Collaborative Inquiry as Pedagogic Intervention: Improving Literacy Learning in Disadvantaged Communities in Australia

• In Event: Addressing Educational Inequality Through School-Based Learning Designs

Abstract

Objectives
The paper engages current debates about teacher quality and educational underachievement in disadvantaged schools by theorizing a view of collaborative inquiry in a school-university design partnership. Working with schools to address seemingly intractable problems of low educational achievement university researchers engaged teachers and school leaders in an ongoing problem solving and capacity building process over a 3.5 year period.
Theoretical Innovation:
The paper develops theories of: (1) pedagogic work exploring knowledge transfer across university – school boundaries, (2) shifting pedagogic identities as teachers make evidence-informed decisions about the design of pedagogic practices, and (3) innovative pedagogic models (see Beck, 2009; Bernstein, 2000)
Methods and Data Sources:
Through an analysis of interview, focus group, and professional learning conversation data, collected from 12 schools, we explore how partners worked together in a highly contextualized problem solving process as they engaged in systematic cycles of activity. We track the design partnership process as a movement from data generation and analysis to rethinking and re-planning curriculum and pedagogy to needs-based professional learning design to enable instructional innovation and to evaluating the effectiveness of such innovations . The complexity of practice oriented, research informed ongoing teacher learning is discussed in light of current debates about teacher professionalism and teaching quality.
Results and Significance:
The partnership activity generated strong professional learning conversations (PLC) that had significant positive impacts on student and teacher learning (Borko, 2004). In this case the strong PLC was characterized by a shared object of inquiry, understanding students’ literacy learning problems, and intense cycles of collaboration for instructional design and evaluation of learning innovations that could make an educational difference. We describe this collaborative model of solving complex educational problems as ‘double simulation’ (Daniels, 2011) whereby the structuring of reflective activities with incremental changes over time, enabled us to monitor the effect of the social activity on the reflective capacity of teachers, and in turn the literacy achievements of learners. We further examine the conditions that are necessary to enable productive reflexive collaborative conversations, as (1) an inquiry habit of mind; (2) the nature of the evidence informing theories and (3) learning conversations that interact to make for a powerful collaborative inquiry improvement process (Earl & Timperley, 2009).
Repeated measures of student achievement (Y4-10) in reading comprehension were collected, together with measures of teacher engagement and professional learning surveys. Effect size comparisons indicate accelerated gains in student learning outcomes. Growth in the partnership schools exceeded the rate of growth expected in a national sample. Indeed, 50% of year level groups in these schools demonstrated a rate of improvement that was close to 1.5 to 3 times the gains expected in any other classroom in the nation. Comparisons of like schools’ results indicate that these substantial gains are the result of the instructional innovation work of teachers who have engaged in cycles of professional learning and reflection supported by partnership activity.

Authors

• Kathryn Glasswell, California State University - Fullerton

• Parlo Singh, Griffith University