Facilitating discussions in English Language Arts can develop students’ skills as speakers and listeners and their ability to engage with diverse perspectives. However, classroom observations often demonstrate a lack of student talk, raising questions about the complexity of facilitating discussion and teachers’ opportunities to learn and hone the practice. In this article, we discuss how teacher educators leveraged a collaboratively designed specification of the practice of facilitating discussions to attempt some alignment across three programs. The teacher educators reached what we call alignment amid variation. There was consistency in the stances regarding the role of children in classrooms and understanding of the purposes for and key aspects of the practice that allowed for alignment amid variation in their work with novice teachers across programs. Our findings have implications for considering the work of cross-institutional collaborations to improve teacher preparation and K-12 student learning.

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Background Writing is an essential literacy skill; however, public school students often receive inadequate writing instruction, particularly as they move into middle and high school. However, research has shown that the nature of writing tasks assigned can impact writing development and student achievement measured by standardized assessments. With the need to assess teacher efficacy, districts are increasingly using some form of value-added modeling, although researchers warn of relying solely on value-added scores to distinguish between more and less effective teachers. Purpose This study investigated the intellectual challenge of typical writing tasks and the intellectual quality of student work in classrooms of higher and lower value-added middle school English language arts teachers to understand what value-added modeling might capture in terms of writing instruction. In particular, this article investigates how higher and lower value-added teachers differ in terms of (1) the intellectual challenge of typical tasks assigned, (2) the quality of supports surrounding the tasks, and (3) the quality of student work produced. Research Design Data for this study were collected as part of a larger study that identified pairs of middle school ELA teachers within the same school who were in their third through fifth years of teaching. Within each school, we identified at least one teacher in the fourth (top) quartile and one in the second (lower) quartile based on their measures of value-added to student achievement. We analyzed the typical and challenging writing tasks and corresponding student work for the intellectual quality, looking within and across the two groups of teachers to document patterns of instructional practices. Conclusions We found differences in the consistency of challenge and scaffolds between the two groups, with higher value-added teachers more consistently providing challenging and supportive tasks. Teachers whose typical writing tasks maintain a high degree of challenge are associated with higher student performance, as defined by a measure of teacher value-added. This implies the importance of educating teachers regarding the importance and nature of challenging assignments.

Modeling, by demonstrating and explaining the cognitive processes involved in writing, has been shown to support writing development. Less often have specific disciplinary aspects of teaching with models been investigated. We draw on research in English Language Arts and apply it in social studies inquiry contexts to propose a framework for teaching models of thinking and writing that offers teachers and researchers new perspectives on the discipline-specific work of modeling. This framework accounts for three modes of instruction -use of models (a tool or a text), demonstrating and explaining, and co-constructing model texts with students -and describes eleven instructional practices that support instruction across these modes. We analyze data from three years of social studies instruction to show how two teachers enact these practices across the three modes to highlight the disciplinary thinking and processes that support writing social studies arguments with sources, highlighting the ways students can actively participate in teaching writing with models. In addition, we consider the role of the curriculum in this work. We show how writing instruction can address disciplinary ways of thinking in social studies and illustrate the potential of the framework for guiding researchers' and practitioners' work on writing instruction across disciplinary contexts.

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