Teacher collaboration at the workplace is generally acknowledged as a powerful context for individual professional learning as well as team learning, and assumed to promote school improvement beyond individual classrooms (Darling-Hammond, Hammerness, Grosman, Rust, & Shulman, 2005). A great part of teachers’ learning in the everyday school context occurs through collaborative interaction with colleagues who understand the practice and context of the school (Hodkinson & Hodkinson, 2005; Little, 2002). These collaborations may occur in all kind of settings varying from formal organized meetings to informal chats during lunch (Borko, 2004; Little, 2003). Some moments of collaboration in teachers’ everyday work are, nevertheless, expected to be more powerful for learning than others (Westheimer, 2008). Within a powerful moment, teachers can learn individually through the activities undertaken in collaboration with colleagues and, in addition, groups of teachers can also develop new and shared understandings (Crossan, Lane, & White, 1999). In the present study, collaborative teacher learning is defined as learning processes consisting of the learning activities that teachers undertake in collaboration with colleagues, which lead to changes in teachers’ individual and/or shared cognitions and/or behaviour (cf. Meirink, Meijer, & Verloop, 2007).

Even though, collaboration is recognized as a powerful context for teacher learning, relatively little is known about what collaborative teacher learning actually looks like (Borko, 2004; Little, 2002). Studies suggest two main reasons for the absence of a comprehensive view on this: (1) the problem of not (sufficiently) taking into account the complexity of collaborative teacher learning, which emerges on the one hand because teachers who collaborate with each other may vary in their learning processes, while on the other hand the learning processes cannot be separated from the context in which they take place; and (2) the difficulty to locate learning in teachers’ collaborations in schools, as it often occurs unplanned and incidentally (Horn & Little, 2010; Westheimer, 2008).

To investigate teacher collaboration and teacher learning within a particular context, two types of studies seem of particular interest. While most studies focus only on observable learning activities (Berings, Poell, & Simons, 2008), within the first type of studies researchers focus on teachers’ observable as well as non-observable learning activities and learning outcomes (e.g., Bakkenes, Vermunt, & Wubbels, 2010). Within the second type of studies it is interesting that researchers studied interactions between teachers in relation to its learning potential and/or individual and group learning (e.g., Horn & Little, 2010; Shank, 2006). With these two types of studies in mind, the present study aims to contribute to existing theories about teacher learning processes in collaborative contexts at schools by combining the advantages and methods used in these studies. Moreover, as teacher learning in collaboration with colleagues is complicated and actual moments of learning in teachers’ collaborations are difficult to identify, it seemed useful to try to map and include these moments of collaboration, within which teachers learn with and from each other (cf. Horn & Little, 2010). Therefore, in the present study processes of collaborative teacher learning were investigated during moments which the participating teachers perceived as powerful for learning.

In sum, the aim of the present study was to obtain a detailed and diverse picture of collaborative teacher learning. In order to realise this, interactions between teachers and individual as well as group learning processes were investigated during moments of collaboration that the participating teachers perceived as powerful for learning. The formulated research questions were:

1. What are the characteristics of teachers’ perceived powerful moments for learning?

2. What interaction and collaboration processes can be observed during these moments?

3. What individual and group learning processes occur during these moments?

Bakkenes, I., Vermunt, J. D., & Wubbels, T. (2010). Teacher learning in the context of educational innovation: Learning activities and learning outcomes of experienced teachers. Learning and Instruction, 20, 533-548. Borko, H. (2004). Professional development and teacher learning: mapping the terrain. Educational Researcher, 33, 3-15. Butterfield, L. D., Borgen, W. A., Amundson, N. E., & Maglio, A. S. T. (2005). Fifty years of the critical incident technique: 1954-2004 and beyond. Qualitative Research, 5, 475-497. Crossan, M. M., Lane, H. W., & White, R. E. (1999). An organizational learning framework: From intuition to institution. Academy of Management Review, 24, 522-537. Darling-Hammond, L., Hammerness, K., Grosman, P., Rust F., & Shulman, L. (2005). The design of teachers education programs. In L. Darling-Hammond, & J. Brandsford (Eds.), Preparing teachers for a changing world. What teachers should learn and be able to do (pp. 390-441). San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass. Flanagan, J.C. (1954). The critical incident technique. Psychological Bulletin, 51,327-358. Hodkinson, H., & Hodkinson, P. (2005). Improving schoolteachers' workplace learning. Research Papers in Education, 20, 109-131. Horn, I. S., & Little, J. W. (2010). Attending to problem of practice: routines and resources for professional learning in teachers’ workplace interactions. American Educational Research Journal, 47, 181-217. Little, J. W. (2002). Locating learning in teachers' communities of practice: opening up problems of analysis in records of everyday work. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18, 917-946. Little, J. W. (2003). Inside Teacher Community: Representations of Classroom Practice. Teachers College Record, 105, 913–945. Lyle, J. (2003). Stimulated Recall: A report on its use in naturalistic research. Britisch Educational Research Journal, 29, 861-878. Meirink, J. A., Meijer, P. C., & Verloop, N. (2007). A closer look at teachers’ individual learning in collaborative settings. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 13, 145-164. Miles, M. B., & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: an expanded sourcebook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. O'Brien, J. (1993). Action research through stimulated recall. Research in Science Education, 23, 214-221. Shank, M. J. (2006). Teacher storytelling: A means for creating and learning within a collaborative space. Teaching and Teacher Education, 22, 711–721. Westheimer, J. (2008). Learning among colleagues: Teacher community and the shared enterprise of education. In M. Cochran-Smith, S. Feiman-Nemser, D. J. McIntyre & K. E. Demers (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: Enduring Questions in Changing Contexts, Third Edition (pp. 756-783). New York: Routledge. Yin, R. (2003). Case study research: design and methods. Beverly Hills: Sage.