Learning to Support Adolescent Literacy: Teacher Educator Pedagogy and Novice Teacher Take Up in Secondary English Language Arts Teacher Preparation

Disciplinary literacy scholars promote text-based instruction in the service of disciplinary inquiry, and scholars of teacher education promote practice-based preparation for teachers. This study brings these scholarly communities into conversation by investigating how practice orientations in teacher education influence novice teachers’ literacy teaching. We conducted video analyses of teacher education coursework and novice teachers’ classroom instruction in secondary English language arts. Data were collected during a summer institute for novice teachers designed through a partnership between a university and an alternative teacher education program. Analyses revealed that when learning targets for novice teacher participants were explicitly connected to teaching practice through the use of representations, decompositions, and approximations, those targets were more frequently observed in novices’ subsequent classroom instruction.