The dimensions can serve as a way for professional developers to think about their work with teacher groups and can help them support teachers' development of a stance that places learning at the center and results in instructional coherence. Since we believe that coherence is a relationship issue, not an issue of materials or policy, it is critical for teachers to be engaged in making sense of the relationships. Some specific approaches that we would like to highlight for professional developers to incorporate into their work with groups of teachers include
- Using dialogue facilitation skills to help teachers learn together.
- Listening to hear teachers' issues and then using them as the starting point.
- Using activities to help teachers look at teaching and learning in new ways.
- Asking questions to help them uncover and examine assumptions and beliefs.
- Bringing resources to the table that teachers identify as needed to further their learning.
Important work remains to be done. We have found that the understanding of facilitation, dialogue, and reflection is not widespread among those who currently work with preservice and inservice teachers. This way of working represents a paradigm shift for many of these individuals. Therefore, we need to learn more about building capacity in diverse individuals to become facilitators who can work with new groups of teachers in ways that enable the construction of more coherent practices.
The new focus on teacher learning that we see in the literature is slow to make its way into most schools. We need to develop better understandings of how school cultures can change to accommodate the forms of teacher learning described in the literature, such as teacher study groups, inquiry groups, and the like. Learning how schools come to function as professional learning communities could be helpful. We need to know more about how to connect the learning teachers experience from practice, inquiry, reflection, and dialogue to the world of educational research and formal knowledge. How can researchers and practitioners collaborate in ways that respect the knowledge of both for the improvement of teaching and learning in schools?
Finally, we believe that we must examine more thoroughly the relationship between teacher learning and student learning. This connection seems intuitive, but has not been thoroughly studied. And yet, our focus and that of many other research groups is on enhancing teacher learning through reflection, inquiry, dialogue, and research in order to improve student learning. We need clearer evidence that there is a positive impact on learning in these teachers' classrooms.
