Joint Work on Teaching and Teacher Learning: Exchanging Expertise

• In Event: 70.065 - Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: 70.065-12 - Division I Roundtable D. Mentoring of Experts by Experts: Dyadic Workplace Learning in Education and Other Professions

Abstract

This paper revisits two related cases of teacher learning that involve experts coaching experts. In the first case, an expert teacher and an expert teacher educator worked on the problem of how to induct student teachers into the intellectual and practical work of teaching (Feiman-Nemser & Beasley, 2007). In the second case, the same expert teacher coached a colleague, a twenty-year veteran, in transforming her teaching practice (Beasley, Corbin, Feiman-Nemser & Shank, l987). In both cases participants had to overcome preconceptions and cultural constraints in order to undertake what Little (1987) calls “joint work” – “rigorous and enduring interactions that induce mutual obligation, expose the work of each person to the scrutiny of others, and call for initiative and leadership in matters of curriculum and instruction” (p. 493).
Set in an urban, elementary professional development school, the two cases were part of a long-term experiment in reform-minded teacher education linked (Holmes Group, l990). Data consisted of weekly journals written by the participants over the course of one year, in the first case, and two years, in the second case, about their ongoing work. Through cycles of data analysis and experimentation, participants constructed practical theories about teaching and teacher learning, tested new approaches to mentoring and transformed their practice as teachers and school-based teacher educators (Feiman-Nemser & Beasley, 1997).
What different forms of expertise did participants bring to their joint work? How did they use each other’s expertise to develop new theories and transform their practice? What ideas and strategies did participants in the first situation transfer to the second situation? By exploring these questions, the paper offers insights about the practice of peer coaching among teachers and the cultural and structural conditions that make such work possible.

Author

• Sharon Feiman-Nemser, Brandeis University