Instructional Conversations in Learning to Write and Learning to Teach

This chapter is about instructional conversations between teachers and students. The issues in question are learning to write and learning to teach. The chapter explores some instructional limits of conversations typically held by teachers and students in the classroom. Examples are drawn from two strategic sites—the conversations held between young writers and their classroom teachers and those between beginning teachers and teacher educators. These are rich conversational situations to examine in tandem. What we learn in one can help us understand the other. This is so, not only because both sites depend on conversation to support learning and development, but because, as Donald Graves (1983) has aptly stated, writing and teaching are “twin crafts” in the sense that “the teaching of writing demands the control of two crafts, teaching and writing. They can neither be avoided, nor separated.”