Transforming future teachers' ideas about writing instruction

In our combined experience of nearly ten years, we have seen the goals of methods courses in writing grow and deepen. Today, we think of teaching writing as a process of 'scaffolding', or supporting children's language development in ways that broaden the writer's expressive possibilities, deepen her or his understanding of written language and text, and socialize the young writer into the role of literate adult (see, for example, Murray 1979, Calkins 1986, Graves 1983). It is our responsibility and challenge to initiate prospective teachers, who may not have been taught writing in this way, into the problems and possibilities of teaching the writing process inventively and meaningfully. After more than twelve years participating in school literacy events, teacher candidates come to us with prior knowledge of what writing is and how it is taught. However, this knowledge is limited in several ways. First, it is limited to what teacher candidates have learned about writing from the pupil's point of view. Second, what teacher candidates have already learned about teacher thinking and pedagogy is based on informal childhood observations of teachers while participating in lessons. Third, learning from one's experience as a pupil typically reflects status quo rather than state-of-the-art practice (Florio-Ruane 1989). In this paper we describe a course that offered opportunities for prospective teachers to transform their prior experiences of teaching, writing, and children as they began to assume the role of the teacher. We then assess how this curriculum was experienced by the teacher candidates.