Sharing practice knowledge
Building up knowledge about teaching is difficult if teachers feel isolated within the confines of their individual classrooms or within the structures of schools. Teaching is a complex activity and teachers have to deal with messy and ill-structured problems as part of their daily practice as educators and in such conditions establishing routines based on tacit, practice knowledge can be a desirable option but one that limits the potential for innovation and improvement. The argument for the importance of creating opportunities for the explicit sharing of the knowledge of practice amongst staff has been strengthened by the identification in the school improvement literature of internal variations within a school as the most significant factor impacting on pupil achievement. The Director of the largest public funded research programme in education in the UK, Andrew Pollard, adds weight to the case for teachers learning together in professional communities by advocating collaboration in the spirit of inclusiveness as the best way to meet conceptual, methodological and transformational challenges in education (Pollard, 2014).
Starting from pedagogy
The formation of groups of teachers into professional learning communities is dependent on finding a stimulus that will interrupt the flow of a teacher’s routine performance in the classroom and so induce the state of doubt identified by Dewey as the prerequisite for stimulation of the authentic inquiry necessary for learning (Dewey, 1933). The model that has been developed through over twenty five years of working in partnership with teachers places more emphasis in the initial stages on sharing pedagogical strategies that support student inquiry and trigger cycles of teacher inquiry. By taking this as the starting point, the teacher’s interest is stimulated and the risk of identifying ‘problems’ leading to a negative, and potentially defensive, view of current practice is avoided. It also means that the teacher has more control over the inquiry and is less vulnerable to any attempts by policy makers to use practitioner research as a vehicle for legitimizing initiatives.
The benefits of collaboration
Access to tools for inquiry enables teachers to become members of a community of inquiry for professional learning and the inclusion of university based educational researchers can develop the capacity to be equal partners in the creation and translation of knowledge about teaching and learning. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses of the research literature on Continuing Professional Development (CPD) endorse the value for teachers in engaging in professional dialogue with academics. CPD opportunities that include university staff as partners have a positive impact on teacher resilience thus promoting the retention of teachers who might otherwise leave the profession (Cordingley, Bell at al, 2003; Day and Saunders, 2006). Frost (2005; 2012) also recognises the potential for partnership between schools and universities to provide a context where teacher autonomy can flourish and teacher leadership is promoted. Assessments of the potential benefits of such collaboration highlight the following features:
- A chance to work across institutional boundaries
- Participation in a community that respects teachers’ knowledge as well as knowledge from university research and from policy makers
- Flexibility and informality in a loose organisational structure
- An environment that supports experimentation and taking risks
(Lieberman, 1999).
Professional learning task: Developing a community of inquiry
What opportunities do you currently have to share experiences and ideas about learning and teaching? How could they be developed so that they have the features of a community of inquiry?