From Shanghai to the United States: Developing Instructional Leadership Through Teacher Peer Excellence Groups

• In Event: 56.080 - Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: 56.080-6 - Developing Teacher Leadership and Expertise Through Lesson Study and Action Research: A Cross-Cultural Dialogue

Abstract

In the U.S., it has been challenging to elevate teaching from anecdotal personal experience to communities of practice where teachers jointly construct, transform, preserve, and continuously deepen the meaning of effective teaching (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). Teachers, principals, and district administrators not only need good examples that can help them visualize new ways of thinking about collaboration, but actionable and operationalizable models with user-friendly structures and protocols that can help them build and sustain communities of practice for instructional improvement. In this study, we ask:

1. What can we learn about the value and purpose of teacher leadership as a strategy for building communities of practice for instructional improvement from high-performing education systems such as Shanghai?
2. What are some of the concrete examples of successful cross-cultural adaptation that might lead toward or support strategies on collaborative inquiry for instructional improvement in today’s complex school environments?
3. What are some potential areas of focus, opportunities, and gaps for teacher leadership to drive professional learning growth in alignment with local needs and state/national standards?

Teacher Peer Excellence Group (TPEG) is a collaborative inquiry model customized from the Shanghai “teaching study groups”, comprised of iterative cycles of lesson planning, peer observations, feedback, and revision. In Shanghai, this largely teacher-led and practice-oriented collaborative model is the main engine that propels multileveled professional development, and has succeeded in raising teacher and student performance across the socioeconomic spectrum (Jenson et al., 2012; Wang, 2013). For more than two years, the TPEG model has been piloted in selected schools of six Southern U.S. school districts. Through surveys, interviews, and focus groups from pilot schools, we document both challenges and necessary enabling conditions in the continuous effort of the pilot schools to sustain this new form of teacher collaboration. Our goal is to qualitatively identify effective teacher leadership and principal leadership practices that support and foster communities of practice, and to assess the viability of taking the TPEG model deeper into system-wide PD redesign and integration.

In this study, 15 U.S. pilot public schools in six districts report that the TPEG model gives the necessary structure and a set of tools for teachers to take leadership and become comfortable with and to develop expertise in communities of practice: observing, being observed by their peers, and providing open, honest feedback. Early implementations also show encouraging signs that the TPEG work could be well aligned with the Common Core Standards, while also focusing on pedagogical indicators within teacher evaluation rubric for instruction. The TPEG approach challenges school leaders to take on the responsibilities of helping teachers make their practice public, sharable, and better – three critical objectives in the shift to develop the profession of teaching. The indication of TPEG model’s positive impact on strengthening the features of communities of practice in selected public schools provides the impetus for further efforts in understanding the transformational changes needed and challenges ahead at the classroom, school, and district levels.

Author

• Xiu Cravens, Vanderbilt University