Teachers Learning in Community: Realities and Possibilities

2. CREATING LEARNINGCOMMUNITIES: The Lucent Peer Collaboration Initiative

鵷 2 鵸 CREATING LEARNING COMMUNITIES The Lucent Peer Collaboration Initiative BETTY LOU WHITFORD AND DEBRA R. SMITH As the Lincoln vignette in chapter 1 demonstrates, analytical conversations among teachers about student work and their own teaching practices can have powerful effects. Teachers’ knowledge—ordinarily tacit and individually held—is elicited, shared, and critiqued. New roles and practices emerge, new insights develop, teacher learning is enhanced , and deeper understanding about individual students’ learning and the connections to teachers’ practices is developed. At the same time, as the Santos vignette in chapter 1 makes clear, these effects are not arrived at quickly or easily. How did the learning communities portrayed in chapter 1 come into being? How did they become situated in their districts? What supports were provided? How did the initiative evolve? What accomplishments and tensions developed as the project unfolded? In this chapter, we address these questions by describing the multiyear Lucent Peer Collaboration Initiative and how the research team interacted with project leaders and participants. The chapter concludes with a summary and discussion of the effects of the initiative across the initial four participating districts. 21 TEACHER LEARNING THROUGH PEER COLLABORATION In 1999, the Lucent Technologies Foundation set a particularly ambitious goal when it supported an initiative aimed at transforming the professional cultures in a set of schools through new approaches to professional development. The centerpiece of the initiative would become “Lucent Learning Communities” (LLCs)—small groups of educators meeting regularly to engage in systematic peer critique and support by sharing their own professional practices as well as artifacts of student learning. The foundation engaged The Philanthropic Initiative (TPI) to develop and manage the project and the National School Reform Faculty (NSRF) to train teachers and administrators in the approach and to support the districts’ efforts. Educators in twenty schools in districts in New Mexico, Washington, Pennsylvania, and Florida were the initial participants. In a second phase, Lucent funded school districts in New Jersey to engage in a redesigned version of the initiative. Lucent also funded researchers—initially based at Teachers College, Columbia University, and later at the University of Southern Maine—to document the project as it unfolded and to provide ongoing feedback and advice to project leaders, the districts, and the foundation. The researchers characterized their work as “documentation” to emphasize their role as formative rather than summative evaluators. One team focused on New Mexico, Washington, Pennsylvania, and Florida, while a second team later conducted research in New Jersey. This chapter draws extensively from the work of the first team, described in more detail later in the chapter. Chapter 5 is devoted to the project in New Jersey. Figure 2.1 displays the initial project participants. LAUNCHING THE INITIATIVE: COACHES’ INSTITUTES As project planning progressed during the period 1999–2000, TPI invited nine districts to apply for Lucent funding, intended to support three subsequent years of work. Following an extensive review of professional development practices and leadership orientations in the districts, as well as consultation with NSRF leadership, TPI and foundation staff selected four districts for awards. District leadership determined the specific schools that would be involved. In some cases, the selected schools formed a curricular or attendance pattern; in other cases, school principals volunteered their schools’ participation. Beginning in August 2000, and over the next two years, NSRF designed and facilitated four multiday institutes aimed at preparing 22 BETTY LOU WHITFORD AND DEBRA R. SMITH teachers and administrators to serve as coaches of LLCs in their home districts and otherwise support the initiative. Each institute was held near one of the four districts in turn, with two cohorts of teachers and administrators attending paired summer and winter institutes. These CREATING LEARNING COMMUNITIES 23 Fig. 2.1. Peer Collaboration Initiative Participants institutes were highly structured, intensive experiences where participants worked in cross-role and cross-district sessions, learning to use specific collaborative techniques for community building, trust building, collaborative inquiry, group facilitation, giving and receiving feedback, discussing professional literature, and critiquing classroom artifacts (such as samples of student work, assignments, and classroom activities) for evidence of quality and for identification and discussion of alternative approaches. The institute sessions were co-directed by members of the National School Reform Faculty, a group that formed in the mid-1990s to promote the use of “critical friends groups” as a vehicle (according to one of the early NSRF leaders) “for building collaborative school cultures, making professional practice public, and...