Collaboration and self-regulation in teachers’ professional development

Abstract

This paper describes a professional development model with promise for supporting meaningful shifts in practice. We begin by introducing the theoretical principles underlying our professional development model, with a focus on explicating the interface between collaborative inquiry in a learning community (Lave, 1991, In L.B. Resnick, J.M. Levine, S.D. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, American Psychological Association, Washington, DC; Lave, & Wenger, 1991, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) and teachers’ self-regulated learning. Next, we report on successes and challenges within a 2-year collaborative research partnership. We recount how participating teachers reflected on practice, constructed conceptual knowledge about teaching, and made important instructional shifts. We also detail features of our model that teachers found most effective. We close by discussing our implications for theory and in-service professional development.

Introduction

Teachers are often called upon to restructure their professional practices, across community and institutional, formal and informal, and pre-school, school-age, and post-secondary education (e.g., Borko, Mayfield, Marion, Flexer, & Cumbo, 1997; Boudah, Logan, & Greenwood, 2001; Pugach, 1999; Scott & Weeks, 1996; Stein, Schwan Smith, & Silver, 1999; Wesley & Buysse, 2001). On one hand, teachers are asked to revise practices to match shifts in societal structure, values, or resources, for example, to integrate emerging technologies into classrooms (Rennie, 2001) or to include students with disabilities in neighborhood schools (Vaughn & Schumm, 1995). On the other hand, teachers are expected to realign practices in light of evolving learning theories (e.g., behavioral, constructivist, sociocultural). Expectations are that teachers remain current with the professional literature and integrate research with practice (e.g., Bromme & Tillema, 1995; Simmons, Kuykendall, King, Cornachione, & Kameenui, 2000). Given this recurrent demand for change, it is not surprising that teacher educators call for professional development that is both on-going and dynamic (Fullan, 1995). But questions remain concerning how to conceptualize teacher learning and, correspondingly, about how to construct professional development so as to foster meaningful change (Collins, 1998; Stein & Brown, 1997).

In recent research on professional development, researchers are criticizing “traditional” approaches and advocating for newer, more collaborative models (Collins, 1998; Scott & Weeks, 1996; Simmons et al., 2000; Stein et al., 1999). Traditional models include one-stop workshops, with a top-down approach to disseminating knowledge, in which teachers are provided with information and resources that they are expected to translate into action (Gersten, Vaughn, Deshler, & Schiller, 1997). In contrast, collaborative models emphasize the importance of nurturing learning communities within which teachers try new ideas, reflect on outcomes, and co-construct knowledge about teaching and learning in the context of authentic activity (e.g., Borko & Putnam, 1998; Perry, Walton, & Calder, 1999). However, although there is a clear movement towards collaborative professional development, there exists disagreement about how to characterize the learning spurred in collaborative contexts. Conceptions range from psychological, “in-the-head” models focused on how individuals’ knowledge, beliefs, and skills are shaped by collaboration, to situated or distributed models that characterize learning as inseparable from the socially situated activity within which “knowledgable skill” is developed and used (Lave, 1991; Moore & Rocklin, 1998). In the face of these conflicting descriptions, what is clearly required is an analytic theory of learning that encompasses the social and the individual without oversimplifying the contribution of either, and that explains individual and collective development in the context of learning communities (Cole, 1991; Damon, 1991; Moore & Rocklin, 1998; Stein et al., 1999). To this end, this article explores the dynamic interplay between social and individual learning processes within one collaborative professional development initiative, and the relationship between the learning achieved and shifts in teachers’ professional practices.

This paper emerges out of a 2-year collaborative research partnership in which researchers and teachers worked together to situate new instructional principles within classrooms, with the more specific aim of fostering strategic, or “self-regulated” learning by students with learning challenges (Butler (1995), Butler (1998a)). Concurrently, we sought to co-construct a collaborative professional development model that could be associated with sustained revisions in practice. Elsewhere we report student outcomes emerging from our interventions (see Beckingham, Novak, Jarvis, & Butler, 2002; Butler, Jarvis, Beckingham, Novak, & Elaschuk, 2001). In this article, we analyze the evolution of our professional development model across the 2 years of the project. In the sections that follow, we clarify the theoretical principles underlying our model and our central research questions. Next, we report findings from each year of the study wherein we evaluated our model. We close by revisiting the relationship between individual and collective learning in the context of a learning community, and by discussing implications of our findings for designing professional development.