Productive Discussions to Support Text Comprehension: Specific Skills and Knowledge in Teachers’ Education

Abstract

The teacher education research has revealed that the teachers need to learn high-leverage practices for an effective instruction. This exploratory and cross-sectional study seeks to describe and characterize the 125 Elementary Teaching students’ performances in three moments of the initial teacher education disciplinary course (year 1), methods course (year 2) and the field experience (year 3) in different tasks that decompose the practice of facilitating text-based discussion for reading comprehension: text analysis and text difficulties, decision making to facilitate the discussion, identification of evidences and misconceptions, and productive discussion observation. This study contributes with empirical evidences to advance in the assessment of specific skills and knowledge on a crucial high-leverage practice for reading instruction; the significant differences identified help to determine trends of professional learning that integrate disciplinary and pedagogical content knowledge based on practice.