thesisthoughts

Material to read…

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/publications_reports_articles/web_articles/Web_Article909

American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 33, No. 1, 193-231 (1996)
DOI: 10.3102/00028312033001193
© 1996 American Educational Research Association

Collaboration as Dialogue: Teachers and Researchers Engaged in Conversation and Professional Development

Caroline Clark, Pamela A. Moss, Susan Goering, Roberta J. Herter, Bertha Lamar, Doug Leonard, Sarah Robbins, Margaret Russell, Mark Templin and Kathy Wascha

University of Michigan

 This article, in both form and substance, seeks to reconceptualize the role of collaboration in professional development. The nature of collaboration and collaborative relationships in professional development research is reviewed, and an alternative conceptualization is offered. Because our work spans multiple sites, we are able to highlight the particularities of our experiences across sites and to contrast the individual stories of each teacher and researcher as opposed to essentializing our story into generalities about these groups. Writing about this work together required the construction of a narrative form that could incorporate and honor the voices of everyone. The story/data is presented as a Readers Theatre—a written script, based on meeting dialogues and interactions. This format highlights the problem of writing in collaborative research, as well as the differences in collaborative experiences among teachers and researchers. It also seeks to challenge traditional conceptions of the roles of teachers and researchers as theorizers about and disseminators of knowledge.

Collaborative Learning and the “Conversation of Mankind”

• Kenneth A. Bruffee
• College English, Vol. 46, No. 7 (Nov., 1984), pp. 635-652   (article consists of 18 pages)
• Published by: National Council of Teachers of English

 Technology, Pedagogy and Education

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t716100724

Learning through on-line discussion: what are the

opportunities for professional development and what are

the characteristics of on-line writing?

Michael Hammond

University of Warwick, United Kingdom

Online Publication Date: 01 October 1998

To cite this Article: Hammond, Michael (1998) ‘Learning through on-line discussion:

what are the opportunities for professional development and what are the

characteristics of on-line writing?’, Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 7:3, 331

— 346

To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/14759399800200041

ttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14759399800200041

I just realized that I haven’t used this article, one of the first I found when I started getting into the teacher-writer question.

The authors did a study of 7 Australian secondary teachers, “four of whom write with their students and three of whom don’t. The aim was to see if there were differences in the way they teach writing.

The authors define teacher writers as teachers who write outside of school hours, regardless of the purpose or the audience of the writing done.

Assumptions formulated by the authors before the study were:

1. Teacher -writers possess a “stronger knowledge base “than non writers
2. Teachers who write are better able to understand difficulties faced by pupils and respond from personal experience
3. Teacher-writers can better motivate students to write as a result of their own passion for writing

All teachers in the study were known as successful writing teachers.

Study:

• teachers observed teaching
• 2 interviews
• questionnaire on beliefs and practice

The study only researched the teaching of personal and imaginative writing.

The 4 teacher-writers held different views on the influence of their own writing experience on their teaching.

No clear correlation between the degree of teacher intervention with individual students, the stages in the writing process at which teachers intervened, and the writing background of the teachers”

“…no clear pattern” in the amount of explicit instruction

There were marked differences in the field of feedback to students but theses did not reflect the writer/non-writer background of the teachers.

Not one of the participating teachers believed that teacher writing improves writing instruction.

Ros one of the participating teachers argued:

“Teachers who were highly attached to their identity as writers might be too prone to have fairly narrow, self-confirming notions of good writing in ways that might be counter-productive for some students” (p. 47).

Small sample

No clear findings in practice which separate teacher writers from non-writers.

“All participant teachers perceived writing oneself and teaching writing as quite separate skills demanding quite different techniques” (p. 48).

Teacher writing is one way of acquiring a knowledge base for the teaching of writing. It may help to understand the task of writing but teachers need far wider knowledge than that.

“No necessary link between becoming a writer and teaching writing better” (p. 48).

Gleeson, A., & Prain, V. (1996). Should teachers of writing write themselves?: An Australian contribution to the debate. The English Journal, 85(6), 42-49. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org

Interview data were analyzed using the constant comparative method. Results indicated that teacher interactions triggered by NBC helped one another’s professional development in several ways: (a) enhancing reflection on teaching practice, (b) establishing a professional discourse community, (c) raising the standards for teaching performances, and (d) facilitating collaboration. Implications for teacher professional development were discussed.

“A teacher can never truly teach unless she is learning herself.A lamp can never light another flame unless it continues to burn its own flame.”

—Rabindranath Tragore (1861–1941), Nobel Prize Laureate For Literature

In this letter to the new president of the US, Lieberman and Pointer Mace call for a move from traditional PD for teachers to a model of PD based on the collaborative learning  from teacher experience and knowledge. The authors explain that “Teachers work in isolation and only rarely have a chance to observe their colleagues or talk about their teaching work” (p. 226).

“But professional development, though well intentioned, is often perceived by teachers as fragmented, disconnected, and irrelevant to the real problems of classroom practice” (p. 226).

The authors claim that traditional top down forms of PD do not recognize the particular needs of classes, the teacher’s own knowledge and that there are varied ways of achieving successful learning in schools. (p. 227).

“Instead of creating the conditions for teachers to teach each other, support their peers, and deepen their knowledge about their students, teachers are being given a “one size fits all” set of professional development workshops that deny the variability of how teachers teach, and how they and their students learn” (p. 227). 

The article also explains the social aspect of learning, that people learn through interaction with others. “They learn through practice (learning as doing), through meaning (learning as intentional), through community (learning as participating and being with others), and through identity ( learning as changing who we are). Professional learning so constructed is rooted in the human need to feel a sense of belonging and of making a contribution to a community where experience and knowledge function as part of community property. Teachers’ professional development should be refocused on the building of learning communities” (p. 227).

  The NWP is quoted as a successful model of PD through teacher collaboration (of course the teacher as writer is also involved here).

Another example is the networked communities in the UK (studied by Jackson, 2006; Jackson & Temperley, 2007). “The school networks helped to create practitioner knowledge (from teachers’ experience), public knowledge (from research and theory), and new knowledge (from what was created together). (p. 229).

“These networks of teachers from different schools managed to raise achievement for students, taught the participants how to work collaboratively linked yo “rigorous and challenging joint work”, and managed to build trust in helping make teaching public as they developed and distributed leadership among the teachers (Earl, Katz, et al., 2006)” (p. 229). 

 See: Networked Communities

http://www.ncsl.org.uk/networked/networked-leo-search.cfm

http://www.nlcexchange.org.uk

Gallery of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org

 ”Living archive” of teaching practice

http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org/insideteaching/

“The teacher communities described here exhibit the best we know so far about effective professional development. They focus on instruction; are sustained and continuous, rather than short term and episodic; provide opportunities for teachers to lern from one another both inside and outside the school; make it possible for teachers to influence how and what they learn; and engage teachers in thinking about what they need to know (Hawley & Valli, 2007)” (p. 233).

 Lieberman, A., & Pointer Mace, D. H. (2008). Teacher learning: The key to educational reform. Journal of Teacher Education, 59(3), 226-234. Retrieved from http://jte.sagepub.com  

While writing this thesis I was running a professional development program for teachers of grades two to six. The name of the twenty eight hour course was “Improving Literacy in a Heterogeneous Class”. The teachers voluntarily signed up.  I began the course by asking the fourteen teachers participating to fill in a questionnaire about themselves, their teaching experience and their expectations of the course. I included a list of possible topics and asked them to mark those most relevant and important to them. I was not surprised to find that the most pressing topic for all of the participants was the teaching of writing and supporting struggling writers.  I opened the third meeting by asking the teachers to write for ten minutes in silence, the topic being an experience they have had teaching writing. I told them that we would be discussing those pieces after the writing period was over.  One teacher immediately left the room, a toilet or coffee break I assumed. Another took out her cell phone and began clicking furiously. Others doodled quietly in their notebooks, began listing points or began to fill lines with Hebrew script.  I sat and watched them, uncomfortable with the squirming that was going on in several of the seats. Each minute that went past was like five, my watch didn’t seem to move. I forced myself to wait ten minutes, resisting my urge to cut the time down to seven or eight minutes.  Silence was kept in the room for most of the time, although occasionally there were embarrassed giggles or a whisper.  When the time was up, some of the teachers were still busily writing their narratives and were sorry to stop. Others looked relieved and were waiting to get on with the seminar.  In the discussion that followed I was interested in hearing what had happened to the participants in those ten minutes, what they had felt and what they had experienced and done in that time.  Many of the teachers commented that they are unused to writing on demand and that they felt uncomfortable. Some confessed that they are not used to writing at all. Several remarked that the time limit and the expectation of sharing their writing pressured them. At least two of the teachers didn’t write at all in the ten minute period. Only two or three confided that they enjoyed the writing experience.  We looked in detail at what had been done in that time and saw how the writing process is different for different people. Afterwards we discussed the implications for these differences in our classrooms. One of the teachers who didn’t write anything, an experienced grade six teacher, explained to the group that she isn’t a writer. “People are either born writers or they aren’t, I’m not” she said. The group discussed this statement. Is it true? If it is, what does it mean for the teaching of writing? I added that this is one of the major misconceptions held by struggling writers in our classes.  I asked the teachers if anyone was willing to share their text with us. Two of the first volunteers started to tell their story without looking at the page. I stopped them and reassured them that it is clear to everyone that this is the roughest of rough draft but that we want to hear what is on the paper.  Two of the pieces we heard were well structured, interesting stories. We were amazed by the writers’ style and clarity. At the end of the session I explained that our next meeting would not be face to face, that we would be meeting on the virtual campus. Each teacher was required to do three things, firstly to revise her story about the teaching of writing (or write another story) and to post it on the assigned private discussion board. The second task was to reflect on the teaching story and on the experience of writing one, I supplied possible directions for this. The third task was to read stories from other group members and respond.  It took ages and lots of encouragement for the first teacher to post a story. She wrote about a poetry anthology she had successfully produced at her school. The poems were all connected to Israel’s sixtieth birthday. This teacher told how she had created a poetry unit suitable for each different age group, chosen appropriate poetry to teach, and encouraged the children to write. Every child in the school had writing published in the festive booklet. She told her story modestly but proudly and expressed her personal excitement and satisfaction with the project. A few days after this story appeared, comments began to appear, most of them congratulating the teacher on her success in the project but also on being the first to contribute a story. Questions also appeared. Gradually a few other stories appeared on the site and the discussion was lively.  Unfortunately only five of the participants took part in the discussion. At our next meeting, I devoted time to the oral reading of those stories posted on the campus and gave those teachers time to share their experiences with the group. I was sure that my enthusiasm, together with showing the participants that it is possible to complete the task, would motivate the others to write and share their stories. A few weeks later, I am still waiting… Although I know that time is a central factor in any work I do with teachers, here I know that the type of task assigned was significant in the low rate of participation.  I am continually aware that these teachers have not been asked to write anything of this nature for a very long time, some of them since they were at school. Another factor is that in a twenty eight hour course many of the teachers do not know each other and may feel vulnerable as a result.  I have tasted this kind of work with teachers and find it far more meaningful than choosing a topic, planning a lecture or a workshop, giving them my knowledge or experience and going home.  When I read the stories written, I was greatly aware of what I have been learning, that every teacher has something to say, that each teacher possesses professional knowledge which can be a wonderful starting point for collaborative learning. S, a second year teacher, had been very quiet and reserved in the first two sessions. We discussed writing in the third meeting and I brought examples of authors talking about the writing process and about how laborious composition is. Suddenly, S shyly told the group that she keeps a personal diary and that because she lives alone she comes home and pours her day into writing. She confessed that writing is an important part of her day. The narrative S wrote and posted was written in very simple language but told a very powerful story of her battle to get her second grade pupils to write. She told us how she used to spend each Sunday morning hearing stories from her class about what they had done on the weekend. She was frustrated that it was always the same children who related experiences and that many remained silent. She told that it was difficult for many to choose just one experience to share.  One day, S gave her pupils special notebooks and told them that they were going to write what they wanted to share from their weekend and that afterwards those that want to can tell their story. She was shocked by the result. Firstly, everybody wrote, including those who usually don’t share and her struggling writers. Secondly, many more children were willing to tell their stories. S, excited by this lesson, decided to continue.  In the weeks that followed, S asked her pupils to write every Sunday morning and was happy that the children wrote willingly and that the texts produced were more and more complex. More and more pupils asked to share their work. As a result of the reflection S did when writing her narrative for our group, she started asking the class to write on other occasions, after recess for example. Another addition was that she herself started writing while her class was busy with their heads down. She used the time for reflective writing on teaching issues. In the weeks that followed, writing became an accepted mode of communication in S’s class. When children were involved in an argument or had a problem, she asked them to first organize their thoughts by writing them in the notebook and that afterwards she would be happy to listen to them. It worked. When S got to school after her day off, she would find a pile of notes waiting for her on her desk. Subject teachers who taught the class were surprised when they began to receive written communication from the young children.  S received positive feedback on her work from the members of our group and also heard ideas for continuing and expanding her work. I found it very satisfying that through this activity she realized that she has something significant to share with a group of experienced teachers. Many of the veteran teachers certainly had something to learn from this shy and nervous early career teacher. I realized that S was similar to her shyer pupils, those that only dared to share a story when they had it firmly on paper.  There is no tradition of composing teacher narratives and collaborating on them in this part of Israel. There are presently no formal options for professional learning through dialogic writing and discussion. Despite the fact that this small scale experience was only partly successful, I am optimistic that significant learning frameworks can be established for Israeli teachers in this direction.  In order to succeed, I believe teachers need to know ahead of time that this will be the framework of the seminar and that they know they will be committed to experience the writing and discussing of teacher narratives. A mix of experienced and early career teachers is likely to be preferable – building on the enthusiasm and burning need for collaboration amongst newer teachers and the experience and knowledge of veteran educators.  I have already taken the first few steps. I have surprisingly managed to convince the coordinator of language and literacy in the northern area of Israel, that this is the way we should be going in our PD for next year. Most of the courses we will be offering will deal with the teaching of writing and they will all be structured around teacher collaboration and the writing and sharing of narratives.  If we begin with a respect for the knowledge the teachers bring with them and their honest desire to raise the achievement levels of their pupils in writing, I hope they will sign up and then be open, flexible and active participants.

 Information from the Israeli Macam center

In an attempt to engage her students in writing, Adam tried bringing her own experience in personal writing into the classroom – with no success.

“I tried to conjure up some samples of my own personal writing. I shared these with my classes, but the samples didn’t solve my problem. Students pointed out that I was older, and of course writing was easier for me” (p. 30).

Adam, D. J. (1992). Journal literature and writing: A fusion. The English Journal, 81(6), 30-32. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org