Invisible Forces: Portraits of Instructional Approaches to Mindset Development in Secondary and Postsecondary Writing Classes
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Invisible Forces: Portraits of Instructional Approaches to Mindset Development in Secondary and Postsecondary Writing Classes The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Liu, Pei Pei. 2019. Invisible Forces: Portraits of Instructional Approaches to Mindset Development in Secondary and Postsecondary Writing Classes. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42081668 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Invisible Forces: Portraits of Instructional Approaches to Mindset Development in Secondary and Postsecondary Writing Classes Pei Pei Liu Mandy Savitz-Romer Karen Brennan Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Education of Harvard University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education 2019 © 2019 Pei Pei Liu All Rights Reserved i For my father 劉 志 隆 1942-2018 ii Acknowledgments I am indebted to so many for this work. First and foremost, I thank my parents, Triung Yueh Yang and Shih-Long Liu, who always put their three kids first and, in raising us outside of their birth country, conquered challenges that I did not fully appreciate until far too late into adulthood. I try to enact my gratitude for what you have given me by working for the benefit of others. I am thankful also to my whole family for nurturing me—literally and figuratively—throughout six years of doctoral study, and beyond. I am grateful for the guidance and mentorship of my committee. My advisor, Mandy Savitz-Romer, has always supported the practitioner perspective in my developing researcher identity and provided a model to me for carving out meaningful work, cultivating fruitful professional relationships and collaborations, and continuously learning and developing. Karen Brennan always answered my questions, maddeningly, with more questions that ultimately pushed me to be precise, explain my thinking, and exercise my own agency in making decisions. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot challenged me to balance empirical rigor with an openness to the transcendent and ineffable, a lesson not just for this dissertation but for life that I hope to carry forward. Megan Powell Cuzzolino and Bryan Mascio provided invaluable feedback, analytic assistance, and emotional support on this project, and Rebecca Wiseman Lee was another stalwart reader, sounding board, empathizer, sanity check, and, as ever, a critical friend. The camaraderie from the rest of the 2013 Ed.D. cohort sustained me though these past six years, as did the advice of those who graduated before us but continued to look back, notably Maya Weilundemo Ott, Aaliyah El-Amin, Candice Bocala, and Jessica Fei, who supplied some perspective and advice at a time when I badly needed some. I thank Bridget Terry Long, Jon Star, and Dana McCoy for their support of my earlier work and overall development as a researcher; Matt Miller, for being my tireless cheerleader and advocate; and Kathy Boudett, for embodying the habits of mind I aspire to (and for facilitating an eleventh-hour Australian writing retreat!). Josh Bookin helped ensure that the work I undertook to fund my doctoral studies was rich and rewarding. I am also fortunate to have had the backing and mentorship of Frannie Moyer, Susan Markowitz, Marya Levenson, and Lisa Smulyan for this journey. For their help at various stages of the dissertation conceptualization and development process, I thank Treseanne Ainsworth, Sheldon Berman, Patricia Bizzell, Arria Coburn, Maria DiPietro, Amy Gonzalez, Steve Mahoney, Peter Nguyen, David Perda, Jennifer Plante, Meghan Rosa, Modhumita Roy, Daniel St. Louis, Adina Schecter, and Nancy Sommers. This work would not have happened without you. Finally, to my participants, the educators I call Diane, Zachary, Liz, and Colin. The experience of original data collection with you, and then revisiting your classrooms through my field notes and reliving our conversations through interview transcripts and recordings, has been infinitely rewarding and enlightening to me. I am truly honored to have been entrusted with your teaching practice. Thank you. iii Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................................. iv Chapter 1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2. Literature Review ............................................................................................................ 13 Chapter 3. Methodology .................................................................................................................... 36 Chapter 4. Making the Team: “I belong in this academic community” ..................................... 54 Chapter 5. Choosing Your Adventure: “This work has value for me” ...................................... 90 Chapter 6. Trusting the Process: “My ability and competence grow with my effort” ........... 122 Chapter 7. Mastering the Game: “I can succeed at this” ........................................................... 157 Chapter 8. Synthesis and Discussion ............................................................................................. 192 Chapter 9. Implications and Conclusion ...................................................................................... 209 Appendices ........................................................................................................................................ 222 References ......................................................................................................................................... 229 iv Abstract Synthesizing a broad swath of motivational and psychosocial literature, the Consortium on Chicago School Research identifies four “academic mindsets” (I belong in this academic community; My ability and competence grow with my effort; I can succeed at this; and This work has value for me) that predict positive academic and social outcomes for students. These mindsets and their analogous constructs increasingly appear in college readiness and success frameworks as critical factors for college attainment, academic performance, persistence, and completion. Yet student mindsets are particularly vulnerable at school transitions, and despite frequent calls for the expansive field of motivational research to be “translated” into practice, an understanding of how to foster and maintain students’ positive mindsets across the college transition remains surprisingly elusive. Specifically, inadequate attention has been paid to how secondary and postsecondary educators understand student mindsets and seek to influence them through intentional instructional design and pedagogical practices. To address this gap in the literature, I conducted a multi-case portraiture study of 12th-grade English teachers and instructors of first-year college writing (N=4). Through interviews, classroom observations, and document analysis, I explored these educators’ understandings of academic mindsets and their pedagogical enactment of those understandings. I find that the educators’ understandings and enactments of positive mindset development often converged with extant theory but were complex and sometimes contradictory, manifesting in pedagogical tensions and tradeoffs. I identify two main instructional growth edges for supporting student mindset development in secondary and postsecondary classrooms: greater transparency about instructional intent and more comprehensive metacognitive scaffolding to assist students with motivational meaning- v making. Additionally, I discuss the emergence of parallel mindset processes in the focal classrooms: the educators’ approaches to promoting student mindsets often illuminated characteristics of their own mindsets toward teaching, particularly their growth and efficacy mindsets. I therefore conclude with recommendations for how institutional actors and researchers can support educators’ teaching mindsets and mastery of motivating instructional strategies, paralleling the supports we want educators to provide to students across the critical college transition. 1 Chapter 1 Introduction I am on hall duty when Damian1 is kicked out of algebra class for the third consecutive school day. On Friday, he apparently called the teacher a “fucking bitch.” On Monday, he was thrown out as soon as he stepped through the door because the teacher was still angry about Friday and thought Damian should have been suspended (but had not drawn up the paperwork to initiate the process). Today—which is also the last day before the math MCAS2 exam that Damian and the rest of the 10th grade will be taking—he was talking in class, Damian says as he shuffles slowly toward me at the hall monitoring table. It is May 2008, and I am nearly through an exhausting third year at Charlestown High School in Boston. After teaching 11th and 12th grade my first two years here, I was shifted to the “lower school” to fill a vacant slot that was initially supposed to be four sections of ninth-grade English. Charlestown High, however, had also just acquired a new headmaster