Formative interventions and practice-development: A methodological perspective on teacher rounds

Abstract

In this paper, we examine Rounds as a research-based method of developing practice in school settings, a method that claims to integrate teacher professional development and school improvement. We see these research goals (teacher learning and organisational development) as linked and mutually generative (Corwin, 1975) but as goals that nonetheless raise some questions about the development of practice itself—in this case, the professional practice of teaching in schools. Our focus is on Rounds (specifically Teacher Rounds, Del Prete, 2013) as a means of research-based development that has a wider collective and social dimension, amethod that proposes a structured and systematic approach to collaboration among teachers with the goal of developing the practice of teaching through the generation of new knowledge in the practice situation. In its emphasis on the development of practice as a goal (perhaps the primary goal) of research activity, Rounds might therefore be understood as a formative intervention, an evidence-driven tool that has a practitioner-centred view of the development of their practice at its heart. Engestrom makes a fundamental distinction between formative intervention and design experiment as types of research: formative interventionists workwith practitioners and from their perspective – and do so with a developmental purpose – rather than seeking to deliver findings (e.g. previously published research findings) to practitioners for them to implement with varying degrees of fidelity. In these ways, our discussion in this article is therefore methodological: we analyse Rounds as a type of collaborative research that seeks to generate new knowledge that can inform the development of practice, and our analysis proceeds by way of a comparison with another type of collaborative research that has the same end-goal. Our analysis is not based on our own participation in a Rounds intervention but from our examination of the research literature, our observation of Rounds in action in other settings and the planning of our own Rounds intervention in a group of schools in London. At the same time, our own previous work has involved collaborations with teachers with formative goals and we have also engaged in practice-developing research that has drawn on a related but distinct tradition of work. Ellis (e.g. 2011, 2010, etc.) has worked alongside teachers, to learn in and from practice and to help teachers to develop their collective practices. Gower (2015) is currently engaged in collaborative teacher professional development using video as a tool. Frederick, as a