When teachers learn together in the context of professional development networks, they act not just as receivers of information, but as knowledge makers (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 2003; Lieberman & Grolnick, 1996; McDonald & Klein, 2003; Vescio, Ross, & Adams, 2008). The National Writing Project (NWP) is one such network (Lieberman & Wood, 2003), offering teachers frequent opportunities to “go public” by sharing demonstrations of their teaching and inquiring together into the foundations for and efficacy of classroom practices.

When teachers compose demonstrations, they offer rationales for choices in their teaching practice, and they make determinations about what their audiences value, believe, and know about teaching, writing, and life in the classroom. They forward arguments to one another about why they do what they do as teachers. In short, they make rhetorical choices about how to present their pedagogical choices.

This study examines teachers' composing of teaching demonstrations using Wenger's (1998) notion of "communities of practice" as a theoretical framework. Within a community of practice, participants negotiate meaning; examining this meaning-making process with Burke's (1969) dramatic pentad offers a way of understanding how individuals learn to make those negotiations. This study offers "an account of how actors size up a situation within which action occurs" (Burke, 1969, p. 44), which helps to make visible the implicit process of negotiation meaning in composing one's teaching for a community of colleagues.

This presentation will draw upon data from a case study of three teachers who participated in the Rust Belt Writing Project (pseudonym). Data used in this study are drawn from a teacher group tasked with writing a letter in response to peers' teaching demonstrations in the summer institute. These include:

1. transcripts of interviews and conversations with the participant-observer (researcher) and/or with their teaching demonstration coach in preparing for each of their own teaching demonstrations

2. transcripts of demonstration response group conversations

3. copies of each participant's final reflection for the summer institute, which includes sections on teaching demonstrations.

Findings indicate that when teachers size up the situation of going public with their teaching, they consider two contexts simultaneously, the context of the teaching demonstration and the context of their teaching in secondary classrooms. This involves not only learning to compose any one kind of text (like a presentation), but also learning to navigate and move between communities of practice and learning what it means to take authority within each of those communities.