Teachers Learning in Community

Description

This book raises provocative questions about the efficacy, viability, and sustainability of professional learning communities given the present political and structural realities of public schools. The culmination of six years of research in five states, it explores real world efforts to establish learning communities as a strategy for professional development and school improvement. The contributors look at the realities of these communities in public schools, revealing power struggles, logistical dilemmas, cultural conflicts, and communication problems—all forces that threaten to dismantle the effectiveness of learning communities. And yet, through robust and powerful descriptions of particularly effective learning communities, the authors hold out promise that they might indeed make a difference. Anyone persuaded that learning communities are the new "magic bullet" to fix schools needs to read this book, including teacher educators, educational leaders and practitioners, professional developers, and educational leadership faculty.
Acknowledgments

Introduction
Betty Lou Whitford and Diane R. Wood

1. Professional Learning Communities for Collaborative Teacher Development
Betty Lou Whitford and Diane R. Wood

2. Creating Learning Communities: The Lucent Peer Collaboration Initiative
Betty Lou Whitford and Debra R. Smith

3. Learning Communities: Catalyst for Change or a New Infrastructure for the Status Quo?
Diane R. Wood

4. Learning Communities in an Era of High-Stakes Accountability
Diane Yendol-Hoppey

5. Context and Collaboration: Growing the Work in New Jersey
Debra R. Smith, Dick Corbett, and Bruce L. Wilson

6. Deepening the Work: Promise and Perils of Collaborative Inquiry
Diane R. Wood

7. What’s to Not Like about Professional Learning Communities?
Ken Jones

8. A Look to the Future
Diane R. Wood and Betty Lou Whitford

About the Authors
Index

Sujets

• Teacher education

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781438430621
• Langue: English

Extrait

SUNY SERIES , R ESTRUCTURING AND S CHOOL C HANGE
H. Dickson Corbett and Betty Lou Whitford, editors

T EACHERS L EARNING IN C OMMUNITY

Realities and Possibilities
Edited by
Betty Lou Whitford
and
Diane R. Wood

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2010 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Diane Ganeles
Marketing by Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Teachers learning in community : realities and possibilities / edited by Betty Lou Whitford and Diane R. Wood.
p. cm. — (SUNY series, restructuring and school change)
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3061-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-3060-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Professional learning communities—United States.
2. Teachers—In-service training—United States. I. Whitford, Betty Lou. II. Wood, Diane R., 1946-
LB1731.T4199 2010
370.71'55—dc22 2009023133
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
BETTY LOU WHITFORD AND DIANE R. WOOD
A s with all long-term field studies, many people have been involved and made significant contributions to the research we conducted and the understandings we developed. Topping our list are the many teachers and administrators in seven school districts in five states who generously shared their time and insights with us. As we fanned out into their offices, schools, and classrooms, they graciously put aside pressing demands to answer questions and explain their perspectives. Many allowed us to watch them at work, and it is the work that they do that provided the core inspiration for this book. While not named to protect confidentiality agreements, they know who they are, and we extend each one our heartfelt thanks.
As explained in chapter 2 , the research project was initially based at Teachers College, Columbia University, where Betty Lou Whitford, then director of the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching (NCREST), served as principal investigator. Linda Darling-Hammond, Carla Asher, and Fred Frelow of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF), also then based at Teachers College, contributed to the conceptualization of the research proposal. Heidi Fisher served as project manager, and research assistants included Ji-Sung Chong, Lindsay Stanley, and Christine Clayton.
In 2002, the project moved to the University of Southern Maine (USM) when Whitford became dean of the College of Education and Human Development. At USM, Debra R. Smith served as project manager and later as principal investigator of the research in New Jersey. Alison Moser, Chris Backiel, Ken Bedder, Laura O'Neill, and Robin Day contributed to project administration and data analysis. Lanna Maheux-Quinn helped with transcription, and Judy Letarte and Kim Warren pitched in on short notice to solve some technological glitches encountered in preparing to submit the book manuscript to State University of New York (SUNY) Press. We are also grateful to Karen Fox whose keen eye helped immensely with copy editing in the final stages of manuscript preparation.
Though his name does not appear on any of the chapters, Edu-Data founder Robert Cole's influence is present in every chapter. His role is best understood as “editor in charge of clarity.” If you find yourself puzzled over meaning here or there, it is probably because we did not take Bob's advice. We also thank Bob for his patience and flexibility with our ever-changing writing deadlines. He generously adjusted his schedule whenever possible to accommodate ours.
At SUNY Press over the course of this project, we thank former director Priscilla Ross, Jenny Doling, and Jane Bunker for their encouragement and support. Publication of this book completes the SUNY series Restructuring and School Change , which Priscilla initiated, edited by H. Dickson Corbett and Betty Lou Whitford. We are grateful to SUNY Press for the continuing support of the series and the addition of this book to it.
Of course, this book would not have happened at all without the generosity of the Lucent Technologies Foundation and the support of the Philanthropic Initiative. Hallie Tamez, senior program officer with the Philanthropic Initiative, was our primary contact throughout. Her twelve years of experience as an elementary schoolteacher showed in both her understanding and her questions. Unwavering in her commitment to improving schooling and teaching so that children benefit, she was unfailingly responsive, supportive, and insightful, asking tough questions and sometimes applying a swift boot to our collective backsides.
At the Lucent Technologies Foundation, David Ford and then Christine Park supported the initiative from their position as foundation president. Most recently, Florence Demming provided oversight from the foundation. We greatly appreciate their support.
This book, focused on collaboration, is also a consequence of it. We are especially grateful to all who contributed chapters, not only for their fine work, but also because they were willing to sit down as a group to discuss and synthesize what we had learned from involvement in this project. Bob Cole facilitated the gathering, and Florence Demming and Hallie Tamez joined us to contribute their insights. That memorable conversation considerably deepened our understanding of emerging patterns across research sites and helped us immeasurably in composing the final chapter.
We also thank Susan Lytle from the University of Pennsylvania and our USM colleagues in the Bozo's Writing Group, particularly Julie Canniff, Melody Shank, and Jean Whitney, for reading early drafts of some chapters.
Over the last five years, as we have wrestled with elusive ideas and struggled to put them into writing, the two of us have learned firsthand a central message in this book. Professional relationships and work become stronger when sustained through both encouragement and critique. We are grateful that our relationship has grown and deepened through our work, and vice versa.
The individual with whom we worked the closest at Lucent, Richard Curcio, will forever have a special place in our hearts. In 2005, Rich died. While with the Lucent Technologies Foundation, he championed grant making intended to enhance the success of public school-children and the effectiveness of adults working with them. The Peer Collaboration Initiative was one of those. Moreover, he understood, even delighted in, the unpredictable, sometimes meandering path of creativity and innovation, both as the project unfolded in the schools and in the evolving research that documented it. He was a teacher and a gentle man. We miss him.

I NTRODUCTION
BETTY LOU WHITFORD AND DIANE R. WOOD
I n the last decade, reference to “professional learning communities” has dramatically increased in the literature of both education and business. What, in fact, is a “learning community”? What purposes should learning communities serve? How do they operate? How do participants interact? How should they interact to fulfill their purposes? What motivates people to participate in them—or resist them? What is the relationship between teachers' learning communities and contemporary demands for accountability and data-based decision making? In other words, do learning communities actually contribute to improving schools and student learning, and how do we know? What conditions would convincingly attest to their efficacy? In the end, how does a learning community differ from any other group of colleagues working together?
In this book, we share what we have learned about these questions based on six years of research in a project originally funded by the Lucent Technologies Foundation, with continued funding from Alcatel-Lucent, following the merger of Lucent Technologies, based in Murray Hill, New Jersey, with a French information technology company, Alcatel. Called the Peer Collaboration Initiative, the project's first phase established professional learning communities in a set of schools in four districts in New Mexico, Washington, Pennsylvania, and Florida and, in a second overlapping phase, three districts in New Jersey. The foundation also funded two teams of researchers to document the project, provide feedback to the funder and to project participants, analyze outcomes, and engage in dissemination of the research. The authors of seven of the eight chapters in the book were members of these research teams.
The project designers intended the initiative to support learning communities as an innovative vehicle for teachers' professional development that would transform the schools' professional cultures. That is, the project's aim was to supplant individualistic and privatized approaches to teaching with a professional culture in which teachers make their practices more public and take collective responsibility for student learning. Thus within the Peer Collaboration Initiative, we came to define “learning communities” as small groups of educators who meet regularly to engage in systematic, ongoing, pee