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Abstract

To meet the composition demands of the future, secondary students in the United States will need more rigorous and more equitable writing instruction. They will need opportunities to inquire into and frame authentic problems. They will need to communicate for a variety of audiences and purposes, and they will need access to a variety of linguistic and literary forms. In turn, secondary teachers will need improved preparation for teaching writing. This conceptual review outlines what intellectually rigorous and equitable writing instruction looks like, arguing that teaching writing in these ways requires that teachers deploy substantial professional judgment. I then rely on sociocultural ideas about concept development, as well as recent research on practice-based teacher education, to build a theoretical framework for thinking about how teacher educators—across disciplines—can support teachers in developing professional judgment, rather than technical skills, for rigorous and equitable instruction. Finally, I make this theoretical framework specific to writing by reviewing research on how secondary teachers learn to teach writing. The result is a set of design conjectures for how we, in the field of writing teacher education, might design activities capable of supporting preservice writing teachers in learning to teach writing rigorously, equitably, and with professional judgment.

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