How the structure and focus of teachers collaborative activities facilitate and constrain teacher l.docx

1、How the structure and focus of teachers collaborative activities facilitate and constrain teacher lHow the structure and focus of teachers collaborative activities facilitate and constrain teacher learning Thomas H. Levine, a, and Alan S. Marcus1, a, a Curriculum & Instruction, Neag School of Educat

2、ion, University of Connecticut, 249 Glenbrook Road U-2033, Storrs, CT 06269-2033, USAReceived 26 September 2008; revised 27 January 2009; accepted 3 March 2009. Available online 9 April 2009. AbstractWhat kinds of teacher collaboration are most likely to improve what teachersand, ultimately, student

3、slearn during their time in school? This study looks within and across different collaborative activities that occurred among one teacher team. Observational data analyzed through a sociocultural theoretical framework suggest how the structure and intended focus of collaborative activity can influen

4、ce (1) how often and how concretely teachers discuss their teaching with colleagues; (2) which aspects of schooling collaboration will address; and (3) what opportunities for teacher learning are afforded and constrained. Intentionally focusing and structuring teachers collaborative activity can imp

5、rove its impact on schooling.Keywords: Collaboration; Teacher collaboration; Teacher improvement; Teacher professional community; Professional development; Staff developmentArticle Outline1. Introduction2. Theoretical framework2.1. Collaborating teachers as a community of practice2.2. The face of pr

6、actice2.3. The transparency of practice3. Methods3.1. Site and participants3.2. Data sources3.3. Data analysis across the entire data set3.4. Sampling and additional data analysis3.5. Feedback from critical others and informants4. The influence of meeting structure and intended focus on teacher talk

7、4.1. Factor one: the structure of meetings4.1.1. Protocol-guided4.1.2. Strongly-structured and facilitated4.1.3. Loosely structured4.2. Factor two: intended focus of meetings4.2.1. Instruction-focused4.2.2. Student-focused4.2.3. School operations-focused4.3. Frequency of meetings categorized by stru

8、cture and intended focus4.4. The influence of structure and intended focus on the frequency of talk about instruction4.5. The influence of structure and intended focus on the specificity with which practice is revealed5. How different types of activity created different opportunities for learning5.1

9、. Instruction-focused, protocol-guided meetings5.2. Instruction-focused, strongly-structured meetings5.3. Student-focused informally-structured collaboration5.4. Addressing or ignoring aspects of teachers work6. What kinds of collaboration are most likely to improve schooling?7. Professional communi

10、ty: if you build it, will they learn?AcknowledgementsAppendix A. Excerpt of codesAppendix B. A critical friends protocolCritical friends protocolProtocolReferences1. IntroductionIn the U.S., research on the organizational norms and conditions of teaching paints a portrait of teaching as work which i

11、s carried out largely alone, with a high degree of autonomy and isolation from colleagues (Little, 1990, Lortie, 1975 and McLaughlin and Talbert, 2001). When teachers do interact, they usually value harmony and congeniality over activities that risk conflict regarding the means and ends of schooling

12、 (Achinstein, 2002 and Little, 1990). During the past two decades, an impressive array of scholars and reformers have sought to counteract the traditional privacy and isolation of U.S. teachers, calling for strengthening various kinds of “community” and promoting teacher collaboration to improve tea

13、ching and learning in schools (e.g., Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1992, Darling Hammond, 1997, Dufour and Eaker, 1998, Fullan and Hargreaves, 1991, Louis and Marks, 1998, McLaughlin and Talbert, 2001 and Meier, 1995).A small but growing body of research confirms that participation in more collaborative

14、professional communities impacts teaching practices and improves student learning (Vescio, Ross, & Adams, 2008). For instance, Louis and Marks (1998) studied 24 restructuring elementary, middle, and high schools, showing that the presence of more cohesive professional community correlates with an ob

15、servable increase in the use of some desirable kinds of pedagogy; in addition, 85% of the variance in student achievement was accounted for by the strength of a schools professional community. Such positive outcomes may occur because more collaborative working conditions can lead whole departments o

16、r even whole schools to develop shared norms, values, practices, and orientations towards colleagues and students (Achinstein, 2002, McLaughlin, 1993, McLaughlin and Talbert, 2001 and Westheimer, 1998). Teachers who indicate that they work in cohesive and highly collegial professional communities al

17、so report high levels of commitment to teaching all students, high levels of energy and enthusiasm, and high levels of innovation (McLaughlin, 1993). Two thorough reviews of research on professional learning communities (Bolam et al., 2005 and Vescio et al., 2008) conclude that teacher communities a

18、re most effective when they focus on student learning or evidence of such learning. One systematic review of 14 studies of collaborative professional development concluded that the presence of such ongoing professional collaboration was “linked to measured increases in student performance in all the

19、 studies” (Cordingley, Bell, Rundell, & Evans, 2003, p. 4); two reviews of research on professional learning communities support this claim (Bolam et al., 2005 and Vescio et al., 2008).Although two decades of research suggest that teacher collaboration and community matter for teachers work and stud

20、ent achievement, relatively little research has sought to look carefully within cases of teacher community to understand whetherand howdifferent types of teacher collaboration afford different types of teacher learning. Teachers might do many different things together. What kinds of teacher collabor

21、ation are most likely to improve what teachersand, ultimately, studentscan learn during their time in school? How do different kinds of activities facilitate and constrain what teachers can learn from their joint work? Without clearer answers to these questions, it will be harder to design effective

22、 teacher collaboration, to support it, and to know where to look to assess the results. This article addresses these questions while reporting on a case study of intensive, ongoing collaboration at one school.2. Theoretical framework2.1. Collaborating teachers as a community of practiceTo explore te

23、achers opportunities for learning from collaboration, we conceptualize teachers ongoing work with colleagues as a community of practice. Works by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger have developed the concept of communities of practice to describe sites where people jointly construct, transform, conserve,

24、and/or negotiate the meanings of practices (Lave and Wenger, 1991 and Wenger, 1998). Such communities form when people engage in a shared enterprise over time. In communities of practice, the key mechanism for individual and group learning comprises access to observing and then participating in the

25、practices at the core of the community. Thus, novice Ph.D. researchers might join a research group to gain access to practices associated with research. They first watch faculty or experienced students write an interview protocol and do an interview; they later may co-interview with an experienced p

26、eer, and get feedback on their fledgling efforts. In a community of practice, novicesand experienced practitionerscan learn from observing, asking questions, and actually participating alongside others with more or different experience. Learning is facilitated when novices and experienced practition

27、ers organize their work in ways that allow all participants the opportunity to see, discuss, and engage in shared practices. Participants in such communities learnor jointly constructpractices, which can be understood as ways of achieving desired ends in the world such as facilitating students learn

28、ing of history. Practices can be understood both as teleological entitiesas containing with them specific purposes or endsand as sociocultural traditions, i.e., socially-constructed ways of being and acting in the world.2.2. The face of practiceDoctoral students can easily engage in shared practices

29、 in each others presence; collaborating teachers, however, usually meet in a time and place apart from their actual engagement in teaching practices (Little, 2002). With the exception of teachers whose collaboration involves peer observation or joint teaching, most collaborating teachers must repres

30、ent their work verbally or through artifacts of practice, such as student work samples or lesson plans. Little (2002) has studied teachers everyday conversation during ongoing collaboration, and has theorized on several factors likely to influence the learning that can occur in such settings. Little

31、 observed that micropolitical processes among teachers can lead groups to open up or close down discussion of certain aspects of their work; thus, the “face” of practice which teachers make public for their own reflection and others learning or critique comprises one key factor affecting what teache

32、rs might learn from their collaborative work (p. 934).In order to think about what aspects of teachers work are part of the publicly available face of practice, we identified six distinct aspects of secondary teachers work based on others conceptualizations (Grossman & Richert, 1988) and our own data. Thus, we are interested in whether the joint work addresses the following aspects of teachers work: content and pedagogical content knowledge specific to their discipline; classroom management; pedagogy; methods of asses