Tensions and Teacher Agency in Adaptive Professional Development

• In Event: Centering Teachers’ Equitable Participation in Professional Development: Partnership Approaches in Chile and the U.S.

Abstract

Professional development (PD) initiatives are impacted by incoherence among PD goals, teachers’ existing practices, and the district context (Desimone, 2009). Adaptive PD that is responsive to teachers’ experiences and contexts (Koellner & Jacobs, 2015) can address incoherence. In the context of a research-practice partnership (RPP) between a school of education and a small district in California, this study examines (1) the tensions that surface when involving teachers in co-design of PD adaptations; and (2) the PD adaptations that were negotiated in response.

Tensions often arise in improvement efforts as stakeholders bring differing backgrounds to understanding the problem space and designing solutions (Johnson et al., 2016). Co-designing adaptive PD to mitigate tensions serves to craft coherence, that is, to continuously negotiate demands across a PD system (Lindvall & Rye, 2019). Traditionally, teachers are expected to change their beliefs or practices to align with PD objectives; they are rarely positioned with agency to craft coherence (Lindvall & Rye, 2019). Through co-design, teachers manifest their agency by making decisions around PD initiatives that affect their professional work (Eteläpelto et al., 2013; Severance et al., 2016). Examining tensions and resulting adaptations provides insight into how teachers exercise their agency to craft coherence.

All district teachers attended ten days of pull-out PD around research on children’s mathematical thinking and responsive instruction. Instructional Improvement Teams (IITs) at two elementary schools co-designed additional site-level teacher learning opportunities. Each team consisted of the principal, three teachers, and three or four university researchers.

Data include audio recordings and field notes from 31 IIT meetings spanning two school years, and field notes and artifacts from PD meetings. Qualitative analyses included: (1) IIT conversation segments where issues were raised were thematically coded to identify tensions; (2) Transcripts and field notes were analyzed to identify designed site-level PD adaptations in response to these tensions.

Three categories of tensions emerged. First, conversations revealed issues related to incoherence in the infrastructure to support teachers, including a misaligned curriculum and conflicting district messaging. Second, tensions arose from our partnership's commitment to incorporating teachers’ voices and perspectives, which led to negotiations over the goals and form of joint work, and the methods for collecting and sharing data. Finally, tensions surfaced from efforts to engage audiences in improvement efforts beyond IITs, including other teachers and families. In response to these tensions, IITs co-designed adaptations to address cross-site and site-specific needs. Tables 1, 2, and 3 provide tensions and corresponding example adaptations.

This study contributes to limited research on adaptive PD (Koellner & Jacobs, 2015) and highlights the affordances of partnership approaches. Through co-design, teachers were able to exercise their agency by crafting coherence, which meant that PD goals and activities were shaped throughout improvement efforts. While some tensions reflected incoherence typical of district-wide PD initiatives, others resulted from our commitment to incorporating teacher agency. Nevertheless, our findings suggest that creating space for teacher voice to surface tensions ultimately resulted in more responsive learning experiences.

Authors

• Christina Kimmerling, University of California - Irvine

• Rossella Santagata, University of California - Irvine

• Patricia Fuentes Acevedo, University of California - Irvine