Teacher peer excellence groups (TPEGs). Building communities of practice for instructional improvement
| Date | 07 August 2017 |
| Published date | 07 August 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-08-2016-0095 |
| Pages | 526-551 |
| Author | Xiu Cravens,Timothy A. Drake,Ellen Goldring,Patrick Schuermann |
| Subject Matter | Education,Administration & policy in education,School administration/policy,Educational administration,Leadership in education |
Teacher peer excellence
groups (TPEGs)
Building communities of practice for
instructional improvement
Xiu Cravens
College of Education and Human Development,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
Timothy A. Drake
Education Leadership, Policy, and Human Development,
North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
Ellen Goldring
College of Education and Human Development,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA, and
Patrick Schuermann
Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to study the viability of implementing a protocol-guided model
designed to provide structure and focus for teacher collaboration from Shanghai in today’s US public schools.
The authors examine whether the new model, Teacher Peer Excellence Group (TPEG), fosters the desired key
features of productive communities of practice where teachers can jointly construct, transform, preserve,
and continuously deepen the meaning of effective teaching. The authors also explore the extent to which
existing school conditions –principal instructional leadership, trust, teacher efficacy, and teachers’sense of
school-wide professional community –enable or moderate the desired outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach –Data for this paper are drawn from a series of surveys administered to
teachers from 24 pilot schools in six school districts over two school years. Descriptive and multilevel
modeling analyses are conducted.
Findings –The findings provide encouraging evidence that, given sufficient support and guidance, teachers
report higher levels of engagement in deprivatized practice and instructional collaboration. These findings
also hold after controlling for key enabling conditions and school characteristics.
Social implications –The TPEG approach challenges school leaders to take on the responsibilities of
helping teachers make their practice public, sharable, and better –three critical objectives in the shift to
develop the profession of teaching.
Originality/value –The indication of TPEG model’s positive impact on strengthening the features of
communities of practice in selected public schools provides the impetus for further efforts in understanding
the transformational changes needed and challenges ahead at the classroom, school, and district levels.
Keywords Instructional leadership, Teacher professional development, Community of practice
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Research suggeststhat variation in student-learning outcomes is partially attributable to the
structure, focus,and quality of teachers’work, much of which maybe observable and subject
to both external stimuli for improvement and internal drive for professional-community
building (Bruce and Ross, 2008; Levine and Marcus, 2010; Louis et al., 1996). Today the idea
that teacher collaboration contributes to instructional improvement is widely accepted by
schools and districts, where more resources and time have been designated to encourage
teachers to work together, and various pathways have been explored to create collective
Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol. 55 No. 5, 2017
pp. 526-551
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/JEA-08-2016-0095
Received 28 August 2016
Revised 28 December 2016
29 December 2016
Accepted 4 January 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0957-8234.htm
526
JEA
55,5
learning opportunities (Desimone, 2009; Louis et al., 1996; Youngs and King, 2002).
Despite significant and continuedefforts, however, states, districts,and schools have not seen
consistent and sustainable effect on the improvement of practice in the average classroom
(Hiebert et al., 2002; Levine and Marcus, 2010).
The notion of communities of practice specifically describes how teachers jointly
construct, transform, preserve, and continuously deepen the meaning of effective teaching
(Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). In recent years, researchers have focused on
communities of practice because such communities are considered as a potentially
effective and malleable approach to optimize instructional conditions for student learning
(Leithwood et al., 2004). Researchers, practitioners, and policy makers converge on the
realization that teachers must engage in ongoing professional development that is of high
relevance to instructional practice and more importantly, sustainable with peer-to-peer
networking and support (Hattie, 2015a, b; Penuel et al., 2009).
It is increasingly clear that simply carving out time for teachers to work together
is only the beginning of constructing meaningful communities of practice (Coburn and
Russell 2008; Jackson and Cobb, 2013). Researchers who study US and international
systems argue that teacher collaboration in communities of practice must aim to build a
shared, accessible, and growing knowledge base for the teaching profession; furthermore,
teachers must actively participate in and contribute to the development of this knowledge
community (Hiebert et al., 2002; Horn, 2005).
Literature highlights that effective communities of practice must be deeply rooted in the
academic and social learning goals of the schools (Darling-Hammond and Sykes, 1999;
Goldring et al., 2009). More specifically, among various forms of teacher professional
development, those that are focused on student learning, specific to content and pedagogy,
linked to curriculum, and school-based, tend to yield the best results (Garet et al., 2001;
Joyce et al., 1993; Loucks-Horsley et al., 1998; Louis, 2007; Printy, 2008). Furthermore,
the effect of professional development is more likely to be deeper and more sustainable
when teachers are given the opportunity to collaborate and draw from a shared and
accumulative growing knowledge base (Hiebert et al., 2002; Lave and Wenger, 1991;
Little, 2002; Printy, 2008).
With a deep culture and long history of teaching as an individual act with a high degree
of autonomy and isolation from colleagues in US schools (Lortie, 1975; McLaughlin and
Talbert, 2001), however, it is very challenging to elevate teaching from anecdotal personal
experience to the collectively transparent, reliable, and validated professional level.
Teachers, principals, and district administrators not only need good examples that can help
them visualize new ways of thinking about collaboration, but also actionable and
operationalizable models, with user-friendly structures and protocols, that can help them
construct and sustain communities of practice for instructional improvement.
In their article about building a knowledge base for the teaching profession,
Hiebert et al. (2002) wondered whether it would ever be possibly to create an infrastructure
that enables teacher collaboration to generate useful and trustworthy knowledge for
teaching in the USA. In offering a glimpse into the “future,”they stated:
If a new system were to emerge, it would institutionalize, in a cultural sense, a new set of
professional development opportunitiesfor teachers and a new means of producing and verifying
professional knowledge. In this new space, teachers would be able to employ the methods of
replication and ob servation across multiple t rials to produce rigorous test s of quality and effects.
Sometimes they would test practices developed by other teachers, and sometimes they would test
ideas generated in t he research commun ity. Over time, the o bservations and re plications of
teachers in the schoo ls would become a common pathway throug h which promising ideas were
tested and refined before they found their way into the nation’s classrooms. And, as in tentions
became reality in cl assrooms, a new kind of k nowledge about imp roving classroom pr actice
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Teacher peer
excellence
groups
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