| The purpose of this dissertation was to examine the adoption of cognitive writing strategies in the eleventh grade writing workshop. New York State students in the eleventh grade English Language Arts classroom are facing a “high stakes” graduation requirement in the newly revised New York State English Regents exam, and this research was designed to contribute to our understanding of how teachers and students make use of a Best Practice innovation designed to prepare for the exam.; The dissertation studied the process of implementing an educational innovation which combined writing workshop and writing strategy methods, for the specific purpose of preparing students for the eleventh grade English Regents exam in one rural high school. The study followed the process of implementing the innovation in a single classroom over a two-year period.; Participants were eleventh grade students and two teachers of English, the researcher one who introduced the innovation, and the other who adopted it. Data included videotapes of writing workshop classrooms, audio/video taped interviews of teachers and students, examples of student work, and recordings of classroom discourse. These data were analyzed for patterns and themes to describe, in a fully contextualized manner, how the theory and pedagogy of writing workshop and cognitive writing strategy instruction were co-constructed in practice by participants in a classroom setting.; Conclusions to this study, indicated that when teacher and students co-construct meaning involved in the adoption and implementation of a specific cognitive writing strategy, writers have a better understanding of how to use the strategy as a means to problem solve contextualized writing tasks. The adoption and implementation of the thinksheet strategy in this study appeared to have assisted both teacher and students in preparation for the newly revised English Regents over the two-year period of the study. From the case study, the most focused needs appeared to be planning and organization during the writing process. From the many complications issuing from the implementation of an educational innovation comes the practical ideas found in the adoption of the thinksheet strategy. However, when we take a close look, we see that in practice the theoretical and research concepts are discernible and their connection to the innovation are obvious. Constructivist theories give us a tool for understanding innovations. Once we stop looking for the innovation to be transported or transplanted and start looking for how it is constructed, we begin to understand more accurately the course of implementing the innovations in schools and in classrooms. |
