A Journey towards Collaborative Culture Development: How to Be Weightless Despite Academic Gravity

This research aimed to explore the English language teachers’ lived experiences of collaboration in teacher education via online mode. This study embraced a phenomenological qualitative research design and involved four English teachers purposively to gather their lived experiences on the phenomena. Informal discussions and semi-structured interviews were used to gather data. Using the Hermeneutic phenomenological method, the data were analyzed. This study used Vygotsky's Social Constructivism as its theoretical foundation (1978). The findings demonstrate that English language teachers have positive perspectives and collaboration experiences in online teacher education. The collaboration develops their confidence, critical analysis, technological skills, and rapport building. The participants expressed that collaboration in teacher education reduces the workload and stress if all the members are equally responsible for the completion of their tasks. However, the division of work constrains the members into their parts only resulting the less exploration and knowledge construction in others’ portions.

Collaboration and innovation in teacher education are essential ingredients for preparing teachers for increasingly diverse and challenging school populations. In the United States, one in five children lives in poverty, and the numbers of children who speak English as a second language are increasing rapidly (National Center for Education Statistics, 1997). If institutions of higher education are to prepare teachers for all students, current program structures and faculty roles must change substantially. Current practice, however, shows less than dramatic change. Some advocates of teacher education reform have cited funding patterns in schools of education, adherence to horizontal staffing of faculty assigned to specialized course loads, lack of public school teacher involvement, and an absence of a moral and ethical imperative throughout the program as barriers that continue to prevent reform and growth in teacher education (Fullan, Galluzzo, Morris, & Watson, 1998; Tom, 1997). State policies allowing alternative certification, limiting the number of credit hours in teacher education programs, and prescribing discrete teaching behaviors in the evaluation of teaching also continue to impede program change (Darling-Hammond, 1996). Some faculty may perceive such state policies, along with other regulatory influences such as the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), as constraining program development in teacher education rather than as guides for quality. The Holmes Partnership accomplished certain outcomes in teacher preparation, such as the proliferation of the professional development schools (PDS) concept, but it did not take strong positions on state and national policy. The lack of unified action in areas of state policy by leading institutions of higher education may have contributed to the stalling of reform (Fullan et al., 1998). The literature of practice in teacher education urges reform that includes collaboration across disciplines essential to educating teachers for increasingly diverse student populations (Blanton, Griffin, Winn, & Pugach, 1997; Darling-Hammond, 1996). Those disciplines may include special education, social work, general education, family and child development, counseling sociology, and educational leadership. Researchers have identified barriers to cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary collaboration in teacher education that are largely administrative or social in nature. Barriers may include lack of incentives in faculty reward structures, inordinate amounts of time in already burdened faculty schedules, absence of understanding of interdisciplinary program development by administrators, lack of institutional resources, unwillingness by administrators to engage in creative faculty assignments, differences in philosophy among faculty, special interests and protectionist issues held by faculty, rigid thinking, and lack of respect across departments (Glassick, Huber, & Maeroff, 1997; Miller, in press; Miller & Stayon, 1998; Tom, 1997). The culture of higher education has traditionally maintained rigid conceptions about content and practices for preparing teachers (Darling-Hammond, 1997; Tom, 1997). A decade of rhetoric about reform and the proliferation of the PDS concept would suggest that reform in collaborative teacher education is underway (Holmes Group, 1995). Interpretation of the status of institutional reform, however, may depend on whether one reads institutional mission statements and other documents, or whether one talks with faculty. In this article, we discuss findings of a qualitative study undertaken to explore the culture of higher education as it fits with proposed reform in teacher education and further describe existing barriers and supports. Although reports from administrators and official institutional documents continue to describe trends toward reform in definitions of scholarship and reward systems for faculty (Glassick et al. …

Background In many settings internationally, initial teacher education (ITE) relies on cooperation between schools and universities. When these institutions collaborate on teacher education, the shared work can form a basis for community building. This article focuses on experiences in Norwegian ITE of the Change Laboratory (CL), a form of participatory data analysis workshop, as an arena for such work, and hence community building, in teacher education. Purpose Contextualised within the framework of cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), the research aimed to understand participants’ experiences of collaboration in CLs, and how the CLs functioned as an arena for community building. We asked: in what way was the work in CLs during the first year of an intervention research project in teacher education experienced as community building? Method The research was conducted within a four-year teacher education research and development project involving two ITE institutions. We carried out focus group interviews with three groups engaged together in shared work: teacher educators in university (n = 10), teacher educators in school (n = 5), and student teachers (n = 20). Data were analysed qualitatively. Findings During the project, all participants gradually felt that they had a voice and were listened to. Their mutual engagement on the project work, and the use of CHAT also brought them together. Overall, the findings were encouraging and suggested that a focus on community building in CLs in the start-up phase of a project can lay the foundation for collaboration between teacher education and schools, contributing to the co-construction of knowledge, and to learning and development. However, the challenge of disseminating the work to colleagues in universities and schools was perceived as a hindrance. Conclusions The development and sustaining of collaboration in teacher education is an important goal, ultimately benefitting the entire learning community. Crossing boundaries can lead to joint learning, as in this project, and to further development and learning in teacher education.

Although collaborative teacher education programs have grown in number over the past two decades, we still do not understand the ways in which these programs, or the practices in those programs, improve the preparation of inclusive teachers. At a time when teacher education’s viability is being questioned, it is problematic that little information exists about the validity and impact of collaborative programs. To justify collaborative teacher education programs and improve the science of teacher education more broadly, the authors propose a framework for conducting research on collaborative teacher education—one that can be used to analyze current research and inform future efforts. In this article, the authors build a framework for studying collaborative teacher education, emphasizing linkages among theory, innovation, and outcomes. The authors then analyze the collaborative teacher education literature according to this conceptual framework, drawing conclusions about the current state of collaborative teacher education research and making recommendations for the future.

A transdisciplinary evaluation framework for the assessment of integration in boundary-crossing collaborations in teacher education

Putting Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) into effect will become a major task for the 21st century, particularly for future teachers who are expected to participate in ESD but whose studies often do not prepare them for this task. This article responds to the question how collaboration in teacher education can help bridge that gap and how it can contribute to the transdisciplinary demands of ESD. It assumes an essential role in enabling collaborative spaces of dialogue and transfer of knowledge between educators and students of all academic disciplines, schools, universities, local stakeholders, and CSO. This specifically includes perspectives from the Global South.
 Presenting the certificate program “el mundo – ESD in university level teacher education” (LMU Munich) as an example for collaborative ESD practice, the article identifies and presents four central fields of transdisciplinary collaboration in teacher education: content– related, institutional, and biography–affecting collaboration, as well as collaboration in pedagogical–didactic contexts.

(1992). Effective Collaboration in Teacher Education. Action in Teacher Education: Vol. 14, At the Crossroads: Visionary Leadership for Teacher Education, pp. 52-56.

Collaboration in teacher education can be seen as a way to prepare student teachers for future social practices at school. When people collaborate with each other, they have to regulate their collaboration. In the Dutch teacher education programme that was investigated, student teachers were members of different types of groups, each of which had its own purpose and curriculum and required a certain amount of collaboration. We studied the ways in which teacher educators and student teachers together regulated collaboration in each of these types of groups. We concluded that regulating collaboration is not yet an explicit learning aim in this programme, while it is important for student teachers to learn how to direct and support collaboration in a group.

This paper reports on the implementation of a 6‐month collaborative teacher education project (CTEP) in China, designed to help teachers adopt CLIL in response to new primary school curriculum requirements. A multi‐site case study was conducted to track two focal teachers' changes in CLIL implementation and its sustainability. Adopting ecological theory, the study investigated how teachers' interactions with university‐based, district‐based, and school‐based teacher educators in the project contributed to their professional development. Our research focused on an innovative dimension of the project, namely, close collaboration among university researchers, teacher educators, and primary teachers who all contributed to the CTEP ecosystem. Data collection involved semi‐structured interviews at the pre‐stage, while‐stage, post‐stage, and delayed post‐stages of the project, classroom observation notes, lesson study minutes, field notes, informal exchanges, and project documents. Our data analysis revealed that although both teachers had a positive attitude towards CLIL, they exhibited different trajectories of changes in their pedagogical practices. The teachers' interactions with teacher educators within and across the four sub‐contexts in the CTEP ecosystem played a significant role in their professional development. Notably, the school‐based teacher educators contributed by establishing a collaborative teaching study group (TSG) that ensured sustainable professional development for the teachers. The findings of this study have important implications for educational policymaking and for designing and implementing collaborative teacher education programmes that offer an alternative to traditional top‐down modes of language teacher professional development.

The intersectionally conscious collaboration protocol for teacher educators (ICC-TE) expands on existing models of collaboration by drawing from intersectionality as conceptualized by Black feminist theorists, collaborative teacher education, and frameworks for stakeholders to establish and maintain ethical, student-centered relationships. The ICC-TE promotes approaches that honor sociocultural differences, model collaboration, and support the development of these practices in preservice teacher education. The authors analyzed the responses of four Latina teacher educators at a predominately white teacher preparation program and teaching artifacts created while using the ICC-TE as they co-taught a special education course. As a result of this study, the researchers refined the protocol. All participants indicated the need for more training on intersectionality, for both teacher educators of color and their white colleagues. A connecting thread across all sources of data was how institutional culture and faculty morale shaped collegiality.

This article presents a successful case of collaborative teacher development that draws on the diverse backgrounds of emerging teachers, including their native languages. Specifically, the article focuses on the use of electronic dialogue journals as a way of facilitating autonomy and collaboration in teacher education. The roles of teacher educators in facilitating greater autonomy and collaborative relationships between native and nonnative English-speaking teachers are also discussed.

Teacher educators have focused reform efforts on preparing graduates to address increasingly diverse K-12 students. Collaboration among general and special education faculty is seen as beneficial for preparing teacher candidates who can teach diverse learners, yet it is not the norm. This practitioner research study explored a curriculum reform effort that employed a faculty learning community (FLC) to engage general and special education faculty to collaboratively integrate Universal Design for Learning (UDL) into two teacher education programs. Faculty perceptions of the collaborative reform process and resulting curriculum enhancements are presented. Findings indicated the process was valued by our faculty, promoted a stronger culture of cross-disciplinary collaboration, and resulted in systematic curriculum improvements coordinated across content and field courses. This study offers guidance to teacher education faculty interested in collaborative curriculum reform.

This article provides an analysis of how collaborative teacher education has developed in terms of practice, discourse, and the relationship between general and special education across three historical stages. It explores how collaborative teacher education between general and special education has been positioned over time in relationship to larger national reform efforts in teacher education. Approaching the history of collaborative teacher education developmentally from these three perspectives sheds light on how today’s emphasis on collaboration and multiple certifications intersects with what it means to teach in a diverse society and what it means to prepare teachers to meet the needs of every student.

The alignment of the teacher quality provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and the transparency of low achievement of students who have disabilities under the testing mandates of NCLB have converged to create substantial renewed interest and activity in collaborative programs of teacher education—a term used to describe program redesign that brings together teacher preparation for general and special education to improve education not only for students who have disabilities but also for all students who struggle. Such preservice efforts (often referred to as “dual certification” or “dual licensure”) are not only proliferating at a rapid pace, they are proceeding in the absence of analytic frameworks to consider collaborative teacher education more critically, to create a common discourse around this trend, to capture variations in collaborative teacher education, to clarify its multiple meanings, and to uncover assumptions under which such program development is taking place. The purpose of this article is to provide a conceptual framework to simultaneously make sense of and problematize the landscape of collaborative teacher education, based on a classification system of program models.

This article explores how elementary and secondary mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) from multiple institutions collectively design and implement digital curriculum resources for practice-based teacher education using digital tools. This cross-institutional collaboration supports the development and adaptation of resources across diverse educational contexts. Through a three-year study utilizing Engeström’s Activity Theory, we examine differences in group objectives, division of labor, and tool usage. Our findings reveal three organizational models – Hosting , Potluck , and Cooking Club – and highlight three key layers of representation: mathematics in K–12 classrooms, students’ individuality, and teacher education pedagogies. These insights underscore the importance of adaptable digital tools and inform strategies for effective cross-institutional collaboration in teacher education.