Look to the Side: Peer Partnerships in Preservice Literacy Teacher Education

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.