Experienced teachers’ planning practices: Orienting, inventing, and envisioning

Although every teacher plans for instruction, little is known about how this complex practice is accomplished in everyday contexts. The bulk of research on teacher planning has construed this core practice as process of mental decision making about a narrow collection of instructional factors. This study broadens the research on teacher planning practices by moving beyond these limiting frames by investigating the planning practices of eight elementary, middle, and high school teachers. To guide my study, I have assembled a three-part theoretical framework: literate activity (Prior, 1998), mediated agency (Wertsch, 1991), and distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995). All three of these theories invite a more holistic framing of the work of teacher planning and situate it in everyday practice. I use qualitative methodology to better situate and understand teachers' choices in their contexts. The data collection for this study extended over the course of a K-12 academic year, during which time I conducted semi-structured interviews, conducted participant observations, wrote jottings and field notes, and collected artifacts of planning and instruction, including participant-created screencast think-alouds. Findings indicated that planning is a social and distributed process that accrues over time and that it is responsive to its context. Across these findings, planning entailed teachers articulating their own activity and student activity in relation to each other through three core practices: orienting, inventing, and envisioning. In sum, I argue that theoretical attention to the development of teachers’ practices can help researchers reconceptualize how we understand, study, and support planning for student learning and teacher development