Assessing the Impact of Teacher Communities of Practice on Instructional Quality

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Teaching and teacher education (TETP) round-table 1

Proposal

In many educational systems, teachers are typically isolated in their classrooms where their practice remains private (Akiba & Wilkinson, 2015; Stigler & Hiebert, 2009). This isolation can hinder teachers from sharing knowledge with their peers to replicate classroom successes. Teacher communities of practice (CoPs), broadly defined, aim to overcome this hindrance by drawing on teacher peer expertise to address the ever-changing instructional needs and to achieve continuous improvement (Huang & Shimizu, 2016; Wenger & Snyder, 2000). Among models that aim to build productive communities of practice, the Japanese Lesson Study and the Shanghai Teaching-Study Group are two examples that employ disciplined and teacher-led collaborative inquiry cycles, and present the most promise. Specifically, the Shanghai teaching-study groups are typically led by teachers with recognized content-pedagogical expertise. Teachers participate in collaborative inquiry cycles of lesson planning, peer observation, feedback, and revision within and across schools. Studies have also associated the “teaching-study groups” in Shanghai with high student achievement and low correlation between student social economic status and academic proficiency (Jensen et al., 2016; OECD, 2010; Yang, 2008; Wang, 2013).

While prior empirical work suggests CoPs and similar models are related to improved teacher and student outcomes, there are challenges to implementing high quality models and even tougher challenges to measuring the impact of such models. To date, few empirical evidences have linked teacher-led professional learning through collaboration with performance outcomes that measure instructional quality and student performance with robust causal claims.

Considering the potential benefits of learning from the Japanese and Shanghai models, a research-practice partnership (RPP) was formed in 2012-13 to take on the challenge of building teacher communities of practice with a visible, shared, and accumulative teaching knowledgebase in pilot schools in a Southern U.S. state. The RPP designed the Teacher Peer Excellence Group (TPEG) model with the overarching objective of instructional improvement that can be validated using observational criteria for instruction and student value-added results.

This study assesses the impact of Teacher Peer Excellence Groups (TPEGs), a professional learning model that aims to build disciplined and teacher-led communities of practice to improve instruction and raise student achievement. TPEGs are collaborative inquiry cycles that iterate through four stages: lesson planning, peer observation, peer feedback, and lesson revision. The study applies a propensity score matching strategy using a rich set of state administrative data to estimate the impact of TPEGs on two measures of teacher performance: observational ratings and value-added scores. The study finds that TPEG teachers experience growth in both performance measures in the subsequent year but the longer-term impact is attenuated. It is of both methodological and practical importance to note that our estimates likely captured the influence of TPEGs when formed by teachers and principals. The study also underscores the need to understand the role of teacher agency in forming and sustaining communities of practice.

Author

• Xiu Chen Cravens, Vanderbilt University