Research questions, objectives, and theoretical framework

Scaffolding adolescent’s disciplinary literacy learning is important for quality and equity in education and an important target for teacher education (Kavanagh & Rainey, 2019, p. 905). To ensure that an increasingly diverse group of students develop disciplinary literacy, it is crucial that teacher candidates (TCs) learn how to scaffold students´ socialization into disciplinary literacy by making explicit what it means to engage in a given text in a given way (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012, 2008; Blikstad-Balas, 2016). Accordingly, TCs must not only have a firm grasp of the content they are teaching, but also substantial knowledge of how to provide scaffolds by for instance teaching and modeling strategy use and coaching and providing feedback to students (Bransford, Darling-Hammond & LePage, 2005, p. 24-27). However, instructional scaffolding requires ambitious practices that need time and experience to be applied successfully, and research steadily finds that TCs will not learn ambitious teaching practices if this is left to field placements alone (Britzman, 2003). It is thus important that teacher education programs develop practice orientations to ensure that even the most novice teachers can support students’ disciplinary literacy learning (Kavanagh & Rainey, 2019).

As part of a longitudinal intervention study set within an integrated 5-year teacher education program at a Norwegian university, the present study aims at investigating how teacher candidates scaffold students’ disciplinary literacy learning during fieldwork in language arts, following a coursework intervention using video from authentic classrooms to represent and decompose teachers (Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009) instructional scaffolding. Drawing on the growing body of practice-oriented teacher education research (Ball & Forzani, 2009; Grossman, et. al., 2009; Zeichner, 2012; Sun and Van Es, 2015), we conceptualized the vague and often inconsistently invoked notion of instructional scaffolding (van der Pol, Volman & Beishuizen, 2010; Brownfield & Wilkinson, 2018) as three instructional practices in line the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observation [PLATO] (Grossman, 2015); modeling and the use of models, strategy use and instruction, and feedback. Even though these are ambitious instructional practices, we consider them core practices that TCs can begin to master if provided with a shared conceptualization and a common professional language for discussing and decomposing video representations in coursework and for approximating instructional scaffolding themselves during fieldwork (Grossman et al., 2009; McDonald, Kazemi & Kavanagh, 2013).  

Although strategy instruction, modeling, and feedback are generic practices that could – and probably should - be part of all subject teaching, we frame our study within a disciplinary literacy approach to teaching and learning (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008, 2012, 2018). As literacy practices in language arts become increasingly more advanced and specialized in secondary and upper secondary schools, TCs must learn how to provide students with explicit and scaffolded teaching of sophisticated genres, specialized language conventions, disciplinary norms, and higher-level interpretive processes (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). At the same time, we acknowledge that language arts - at least in our Norwegian context – also has additional responsibility for students´ continuous development of generic literacy skills and that context-specific support for disciplinary literacy would require learners to deploy a variety of literacy practices (Collin, 2014), including generic literacy practices that are transferable to other subjects and everyday life (Hinchman & O´Brian, 2019). Against this backdrop, this study investigates (i) the extent to which teacher candidates enact strategy instruction, modeling, and feedback when teaching language arts during field practice and (ii) whether the scaffolds they provide are generic or specific to disciplinary literacy in language arts.

Methods In the overall design of the longitudinal study, TCs from two cohorts are followed from the coursework intervention into their fieldwork and their teaching practice as novice- and experienced teachers. The coursework intervention was conducted in six method classes in language arts in the TCs´ 6th and 7th semester. The classes were taught by the first author and video recorded by the second author. We selected videos of authentic classroom teaching to represent and decompose teacher’s use of modeling, strategy instruction, and feedback and used a simplified version of the PLATO framework to provide a shared conceptualization and a common language. The present paper reports on seven teacher candidates´ instruction in language arts during a nine-week field placement in their 7th semester, following the coursework intervention, and draws on video data (N=704 minutes) that the TCs recorded using the video-enabled professional learning platform IRIS Connect. The TCs, which were sampled based on voluntary participation, were asked to record three lessons in which they planned to enact strategy instruction, modeling, or feedback to scaffold students learning of skills or processes in language arts. From these recordings, they chose video clips that they reviewed in mentoring conversations with their peer and cooperating teachers. Six of the TCs recorded three lessons and one TC recorded two lessons. All students taught in upper secondary schools and assumed complete responsibility for most of the teaching. Our analytical approach was two-fold. First, we analyzed the data deductively, using PLATO (Grossman, 2015) to score segments of 15 minutes on modeling and use of models, strategy use and instruction, and feedback. We scored the segments on a scale from 1-4, where 1 typically means no evidence of the feature, 2 means vague evidence, 3 means clear evidence, and 4 means clear and consistent evidence. Second, we analyzed the segments which were scored a 2 or above inductively. First, we identified the scaffolds that were provided to students within these segments. Next, we generated codes that captured whether the scaffolds were generic or specific to disciplinary literacy in language arts. Among these codes were generic scaffolds, genre-specific scaffolds, disciplinary terminology, and scaffolds for disciplinary reasoning. 30 % of the segments will be double scored to check for inter-rater reliability.

Preliminary findings Preliminary findings indicate considerable differences in the extent to which the TCs enacted instructional scaffolding. Four of the TCs accounted for most of the high PLATO-scores (score 3 and 4) and systematically integrated strategy instruction, modeling, and feedback in their approach to teaching and assessment for learning. These TCs typically decomposed models for writing a literary or rhetorical analysis, introduced and modeled strategies for interpreting and writing genres specific to language arts, and provided substantial feedback in which they also supported students in using the scaffolds provided. The rest of the TCs also had instances of high-quality feedback as measured with PLATO, but did not decompose their models or introduce the strategies as explicitly as the others. Initial analysis indicates that the majority of the scaffolds were generic or genre specific. We did not find much evidence for scaffolds for disciplinary reasoning, but discovered potential in quotes like the following: “Remember that we have talked about the importance of close reading. Do not skim and think that you now remember what it´s all about. I myself often read a short story ten times before I decide on a theme I want to pursue in my analysis”. Although close reading is an important generic strategy, we here see the potential for modeling how a skilled reader of literature reasons and makes interference to identify themes in literary texts. Overall, this study indicates that TCs are able to provide instructional scaffolding when conceptualized as instructional practices that can be represented and decomposed in coursework and that scaffolds specific for disciplinary literacy are more challenging to TCs and thus require more attention in coursework (Kavanagh & Rainey, 2017). We have reasons to believe that differences between TCs might relate to different cooperating teachers, but further analysis will have to investigate this.

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