Building on both cutting-edge research and professional learning practice, Amanda Datnow and Vicki Park explore how professional collaboration can support deeper learning for students and teachers alike. While many schools and systems support teacher collaboration, they often fall short of their intended goals of improving teaching and learning. This book provides concrete guidance for creating the conditions for collaboration in which teachers are moved toward—rather than repelled—by joint work. The authors explore how collaborative settings can provide a space for working through the inevitable challenges that accompany the changing nature of teaching in the age of accountability and show the motivation, inspiration, and energy that teachers personally--and collectively--gain from collaborating to improve student learning. Ultimately, they show how teacher empowerment towards working together builds equitable and excellent learning environments.

Teacher Collaboration for Professional Learning contains the essential information, tools, and examples teachers and school leaders need to create, manage, and sustain successful collaborative groups. Designed to be a hands-on resource, this practical guide shows you how to: Advocate for collaborative teacher learning Develop and sustain collaborative research groups Organize and conduct productive research projects Address issues of ethics, leadership, and group dynamics Evaluate and sustain collaborative learning activities Based on data from a major survey, Teacher Collaboration for Professional Learning features extensive case examples from model research communities collaborating within schools, across districts, in partnership with universities, and as online networks. The book also offers a wealth of reproducible templates as well as reflection questions and exercises?invaluable tools for organizing study groups.

This volume explores the value of teacher collaboration in meeting the needs of diverse English language learners (ELLs). A range of research-based chapters demonstrate examples of effective collaboration between English language specialists and content area teachers and offer recommendations for collaborative practice. Foregrounding the ways in which teacher collaboration can better support the needs of ELLs in elementary, middle, and high school classrooms, this volume provides evidence-based insights and suggestions to underpin effective teacher collaboration across the curriculum. Through case study examples, readers can understand common challenges and pitfalls, as well as best practices and how to apply teacher collaboration in real classroom settings. Research studies in subject areas including mathematics, science, and English language arts provide a basis for practical, evidence-based recommendations to engender mutual trust, teacher agency, and the development of shared goals to enhance instruction for ELLs’ achievement. This book provides educators with new insights from empirical studies, and is vital reading for researchers, scholars, teachers, and teacher educators who are aware of the importance of collaboration for student success. Those involved in ESL, bilingual, and dual language programs may be particularly interested in this volume.

Ensure Conversations About Collaboration Get Results. This book lays out the theory and practice of Collaborative Professionalism. Through five international case studies, the authors distinguish Collaborative Professionalism from professional collaboration by highlighting intentional collaborative designs and providing concrete examples for how to be more purposeful with collaboration. Additionally, the book makes Collaborative Professionalism accessible to all educators through clear take-aways including: Ten core tenets, including Collective Efficacy, Collaborative Inquiry, and Collaborating With Students. Graphics indicating how educators can move from mere professional collaboration to the deep and transformative work of Collaborative Professionalism. Analysis of which collaborative practices educators should start doing, keep doing, and stop doing Collaboration can be one of your most powerful educational tools when used correctly, and turned into action. This book shows you how.

Self-study is inherently collaborative. Such collaboration provides transparency, validity, rigor and trustworthiness in conducting self-study. However, the ways in which these collaborations are enacted have not been sufficiently addressed in the self-study literature. This book addresses these gaps in the literature by placing critical friendship, collaborative self-study and community of practice at the forefront of the self-study of teaching. It highlights these forms of collaboration, how the collaboration was developed and enacted, the challenges and tensions that existed in the collaboration, and how practice and identity developed through the use of these forms of collaboration. The chapters serve as exemplars of enacting these forms of collaboration and provide researchers with an additional base of literature to draw upon in their scholarly writing, teaching of self-study, and their enactment of collaborative self-study spaces.

In recent years there has been a new mood in teacher education. The emphasis is on professional studies, on encouraging trainee teachers to think intelligently about how to tackle problems of the classroom.This book surveys the developments which are taking it further in both Britain and North America. It goes on to argue the case for consolidating the new approach in a thoughtful, structured and comprehensive way. It argues that teacher education should be regarded as a discipline in its own right; that teacher education should be increasingly school focused and problem-centered; that it needs to blend theory more effectively with practice. It argues that teacher training programmes should prepare teachers for an uncertain future in a changing world. This calls for an emphasis on process rather than content in programmes and the preparing of teachers who are self-directed.