Teacher-Centered Professional Development: Study Groups
(Inland: A Journal for Teachers of English Language Arts, Spring/Summer 2003, Vol. 25, No. 2)
Abstract: In a study group format, teachers from across grade levels and curricular areas use a learner-centered model of professional development. Their teacher talk leads them to significant discoveries about their teaching and their own professional development.
My professional interest in student-centered discussions about literature began over twenty years ago when I started on my own journey of classroom teaching. Over the course of those years, the many students, and countless stories and poems, I gradually began to value not just that students talked about the stories, poems, and plays, but how they talked about them and with whom. What had begun as the teacher firing questions and catching “correct” student responses evolved into my observing and guiding students as they questioned each other about the stories and gained important insights about those stories from their own and their peer’s experiences and ideas. Over the course of those years, I learned from my students and their needs, from my esteemed colleagues, and from the professional literature I studied, that students need to talk about literature in authentic, meaningful ways for the literature to have any possibility of providing growth and learning for the students.
It was a short leap from this awareness of the strengths of student-centered discussions to my realization that teachers, too, would grow in their knowledge, skills, and dispositions about teaching if they could be involved in their own learner-centered discussions about teaching and learning. I had been keenly aware of the inefficiency of how we teachers typically learned from each other: snatches of conversation in the hall as the students prepared for class or conversations about teaching and learning during a drive, perhaps, to an in-service or professional opportunity. The in-services themselves rarely allowed for significant teacher conversation and professional development at university classrooms was often “academy-focused.” Why were we stuck in this plodding and unreliable system of learning from each other? This question was the spark that resulted in my decision to explore the possibility of teachers talking together in a study group format about student-centered discussions of literature. As we learned techniques and strategies of facilitating student-centered learning, would we transfer this knowledge to our own needs as learners?
Several important studies inspired me to consider a study group structure for my colleagues and me to learn more about students-centered discussions of literature. The study group format would provide a way for me to learn more, as well, about the dynamics of the interaction of teachers in a learning community.
Wenger (1998) points to concepts of interaction within groups of similar practice that structure and facilitate their work, ease and enhance the doing of that work, facilitate growth within and among the members, and suggest negotiated meanings of the work.
Theories of social practice address the production and reproduction of specific ways of engaging with the world. They are concerned with everyday activity and real-life settings, but with an emphasis on the social systems of shared resources by which groups organize and coordinate their activities, mutual relationships, and interpretations of the world. (p.15)
Wenger further suggests the impact of the group’s work on the teacher’s identity, and the enculturation of individual teachers into a community. Clearly, a study group speaks to the possibility not only of a professional development of teachers but actually suggests a potential for teacher transformation.
Conceptual frameworks for small group learning are rooted in such disparate fields as philosophy of education (Dewey, 1976), cognitive psychology (Piaget, 1926; Vygotsky, 1978), and humanist and feminist pedagogy (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986). As early as 1916 Dewey wrote:
That education is not an affair of “telling” and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is merely told? It is preached, it is lectured, it is written about. (pp.43-44)
His theory points to the usefulness of working out ideas in practice, not merely hearing and/or absorbing those ideas.
The works of Piaget and Vygotsky are grounded in queries of how language used socially both mediates and constitutes the thinking self. In discussing the functions of the annual meetings of their national network, Belenky et.al. (1986) justify the collaborative format they used.
Instead of speaking at an “audience,” we began to construe it as conversing with colleagues, working on questions that matter to us all. Instead of disseminating knowledge and protecting our turf (our theory), we tried to involve others in questioning and expanding our ideas. We were not delivering a product…we were engaged in a process (preface).
They claim essentially that the groups to which they spoke learned more and learned better if they, the participants, became involved in dialogue about the issue. The “experts” no longer delivered answers but recruited the knowledge and experience of the people to whom they were speaking in actively and socially constructing the important information about the issues. Their study as well as others has consistently reported that cooperative/collaborative learning has favorable effects on achievement and productivity, psychological health and self-esteem, intergroup attitudes, and attitudes toward learning (e.g. Johnson & Johnson, 1989; Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1991a, 1991; Johnson, Maruyama, Johnson, Nelson, & Skon, 1981; Quin, Johson & Johnson, 1995). In all these examples, social construction of knowledge and authentic activities to produce that knowledge enriched the learner, the teacher, and the level of knowledge.
Several characteristics of the Tucson study group (Birchak, et.al, 1998) are echoed in the structure and intent of our study group. Our group did not have a specific agenda or plan for professional development but instead focused on “negotiating a shared agenda and encouraging professional growth” (p.3). Participation in our group was voluntary. Together our group established an appropriate calendar of meeting times. This way we could honor the diverse scheduling needs of the teacher participants: six classroom teachers from various buildings and academic departments within the school district and me, a teacher educator from a nearby university but more importantly, a former colleague of the teachers. Together we also decided on the readings and topic of discussion for the subsequent meeting. Our group did not convene to listen to presentations. Rather, the purpose of our group was to dialogue and reflect on the impact of the reading (usually an academic research piece) on our classroom practice.
The connection between theory and practice also concerns Wenger (1998). “The relationship between practice and theory is always a complex, interactive one….Practice is not immune to the influence of theory, but neither is it a mere realization of theory or an incomplete approximation of it.” (p.48) Wenger further suggests this mixing of theory and practice as yielding something new, not revisions of each. It is this possibility of something new which I hoped would evolve in our teacher talk during our study group.
Our group met six times over the course of a school semester. At each session we discussed the research piece we had read (e.g. Applebee, 1996; Cazden, 1988; Nystrand, 1994; O’Connor & Michaels, 1996), the inquiry we had tried concerning that research idea in our own classrooms, and our discoveries of how the research interfaced with our classroom practice. At the end of the semester, interviews with each of the participants yielded rich results.
The interviews revealed basically five outcomes . First, all of the teachers, without exception, said they valued a framework in which they were “forced” to read research or theory. They perceived the study group as an opportunity to read research, which they valued but for which they did not make time on their own. Only one teacher, a thirty year veteran and a reading/language arts coordinator, made time in her own schedule for reading research. She did this primarily on her vacation time, but she noted that it was more valuable for her to read theory and research during her weeks of teaching so she could immediately “try them out” and ultimately, connect them to her teaching. The other teachers simply did not allow time in their schedule for reading academic research even though they realized they should. So the study group format was a framework with reading built in and the expectations set. Only two teachers said they would probably continue on their own with a routine of reading research and/or theory. The others reported that they would like to but realistically speaking knew that their reading of research would probably be unsystematic. This finding points to the value of ongoing study groups during the teaching semester as a valuable means of professional development.
Second, all six of the teachers agreed that talking about the research and/or theory “made it work.” One teacher said reading the research made the light bulb come on, but hearing what the others had to say about it or explain how they had used it in their teaching helped her to see real meaning of the research because “we all saw things differently.” The conversations were crucial to their gains as teachers learning more about their practice. The high school teachers in the group reported that the conversations in the study group sometimes made their way to lunch talk later in the lounge with other staff members. An elementary teacher in the study group said she often shared parts of the study group conversation with her fourth grade team back in her building. Both these testaments suggest an outreach effect of the knowledge gained through the study group participation.
The two teachers in the study group who were new to the district that school year felt that participating in the study group helped them to feel more at home in their new school, and in doing so echo Wenger’s (1998) of the enculturation possibilities of study group participation. The study group was a way for them to learn the values and philosophy of colleagues and their department, a result that might have taken years to achieve with merely casual conversations, or worse yet, the usual “complaint sessions” that can happen in department meetings. They were impressed, too, with the positive atmosphere of the study group. As one of the new teachers said, “We came together to talk about possibilities, not the usual department or faculty meeting stuff where people feel their purpose is to complain about students or texts or tests or whatever. That positive quality made a difference in how we talked. For a new staff member, participating in a group like this seemed community building. You get to know other teachers in a way that you can’t often get. And this high school needs community building.” They were also very excited about the mentoring possibilities such study group participation suggests.
A fourth and significant outcome of the study group became apparent as two teachers spoke of the value of attempting to “try out” some idea from the research writing into their own teaching. This classroom inquiry helped them to “step outside” themselves and see themselves in new ways. As they subsequently revised their own practice, hearing about other’s inquiry projects also gave them new ways of looking at teaching and learning. One teacher mentioned, too, that as she read the selections and listened to the other teachers she found herself imagining herself teaching in those new ways or using new strategies.
Finally, several teachers shared during the interviews that they had established some professional goals as a result of participating in the study. This step was completely authentic to the teachers because at no time did the group suggest that they think about goals beyond the format of the study group. The fact that several did indeed consider their professional growth beyond this study group and as a result of this study group is an endorsement of the study group’s effectiveness for professional development. The social studies teacher of the group said that she was considering a few specific ways of incorporating more oral language into her sociology course. She was looking at a variation of daily oral language, which some of the language arts teachers had discussed at one of our sessions. She wasn’t sure how she would use this practice, but her goal was to work with it over the summer break and create an organized and sequential set of daily oral language experiences for students having to do with concepts or ideas in sociology. She also shared that she has already begun to look at ways of integrating some ideas she had learned at a district in-service session on “Five-type Writing,” an organized program which attempts to target certain thinking skills within a writing activity, with some of the techniques our group discussed for discussion, especially the ideas about formulating questions and facilitating discussions where students interact with each other and not directly with the teacher. It is impressive that this twenty-five year veteran would come away from a study group with two very specific goals about changing her teaching to a more student-centered approach. This change was a result not only of the research we had read but was clearly the result, too, of the conversation about that research in which the members had participated.
One other teacher spoke about wanting to spend some time that summer working on ways to integrate the “Five-type Writing” with various discussion strategies that we had talked about. Both of these teachers are also department coordinators in the district. It seems likely that the learning gained from our study group will eventually have a distributed effect in these other departments and curricular areas. Another teacher said that undoubtedly she will return to professional journaling as a result of having participated in the study group. “That got me through my first years of teaching and I don’t know why I ever stopped, but our conversations have reminded me of how much I learned from journaling. So I will pick that up again.”
A disturbing insight that I gained, however, from the interviews with the teachers was that three of these teachers who were also department or curriculum coordinators had the regular opportunity as members of the district curriculum council to read theory and research and talk about it at various council meetings. The plan for these councils is for these “district leaders” to read various selections from research and then set aside a part of their monthly meeting to discuss that reading. All three of these teachers reported that these council meetings are a wonderful opportunity to read and talk about important issues. What is disturbing about this is that for many teachers in the district, this kind of opportunity will never be available. Between matters of seniority and district politics, many teachers never get to serve on this district curriculum council. And all classroom and resource teachers need and deserve quality collaborative time for discussion and exchange of ideas. It strikes me as hegemonic that a select group, who incidentally also gets paid for their time on the council, has this opportunity, while the majority of teachers, all who deserve such an opportunity, have to find their own ways of achieving this level of discourse.
I can’t help but be reminded of Bourdieau’s (1991) notion of “social goods.” Opportunities to grow and learn through reading and discussing theory can be seen as a power issue such as status or possessions might seem because of the exclusivity of their interaction. I am reminded too of the unpleasant reaction educators often have when confronted with the charge that public education is two-tiered for the students: one product for the elite (Advanced Placement, Gifted and Talented ) and an entirely different product for the disenfranchised (Learning Disabled, Emotionally Disabled). It should be appalling that such a two-tiered structure exists for the professional lives of our teachers.
Nonetheless, the professional goals and teaching plans created by these teachers point to the possible long-range effects of study group participation. As one teacher said, “This group was different from the usual in-service where you get handouts that you probably won’t ever look at again. Here we learned by reading, and speaking, and listening, and doing. It’s just what we offer our students to do to learn and remember.” It is likely that she and the other teachers have recognized the power they have to be agents of their own professional growth and change. The study group gave them the chance to combine in a meaningful way their practice, academic theory and research, and the potential of collaborative effort and constructivist learning.
References:
Applebee, A. (1996). Curriculum as conversation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Belenky, M., Clinchy, B., Goldberger, N., & Tarule, J. (1986). Women’s ways of knowing. NY: Basic Books.
Birchak, B., Connor, C., Crawford, K.M., Kahn, L.H., Kaser, S., & Short, K.G. (1998). Teacher study groups: Building community through dialogue and reflection. Urbana, IL: NCTE.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Trans by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Ed. By John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Cazden, C. (1988). Classroom discourse and student learning. In Classroom discourse: The language of teaching and learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Dewey, J. (1976). Democracy and education. In The middle works: 1899-1924. Ed. By JoAnn Boydston. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press.
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Johnson, D., Johnson, R., & Smith, K. (1991). Active learning: Cooperation in the college classroom. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Company.
Johnson, D., Maruyama, G., Johnson, R., Nelson, D., & Skon. L. (1981). Effects of the cooperative, competitive, and individual goal structure on achievement: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 89, 47-62.
Nystrand, M. (1997). Dialogue instruction: When recitation becomes conversation. In Opening dialogue: Understanding the dynamics of language and learning in the English classroom. NY: Cambridge University Press.
O’Connor, M. & Michaels, S. (1996). Shifting participation frameworks: Orchestrating thinking practice in group discussion. In D. Hicks (Ed.). Discourse, learning, and schooling. NY: Cambridge University Press.
Piaget, J. (1926). The language and thought of the child. NY: Harcourt Brace.
Quin, Z., Johnson, D. & Johnson, R. (1995). Cooperative versus competitive efforts and problem solving. Review of Educational Research, 65,129-143.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.