This symposium brings together a number of research projects on teacher learning in the context of learning groups or communities at the workplace and the conditions and characteristics that affect such learning. The topic of teacher learning within learning communities receives a growing attention in both practice as well as different research domains, such as network theory, systems theory, educational psychology and research on organisational learning.

Central focus of the symposium is on the conditions that are needed for establishing successful professional learning in the context of communities or learning groups. These communities, the conditions needed for successful functioning and teachers learning processes are multi-level in nature. In the symposium, learning and its conditions (both stimulating as well as hindering) are studied at different levels: the individual, the (sub)team, the organisation and the network level. By bringing these projects together, conditions can be linked within and between these various levels. By focusing at different contexts (primary and secondary education) and different types of teachers (student teachers or prospective teachers, beginning teachers and experienced teachers) the stability and variability of teacher learning within learning groups and the stability and variability of conditions needed for this can also be established.

This symposium presents work-in-progress from four Ph.D. projects, utilising different methods, with an emphasis on case studies and survey research. This implies that data collection and analysis are in various stages of progress at the moment. However, all studies will be able to present both theory as well as empirical data at the time of presentation.

 

Learning at the workplace of Academic schools: discrepancies between theory and practice.

 

 

 

 

Conditions for the quality of primary education teachers’ collective learning at individual and group level.

 

The world around us changes rapidly. To suffice the needs of society, education has to change as well and schools need to learn to adapt. Schools should be able to continuously develop, change and improve to ultimately, become a learning organisation. Teachers play a central roll in this process and have to continuously develop their teacher professionalism as well. Collective learning has been argued to be of major importance for the professional development of teachers and to the innovative capacity in schools. Collective teacher learning in this study refers to activities that lead to a change in cognition or behaviour, or both (Meirink, 2007).

However, collective learning has been varied and weakly conceptualised and little empirical evidence exists with respect to the contributions of collective learning to professional development of teachers and the learning of their students. Unclear is how schools (can) stimulate collective learning of their teachers and the conditions that hinder or enhance collective learning.

From the literature, a number of conditions has been reported at the individual/teacher level (teachers’ beliefs and knowledge, preferences for learning activities), the school/team level (learning culture, vision) and the context level (organisational conditions, school leadership). Research on organisational learning mostly emphasizes organisational conditions fostering learning (Leithwood & Louis, 1998), but research of for example Kwakman (2003) suggested that personal conditions might be more significant in predicting professional learning activities than task and work environment conditions. Obviously, there are interactions within and between conditions at the individual and group level. However, such interactions have been studied scarcely.

The aim of this study is to answer two major questions:

 

To answer these questions a questionnaire for teachers and school leaders was developed. For this purpose first a literature review was conducted as well as semi-structured interviews with teachers and school leaders of primary education schools.

The questionnaire aimed at measuring the following components of collective learning: learning processes (like experimenting and discussing), learning results (like change in cognition and shared language), and learning conditions (like a will to learn, shared vision and leadership) of collective teacher learning. The questionnaire consisted of a number of scales representing the components and their subgroups, such as collectivity of goals, transparency of visions, learning skills of the individual and the group and opportunities to work together.

Items in the scales were constructed as a Likert-type five-point scale (totally agree – totally disagree). In December 2008 the developed questionnaire will be administered to over a hundred primary education schools in the southern part of the Netherlands.

The data will be analysed in a number of ways. First, reliability (Cronbach’s alpha) and construct validity analyses (exploratory factor analyses, scale inter correlations) of the questionnaire will be conducted to check the quality of the questionnaire. Also, empirical results of the questionnaire will be compared with the theoretical model to see if the questionnaire represent what has been found in theory. Second, descriptives (means and standard deviations) will be generated per variable to see what conditions are more and which are less frequent; teachers and schools will be divided into groups of ‘less’ and ‘more’ effective based on the presence of characteristics of collective learning and mean scores on the (presence of) conditions will be determined between the groups to see whether significant differences could be found; regression analyses will be conducted on effectiveness measures with the conditions (at the different levels) as explanatory variables.

 

Since the data collection is still in progress, we can only report some preliminary results, based on steps in the development process of the questionnaire. Results of the interviews showed that teachers think that important conditions are: time, an organisation structure to facilitate collective activities, a subject that all teachers are interested and motivated for, teachers that are good listeners, teachers who respect each other and accept each others differences. also Interestingly, several teachers mentioned that the collective activity was hindered by another colleague, because he or she acted differently. It seemed that accepting each others differences is not a common process. The questionnaire itself, its empirical results regarding collective teacher learning and the conditions that influence the quality of collective teacher learning will be presented.

 

Kwakman, K. (2003). Factors affecting teachers’ participation in professional learning activities. Teaching en Teacher Education, 19, 179-170.

 

 

 

 

 

The dissemination and use of research-based knowledge in school-university networks.