High school teachers inquiring collaboratively: Process and promise for change in teacher practice and professional culture

Creating schools as professional communities has become an important agenda for both school reform and teacher development specialists. In professional communities, where teachers are continually learning, students achieve at high levels. These communities, however are difficult to develop in high schools and little research focuses on how bureaucratically organized high schools can create the conditions necessary for such communities. Teacher inquiry groups are suggested as one means for establishing these conditions. This dissertation is an interpretive case study of a high school collaborative inquiry group where members examined their teaching practices and student learning in the context of their everyday practice. Through active participant-observation, interviews and document and artifact review, I studied how the group simultaneously acted to create the conditions of community, facilitate individual and collective understanding of and change in teaching practices, and influence the professional culture in the school. I discuss how the group members through continued engagement created a dynamic space and a web of relationships that supported the connections between their teaching practices and broader school and philosophical issues and enabled the members to come to shared understandings about teaching and learning. I also discuss how the growing professional web was characterized by the conditions of collegiality, trust, respect, confident vulnerability, common purpose, and intellectual/pedagogical movement and how participation in the group enabled key members to develop inquiry stances and change their teaching practices to engage students in actively using their minds well. Finally, I discuss how the stances and leadership of the group members were gradually creating more collegial interaction about a common focus in the school. The limitations and potentialities of the collaborative inquiry group for fostering a collaborative professional culture in the whole school are also discussed.