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Abstract

Most often teacher education has attended to the expertise of university instructors and cooperating teachers in preservice teachers’ (PTs) learning in and from practice; rarely has the field addressed leveraging horizontal expertise within this learning-to-teach process. In this multiple case study, we examined what happens when teacher educators incorporate peer partnerships (Assaf & Lopez, 2015; Hoffman et al., 2018), where PTs coach and mentor each other around literacy teaching practices, within literacy field-based courses. Through our cross-case analysis, we found that peer partnerships scaffolded PTs’ learning by expanding their views of teaching practices, provided space to utilize their literacy content knowledge and literacy pedagogical content knowledge, and facilitated PTs’ development of equity-focused teaching stances. By establishing collaborative approaches to literacy instruction through peer partnerships, PTs served as sources of expertise and knowledge, thus disrupting the expert–novice divide in teacher education courses.

Keywords

preservice teachers literacy teaching peer partnerships field-based equity-focused teaching literacy content knowledge literacy pedagogical content knowledge

Introduction

The current political and education climate places immense pressure upon educators to remediate and accelerate literacy learning of students whose experiences were impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Often described as experiencing “learning loss,” students have been subject to intensive intervention and accelerative instructional practices over the last two years. By limiting teaching to the “essential” standards through scripted programming, educators are left grappling with how to best support students in humanizing and culturally responsive ways (Delaney et al., 2020). Not only do these mandates shape a professional's curricular decision-making but they also reinforce linguistic and epistemological authority to white Mainstream English and culturally dominant ways of being and doing. In response, literacy teacher educators must support preservice teachers (PTs) in developing their criticality (Mosley Wetzel, 2020) and utilize approaches that advance socially just pedagogy (Daly, 2022) to prepare equity-oriented teachers. In our work as literacy teacher educators, we crossed borders to disrupt power relations in our own classrooms throughout the Covid-19 pandemic to center the expertise of all participants, including PTs, and advance our goals for justice-focused literacy teaching.

Within practice-based literacy teacher education, scholarship addresses how PTs’ learning is mediated by experts, including mentorship with equity-oriented classroom teachers (Braden & Gibson, 2021; Hoffman et al., 2018) to support PTs’ criticality (Muhammad, 2020). More recently, researchers have named the affordances of PTs collaborating with peers to develop equity-oriented stances and practices (Assaf & Lopez, 2012, 2015; DeGraff et al., 2015), recognizing PTs as sources of knowledge in the learning-to-teach process. When PTs are positioned as knowledgeable, they can better leverage their expertise for navigating ongoing challenges in the field (Walker, 2020). As our learning contexts shifted between virtual and in-person, we became interested in how peer-mediated learning might disrupt the ways knowledge often flows from expert to novice, which the online context seemed to exacerbate. To leverage PTs’ expertise, we began innovations in our teaching to move across normalized hierarchies and boundaries, offering more equitable experiences that might transfer to their reflective practices.

We investigated iterations of peer partnerships in teaching and learning across multiple literacy course-based contexts as a part of a larger cross-institutional, design-based research project that created opportunities for testing and revising small innovations in our teaching (Bryk et al., 2015). Within our university, we implemented literacy course-based peer partnerships to leverage PTs’ expertise within their learning-to-teach experiences, including reflection on literacy teaching with elementary students. Specifically, we asked: What happens when PTs engage in peer partnerships within course-based literacy experiences?

Theoretical Frameworks

We utilized Vygotsky's (1978) Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and the pedagogical metaphor of scaffolding (Brownfield & Wilkinson, 2018; Wood et al., 1976) to conceptualize how PT peers co-construct knowledge around teaching literacy. Through this lens of scaffolding, or mediated learning around the complex activity of instruction, we focused on how PTs take literacy theory into practice in ways that actualize their learning. In the extant literature, the theoretical tenets of scaffolding assume an expert–novice framework that situates learning around singular notions of knowledge. Much like the ladder or platform metaphor might suggest, this instructional support is applied to transfer a learner's skills to the next level. This conception of scaffolded support is contingent upon the learner's present performance in relation to the performative task or goal at hand. Such framing, which denotes a singular pathway toward success, is driven by an epistemological objectivity that we, alongside Moll and Whitmore (1998), argue is neither critical nor aimed toward liberatory teacher instruction with a diversity of learners.

Engaging with ZPD and scaffolding from a theoretical stance around multiple epistemological orientations to learning, however, shifts the notion of “mastery” toward a spectrum with a diversity of application, requires an intentional broadening around “best practices,” and demands our PTs utilize their own sociocritical, sociocultural literacies to expand meaning around teaching for equity. Under this frame, we reconsidered what knowledges and experiences are of most value, recognizing the need for PTs to look to the side, rather than up, for support. We can no longer only use the levels-metaphor of scaffolding if we look to the side, to our peers, and to the children with whom we work (Gregory et al., 2004). This expansive stance on scaffolding as horizontal or peer-to-peer (without the assumption of a more knowledgeable other [MKO]; Granott, 2005) disrupts the expert–novice divide in much teacher education scholarship by asking how peers’ lived experiences, counterstories (Kelly, 2017), and critical coaching observations (Daly, 2022) push learning outwards. Similar to how teacher education scholars have utilized horizontal expertise to disrupt hierarchical divides between university and school partnerships (Anagnostopoulos et al., 2007), we argue peer partnerships disrupt “scaffolding” as linear or hierarchical and reconceive it as an interrelational, horizontal, and expansive tool of meaning-making.

We also drew upon Shulman's (2004) distinction between content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Shulman explains that while teachers must have sufficient knowledge of their content, they also need sufficient knowledge of the most effective ways to teach this content. This framework highlights how the curriculum in teacher education is about learning and development, knowledge of the content area, and the materials and practices of teaching that relate specifically to that domain. Our study focused specifically on PTs’ literacy instruction, so we utilize the terms literacy content knowledge (LCK) and literacy PCK (LPCK). Often in university-based methods courses, teacher educators operate from a “knowledge-for-practice” stance where a MKO shares “formal knowledge” with teachers in order to improve teaching (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999). Although LCK and LPCK are crucial for effective literacy instruction, we argue that this knowledge does not always need to be disseminated by an expert.

Peer Partnerships in Literacy Teacher Education

As a research team, we initially used definitions and approaches of “peer coaching” (Lu, 2010) to center peer learning when creating instructional practices in our courses. The language of partnerships reflects our choice to steer away from hierarchical, evaluative, and prescriptive models of coaching toward equity-focused ones that emphasize participation, collaboration, and reflection (Mosley Wetzel et al., 2023). Conceptualized in this way, partnerships both disrupt power relations and hierarchical systems within teacher education and make space for more generative ways of supporting PTs. In this review, we summarize existing scholarship featuring peer partnerships in teacher education programs. Specifically, we examine findings within course-based literacy experiences where PTs engaged as partners in learning-to-teach opportunities through collaborative planning and teaching relationships where mentoring, reflecting, and/or coaching one another impacted their development as equity-focused teachers. These findings are in alignment with conceptions of dialogic learning and ZPD (Vygotsky, 1978), which view learning as occurring in social processes with others, specifically in joint activities where problem-solving occurs through collaboration.

Peer Partnerships Grow Teachers’ Identities and Practices

Traditionally, mentoring in teacher education has been conceptualized through expert–novice relationships (Cornu, 2005). More recently, scholars (Ammentorp & Madden, 2014; Lammert & Tily, 2022) have turned to collaborative relationships to position PTs differently; here, PTs partner together as mentors to promote dialogue that shifts their teaching practices and develops critical reflection skills (Cornu, 2005). These nonhierarchical partnerships mean that neither holds “a position of power over the other” (p. 362), bringing attention to how supportive peer partnerships contribute to PTs’ growing identities and practices as teachers.

When PTs engage as co-teachers planning and teaching together, practices become visible to one another, creating opportunities for PTs to envision new possibilities in their teaching (Lammert, 2020). PTs in Lammert and Tily's (2022) study partnered as co-teachers to work alongside small groups of elementary students; these relationships pushed PTs to negotiate their teaching identities on deeper levels as they observed each other and reflected on their own and their partner's decision-making, weighing these actions against their vision of themselves as teachers. Partnerships encouraged PTs to use their agency in decision-making for planning, teaching, and responsiveness to students and created opportunities for coaching as they offered one another suggestions and feedback. However, when PTs entered evaluative spaces in their partnerships, power dynamics shifted and disrupted the learning and reflective process. Other studies (Ammentorp & Madden, 2014; Assaf & Lopez, 2012; 2015) have found PTs appreciated their peer partnership experiences, sharing that supportive feedback from partners contributed to their growing identities as teachers. When PTs encounter tensions in their partnerships, possibilities open for PTs to deepen their problem-solving capacities and learn how to maintain professional, collaborative relationships with colleagues (Ammentorp & Madden, 2014). Each of these studies demonstrates how supportive peer partnerships contribute to PTs’ growing identities and practices as teachers, illuminating how literacy teacher educators might position PTs as essential partners in learning to teach. However, these studies do not identify the role of peers in developing their equity-oriented literacy practices.

Peer Collaboration Supports Responsiveness to Students

Peer partnerships around collaborative planning and teaching opportunities can deepen responsiveness to students (Assaf & Lopez, 2012; 2015; Hoffman et al., 2018). Assaf and Lopez studied how PTs collaboratively designed and taught culturally responsive writing lessons with a partner. PTs took turns teaching or observing and offering feedback before reflecting and debriefing together. Then partners made collaborative teaching decisions and specifically tailored lesson plans for students based on being responsive and on information from teachers and families. Other studies have explored how collaborative peer partnerships support PTs in deepening responsive practices by planning, teaching, and debriefing their instruction with students (DeGraff et al., 2015; Hoffman et al., 2018). DeGraff et al. found consistent partnerships contributed to PTs understandings around collaborative work in teaching. Partnering PTs when learning-to-teach can deepen their capacities for responsive literacy teaching as they reflect and learn together. Although these studies’ findings are both exciting and promising, they do not necessarily address how PTs might deepen one another's capacities for critical, equity-oriented literacy teaching.

Our study seeks to add to the existing literature by intentionally attending to equity and building additional understandings around what happens when PTs interact and collaborate during their learning-to-teach experiences.

Methodology

We used a multiple case study design (Thomas, 2011) to focus on peer partnerships in course-based literacy contexts. Rather than focusing on the case itself, a multiple case study design centers the research on the object or the phenomenon (Thomas, 2011). Each case in our study is bounded within a teacher education course that took place in Fall 2021 or Spring 2022 within the same EC-6 licensure program, with PTs from multiple cohorts as participants. In the section that follows, we provide a short description of each of the peer partnership contexts within the three cases: Cohort A, Cohort B, and Cohort C.

Cohort Contexts

All three cohorts met on elementary school campuses in a large urban school district. Each campus’ demographics include a large population of culturally and linguistically diverse students. As field-based courses, each course dedicates significant time to engaging in literacy practices (e.g., conferring, assessment, word study, interactive read-alouds) alongside elementary students. The reading assessment and development course bridges Science of Teaching Reading (STR) standards with culturally sustaining pedagogy (Wetzel et al., 2020). In response to the deficit perspectives of both teachers’ and young students’ knowledge within the STR discourse, we sought to create a community of practice of disruption, revealing the limitations of STR approaches in this multilingual space with emergent readers (Laman, 2015). The reading methods course builds upon and integrates learning from the reading assessment and development course and focuses on developing specific instructional methods and materials for teaching whole group, small group, and individuals, utilizing the five pillars of literacy. Both courses are grounded in and taught from the perspective that each student brings valuable knowledge, experiences, and literacies into the classroom.

The first case, Cohort A, took place in a multiage preK/K multilingual practicum in the first semester of the three-semester professional development sequence (PDS) during Spring 2022. Seventeen PTs collaboratively planned, taught, and debriefed using a peer coaching protocol designed to develop asset-based assessment using multimodal artifacts. The second case, Cohort B, took place in a second-grade practicum during the first semester of the PDS, also in Spring 2022. Twelve PTs collaboratively planned, taught, and reflected using a slightly different protocol designed to develop responsive literacy lessons for small groups of students, utilizing word study and interactive read-aloud while keeping students’ sociocultural, linguistic, and emotional presence central. The third case, Cohort C, occurred inside a reading methods course with 15 PTs during the second semester of the PDS during Fall 2021. Course assignments and discussions continued to expand on the negotiation process of bridging STR and CSP within an elementary reading classroom. Within Cohort C, data were collected from two teaching contexts. In one, PTs created lesson plans for their second-grade students and engaged in weekly peer coaching sessions. On the other, PTs recorded a read-aloud from their field placement and used this teaching artifact in an additional peer coaching session at the end of the semester.

Preparing for Peer Partnerships Across Contexts

The course instructors took different approaches to preparing PTs for peer partnership activities within each literacy course and were intentional in guiding partnerships to be generative for PTs’ learning. For example, in Fall 2021 with Cohort C, Liz and Heather assigned peer partners based on observations of PTs’ engagement with the course and provided sentence stems for peers to use during coaching sessions, revising them three times throughout the course (see Appendix 1). The peer coaching sentence stems were derived from our critical and justice-focused coaching work (Mosley Wetzel et al., 2023; Mosley Wetzel et al., 2017), connected to our teacher preparation program's social justice cross-cutting themes, and responsive to our observations of PTs’ peer coaching sessions. After the first week of peer coaching, Liz and Heather noticed that the majority of the peer coaching sessions focused on affirmations, rather than inquiring or offering suggestions, and adjusted the sentence stem prompts accordingly. Upon reflecting at the end of the semester, Liz and Heather found a greater need for modeling a peer coaching conversation so PTs could see and hear vivid examples of how to support each other. This prompted the instructors to model peer coaching interactions at the beginning of the Spring 2022 semester with Cohort B and Cohort A.

Drawing from Mosley Wetzel and colleagues’ (2017) coaching model, the instructors took on the roles of peer-teaching-partners and modeled teacher observation “POP” cycles (preconference, observation, postconference) with their students. Peer partnerships met for 15 min before mentoring (Cohort C) or 10 min before and 15 min after mentoring (Cohort A, Cohort B) to discuss their teaching. As teacher educators across courses, our mentoring approaches embedded similar dialogic practices (e.g., debriefing on selected teaching moments) and peer-coaching supports, including (but not limited to) co-constructing sentence stems (see Appendix 1), modeling depth and foci of participation, sitting alongside partnerships and providing support in giving feedback, and collecting explicit use of teacher and student languaging based on individual goals and concerns. In each context, we refined our toolkits as needed. In this way, our team of instructor–researchers continually nuanced the necessary routines and learning environments that would support the development of equity-focused peer-partnerships.

Data Collection and Analysis

Within these experiences, PTs designed weekly literacy lesson plans for elementary students, reflected on practice through peer coaching sessions, and leveraged their learnings into future planning and summative assignments. Artifacts for analysis included summative reflections, such as mentoring final case reports, final exam notes, and literature unit reflections; lesson plan reflections; and oral and written peer feedback on lesson plans (see Appendix 2). These artifacts represent PTs’ peer coaching within their respective practicums.

We conducted cross-case analysis in which “the analytic frame is provided by the comparison” (Thomas, 2011, p.145). We systematically compared all data sources through constant comparative methods (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and engaged in multiple rounds of open and axial coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) to develop themes that captured and summarized the contents of the data. In our first round of coding, we generated 72 open codes using language that remained close to the data across the three cases (e.g., peer mentoring encourages use of home language, reflecting on practice around prereading strategies). We then collapsed the open codes into 35 categories and brought in our theoretical framework focused on scaffolding to guide our analysis. Finally, we arrived at three themes: expansive teaching practices, LCK and LPCK, and equity-focused teaching stances. To give voice to these three themes, we identified data excerpts from across the cases that contained strong alignment between the participants’ own language and the larger themes. This analytic method facilitated a continuous examination of the data to develop understanding of the participants’ perspectives and experiences (Thomas, 2011).

Positionality

It is important to note our dual identities as researchers and course instructors throughout this research process. As course instructors, we were able to design and tailor the peer partnership structure to meet the needs of each cohort. Members of our research team identify as white, monolingual English-speakers and individually have 5–30 years of experience as elementary and secondary classroom teachers. Our approaches to literacy instruction and the preparation of PTs are grounded in our teacher education program's vision of creating a more equitable and just society through educational practices.

Findings

Our study sought to determine what happens when PTs engage in peer partnerships within course-based literacy experiences. Through data analysis across the three cases, three themes emerged. First, peer partnerships allowed PTs to expand their views on teaching practices. Second, engaging in peer partnerships provided opportunities for PTs to try on and try out language related to LCK and LPCK. Finally, the peer partnerships helped facilitate PTs’ development of equity-focused teaching stances. We argue that expanding views and languaging around literacy teaching across contexts disrupt epistemological hierarchies of expertise, as further discussed in the following sections.

Expansive Teaching Practices

Across cohorts, we found that peer partnerships expanded PTs’ perceptions around early literacy teaching practices and, like Lammert (2020), that these teaching practices became more visible to PTs through their peer partnerships. Within this collaborative space, PTs scaffolded each other's understanding of teaching practices by encouraging responsiveness, sharing new perspectives on teaching, and reflecting on teaching practices.

Encouraging Responsive Teaching Moves

Although all three courses focused on responsive literacy instruction, peer partnerships became the space where PTs expanded what this looked like in practice. Together, PTs encouraged each other to create lesson plans that responded to students’ literary skills and interests while also encouraging responsiveness at the moment. For example, after sharing a video of her read-aloud with her peer partner, Sarah reflected on the ways she could have been more responsive:

[My peer coach] encouraged me to try and interact with all the students, as she noticed one of my quiet boys [was] not talking. She prompted my thinking about how to reach all the students in my class.… I thought about the comment and how I could engage him with one-on-one questioning if I went to him and his partner's turn-and-talk to support their discussion. (Summative Reflection, Cohort C)

In this example, Sarah's peer partner offered an outsider perspective by noticing one student's lack of participation during Sarah's read-aloud. Encouraging her to be responsive to the needs of this student, Sarah's peer partner prompted Sarah to envision a way she could engage her student during a turn-and-talk.

In another setting, PTs worked together to create a lesson plan that met the needs of two early readers. Through their collaborative lesson planning, instruction, and reflection, peer partners Sammy and Tonya determined their students’ “different strengths and areas that need[ed] more focus” and brainstormed how to “use what [they] learned” to make their future lesson plans more responsive (Lesson Plan Reflection, Cohort B).

Sharing New Perspectives on Teaching

In multiple summative reflections, PTs shared how peer partnerships provided new perspectives on their teaching. Having a peer throughout the planning, instruction, and reflection process “allowed [PTs] to see small details that [they had] missed or sometimes even the big picture” (Deb, Summative Reflection, Cohort A). Additionally, PTs gained new perspectives on teaching and learned about new teaching practices by sharing video-recorded lessons with their partners. For example, Melanie learned a strategy for supporting multilingual learners during a read-aloud:

I loved watching my peer's video because I got to take away some things she did that I like and want to bring into my lessons. For example, she gave a lot of time for questions because one of the students didn’t speak English and was translating for another student. It was cool to get a peek into her classroom and see how she molded her lesson around her students to let every student get a chance to answer while also keeping time and getting to the point of the lesson. (Summative Reflection, Cohort C)

In Melanie's teaching placement, she did not have many multilingual students in her classroom. Thus, she gained a new perspective, and teaching tool, through watching her peer teach in a different context. Ultimately, PTs agreed that having a peer going through a similar experience in terms of learning to work with young readers was helpful for sharing ideas and gaining new perspectives. As Zara concluded, “I think that it definitely showed me the power of talking with fellow teachers and learning their perspectives on certain situations” (Summative Reflection, Cohort A).

Literacy Content Knowledge and LPCK

Our second finding foregrounds the ways peer partnerships provided space for horizontal sharing and affirming of PTs’ LCK and LPCK. We found that PTs tried on and tried out content vocabulary and teacher language related to literacy pedagogies. Additionally, peer partnerships provided space for PTs to push each other for the specificity of teaching practices while utilizing this knowledge.

Trying On and Trying Out Language

As PTs engaged in peer partnerships, opportunities arose for PTs to utilize language drawn from their LCK and LPCK. Across cohorts, PTs met with peers to provide feedback on lesson plans, plan together, or collaboratively reflect on their work with elementary students. These communal moments became places where PTs could employ specific literacy content vocabulary, a necessary component for effective literacy teachers. In a written comment about her peer partner's lesson plan, Cassie wrote, “The sticker story game builds on the learner's ability to infer” (Cohort C, Peer Feedback). Here, Cassie affirmed her partner's literacy activity selection and connected it to her LCK by naming a specific comprehension strategy and inferring. Other PTs made similar connections as they affirmed their partners’ lesson plans and connected the activities to their LCK focused on specific phonics skills such as digraphs and blends (Nayeli, Cohort C, Peer Feedback).

Working together, PTs had opportunities to showcase both their LCK and LPCK through lesson plan reflections:

We only had time to discuss my read-aloud activity. [My partner] suggested that with the read aloud, I should focus on words that rhymed, close the book, and write on sticky notes to isolate the words and take away the distractions of illustrations. The other professor also highlighted that it could be useful to ask the student what in the illustration rhymes with the words I am asking, as a way to connect her interests in the illustration with what I am trying to highlight in rhyming, alliteration, etc. (Greta, Lesson Plan Reflection, Cohort A)

Here, Greta shared how her peer partner offered suggestions about a word work activity that was an extension of her read-aloud. Greta used language related to her LCK (i.e., rhyming words, alliteration) and drew a clear line to her LPCK as she worked through a teaching practice, suggested by her peer, that encourages the young reader to focus on the sounds and letters within a word without the support (or distraction) of the text's illustrations. Across cohorts, PTs collaborated with peers to try on and try out language that showcased both their LCK and LPCK. From a teacher learning perspective, PTs utilized this language in an authentic learning space, connecting to their work with young readers.

Pushing for Specificity of Teaching

PTs also showcased their LCK and LPCK as they pushed their partners to be more specific within their lesson planning and instruction. Often this took the shape of inquiring about literacy pedagogy and pushing their partners to think through common language used to describe early literacy practices. In Cassie's feedback to her peer partner she asked, “What do you mean you will have your buddy read with you? Will they read a page and alternate?” (Peer Feedback, Cohort C). Buddy reading is a common early reading practice where two or more readers determine a method of reading a shared text together. The second part of Cassie's question showcased her knowledge of this practice by offering a structure for the buddy reading in the form of a question to her partner.

Other peer partnerships pushed for specificity within emergent literacy assessments. In one reflection, Deb puzzled around whether or not her student truly did not know her letter names and sounds or if the student was just reluctant to answer. Deb's partner offered the following advice:

Try breaking down the phonics assessment. For example, try doing a few letters at the beginning, some in the middle, and the rest at the end. When she does not know a letter, emphasize that it's okay and reassure the student. (Lesson Plan Reflection, Cohort A)

Through this reflection, both PTs leveraged their LPCK to grapple with structuring an assessment for a specific young reader. Together, they determined that chunking the letter sound assessment would be a helpful solution for eliciting the student's phonics knowledge. To push for specificity in their peers’ lesson planning and instruction, PTs needed to draw on their LPCK to think deeply about the best ways to structure literacy activities for their students.

Equity-Focused Teaching Stances

Our third finding shows that peer partnerships facilitated PTs’ development of equity-focused teaching stances. We locate participants’ emerging stances across several “moments” in their practice—enacting appreciative lenses, disrupting norms, and attending to criticality. Each of these moments, described below, represents what Ladson-Billings (2021) has described as “step[ping] through sliding glass doors to better understand the perspectives that students bring with them and to support their students’ cultural practices” (p. 77). By framing PTs’ movements into the world of equity-focused teaching as steps into stances, we approach scaffolding as horizontally expansive, recognizing that for PTs and teacher educators, equity-focused teaching stances are contextual and ever-growing.

Enacting Appreciative Lenses

PTs stepped toward equity by enacting appreciative lenses that recognized students’ strengths. These included aspects of children's identities (e.g., artist, bilingual speaker, mathematician) and more contextual literacy-specific strengths (e.g., word-breaking and word-making, oral fluency, making connections). Rather than focus solely on assessing gaps in students’ knowledge, participants also centered the literacy “gems” (Bomer, 2010) in their students’ activities.

These appreciative lenses fostered culturally sustaining (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Alim & Paris, 2017) practices with multilingual students (Dunham et al., 2022). For example, working with an Afghan-American child, Greta reflected: “What I learned about my student's strengths from the read-aloud is that she is able to connect words that she sees in books to words in Pashto” (Lesson Plan Reflection, Cohort A). After Greta explicitly invited her student's linguistic repertoire into the lesson (by labeling favorite words), the child extended the translingual (see García et al., 2017) teaching by translating vocabulary from a shared picture book into Pashto, too. Reflecting with a peer, Greta concluded: “[My student] is able to code switch between languages when she is listening to words read aloud.” Through their partnership, both Greta and her peer came to understand how a child's emergent multilingualism represents literacy ability rather than an English deficiency, moving toward an equity stance.

PTs leveraged these appreciative lenses to engage in responsive teaching. Whether selecting books from students’ favorite genres or subjects, intentionally incorporating drawing or games, or providing mentor texts, PTs used peer partnership conversations to brainstorm ways to make their lessons more inclusive of and tailored toward students. Often, like Zara, they recognized how their students made meaning: “Today I learned that [my student] thinks like an artist and has a vision in her mind ready to go” (Lesson Plan Reflection, Cohort A). Other times, like Hank, they located gems where students themselves did not: “For G, I think her vocabulary is more vast than she thinks it is” (Lesson Plan Reflection, Cohort B). This asset-based attentiveness was nourished by peer partners who appreciatively wondered about their students’ strengths, too.

Disrupting Norms

PTs’ equity-focused stances pushed them to read the words and worlds (see Freire & Macedo, 1987) of the children in their care beyond the sort of single stories (Adichie, 2009) that teaching in isolation tends to perpetuate. When Deb observed her kindergarten-age mentee struggle to identify sounds on a phonemic awareness assessment, she initially concluded that the student “either did not know any of the letters except j or… simply did not want to engage in the activity” (Deb, Lesson Plan Reflection, Cohort A). During a peer partner session following the lesson, however, Deb reframed her initial (and quite normative) reading of a perceived lack of alphabetic knowledge or interest through the child's perspective. She inquired:

I wonder if my student truly does not know her letters or if she was just reluctant and scared of giving me an answer. I wonder if there is another way to conduct my phonics assessment, without putting too much pressure on my student. (Lesson Plan Reflection, Cohort A)

As their conversation unfolded, Deb's peer suggested chunking the assessment into manageable parts shared at different points during the entirety of the tutoring session. Rather than move on from the assessment, Deb recorded the following notes to guide her lesson planning: “…try doing a few letters at the beginning, some in the middle, and the rest at the end. When she does not know a letter, emphasize that it's okay and reassure my student” (Lesson Plan Reflection, Cohort A). Here, we see Deb shift her assessment approach to better serve the socioemotional and contextual desires of her student. Through peer partnership, the phonemic awareness assessment became more than a normative checklist for leveling a student's reading ability; the PTs reorganized it as a transformative tool for coming to know the reading strengths of and for developing relationships with children.

Peer partnerships also pushed PTs to disrupt norms about children's perceived identities. Ren, co-teaching with Tara, noticed a student's strong response to a story about a boy who felt broken. Together, Ren and Tara reflected on what this meant for their teaching beyond making connections: “This had us thinking about how much of his behavior is a result of the things he hears about his behavior. [Our student] did AMAZING and was super engaged!” (Lesson Plan Reflection, Cohort B). Teaching and reflecting with Tara facilitated Ren's deeper reading into their student as a person, evidenced in this comment, “Based on his response to the book, I think he feels a little misunderstood… I am glad Tara had this book selected so we could see this side of him” (Lesson Plan Reflection, Cohort B). Here, peer partnerships and co-teaching pushed PTs to engage in critical empathy—critical of the norms of schooling and empathetic toward children as people with their own stories to tell… or not tell. Ren and Tara's conversation about their student's subtle response to a story represents the sort of reflection that teaching children requires. By disrupting norms, they stepped toward equity.

Attending to Criticality

Connected to PTs’ enactment of appreciative lenses and disruption of norms, we locate moments in which PTs explicitly attended to criticality, or the ability to engage in literacy acts “with an understanding of how power, anti-oppression, and equity operates throughout society” (Muhammad, 2020, p. 117), as part of their emerging equity-focused teaching stances. Attending to criticality, in our view, is an essential part of PTs’ LPCK.

After observing a videotaped lesson of her peer conducting a small group read-aloud of a book with sociopolitical themes, Ivy wondered “if small groups were a better place to have critical conversations and discussions, as it is easier for everyone's voice to be heard” (Summative Reflection, Cohort C). Having the opportunity to step into and reflect on a peer's lesson pushed Ivy to think critically about the affordances and constraints of different discursive structures. Ivy noted that “the dynamic was slightly different” from her own whole-class read-aloud and described her peer's students as “exploring through the book rather than simply reading it,” because “the kids could talk and discuss more freely [than in a whole-class setting], not having to worry about raising hands or talking over others” (Summative Reflection, Cohort C). In this instance, peer partnerships pushed Ivy to interrogate how power operates within critical conversations during whole-group and small-group discussions; she noticed that relaxing “the rules” of teacher-centered talk created more equitable space for multiple voices to share and be heard.

Likewise, Hank explicitly named the disruption of power dynamics as a strength of co-teaching a small group of students with his peer partner. Following a reflective session with his partner, Hank noted: “There was definitely a lot of negotiating and cooperating… I liked this though, because it really paints all of us as a community of learners rather than as a teacher/student hierarchy” (Lesson Plan Reflection, Cohort B). For Hank, teaching and reflecting with a peer pushed him to think metacognitively about the critical issue of power. Thus, through peer partnerships, PTs attended to criticality within the content, design, and implementation of their teaching, further developing their equity-focused stances.

Discussion

By implementing peer partnerships across different literacy teaching experiences and course contexts, we learned how peers become trusted sources that make teaching practices visible in approachable and thoughtful ways. As PTs shared teaching spaces, both live and retroactively, they co-witnessed one another's decision-making and actions, allowing them to internalize observable moments and envision future teaching.

Historically, literacy teacher education has employed different models and structures to mediate PTs’ learning. Our teacher education program embraces communal approaches to teaching and learning; therefore, we intentionally positioned PTs as knowledgeable professionals (Barnhart, 2020; Haneda et al., 2019), capable of supporting one another in their growing identities and practices as teachers. As our findings demonstrate, offering PTs authentic, community-centered learning spaces to try on new practices with trusted and encouraging peers equipped them to apply the numerous, complex, and often intimidating components of literacy instruction. By examining peer partnerships across different spaces, we learned that peer partners are essential in learning to teach literacy.

In partnerships, peers became knowledgeable mirrors, making teaching practices visible to the teacher. PTs, as partners, noticed and named (and sometimes questioned) what each other was doing, which allowed them to see the choices they made and how their students responded. Further, peer partnerships were crucial to support PTs in internalizing their learning (Ball, 2009; Vygotsky, 1978). Specifically, this horizontal scaffolding facilitated internalization of the expansive teaching practices, LCK and LPCK, and equity-focused teaching stances that they encountered across the program.

The conversation spaces where PTs debriefed, reflected, and planned together became essential for enhancing reflective thought and action, and developing the tools and dispositions for designing inclusive and responsive literacy lessons (Assaf & Lopez, 2015; Lammert & Tily, 2022). There, PTs questioned and challenged themselves and each other to form more nuanced understandings of children. This process echoes what Ball (2009) calls generative change, or teachers’ ability to connect personal and professional knowledge to the knowledge and desires of their students as they generate new ways to be pedagogical problem-solvers and agents of change. According to Ball (2009), teacher learners move toward generativity when “the processes of cognitive change…take place within an individual's zone of proximal development” where “he or she is allowed to grow within safe spaces where risk taking is encouraged” (p. 66). This process is particularly impactful for PTs entering culturally and linguistically complex classrooms. As the documented sociocultural mismatch between teacher and student populations (National Center for Education Statistics, 2019) suggests, PTs need support in “developing their voices on issues of diversity and becoming generative in their thinking” (Ball, 2009, p. 48). Indeed, across contexts, peer partnerships became sites of inquiry for applying critical lenses that interrogated their own understandings, teaching, and experiences. In other words, peer partnerships horizontally scaffold PTs’ generativity. Within these contexts, PTs collaborated to try on and enact expansive teaching practices, LCK and LCPK, and equity-focused stances within their zones of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978). We argue that establishing such collaborative orientations to planning, teaching, and reflection prepares PTs to seek out their future colleagues for generative conversations as they continue to grow their practice.

In a Vygotskian sense, PTs collaborated not with “more capable peers” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86) but across the mediated space of peer partnerships in which the MKO became less important than co-constructing learning as fellow agentive participants. The reciprocal and responsive nature of these peer conversations disrupted notions of teacher knowledge as hierarchical, fixed, and one-size-fits-all. Rather, by reflecting on their experiences, wrestling with themes from courses and fieldwork, and committing to justice and equity, PTs positioned themselves, their peers, and—most importantly—their culturally and linguistically diverse students as knowledgeable partners in learning. They acquired, then, not just knowledge of content and pedagogy but the capability to use acquired knowledge to reinvent their practices so their teaching and learning are interdependent rather than separate (Ball, 2009). In this sense, learning to teach became not a fixed goal but a constant, iterative process within specific sociocultural contexts.

Implication and Limitations

Ball (2009) has called on teacher educators to expand our “conception of student knowledge as an important resource in the professional development of teachers” (p. 70). Across three semesters of a PDS, we found increasing opportunities to disrupt expert–novice binaries and leverage the growing experiences and expertise of PTs in collective and communal ways (Barnhart 2020; Walker, 2020). At the institutional level, our study allowed for improving internal alignment to our college's cross-cutting themes as we prepared PTs to teach toward a more just society for all. Systematically examining iterations of peer partnerships across different teacher education courses within one program brings forward insights into how teacher education might address equity in different ways. We see the following implications for programs bringing peer partnerships into courses and fieldwork.

First, programs should intentionally position PTs as experts who have teaching and coaching knowledge (Barnhart 2020; Walker, 2020). In order for PTs to agentically examine their own teaching practices, they need to be seen as teachers and coaches. Language used in program documents and coaching protocols must emphasize this agentic positioning, and faculty across courses can create those guiding documents to ensure they are aligned with course objectives as well. Second, within their guiding vision documents, programs should connect collaborative experiences with reflection. Relatedly, teacher educators might link multiple courses across semesters to the guiding principles around collaborative reflection opportunities, focusing on how to build these experiences so PTs continuously grow in their reflective capacities.

Although the variability across the contexts led to a rich data set, we recognize that these data are limited to one semester each and that we do not have the longitudinal data to see how peer partnerships supported PTs over time. Future research is needed to follow PTs throughout their teacher education program and into the profession to further understand how peer partnerships support PTs. Moreover, research should examine the type of impact peer mentorships have on participants’ perceptions of coaching and mentoring once they enter the field.

Future research should also explore how the field prepares teachers to work in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms, creating spaces where PTs embody their own expertise in peer partnerships. Continuing to explore these interactions allows us an opportunity to learn from and alongside PTs in our teacher education programs about the ways such partnerships can support PTs’ developing identities and practices as teachers. Additionally, we envision peer partnerships enacted within inservice teacher professional development as a way to further value teachers’ expertise and to create spaces for continued growth. Exploring this might identify how sharing horizontal expertise can be used to “find innovative solutions to the compelling dilemmas that characterize the everyday work life” of inservice teachers as well as PTs (Zeichner et al., 2015, p. 125).

In closing, we return to Zara, who recognized “the power of talking with fellow teachers and learning their perspectives” to illuminate how teaching is community work. We encourage all teachers, from preservice to veteran, to continually position themselves as teacher learners who reconsider their knowledge, experience, and perspectives alongside their colleagues as partners committed to pushing boundaries toward literacy teaching that is critical and responsive for all children. We are better together when we remain open and willing to learn and grow as we all share our expertise, affirm each other's perspectives, ask questions, and nudge each other toward transformation.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-lrx-10.1177_23813377231182096 - Supplemental material for Look to the Side: Peer Partnerships in Preservice Literacy Teacher Education

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-lrx-10.1177_23813377231182096 for Look to the Side: Peer Partnerships in Preservice Literacy Teacher Education by Elizabeth Ries, Heather Dunham, Kelsie Corriston, Kerry Alexander, Valerie Taylor and Melissa Mosley Wetzel in Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-2-lrx-10.1177_23813377231182096 - Supplemental material for Look to the Side: Peer Partnerships in Preservice Literacy Teacher Education

Supplemental material, sj-docx-2-lrx-10.1177_23813377231182096 for Look to the Side: Peer Partnerships in Preservice Literacy Teacher Education by Elizabeth Ries, Heather Dunham, Kelsie Corriston, Kerry Alexander, Valerie Taylor and Melissa Mosley Wetzel in Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Elizabeth Ries

Heather Dunham

Melissa Mosley Wetzel

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Author Biographies

Elizabeth Ries, Kelsie Corriston, Kerry Alexander, and Valerie Taylor are doctoral candidates and graduate instructors in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Language and Literacy Studies, at the University of Texas at Austin.

Heather Dunham is an assistant professor of literacy education at Clemson University.

Melissa Mosley Wetzel is chair of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and a professor of language and literacy studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

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