Transforming Knowledge into Professional Development Resources: Six Teachers Implement a Model of Teaching for Understanding Text

This article describes our attempts to transform knowledge from classroom implementations into resources, which we call Accessibles, to support teachers' implementation of Questioning the Author (QtA), an instructional approach aimed at building students' understanding of what they read. We developed 25 Accessibles, which are brief, single-issue documents available for teachers to use on their own. Each Accessible presents examples of classroom interactions and explicates how those interactions exemplify QtA issues or solutions to issues. In this article we report the results of a field test to document the effects of the Accessibles. 6 teachers implemented QtA in their classrooms in reading and social studies over 7 months. Transcripts of videotaped lessons, collected before the teachers began QtA, and QtA lesson transcripts were analyzed for patterns of classroom discourse interactions in terms of the kinds of questions asked, students' responses, and teachers' rejoinders to students. Results showed that use of the Accessibles changed classroom discourse from teacher dominated and focused on retrieving information to discourse shared by students and teacher and focused on building ideas from text. Interviews that probed teachers about their attitudes toward and use of the Accessibles indicated that the majority of the time teachers found the Accessibles useful. We also present teachers' comments about the Accessibles, which provide insight into aspects of the Accessibles that they found particularly helpful. Finally, we discuss themes underlying the Accessibles in terms of their potential for other approaches to teaching for understanding.