Scholars of professional learning communities (PLCs) agree that collaborative inquiry into practice is a defining and pivotal feature of productive teacher PLCs. Eliciting and sustaining these interactions has been found challenging, however. In the current study, we explore how the leading teacher’s (LT) choice for a group activity during team meetings facilitate (or inhibit) collaborative inquiry into practice. The study is conducted in the context of a large-scale intervention program that aims to support teacher dialogue about practice in school-based, team meetings. We systematically compare between the four most common group activity types: (a) Peer consultation; (b) Pedagogical planning; (c) Analyzing peer videos; and (d) Sharing experiences from practice. A set of 80 team conversations (20 for each activity type) was selected for detailed dialogue analyses, separately focusing on the three defining dimensions of teacher collaborative inquiry of practice: Measures for participation modes (collaboration), for dialogue form (inquiry) and for dialogue content (focus on practice). Preliminary results, based on the analysis of 25% of the full data set, show that when teachers are involved in Sharing experiences from practice, their interactions tend to be least inquiry-oriented. In contrast, teacher dialogue in Collaborative planning activities is characterized by frequent inquiry into each other’s ideas and high levels of involvement. As for Video-based analysis and Peer consultation, which both come highly recommended in the literature as well as in the intervention program, the findings showed that inquiry was not particularly high, nor low. Even though teachers introduce specific, personal problems of practice in both activity types, video-based analyses enable a more practice-focused dialogue, compared to the interactions that ensued in the Peer consultation activities, which scores very low on measures of focus on practice. An analyses of the full data set will be presented at the symposium.
