Jim Webber, University of Nevada, Reno
October 8, 2025

In our proposal for the 2026 CCCC, we acknowledged that the field’s conversation about professional development (PD) runs in two primary directions.

The first recognizes the limits of conventional PD for professionalizing composition teaching. Single workshops not only don’t change teaching, they often undermine long-term efforts to build community, establish a shared understanding of pedagogical goals, engage teachers in critical reflection, or foster an intellectual interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning (e.g., Bergmann; Marshall; Schneider).

The second direction recovers the potential for alternate forms and sites of PD to build partnerships, with dual enrollment (DE) composition scholarship figuring prominently (e.g., Stokdyk, Johnson, and Grandone; Russo; McWain; Wilkinson). While high school teachers and university faculty enter into partnerships speaking different languages about writing instruction, and DE programs often have to differentiate their PD from teachers’ prior experiences, it is the foregrounding of these differences that often present new opportunities for learning. These insights are not limited to DE composition. Paradoxically, the conditions that challenge normative images of professionalization suggest opportunities to fulfill modes of professionalization better suited to the sites and conditions of composition teaching.

This year, the DE Collective will explore PD as a site for extending the conversation about professionalization. Does the variety of instructors we prepare—high school teachers, teaching assistants, adjunct faculty members, teaching faculty, research faculty—indicate the breadth or the limits of our profession? Do the varied and sometimes conflicting forms of expertise in writing instruction highlighted by DE composition suggest our profession’s pluralism or our disjunctions? Does the incomplete professionalization of DE teachers call for a different image of the profession or different ways of preparing faculty? While this conversation is prompted by and reflects the experiences of DE teachers, faculty, and administrators, it aims to foster a broader discussion about the prospects for professionalization in composition writ large. This conversation will build over the year and culminate in the 2026 CCCC.

To get the conversation going, I’d like to share how we’ve been thinking about PD in the concurrent enrollment program at the University of Nevada, Reno. That thinking has followed a sort of narrative arc. We recognized the limits of our existing approach, so we attempted an alternate form of PD, and now we’re studying the results.

What did we do before?

We provided teachers with written guides to our curriculum and pedagogy. These guides summarized research and described how teachers can work with our assignments. But we learned over time that teachers weren’t reading the material, and as a result, our conversations became stilted. Program coordinators struggled to draw teachers out. Once we started doing observations, we also realized that teachers were struggling to translate our guidance into instruction.

Around this time, I was re-reading Donald Schon’s The Reflective Practitioner (Basic Books 1982). What does Schon mean by reflection? It’s what people do in the context of their practice, whether we’re talking about teaching, being a lawyer, or working in some other knowledge-based profession.

A practitioner’s reflection can serve as a corrective to over-learning. Through reflection, he can surface and criticize the tacit understandings that have grown up around the repetitive experiences of a specialized practice, and can make new sense of the situations of uncertainty or uniqueness which he may allow himself to experience. (61)

Reading Schon clarified the purpose of our PD. We wanted to invite teachers and students into a particular kind of relationship with us. We showed teachers what good or bad practice looks like, or we linked theory to practice. But if we didn’t explore our thinking process of how we responded to a unique situation, teachers never grasped “the fundamental structure of inquiry which underlies [our] virtuoso performance” (104). Teachers may “want more help than [they are] getting, but feel angry when [they have to ask] for it.” Here, reflection happens across cognitive, affective, and values domains. That means it’s important to know when teachers feel like they’re being asked to work with counterintuitive ideas, or feel frustrated, or sense conflicts between the program’s values and their own.

So what are we doing? We're trying to show our own process of inquiry, or our own thought process of how to draw on our repertoires to respond to unique situations. This means we need to acknowledge our confusion, vulnerability, and uncertainty. And that’s a way of modeling what reflective practice looks like. We need what Schon calls a reflective contract. 

In a reflective contract between practitioner and client, the client does not agree to accept the practitioner's authority but to suspend disbelief in it. He agrees to join the practitioner in inquiring into the situation for which the client seeks help; to try to understand what he is experiencing and to make that understanding accessible to the practitioner; to confront the practitioner when he does not understand or agree; to test the practitioner's competence by observing his effectiveness and to make public his questions over what should be counted as effectiveness; to pay for services rendered and to appreciate competence demonstrated. The practitioner agrees to deliver competent performance to the limits of his capacity; to help the client understand the meaning of the professional's advice and the rationale for his actions, while at the same time he tries to learn the meanings his actions have for his client; to make himself readily confrontable by his client; and to reflect on his own tacit understandings when he needs to do so in order to play his part in fulfilling the contract. (297)

What can we do as a program to establish a reflective contract? We can carry out what Schon calls reflective research. Schon describes four kinds: frame analysis, repertoire building, methods of inquiry, and reflection-in-action.

Frame analysis: Schon argues that this helps us recognize our tacit frames/values/roles and experience dilemmas inherent in professional pluralism (311), change images of effectiveness (314), and try on new roles (315). For example, I think of one common frame in responding to student writing, and that is the assumption that we as teachers have to address all issues at once (that is, comment on sentence-level issues at the same time as higher-order concerns), or we have to determine whether students’ ideas are good or not when they’re still being developed.

Repertoire building research: Schon argues that most cases focus on a professional’s start (the problem) and the finish (a solution) but don’t explore the path of inquiry (317) and how solutions emerged through experiment and reflection. For example, in our program, we can explore how we changed the way we taught something in response to learning about students’ needs. 

Research on methods of inquiry and overarching theories: Schon describes these as springboards for making sense of new situations that at first may seem not to make sense for a theory, but the theory is used to restructure the situation so that the situation fits the theory. What Schon calls an action science looks at unique situations that challenge the application of theory (319). For example, in our program, we asked, how do we respond to students when conferencing? We have a theory of sayback (“I hear you saying ____”), questions (“Based on your example, I was expecting ____ but instead you offered _____”), and identifying revision priorities (“it seems like your first step would be to ______”). That’s an established theory. But sometimes, we might have to ask if that feedback is appropriate at the planning stage of a project. For example, how might we respond to the student who comes to a conference without a developed plan for a project? As Schon puts it, what can we learn if we try to make the situation fit the theory rather than the more conventional approach of making the theory fit the situation?

Research on the process of reflection-in-action: for Schon, this process seeks to reveal and examine one’s own confusion (323). For example, I anticipate that teachers may experience confusion about some of the concepts we take for granted. At the end of our yearlong courses, we hold a writers’ conference in which students present in a conference format on a significant learning experience during the year in our courses. We ask students to describe this experience and then to explore why it mattered to them and why it might matter to their peers. This activity is familiar to people who’ve seen a conference panel or a celebration of student writing, but for teachers, this activity might be bewildering. So, we realized teachers might benefit from doing a talk-aloud reflection when they first read the program materials instead of assuming that the materials were self-evident.

That’s a lot to try, but the overall idea is simple. We recognize that communicating best practice in our meetings with teachers or with students only goes so far. What we’re aiming for is to change our relationships so that we can do what Schon argues for, which is to treat practice like research. Most research is considered separate from practice, and in the conventional view, we at the university do the research, while teachers do the practice. But if we recognize with Schon that practitioners’ reflection is central to the field, now we’re reframing practice as a site of research. And that changes the power dynamics of the field. We’re not just aiming at replicating best practice; instead, we’re aiming for teachers and students to become reflective practitioners in their own right in a new reflective contract with us.

Where are we going next?

That approach evolved into the plans we have now for the program’s 2025-26 PD. We gauged teacher interests, formed groups around those interests, gathered potential readings, and then introduced program members to think-alouds as a method for reading and discussing research in the field. These think-alouds will be recorded, and we’re planning to do a study of the recordings to explore how DE teachers and staff engage with disciplinarity in writing. As we mentioned in our materials, we’re hoping that experiences with disciplinarity in PD can help DE teachers participate in our field more fully and model for students how to deal with disciplinarity in their fields of interest.

I hope this account of our program’s journey is helpful. I’m looking forward to continuing the conversation at our event in October and again at CCCC 2026!