Program A: Studio School Design and Implementation

• In Event: 46.067 - Team/Design Professional Development School: Critical Common Commitments for Teacher Development

Abstract

For Program A, our emphasis is on building a culture of practice over 30 different sites or Studio Schools, using ResponsiveDesign (Córdova, Taylor, Hudson, Sellers, Goetz, Pilgreen & Jung, 2014; Córdova, Kumpulainen & Hudson, 2012; Murawski & Córdova, 2012) as a theory of action and the associated Inquiry into My Practice (IMP) as a signature pedagogy. The Studio School model involves undergrads and grads, early field experience participants and students teachers/interns.
From a theoretical standpoint, the faculty design team's views are grounded in an interactional ethnographic perspective (Green, Dixon & Zaharlick, 2003; Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group, 1995) guiding them to understand classrooms as cultures (Santa Barbara Classroom Discourse Group, 1992a, 1992b) and knowledge as situated and socially constructed.
Groups of candidates have been placed with teams of teachers in Studio Schools. This last year, the second year of the program, we began to move more deeply into a intentional theoretical approach using ResponsiveDesign. ResponsiveDesign involves phases of exploring, envisioning and enacting. We moved from one-to-one and into a team-to-team structure as part of intentionally building a particular educational learning culture visible to our candidates. The moment by moment building of this culture is named, and transparent, and its affordances – the 3 Durable practices of collaboration, instruction and reflection -- are made visible to all participants including candidates, university clinical instructors and school staff.
This happens through structured on-site seminars, where candidates work through an Inquiry into My Practice (IMP) protocol, which brings ResponsiveDesign to life at the level of classroom practice. Candidates learn as prototypers, moving through cycles of exploring the challenges and expectations they face, envisioning solutions drawing on their research based learnings, and then enacting solutions in order to study and test them out and learn and adjust. The IMP work begins with candidates and clinical instructors and moves out to classroom teachers.
The IMPing builds the culture around 3 Durable practices, collaboration, instruction and reflection, and establishes the ResponsiveDesign theory of action. One way of looking at this is to see each classroom as a hub of an in-school Liquid Networked Innovating Community (LiqNIC) (Córdova et al., 2014), where the differentiated staffing and the IMPing draw educators and administrators together to learn with and from each other in different combination than the usual "egg-crate". The result is learning flowing in a “liquid network” (Johnson, 2010, p.52) that constitutes itself in different ways and at different times. If we zoom out, each school is also a part of a network, and the work we do on campus, and with the clinical educators just scratches at the potential of how these schools could be learning with and from each other.
As present, most of the powerful work is happening as we establish the IMPing at the finer grain size of classroom instruction; we have not yet introduced ResponsiveDesign to power larger scale problem solving. Probing the possibilities for scaling up to the school level is a question for discussion.

Authors

• Ann R. Taylor, University of Missouri - St. Louis

• Stephanie Koscielski, University of Missouri - St. Louis