Learning in Practice: What Preservice Teachers Report Learning about Writing in a Middle School Role Based Field Experience

ABSTRACT Despite the importance of learning to teach writing, many preservice teachers do not take a writing course as part of their teacher preparation. For those universities that do offer a writing methods course, teacher educators face challenges in designing responsive and rigorous clinical experiences especially since writing is often under taught in middle and high schools. This qualitative study examines supportive clinical field experiences where preservice teachers apply and enhance what they learned in their methods courses. This study examined PSTs’ experiences learning about practice in practice when provided with specific roles to enact in the field: Lead Teacher, Secondary Teacher, Participation Partner, and Notetaker. Preservice teachers taught writing in teaching teams, once a week for seven weeks in an eighth-grade classroom. Preservice teachers responded to two open ended questions via google forms following their weekly field experience. In total, they made 377 comments within three categories: Understandings about Teaching (n = 169, 45%), Students (n = 90, 24%), and Writing (n = 118, 31%). A deeper analysis revealed that the roles made an important contribution to their learning by supporting their practice in practice and providing nuanced and rich opportunities for learning about the teaching of writing. Findings from this study demonstrate that preservice teachers benefit from collaborative field experiences learning about different aspects of how to teach writers when inhabiting different roles.