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Collaboration amoung teachers

Math & Science

LASW with Families

Nancy Barnes.
"Teachers Teaching Teachers,"
in Education Week, January 19, 2000 (19:19, pp. 38, 42).
The article is available in full on EdWeek's web site for members or for purchase.
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Nancy Barnes, a professor of cultural anthropology at Lang College of the New School, argues for a reconceptualization of professional development from workshops to work within schools. "Instead [of workshops], what teachers need is the opportunity to think and talk with each other on a sustained basis about the day-to-day life of their classrooms. They need to investigate and analyze questions that feel urgent, troubling, exciting, useful, or in some other way consequential to them, given the circumstances of their individual schools and students. Serious conversations about shared work is always a powerful resource for people doing the work. We recognize the process of investigation and critical discussion in a community of colleagues as professional development in a host of other fields. Why not in education?"

Barnes describes her experiences in collaborating with teachers engaged in school-based participatory research at three schools in the New York Networks for School Reform (small public schools in New York City).

In one of the schools, the School for Academic and Athletic Excellence, teachers use a format for reflection on questions, such as, "What does intellectual vigor look like in the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade classrooms?" Teachers observed an individual student week by week and "queried his or her findings with the whole group: What does this piece of student work tell you about this particular child? What changes have you noticed since the last time we met? What are you learning about yourself as a teacher in relation to this young person?"

Barnes identifies four dimensions that make school-based inquiry a useful strategy for professional development:

1. Participatory research helps teachers to be responsible to themselves and their colleagues for the growth and learning of student in their classes. This is a critical kind of accountability.

2. Teacher inquiry encourages professional development that "fits" the local school conditions.

3. School-based research turns the traditional authority of research upside down. It positions practitioners as knowledgeable, thoughtful professionals who collect and analyze data and use their findings to improve their schools.

4. Teacher inquiry sustains extraordinarily busy people who are hungry for intellectual exchange, for time to analyze what they are doing, to share ideas, observations, and articles, even as they balance an astonishing range of demands on their energies and talents