Locating learning in teachers’ communities of practice: opening up problems of analysis in records of everyday work
Section snippets
Making headway in the study of professional community
Research spanning more than two decades points consistently to the potential educational benefit of vigorous collegial communities. Despite some caveats, that research has steadily converged on claims that professional community is an important contributor to instructional improvement and school reform. Researchers posit that conditions for improving teaching and learning are strengthened when teachers collectively question ineffective teaching routines, examine new conceptions of teaching and
Design of the study
The project employs a multi-level case study design centered principally on intensive case studies of knowledge, practice, and learning among teachers of mathematics and English in two high schools. The schools presented contrasting cases with regard to their involvement in whole-school reform, and thus an opportunity to examine the meaning of reform-oriented professional community in two quite different organizational contexts. South High School1
Investigating the practical accomplishment of professional community
On the whole, the field of education has not developed the kinds of fine-grained investigations of teachers’ collegial workplace practices that have began to emerge in other occupational arenas (for example, Barley & Orr, 1997; Chaiklin & Lave, 1996; Engestrom & Middleton, 1998). Researchers outside education have exploited both traditional ethnographic methods and advanced video and audio technologies to uncover the practices by which people at work learn, construct, coordinate, and transform
The ‘SSR’ episode
On September 22, the second weekly meeting of the Academic Literacy Group opens with an exchange regarding the classroom practice termed “SSR” (Silent Sustained Reading).6
Analytic dilemmas in the SSR episode
This episode presents several analytic problems that are central to the problem of locating teacher learning and teacher learning opportunities in the context of ongoing daily work. I do not claim to have constructed a complete inventory of relevant analytic problems, but the following problems surfaced prominently in our analysis and inform the analytic scheme that follows.
Locating learning in teachers’ communities of practice
Taken together, the analytic problems embodied in this episode inform a more general conceptual scheme for investigating the significance of professional community to teacher development and school reform. Responding to the emergent analytic problems embodied in these data, and drawing also on available conceptions of a “community of practice,” I have arrived at a provisional conceptual scheme to help unpack the relations among teacher community, teacher development, and the improvement of
Conclusion
This paper starts from the premise that if we are to theorize about the significance of professional community, we must be able to demonstrate how communities achieve their effects. It is designed to build on—but also to deepen and challenge—research of the last decade that has steadily converged on claims that strong professional communities are important contributors to instructional improvement and school reform. Drawing on an episode from a large corpus of audiotaped and videotaped records
Attachment A. Transcription conventions and episode transcript
Transcript conventions (adapted from Ochs, 1979):
Self-interruption No gap between utterances (.), (5) Very slight pause, five second pause //, ] Beginning of overlapping utterances, end of overlapping utterances . Fall in intonation ? Rise in intonation :: Marks lengthened syllable, each : equals one “beat” italics Marks stress capital letters Increased volume -h, h- in-breath, out-breath (??), (cow) Unclear reading, tentative reading (( )) Marks other voice qualities, such as ((WH)) whisper, ((LF)) laugh, or
Acknowledgements
The research on which this paper is based has been funded by the Spencer and MacArthur Foundations and by the Office of Educational Research & Improvement (OERI), US Department of Education. Thanks to Suzanne Wilson, Pamela Grossman and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft, and to Lora Bartlett and Ilana Horn for their contributions to the analysis.
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