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A Theory of Teacher Community

Grossman, P., Wineburg, S. & Woolworth, S. (2001). 'Toward a theory of teacher community.' Teachers College Record, 103 (6) 942-1012. http://www.tcrecord.org

In this paper, Grossman, Wineburg and Woolworth (2001) describe a project that brought together 22 teachers (English, Social Studies, ESL, Special Education) twice monthly to read together and create an interdisciplinary curriculum. The authors discuss the challenges involved in forming a professional learning community - in particular, the perceived tension between professional development geared towards learning new pedagogical practices, and the need to consider teachers as lifelong learners with goals to deepen their own subject matter knowledge.

The authors argue that the word 'community' has lost its meaning, and that 'community has become an obligatory appendage to every educational innovation' (p. 942). They draw a distinction between a community of teachers and a group of teachers sitting in a room for a meeting (p. 943).

We have little sense of how teachers forge the bonds of community, struggle to maintain them, work through the inevitable conflicts of social relations, and form the structures needed to sustain relationships over time. (p. 943)

Creating communities can be problematic when there is little agreement on processes. The authors describe their own successes and failures in setting up a professional learning community, touching on the following.

They consider the importance of face-to-face interactions, dialogue, trust, the formation of group norms, shared moral life and civility. They employ the following definition of community.

A group of people who are socially interdependent, who participate together in discussion and decision-making (sic), and who share certain practices that both define the community and are nurtured by it. (Bellah et al. 1985, p. 333, cited in Grossman et. al., 2001, p. 946)

They point out that establishing a community takes time, as individuals build up a shared common history and become a 'community of memory'.

In teaching, the authors say, a key rationale for developing teacher communities is that such communities provide an ongoing venue for teacher learning (p. 947). However, a major impediment to the development of teacher communities is the temporal and spatial organisation of school life, which often leaves little time or space for the development of communities that can enable deep learning.

The authors provide extensive text extracts from recorded conversations with teachers, illustrating many of the difficult issues of curriculum development and personal learning that the teachers discussed in the project. From their analysis of the extensive texts generated by the participants in the study, the authors provide a model of the formation of a teacher professional community. The model suggests that developing a mature community involves:

forming a group identity and norms of interaction
navigating fault lines
negotiating the essential tension
communal responsibility for individual growth.

Grossman et al. ask 'Why should we care about community?' and provide the following answers.

Professional communities can be the source of intellectual renewal. 'We cannot expect teachers to create a vigorous community of learners among students if they have no parallel community to nourish themselves' (p. 993).
They can be a venue for new learning.
They can be a venue for cultivating leadership.
They can provide adult role models who care passionately about lifelong learning.
They embrace individual voices, different perspectives and collective wisdom.