Collaboration and Teacher Development: Unpacking Resistance, Constructing Knowledge, and Navigating Identities.

Abstract

This article presents a study of the Collaboration Centers Project (CCP), which is a pseudonym for a three-year, federally-funded program that focused on helping in-service teachers better address the needs of English language learners (ELLs) in their classrooms. The CCP is important to study because of its clear intention to integrate real teachers--their understandings, voices, selves, and practices--into professional development by providing an experiential, collaborative and school-centered context for ongoing reflection on teachers' practice. It is important to understand the complexities of teacher development in the context of a project that sought to break with the short-term transmission model that Richardson (2003) described as the still dominant approach to in-service professional development. By investigating the ongoing collaboration created by the program, the authors seek to provide a multi-layered understanding of how collegial and collaborative professional development affects teachers and how teachers affect professional development. Therefore, their purpose is to add to the existing research that explains the complexity of teacher collaboration by uncovering the meaning of teacher resistance and by providing an in depth look into how a group of teachers co-constructed knowledge and negotiated their identities over time.