Teachers Learning in Community: Realities and Possibilities

6. DEEPENING THE WORK: Promise and Perils of Collaborative Inquiry

鵷 6 鵸 DEEPENING THE WORK Promise and Perils of Collaborative Inquiry DIANE R. WOOD There is a widening consensus that the quality of students’ educational experiences has everything to do with the quality of their teachers. While opinions differ about how to ensure “quality,” most of those writing about improving schools agree that top-quality teachers know how to craft engaging, effective learning experiences for students despite shifting demographic, social, and economic conditions. Because constant change is a condition of teachers’ lives, the most effective teachers must keep their knowledge current and useful. For the best teachers, ongoing professional learning simply must become an essential aspect of their work. Recognizing this, the literature of school change increasingly contains recommendations that teacher learning be organized around professional learning communities (Allen, Blythe and Thompson-Grove 2004; Calderwood 2000; DuFour and Eaker 1998; Lieberman and Wood 2002; McLaughlin and Talbert 2001; Westheimer 1998; Weinbaum , Allen, and Blythe 2004). At the heart of such recommendations is a compelling notion of teacher professionalism that casts teachers as not only users of pedagogical knowledge but also as creators of it, as not only effective practitioners but also as career-long learners, as not only coaches and guides for students but also as constructive collaborators with colleagues. How does participation in a learning community give teachers opportunities to enact this vision of the teacher’s role? Under what conditions does the experience advance this vision of teacher professionalism? Do teachers embrace or reject these roles? What are the promises and the perils when they try? 119 In order to delve into these questions, this chapter begins by tracing the work of two teachers who facilitated learning communities. Realizing the potential of collective inquiry as a process for structuring and deepening the efforts of teachers in their respective learning communities to improve their practices and improve student learning, they worked to instantiate it as a core process. Their story, then, is about a struggle to replace the quest for certainty with a “stance of inquiry” (Cochran-Smith and Lytle 2001), about the obstacles and barriers they encountered, and about how they and their colleagues came to embrace new professional roles and responsibilities for student learning . In the process, many participants developed a new vision of teacher professionalism. In an effort to harvest as much understanding as possible from their story, the chapter parses the concept “professional learning community” through the lens of teacher professionalism and the role collective inquiry might play in enhancing it. As DuFour and Eaker (1998) have written, each word in that phrase—professional, learning, and community —defines an essential dimension of these groups. This chapter explores these three dimensions and concludes with an analysis of the obstacles that professional learning communities can encounter along the way. REDEFINING PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY After having been facilitators of LLCs in their school for two years, Joanne, a literacy specialist, and Karen, a classroom teacher, spoke enthusiastically about the positive impact of the LLCs. Teachers, they claimed, were growing more positive about meeting in collegial groups, and they were beginning to recognize why sharing challenges in their teaching might be helpful. Most of the resistance to the LLCs had, according to Karen, “faded away.” This success was heartening for Karen and Joanne, whose school served a diverse student population with many English-language learners. It was also known for low test scores, and three fourths of its students lived in poverty. In fact, the district ’s former superintendent had selected Lincoln Elementary School to participate in the Peer Collaboration Initiative precisely because of these unpromising conditions. She had also recognized that Yvette, Lincoln’s principal, was a strong, visionary leader. For Yvette and teacher leaders like Joanne and Karen, the LLCs became the “great hope” to rally the adults in the school around improving student learning. 120 DIANE R. WOOD Despite an auspicious beginning working with their learning communities , by the end of the second year both Karen and Joanne described a nagging suspicion that something was missing. Joanne put it this way: We’re doing great with [community building], but what I’m thinking is: Is that all we’re doing? I’m afraid that’s the way it’s playing out in some of the groups in our school. I’m wondering for myself [as a facilitator]: Have I gotten it balanced? Am I doing too much community building? But I do know it’s paid...