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Grounded in Critical Youth Studies and English education scholarship that examines the consequences of conceptions of adolescence on English teachers’ thinking about pedagogy, this chapter highlights two ways English teacher educators can facilitate pre-service English teachers’ interrogation of dominant discourses of adolescence/ts so they might be better positioned to create pedagogical practices aligned with more comprehensive understandings of secondary students. The first focuses on teaching a Youth Lens in the context of a Young Adult Literature course, an approach that helps future teachers learn about adolescence as a construct and the linkages between this idea and English pedagogy. The second focuses on integrating youth into English teacher education coursework as guest speakers on a range of English and schooling practices whereby they are “re-positioned” as experts and contributors to English teacher education. Together, these points of intervention provide ways to re-position youth systemically throughout English teacher education programs.

This chapter describes a new video-coding tool, Edthena, and how two teacher preparation programs adopted and implemented this technology. We present our successes and our missteps to help other teacher preparation programs learn from our experiences.

Multiple stakeholders were involved in the implementation of Edthena: teacher candidates, cooperating teachers, university supervisors, and university course instructors. Each of the authors of this chapter fills at least one of these roles. Each author reflected on his or her use of this tool, and we collaboratively analyzed our reflections to ascertain successes and lessons learned in the implementation of a new tool.

We found that Edthena provided many enhancements to traditional teacher candidate field experiences and internships, most notably more consistent and richer reflection on and communication about instruction.

When implementing a new technological tool, teacher educators need to be very strategic and intentional in introducing the tool. All stakeholders need to know the benefits of using a new tool and also require clear guidelines for its use to reduce the natural tendency of resisting change.

The varying traditions, goals, paradigms, and discourses associated with English language arts (ELA) underscore the degree to which there is not one school subject English, but many “Englishes.” In a neoliberal context, where movements like standardization and accountability stake claims about what ELA should be and do in the world, teachers, especially beginning teachers, can struggle to navigate the tensions engendered by these many and contradictory “Englishes.” This chapter attends to this struggle and delineates a process by which English Educators might illustrate the field’s vast and ever-changing terrain and support beginning teachers as they locate themselves in ELA. In delineating this process, we argue that in order to see and navigate the field in a neoliberal era, ELA teachers should treat the field as a discursive construction, constantly re-constructed by the dynamic play of social, political, and economic discourses. We argue that in treating the field as a discursive construction and exploring and locating themselves within the terrain, ELA teachers, rather than feeling powerless in the face of neoliberal forces, can leverage these different discursive forces, and gain footing in their classrooms, schools, and extracurricular communities to navigate the coexistence of many “Englishes” and argue for their pedagogical choices.

To describe how low-stakes writing can assist teachers in eliciting greater student engagement and involvement in their own writing by focusing the stages of the writing process more on student thinking than on the surface structure of their writing.

This chapter examines some of the important research literature addressing process writing in general and low-stakes writing in particular. The authors’ experiences with teaching English in the secondary classroom inform their analysis of implementing low-stakes writing assignments as part of the writing process.

The authors describe how using non-judgmental feedback on low-stakes writing assignments allows the teacher and students to have conversations on paper which are intended to help students explore, expand, and clarify their own thinking about a topic. By establishing a continuing conversation on paper with the students about their writing, the teacher takes on the role of “trusted ally” in the writing process, rather than the more traditional role of an arbiter of writing conventions.

Although the presumptive focus of writing instruction for the last two decades has been on the writing process, the tendency to turn the individual steps of the writing process into discrete writing products in a formulaic manner can cause many important parts of the writing process itself to be either overlooked or given short shrift. This chapter provides useful descriptions of ways in which low-stakes writing assignments can afford teachers the means by which to focus their students’ attention on key portions of the writing process so that their writing products are ultimately improved.

Children of recent refugees and immigrants are the fastest growing student population in the US public education system. Thus, it is imperative to create research-based pedagogies that value linguistic diversity, provide academic and social–emotional support and embrace life experiences that are often vastly different from those of the teachers and typical students. The goal of this study was to examine the effects of an instructional model designed to address specific academic and social–emotional competencies of linguistically and culturally diverse students on the writing of eight and nine-year-old students (n = 10) enrolled in an afterschool programme serving students from refugee families. The model of explicit writing instruction implemented in the study included culturally responsive literature, mindfulness practices, and differentiation in teaching genre-specific text structure and academic vocabulary. Pre- and post-test personal essays were scored for holistic quality of writing and use of academic vocabulary. The findings indicate that explicit and differentiated instruction in both writing organisation and vocabulary use was effective in increasing the holistic quality of students' personal writing and their ability to integrate academic vocabulary appropriately and meaningfully in independent writing. Implications for culturally responsive instruction for refugee students are discussed.

Rural schools have typically been strong on community but weak on professional learning. Their small size and geographical isolation have meant that much of the recent reform movement focused on professional learning communities has passed them by. But there is no reason why rural educators cannot participate in professional learning networks (PLNs) and benefit from heightened levels of collegiality that can be experienced across schools. However, intentional design for deeper collaborative work and face-to-face connection is necessary for PLN members to reap the benefits from increased professional capital and teacher leadership opportunities. This chapter describes the work of the Northwest Rural Innovation and Student Engagement (NW RISE) network in the United States. NW RISE brings together rural educators in gatherings that take place every six months, helps them to form “job-alike” groups focused on academic subject matter or cross-contextual themes, and provides support for shared curriculum design. This chapter describes how rural educators have seized upon the resources in NW RISE to promote student engagement and to develop their professional capacity across the network’s schools.

A growing body of evidence confirms that good teaching is the most important school-specific factor impacting student achievement and growth. Concerns over teachers’ effectiveness have led to escalating demands for reliable systems that measure teachers’ effectiveness. Such performance systems require a stable and explicit definition of knowledge, skills, actions, and dispositions that comprise the work of teaching. In this chapter, we refer to these as teacher “core competencies” (CCs). Well-defined core competency constructs can anchor investigations of teacher effectiveness for purposes in many different settings, but the field currently lacks a set of common stable descriptors. The descriptors encoded in current standards and assessments are plagued by confusion arising from multiple ideological perspectives, conflicting political views on teacher preparation, and disconnects between stakeholders (e.g., university versus alternative preparation routes).

This chapter presents a study designed to move from descriptive, “input-based” ways to describe teaching to the development and early testing of specific construct descriptors. We begin by distilling many disparate sources of authority regarding what teachers should know and be able to do and assess the validity and usefulness of the resulting descriptors across several measurement applications. We find evidence of stability across multiple populations and different settings and evidence that the constructs can describe preparation program emphases, as well as evidence that some program-level aggregate scores correlate with student assessment scores. We also investigate the stability of competency constructs in different settings, attempting to understand the implications of k-12 school contexts for interpreting core competency measurements of preparation programs.

This one-year qualitative study examined the role Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014) had on secondary pre-service teachers in an urban school. This study examined the journey of six pre-service urban high-school teachers in Arizona as they enact Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP) in a year-long student teaching residency. Pre-service teachers worked with and learned from English Language Learners in various contexts. Factors that influenced their CSP practices are discussed through themes that emerged from interviews and classroom observations.