No abstract

Building on theories of scaffolding and previous research on scaffolding between adults and children, this article provides empirical examples of over-scaffolding as it occurs in peer-topeer literacy activities among elementary-level emergent bilingual students. In their analysis of data from the first year of a design-based research project (Bradley & Reinking, 2011) consisting of a cross-aged peer-tutoring program, the authors shed light on how their curriculum tools unintentionally overscaffolded students' interactions. Over-scaffolding limited students' productive and substantive engagement and inadvertently led students to enact the prevalent initiate-respondevaluate discourse pattern in their partner discussions. The broader phenomena of over-scaffolding in many classrooms may position emergent bilinguals as passive respondents in literacy interactions rather than as active participants in their language and literacy learning. To ensure that learners are participating and teachers and tutors are scaffolding literacy practices appropriately, the authors advocate for responsive, contingent scaffolding to keep learners productively engaged. The aim is for the findings and implications to help readers reexamine their own interactive literacy practices and research TESOL Journal 7.2, June 2016 393

This study examines collaboration between English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teachers and content-area elementary school teachers, and makes the case for conceptualising teacher collaboration as an opportunity for shared teacher learning. Using a sociocultural theoretical lens, this study examines how three pairs of elementary teachers and ESOL specialists used and constructed tools for collaboration, which mediated and made visible teachers' learning processes. Employing interpretive enquiry and cross-case analysis, we examined data from classroom observations, teacher co-planning sessions and interviews with teachers. Findings demonstrated that collaborating teachers used tools to articulate and reconceptualise teaching goals, co-construct knowledge and ultimately transform teaching practices to meet the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students. This study has implications for teacher education and ongoing professional development, by shedding light on the potential affordances of collaborative tools for teacher learning. Findings suggest that teacher education could harness these opportunities for learning by incorporating collaboration between ESOL specialists and content-area teachers as an integral part of preparing more qualified teachers to work with culturally and linguistically diverse students.

This study contributes to research on teacher collaboration, which has not adequately examined the supports and challenges to English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) specialists and mainstream classroom teachers sharing roles in a student‐centered classroom. Using a sociocultural theoretical framework, this study highlights the importance of routine in collaborating teachers' attempts to create a shared division of labor. Using qualitative analysis of interview and observational data, we focus on the division of labor of a coteaching pair, exploring how the teachers used shared teaching goals and tools to facilitate collaboration. Findings indicate that although the teachers valued their collaborative work, interruptions to their routine made it difficult to work productively together at times. This work has implications for administrators and policy makers whose decision making has an impact on teachers' daily schedules. When teachers cannot count on a consistent routine together, they are unable to engage in truly equal coteaching in which both teachers' skills are used to their fullest to benefit not only English language learners, but all students. Future studies should engage in more detailed and sustained observation of coteaching pairs as they negotiate roles and engage in their particular approaches to their division of labor.

Citywide constructs such as “West Side” or “South Side” are spatial codes that result from more than the informal conversations of city residents. This article shows how elementary school educators in one U.S. metropolitan school district participated in the production of a local knowledge of the East Side and West Side space and individual. It demonstrates how educators used these codes to name race and class, as well as to obscure the codes’ meanings. The article maps the convergence of institutional technologies and local educational knowledge whereby this knowledge resisted change and buttressed the citywide East Side–West Side relations and knowledge. The disjunctures in this knowledge base are also identified, as educators attempted to produce a knowledge of a third space that they termed “Central City.”