ABSTRACT
Traditionally, the professional development of teachers has been thought of as something that is done by others for or to teachers. And while postsecondary coursework, professional workshops, and educational seminars will most certainly continue to play an important role in the professional credentialing of L2 teachers, a host of alternative professional development structures that allow for self-directed, collaborative, inquiry-based learning that is directly relevant to teachers’ classrooms have begun to emerge. Since the mid-1980s, the reflective teaching movement (Schon, 1983, 1987; Zeichner & Liston, 1996), the predominance of action research (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988; Somekh, 1993), and the teacher researcher movement (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999) have helped to establish the legitimacy of teachers’ accounts of their experiences and to recognize the importance of reflection on and inquiry into those experiences as a mechanism for change in teachers’ classroom practices as well as a forum for professional development over time. Indexed in the general teacher education literature as the new scholarship (Schon, 1995; Zeichner, 1999), this growing body of research has fostered the popularity of a variety of school-based, practitioner-driven, collaborative, inquiry-based approaches to professional development. In this chapter, several models of inquirybased professional development will be reviewed, including: Critical Friends Groups (Bambino, 2002), Peer Coaching (Ackland, 2000), Lesson Study (Takemura & Shimizu, 1993), Cooperative Development (Edge, 1992), and Teacher Study Groups (Burns, 1999; Clair, 1998; Dubetz, 2005). These particular models were selected for review because of their unique structural arrangements, which create the potential for sustained dialogic mediation among teachers as they engage in goal-directed activity, and which provide assisted performance to those struggling through issues that are directly relevant to their classroom lives. Consistent with a sociocultural perspective, each of these models seeks to create a mediational space for teachers to engage in on-going, in-depth, systematic, and reflective examinations of their teaching practices and their students’ learning. They are grounded in the fundamental principle that participation and
context are essential to teacher learning; and they support the notion that teachers’ informal social and professional networks, including their own classrooms, can function as powerful sites for professional learning.
