Teacher-practitioner research inquiry and sense making of their reflections on scaffolded collaborative lesson planning experience

Sally B Gutierez

doi:10.1186/s41029-019-0043-x

Abstract

Capacity building usually follows any initiative. This also applies to education especially after curriculum reforms. This is to equip teachers with enough skills that would make them align their practices to the news standards. The focus of this qualitative study was to articulate the sensemaking and practitioner research inquiry of the teachers on their scaffolded collaborative lesson planning as one of the components of their on-going professional development (PD). Data were obtained from the formal and informal reflections of the teacher study groups who collaboratively worked on an inquiry-based lesson for elementary school classes. These data were audio and video-recorded, transcribed in verbatim and iteratively analyzed using the constant comparison method of the grounded theory. A priori codes from literature and the objectives of the PD program were merged with the data-driven codes to form the themes which established the findings on how the teachers as practitioner researchers made sense of their collaborative lesson planning experience and its implications to their professional identity. Final codebook were created, validated by an outside expert, and was used to code the anonymized transcripts. Results showed that three themes emerged which represented the teachers’ sensemaking of their scaffolded collaborative PD: 1) cognitive and social process of adult learning; 2) collective ownership of learning resulting to professional commitment; 3) research-based experiential learning. It was also found out that their scaffolded collaborative lesson planning experience created impact on their teaching profession as they articulated the activity as a venue for: 1) mutual leadership leading to increased feeling of effectiveness; and 2) improved teacher professional identity.

Highlights

There exists a long-standing notion that research is restricted only to the academe, the universities
While there is a growing interest to design teacher practitioner research inquiry as a sustainable professional development (PD), this paper reports the result of an attempt to engage teachers in this activity as they are scaffolded by university education specialists
As an introduced mode of lesson planning, the teachers were asked to formally and informally reflect on this and results showed that based on their reflections, three themes emerged which represented the teachers’ sensemaking of their scaffolded collaborative PD: 1) cognitive and social process of adult learning; 2) collective ownership of learning resulting to professional commitment; 3) research-based experiential learning

Summary

Introduction

There exists a long-standing notion that research is restricted only to the academe, the universities. Practitioner research is embedded in the teachers’ daily routines and their inquiry is contextualized from students’ responses in order to hypothesize and explore effective and meaningful instructional practices. It can be equated to action research, which is directed towards enhanced teacher knowledge and skills in order to become responsive to students’ learning needs. It is essentially for teachers’ regular professional inquiry, which becomes meaningful when they focus on their classroom setting (Raphael et al 2014) in the process of unraveling the knitted instructional complexities and explore their willingness to adapt to the emerging practices of the teaching and learning process (Loucks-Horsley et al 1987)

Methods

Results

Conclusion