Judith Warren Little

Teachers' Professional Development in a Climate of Educational Reform.

This essay posits a problem of fit among five streams of reform and prevailing configurations of teachers’ professional development. It argues that the dominant training-and-coaching model—focused on expanding an individual repertoire of well-defined classroom practice—is not adequate to the conceptions or requirements of teaching embedded in present reform initiatives. Subject matter collaboratives and other emerging alternatives are found to embody six principles that stand up to the complexity of reforms in subject matter teaching, equity, assessment, school organization, and the professionalization of teaching. The principles form criteria for assessing professional development policies and practices.

Norms of Collegiality and Experimentation: Workplace Conditions of School Success:

Semistructured interviews with 105 teachers and 14 administrators, supplemented by observation, provide data for a focused ethnography of the school as a workplace, specifically of organizational characteristics conducive to continued “learning on the job.” Four relatively successful and two relatively unsuccessful schools were studied. More successful schools, particularly those receptive to staff development, were differentiated from less successful (and less receptive) schools by patterned norms of interaction among staff In successful schools more than in unsuccessful ones, teachers valued and participated in norms of collegiality and continuous improvement (experimentation); they pursued a greater range of professional interactions with fellow teachers or administrators, including talk about instruction, structured observation, and shared planning or preparation. They did so with greater frequency, with a greater number and diversity of persons and locations, and with a more concrete and precise shared language. Findings suggest critical social organizational variables that lend themselves to quantitative study.

Locating Learning in Teachers' Communities of Practice: Opening Up Problems of Analysis in Records of Everyday Work.

Abstract Research spanning more than two decades points to the benefits of vigorous collegial communities, yet relatively little research examines specifically how professional communities supply intellectual, social and material resources for teacher learning and innovations in practice. This paper examines the theory-building potential of audio- and videotaped records of situated interaction among teachers in the course of everyday work. The paper employs a small segment of a larger data set to chronicle analytic dilemmas and opportunities and to introduce a scheme for theorizing about the nature and significance of professional community for teacher development and school reform.

Attending to Problems of Practice: Routines and Resources for Professional Learning in Teachers’ Workplace Interactions

The authors investigate how conversational routines, or the practices by which groups structure work-related talk, function in teacher professional communities to forge, sustain, and support learning and improvement. Audiotaped and videotaped records of teachers’ work group interactions, supplemented by interviews and material artifacts, were collected as part of a 2-year project centered on teacher learning and collegiality at two urban high schools. This analysis focuses on two teacher work groups within the same school. While both groups were committed to improvement and shared a common organizational context, their characteristic conversational routines provided different resources for them to access, conceptualize, and learn from problems of practice. More specifically, the groups differed in the extent to which conversational routines supported the linking of frameworks for teaching to specific instances of practice. An analysis of the broader data set points to significant contextual factors that help account for the differences in the practices of the two groups. The study has implications for fostering workplace learning through more systematic support of professional community.

The Emotional Contours and Career Trajectories of (Disappointed) Reform Enthusiasts.

ABSTRACT Three individual cases, drawn from a larger body of case study data, illuminate a relatively unexamined aspect of teachers’ participation in large‐scale reform‐‐teachers’ experience of heightened emotionality and its relationship to career discontinuity or career risk. Disappointed reform enthusiasts point to three conditions that intensify emotional responses to reform and appear to result in career turning points: (1) the nature and extent of reform‐related conflict within salient work groups; (2) the degree of equilibrium among multiple sources of pressure and support; (3) institutional or administrative capacity to manage the pace, scale and dynamics of reform.

Professional Community and the Problem of High School Reform.

Abstract A two-year qualitative study of mathematics and English teachers in two urban comprehensive high schools investigated how teacher community serves as resource for teacher development and school reform. A school engaged in whole-school reform sustained high teacher commitment and school-level community by constituting professional community strongly at the school level, but its departments displayed varying capacity and disposition to examine problems of teaching and learning at the classroom level. In the second school, innovative teacher communities were constituted strongly at the department level in English and mathematics, but suffered problems of stress and turnover due to weak organizational supports for teacher development and school reform. Findings point both to the potential contribution of professional communities situated in subject departments and the challenge of capitalizing on such communities to advance whole-school reform. The study suggests complex relationships among organizational context, teacher community, teacher development, and institutional reform.

How Schools Organize the Teaching Occupation.

The Elementary School Journal Volume 86, Number 4

Constructions of teacher leadership in three periods of policy and reform activism

It is primarily within the last two decades that ‘teacher leadership’ has emerged as a prominent element of reform strategy and policy rhetoric. Three bodies of data spanning 14 years show how the meanings of teacher leadership vary, paralleling shifts in policy goals and strategies. Over time, designated teacher leadership roles have become heavily weighted toward institutional agendas over which teachers have little direct control and over which teachers themselves are divided. Much formally defined teacher leadership accomplishes a division of labour without entailing much initiative on matters of purpose and practice. Yet in each of the reform periods—from progressive and relatively decentralised to conservative and strongly centralised—some instances of teacher leadership constitute genuine initiative in teaching, learning and schooling. Such cases present existence proofs that illuminate both possibilities and dilemmas. From them we have begun to learn how teacher leaders might mobilise resources for teacher learning and educational reform.

District Policy Choices and Teachers' Professional Development Opportunities

A comprehensive inventory of formal staff development activity and costs in 30 California districts yields a portrait of locally organized opportunities for teachers and reveals the policy stance taken by districts toward teachers and their professional development. Present patterns of resource allocation consolidate the district’s role as the dominant provider of teachers’ professional development; other sources, including the university or the larger professional community of teachers, are less visible. Expenditures reflect a conception of professional development based almost exclusively in skill acquisition, furthered by a ready marketplace of programs with predetermined content and format; other routes to professional maturation are less evident.

Structuring Talk About Teaching and Learning: The Use of Evidence in Protocol-Based Conversation

Chapter Overview In this chapter Judith Warren Little and Marnie Curry critique a conversation among secondary teachers in a critical friends group in the USA. The conversation is driven by a problem of professional practice using artifacts of teaching and learning with the discussion guided by specifically designed protocols. These conditions both promoted opportunities for them to learn while at the same time limiting that learning. Through the discussion some teachers recognized and revealed their tenuous grasp of important aspects of discipline content knowledge but the protocols did not provide for this unexpected development. The authors raise the important issue of expertise in facilitation if such protocols are not to take on a formulaic or ritual character that limits rather than enhances professional learning.