Teacher and teacher-researcher classroom collaboration: Planning and teaching in a secondary English classroom using process-oriented drama approaches

The need to improve America's public schools has been a recurrent theme in the recent history of the United States. Increasingly, would-be reformers have looked to teachers and to ongoing professional development as avenues for change that place how instruction might foster student learning at the center of reform. This study examines one case of a collaborative effort between a teacher and a teacher-researcher who were interested in implementing, at a classroom level, a teaching strategy that was new to that context and to the teacher's instructional repertoire.;Specifically, this study was conducted in the context of an urban school which is the site of multiple building and district reform initiatives. The study uses an action research case study approach to document a sustained collaboration between a veteran grade twelve English teacher and a teacher-researcher. The collaborators employed process-oriented drama approaches as a teaching strategy that shared their planning, teaching and reflecting on lessons in significant ways as they taught grade twelve students in a World and British literature course. The theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of the process-oriented approach are based in drama in education, process drama, and creative dramatics and are intended to offer teachers an alternative to more traditional ways of teaching students to write and to read literary texts.;This study found that there were a number of factors which affected the planning, teaching, and reflection on English lessons. These factors included institutional constraints, such as a textbook driven curriculum which made it difficult for the participants to implement more student centered alternatives and the participants' personal beliefs and routines for the teaching of secondary English. Other factors included student response to instruction, the participants' interpretation of the student response, and tensions which emerged due to differing visions of teaching.;This study suggests that collaborative professional development is a powerful way of accomplishing educational reform, but also acknowledges the incredible complexity and difficulty inherent in such an approach. Implications for collaborative reform in general and in English education in particular are offered.