Anthony, Ray, Lavell, Corey, Junius, and Kenneth jostled each other as they approached the front of the classroom. Several of their 5th grade classmates were already beginning to giggle as the boys assembled in a nervous knot facing their peers. Their teacher, Anna, shushed the class

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This article focuses on how a statewide reform initiative, when envisioned as a professional development opportunity, impacted teachers’ capacities to become change agents in their classrooms and districts and how individual district contexts shaped the development of those capacities. The interview and artifact data used for this study were gathered from teachers and administrators in four demonstration districts that were involved in a standards-based professional development initiative within the federally funded Michigan English Language Arts Framework (MELAF) project. These data reveal that teachers experienced changes in their personal literacy practices and views of themselves as learners and felt an increased ability to evince change in a variety of educational contexts, including their classrooms, buildings, and districts. Across these changes in teachers’ practices, district patterns emerged that spoke to the individual districts’ capacities to support teacher growth and foster reform. These differences suggest that the changes that took place were a function of many factors, including the size and structure of the district, the district's readiness for change, and the source of language arts leadership within the district. One implication of these results is that the particular histories and competing forces that operate for both individuals and districts shape the implementation of new policy.

Facilitating discussions in English Language Arts can develop students’ skills as speakers and listeners and their ability to engage with diverse perspectives. However, classroom observations often demonstrate a lack of student talk, raising questions about the complexity of facilitating discussion and teachers’ opportunities to learn and hone the practice. In this article, we discuss how teacher educators leveraged a collaboratively designed specification of the practice of facilitating discussions to attempt some alignment across three programs. The teacher educators reached what we call alignment amid variation. There was consistency in the stances regarding the role of children in classrooms and understanding of the purposes for and key aspects of the practice that allowed for alignment amid variation in their work with novice teachers across programs. Our findings have implications for considering the work of cross-institutional collaborations to improve teacher preparation and K-12 student learning.

A significant body of research articulates concerns about the current emphasis on high‐stakes testing as the primary lever of education reform in the United States. However, relatively little research has focused on how children make sense of the assessment policies in which they are centrally located. In this article, we share analyses of interview data from 33 third graders in an urban elementary school collected as part of a larger qualitative study of children's experiences in literacy in high‐poverty classroom. Our analysis of assessment‐focused interviews focused on two research questions related to children's perspectives on high‐stakes testing: What patterns arise in children's talk about high‐stakes testing? What does children's talk about high‐stakes testing reveal about their perceptions of the role of testing in their school experiences and how they are positioned within the system of accountability they encounter in school? Drawing on tools associated with inductive approaches to learning from qualitative data as well as critical discourse analysis, we discuss three issues that arose in children's responses: language related to the adults invested in their achievement; their sense of the stakes involved in testing; and links between their feelings about test taking, perceptions of scores, and assumptions of competence. We argue that children's perspectives on their experiences with high‐stakes testing provide crucial insights into how children construct relationships to schooling, relationships that have consequences for their continued engagement in school.

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