An Exploration of Professional Knowledge Needed for Reading and Responding to Student Writing

This study explored the knowledge elementary teachers need for one core practice: reading and responding to students’ writing. Forty-five preservice teachers read and responded to an elementary student’s narrative writing sample. Using teacher noticing as a framework, we first decomposed the practice into five components indicative of differences in teachers’ attention to writing features, reasoning about those features, and suggested responses. We used multiple correspondence analyses to investigate potential underlying relationships among components and developed cases to highlight one underlying relationship that was found. The findings indicate reading and responding draws upon teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge. More specifically, it draws on both knowledge of content and students and knowledge of content and teaching.