Researcher-Teacher Collaboration for Professional Development: Exploring Practices for Effective Learning

Researcher-Teacher Collaboration for Professional Development: Exploring Practices for Effective Learning

Researcher-teacher collaboration is powerful for professional development and provides a direct means to understanding how learning theory applies to classroom practice. Empirical studies focusing on the relations between learning and teaching present opportunities to bridge theoretical principles and everyday classroom practices. The study presented in this paper explored how teachers talked about fostering students’ effective learning in the context of the middle years of schooling. Following the principles of Appreciative Inquiry, rather than an approach that looked for a problem to solve, the act of asking questions grounded this research in the teacher participants’ actual experiences. An exploratory case study design was chosen as the most appropriate approach for addressing the research question as it provided a holistic, in-depth, investigative design. Interviews were conducted with primary and secondary school teachers to identify planning, instruction and classroom organisation that were embedded in their everyday practices. The researcher’s role was to represent the interpretations using the teacher participants’ words to communicate their practices intended for fostering their students’ effective learning. The unfolding of the dialogue between the teachers and researcher was intended to provide a basis for the development of teachers’ skills and capacities, and to enable future proficiency of practices. Fundamentally, the teachers’ reflections were extended beyond the technical skills towards consciously understanding what underlies their personal beliefs. The alignment of theoretical understandings about teaching and learning with the applied practices was shared as an outcome to address the research question. The transformation of teaching practices in the classroom is often an outcome of the exchanges between the teachers’ reflections and the researchers’ interpretations. To reduce the gap between educational research and teaching, it is recommended for future research that teachers and researchers productively play a dual role in developing the interpretations. Successful professional development outcomes are more likely when teaching practices are underpinned by an appreciation of why things work.