Taking the Lead: Teachers Leading Educational Reform Through Collaborative Inquiry

• In Event: 18.046 - Teachers Leading Education Reform: The Power and Potential of Professional Learning Communities

Abstract

Objectives or purposes

Professional learning communities have become a relatively common method of building professional capital within schools and districts. This paper reports the findings from a three-year teacher-led development and research project designed to build professional capital across a range of organisational, geographical, political and professional boundaries in order to promote educational equity for children from high poverty settings.


Perspectives

This draws on the ideas and concepts associated professional learning communities (eg. Bolam et al, 2005), collaborative inquiry (eg. Bryk et al 2015; Chapman et al 2014; Chapman 2016) professional capital (Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012) and adopts a socio-cultural perspective to examine how grid-group theory (Douglas, 1982) within public service settings (Hood, 1992) can be used to explore and better understand the development of teacher-led professional learning communities.


Methods and data sources

This paper focuses on a national development and research programme involving a partnership between Scottish Government, local authorities and the Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change at the University of Glasgow to support the development of rigorous, teacher-led structured improvement and innovation school partnerships across Scotland (see Chapman et al., 2014; Chapman et al., 2015).

Findings

The findings report that teachers involved in this initiative draw on a sophisticated range of practices to build professional capital across a range of organisational, geographical, political and professional boundaries.

Significance

The significance of these findings relate to the identification of within, between and beyond school factors that support the development of professional capital through effective collaborative practices of teachers and teacher leaders both within their own contexts but also in leading change to promote educational equity across institutions and school district boundaries and how these practices relate to and be explained by grid group theory.


References
Bryk, A.S Gomez, L.M Grunow, A and LeMhieu, P.G (2015) Learning to improve: How America’s schools can get better at getting better Boston, MA: Harvard Educational Press
Bolam, R., McMahon, A., Stoll, L., Thomas, S., Wallace, M., Greenwood, A., Hawkey, K., Ingram, M., Atkinson, A. & Smith, M. (2005). Creating and sustaining effective professional learning communities. Research Report 637. London: DfES and University of Bristol.
Chapman, C Chestnutt H Friel N Hall S Lowden K (2016) Professional capital and collaborative inquiry networks for educational equity and improvement? Journal of Professional Capital and Community, Vol. 1 Iss 3 pp. 178 - 197

(2015) The School Improvement Partnership Programme: Using collaboration and inquiry to tackle educational inequity, Report to Education Scotland. Livingston. Education Scotland.

Chapman, C., Lowden, K Chestnutt, H.R Hall, S McKinney, S Hulme, M and Friel, N (2014) The School Improvement Partnership Programme: Using collaboration and inquiry to tackle educational inequity, Report to Education Scotland. Livingston. Education Scotland.

Douglas, M. 1982. In the active voice, Routledge & Kegan Paul. London

Hargreaves, A. & Fullan, M. (2012). Professional capital: Transforming teaching in every school. New York, NY: Teachers College Press and Toronto, ON: Ontario Principals’ Council.
Hood, C. 1998. The Art of The State, Culture rhetoric and public management, Clarenden Press: Oxford

Author

• Christopher James Chapman, University of Glasgow