Teacher Learning Through Teacher Teams

Joke Voogt, Jules Pieters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138565166
• eBook ISBN: 9781351344036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teacher collaboration helps to facilitate meaningful and effective learning and enables sustainable development of schools. Teacher teams who collaboratively investigate a shared problem, or design curriculum materials together, significantly contribute to the professional development of teachers in areas of subject matter, curriculum design and data skills.

Contributions to this book discuss various perspectives of teachers collaborating in design teams, by investigating the sense of collaboration and its effects, and the conditions that influence and drive it. The studies provided suggest that collaborative design and research supports participants (teachers and teacher educators) to improve their knowledge, specifically in regards to technological pedagogical content and subject matter. Participating teachers further developed curriculum design expertise, such as, understanding the relevance and effectiveness of involving stakeholders in designing and implementing newly designed curricula. This volume was originally published as a special issue of Educational Research and Evaluation.

Teacher collaboration in curriculum design teams: effects, mechanisms, and conditions

Joke M. Voogt, Jules M. Pieters and Adam Handelzalts

ABSTRACT

Collaborative design positively affects both professional development and the implementation of curriculum change, because teachers develop competencies and practice and develop ownership of the change. The current study was aimed to explore what empirical evidence is available about processes that take place when teachers co-design and how these contribute to professional development and curriculum change. Evidence from 14 PhD studies was collected to study their impact on teacher learning and curriculum change, by analysing effects, mechanisms, and conditions. Results showed that effects of curriculum design teams, in terms of learning outcomes for teachers in areas such as (pedagogical) content knowledge and design knowledge and skills, became manifest in the outcomes of the curriculum design process, and in the appreciation by the stakeholders. We concluded that professional development, through collaborative design in teams, which is specific and linked to the curriculum, influences teachers’ knowledge and practice and impacts implementation of curriculum change.

Introduction

Teachers’ professional development is generally seen as supporting curriculum change, through influencing teacher’s competencies and practice (Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman, & Yoon, 2001; Penuel, Fishman, Yamaguchi, & Gallagher, 2007). These studies show that promoting curriculum change via teachers can be best achieved through utilizing teacher development and through stimulating collaborative curriculum design. Although the importance of teacher development for curriculum change has been acknowledged for a long time, teachers’ active involvement in collaboratively designing curriculum materials is recently becoming more prominent in educational practice (Simmie, 2007; Vescio, Ross, & Adams, 2008). A major reason is that traditional teacher development practices were found to be inadequate, not only for professional development but also for curriculum development and implementation, because of its passive nature (Borko, 2004; Lumpe, 2007). It is also generally accepted that curriculum change is not likely to succeed when teachers are merely viewed as practitioners who are expected to implement the plans of others (Ben-Peretz, 1990; Borko, 2004).

The common premise in all these teacher and curriculum development practices is that collaborative design positively affects both professional development and curriculum implementation. Recently, several studies have been published about the empirical basis of teachers’ professional development and collaborative curriculum design in order to reach curriculum implementation and innovation (Drake, Land, & Tyminski, 2014; Penuel et al., 2007; Simmie, 2007; Voogt et al., 2011). With the teacher as the main link in the chain, there are two initial starting points for promoting curriculum innovation. On the one hand, teacher professional development is seen as the primary aim. The production and enactment of curriculum materials is considered more of a means, and the designs are by-products, such as the case in lesson study (Lewis, Perry, & Hurd, 2009). On the other hand, the emphasis is on curriculum innovation, and here professional development is considered a conditional process (Coburn, Russell, Kaufman, & Stein, 2012). From both perspectives, it is believed to be necessary to continually and actively engage teachers in the process of learning to become effective in curriculum development in order to contribute to their professional development.

In view of the increased attention for collaborative design in educational practice, the current study explored what empirical evidence is available about processes that take place when teachers co-design and how these contribute to professional development and curriculum change. In particular, the aim of our study was to determine the effects of participation of teachers in design teams on professional development and curriculum innovation processes, and thereby to target at effective mechanisms that determine designing in teams and the conditions under which these mechanisms are effective.

In the next sections, we discuss in more detail the relation between participation of teachers in design teams and its effects on teacher learning and curriculum practices, thereby aiming at identifying effective characteristics of designing in teams, to theoretically underpin the analyses that we carried out.

Theoretical underpinnings

In this study, we analysed a number of doctoral theses aiming to unravel the relation between teacher development and collaborative curriculum design and their contribution to curriculum innovation, identifying effects of collaborative design in teams on teacher development and on curriculum change, the effective mechanisms of collaborative design in teams that account for these effects, and the promoting or hindering conditions that affect collaborative design in teams. The theoretical underpinnings of these three aspects of collaborative curriculum design are described below. They form the theoretical basis of the analyses carried out.

Teacher learning in curriculum design teams: effects

The benefits of teachers collaboratively generating new knowledge about curriculum and teaching in schools or teams are increasingly recognized (Cober, Tan, Slotta, So, & Könings, 2015; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993, 2009; Hubers, Poortman, Schildkamp, Pieters, & Handelzalts, 2016; Pareja Roblin, Ormel, McKenney, Voogt, & Pieters, 2014). Effects of teachers’ collaborative design on curriculum change have been reported by several scholars (Coburn et al., 2012; Penuel, McWilliams, et al., 2009; Penuel, Sun, Frank, & Gallagher, 2012). These effects pertained to curriculum design approaches, curriculum products, and sustainable and transferable teaching practices. Voogt et al. (2011) found that teachers’ collaborative curriculum design contributes to the professional development of teachers in areas such as subject matter and systematic curriculum design skills. Penuel, McWilliams, et al. (2009) also found that curriculum implementation was reinforced by the incorporation of time for teachers to plan for implementation and the provision of technical support. These findings are consistent with studies on effective professional development (Ingvarson, Meiers, & Beavis, 2005; Walter & Briggs, 2012) and point to the significance of teachers’ perceptions about the coherence of their professional development experiences with their own learning and with curriculum implementation (Garet et al., 2001; Penuel et al., 2007).

Teachers as co-designers in design teams: Mechanisms

Vescio et al. (2008) conclude, based on an overview of characteristics of professional learning communities (PLCs), that the PLC model represents a fundamental shift away from the traditional model of professional development. PLCs at their best are grounded in generation of knowledge of practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999), whereas traditional models of professional development have typically been grounded in the assumption that the purpose of professional development is to convey to teachers knowledge for practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999). In this study, we consider practices of teachers collaboratively designing curriculum as a specific form of a professional learning community. We argue that when teachers collaborate in design teams as co-designers of new curricula, processes of curriculum development and teacher professional development interact: Curriculum development activities can lead to increased professional development, and, in return, increasing professional expertise can lead to further improving curriculum development. Through the co-design process, teachers collaboratively generate knowledge of practice. As such, mechanisms are associated with the characteristics of the team and the processes within the team that lead to knowledge development with and of teachers.

In addition, the active involvement of teachers in collaborative curriculum design can improve the harmonization of the formal and the enacted curriculum, enhance teachers’ ownership of the curriculum, and promote teachers’ curricular collaboration (Penuel, McWilliams, et al., 2009). Such active involvement can only be effective when teachers themselves feel the need to change their practice, are convinced that their effort will bring about that change, and that they are indeed able to promote and install that change (Becuwe et al., 2015; Morris & Hiebert, 2011). The impact of teacher collaboration in design teams on both curriculum development and teacher professional development can be attributed to three effective theoretical principles: “… the situatedness of activity, agency, and the cyclical nature of learning and change” (Voogt et al., 2015, p. 261). “Situatedness” refers to the fact that the curricular problems that the teachers work on, and hence learn from, are the ones that are authentic and site based. “Agency” concerns the teachers’ ownership and the individual and collective responsibility of the curricular change, as this originates from addressing their own curricular needs. The “cyclic nature of learning and change” refers to the interaction of the learning process with the cyclical nature of design. The cyclic and iterative nature of the learning process takes place through the interactions with peers in the design teams and the external stimuli, the implementation in practice, and its effects on student outcomes, which may result in professional growth. These learning processes take place in the context of activities the teams carry out during the process of curriculum design, which can be visualized in the ADDIE model and concerns core activities related to analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation (ADDIE), respectively (Gustafson, 2002). Although the ADDIE model suggests a linear approach to curriculum design, Visscher-Voerman and Gustafson (2004) found in an analysis of practices of designers that these core activities often take place, but that the process is messy and not linear. In our study, the ADDIE model is only used to reveal the core design activities in the design practices of teacher design teams.

Collaborative design in teams: conditions

It has generally been accepted that for design teams to be effective support is needed (Becuwe et al., 2015; Binkhorst, Handelzalts, Poortman, & Van Joolingen, 2015). Binkhorst et al. (2015) see an essential role for a coach to support the design team. According to them, specific tasks for the coach are regulating the team’s interactions, alignment of goals within the team, and providing structure in the activities the team carries out. Linder (2011) distinguishes between two forms of support: pro-active, which means that the support is designed based on the needs of the design teams, or re-active, support aligned with the process in the design team. On the basis of their study, Becuwe et al. (2015) argue that the coach of a design team should be able to adapt to the needs of the team. However, Svihla, Reeve, Sagy, and Kali (2015) showed that it is important to scaffold the design process, because teacher teams are often unfamiliar with the design process. This suggests that both forms of support are plausible and need to be complementary to each other.

In addition to support of a coach, the teams need support from the school leadership to realize the intended curriculum change. School leadership includes purposeful curriculum leadership, ensuring that student learning is taking place, teachers are being supported, collegiality is encouraged, vision and goals are developed and shared, and curriculum-developing efforts are well coordinated and aligned (Darling-Hammond, Meyerson, LaPointe, & Orr, 2009; Neumerski, 2013; Wiles, 2009). Efforts to improve teaching quality through collaboration build relational trust in a school (Penuel et al., 2007). Such trust allows leaders and teachers more latitude and discretion in making difficult decisions, creates clearer understandings of role obligations, and sustains commitment to improving student outcomes. Interactions among teachers constitute a resource for teachers in support of their implementation of reforms, which can be considered a form of social capital (Penuel, Riel, Krause, & Frank, 2009). The school leadership has an essential role in creating such a professional learning culture. Becuwe et al. (2015) formulated three institutional conditions that need to be in place for design teams to be effective. The first condition, a supportive attitude of the school leadership towards the concept of design teams, visible in the school policy, reflects the important role of the school leadership in creating a professional learning culture. The other two conditions provide facilitation structures for the work of the teams: the provision of time for the design work and time for a coach that supports the design team.

Research questions

The aim of our study was to determine the effects of participation of teachers in design teams on professional development and curriculum innovation processes, and thereby to target at effective characteristics of designing in teams. We collected evidence from 14 PhD studies on teacher collaboration in curriculum design and studied its impact on professional development, that is, on teacher learning and curriculum change. The following questions guided our analysis:

•What are the effects of teachers’ involvement in design teams on teachers’ learning?

•What are the effects of teachers’ involvement in design teams on curriculum change?

•What mechanisms of collaborative design in teams account for the effects on learning and curriculum change?

•Which conditions affect collaborative design in teams?

Methods

Because we aimed at developing an in-depth understanding of the processes and effects of collaborative...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Teacher learning through teacher teams: what makes learning through teacher teams successful?
• 1 Teacher collaboration in curriculum design teams: effects, mechanisms, and conditions
• 2 Teacher design teams as a strategy for professional development: the role of the facilitator
• 3 Unpacking the roles of the facilitator in higher education professional learning communities
• 4 How to become a broker: the role of teacher educators in developing collaborative teacher research teams
• 5 Extended teams in vocational education: collaboration on the border
• 6 Data-based decision making in teams: enablers and barriers
• 7 Is action research necessarily collaborative? Changing mutuality within a project
• Index