During the first year, Tricia remained firmly planted in the No Attempt level of Appropriation, while 83% of
her peers moved through Superficial, Supported, and on toward Masterful Appropriation. When interviewing Tricia
about her early reluctance to engage in QAR instruction, I learned that a negative experience with revolving-door
professional development early in her career may have slowed her uptake of the QAR professional development.
Tricia:
I went to this (week long) elaborate training... And never used it... it was workshop after
workshop after workshop with tons of lovely parting gifts, which of course I never used
(Teacher Interview, 3/20/07).
Tricia had concluded early on that QAR would be disposed of at Plato, just as previous instructional initiatives had
been, and demonstrated reluctance to incorporate the new practice into classroom routines. Regardless of her
resistance, I continued to cultivate a supportive relationship with Tricia, hoping that she could trust me enough to
begin an attempt with QAR.
Phase II – Limited Understanding. Trailing the QAR pack, Tricia unexpectedly demonstrated evidence of
using QAR in the classroom in late November of the second year. One morning, I popped into her classroom for a
brief greeting and was surprised to spot a student-created QAR question sheet pinned to the front board. During our
brief, casual conversation, Tricia offered no explanation of the QAR artifact. I left her room hoping she had started to
genuinely use QAR as a result of emerging understanding rather than as a response to administrative pressure. My
hopes seemed dashed, however, at the next professional-development workshop, when her strong, verbal
challenges of QAR continued to test me.
Whether or not Tricia was convinced that QAR had value for her students, she had begun to demonstrate use
of QAR in her classroom. Tricia allowed me to enter her classroom for support and feedback as she experimented
with QAR lessons. Her lessons were basic replications of QAR workshop activities, perfunctorily moving through the
process of creating and recording questions for comprehension. In one observation, I noted that she was holding an
index card with questions that had been created at our most recent QAR workshop. She was reading the first few
words of each to guide students’ QAR question formation, but with little success. In my field notes, I recorded,
“Tricia’s QAR lesson didn’t help students construct meaning of text. She still doesn’t seem confident using QAR
beyond the most basic level” (Field Notes, 2/25/05).
An end-of-year interview provided a window into Tricia’s increasing levels of understanding of QAR over the
time she was enacting the lessons I had observed:
Tricia:
Tam:
Tricia:
At first, QAR was a very isolated strategy, your way of QAR I would do - just identifying and
creating. So what does that have to do with anything? I was able to identify a question. How
the strategy helped I wasn’t sure.
But you continued to use it. Why?
You were very convincing [both laugh]. No, seriously, in every conversation we had, I started
seeing it and better understanding it (Teacher Interview, 3/20/07).
Tricia spent the remainder of Year Two in Superficial Enactment of QAR while I continued to build a trusting
relationship with Tricia and foster QAR experimentation and thinking. The gap between Tricia and her peers was
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