Developing writing pedagogy in a teacher professional learning community

Pella, S. (2011). A situative perspective on developing writing pedagogy in a teacher professional learning community. Teacher Education Quarterly, 38, 107-125.

Background

The National Writing Project (NWP) is a social learning network for teachers in America. The NWP learning model is structured for social interaction and knowledge co-construction amongst teachers. The reported study was a government funded project, in partnership with NWP and an American university, that explored how the NWP learning model could be enhanced by incorporating lesson study.

Aims

The study examined how teachers’ participation in lesson study inquiry fostered the transformations in teacher perspectives and pedagogy with regard to developing effective lessons for teaching response to literature and persuasive writing.

Sample

Involved in the study were four middle school teachers from different schools: two from affluent suburban settings, and two from large urban districts that served a majority of low income families.

Method

The teachers met monthly and communicated via email weekly over the course of a school year to develop four lessons. The project funded ‘release days’ for the teachers to observe one another teaching the collaboratively planned lessons and to participate in the debriefing meetings that immediately followed the observations. All the meetings were audio taped and transcribed for analysis using a grounded theory approach.

Findings

The study found that the teachers synthesized their own and one another’s prior knowledge and theoretical frameworks in the teaching and learning about writing. The analysis of the teacher interactions pointed towards the collaborative planning and observation processes as catalysts for synthesizing various forms of prior knowledge and experiences. Evidence of the teachers’ transformed perspectives and pedagogy was linked to their negotiation of the conflicting values inherent in their diverse experiences and practices. Support from the lesson study group empowered teachers in moving away from the reliance on formulaic writing structures targeted at preparing students for the national examinations and, instead, towards the use of multi-modal, discovery-based writing activities to access students’ prior knowledge and develop their points of view for writing. The teachers also reported increased notions of self-efficacy and higher expectations of student learning.

Implications

The author called for more research to focus on the socio-cultural settings and interactions among teachers as units of analysis. A broadened lens of inquiry on how teachers co-construct knowledge for teaching would be needed to illustrate ways in which participation in a professional learning community could meet the learning needs of teachers.

Original article retrieved from Google scholar.