Scaling up professional learning: technical expectations and adaptive challenges

Abstract

In order to be effective, professional development efforts are most promising if they are context specific and focus on supporting collaboration. Increasingly, schools initiate professional development with small groups of teachers, with the intention that the effects of the initiatives will spill over to other school personnel. This study follows one such context-specific and collaboration-driven professional development initiative designed to support teachers in implementing new disciplinary literacy practices. Qualitative data – including interviews, focus group data and written narratives from participants – were analyzed to understand how teachers understood the work of participating in a professional learning community over two years and how they thought about scaling their work to other teachers. Initially, participants perceived change as technical and straightforward, but they came to revise their views over time. However, participants’ increasingly complex views of change eventually came into conflict with teachers not in the project, who expected advice about making similar instructional changes to be much simpler. We conclude with implications for how school leaders and professional developers might manage expectations and lead change efforts in ways that balance technical and adaptive work over time.