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Paper Summary

Distributed Leadership Through Communities of Practice: Collaborative Inquiry-Based Professional Learning

Sun, April 15, 2:15 to 3:45pm, Vancouver Convention Centre, Floor: Second Level, East Room 8&15

Abstract

Purpose and Perspective
This paper will generate a critical discussion of teacher collaborative inquiry as a professional learning process which supports adaptive, local and large-scale system improvement within elementary schools. These communities of practice, in effect, build instructional leadership among teachers, thereby supporting the process of distributed leadership. The paper will focus on three initiatives: Collaborative Inquiry for Learning – Mathematics (CIL-M), Early Primary Collaborative Inquiry (EPCI), and Student Work Study Teachers (SWST). Within a large-scale elementary school reform, they use teacher collaborative inquiry to inform and adapt teaching and assessment practices.

The notion of what Goodlad (1991) and Sergiovanni (2007) called teacher stewardship is a stance within educational change that places student actions and learning as the predominant rationale and motivation of, and for, teacher action, learning, and change (Greenfield, 1991). The local education ministry works from this stance through teacher professional learning initiatives based on collaborative inquiry. Teacher collaborative inquiry is based on relevant and authentic (generated from participating teachers) inquiry questions that ground the work in the learning process of students and the products of their learning (LNS, 2010). In so doing, it sits firmly within what Coburn and Stein (2010) argue is a conception of building knowledge of practice, in which teachers learn through opportunities to collaboratively interrogate their own practice.

CIL-M, EPCI and SWST rely on school-based learning teams and school-to-school networked learning communities to foster deeper teacher engagement in teaching and learning, and enriched student learning conditions. These initiatives also anchor the work in the use of evidence (e.g., observations) drawn from the immediate experiences of students working in classrooms, to inform strategies and actions. The initiatives are adaptive, allowing for informed adjustments as teachers work together and take an experimental and embedded reflective approach to their practice.

Methods and Data
The three initiatives in this study exemplify collaborative inquiry within school and district teams. Data were drawn from a multi-method assessment of: six collaborative inquiry sites for the CIL-M initiative from 2008-09 to 2010-11; 70 participating teams in an EPCI initiative from 2009-10 to 2010-11; and 50 case studies written by teacher-researchers in the SWST initiative from 2009-10 to 2010-11. In total, these inquiry teams cut geographically across this large Canadian jurisdiction and represent nearly one-quarter of the province’s elementary schools.

Results and Significance
Data from these initiatives suggest three larger implications for using these models system wide:
1- A core catalyst and motivator for teacher action and professional learning occurs in response to increased student learning and engagement of students in situ, and as a result of the collaborative work done by teachers.
2- These models generate explicit top-down/bottom-up tensions as centrally directed process and initiatives support effective adaptations to individual student and local classroom contexts and needs.
3- Mirroring Coburn and Stein’s (2010) discussion on the use of research tools to connect research and practice, these initiatives build skill sets in capturing student experiences through systematic, collaborative observation, in ways that provide enriched information for teacher and institutional action and understanding.

Authors