” (p. 547).
35
Another area of emerging writing self-efficacy research focuses on teachers’ beliefs
evaluating themselves as writers, as well as teachers of writing. Within the last three decades,
researchers have examined general teacher efficacy and writing instruction, teacher attitudes
toward writing, and teacher’s pedagogy for writing. Few studies have explored the causal
relationships between teacher attitude and efficacy about writing and the impact on student
achievement. Studies of adults’ beliefs about their ability to read and write have found that belief
(efficacy) has a lower relational connection to achievement in writing than for reading (Shellvet
al., 1995).
One could argue that writing is one of the most difficult literate activities challenging the
human species, requiring multiple areas of simultaneous interaction throughout the brain to
construct written communication (Wolf, 2008). Composition represents selecting and ordering
words into logical patterns for self-expression involving an individual thinking of something to
say, organizing his or her thoughts, and then choosing the right words to express the meaning
behind his/her communication (Bruer, 1993).
Social cognitive theory acknowledges individual belief constructs but suggests that
through a collective coordination of personal agencies, a broader network of socio-cultural
influence can be developed to affect the collective efficacy of a school (Goddard et al.,
2000). Schools present teachers with unique challenges involving public accountability and
shared responsibility for student outcomes with minimal control over their work
environment
(Bandura, 1997). Bandura (1993) suggested that teachers develop their self-efficacy through four
methods: mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, social persuasion, and affective
states. When given the opportunity to attend professional development in their field or attend
curriculum-focused workshops, teachers acquire ideas from a variety of sources. When talking
36
to peer groups students exchange experiences, successes, and failures within their classrooms
and learn from others. The most ineffective way to invoke collective efficacy in a school would
be for school administrations to mandate a belief system and then punitively legislate
compliance.
Perceived self-efficacy, through the four lenses of cognition, motivation, affect, and
selection, affect a school from three different points of efficacy: student, teacher, and
administrative beliefs (Bandura, 1993). Empirical study results validate the impact of each
participant’s role in the educational system and its impact on the other; little research has been
done to discuss the relationship of the three and their composite role on school-wide academic
achievement.
Socio-cultural learning feels less structured, provides time for discovery, and is process
driven as opposed to task oriented. This does not mean, however, that the delivery of content
lacks rigor; in fact, students will often write more in this environment than in a task-grade
situation. Supported by teacher and peer feedback, students will work longer on individual
pieces using a hierarchical process to revise their writing. In this environment, the teacher and
student fluidly exchange roles between learning and teaching – increased complex exchanges
develop “crazy about you” relationships between mentor and mentee. Relationships connected to
experiential learning create transforming learning experiences that stay with both the teacher and
student years after their classroom interaction has ended. t is not the content that we remember,
but our beliefs in how the teacher believed in us, and our striving to overcome rigorous content
to benefit from the teacher’s praise.
Perhaps it is these experiential complex exchanges, within a social environment, that help
to construct cognitive structures to promote the transference of knowledge from one situation to
37
another – a connection between cognitive and social culturists. They feel confident in what
they know about writing; and when comparing themselves with their peers, they have a strong
belief that they can accomplish varying writing tasks. The culmination of some students’ ability
to transfer information from grade to grade, class to class, and ultimately academia to the
world, warrants the need for more qualitative research to be conducted to investigate the
teacher- student-environment relationships, and their effect informs teacher education
instruction to increase student achievement.
Situated Learning Framework
Schools struggle to connect academia and societal learning needs, leaving students trying
to balance knowledge acquired from institutionalized structures of their school situated learning
experience and their anticipated real-world needs. Teachers work to transfer knowledge acquired
from their sterile university methodology coursework into classrooms burgeoning with reluctant
learners. Battles are waged from level to level – “What do the middle school teachers teach?”,
say the high school teachers, and college professors claim the incoming freshmen lack the skills
necessary for success in a post-secondary world. Although each instructional level insists that
they are teaching skills transferable to the next learning environment, many students are unable
to connect or transfer knowledge gained from one situation to another.
Relatively new to the cognitive research community, “situated learning” theorists have
begun to question disconnects between school measures of proficiency and college/career
readiness goals (Billett, 1996). Re-examining accepted research from anthropology and
sociology that studied the influence of individual acquisition of knowledge and its influence on
cognition theorists (Collins et al., 1989) combined with the research of socio-cultural
38
constructivists perspectives (Lave, 1990, 1993; Rogoff, 1990, 1995; Scribner, 1984), situated
learning studies have become widely acknowledged by cognitive views.
In Collins et al.’s (1989) article Cognitive Apprenticeship [CA], the authors described a
cognitive apprenticeship model that supports a “master-apprenticeship” relationship to create a
successful environment for learning. They argued two problems limit students’ ability to acquire
metacognitive skills necessary to transfer from one situation to another: (1) the design of schools
lend few resources that support critical thinking or higher-order problem solving skills and (2)
these skills are not integrated within the school (p. 455).
Within the sanctuary of their classrooms, teachers bridge the gap importing personally
acquired resources and find ways to bring in other curriculum concepts into their course
instruction. For example, an English teacher might use sentence diagramming to help students
understand the math of a sentence. Students needing graphic organizers to deconstruct a
sentence quickly recognize patterns developing where they once thought each sentence looked
alike. This style of grammar instruction, while not currently popular, offers a common formulaic
approach to understanding sentence variety. Another example can be found during reading
instruction, where teachers make connections to historical context, cultural influences, and/or
social development.
Expanding upon traditional apprentice studies of Lave and Wenger (1991), CA teaching
methods are designed to teach the mentor high-order complex problem-solving processes, so that
they can model for the apprentice using heuristic strategies and control strategies. Heuristic
strategies (tricks of the trade) are scaffolded techniques and approaches to accomplish the
task. Control strategies create boundaries for the process of carrying out the task and require
reflection on the problem-solving process, whereas traditional apprenticeship relationships tend
39
to be skill based and direct instruction delivery from the mentor (Collins et al., 1989). Teachers
cannot posture as the keeper of the knowledge, but instead must teach their students to take on
mentor and apprentice roles. When one student masters a topic, he or she should be encouraged
to mentor another student to comprehend the strand.
Situated learning requires the teacher (mentor) to relinquish visible control of the
students’ (apprentice) construction of knowledge. By defining the domain of the learning
through clear objectives of the task, by sharing their “tricks of the trade” and by scaffolding the
process, teachers place the metacognitive problem-solving skills back into the hands of the
students. Cognitive psychology research posits that it is the development of cognitive structures
connected with situations that aid in students’ abilities to transfer knowledge from one situation
to another; their socio-culturalist counterparts maintain that it is only through a student’s
immersion within a social situation over time that students begin to develop transfer
connections (Billet, 1996). Transference of knowledge from one learning situation to another
that is non-routine increases cognitive load and learners rely on previous socially constructed
dispositions on what they deem worthy of effort (Goodnow, 1990).
It is everyday school activities that Vygotsky (1978) cited as the socio prevalent form of
personal interaction, leading to the co-construction and organization of cognitive
structures (Fuhrer, 1993). Situated learning, therefore, becomes the connective tissue between
students’ abilities to engage in complex problem-solving skills and their socio-relationship
interactions with their peer group and teacher (mentors) affecting student achievement. Within
this learning environment, students learn to negotiate cognitive load challenges while being
supported by mentors invested in the apprentice’s success. Students become more confident in
their abilities to accomplish each task when supported.
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Conceptual Frameworks
The theoretical frameworks have focused on the social, cognitive, and emotional aspects,
providing research that suggests effective writing instruction profiles. The conceptual
frameworks aided in defining key terms necessary to evaluate the data collection from the
veteran Secondary English teacher participants. In this section, the parameters of an
accomplished or master teacher are defined, along with previous measurements of writing
beliefs, and teacher beliefs/attitudes about writing and writing instruction.
Accomplished or Master
Since 2001, educational policy has put to the forefront the pairing of students achieving
content mastery or levels of proficiency with correlations to teacher effectiveness. Emerging in
the late 1980’s, the United States legislated the National Board for Professional Training
Standards (NBPTS), establishing a teaching certification system with five core propositions to
identify accomplished/master teachers:
(1) Accomplished teachers are committed to students and to their learning.
(2) Accomplished teachers know the subjects they teach and how to teach those
subjects to students.
(3) Accomplished teachers are responsible for managing and monitoring student
learning.
(4) Accomplished teachers think systematically about their practice and learn
from experience.
(5) Accomplished teachers are members of learning communities. (Bond, 1998, p.
243)
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Other countries have established similar policies, and while the terms “master or
accomplished” use different synonyms [e.g., ‘lead teacher’ (US), ‘advanced skills teacher’
(England), ‘accomplished teacher’ (Scotland),’highly accomplished’ (AU)], they all believe
teachers to be highly effective, skilled classroom practitioners who routinely work independently
and collaboratively to improve their own practice and the practice of their colleagues.
Watson and Drew’s (2014) qualitative interview approach in their research explored the
beliefs of 19 early career teachers with two to four years teaching experience who were involved
in a Master Certificate program. Researchers conducted hour-long discussions asking
participants in what ways had their undertaking the postgraduate certificate in professional
enquiry contributed to their development as an accomplished teacher.
Audio data collection was then transcribed and using narrative analysis examined in
‘small story’ section analysis. Analysis of the small stories considered identity claims made by
participants conveying some significance of identity produced locally and through a specific
audience (Watson, 2007, 2012a). Results indicated that teachers, through their reflection on their
own practices and learning, engaged in accomplished/master educational policy proposed by
NBPTS propositions.
Measurements of Writing Beliefs
Before Pajares’ (1996, 2000, 2003, 2007) correlation work, Emig (1976) created a
version of “teacher and student attitude surveys” using very domain specific questions, but the
questions, although task-specifically defined, used a varying redundant questioning format,
resulting in a generalized assessment of how the teacher group and student groups felt about
different writing tasks.
42
King (1979) built upon Emig’s original 50 attitude-scaled clusters by adding an
additional series of construct questions to assess how teachers instruct writing. While the first
questions were task specific in design, on their own they only produced a generalized survey of
teacher self-efficacy toward their own feelings about their abilities to write, whereas the
construct questions focused on the teacher’s beliefs on how to teach writing. Before one can
change a school-wide vision for writing instruction, one needs to begin with the individual
beliefs of teachers’ campus wide.
In the mid 1980s, researchers looked at relationships between writing self-efficacy and a
variety of writing-related variables driven to identify the role a student writer’s beliefs about
their own writing affected their writing achievement. The earliest empirical studies explicitly
referencing writing self-efficacy (McCarthy et al., 1985) studied college student writing beliefs
and performance. McCarthy et al. evaluated 19 skills, focusing mainly on mechanics students
used in writing expository essays and how the students rated their confidence in their ability to
perform those skills. Researchers identified these skills as 10-15% of students writing scores.
The Shell et al. (1989) measurement surveyed college students examining writing
self- efficacy at the college level, adding outcome expectancy beliefs to correlate with
achievement. After collecting writing samples from each student, task and components skill
subscales measured student confidence levels for completing an assignment (e.g., writing an
essay or a short story) and their ability to perform skills needed to effectively complete the task
(e.g., correct spelling, use of parts of speech, etc.). While Shell et al.’s findings did not conclude
writing task self-efficacy to be a predictor for writing performance, writing skills did foreshadow
a reliable predictability for writing quality.
43
Shell et al.’s (1995) study, conducted with 4th, 7th, and 10th graders’ writing self-efficacy,
mirrored the previous studies’ results; however, although student’s beliefs in writing skills
served as a predictor for writing achievement, abilities did not increase as students progressed to
the higher grade levels, whereas, writing task performance progressively improved. Researchers
concluded that writing self-efficacy gains significantly correlate to students' abilities to
successfully perform tasks rather than their ability to master rote mechanical structures.
The largest, most comprehensive, and significant contribution to the study of writing self-
efficacy draws from Pajares’ and his associates’ (Pajares, 2003, 2007; Pajares et al., 2000;
Pajares et al., 1999; Pajares & Valiante, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2006) research. Early studies
mirrored the findings of Shell et al., but subsequent research added variables of gender, inverse
relationships to writing apprehension, and its independent and mediating effect on writing
achievement (Pajares, 2007; Pajares & Valiante, 1997, 1999, 2001). Pajares revised and adjusted
Shell’s self-efficacy scale for appropriateness for all grade levels.
The Writing Self-Efficacy Scale (WSES) required the student to “provide judgments of
their confidence in their ability to successfully perform grammar, usage, composition, and
mechanical writing skills, such as correctly punctuating a one-page passage or organizing
sentences into a paragraph to clearly express a theme” (Pajares 2007, p. 240). Pajares’ scale
allows for writing self-efficacy research to break from a unilateral construct assumption,
suggesting that the WSES provides potential separable dimensions, allowing for exploratory
factor analysis.
Parallel to researchers studying the role of self-efficacy on writing achievement another
body of research emerged studying the impact of models of writing on writing performance
(Bereiter & Scardmalia, 1987; Flower & Hayes, 1984; Hayes, 1996, 2006). Connecting the dots
44
between self-efficacy and writing model research proved difficult until Zimmerman and
Kitsantas (2007) framed self-efficacy for self-regulation as writers plan, write, and reflect on
their writing through theory-based accounts of the writing process.
One of the most significant writing self-efficacy measurement tools emerged from the
studies of Zimmerman and Bandura (1994); it was developed to predict college students’ self-
efficacy for regulating writing activities, self-efficacy for achievement, and grade-related
goals. Zimmerman’s (1994) subsequent research made ties between self-efficacy and writing
models with experimental interventions that provided stem sentences for students to identify,
model, and create.
Bridging Writing Efficacy and Writing Models
Building upon the body of research focused upon self-efficacy’s value for successful
writing performance (McCarthy et al., 1985; Pajares, 2003, 2007; Pajares & Johnson, 1996;
Pajares et al., 1999; Pajares & Valiante, 1997, 2006; Shell et al., 1995; Shell et al., 1989;
Zimmerman & Bandura, 1994) and adding upon the variety of writing-related variables
discussed previously, the “Examining Dimensions of Self-Efficacy for Writing” study examined
three writing factors (Bruning et al., 2012). Bruning’s review of previous research informed his
four assumptions about the act of writing and writing self-efficacy:
1. Writing is a complex cognitive act generating high demands on working memory
(Chenoweth & Hays, 2001; Flower & Hayes, 1980, 1981, 1984; Hayes, 1996,
2012; McCutchen et al., 2008; Zimmerman & Kitsantas, 2007).
2. Writing development advances slowly (Bereiter & Scardamlia, 1987; Kellogg,
2008; McCutchen et al., 2008).
3. Writing is based on the researcher’s own experiences and observations (Pajares, 2003).
45
4. Writers group their writing-related experiences into psychologically
meaningful categories (Schraw, 2006).
Correlating two studies (n=697 middle school students and N=563 students from two
different high schools) using the Self-Efficacy Writing Scale (SEWS), aligned to identify
students’ self-efficacy for writing ideation, writing conventions, and writing self-regulation,
researchers found significantly strong results indicating higher achievement for writing ideation
and self-regulation self-efficacy if students liked writing. While the researchers attempted to
connect their three-writing-factor approach to model writing, limitations in their study emerged
indicative of a problem being difficult to define from a singular study. Researchers eliminated
the planning factor because the study revealed that not all students plan the same way, and some
do not plan at all. When studying beliefs about writing the researcher must balance their
measurements between being too broad or too narrow in scope to attain authentic research.
Filling the Void:
Writing Relationships and Writing Performance
While the need to improve writing instruction and student writing performance remains a
priority of literacy, research has yet to find connections between the demands. This study adds
to the body of knowledge accrued in a variety of research foci surrounding values found within
the roles of Secondary English teachers, writing instruction, writer beliefs, and their correlations
to writing performance. As the literature review suggested, research on this topic has yet to find
direct connections among all the domains of socio-cultural, self-efficacy, writing models,
situated learning, and writing performance.
Independently each theoretical framework adds to a body of literature, suggesting a
significant correlation to increased student achievement, but it is this researcher’s belief that little
46
has been done to explore the perceptions of English teachers’ perception of the barriers or
influences that inform their writing instruction decisions.
Overview of Methodology
This study used interviews to engage veteran secondary English teachers in discussions
about distractions within and beyond the classroom that affect how they design writing
instruction. The data from this study adds to the current body of literature by serving to connect
teachers’ self-confidence to teach writing, the writing model of instruction used, and how they
think that their writing instructions have changed over their career.
Interview questions for this study were informed by previous self-efficacy survey
models, as identified in the literature review as appropriate for a high school English class. The
tools described in the literature have been piloted and tested in multiple studies (Shell et al.,
1989; Zimmerman & Bandura, 1994; Zimmerman & Kitsantas, 2007; Pajares & Valiante, 1997,
2006; Shell et al., 1995). Using a multiple case study methodology infused with an exploratory
lens and a semi-structured interview approach (Stake, 1995; Marshall & Rossman, 2011; Yin,
2012) allowed for an exploration of how English teachers reflected upon their practices in the
teaching of writing.
Chapter Summary
Chapter two provided an in-depth, empirical research review of theoretical and
conceptual frameworks in the domains of writing performance as influenced by socio-cultural,
self-efficacy, situated learning, and writer’s beliefs, in addition to models of measurement to
inform this qualitative study. While comprehensively discussing the human journey toward
written literacy and reviewing the current literature concerning the teaching and learning of
writing, chapter two also addressed a gap in the research that called for the study.
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Chapter three details the approach and methodological design of the study. It discusses
how a qualitative multiple-case exploratory design was used to research how veteran English
teachers informed their writing instruction decisions in the face of internal and external
distractions. The ethical considerations of the study are specifically addressed, along with
parameters for participant recruitment and informed consent processes for the study. Finally,
chapter three details the data collection and analysis utilized for this study.
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Chapter Three: Methodology
Introduction
Chapter one provided a personal and professional rationale for an exploratory multiple
case study concerning if and how discipline-specific evaluations (e.g., national, state, and
district) of high school English teachers informed their decisions about writing instruction.
Additionally, the first chapter provided a brief review of the literature describing both the
theoretical and conceptual frameworks supporting decisions for the methodology design
selections, and an outline of the methodological design of the research.
Chapter two thoroughly reviewed empirical studies of the literature, theoretical
frameworks of socio-culturalism, writing pedagogy, and teacher demands beyond the confines
of an English classroom, focusing on how a teacher makes decisions about writing instruction,
and additionally reviewed conceptual frameworks to support decisions for data analysis for this
study. The literature review revealed gaps in the literature citing that few studies focus on how
veteran English teachers’ writing instruction practices change over time, thus providing a
rationale for this study. Chapter three provides a detailed explanation of the methodological
approach and design of the study. The chapter outlines the specifics of the informed consent
process for participant sampling, data sources and data analysis procedures. Finally, chapter
three discusses the layout and timeline of the study.
Restatement of Problem
The purpose of this study was to explore how high school English teachers between 30-60
years of age with 10+ years of experience, and currently teaching in an urban setting, balanced
the demands of teacher evaluation criteria, standardized assessments, and/or curriculum standards
with their decisions for writing instruction. The researcher sought to determine if and how
49
discipline-specific evaluations, standardized assessments, and curriculum standards (e.g., national,
state, district) influenced high school English teachers’ decisions about writing instruction.
While the United States Department of Education doubles-down on standardized rigor
and states raise the stakes on teacher evaluations, pre-service teachers receive less than three
courses focusing on the teaching of writing, i.e., a grammar course, linguistics and/or history of
the language. After college, the incoming teacher must find resources, strategies, and self-taught
instruction to bolster their content knowledge, while spinning the plates of administrative
demands, classroom behavior, teacher-student relationships, parent-community connections, and
teaching the whole child. In this crucible of classroom dynamics and professional teacher
demands, it is no wonder that only a small percentage of teachers stay in practice beyond the
five-year mark.
Research Questions
1. What influences impede or inform English teachers’ design of writing instruction?
2. How do veteran English teachers, who have taught for 10+ years, and are between 30-60
years in age, evolve their instructional writing practices over their career?
Approach to the Study: Rationale for a Qualitative Study
The publishing of seminal studies (Emig, 197; Flowers & Hayes, 1980; Perl, 1980) noted
a rise in case study submissions and the in the Fall of 1981 NCTE’s College, Composition, and
Communication journal received 47 case studies to review, allowing the researcher to derive
conclusions based upon empirical evidence, thus effectually putting process writing as a viable
topic demanding further study. Of the 504 studies written before 1963, cited in the bibliography
of Research in Written Composition (Braddock, 1963), only two indirectly addressed process
writing among adolescents (Emig, 1971). Prompted by those findings, Emig’s (1971) seminal
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case study used “inquiry” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005; Merriam, 1998; Yin, 2009) and multiple
points of data collection to investigate composing processes of 12th graders. Eight 12th graders
participated in four sessions to record autobiographies of their writing experience and compose
aloud in the presence of a recorder and the investigator. Emig (1971) admitted weaknesses
supported by case study critics that using such a small group skewed results; orally composing
proved challenging and artificial, even for the most sophisticated student, and none of the data
was correlated to standardized testing to make connections to state achievement expectations.
This study, however, seeded ideas for the solicitation of humanistic data collection not
previously elicited from participants engaged in the writing process. Pushing against researchers’
claims that case-study methodology does not have the same objectivity of laboratory sciences,
Flower and Hayes (1980) used protocol analysis techniques borrowed from cognitive psychology
studies to record writers’ thinking processes while they composed. This new approach using
protocol analysis provided results that allowed researchers to describe what writers do as they
write, not just what theorists had perceived the writers were doing based on researchers’
observations (Flower & Hayes, 1980).
The design of this study was a qualitative research methodology because the
investigation of a teacher's writing classroom community is an aspect of the social world in a
school setting (Rossman & Rallis, 2003). The literature review revealed a plethora of research
concerning writing instruction, history of writing pedagogy, and influences outside of the
curriculum design that impact teachers’ decisions concerning writing practices and instructional
design. Using an exploratory focus allowed the researcher the flexibility of discovery. On its
own, an exploratory case study becomes problematic, opening the investigator to accusations of
conducting a case study where the researcher found only what they were looking for (Yin, 2009).
Using a multiple
51
case study design, combined with an investigatory approach using interviews for data collection,
the researcher strengthens the framework to focus on multiple aspects of the entire culture-
sharing group. Voss (1983) contended that case studies have provided a wealth of insight and
understanding about how students write and have generated stronger theoretical and process
pedagogy to classroom instruction.
Case study approaches allow researchers to focus on phenomena as it plays out in real-
life contexts, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly
defined (Yin, 1994). Stake (2005) argued that case study research is more of a choice of what is
to be studied bound by time and place rather than a methodology. Other researchers present this
approach as a strategy of inquiry or comprehensive research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005; Merriam,
1998; Yin, 2009). Critics of case studies minimize their value to merely supportive roles for
theory building or providing hypotheses for later validation when grouped with multiple studies
on the same topic (Eckstein, 1975), but this approach seemed well suited for investigating
socially complex phenomena (Creswell, 2013), particularly in the teaching of writing. This case
study method addresses “how” and “why” research questions. Designs for this method can range
from single to multiple studies, use three types of study (explanatory, exploratory, or
descriptive), and use qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods for data collection and
analysis. Other qualities of case study include in-depth understanding of the interaction of
participants with an event or activity, in addition to collecting multiple sources of data (i.e.,
observation, interviews, visual material, documents and reports) within an authentic setting (Yin,
2014; Creswell, 2013). A visual representation of the research design for this qualitative study
using a multiple case study approach is provided in Appendix A.
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Role of the Researcher
In qualitative research, the researcher should have a close relationship to the phenomena
that is being studied (Creswell, 1998). Therefore, it is critical that the reader be aware of the
researcher’s biography to vet innate biases inherent to having an embedded researcher in a study.
Having taught 9th-12th grade curriculum for 14 years, the researcher observed many teachers
with varying styles of teaching enter and leave English departments. Additionally, the researcher
worked with three different shifts of administration, all with different visions for the school, and
how English should be taught. In congruence with my teaching career, I engaged in university
course work with transitions throughout the Education Department, providing various foci on the
teaching of reading and writing instructional design. For these reasons, I have been in the
profession of teaching long enough to have taught through behaviorist, progressiveness, and
essentialist views of classroom instruction. As a veteran high school English teacher, with 10+
years of experience, and within the range of 30-60 years of age, it is important for the researcher
to recognize and forgo a bias of practitioner opinions and report findings from an objective
researcher’s lens.
Theoretical and Conceptual Frameworks
Both theoretical and conceptual frameworks have been reviewed with the understanding
that the theoretical frameworks of human engagement and self-efficacy inform the social
constructs of human behavior and participants beliefs about writing instruction, while the
conceptual frameworks create a roadmap for data collection analysis. Theories of social
culturalism, self-efficacy, and situated learning define the parameters of how individuals
cognitively construct knowledge and individuals’ beliefs in an ability to learn and achieve in a
situated learning environment. Models of effective writing strategies, pedagogy, and the
53
measurement of success also inform the data collection process. Finally, as a qualitative
multiple-case exploratory interviews for data collection, qualitative frameworks for case study,
explorative research, and interview data collection frameworks were engaged to collect,
analyze, and describe the findings of the study
Research Design
Participant Selection
The researcher used a convenient sample criterion to select eight to twelve veteran high
school English teachers. Teachers were recruited through the distribution of a paper flyer
(Appendix B). The researcher reached out to teachers with whom they had engaged outside of
work contexts who were relevant to the study (i.e., contexts in which high school teachers
interact outside of work such as in public social spaces), in addition to relying on teachers
referring other teachers to distribute the flyer beyond the bounds of the researcher’s community
of work relationships. The flyer briefly introduced the study, identified the inclusion criteria, and
provided instruction to potential participants on how to follow up with the researcher to express
an interest in participating in the study. Teachers interested in enrolling for the study did so via
the link or QR code provided on the flier. To be considered for the study, individuals had to
meet the following criteria:
1. Adults aged 30-60
2. High school English teachers
3. 10+ years teaching experience
4. Currently employed at an urban school site
Once the researcher received potential participant’s confirmation of interest, the researcher
contacted the participant via phone and/or email for an introduction, to sign the “Informed
Consent” form (Appendix C), to discuss a 90-minute face-to-face interview, and an optional 20-
minute discussion, if the participant was interested in reviewing the interview transcription.
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Data Collection
Data collection and analysis used practices and sources described by Yin (1994, 2012)
and Stake (1995, 2010) to prevent possible devaluing of the researcher’s use of a multiple case
study embracing an exploratory approach. The researcher collected data with 90-minute face-to-
face interviews (Appendix D). After each interview, the researcher notated the takeaways from
each participant’s interview to capture initial impressions.
Interviews were conducted within the ZOOM conferencing platform and recorded with
transcription enabled. The ZOOM recordings were then uploaded to Temi.com for further
transcription cleaning. The researcher de-identified the Temi.com created transcripts of any
information that could potentially identify the participant.
Data Analysis
The analysis process for the transcripts of the 10 individual participant interviews
revealed codes and patterns of shared views of writing instruction in the participant’s
classroom(s) using both an inductive and deductive process (see Appendix E for a visual
representation of the analysis process). The researcher used multiple levels of analysis (1)
observation, (2) thematic coding, and (3) summarizations of each interviewee’s perspectives of
the impacts on their teaching of writing, with correlating frequencies between research questions
and themes.
Observation Analysis
During the interview process the researcher focused on being present and listening to the
overtones and undertones of each participant’s reflection of their experiences with teaching and
in particular their teachings of writing. After each interview, the researcher noted take-aways and
significant statements from each recording to investigate further during the next layer of analysis.
55
After completing all the interviews, the researcher viewed each interview and took journal notes.
The notes included the interviewer's commentary and connection to both their own experiences
teaching high school English and to the researcher’s remembrances of what other participants
had shared.
Thematic Coding
Initially, the researcher used deductive analysis to sort the interview questions into the
two research question categories. Returning to the transcripts the researcher used an inductive
line by line approach to allow the interview narratives to reveal emerging codes, rather than
coding from a preconceived lens of what the data should reveal. During this ground-up coding
process (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2006), five overarching themes emerged from the data in
relation to teaching and writing instruction: Career Experiences (CE), Writing (W),
Relationships (R), Content Knowledge (CK), and External Influences (EI). Using deductive
analysis, the researcher then sorted the individual codes under their respective parent theme
code. To test the validity of the coding the researcher then used key-word searches to auto code
research categorized interview question data, and then cross-referenced the auto coded research
question families with the themes to reveal frequencies between theme category and research
questions. (see Table 1)
Table 1
Research Question 1 Correlations to Themes
RQ1: What influences impede or inform English teachers’ design of writing instruction?
RQ1 Correlating IQ(s): 1,4,6,7,13,14,15,17
Themes Theme
To RQ1 Frequency
Career Experiences (CE) 2908
56
Writing (W) 6058
Relationships (R) 2492
Content Knowledge (CK) 6458
External Experience (EI) 2986
Research Question 2 Correlations to Themes
RQ2: How do veteran English teachers, who have taught for 10+ years, and are between 30-60
years in age, evolve their instructional practices over their career?
RQ2 Correlating IQ(s): 2,3,5,8,9,10,12,16,18
Themes Theme
To R2 Frequency
Career Experiences (CE) 1338
Writing (W) 3574
Relationships (R) 1062
Content Knowledge (CK) 3592
External Experience (EI) 1328
Subcategories were needed for a granular view of the specifics of what the participants
viewed as influences on their teaching of writing; the outlines for each category served to
capture the summary of each participant's experiential perspective on the teaching of writing.
(see Table 2)
Table 2
Participant Code Segment Theme Frequencies
Participant CE W R CK EI
Beth 19 41 12 3 19
Christina 19 79 17 22 43
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Jack 29 89 15 12 35
Jenny 32 93 21 6 32
Luke 24 50 13 29 11
Patty 30 53 40 14 38
Sarah 23 40 31 27 37
Sotera 28 82 20 23 22
Trina 27 44 26 21 12
Wendy 27 82 8 22 31
N = 10 258 653 203 179 280
Chapter Summary
Chapter three provided the methodological approach, design, and analysis process of the
study. This study addressed two overarching research questions seeking to understand the
influences that impeded or informed English teachers’ design of writing instruction and how
those design decisions evolved over their career. Through the exploration of these questions, this
study found teachable strategies to transfer veteran teachers’ knowledge about the value of
nurturing classroom relations to motivate, engage, and increase achievement in the teaching of
writing.
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Chapter Four: Findings
This study sought to explore how veteran high school English teachers changed their
writing instruction practices, while balancing external demands beyond classroom instruction
[e.g., teacher evaluation criteria, standardized assessments and/or curriculum standards].
Chapter one provided a rationale for this exploratory multiple-case study based upon the
stagnancy and/or decline of 12th graders and 8th graders between 2008 to 2012 as reported by
National Report Card statistics for writing proficiency.
Empirical and theoretical studies reviewed in chapter two in the areas of socio-
culturalism, writing pedagogy, and teacher demands beyond classroom instruction revealed a
research gap that suggested that little to no studies had been conducted with veteran English
teachers to discuss how their teaching of writing changed over the span of their one-to-three-
decade long careers, further leading to a justification for this study. Chapter three laid out the
methodological approach, design, and process of analysis that the researcher used to expose the
findings for this qualitative study by providing specific details regarding participant selection,
site location, data sources, and data analysis methodologies.
Chapter four provides the findings of the completed exploratory multiple-case
methodology study conducted to answer the research questions:
RQ1: What influences impede or inform English teachers’ design of writing instruction?
RQ2: How do veteran English teachers, who have taught for 10+ years, and are between 30-
60 years in age, evolve their instructional practices over their career?
This chapter discusses how the analysis conducted was consistent with qualitative semi-
structured interview methodology and how the analysis tied back to the research questions.
Additionally, this chapter includes the demographics of the participants and details the process
59
used to conduct and analyze the 10 interviews. Each teacher participant is discussed using a
similar framework to introduce their personal and professional backgrounds, their teaching styles
and belief orientations, and how they navigated writing instruction. The reporting of each case
mirrors the sequence in which the data was collected.
Participant Sampling
Teacher participants were acquired using a snowball recruitment technique. Once an IRB
was obtained, professors on the researcher’s dissertation committee and the researcher sent the
recruitment attachment (Appendix A) to leaders and personal connections in their educational
circles for distribution to high school English teachers, still in the classroom, who showed
promising interest in participating in a study focused on their writing instruction practices
throughout their teaching careers. Twelve participants completed the initial participant
qualification survey and 10 of those qualified committed to participate in a 90-minute, online
Zoom meeting interview. Of the 10 participants, the researcher had taught at the same site with
one and knew two others from professional development opportunities.
Participants’ teaching careers ranged from 11 to 32 years in the classroom with only one
concluding their last year in the profession (n = 10; Range 21; Mean 20.6; Median 20.5; Mode
19, 22). Although the study sought to recruit high school teachers who had taught between 10 to
30 years and were currently teaching in a classroom, participant Patty remained in the study
because she had recently retired at the time of the study with 30 years of experience in the same
district. The researcher thought that the 30-year career span provided a comprehensive lens of
the changes over time in a teaching career and might correlate to what other teachers in the
study had experienced during their years of service.
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Although the researcher had little to no influence on the selection of participants, the 10
who committed to the study proved to be enthusiastic and representative of typical English
departments presenting with mostly white female instructors teaching in public school settings.
Table 3 Participant Demographics
Participant Demographics N Percentage
Gender
Male 2 20%
Female 8 80%
Total 10 100%
Education (highest degree)
BA +16 1 10%
Masters 2 20%
Masters +16 1 10%
Masters +32 4 40%
MED 1 10%
EdD 1 10%
Years Teaching
10-15 years 3 30%
16-20 years 3 30%
21-25 years 2 20%
26-30 years 2 20%
*2 published authors (1 playwright, 1 romance novelist)
**All had public school, charter and/or Magnet program experience
***Only 1 had taught at a virtual school
It should also be noted that at the time of this study, all the teachers had converted
their face-to-face strategies to online platforms and were teaching their lessons online due to
Covid protocol mandates.
Additionally, the researcher knew that the teachers worked at different locations within
their district throughout their careers, and that they often met at conventions or other forms of
district professional development; with those concerns and concerns of site-based retaliation, the
61
researcher used multiple layers of de-identification. Participants selected their pseudonyms used
during the interview, recorded transcripts were redacted of any identifying information, i.e.,
name drops, place, colleagues, or any other reference that might lead to the identification of a
participant.
Data Collection Process
Once participants qualified for the study, they signed up via email for a 90-minute time
slot for their individual Zoom interview using the platform Calendly to avoid overlapping of
interviews, and to preserve privacy by providing secure individual meet logins. This method
allowed participants control of their sign-up and/or rescheduling needs with immediate
notification only to the researcher. Each semi-structured interview was of the same format,
beginning with a welcome introduction from the researcher to review the expectations of the
study and to reconfirm the participant’s consent to continue the recording of the interview.
Working from a guided transcript, the researcher asked all participants the same 18 interview
questions (Appendix D); however, due to the semi-structured style of the interview the questions
were not always addressed in the same order. Some participants answered questions during their
responses to previous questions.
The researcher began the interviews by asking the participant to describe their first five
years of teaching, especially focusing on how they taught writing; the participant then told their
story with little to no interference from the researcher, unless further clarification or prodding
was needed to develop rapport. Using the researcher’s intuition and participant cues, each
interview took on the personality of the relationship developed between the interviewer and
interviewee. Since the researcher was also a high school English teacher who had taught for 20
years, there were relatable intersections of context, but the researcher worked hard not to insert
62
their opinions; instead, using shared experiences only session relationship building to place the
participant in a comfortable place to their personal teaching experiences.
Data Analysis Process
Data analysis used MAXQDA 2022 qualitative data program as a data sorting tool and
the researcher incorporated both deductive and inductive coding strategies (see Appendix E).
Due to global pandemic Covid protocols, all 90-minute interviews were conducted online using
the Zoom video conferencing platform. Each interview was recorded both visually and audibly.
The live ZOOM transcript for each participant was downloaded and then uploaded into
Temi.com to correct ZOOM transcription errors and to be used for further de-identification of
participants.
The revised and de-identified scripts were then uploaded into MAXQDA 2022 for further
revision and analysis. Revisions were made only for clarification purposes to meet the context of
the visual online audio interview and to remove any missed identifiers, i.e., name drops, schools,
etc. Using the MAXQDA 2022 qualitative coding and analysis tools, the researcher used
inductive analysis to elicit theme family code segments from each participant’s transcripts and
then ensured that the subjective coding had validity; both the research questions and interview
questions were keyword searched using deductive analysis to auto code segments from each
transcript. By using both inductive and deductive analysis methods the data provided rich results
to support the findings. Charts are embedded within this chapter to pair the narrative with the
MAXQDA 2022 data analysis representations.
With varying years of teaching experience, education, content knowledge, and personal
philosophies, each participant’s voice is summarized in the following section.
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Narrative presentation of how participants answer the Questions
Each of the participants described school settings that were led by veteran teachers who
were the self-proclaimed gatekeepers for the newly hired staff. Culture, climate, and tone were
determined by department and site leadership. At first the participants tried to get along and
follow what the implied site-system required even if it contradicted their pre-service training or
funds of knowledge. They learned that along with their department expectations, there were
embedded site-based requirements, and individual administrative supervisor demands.
Often the expectations of each English department did not align with the individual
teaching philosophies and/or styles leaving opportunities for vertical alignments of curriculum,
or a lack of a school-wide shared vision lost in the melee of contradictory pedagogies. When
there was evidence of a shared vision, it often appeared as a one-size-fits all mandate under the
guise of student improvement for ALL.
Participants said that schools used one shared Student Learning Goal (SLG), usually
connected to an aspect of the American College Test (ACT), e.g., “Cite strong and thorough
textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn
from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain” (CCSS.ELA-
LITERACY.RI.11-12.1). This strand might work well for core classes with heavy reading
expectations, but participants did not think it was effective to authentically serve the needs of
their students nor did it always align with the illuminated academic weaknesses identified in
their own pre-assessments.
The following narratives of each participant's responses shows who they were and
how the analysis of their interviews helped to understand each participant's responses and
provided insight into their connections to the two overarching research questions.
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Beth
Beth presented as a passionate teacher who entered the profession with a goal to get
students turned on to learning. Beginning her education in theater as a props designer, she
changed her major to English, worried that a theater degree would be too limiting. Her BA in
English took her through a varied course list of literature and writing focused genres, each
providing platforms that she incorporated into her future classroom. (see Table 4)
Table 4- Beth’s Education, Teaching, and Writing Experience
Participant Education Years
Teaching
School Site
Experience
Classes
Taught
Writing
Preparation
(WM) Beth
BA: English
major/Secondary Ed
minor
M.Ed. +32: (Licensure
program)
National Board certified
19 U.S.A public
Eng 9-11
AP Lang
IB- extended
study lab
Adv.Grammar;
Creative Writing;
SS Writing;
Sound/sense
Poetry;
Mechanics; Adv.
Comp.
Using opportunities afforded by an Alternative Routes to Licensure (ARL) she earned her
M.Ed. in secondary education. Most of her teaching experience had been in AP Language, IB
(extended essay), and or 11/11H level courses. She did not belong to any professional groups but
attended two AP conferences each year and was IB (Extended Essay) trained.
Additionally, Beth stayed engaged with district and community professional development
opportunities and, prior to the Covid pandemic, enrolled in a 101/102 course at a community
college to see the comparative teaching to her AP Language course. Like Trina, another study
participant, she preferred to follow online blog sites, teacher podcasts, and other social media
platforms to continually keep herself and her teaching of writing strategies fresh.
Nationally Board certified, an avid reader, and structured writer herself, she was
surprised that most teachers who teach writing do not have a content-based BA prior to
acquiring
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their secondary licensure degree. She found this to be a deficit to the practice because teachers
do not share a common vocabulary or experience of English coursework. Her English degree
required her to take a variety of literature and writing genre courses and she said she is no
stranger to the cruelty of the red-lining professors on her pieces of writing.
She claimed not to be a writer herself and that she was much better at teaching someone
else how to write an email that would not get them fired than for her to personally write.
However, she understood and appreciated the value of students writing with purpose and intent
to achieve their goals. She insisted that it was important that students craft pieces with clarity.
Most of her courses were driven by program standards, guidelines, and formulaic structures
and, since she did not see herself as a writer, she did not feel confident to teach creative writing.
She thought that her students would refer to her courses as rhetoric in lieu of their assigned
names.
Schools in her district had small classrooms, but assigned 40 students to a class, forcing
Beth to use a traditional design that organized her students into rows facing forward and to
reconfigure grouping dynamics to change their adjacent “buddy” groups each quarter. She
wanted her students to be “turned on to learning”, so taught with passion and enthusiasm or, as
she claimed to be, “a Toxic Optimist”; however, she was full of passionate grace as she
explained her reasoning for her lack of investment in punitive grading. Her gradebook aligned
with the expectations of her job requirements, but she refused to use grades as leverage against
student learning and instead preferred to have students see their grades as representations of
specific standard-aligned progress.
Beth was not sure how to justify her mathematical gradebook calculations to her
administrator, but she knew that she could not punish a student who was striving, experimenting,
and/or willing to revise their work. Although rubrics are embedded within the AP structure, she
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also added running commentary throughout her students’ essays – seeking to point out the
“magical moments”, feeling that each student had them, even though some were harder to find
than others. She reminded herself that she should ask her students if they found her reference to
“magical moments” endearing or annoying.
In fact, Beth’s classroom was full of real “magical moments”, spaces for intentional
conversation. As a writing teacher providing texts for students to read, one never knows what
might trigger an emotional spark for one beyond the expected boundaries of an assignment.
Beth shared an experience during Covid writing, when a student publicly announced that
they were depressed and did not feel like getting out of bed. The researcher asked, “How were
you prepared to react?”, to which Beth burst forth, “You have to have a conversation! Publicly,
on the spot, celebrate their brave writing and have them keep writing.” She told them that she
would be calling them that night to talk about it further, “but in the meantime see if you can write
through the feelings.”
For most writing, she provided feedback and return for a revision assignment, but when
she received emotional responses that were so raw, she never has them revised but instead has
them “dump write”, a method of getting raw ideas/feelings on paper. She then retooled the text
so as not to continue to trigger that student’s feelings on a specific subject.
Upon reflection, Beth suggested that teachers should always check in with their students,
not just at the end of the year but along the way. Teachers should continue to reflect on their
writing instruction and own their mistakes to their students, parents, and administration.
Sometimes lessons do not work or quizzes have errors, so when Beth found or had issues
pointed out to her, she had no problem erasing the assignment. She did not hold her students
accountable for something she poorly executed.
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Like many of the participants in the group Beth was discouraged by Covid online
learning experiences, believing that she did not have the ability to pivot and provide appropriate
online instruction to mirror the effective strategies and community building that she used in her
brick-and mortar-classroom. Students were reluctant to share their writing and peer review for
revision strategies, causing Beth to adopt truncated lessons that were more creative to engage
online learners.
From this experience she reflected on never teaching tone words again, but instead using
technology tools to help her study them on their own. She was re-tooling her next year’s lessons
to incorporate a balance between online and face-to-face learning with an excitement to have the
freedom at her school to address the human needs of her students who have been isolated for so
long, and as the department chair to support her team as they return with pandemic anxieties.
In Table 5, one can see the connections between Beth’s transcript analysis narrative and
the MAXQDA 2022 coding analysis.
Table 5
Beth
Research Question Correlations to Theme
Themes Theme
To RQ1 Frequency
Theme
To RQ2 Frequency
Career Experiences (CE) 310 70
Writing (W) 516 172
Relationships (R) 288 64
Content Knowledge (CK) 220 244
External Influences (EI) 366 96
TOTAL 1700 646
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Beth began her career with an English degree (CK), was leading her department, had
achieved National Board Certification, and was IB extended essay and AP trained (CE). Feeling
supported by administration, “they just trust what we are doing, and it works”, even when
experiencing an administrative change, the department values remained constant. While Beth
had a strong coursework background in writing and career experiences for specific testing
structure formats (R1, R2), writing instruction during Covid “lock down” was an external
influence that almost broke this vibrant interactive teacher; she felt unable to convert her
dynamic classroom into a sterile online community of writers. Relationships within her
department were key to navigating students through English instructions and the support of
peers kept the program consistent.
Christina
Knowing that she was born to teach Christina entered the profession with a laser focus on
how to best serve her students. She attended a northeastern state teacher college that required an
M.Ed. connection that imposed 40+ hours of practicum hours. This participant underwent a
rigorous preparation resulting in her earning a BA in English and M.Ed. in English instruction.
The teacher college was myopically focused on the teaching of standards that aligned with
authentic data collection that measured what students learned from instruction. (see Table 6)
Table 6- Christina’s Education, Teaching, and Writing Experience
Participant Education Years
Teaching
School Site
Experience
Classes
Taught
Writing
Preparation
(BF) Christina
BA: Secondary Ed
major/English M.Ed.
+32 (traditional
program)
Ph.D. program
12 U.S.A public
Magnet/Charter
Eng 9-11
AP Lit ELA focused
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Teachers were taught how to analyze the data and incorporate the findings into their daily
instruction. Christina thought that teachers in her new state/district did not use data effectively,
often collecting state data after the information was relevant to instruction. Teachers did not
understand how to analyze the data to inform their daily instruction at a granular level; instead,
they used broad strokes to say students scored poorly on this overarching strand or students
needed more writing, etc. States, districts, and school sites used data collection to serve their
needs, not the instructional needs of the students, and Christina was shocked by the data
collection in juxtaposition to the much broader issue of apathetic family and community views
towards education, lack of state funding, or community support.
After leaving her northeastern training she sought warmer climates and took a position in
a southeastern state, near family and a set of community shared beliefs and values. As she started
an online Ph.D. program, her state imposed a seven-year freeze on teacher pay and, not willing
to suffer poverty level wages, she uprooted again to go West, where teachers were receiving
better pay and a Ph.D. would receive a pay increase.
Students in the new state and district, however, were unexpectedly lacking in the morals
and educational civilities that her previous students had presented. After only a year of teaching,
she could no longer compromise her teaching values and left two weeks before school ended;
she was devastated and discouraged by a job that she had believed was her life calling. After a
couple of years in a different field, she returned to the classroom with a stronger conviction to be
the best teacher she could be for the students before her. Her teacher preparation had provided a
strong platform for content aligned to the standards but had not prepared her for the behavior
issues or classroom management that she faced in her new state’s at-risk high schools. She
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corrected the researcher saying, “You may call them at-risk, but I see them as full of
opportunity.”
At the time of this study, Christina was teaching AP English Language and 10/10H at a
magnet high school, where students selected an interest-school that they wanted to attend and
were enrolled based upon district lottery; she had returned to her high level of expectations and
rigorous guidance from the standards. She mused on how she never thought it was the students’
fault that they were failing, but laid the blame on poor instructors touting that they “looked out
for their Black kids”; as a Black female teacher who looked out for all students, she never
thought that the student’s skin color should impact a teacher’s writing instruction.
She commented that, “Nobody talks about the teacher of color's relationship expectations
with their students of color, often putting the teacher as a family member or community support
replacement.” It took years for her to recognize that she was doing her students no favors by
letting their personal stories detract from the quality of writing instruction that they deserved.
Christina strongly believed, “Writing is freedom – a book in your pocket and a pen in your hand
is the way to live and succeed in an academic setting.”
An avid reader and writer, through the years she has maintained writing books where she
notes future novel ideas. She wrote letters to her mother and was steeped in academic writing for
her Ph.D. She cannot imagine why all English teachers are not readers and writers, believing that
reading is how she connects to the different voices of the world and writing provides the
freedom to interact or explore with those worlds.
Christina had spent a lifetime trying to improve her teaching craft. Believing that students
in her new state/district were grade levels behind, she sprinkled in previously needed content,
while trying to move students toward observation of author’s purpose and craft moves. “Students
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have a difficult time divorcing themselves from a reader's perspective toward recognizing how a
writer’s craft choices impact the reading of a text”. She felt compelled to learn how to diagram
sentences so that she could help her students understand sentence structure but found that their
lack of language knowledge made peer review more frustrating than fruitful. No longer face-to-
face with her students, Christina empowered her students to use on-line self-revision platforms
tools i.e., “Grammarly” and “Paper-Rater”, so that they could make informed decisions about
their writing structures.
When designing the environment of her classroom Christina put respect for her students
first and created a safe and encouraging environment for interactive learning. Using flexible
seating, students engaged in varying group sizes with each student having a role at their table.
Roles were assigned each week and posted on the wall so that students knew their
responsibilities for the assigned task. Each Monday and on the first day returning from a break,
the class reviewed the norms that identified their roles, responsibilities, and expectations to
each other, their teacher, and in honor of their classroom learning environment.
Christina leads her class with a writing process pedagogical stance, with the
understanding that there is not one right way to write a piece but instead a need for the writer to
make decisions on what will give their writing the most power. Using commentary, discussion,
modeling, and conferencing, the class works through the AP Language content by constructing
and deconstructing the knowledge needed to gain success on the end of year AP assessment.
It can be assumed that Christina used a variety of AP training strategies to provide
writing scaffolding, something she wished she had earlier in her career. Upon entering the
profession, she felt confident of the standards and what students needed to learn but had no idea
how to set up the environment for writing instruction. It was one thing to watch master teachers
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during practicum experiences, but another to have the reins and responsibilities of your own
classroom. Through mentors, professional development, and continued education teachers put all
the pieces of effective learning strategies in place that engage students and move the needle
toward authentic writing instruction methodologies.
Table 7 reflects the connections between Christina’s transcript analysis narrative and the
MAXQDA 2022 coding analysis.
Table 7
Christina
Research Question Correlations to Theme
Themes Theme
To RQ1 Frequency
Theme
To RQ2 Frequency
Career Experiences (CE) 304 88
Writing (W) 520 226
Relationships (R) 252 66
Content Knowledge (CK) 730 336
External Influences (EI) 428 140
TOTAL 2234 856
Beginning a teaching career with a rigorous English degree and data focused education
degree, and experiencing NE, SE, and Western districts, Christina struggled to stay in the
profession. While her Content Knowledge (CK) represented a strong personal stance and
pedagogical focus, it was the External Influences (EI) and negative Career Experiences (CE)
that impacted her writing instruction choices. Both RQ1 and RQ2 frequencies indicated that this
participant understood the components of writing instruction, but site-based administrative
decision making and district directives negatively impacted the teaching of writing; she said,
“We keep teaching towards the next test, but nobody looks at the data - nobody uses the data to
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inform instruction.” Feeling called to teach, the weight of education politics made it difficult for
her to remain in the classroom and pushed her to work towards a Ph.D., as she described, “to
make changes in education.”
Jack
Needing money and in a mid-life crisis, Jack turned to teaching. A confident writer, he
showed up for his GRE test and scored in the 90th percentile, without studying. Not sure how he
passed the literature portion of the exam, he attributed his passing to his undergraduate theater
courses that required a large repertoire of reading assignments. Having always considered
himself a writer, he reflected on his high school experiences when he had a teacher who had
them read and write essays; he saved every essay and he shared those high school writings with
his students. (see Table 8)
Table 8 Jack’s Education, Teaching, and Writing Experience
Participant Education Years
Teaching
School Site
Experience
Classes
Taught
Writing
Preparation
(WF)
Jack
BA: Drama (traditional)
M.Ed+32 (ARL)
Published Playwright 22 U.S.A public
Eng 9-11
AP Lang
Trans. 12
12th RSP
College Peer
Mentors
2 Gen Ed
requirements;
read/curriculum
development for
certification
One summer, his teenage brain thought it would be a good idea to hand-copy
Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night's Dream, which upon reflection made him aware of the writing
he did online versus in his “writing book”. He writes every day and shares both his book and
writing philosophies with his upper-level AP and Expository, Reading, and Writing Curriculum
(ERWC) students. Twenty years beyond his BA he was shocked to find how little students read
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and wrote, frustrated by the striking difference between how he had felt about reading and
writing as a student their age.
Even as a published author, like many participants in this study, Jack began teaching
without really knowing how to teach writing instruction. Shored up by mentors sharing their
vetted lessons, scaffolding tools, organizers, and other strategies for the first five years, his
practice did not change until he intersected with the ERWC (Expository, Reading, Writing,
Curriculum) program, a collaboration with the local university. The ERWC training provided a
platform of researched writing strategies that taught instructors the specifics of how to take
students through an effective writing process.
Throughout the interview Jack alluded to an understanding about the writer's process but
did not seem to have a “writer’s workshop'' style of writing. He opposed peer review saying that
having peers look at each other’s work is too confusing, especially if the peer says the writing is
awesome and the teacher cannot find coherent sentences. While Jack had a large classroom,
seemingly conducive to student discourse, he described himself at the front of the room or
traveling with a moving podium. Recently, he realized that it would be more effective for him
to project notes from his computer rather than write the notes on the whiteboard hoping that
they would stay up throughout the unit.
Although he professed to have a playwriting program on his own computer, he did not
present as being tied to technology other than internet research. In contradiction, Jack, a self-
professed grammarian, prideful of his ability to test out of all English course credits, questioned
whether it was a strategy that he should teach in class, and argued that “students will not be
asked about intransitive verbs for an interview or other work/college experiences”.
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Jack was a consummate reader and writer– reading everything put before him and
writing every day. He struggled with students’ lack of respect for the planning component for
writing; no matter how he framed it, students did not value taking the time to plan what they
were thinking about writing. Students push backed arguing, “that they were good writers and
knew how to get it down on paper for a good grade”. Jack said, “That is how they see writing.
How little they can do to get the highest grade”.
It seemed difficult for Jack to understand why or how students would not want to be
writers and readers. There were indicators that Jack’s class was writer-focused using texts to
discuss author choice, purpose, and author craft to aid students in developing a deeper
appreciation of writing structures. Additionally, he had students do multiple drafts, with the
teacher reading each submission, first for content, and then on additional drafts he preferred to
write commentary or have individual conferences. During class he used a whole group strategy
to revise [his] work, professional writer text, or student work to continue to draw attention to
quality writing attributes. Table 9 supports the connections between Jack’s transcript analysis
narrative and the MAXQDA 2022 coding analysis.
Table 9
Jack
Research Question Correlations to Theme
Themes Theme
To RQ1 Frequency
Theme
To RQ2 Frequency
Career Experiences (CE) 398 264
Writing (W) 1228 906
Relationships (R) 292 198
Content Knowledge (CK) 648 526
External Influences (EI) 470 326
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TOTAL 3036 2220
Passionate about writing and an avid reader, Jack’s RQ1 and RQ2 frequencies ranked
high in both Writing (W) and Content Knowledge (CK). Intersecting with a local university, he
trained in ERWC (Expository, Reading, Writing, Curriculum) and focused his writing
instruction on high school to college writing. Working in a male majority department, he thought
that the team worked well together with little ego and welcomed new members with a supportive
attitude. Having come to the profession in a nontraditional route, he struggled the first years of
his career to learn “how to teach, you know strategies, graphic organizers, figure out ways to
engage students”. As with most of the participants, Career Experiences (CE) evolved over time
and in Jack’s case, raised his R2 frequency indicating that those experiences helped him to adapt
his writing instruction practices.
Jenny
Jenny entered the profession anticipating that teaching English would be discussing
literature, analyzing characters, and that the students would love doing projects to support their
understanding of the literature. Often Jenny found herself to be one of the few Black teachers in
her department, walking a fine line between offering too many minority texts and, after the rise
of the Black Lives Matter movement, the department resource for all things Black. She wrestled
with frustration and blatant discrimination by the lack of support from administration and her
department. Her commitment to students and the teaching of writing kept her in the classroom
(see Table 10).
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Table 10 Jenny’s Education, Teaching, and Writing Experience
Participant Education Years
Teaching
School Site
Experience
Classes
Taught
Writing
Preparation
(BF) Jenny
BA: English
major/Philosophy
Minor
(traditional program);
M.Ed.;
NWP Teacher Leader
25 U.S.A public
Magnet/Charter
Eng 9-11
AP Lang
AP Lit
W Electives
Composition;
Grad Teaching
Writing;
Linguistics;
Journalism
Jenny’s first English department was a formidable staff of 18 people. She felt
intimidated by the lengths to which the staff went to draw students into the learning. Some
teachers dressed in costume to open a text unit, transforming their rooms with a new theme each
month; Jenny watched them and took copious notes, but they were covetous of their units and
feared that she would “steal” their ideas. They blocked her from seeing what they were
photocopying for their classes, while she struggled alone without anyone reaching out to support
her. She stayed late each night and went through all the department resources looking for ways
to be a better teacher, and to make it real and engaging for the students. It was a tight knit
department who ate lunch together and met off campus and was wary of new teachers. Finally,
two teachers took her under their wings and she flourished.
As an African American teacher, teaching diverse text was problematic, especially if it
was perceived that she was teaching too many “Black” texts. When her class read Narrative of
Life by Fredrick Douglas in AP, parents called and asked, “Why are you teaching my kids that
stuff, you know, this illiterate stuff? That’s not a classic.” She was summoned to the principal’s
office because of complaints from male students uncomfortable with the discussions or personal
connections when she taught In the Time of Butterflies (Julia Alverez) because it was about
women constantly forced to defend her view of robust literature. She observed counter
Caucasian
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teachers having more freedom with their reading selections when she had to fight for content of
controversial texts from which she eventually backed off to protect her career interests.
After the death of George Floyd, teachers, the same colleagues who previously
dismissed her, called for help to understand how to teach multicultural text. While she had
incorporated multi-voice in her pantheon of texts, i.e., “Irish, British, Latin, African, they had
only taught the canon and were uncomfortable with deviating but felt that now that ‘Black’ was
a talking point…”. Now they expected her to “explain what it felt like…what it was like to be
Black”, so they could be sensitive for their students.
Angered by colleagues who “seemed to miss the point by only focusing on the color of
the writer instead of the depth of the text” became the turning point in her confidence and
fueled the ownership of her own teaching style. No longer tethered to educators who had not
done the work but had touted the status quo of reading and writing strategies, she felt free to
return to previous text selections.
Jenny’s classroom design was interactive, with desks pointing to the center leaving an
open space for the plays they performed. She described the layout more like a starburst of rows
facing the center. In addition to the students’ movement, the teacher also bounced from student
to student, peeking over shoulders and offering support - creating a hive of discovery. Around
the room she had books related to the month along with student writing samples papering the
walls. Understanding her students’ need for structure and routine, her lessons began with
something to “hook” the lesson, i.e., music, picture, piece of text, etc., something that would
open the conversation and get students writing. When beginning a piece of writing, Jenny used
the whiteboard to capture the ideas the students shouted out and then they talked about ways
that
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they might organize their ideas, with a belief that pre-writing begins with these early kinds of
conversations.
Elements throughout Jenny’s philosophy, teaching style, and planning pointed to her
intersection with the writing project. She stood out in whatever staff she joined as being the
counter to the treadmill style of writing instruction: “read, answer questions, write, test - next -
repeat”. Students must learn writing as a process and find that “it takes longer” because they are
used to a test-taking mindset without abilities to revise. Using varying revision strategies Jenny’s
students worked on pieces longer to develop deeper understandings of craft moves. Table 11
supports the connections between Jenny’s transcript analysis narrative and the MAXQDA 2022
coding analysis. (See Table 11)
Table 11
Jenny
Research Question Correlations to Theme
Themes Theme
To RQ1 Frequency
Theme
To RQ2 Frequency
Career Experiences (CE) 286 94
Writing (W) 392 154
Relationships (R) 222 62
Content Knowledge (CK) 500 184
External Influence (EI) 304 104
TOTAL 1704 598
Jenny had a strong English and writing background (CK), but her theme and RQ1
frequency correlations indicated the strong influences that got in the way of teaching rigorous
content. The writing process was often interrupted by demands beyond her classroom with
students being pulled out of class for other events. Relationships (R) had a negative effect on her
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lesson planning and gain of new Content Knowledge. This participant also had early career
negative experiences that impeded her ability to use pre-service education in her own classroom.
Looking at Jenny’s R2 frequencies, she also scored high in both the (CK) and (W) themes
indicating that she has continued to evolve her writing instruction practices.
Luke
Inspired by the teaching styles of his second grade and high school English teachers,
Luke knew that he wanted to be a teacher. Because of his love of music, he began his
undergraduate studies as a 4-instrument music major with a secondary education emphasis. He
had more time for literature courses; “One day on the way to observe a choir practice, I dipped
into an English class. That night I wrestled with my love of music and wanted to change my
major to English”. After 15 years, he still played music but has never regretted his move to
become an English teacher. (see Table 12)
Table 12 Luke’s Education, Teaching, and Writing Experience
Participant Education Years
Teaching
School Site
Experience
Classes
Taught
Writing
Preparation
(WM) Luke
BA: English
Secondary/Major;
Music/minor
(traditional)
M.Ed. (literacy)
EdD (literacy)
15 U.S.A public
Higher Ed
Eng 9-12
AP Lang/Lit
College
Courses
Freshman Comp
Courses; creative
writing; elective;
writing methods,
Applied Writing
Theory
For his first position, he said he felt he had won the lottery. Joining the staff of the school
where he had completed his practicum work and had substitute taught afforded him the
advantages of already having built collegial relationships and an understanding of the school
vision. Unlike many of the other participants in the study, Luke “found the principal of school to
be very welcoming and interested in conversations about what was working or not working in his
classroom.” The vision of this newly opened school, only two years old, allowed teachers the
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freedom to hone their craft through experimentation and innovative strategies. Luke, young and
green from college, felt welcomed and thought that “the school appreciated new ideas and were
willing to try new things.” For his first five-years of teaching, he was nurtured and given time
and space to grow.
Luke’s district and division launched initiatives to support writer’s workshop instruction,
and he was well versed in the history of writing, the key researchers, and the process writing
movements of the 70s and 80s. Linda Darling Hammand and Kelly Gallaher were two of the
consultants who came to their school to support their understanding of writing instruction. The
whole staff learned the components of the writer's workshop, creating a shared vision of cross
curricular writing instruction and expectations.
This participant’s experiences early in his career were different from the others in the
study who seemed to incorporate writer workshop elements much later in their careers but did
not have an authentic writing process workshop. Luke met Lucy Calkin at a workshop and,
although she was shocked that a high school teacher was able to invest in her model of writing
instruction, she was impressed. To the outsider, the writer's workshop looks chaotic with a lot
of conversation and collaborating, making finding the teacher in the room difficult; as a
facilitator, they are often crouching by students or in the shadows of observation but rarely at
their desk or at the front of the room. Like Jenny, Luke preferred to use longer writing
assignments that the class worked on over time.
Luke writes every morning before his children are up with the understanding that he will
return to it the next morning. Because of this understanding, he was comfortable with his
students stopping and starting each day and thought that students did not view his writing
instruction as episodic.
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When entering this participant's classroom, he greets you at the door, checks to see how
you are doing – “Did you guy’s win last night?”, “How’s your dad?” etc. Luke was all about
relationships: relationships with his students, relationships with his colleagues, relationships with
his books, and all of this was reflected in how he designed his writing instruction. When
reflecting on the beginning of his career, he bemused how little he knew about writing and how
he fell into the same trap that many teachers do when delivering writing instruction– providing
them with a “Grecian Urn” finished product and saying, “Create this, this is your goal. Now go
and do it”.
If he had known then the value of meaningful and research-based writing instruction he
would have understood the strategies needed to move students to authentic writing. It was not
until intersecting with the writings of Darling-Hammand, Fry, Hattie, Gallagher, and the other
rabbit-holes of writing research that Luke explored and landed on “The Writing Next”
document; finally, he understood what writing instruction required. During his career he added
to his BA in English, acquiring an M.Ed. and EdD, providing a strong content foundation so that
all his classroom decisions are based upon a plethora of research to support his “experimental”
ideas.
In addition to being an avid reader and writer, Luke was sensitive to the varying needs of
his students when it came to text selection. He provided much student free choice for novel
selections and introduced smaller pieces along the way to create conversation. While the
researcher could hear hints of AP strategies, the participant did not seem to be test driven but,
instead, was passionate about the purpose of an argument. During Covid learning, his five- and
seven-year-old children navigated the academic changes while he redefined instruction to make
sense online.
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Luke was impressed with how his second grader could point out author craft moves in
their reading, and when done well Core Standards were getting students to think from the writer's
perspective of author choices on the reader. In contrast, he did not see the benefits of what
students learned in his AP Language course transferring to the college level writing he saw in the
college class that he taught. What was unique about Luke was that he had an authentic
understanding of pre-K through college writing instruction and the disconnects that occur
throughout the learning timeline. Luke offered this advice to teachers new to the profession:
to view writing not merely as an academic pursuit with a heavy focus on argument, but as
an opportunity to write arguments that we need to have – writing for conversation.
Writing instruction should teach students about context to develop and understand how
craft moves can be used and how those impact the power and purpose of writing.
Luke struggled to reconcile the concept of final drafts; as he pointed to the 3rd edition of a
book behind him, he questioned what the 1st edition was called. He thought sometimes when we
think of writing, “We imagine someone writing something great, but often the one monumental
piece is not enough to create a seismic shift in thinking.” He thought that:
The day to day, smaller contributions to our understanding, contributions to these debates
and conversations that are on-going, allow people to have a legitimate place in decision-
making processes; a place where we begin to engage as a society, a nation, or as a smaller
community.
Luke stood out as a participant because he recognized the writing bridge from high
school to college writing and, because of his career and personal experiences, he had a
kindergarten to post-secondary understanding of writing instruction. Table 13 connects Luke’s
transcript analysis narrative with the MAXQDA 2022 coding analysis.
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Table 13
Luke
Research Question Correlations to Theme
Themes Theme
To RQ1 Frequency
Theme
To RQ2 Frequency
Career Experiences (CE) 524 398
Writing (W) 1050 820
Relationships (R) 320 238
Content Knowledge (CK) 946 794
External Influences (EI) 278 204
TOTAL 3118 2454
Of the participants, Luke attained the highest English background, focusing on literacy
and specifically the teaching of writing. His college coursework included Writing Theory and
Pedagogy, which seemed to connect directly to the high frequencies between Writing (W) and
Content Knowledge (CK) correlations found in RQ1 and RQ2. Additionally, this participant
presented the highest Relationship (R) correlations consistent with his references to how he
greeted his students, his administration, and being part of a support team. While he
acknowledged External Influences (EI) impacted his teaching of writing, the correlation
frequency in RQ2 indicated that those influences helped evolve his teaching of writing practices.
Patty
Fresh out of college at age 23, only a half-decade older than students who towered above
her small frame, Patty was armed with a BA in Comprehensive English with a minor in
Education. Though well-read and an accomplished writer, she felt ill prepared to teach writing
instruction. Born into a family of teachers, she grew up having college professors in her home
and seeing the highs and lows of classroom teaching. Privileged to have supporters who could
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help her navigate teaching as a profession, she served as an educator for 32+ years. (see Table
14)
Table 14 Patty’s Education, Teaching, and Writing Experience
Participant Education Years
Teaching
School Site
Experience
Classes
Taught
Writing
Preparation
(WF) Patty
BA Education
Comprehensive English
(tradition
M.Ed. +32 32
U.S.A public
Magnet/Charter
Virtual
Higher Ed
Eng 9-11
AP Lang/Lit
Dual Credit
Writing
Electives
Modern
Grammar;
Literature focused
courses:
Secondary ELA
licensure methods
courses
Patty’s first teaching assignment was at a renowned at-risk high school, which often was
in the news for negative events. She was terrified and claimed that if it had not been for a coven
of mentor teachers that took her under their wings, she might not have made it. The teachers
willingly shared with “the kid” their vetted unit designs and honed tricks of the trade. Like the
other participants, the wealth of her teaching knowledge was acquired through post-teacher
preparation course work over a three-decade career. As the students changed over time, she too
adapted her teaching strategies to meet the needs of her classes' learning needs.
Of those first years of teaching she said, “I struggled to work with boys who didn’t think
they could read or write, but more importantly, didn’t think they had anything to say.” Sheer
survival made her instincts kick in to connect with the students. If they couldn’t read, then she
used pictures to prompt them into writing. Using “fifty Zoo books with shocking articles about
the male seahorse having babies, sent my students into researching further…did any other
animals have this strange behavior?” She had hooked them!
Leaning into their competitive spirit, they drew and wrote about the perfect superhero
with evidentiary defense of their claims. They began performing and sharing with their “Ms. B”,
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or “Wonder bread” as they lovingly called her out when she naively missed a “thug life”
reference. They began explaining their “thug” dictionary, telling her in a language that she
understood, “No, Ms., you use it as a verb; it’s something you do, not something you are. ''
Their daily banter was sometimes disturbing and shocking to the Wonder Bread as
students responded to a rich text by asking, “Why didn’t they just bury the body in the
backyard? That's what we do. '' She did not always know how to respond, but they knew that she
listened and really “saw” them. They saw it in the way she read all their work and made jokes or
comments along with suggestions and corrections; she commented, “most, never having a
teacher that had read their work.”
Often accused of not having a life because her weekends were filled with grading, Patty
thought that students had written for her, so she found varieties of ways to provide them
feedback. One year, she realized writing the comments took too much time, so she bought a class
set of cassettes and students listened to the feedback that she gave on their personalized tape.
They also used the tapes to record their reading fluidity; she lugged the box of tapes back and
forth from home to classroom and back again.
For Patty, relationships were key to engaging her students in learning. When she earned
her MA in English, she researched student portfolios. Students were given a personalized folder
and were required to put all writing pieces into their folder, which moved her students to a
growth mindset to be accountable for their own learning by providing a place for them to reflect
on their writing. Patty stood behind the belief that “Writing matters – they needed to know that
their writing mattered.” Once again, she hooked them and through their high school years, they
sneaked into Ms. B’s class to slip things into their folder, knowing that even though they had
moved on, she would read their work.
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Throughout her career, Patty struggled with the political instability of the profession:
changes made to administrative policies, changes to teacher evaluations, changes to learning
standards, feeling the bar of expectation was always moving out of reach. A daughter of teachers,
her father a college professor and playwright, she had grown up around education conversations
and so adapted to the new rules of the game along with the changing needs of her students.
She changed schools every few years, anytime her values or convictions no longer
aligned with the school expectations, and never wanting to compromise herself in the profession
that she loved. She left one school due to staff bullying, another because it was not aligned with
the school writing model, and others for opportunities of growth.
Patty’s academic strength always leaned toward her ability to design creative activities
and the “golden thread” of grammar instruction. Not data driven but judged by the relationships
she fertilized over the years, Patty prided herself in knowing where the educational leaders'
bodies were buried and the students she had “saved” or the students who had “saved her” along
the way; she remained constant with a teaching style that always put relationships first whether
with text, writing, or the human capital she taught. Table 15 shows the connections between
Patty’s transcript analysis narrative and the MAXQDA 2022 coding analysis.
Table 15
Patty
Research Question Correlations to Theme
Themes Theme
To RQ1 Frequency
Theme
To RQ2 Frequency
Career Experiences (CE) 266 94
Writing (W) 362 820
Relationships (R) 422 168
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Content Knowledge (CK) 670 308
External Influences (EI) 326 162
TOTAL 2046 1552
Beginning her teaching career with an understanding of the profession and a content
degree, Patty had a high frequency in Content Knowledge (CK) in her responses to RQ1 and
RQ2 indicating that she continued to evolve her craft. While both her RQ1 and RQ2 (W)
frequencies were high it should be noted that her RQ2 frequency reflected her ability to adapt
writing instruction for her students regardless of the impediments on her writing instruction. In
alignment with Patty’s value of relationships, she had an elevated RQ1 frequency, which in her
RQ2 responses demonstrated that over her career she developed her relationship work.
Her high RQ1 Career Experiences (CE), External Influences (EI), Writing (W)
frequencies mirrored her struggles with different school visions, changes in standards, and
influences of policy changes that impacted her writing instruction.
Sarah
Concerned that she would not meet the qualifications for this study because she had not
been required to have composition courses during her degree programs, but, having both a BA
and MA in English and an M.Ed. in secondary education along with an MFA in creative writing,
made Sarah one of the strongest English content-educated members of the study. As an avid
reader and writer, she was drawn to the teaching profession that seemed to fill her need for
wanting to be part of something important – to be able to make a difference. She wanted a career
that had value, initially looking at social work or family law, and found that education fulfilled
all her needs and passions. (see Table 16)
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Table 16 Sarah’s Education, Teaching, and Writing Experience
Participant Education Years
Teaching
School Site
Experience
Classes
Taught
Writing
Preparation
(WF) Sarah
BA: English
major/German minor
M.Ed. (traditional
program)
IB Certification
AP Certification
National Board
Certification (x2)
22 U.S.A public
Magnet/Charter
Eng10/11
AP Lang
AP Lit
Dual Credit
IB Lang
Lit 1-2
(Honor College)
Writing courses
waived
Sarah taught a variety of courses throughout her 22-year career, ranging from
remediation to specialized college courses, all of which afforded her intensive training in AVID,
AP, Dual-Credit, and IB instructional practices. Many of her writing experiences hinged on
scripted writing expectations to meet the demands of standardized or national test platforms;
however, Sarah believed that while mastering the template was a feat for some students, she
cautioned that prescriptive writing could grow a writer but not make them shine.
Like other participants, Sarah believed that “students who read and write often tend to
have more voice in their own writing.” She used the same strategies in her college level
coursework that she used in her generalized classes “because good writing is good writing.” She
believed that “Whether you are in elementary school or college the writing process is the same,
only the expectations and content elevates from year to year.” She had students write an essay
at the beginning of the year, which she returned to them at the end of the year so they could see
their progress.
Using strategies to deliver small pieces of content over time, Sarah thought that her
students were less overwhelmed and were surprised by how much they grew over the year as
writers and readers. Sarah wished that all English teachers were readers and writers and active in
the process of writing. Many of her students are surprised at the amount of feedback she
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provided on their work, both celebratory and constructive, indicating that she read their work.
Students cited that their previous teachers did not read their essays or only gave them essays to
write if they were in trouble.
Professing that she did not have a life outside of school, Sarah often graded all weekend,
preferring to keep her classroom time to facilitate writer workshop style learning. As a writing
project participant, she strived all year long to teach writing as an active process but thought
that peer-review can only take a student so far and at some point, students need the teacher's
input.
Sarah purple-lined essays she received, identifying grammar patterns, leaving jokes in the
margin, writing dialogue with the student throughout the piece, and often writing a paragraph
summary at the end with suggestions for rewriting. When asked how she knew if this depth of
feedback was effective or if students only revised based on her suggestions, she was unsure as to
the benefit, acknowledging that many students just revised to raise the grade. She used to require
mandatory revisions, but received pushback from administration, so she incentivized the best she
could with encouragement to better their craft without penalty if the revision was a lower score.
Her writing project roots helped her create a classroom environment to support trust and
support vulnerability for students when sharing their work and reviewing others, and a
willingness to talk about reading and writing. Although she had 40 desks crammed into a small
classroom and often had to climb over furniture to get to each student, she preferred not to be
stationed at her desk during class time. Uncomfortable with a teacher driven design, she asked
her students to make choices on what they thought they needed to learn.
Possessing a German minor, she was familiar with grammatical structures deeply
discussed in foreign language courses, but found that native speakers took grammar for granted,
and tended to write guided by the way the sentence structure sounds. At the beginning of each
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year, she has her classes brainstorm what comments on their previous essays suggested that they
needed to improve. Because of her use of student buy-in, she rarely had resistance to grammar
instruction.
Sarah reflected on the beginning of her career and wished that she had been less teacher-
centered and more like how she learned to encourage students to take leadership in their own
learning. Instead of assigning one essay prompt, students select from a set of prompts or texts for
their writing. She described her classroom as organized chaos with students talking and
responding to what they are reading and writing and prided herself with the mantra, “Every day
we will read a little, write a little and talk a little.” Class runs from bell-to-bell and students are
always working, but she has struggled with admin and one-size-fits-all policies for lesson
planning and design.
Although the district provided three different lesson planning options, Sarah was required
to use the one assigned to the staff and administration expected to see examples of all NEPF
standards in each lesson. All lessons had to stand alone and there was a prescriptive flow of what
the administration expected to see during their observations. The myopic focus on evaluation
standards did not coincide with Sarah’s extensive content knowledge of best practices for writing
instruction. Because of seemingly irreconcilable differences in how her curriculum should be
taught, Sarah was looking to transfer schools and suspected her school to have a heavy turnover
the next school year.
While many administrators chose to dial back their expectations for teacher performance
during Covid learning, Sarah’s administration raised the demands on their teachers, seemingly
unable to let go of rigidly timed lesson designs during alternative educational platforms of
learning. Sarah often found herself in opposition to administrative supervisors who did not know
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her content. Supervisors only looked for evidence that they had to check off on their evaluation
form, not realizing that not all components could be observed in one class session. Without
understanding what they were observing the evaluators did not understand the substrands that
would have been taught before and after for the observed lesson to register as effective.
Sarah found flaws in the deficit-model evaluation format as students do not learn at the
same pace and the administrative belief that all evaluation elements should and could be isolated
to one free-standing lesson. Although lesson plan submissions were required, rarely did
administrators deeply review or discuss the unit plan with the teacher prior to the lesson
observation. Table17 reflects the connections between Sarah’s transcript analysis narrative with
the MAXQDA 2022 coding analysis.
Table 17
Sarah
Research Question Correlations to Theme
Themes Theme
To RQ1 Frequency
Theme
To RQ2 Frequency
Career Experiences (CE) 72 94
Writing (W) 632 162
Relationships (R) 422 168
Content Knowledge (CK) 670 308
External Influences (EI) 326 132
TOTAL 2122 864
Sarah was frustrated by her administration’s lack of empathy toward Covid curriculum
design and implementation. When looking at Sarah’s RQ1 (W), (R), (CK), and (EI) frequencies
one can see the high impact on her classroom instruction. While she had a strong pedagogical
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foundation that evolved over her career (RQ2 CK), the external barriers stalled her evolution of
writing instruction. Looking at her RQ1 and RQ2 (CE) frequencies, they were the lowest of the
participants indicating that she relied on writing content knowledge over district or site-based
initiatives for writing instruction. When looking at the RQ1 and RQ2 frequencies in conjunction
with her transcript narrative, it was evident that Sarah’s conflicts with administrative expectation
were pushing her to change schools or potentially leaving the profession.
Sotera
Sotera, a published romance author, began her post-secondary education as a Theater
major, received her MA in Education through a licensure program, and became Nationally Board
Certified. Sotera was almost broken by a year and a half of providing online instruction under
the weight of Covid quarantine mandates and was on the verge of quitting 19 years of teaching.
Like most teachers during that time, she felt unprepared for the shift in lesson delivery and ended
the year with a sense of failure that she had not sufficiently prepared her students for their AP
Language exam. (see Table 18)
Table 18 Sotera’s Education, Teaching, and Writing Experience
Participant Education Years
Teaching
School Site
Experience
Classes
Taught
Writing
Preparation
(WM) Sotera
BA: Theater with
Secondary Ed focus
Psychology minor
MA+16: Licensure
program
National Board certified
Romance author
(published)
19 U.S.A public
Magnet/Charter
Eng 9-11
AP Lang
AP Lit
AP Capstone
AP Seminar
W Electives
Adv. Grammar;
Writing across
Curriculum; Adv.
Comp; Eng
Methods, and
Composition
In a normal year, Sotera described her room as cheerful with flexible table options – a
sense of community. Many of the procedures that she discussed were Writing Project elements
even though she had never attended a Writing Project institute; she clearly thought the “writing
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was organic” and her students needed time and space to craft their writing. During her online
instruction she was unable to continue peer review or multiple drafting revisions/edits and
thought that students were less engaged, and that with virtual learning it was difficult to build a
community of trust and willingness to be vulnerable.
In her traditional curriculum design, she mentioned writing workshops several times with
a focus on “students needing to read what published authors said about writing, e.g., Stephan
King, talk to each other about their own writing choices, and share their pieces.” She emphasized
that “students needed to hear peer feedback as much as teacher feedback.”
When asked how she learned to teach writing, Sotera could only reference one
undergraduate class that focused on the Jane Shaffer model of crafting an essay. Most of her
content knowledge had been gained over time through Romance Writers of America (RWA)
conferences, her own experiences with publishing, and both positive and negative mentors
throughout the years.
While most of the interview focused on her AP Language essay writing strategies, also
prescriptive in nature, she indicated that “only students that could share their voice in their
writing were going to score a 5 on the AP test”, and that students needed to move beyond
formulaic styles of writing to achieve college level writing skills. Sotera contradicted her
curriculum delivery to meet the demands of AP test prep with the value she saw in the teaching
of creative writing skills to students, beginning with narratives and anecdotes at the start of the
year.
While the participant moved to AP Language because she was disenfranchised by the
lack of writing instruction in other English courses, she readily admitted that the AP test required
a formulaic style of essay writing that she thought benefitted her general students' writing
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instruction. Interestingly she did not believe that all students were suited for AP, but that all
students benefitted when a teacher taught them AP strategies.
When asked about grading, she refused to write on student’s papers, even though she
prided herself in her own vulnerable sharing of her red-lined writing from her publishing editor.
Instead, she refused to read student essays unless they had gone through a minimum of two peer
revisions and edits and grades based upon the AP rubric, which, in my experience, is common
for most AP teachers. However, she did agree that the rubric should be used as a guide for the
teacher to provide a range assessment of individual writing progress and not a hardline tool,
making it impossible for students to feel a measure of improvement.
Over the years, Sotera adopted the practice of grading with a rubric in lieu of
commenting due to students' lack of appreciation of all the beyond contract hours spent on each
individual student, only to have them glance at the notes and toss them into the trash. She self-
realized that she was providing a dis-service to her students and herself by this inefficient
practice. Rubric grading provided a faster turn-around of grading feedback and inspired students
to conference with the teacher for specific guidance for next assignments, instead of being
overwhelmed by a plethora of individual markings on their writing. Table 19 captures the
connections between Sotera’s narrative and MAXQDA 2022 data analysis.
Table 19
Sotera
Research Question Correlations to Theme
Themes Theme
To RQ1 Frequency
Theme
To RQ2 Frequency
Career Experiences (CE) 248 130
Writing (W) 574 358
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Relationships (R) 232 108
Content Knowledge (CK) 630 340
External Influences (EI) 254 120
TOTAL 1938 1036
Disenfranchised with the teaching profession, Sotera’s high RQ1 frequencies compared
to her RQ2 frequencies indicated that the impacts on her teaching of writing impeded her
evolution of writing practices. Her Theater BA provided a strong multicultural literature base,
but she moved to AP Language to focus on the teaching of writing and teaching towards the test
is formulaic. As a romance writer, she had a strong understanding of peer review and workshop
writing, but she could not pivot her instruction in an online environment. Content Knowledge
frequencies were high, but relied on district, site-base, or College Board influences and Sotera’s
evolved writing practice was fed by her yearly RWA conference connections (CE, W, CK).
Trina
Trina was educated in the K-12 in the district in which she was hired as a teacher.
Having graduated from the high school where she worked as the Junior Varsity soccer coach,
she was encouraged by the principal to acquire a teacher credential. Starting strong with a BA in
English, a minor in Political Science, and quickly acquiring National Board certification and
taking leadership roles for new standards, one would have expected Trina to make a strong
connection to writing pedagogy. Her post-teacher preparation learning centered around
SpringBoard/AP College Board training, local professional development, and site-based driven
visions. (see Table 20)
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Table 20 Trina’s Education, Teaching, and Writing Experience
Participant Education Years
Teaching
School Site
Experience
Classes
Taught
Writing
Preparation
(WF) Trina
BA+16 English
(writing)/major; Poli
Sci/minor (traditional)
ARL certification
National Board
Certified
PD instructor for
District
11 U.S.A public
Eng 10 & 12
ACT Prep
HS AP Lit; Comp
102; Intro to Lit
Theory and
Criticism;
Expository
Writing; Adv.
Non-Fiction;
Topics in Writing;
Intro to
Linguistics, and
Principals of Mod.
Grammar
Loving the high school where she was teaching, Trina praised the warm and welcoming
vibe of the school and how they welcomed new teachers. She attributed the strength of her
English department to her colleagues' lack of ego and willingness to share curriculum to
provide continuity from 9th through 12th grade. Additionally, their department had little
turnover and even with a new principal, she thought that everyone was on the same page and
did not fear administrative evaluations or pushback. While the new principal had a more micro-
managerial style than the last, the quality remained the same with little change from one
principal to the next.
This participant struggled to find an academic voice to describe her experiences with
writing instruction. Uniquely, Trina did not read “teacher” books, but relied heavily on her
“mentorship posse” to help her guide the direction of her class. Of her grade-level team, she
described how she and her grade-level partner “were always redesigning their lessons each year,
so much so that I felt that they were always first or second-year teachers.”
When Covid learning began, Trina floundered with how to change her face-to-face
lessons into online versions and found herself “dog paddling” from week to week. Her
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adaptations often included shorter paragraph writing to assess the skills she was teaching, and, as
other study participants cited, writing process activities could not be transferred to the online
environment. She missed the warmth of her “soft-lighted classroom with the slight scent of fresh
leaves and the buzz of students engaging in their writing”.
Used to creating a sense of community with the start of the year activities and comradery
that quickly developed with their shared experiences, Covid did not allow for the same depth of
relationship for which Trina aspired in her brick-and-mortar classroom. Mentors were the key to
her survival throughout her career and those relationships continued even as their department
went through online learning experiences.
In her 11 years of teaching, she learned under the “No Child Left Behind Initiative” and
began teaching during the roll into “Common Core Standards”. At the middle school where she
was first assigned, she learned SpringBoard, a canned curriculum style of learning designed by
College Board that incorporated many of the researched best practices for writing instruction and
templated strategies. All standards were tied to Common Core and teachers were provided scripts
for what and how they were to be teaching writing.
Certifying with an alternative route to licensure program, Trina found the canned
curriculum and Jane Shaffer modeling effective ways to help all her students learn the
components of an essay. Although she remembered having taken an English methods course and
linguistics, she did not find those courses effective to teach second language, IEP, or deficient
students writing instruction. She thought that “canned curriculum and Jane Shaffer had gotten a
bad rap, but actually equalized the playing for new teachers that did not know where to start for
writing instruction.”
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The youngest of all the study participants, Trina always had an intertwined connection
with learning and technology. She did not belong to any professional groups, but looked for
educational guidance from Tik Tok, blogs, and other social media platforms, requiring
professional development, and the influence of mentors. The researcher wondered if Trina would
thrive if placed in a different school setting or would she be more likely to change her practice
based on a new set of mentors. It should be noted that although she referenced media as her
informational resource, she did not say if they were research-based supports or other teacher
suggestions.
Trina was familiar with the use of technology, but she did not seem tech savvy when she
was entered the meeting, nor was she concerned with presentation (e.g., lighting, background,
framing); the researcher assumed that Trina was also of the “swiper generation”, like the students
whom she was teaching.
During her interview Trina referenced elements of the writing process and hinted at
components of writer workshop elements, but then pivoted when asked if she allowed revision,
declaring, “Only if they completely went sideways on a grade, otherwise they should use the
previous assignment to inform the next.” While she was comfortable with her own understanding
of grammar, she did not think it should be the focus of grading stating “nobody wants 62 error
comments”, indicating that she preferred to write commentary or use a rubric. “Students should
then look at the rubric first to rationalize their grade and then come to the teacher if they need to
conference”.
Trina believed that it was her responsibility as a senior teacher to help them navigate
conversations as they would in college or with a college professor. She thought that seniors only
needed “clean-up” grammar but used their previous writing to get the class to brainstorm on
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what structure they needed to work for the next assignment. And while she had moments of
“loving peer review or editing” she never described a process of how that worked in her
classroom or how she taught those skills. She referred to using Turnitin.com as a source for
students to turn in their typed essays, but did not know that ETS was connected to the program
and would cite the grammar errors for the students; the program statistics were only used to
check for plagiarism and the ability to grade via a rubric. Table 21 mirrors connections between
Trina’s narrative and MAXQDA 2022 data analysis.
Table 21
Trina
Research Question Correlations to Theme
Themes Theme
To RQ1 Frequency
Theme
To RQ2 Frequency
Career Experiences (CE) 246 84
Writing (W) 260 102
Relationships (R) 220 68
Content Knowledge (CK) 762 396
External Influences (EI) 174 44
TOTAL 1662 694
Although Trina was the youngest participant, she presented a strong (RQ1 CK)
frequency indicative of her English and Political Science post-secondary degrees. In the short
teaching tenure, she had also been motivated and supported by her mentors to achieve National
Board Certification. When looking at her Career Experience she registered a high RQ1
frequency, but the impact and influence on her teaching of writing had not evolved over time.
Because Trina was comfortable at the school and department in which she taught, her Theme to
RQ1 scores represent positive influences on her teaching of writing instruction, raising her RQ2
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Writing
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frequency. With the shortest career span, it should be noted that this participant had not had the
extra decade that the other participants had to evolve their practice (RQ2).
Wendy
Wendy entered the profession in a predominately white school deemed not “at-risk”
enough to receive extra-funding and under the tutelage of her formidable department chair, the
infamous Jane Shaffer – known for the five-paragraph essay template process. Receiving her BA
in Literature with a Pan-American global focus, the participant tested out of her undergrad
writing courses and moved directly into literature classes both for English and Spanish
instruction. While the foreign language courses required an understanding of grammatical
structures to navigate the Latin-based patterns of discourse, her native tongue did not provide the
same depth of attention to parts of speech impact on sentence patterns. (see Table 22)
Table 22 Wendy’s Education, Teaching, and Writing Experience
Participant Education Years
Teaching
School Site
Experience
Classes
Taught
Writing
Preparation
(WF) Wendy
Pan American Regional
Specialization; teaching
focus
M.Ed (secondary)
National Board
Certified (x2)
Jane Shaffer Mentee
29 U.S.A public Eng 9-11
Yearbook
Program required:
foreign language
(tested into Lit);
integrated writing
- no grammar
- no linguistics
Although well versed in writing, she felt ill prepared to teach students how to write as she
had no background in writing instruction; she found her school’s writing program (later codified
into the Jane Shaffer model) to be a linear structure that worked well for her logical mind. In her
college studies, she had initially wanted to be a marine biologist, but claustrophobia and Organic
Chemistry imposed doubts on her forward paths. Having always been good at school and loving
her high school English courses, becoming an English teacher seemed to make sense. The
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school’s writing model reminded her of the hours she had toiled over 15- to 20-page lab reports,
identifying evidence of findings and the use of questioning to frame her conclusions.
Originally the school's writing project was created to find a way to move ninth graders
from writing “book report” style essays that focused on plot toward evidenced-based writing.
The teachers found that students did not have the strategies to organize their essays with a thesis
statement, evidence, and conclusionary take-aways. Organically, they worked as a department
to hone teaching students a linear way to organize their writing in a way that would invite all
students equal access to writing a functional essay.
Wendy confessed that Jane Shaffer was a “her way or the highway” type of department
chair, which in the beginning worked well to get every grade-level vertically aligned using the
same vocabulary to talk about writing, but it wasn’t until Jane retired that the teachers felt free to
adapt their own writing instruction needs. As a team they realized that they had traded the “book
report” format for the Jane Shaffer formulaic style, so they struggled to figure out the “What
next?” that the templated writing had not addressed. Their department struggled with how to get
students to take off their “writing training wheels” to begin to make author-style craft move
decisions and to start pulling in evidence to guide the focus of the writing instead of randomly
plucking quotes from the text.
Wendy reflected on her career, noting the struggles in her students' writing, and finding
the background information/tools her students would need to accomplish her goals. When
teaching the 11th grade, composed with many of her previous year’s 10th graders, she moved
them to a higher level of writing by adding another layer to the writing model that required
students to add a connection (text-text, world, self, etc.) to each paragraph, reflective of the style
of writing that she would have had to have done in her Pan-American coursework.
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Additionally, the school partnered with a university professor program who helped them
make appropriate text selections and incorporate non-fiction texts into their lesson designs. Prior
to the department’s intersection with the university, they only read fiction– a novel every six
weeks and writing an analysis essay. The department moved their students toward evaluation-
based papers that “had students looking deeper as to what argument they were trying to make
and which evidence would best suit the way they were writing their essay.”
With the retirement of Jane Shaffer, Wendy thought the department went through a “Girls
Gone Wild” phase with everyone doing their own thing with only a few lingering agreements
within the department. Over time they settled into a more vertically aligned rhythm, agreeing on
major readings, styles of writing with teachers being allowed one “free-choice unit”, but Wendy
admitted that she did “free-choice units” in her class to allow her to add creative writing.
Covid and online learning threw another wrench into their writing instruction system,
requiring the department to adapt again by providing shorter texts and incorporating a “book
tasting” unit with free choice of 70 books that the librarian had curated for the students. While
Wendy questioned the quality of some of those “high interest” texts, she reported that her
students’ feedback thanked her for the opportunity to read texts that spoke to their world. In the
interview she had discussed reading and English instruction as being timeless in general and the
Gatsby read at different times could mean different things to different readers.
While this participant did not speak directly about student-teacher relationships, it can be
assumed that as the school’s yearbook teacher, she would have built strong relationships with
students engaging with them before, during, and after school hours. Her desks were organized
for grouping, with two tables put together to seat four or five students in each group. Having a
large classroom allowed for movement of the desks and for students to change seats or go to 24
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IMacs stationed along the walls of the room. Her desk was positioned diagonally at the front of
the room facing the students and there was a white board on the front wall. She rarely pulled
down the projector screen so that she could annotate directly onto the front board. She greeted
the students at the door with peppy music playing as they entered. The end of the music was the
cue for students to “stop the chit chat and begin the lesson.”
Wendy seemed to have an organized, skill-based class that, over the years,
accommodated the latest testing, school, or district expectations. In her 29th year of teaching, she
required more drafts and her department provided students a folder that they carried with them
throughout high school to document their growth, indicating that they had moved towards a
growth model. For grading, she used a number system. Wendy “writes a number beside errors
found on students’ papers that correlate to a word document list of commentary”, finding that
students tend to make similar errors, so the commentary saves her time and was a way for her to
provide individualized feedback. While one “might not view this as a fun class”, there was no
doubt that students learn using a sequentially logical design framework reminiscent of the
teacher's learned behaviors during her science writing coursework. Table 23 visually makes
connections between Wendy’s narrative and MAXQDA 2022 data analysis.
Table 23
Wendy
Research Question Correlations to Theme
Themes Theme
To RQ1 Frequency
Theme
To RQ2 Frequency
Career Experiences (CE) 254 74
Writing (W) 524 196
Relationships (R) 172 48
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Content Knowledge (CK) 610 292
External Influences (EI) 314 120
TOTAL 1874 730
Wendy began her teaching experience with Jane Shaffer as her department chair, in a
department that already collaborated on student writing data (CE). The influence and impact on
her writing instruction showed a high RQ1 frequency. The Content Knowledge that she brought
to her teaching career was the most unique among the participants and had the strongest support
for grammar influenced writing instruction. Because Wendy was in a small district her Career
Experiences and Relationships only included a few school-sites (RQ2 frequency). Her RQ1 high
frequencies can be attributed to a functioning aligned department that had a vision for 9th
through 12th writing.
Tying it All Together
Each participant entered the teaching profession for different reasons with different
levels and backgrounds of education, notions of what high school English instruction would look
like, and their own beliefs in writing. Yet, all of them agreed that where you worked, the
resources with which you had to work, and the site-based view of writing instruction made the
difference in the effectiveness of student writing progress. They did not agree that ALL teachers
had to be writers themselves, but rather made the case that an individual teacher’s content
knowledge and understanding of how to teach writing were important contributors to graduating
students with college and career writing skills. Many thought that teachers should have at least
one degree in their content area, that “learning how to teach was not the same as learning what to
teach.”
All the teachers were exhausted and burdened by the weight of Covid 19’s higher
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expectations. Overwhelmed by new technology to be learned and having to convert face-to-face
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instruction into a digital platform left them questioning if they were too old to learn the new
tricks needed for 21st century instruction. When asked about what writing instruction looked like
in their classroom, invariably all participants began with, “Do you mean now or before Covid?”
What had kept them in the profession was the engagement they had with their students, but with
online learning, those students were often abandoned avatars and online assignment
submissions.
While their districts struggled to define education during a global pandemic, teachers
were still required to complete their yearly evaluations, complete their student and professional
learning goals, learn the next new technological strategy, while continuing to be responsible for
the physical, emotional, and academic needs of their students - students they only knew from the
submissions they received. Many described their work/home life blurred by working at home
and scrambling to find new ways to engage their students and working longer hours with less
effectiveness.
Although Trina and Beth confessed Covid fatigue and a hunger to go back to face-to-
face instruction, they loved their school and the support of their administration. They thought
that their cohesive departments and mentors throughout their careers made the difference. Jack
and Wendy saw the turning point of their careers as when their sites engaged in connecting with
the local university or college for professional development, helping them to find mentors to
help support what they were teaching toward. Luke, on the other hand, taught both high school
and college courses at a university, seemed the most comfortable and qualified with his writing
instruction, and did not seem affected by negative impacts on his teaching of writing.
When relegated to site mentors, all the participants discussed instruction becoming site-
based alignment driven, with myopic foci setting targets on the next standardized test instead of
on specific writing strategies for essay writing techniques. Luke’s discussion of his second-grade
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daughter’s ability to recognize “author's craft move” in their nighttime bedtime stories and to be
able to discuss what the writer was trying to do inspired him to have deeper discussions with his
high school and college freshman on choices writers make when writing. Both Jack and Wendy
engaged in university professional development that supported high school to college writing
strategies.
When looking at the correlations between the frequencies of coding connecting theme
and participant responses to RQ1 and RQ2, it was clear that the teachers identified and discussed
elements of their writing instruction practices and that, based on their responses to RQ1, their
writing instruction planning and practices were either positively or negatively impacted by
factors beyond their control. (see Table 24)
Table 24 Correlations between Participant Themes and RQ Frequencies
Participant CE W R CK EI
Beth DA 1 19 41 12 3 19 RQ1 RQ2
Beth DA 2 of RQ1 310 516 288 220 366 1700
Beth DA 2 of RQ2 70 172 64 244 96 646
Christina DA 1 19 79 17 22 43
Christina DA 2 of RQ1 304 520 252 730 428 2234
Christina DA 2 of RQ2 88 226 66 336 140 856
Jack DA 1 29 89 15 12 35
Jack DA 2 of RQ1 398 1228 292 648 470 3036
Jack DA 2 of RQ2 264 906 198 526 326 2220
Jenny DA 1 32 93 21 6 32
Jenny DA 2 of RQ1 286 392 222 500 304 1704
Jenny DA 2 of RQ2 94 154 62 184 104 598
Luke DA 1 24 50 13 29 11
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Luke DA 2 of RQ1 524 1050 320 946 278 3118
Luke DA 2 of RQ2 398 820 238 794 204 2454
Patty DA 1 30 53 40 14 38
Patty DA 2 of RQ1 266 362 422 670 326 2046
Patty DA 2 of RQ2 94 820 168 308 162 1552
Sarah DA 1 23 40 31 27 37
Sarah DA 2 of RQ1 72 632 422 670 326 2122
Sarah DA 2 of RQ2 94 162 168 308 132 864
Sotera DA 1 28 82 20 23 22
Sotera DA 2 of RQ1 248 574 232 630 254 1938
Sotera DA 2 of RQ2 130 358 108 340 120 1036
Trina DA 1 27 44 26 21 12
Trina DA 2 of RQ1 246 260 220 762 174 1662
Trina DA 2 of RQ2 84 102 68 396 44 694
Wendy DA 1 27 82 8 22 31
Wendy DA 2 of RQ1 254 524 172 610 314 1874
Wendy DA 2 of RQ2 74 196 48 292 120 730
TOTALS
Participant Total: N = 10
Theme Totals 258 653 203 179 280
RQ1 and RQ2 Totals 21,434 11,650
When comparing the frequencies between Content Knowledge (CK) and Career
Experience (CE), it was evident that most of the teaching style and personal writing beliefs
developed throughout a teacher's career and relied less on their pre-service understanding of
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Content Knowledge (CK). Beth focused on test taking strategies that aligned rhetorical standards
with Advanced Placement (AP) rubrics for college course credit. In contrast, published authors
Jack and Sotera spoke about writing craft and process; they all spoke of their different
approaches to teaching writing (W).
Jack, a playwright, thought his students to be lazy and only concerned about the least
amount of work for the highest grade (EI). Sharing his high school experience of a love of
writing, recounting that he penned an entire Shakespearean play to better understand the
author’s playwriting style, he recounted that he could barely convince his students to revise and
only if the assignment was incentivized (RQ2). Notably, Jack saved every high school essay that
he wrote and used those essays as examples for his students.
Sotera, a romance writer, also shared her professionally edited work with her students to
show the “hard work” of writing and that even as a published author she received “redline”
feedback. While Jack did not find value in peer-review, Sotera preferred a writer workshop style
of writing where students write fewer essays but share their work with peers and work with
revision. Both published teachers understood craft but did not share similar beliefs about writing
instruction practices.
When looking at the frequencies, all the participants struggled with how to teach writing
to high school students (W - 653 T), but other Theme totals compared with RQ1(21,434 code
segments) indicated that there were strong positive and negative influences that impeded the
participants’ evolution of writing instruction as captured in RQ2 (11,650 code segments).
Chapter Summary
This chapter presented the findings of what influenced or informed veteran high school
English teachers’ design of writing instruction (RQ1) and how their instructional practices
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evolved throughout their careers (RQ2). Analysis of the findings were presented using three
levels of analysis: narrative summaries of each participant's interview, inductive theme coding
(D1 analysis), and deductive RQ(s) and IQ(s) auto coding (D2 analysis).
Using three data perspectives, the research confidently reported that teachers who began
with a strong English foundation presented high Content Knowledge frequencies but had
inconsistent frequencies when compared to their change in practice throughout their career
(RQ2). Teachers with positive relationships within their departments and administration
experienced higher frequencies in Career Experience.
Looking at teachers who had taught high school English between 10-30 years provided a
longitudinal perspective of how teachers have adapted their writing practices throughout their
career, while navigating changes in curriculum, administration, and external interferences
pushing against their writing instruction practices. Although one could assume that English
instruction practices should be the same and in alignment with the prescribed curriculum
standards, each participant reflected varying experiences within their school sites and classroom
instruction.
While chapter four delivered the findings of the study, chapter five provides a discussion
of what the findings suggest, address the implications for teaching writing, and suggests future
research recommendations. Additionally, limitations of the study are addressed.
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Chapter Five: Discussion
Stake (1995) postulated that case study reporting is reflective of one person’s perspective
and supports the researcher to include the intersections of their own personal perspectives within
their interpretation of their findings (p.135). Following Stake’s suggestion, this chapter blends
the discussion of the findings, as well as the researcher’s perspective influencing the
interpretation throughout the study. The findings add to the previous studies researching teacher
writing instruction and the influences that impact how teachers evolve their teaching of writing.
Summary of the Study
Chapter one established the personal and professional rationale for the researchers desire
to investigate how high school English teachers implemented writing instruction. The first
chapter also detailed the conceptual frameworks to be used in this study. Chapter two shared the
empirical and theoretical research in fields of writing instruction and influences on classroom
instruction. A gap emerged when the researcher could not find any research that studied
teachers’ writing instruction practices over the course of their career.
The multiple case study methodology used to complete this study included how
participants were recruited, along with the semi-structured interview procedures. Additionally,
chapter three foreshadowed how data was collected and the analysis procedures used to
establish the findings. The findings of the study were reported in chapter four and this chapter
discusses the implications, need for further studies, and limitations that were revealed
throughout the study.
As a result of the researcher using various data coding styles to report the findings
Narrative, D1 analysis using inductive coding, and D2 analysis using deductive auto coding,
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various themes and connections were revealed. In this chapter the researcher first summarizes the
individual interview findings and then addresses how each of the findings elicited from all the
participant findings directly answer the research questions that initiated this study.
RQ1: What influences impede or inform English teachers’ design of writing instruction?
RQ2: How do veteran English teachers, who have taught for 10+ years, and are between
30-60 years in age, evolve their instructional practices over their career?
Summary of Findings
Students need to be functionally literate to engage in 21st century educational and
workspaces. Not only is it imperative for them to be able to read and analyze text; they must be
able to write with precision to share not only their voice, but also to change policies to support
their views. Most of what we know about how teachers teach writing has been research through
surveys that collated teachers’ writing instruction practices [(e.g., Gilbert & Graham (2010),
Tse & Hui, (2016)], and studies that investigated how writing was taught in schools from an
observational perspective [(e.g., Apple & Langer, (2011), Rietdijk van Weijen, Jassen, van den
Bergh, & Rijlaarsdam, (2018)], in addition to mixed methods studies [(e.g., Hertzberg & Roe,
(2016); McCarthy & Ro, (2011)].
Graham (2019) collated that data into a summary of the writing instruction practices of
over 7,000 teachers, two thirds of whom were from the United States. While studies have
focused on the need for quality writing instruction and investigated how teachers are taught to
teach writing, this study explored factors that impact or impede writing instruction and how
writing instruction changes over a teacher’s career of teaching through the five different
thematic lenses of career experiences, writing, relationships, content knowledge, and external
influences within and beyond the boundaries of the classroom.
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Theme Connections
Career Experiences
Participants for this study entered the teaching profession with a variety of backgrounds.
For some it was a mid-year career change, an alternative route to licensure, while others took a
traditional educational studies program. The participants who entered the profession with work
experience and an ARL, while feeling confident of their own writing, struggled to know how to
teach students how to write. The two participants who were offered writing theory or pedagogy
classes during their undergraduate program used a higher level of academic language and
expressed a greater self-efficacy for their teaching of writing.
The learning curve is steep for a first-year teacher to manage the professional demands
of teaching while learning the content for lesson planning and instruction. First year teacher sites
and department experiences ranged from mentor to hazing-like models. When participants
identified their first site as welcoming and collaborative with a mentor vision, those teachers
thought it easier to reach out for support. Participants who taught at the same site for over five
years developed more security in their teaching strategies and style and felt vetted and validated
by their “tribe”, those teachers or administrators who has taught together for long periods of
time.
The researcher found that many of the participants did not see the need to join content
connected professional learning groups; instead, they found free online resources or paid
products a stronger support for their teaching of writing, while struggling teachers seemed more
concerned about activities than research-based strategies.
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Participants articulated that they became stronger teachers when intersected by impactful
on the job training or intersections with external program initiatives or college writing
collaboration work. Bridging conversations between grade levels and post-secondary education
revealed that high school instruction and college writing are two different entities, driven by
different output expectations. High school teaches habits and structures, and college works to
elevate a student's skill-based K-12 education to writing with an analytical depth supported by
evidence. By opening dialogue between college professors and high school English teachers,
instructors have a better understanding of what they are teaching and expectations for what
students should have learned previously.
Writing
Writers need to work in a community anchored in trust – a safe place to share (Atwell,
1991; Baker, 1999; Behrman, 2002), a nurturing place for vulnerability, with a teacher who
understands that a variety of feedback is necessary to raise student self-efficacy in their writing
abilities. All participants struggled to find creative lesson strategies to engage her students, but
also had high expectations of themselves to provide authentic rigorous and relevant writing
instruction. Having learned and taught under or through various writing initiatives, scripted
writing and/or the Jane Shaffer model either plagued or anchored their understandings of how
writing should be taught.
As college graduates, all the teachers knew how to write, but only one had taken courses
in writing theory and writing pedagogy, and none had experienced a writing methods course.
Therefore, without realizing it, some were still using some form of “how to write an essay”
template. Even though, all but one had been required to take a graduate level grammar course,
only one of the ten participants valued the teaching of diagramming sentences. The majority
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focused on either providing individualized feedback that focused on content, organization, or
major structure flaws, or found the need to mark every punctuation error. Teachers who taught
AP praised rubrics and having students reflect (Beach, 1989) on their score based upon the rubric
feedback. This style of writing assessment aligned with Bandera’s (2002) views of self-efficacy
through individual agency. One could imagine students looking at their scores and comparing to
others in connection to the shared rubric measurement.
As writing inquiry is framed around socio-cognitive theories (Vygotsky, 1978, 1997) and
the narrative construction of identity (Watson, 2012), students judge the quality of their writing
against the quality of their peers. This also impacts teacher self-efficacy within their own writing
practices compared to their colleagues as they too compare AP, ACT, and other standardized
scores. If scores are low, blame quickly shifts to someone else i.e., today’s students cannot write
or teachers cannot teach.
Using a community practice model (Ashworth, 1979; Billet,1996; Baker, 1999), writing
instruction is first scaffolded and then modeled before students begin to write. This style of
teaching creates an environment of shared learning between peers and student to teacher - both
willing to linger in the struggle and vulnerability of writing. Only three teacher-participants
applied variations of writer workshop writing instruction designs in their classroom. Those who
did not allow shared writing or revision argued that absenteeism and/or lack of class time for
them to offer multiple revisions.
Large class sizes limited the amount of writing they could give and then grade in a timely
fashion, creating a burn and turn process of writing. Participants questioned the value of the
amount of beyond contract hours needed for grading and feedback. Frustrated and discouraged,
participants turned to rubrics, because they did not think that the students read the lengthy,
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heartfelt support. All participants talked about strategies that they had developed over the years
to systemize the grading process: quizzes that graded themselves, not grading everything, and
using peer review to alleviate the sole responsibility of assessment on the teacher.
Relationships
Participants struggled to move students' self-efficacy beliefs from not thinking they
could write to using evidence to support their ideas. However, it should be noted that although
positive student-teacher relationships have a high-impact on writing instruction (Baker, 2008;
Brophy & Good, 1974; Hamre et al., 2012), they are not enough to move student growth without
pedagogically sound writing instruction. Without data-driven markers in balance with teacher-
student relationships the measurement of student writing growth can be blurred with subjectivity
– over-inflating student progress based upon the student’s personal experiences instead of their
academic writing abilities.
Conflicting relationships between administration/department and personal views of
content will either break a teacher’s confidence in their teaching abilities or warrant them
changing schools to find a place that mirrors and appreciates their teaching style and
understanding of the standards for their content. Many of the 10 participants expressed
questioning how much longer they could stay in a profession where they thought that they did
not matter either to the community they served, the students they taught, or the administration
under which they worked. However, the longer the participant stayed at a school, the less
concerned they were about influences outside of their classroom. Teachers become strong
teachers only when intersected by impactful on the job training or intersections with external
program initiatives or college writing collaboration work. While the literature suggested direct
instruction of grammar is ineffective (Graham & Perin, 2007), students who are not consummate
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readers or writers struggle to navigate from the building blocks of language to clear
communication.
Content Knowledge
“Unfortunately, the lack of attention to teacher preparation, self-efficacy, and motivation
to teach writing impacts K-12 student motivation to write” (Dismuke & Martin, 2016, p. 311).
All participants felt ill equipped to teach writing their first year of teaching. Even the sole
participant who had taken required writing theory and pedagogy relied on mentors to guide with
pacing and finding a writing instruction design. When asked what they had expected teaching
English courses would look like, the participants described movies where the teacher protagonist
had inspired and saved students with the power of reading a text. That writing would be
engaging, and students would be hungry to share their ideas and scraps of writing. Visions of
Socrates played in their heads, of them as the facilitator that inspired deep thought and
contemplation [bubble burst]. Instead, they were met by reluctant readers and students who just
wanted to know what to do to get the grade they wanted.
They had not anticipated how classroom behaviors would impact class time. That
students would not read assigned reading and would only write basic simple sentence lists of
facts to analyze what they had read. Teachers who were avid readers themselves, who had
entered the world of teaching to share stories, had no idea where to start with high school
students who read at or below a sixth-grade level and whose vocabulary had quit growing by the
third grade. Without reading to support writing (Brenner, 2013) and the teacher’s lack of pre-
service cognitive apprenticeship training (Collins et al., 1989; Carroll & Wilson, 2007), teachers
scrambled to find strategies to engage, motivate, and move their students toward mastery.
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Participants who quickly found mentors or had supportive English departments provided
vetted lessons until the new teacher could find their own voice. However, as their careers
lengthened and initiatives changed, the same groups that gave them comfort in their early years
of teaching sometimes became obstacles as their own understanding of writing instruction
expanded. Teachers who veered away from their beginning styles of teaching struggled to
define their own style of teaching writing, and those that found their way to Writing Project or a
workshop and built inviting collaborative writing classrooms were dismissed as too playful or
not strict enough with how traditional writing instruction should be taught - even though no one
seemed to be able to explain why the traditional style of writing design was thought to be
effective.
External Influences
Along with the participant’s original movieland fantasies of English instruction, teacher
preparation courses did not prepare the new teacher for the onslaught of distractions that would
feel like a stick being poked through their wheel of instruction. Random monthly safety drills,
the deluge of daily emails, parent conferences, IEPs, 504s, bathroom passes, office student call
downs…a seemingly never-ending list of the unexpected. The administrative side of academic
instruction was clearly underplayed during their teacher pre-service coursework. Being hired
into an established invisible social contract made the first five years feel like there was a secret
code that they needed to know to access what others seemed to have understood.
Participants who found a supportive environment in their first teaching assignments had
more of a cum se cum sa attitude toward administration, knowing that they only needed to
endure or train that leader for three to five years before the next one wanting to make a mark
arrived. Administration perspectives can have a tremendous impact on the classroom
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environment, teacher morale, and teacher curriculum design. Managerial styles of the leaders of
the school can impede the level of writing instruction to be delivered in a classroom if they do
not see the value of shared writing practices throughout a department.
The biggest frustration expressed by the participants was their administrators’ lack of
understanding about their content, yet every teacher was evaluated using the same rubric.
Although all administrators of a district attend the same training, each one adapts that training to
their own leadership style. If the administrator rules with a heavy hand, then they look for ALL
the evidence in a forty-minute lesson, but may only observe the opening, middle, or closing of
the lesson; another administrator may take a holistic approach. Participants with the least
experience or department support described their effectiveness as a teacher through the
perspective of their administrator.
The men in this study did not seem as impacted by their evaluation and found comradery
with their male leaders and nurturing by their female bosses. The eight females in this study,
however, related painful experiences of bullying, regardless of the sex of their administrator,
and had at least at one or more times during their career had to either change schools for a better
situation or consider leaving the profession. Teaching is an ever-changing job with varying
professional expectations, rolling mandates, and cyclical strategy rebranding that keep the
teacher responsible for balancing the art versus science of writing instruction in their classroom
to continually produce consistent student growth results from year to year regardless of the
rotation of students. It is unnerving for a teacher to be consistently measured by a deficit model -
being judged by what they have left undone, instead of being celebrated for what they have
accomplished.
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RQ1: Influences that Impeded or Informed Participant Writing Instruction
Participants who had been assigned to schools that had clearly defined department and
site writing instruction visions that were aligned with sound writing theory and writing felt
supported and confident with their writing instruction practices. Participants with dysfunctional
or disjointed departments that were not supported by administration described their experiences
with terms that indicated bullying or limited access until they had proven their worth.
Mentorship seemed to be a key in teachers’ ability to thrive and take risks in their writing
instruction designs.
Administration played a key role in most of the participants' view of their writing
instruction success. Again, this study was conducted during the Covid Pandemic, at a time when
the participants had spent 18 months transferring their writing instruction to an online platform.
However, much of their dissatisfaction with administration was their lack of ability to revise any
of the external administrative practices i.e., standardized testing, and teacher evaluations to
alleviate teacher stressors. Already experiencing a digital learning curve with little or no time to
receive enough professional development, all participants expressed frustration, exhaustion, and
their own sense of failure to their students.
Positive impacts on writing instruction involved interactions with writing instruction
beyond the insulation of their departments and school sites. Participants who embraced post-
secondary collaborative writing opportunities that helped to bridge the gap between high school
and college writing thought that their writing instruction had evolved. Evidence of Writing
Project participation, conference attendance, and the reading of professional resources also
suggested a greater impact on writing instruction; whereas the reliance of insular department
collaboration and social media only changed the writing activities used in a classroom.
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Participants with a strong personal stance and pedagogical vision did not experience as many
negative experiences with external influences.
RQ2: Participants’ Evolution of Instructional Practices over their Career
Participants who did not or could not identify connections to a pedagogical stance to
define their instruction were swept by the trendy initiatives that rolled through their schools or
districts. While some may improve instruction, others seem to lose what is working, or merely
rebranding what has already been done. The longer participants had been teaching registered
stronger changes in their teaching instruction. Also, most participants began teaching writing
the way they were taught to write and experienced little to no postsecondary teaching writing
course work. Writing instruction becomes on the job training that changes with each teacher
depending on what writing strategies they learn from others or develop through trial-and-error
practices over time.
Participants who did not have strong content knowledge about writing theory or
pedagogy described their lesson instruction design through the perspective of writing activities
or strategies and lacked an academic writing language to discuss their practices. There seemed to
lack a common intersection of writing foundations, instead reliant upon what learning initiative
cycle the teacher entered the profession. For example, if the participant was old enough to have
been taught sentence diagramming when they were a student, then their grading and writing
practices were focused on grammar and sentence structure. Participants that entered later or had
intersected with writer workshop training or a Writing Project had classrooms that were
collaborative student writing environments.
While participants described their students changing over time it was usually in
comparison to their own positive writing experiences and reflective of their disappointment that
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their students did not work as hard at writing or value the revision process as the participant had
when they were their student’s age. The participants whose practices had evolved the most
throughout their career could be attributed to their length of time teaching, their higher level of
education in the field of English instruction, and/or their commitment to keeping up with current
research on writing theory and pedagogical research. While participants who taught at one
school site for over five years had more confidence in their teaching of writing, teachers who had
been at several schools had a higher level of career experience with a broader scope of writing
styles and strategies.
Covid 19 - Online Learning
Although the global pandemic was not an intentional theme of this study, one cannot
ignore the toil it took on the participants’ instructional designs, and how it especially impacted
were their writing instruction. None of their districts had a plan for at home on-line instruction.
When schools shut their doors March of 2020, teachers were told to keep track of their students
for mental health and attendance; districts scrambled with the lack of infrastructure in the
community and lack of technology in the hands of not only the students but also their teachers.
Over the summer, teachers scrambled to consume digital learning strategies, attend online
professional development, reformat lessons for online instruction - all while navigating their
personal lives and the uncertainty of what was to come.
The participants during this study were exhausted from treading 18 months in what felt
like shark infested waters. When classes started in the Fall, teachers quickly realized that the
relationships that they had built the previous Fall had guided them through the Spring, but their
new roster was strangers. Districts that feared student faces online left teachers providing
lessons to avatars and only knowing their students by their submissions.
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Communities claimed the teachers weren’t earning the money their tax dollars had paid,
political factions battled about mandates, and teachers working from home worked longer hours
online. Only one of the participants had taught online, but all were expected to produce lesson
plans, have their yearly evaluation, and prepare their students for all the standardized testing.
Half of the participants talked about thinking of retiring early, with only the financial stability
being the obstacle of turning their backs on a profession to which they all believed that they had
been called.
Implications of the Study
This study provided an opportunity to interview veteran high school English teachers
who had taught for over ten years; many of them said that they had never been asked about how
they taught writing.
Darling-Hammond (2006) postulated that “having teacher prep programs that include
core knowledge are important, but teachers also need to be prepared to recognize students’
diverse ways of learning and develop the ability to continually adapt their teaching to effectively
respond to the multifaceted nature of the classroom” (p. 6). While this researcher agrees with
Darling-Hammond, they also question how a lack of content instruction might impede a
teacher’s ability to adapt to students’ diverse writing needs in the classroom. In many teacher
preparation programs, especially ARL programs, teachers learn to build units, gather strategies,
and produce activities in preparation for their first teaching experience, but they are not
provided consistent data driven writing instruction in how to teach writing.
In essence, once teachers have their own classroom, writing instruction is garnered
through on the job training. If their English department has a shared vision, it may not be based
upon a unifying theory of writing or a pedagogical stance. This lack of national consistency
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could be the reason the National Writing Report continually finds 8th grade and 12th grade
writing proficiency with flat or declining statistics. This study affirms that teachers should have
writing instruction courses that teach the practice of teaching writing at the secondary level.
Even though Common Core State Standards attempted to have English instruction design lessons
through a writing lens, teachers cling to the romanticism of the classroom novel to elicit writing,
instead of looking at the novel’s writer craft moves from the perspective of a writer.
This study also revealed that teachers teaching at the same site for over five years seemed
to have more security in their teaching strategies and personal style, in feeling vetted and
validated by their “tribe” of teachers or administrators who have taught together for long periods
of time. Additionally, the more experience teachers have or time in service, the less they seem to
be concerned with the minutia of teacher evaluations having an impact on their writing
instruction. However, this researcher suggests that administrative training should include
updated views of what instruction should look like in each content, that is do they know the
underlying standards being taught or are they relying solely on the teacher to identify all the
standards that have led up to the class that they are observing? Lack of administrative content
knowledge can frustrate a teacher with a strong content knowledge in English instruction and in
worse cases break that teacher’s confidence, driving them out of the profession.
Writing instruction requires teachers to find their voice, to identify what they don’t
know, and to take ownership of their own style of teaching with the understanding of their own
experiential biases. The process of writing is a vulnerable experience, the exchange of ideas
from the writer to a reader to judge the quality of the writing. Administrators need to understand
that to create a strong teacher, that teacher needs to be supported while they take risks to
improve their teaching of writing practice. As the facilitator of the school site the administrator
should
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insist that departments have procedures and protocols in place to provide an inviting and
supportive environment for new teachers and a collaborative design to help all their teachers to
evolve their teaching of writing practices.
Limitations of the Study
The primary concern of qualitative multiple case study research is the generalization of
the findings. Yin (2003) rejected that criticism, insisting that the role of case study is to “expand
on a broader body of knowledge by investigating within a real-life context” (p. 10). He believed
that case studies allow for analytical generalizations as opposed to statistical generalizations.
The small sampling size of this study imposed a myopic view of how 10 participants were
influenced and impacted by things beyond their classroom and how those positive and negative
experiences affected their writing instruction development.
A limitation to this study might have been the confluence of converting face-to-face
classroom instruction to an online platform during a global pandemic. Participants often asked
the researcher “Do you mean before or after Covid?” and then reflected or reminisced on what
they used to do in the classroom as opposed to how they taught writing instruction online. While
the researcher thought participants would gush over their school relationships, it was not until the
participants articulated why online instruction did not work for instruction that they recognized
the value of the teacher-student relationship. Many acknowledged not knowing their students
through their online submissions.
The researcher must acknowledge that a further limitation to this study may have been
the researcher's own experiential funds of knowledge as both a high school English teacher and
a researcher of writing. Although only one of the participants had been invited by the researcher
to participate in the study, the researcher acknowledged knowing two of the other participants
from
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shared district professional development experiences or attendance at conventions. Additionally,
only the researcher’s invitee had worked at the same site as the researcher.
Despite the mentioned limitations, the researcher is confident that the findings from this
multiple case study provide the field of education with valuable insight into how teachers
perceive their teaching of writing and what variables may support or impede their ability to
deliver effective writing instruction.
Suggestions for Further Research
Authentic investigative research reveals future research opportunities. The researcher
begins with their research questions to investigate one area to study, only to have more questions
emerge throughout the investigative undertaking. Stake (1995) posited that the most difficult task
for a researcher begins with “a good research design that will direct the looking and thinking
enough, but not too much” (p. 15).
As an exploratory study, this study sought to uncover how veteran teachers were
impacted by external influences and how their writing instruction practices changed over time.
While the participant group for this study was a diverse sampling representative of teacher
demographics, i.e., 80% white women, it would be interesting to duplicate the study with only
minority teachers or only male teachers to determine if the same findings would occur or if
different obstacles would be revealed for participant samplings.
Because this study was conducted during a global pandemic, while teachers were
teaching writing through online platforms, further research is warranted to investigate how to
provide rich collaborative writing experiences for students who cannot be in a face-to-face
educational environment. Investigating online teachers' writing instruction and how they draw
students into the writing process in an online environment without social interaction and
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community building may reveal skills and strategies or validate writing strategies that could be
carried back into brick-and-mortar classrooms.
Additionally, based upon Jenny and Christina’s experiences as Black female teachers,
future research should be done on the roles teachers of color play in interactions with students of
color, and fulfilling parental or community leadership roles that students are missing in their
personal lives and how that impacts writing instruction. Not only did these participants have
difficulty breaking through department acceptance barriers, but they also thought that their white
administration did not support text selections of teachers of color when parents complained.
Conclusion
This study afforded the researcher authentic conversations about the practice of writing
with veteran teachers who spent years honing their craft. While each teacher preparation
program has its own expectations for pre-service education, it is clear that teachers grow their
practice in the field. Each participant that the researcher interviewed commented that no one had
ever asked them or entered a discussion about their style of writing instruction, beliefs, or
philosophies; those conversations about pedagogy or personal stances were left behind in their
graduate work.
Prior to the introduction of Common Core Curriculum Standards initiatives, generations
of teachers were trained to use novels to teach literary devices and reading standards,
culminating in a literary essay as measurement of a student's writing abilities. Students read
chapters and teachers gave comprehension quizzes to check if students had done the assigned
reading. The teacher crafted the culminating essay prompt and students wrote to the prompt and
were graded on how they could make connections within the text. Creative writing was left
behind in elementary classrooms and by the time students met their high school teachers, they
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either hated English classes or, worse, believed that they could not write. When asked why they
thought they could write, students would roll their eyes and talk about bad grades and how the
red lines on each paper confirmed their failures.
This study reaffirmed that teachers begin teaching writing the way they were taught. If
their papers had been redlined, then that teacher is more likely to focus on grammar and sentence
structures. Unfortunately, this model of teaching writing bleeds cross-curricular paralyzing
teachers who had beliefs that they too were not good writers, that they didn’t know grammar, so
they couldn’t have their students write essays in math, P.E., or music classes. When teachers are
provided offsite writing instruction opportunities with post-secondary institutions or
administrators invite writing instruction authors to their schools, teachers gain confidence to try
new writing strategies and develop research-based strategies to support their teaching of writing.
It is my hope that this study inspires future studies to investigate how school sites and
districts can develop shared writing experiences to support teachers beyond pre-service teaching
instruction. Teachers need time and space to explore their teaching styles and writing instruction
practices. This researcher suggests that in lieu of the deficit model of teacher evaluation,
administrations need to find opportunities and time for teachers to have deeper discussions about
educator craft, use coaching structures to support new teachers, and reward teachers who invest
extra time into their teaching of writing.
