| In the last decade, the importance of reforming schools as a learning community for improving teaching and learning has been noticed. Restructuring school systems and rethinking teachers' roles create new working conditions, relationships and workplace norms. However, there is little empirical or grounded research that focuses on the processes of reforming a school, and how such reform processes might lead to building the school as a learning community and impact teachers' learning and school culture.{09}This study provides a theoretical approach to understand how a teacher group can grow into a learning community, and how this growth can benefit teacher's professional development within the school.; This research uses a sociocultural perspective to examine the impact of a school reform partnership between a university and a local school district in one of its elementary schools. The multiple designs of this program provide a rich research site to investigate how a community for teacher professional development might be constructed through sharing outside expertise and developing internal expertise. The study explores changing workplace culture, roles and relationships among teachers in a developing community.; Through participant observation, data were collected and constructed throughout the 2000--2002 school years in the form of fieldnotes, videotape, interviews, and documents. Ethnographic analysis identified the salient themes and patterns in the setting that illustrated how the Effective Schools Process (ES Process) afforded opportunities for professional growth in a developing community.{09}Moreover, discourse analysis made visible the practices and knowledge constructed through social interactions in this research.; The findings of this research suggest that it is possible to create a learning community for teacher professional development through school reform with certain characteristics (e.g., the designated facilitator, the regular meeting time and space). I identified four different phases that emerged in the process of developing the community including prescriptive, participatory, collaborative and self-refining phase. This study showed that the zone of proximal development was created through engaging in a purposeful activity---developing and implementing units. This form of joint activity provided a context for collective as well as individual learning. |
