Session Information
01 SES 03 A, Action Research (Part 2)
Paper Session continued from 01 SES 02 A
Contribution
Teacher educators and teacher education researchers have long underscored the importance of professional learning community (PLC) in facilitating teacher professional development (PD) in context (Borko, 2004; Vescio, Ross, & Adams, 2008). Recent body of scholarship discusses the ways in which PLCs promote teacher development (Zheng, Yin, & Wang, 2021), factors that influence teacher participation in PLCs (Bridwell-Mitchell & Cooc, 2016), the transformative consequences (Brennan & King, 2022), and so on. Nevertheless, while the portrayals and mechanism of productive PLCs become increasingly clear, how to sustain them in varied social and political contexts remains a difficult challenge (Hairon et al., 2017).
A growing body of scholarship stresses the local perspectives of teachers in sustaining PLCs. For example, Brodie (2021) describes the vital role of teachers’ professional agency in deciding to participate in or withdraw from PLCs. Similarly, Heikkiläa, Iiskalaa, and Mikkilä-Erdmann (2020) depict the nuances of professional agency in a group of student teachers and examine how different enactments of agency shape their participation in the community. One would assume, based on existing literature, that the more diverse the community members and the activities they engage in are, the more sustainable the PLC will be. Yet, most studies focus merely on a homogenous group of teachers (e.g., senior school teachers in Cooper et al., 2020) or regular PD activities (e.g., teacher research in Zheng, Yin, & Wang, 2021). What does a PLC with diverse participates engaging in varied activities look like and how does it sustain?
To address these problems, this study draws on the idea of “inquiry as stance” to explore how a group of in-service teachers and teacher educators in China build and sustain a PLC through an assemblage of book clubs, video clubs, and lesson planning sessions. Against the view that professional development is a time-bounded project where “what work” get shared and duplicated, Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) argue that inquiry is a way of generating local knowledge of practice from within. From their perspective, novice teachers do not necessarily learn from the experienced. Instead, teachers with different backgrounds and experiences work together to “pose problems, identify discrepancies between theories and practices, challenge common routines, draw on the work of others for generative frameworks, and attempt to make visible much of that which is taken for granted about teaching and learning” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 45). In our study, thus, we see a PLC as a local organization in which teachers discuss their everyday work in school, share their experience, feelings, and reflections on their teaching practice, and make their ideas public and legitimate through noticing, discussion, and critiques (e.g., Bakker, de Glopper, & de Vries, 2022; Zhang & Wong, 2021). Our focus is not on how a teacher applies what she learns in some PD program to her classroom, but on how she makes sense of her professional learning with others and within particular contexts and how her sensemaking is consequential to herself, to others, and to her school. Following Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999, 2009), we name such PLC “inquiry community” hereafter to stress our inquiry-as-stance lens.
Two research questions guide our study here. First, how do the teachers participate in the inquiry community? Second, how are different activities assembled to sustain the inquiry community? We use a video-based approach to documenting and analyzing the workings of an inquiry community in an urban school district in Shanghai. By focusing on the sustainability of an inquiry community, our study provides insights into one of the most serious challenges professional development and learning research faces and sheds light on the design of and support for teacher learning.
Method
Our data are drawn from a PD program in which a large school district in Shanghai partners with a university research group to support productive orchestration of talk in the classroom (Michaels & O’Connor, 2012). Twenty-nine teachers and teacher educators with different backgrounds with regard to schools, grade levels, subjects, and professional experiences participated in the program. The second author designs and leads the program with two administrators of the school district. It is a one-year program comprised of a set of workshops over the 2022–2023 school year and, as of January 2023, we have just finished the first half. In particular, a book club, a video club, and regular lesson planning activities were assembled. In the book club, the participants read, discussed, and critiqued a book about classroom interactions and learned relevant ideas and theories (e.g., revoicing, the third space). In the video club, the participants observed, transcribed, and analyzed video clips from a sixth-grade science classroom, using conceptual tools they learned from the book club. The lesson planning is a regular event that teachers in Shanghai, like their colleagues around the world, discuss and co-design a particular lesson or a unit and reflect on the implementation after the lesson(s) on a weekly or even daily basis. The program will continue in Spring and Summer 2023. We are collecting multiple sources of data for our study, including the video records of all the workshops, teacher interviews, artifacts generated in the program (e.g., teachers’ slides presented in the activities, their written analysis of the video clips, lesson plans). For this proposal, we analyze a case of one teacher, Mr. Yan, drawing mainly on the video records of the first semester (approximately 700 minutes). In the final presentation in ECER, we will present, in addition, our analysis on the interviews and the artifacts. We followed an interaction analysis approach to the data (Erickson, 2006). First, the video records were transcribed in full. Then, all of Mr. Yan’s contribution, such as presentations and utterances, were segmented. We reviewed the marked segments in their contexts to identify how Mr. Yan participated in the activities, what he contributed to the community, and how other participants responded to him. Meaningful categories and themes were generated during the process with a focus on the shaping and sustaining of the community. Last, categories and themes were constantly compared between different activities.
Expected Outcomes
For the first research question, we identified four iterative patterns of how Mr. Yan participated in the inquiry community: (1) positioning, in which Mr. Yan positioned himself in relation to his career path, his organizational contexts, desired teaching (e.g., argument-oriented), and his particular classroom; (2) gaining ideas, in which Mr. Yan tried to understand new concepts and ideas from literature and “experts;” (3) working the dialectic of theorizing and doing, in which Mr. Yan planned, implemented, and critically reflected on his lessons; and (4) problematizing, in which Mr. Yan interrogated his existing assumptions about teacher knowledge and practice, and started to adjust his positioning. This finding resonates and expands on existing research (e.g., So, 2013). For the second research question, we found that different activities served varied roles in the sustaining of the inquiry community. In particular, the book club provided a source of connective concepts, ideas, and theories that the teacher could “work the dialectic on.” Throughout the program, all the teachers referred frequently to the book they co-read for elaboration, clarification, and justification. The video club, on the other hand, afforded them to find discrepancies between their beliefs, ideas from the book, and their practice. It drove Mr. Yan’s “working.” Finally, lesson planning provided structured, organizational support. We argue that these various activities altogether sustain the inquiry community. In the next few months, we plan to continue collecting data during the second half of the program and to conduct finer-grained analyses. Specifically, we have identified another two focal teachers who differ in various aspects from Mr. Yan. A comparative analysis will delineate the nuances of participation in the community. Moreover, analyses on the interviews and artifacts will examine how teachers make sense of their inquiry as stance. We will present our full analyses and findings in ECER.
References
Bakker, C., de Glopper, K., & de Vries, S. (2022). Noticing as reasoning in Lesson Study teams in initial teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 113, 103656. Borko, H. (2004). Professional development and teacher learning: Mapping the terrain. Educational Researcher, 33(8), 3–15. Brennan, A., & King, F. (2022). Teachers’ experiences of transformative professional learning to narrow the values practice gap related to inclusive practice. Cambridge Journal of Education, 52(2), 175–193. Bridwell-Mitchell, E. N., & Cooc, N. (2016). The ties that bind: How social capital is forged and forfeited in teacher communities. Educational Researcher, 45(1), 7–17. Brodie, K. (2021). Teacher agency in professional learning communities. Professional Development in Education, 47(4), 560–573. Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. L. (1999). Relationships of knowledge and practice: teacher learning in communities. Review of Research in Education, 24, 249–305. Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. (2009). Teacher research as stance. In S. Noffke & B. Smoekh (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Educational Action Research (pp. 39–47). London: SAGE. Cooper, R., Fitzgerald, A., Loughran, J., Phillips, M., & Smith, K. (2020). Understanding teachers’ professional learning needs: What does it mean to teachers and how can it be supported?, Teachers and Teaching, 26(7-8), 558–576. Erickson, F. (2006). Definition and analysis of data from videotape: Some research procedures and their rationales. In J. L. Green, G. Camilli, & P. B. Elmore (Eds.), Handbook of complementary methods in education research (pp. 177–192). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hairon, S., Goh, J., Chua, C., & Wang, L. (2017). A research agenda for professional learning communities: Moving forward. Professional Development in Education, 43(1), 72–86. Heikkiläa, M., Iiskalaa, T., & Mikkilä-Erdmann, M. (2020). Voices of student teachers' professional agency at the intersection of theory and practice. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 25, 100405. Michaels, S., & O’Connor, C. (2012). Talk Science Primer. TERC. Vescio, V., Ross, D., & Adams, A. (2008). A review of research on the impact of professional learning communities on teaching practice and student learning. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24(1), 80–91. Zhang, X., & Wong, J. L. N. (2021). How do teachers perceive their knowledge development through engaging in school-based learning activities? A case study in China. Journal of Education for Teaching, 47(5), 695–713. Zheng, X., Yin, H., & Wang, X. (2021). “Doing authentic research” with artifacts to facilitate teacher learning across multiple communities. Teaching and Teacher Education, 105, 103394.
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