Michael Sherry

University of South Florida, Teaching and Learning, Faculty Member

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Dr. Michael B. Sherry studies teacher response to students in whole-class discussions and in writing, especially to those students who might otherwise be marginalized by academic discourse.

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Monash University

Dr William Medina Jerez, PhD

Danny C. Martinez

University of California, Davis

Paula S Calderon

Estanislado S Barrera IV

Louisiana State University

Angela W Webb

Louisiana State University

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Papers by Michael Sherry

Prospective English Teachers Learn to Respond to Diversity in Students’ Writing through the Student Writing Archive Project (SWAP)

English Education, Jun 30, 2017

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Expressive Language and the Art of English Teaching: Theorizing the Relationship between Literature and Narrative

English education, Apr 1, 2007

Provocateur Piece: English Education for a Sustainable Future (or Why We Need Writing Teachers at the End of the World)

How might English educators respond to the increasing need for advocacy associated with climate c... more How might English educators respond to the increasing need for advocacy associated with climate change and ecological sustainability? As alternatives to these stories of isolation and despair, I offer empowerment strategies based in Dr. Joanna Macy’s “The Work that Reconnects,” which emerges from her 30 years of environmental advocacy. In contrast with other calls to social and political activism, action is the last stage of this four-step, spiral approach that includes coming from gratitude, honoring our pain for the world, seeing with new eyes, and going forth.

“One Row at a Time”

Advances in educational technologies and instructional design book series, Jul 25, 2023

Storying Climate Change

Routledge eBooks, Mar 9, 2023

Mode-switching as Face-saving Resource in a Synchronous Online Class about Linguistic Racism

Linguistics and Education, Feb 1, 2023

Journeys Inward: That’s How the Light Gets In

English Journal, May 1, 2019

English Education for a Sustainable Future (or Why We Need Writing Teachers at the End of the World)

English in Education, 2019

Useful and Appropriate: How Preservice Ela Teachers React to Teacher Feedback on El Student Writing

SSRN Electronic Journal

Three Strategies for Better Online Discussions

Educational Leadership, 2020

Improvising identities: Comparing cultural roles and dialogic discourse in two lessons from a US elementary classroom

Linguistics and Education, 2019

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The Student Writing Archive Project (SWAP): 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 investig... more Teacher candidates have few opportunities during their teacher-preparation coursework to investigate practices associated with eliciting and responding to student writing. In this article, I describe my attempt to address this problem by creating 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. In this article, I explain the design of the archive. I also showcase three broad “paths” through the archive, which I created. 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...

How Feedback From an Online Video Game Teaches Argument Writing for Environmental Action

Journal of Literacy Research, Jan 24, 2021

Literacy researchers have explored how video games might be used as supplementary texts in second... more Literacy researchers have explored how video games might be used as supplementary texts in secondary English language arts (ELA) classrooms to support reading instruction. However, less attention has been focused on how video games, particularly online educational games designed to teach argumentation, might enhance secondary ELA students’ writing development. In this article, we describe how the pedagogical feedback provided by one such game, Quandary, influenced two seventh graders’ written arguments in advocacy letters addressed to the state governor regarding a local environmental disaster. We compare these two embedded cases to data from 10 focal students, as well as patterns from 114 seventh graders (in five ELA classes). Based on our analysis of screen-capture video of students’ gameplay, drafts of their advocacy letters, and video-stimulated recall interviews, we conclude that game feedback rewarding or penalizing predetermined right or wrong player moves may encourage students to develop argumentation strategies that are less effective in more complex rhetorical situations and may foster a false sense of competence.

Put Me in the Game: video Games and Argument Writing for Environmental Action

English Journal

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

Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 2014

Teacher candidates have few opportunities during their teacher preparation coursework to investig... more 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 addres...

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Indirect Challenges and Provocative Paraphrases: Using Cultural Conflict-Talk Practices to Promote Students' Dialogic Participation in Whole-Class Discussions

Research in The Teaching of English, 2014

English-education researchers have demonstrated the importance of whole-class discussions for lit... more English-education researchers have demonstrated the importance of whole-class discussions for literacy learning. Several national studies (e.g., Applebee, Langer, Nystrand, & Gamoran, 2003) have correlated discussion-based approaches with literacy achievement for students of various backgrounds and ability levels. In such studies, whole-class discussions are described as a "dialogic collision" of voices (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 209), or exchanges in which students voice interpretations that differ from those of their classmates. Opportunities for students to engage diverse perspectives during whole-class discussions can prepare them for participation in civic life, where different opinions abound (e.g., Parker, 2010). However, while much research has been devoted to identifying, describing, and explaining linguistic features of classroom talk, fewer studies to date have examined instructional dis- course moves that may encourage secondary English language arts (ELA) students to ...

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Prospective English Teachers Learn to Respond to Student Writing through the Student Writing Archive Project ( SWAP )

Responding to students' writing is integral to English teaching. However, preservice secondary En... more Responding to students' writing is integral to English teaching. However, preservice secondary English teachers (PSETs) often have few opportunities to practice this skill or to see how experienced teachers respond to diverse writers. I built an online database of students' writing, teacher feedback, and teacher interviews; 32 PSETs in my English methods courses explored this database in conjunction with fieldwork in local classrooms. In this article, I analyze PSETs' database discussionforum posts, comments on field-placement students' writing, and reflections about learning to provide feedback. Reading teachers' feedback positioned PSETs as students, evoking recollections about receiving teacher feedback, while writing their own feedback positioned them as teachers, evoking visions of what a writing teacher must do/be to claim authority in the classroom. All but two PSETs provided feedback of the kind they had claimed to hate. Those two adapted approaches they encountered in the database, learning to draw on their own writing histories as resources for responding with authority. R esponding to student writing is an integral part of the work of a high school English teacher. Indeed, a recent national study by Applebee et al. (2013) found that 80 percent of all secondary teachers, across disciplines, not only graded student writing but also responded to compositions with instructional feedback (p. 17).While responding to student writing is a crucial pedagogical practice, it is also challenging. Students come with various cultural/linguistic 1 backgrounds, yet they must meet state and national standards while writing in English. However, in my experience as an English teacher educator, I have noticed that mentor teachers tend to reserve this work for themselves rather than share it with their preservice mentees. As a result, during their student-teaching internships, preservice secondary English teachers (PSETs) often have few opportunities to practice strategies for responding to students' writing.

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Reframing responses to student writing: Promising young writers and the writing pedagogies course

This article describes an attempt to provide future teachers with an opportunity to practice eval... more This article describes an attempt to provide future teachers with an opportunity to practice evaluating and responding to student writing through a collaboration among members of an NCTE committee, a blended writing pedagogies course composed of education, creative writing, and professional writing students, and middle school teachers and their students in two states. Students’ texts were drawn from the NCTE’s “Promising Young Writers” contest, for which college students acted as judges and provided feedback to the middle school writers. We argue that the experience of responding to actual student writers about the texts they had submitted provided potentially important opportunities for teacher candidates to reimagine their roles in reading and then responding to student writing. The perspectives of students from other majors offered teacher candidates other ways of evaluating and responding to student writing than those they had initially applied. This experience of evaluating and...

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Emergence and Development of a Dialogic Whole-class Discussion Genre

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 2019

Prior research across disciplines has established the value of dialogic, whole-class discussions.... more Prior research across disciplines has established the value of dialogic, whole-class discussions. Previous studies have often defined discussions in opposition to the notorious triadic pattern called recitation, or IRE/F, focusing on variations to the teacher’s initiating question or evaluative follow-up on students’ responses. Recent scholarship has also identified variations on recitations and dialogic discussions that suggest these categories might be flexible, containing types of interaction associated with particular contexts. However, research remains to be done on how such types, or genres, of dialogic, whole-class discussion emerge and develop over time. In this article, I take up this line of inquiry, analyzing the classroom discourse of five lesson excerpts generated by a prospective teacher and his students in a US secondary History classroom between October and March. I illustrate how, over time, teacher and students repeatedly renegotiated the nature of a recitation-sty...

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