| This dissertation explores teachers' professional conversations and interaction in the context of one high school's conversion to smaller learning communities (SLCs), and the implementation of collaborative inquiry (a type of action research) aimed at improving the academic outcomes of struggling students. School reformers have viewed effective teacher professional communities as a critical lever of change in increasing achievement for low performing students and closing the achievement gap. Drawing upon extensive observations of teachers' common planning time meetings over the first year and a half of the reform implementation, this qualitative study posed several questions around how teacher conversation and community developed, with a specific focus on whether and how teachers discussed pedagogy.Teachers undertook challenging, incremental, and unfamiliar work, successfully introducing new norms of professional practice centered on consistent discussion of "target" groups of struggling students. Even though operating in a shared reform context, teacher communities in different SLCs manifested unique patterns of development and interaction. The unfamiliar nature of teachers' reform work was an important context for, and shaper of, teacher conversation. Teacher conversations were also important vehicles through which teachers conveyed conceptions of students, practice and the reform initiative. Although teachers' inquiry work aimed to ground teacher conversations and work in the realm of low-inference, objective thinking, teachers routinely gravitated toward familiar and comfortable topics such as student behavior, family life and disposition, for example. Teachers referenced these kinds of issues as obstacles to students' greater academic achievement even a year into the reform's implementation. This behavior was consistent through the course of the study and may have had bearing on teachers' sense of accountability and agency for student learning.When teachers talked about pedagogy, they overwhelmingly discussed the students they taught, focusing less on what they taught or how they taught it. Conversations about "who" students were generated the greatest teacher participation. SLC leaders exerted tremendous influence in these conversations, establishing frames, and expanding or constraining opportunities to talk meaningfully about students and instruction. The findings of this research offer critical points of leverage reformers can utilize to focus teachers' efforts more effectively in similar reform contexts. |
