ABSTRACT
The pedagogical model of cooperative learning (CL), which integrates academic and social learning, is a powerful pedagogy that teachers can use to enable their students to develop competencies that will prepare them for their future social and work lives. However, changing teaching practices can be difficult, and teachers face challenges when incorporating CL into their teaching. Thus, the provision of learning opportunities for teachers and support structures for a sustainable CL practice is vital for their implementation of CL. This chapter presents experiences from a Norwegian research and development project in which teachers implemented CL through a context-driven professional development (PD) programme. By learning and exploring CL within interdisciplinary teacher teams, teachers developed into a community of practice, which supported their change of practice and their own and their students' learning. The chapter discusses the teachers' learning opportunities during the PD programme, focusing on how teacher collaboration and proactive action research as a working frame cultivated the teacher team into a community of practice. Thus, cultivating teacher teams to become communities of practice is proposed as a valuable means of supporting teachers' learning and implementation of CL.
