Risk-Taking as Practice in a Coteaching Professional Learning Community

Gallo-Fox, Jennifer

doi:10.1007/978-90-481-3707-7_6

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 17 publications

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“…She described a mutual sense of accountability between teachers as they co-taught a lesson, invoking an image of each teacher 'having the back' of the other and not wanting to let the other person down. The image of a co-teaching partner 'having your back' was similarly used by Gallo-Fox (2010) to describe the security that co-teaching offered experienced teachers who were experimenting with new pedagogies and attempting to expand their practice. Negotiating shared goals prior to co-teaching promoted trust between the two teachers whereby shared understandings of the pedagogical practices they were aiming to implement influenced how they worked together.…”

Section: Accountability and Trust: Productive Relationships "Have To Be Earned"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Restructuring mathematics teaching | learning: Co-teaching as a designed approach to teachers' collaborative inquiry

Eden¹

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<p>This study explores how participation in collaborative inquiry opens space for an expanded set of understandings and practices for mathematics teaching | learning. It examines the affordances of collaborative inquiry to promote, or constrain, teacher learning in the context of teachers’ day to day work. Sociocultural perspectives underpin the study whereby professional learning is presumed to be situated in the social and cultural contexts of teachers’ work. A survey of the literature supports the assumption that persistent underachievement in mathematics for some groups of learners requires shifts in what teachers know and can do and reveals the importance of collaboration and inquiry for teacher learning. The study involved a participatory, design-based approach underpinned by an authentic and appreciative inquiry stance. Design-based research was chosen for its proximity to practice and its focus on connections between the enactment of learning designs and outcomes of interest. The research was iterative and cyclical whereby the researcher worked with a group of four teachers in one New Zealand primary school to design, implement and refine an approach to teachers’ collaborative inquiry. A range of data were gathered during a 6-month collaboration, including from teacher interviews, classroom observations and three-weekly group meetings. The analysis took a pragmatic and multi-theoretical approach to examine what it meant to design and enact teachers’ collaborative inquiry. Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) was employed to capture the complexity of the teachers’ collaborative inquiry activity and to analyse and interpret the contradictions that arose. A key finding was that a co-teaching inquiry approach fostered conditions that afforded teachers’ expanded access to and depth of engagement with new, and often dissonant, practice ideas. Through co-teaching, mathematics teaching | learning was restructured within three interconnected fields of practice: the teachers’ enacted practice, their talk about practice, and their noticing of student thinking within practice. The co-teaching inquiry activity was increasingly directed at a collective purpose; involved an interplay of risk and trust; supported shifts in teachers’ roles and responsibilities; and allowed teachers to constantly renegotiate the goals of their shared activity. The co-teaching arrangement disrupted practice whereby teachers’ actions served as minor interruptions to each other’s practice and thus became a resource for teacher learning. Opportunities to engage deeply with one another’s practice opened space for an expanded set of actions for each of the teachers in their own practice. This thesis adds nuanced understandings of the interrelated roles of collaboration and inquiry in improving teaching. It contributes to the growing body of literature exploring co-teaching arrangements for teacher learning, in this case in the previously under-examined context of teachers’ collaborative inquiry for their ongoing professional learning. It offers insights into how co-teaching might support teachers to enact new and challenging pedagogies aimed at addressing the persistent and considerable challenges posed by an ethical imperative to promote mathematics learning for diverse (all) students. Participating in the co-construction of a design for their collaborative inquiry enabled teachers to restructure their work and expand the possibilities for their individual and collective practice. It allowed teachers to reconstruct their identities from the lone operator whose professional reputation needs protection from exposure of any weaknesses in their mathematics knowledge or practice, to a learner whose naïve questions and gaps in practice served as a resource for all in their learning.</p>

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Section: Accountability and Trust: Productive Relationships "Have To Be Earned"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Restructuring mathematics teaching | learning: Co-teaching as a designed approach to teachers' collaborative inquiry

Eden¹

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Coteaching with senior students – a way to refine teachers’ PCK for teaching chemical bonding in upper secondary school

Schultze

Nilsson

2018

International Journal of Science Education

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During the last decade there has been ongoing discussions about students' declining interest and low achievement in science. One of the reasons suggested for this decline is that teachers and students have different frames of reference, whereby teachers sometimes communicate science in the classroom in a way that is not accessible to the students. There is a lack of research investigating the effects of coteaching with senior students in science in upper secondary schools. To improve teaching and to narrow the gap between teachers' and students' different frames of references, this study investigates how an experienced chemistry teacher gains and refines her pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) by cooperating with two grade 12 students (age 18) as coteachers. The teacher and the two coteachers coplanned, cotaught and coevaluated lessons in chemical bonding in a grade 10 upper secondary class. Findings indicate that the coteachers contributed with their own learning experiences to help the teacher understand how students perceive difficult concepts. In such way, the coteachers were mediating between the teacher and the students, thus bridging the gap between the teacher and the students' frames of references. The teachers' PCK was refined which in turn lead to improved teaching strategies.

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Using Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development to propose and test an explanatory model for conceptualising coteaching in pre-service science teacher education

Murphy

Scantlebury

Milne

2015

Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education

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Risk-Taking as Practice in a Coteaching Professional Learning Community

Cited by 5 publications

References 17 publications

Restructuring mathematics teaching | learning: Co-teaching as a designed approach to teachers' collaborative inquiry

Restructuring mathematics teaching | learning: Co-teaching as a designed approach to teachers' collaborative inquiry

Coteaching with senior students – a way to refine teachers’ PCK for teaching chemical bonding in upper secondary school

Using Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development to propose and test an explanatory model for conceptualising coteaching in pre-service science teacher education

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