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Inside Teacher Communities

Little, J. W. (2003). 'Inside teacher community: Representations of classroom practice.' Teachers College Record, 105(6), 913-945. http://www.tcrecord.org

In this article, Little (2003) draws from intensive case studies of teacher knowledge, practice and learning to consider how classroom teaching practice comes to be known, shared and developed among teachers through their out-of-classroom interactions. She proposes that teachers' professional relationships are significant to teacher development, careers, commitments and school reform. Conditions for improving teaching and learning are strengthened when teachers:

collectively question ineffective teaching routines, examine new conceptions of teaching and learning, find generative means to acknowledge and respond to difference and conflict, and engage in actively supporting one another's professional growth … [There has been] … considerable progress in the conceptualisation and measurement of collegial interaction, and in specifying the attributes of professional communities. (pp. 913-914)

Little writes that there is not much understanding of how teacher communities contribute to personal support and professional development.

Is it that lesson planning improves as people press each other to say not only what they do with students, but why? Is it that the toughest, most persistent problems of curriculum, instruction and classroom management get the benefit of the group's experience? Is it the combined sense of confidence and obligation that teachers carry into the classroom? Is it the peer pressure to live up to agreements made and ideas offered? Is it that in making teaching principles and practices more public, the best practices are promoted more widely and the weakest ones are abandoned? Is it simply that close work with colleagues affords a kind of stimulation and solidarity that reflects itself in energetic classroom performance and holds talented teachers longer in the profession? (Little, 1987, p. 494, cited in Little, 2003, p. 915)

Little and her co-researchers employed observations, interviews, pen-and-paper surveys, and school documents to ask 'what teacher learning opportunities and dynamics of professional practice are evident in teacher-led groups that consider themselves collaborative and innovative?'. Little includes extensive text extracts from recordings of teachers' interactions, and analyses how they answer the research question. She concludes that teacher learning communities:

reserve time to identify and examine problems of practice; they elaborate those problems in ways that open up new considerations and possibilities; they readily disclose their uncertainties and dilemmas and invite comment and advice from others; and artefacts of classroom practice (student work, lesson plans and the like) are made accessible. In all these ways the groups display dispositions, norms and habits conducive to teacher learning and the improvement of teaching practice. (p. 938)

In addition, the case studies found that:

ongoing interactions both open up and close off opportunities for teacher learning and consideration of practice … Even within those groups that would reasonably be considered collaborative, innovative, and committed to improving practice, teacher learning seems both enabled and constrained by the ways that the teachers go about their work. The force of tradition and the lure of innovation seem simultaneously and complexly at play in the teachers' everyday talk. Habitual ways of thinking or acting coincide closely with moments of surprise ('aha'); the impulse to question practice resonates against the press to simply get on with it. (pp. 939-940)

Little concludes that:

if we are to understand more fully what distinguishes particularly robust professional communities, we may have to understand the interplay of the conventional and the creative. (p. 940)