The Student Writing Archive Project: Designing a Searchable Database of Student Writing and Teacher Commentary for English Teacher Preparation Courses

Teacher candidates have few opportunities during their teacher preparation coursework to investigate practices associated with eliciting and responding to student writing. This article describes an attempt to address this problem with a searchable online digital archive of student writing, with and without teachers’ written feedback, as well as other instructional materials from elementary, middle, and secondary classrooms in diverse linguistic/geographic regions of the country. The archive also includes interviews with teachers about their approaches to teaching writing, especially the principles and practices that inform their responses to student work. The design of the archive is described, along with three broad paths through the archive, which were created by the author. These paths provide opportunities for instructors of English teaching methods courses, writing pedagogies courses, and linguistics courses to investigate with teacher candidates issues that are commonly addressed in those three types of courses, like modeling writing, machine scoring, and responding with sensitivity to writers who are English language learners. English teacher educators who teach courses on English teaching methods, writing pedagogies, and linguistics share a unifying concern: writing instruction. Writing instruction includes how teachers design and implement writing assignments; how teachers provide feedback on student work; and how teachers use patterns they identify in student writing to plan and implement subsequent instruction.