suitable, and realistic” while also being rooted with peers in everyday class-
room life (p. 104).
As pointed out by City, Elmore, Fiarman, and Teitel (2009), professions such
as medicine have embedded their learning experiences in collaborative prac-
tice via “instructional rounds” for some time. Through specified processes and
protocols, physicians work together to develop their
knowledge of practice, in
practice
. The educational community, in recent years, has more intentionally
borrowed these approaches to connect teacher professional development to
“the actual work of teachers and students in classrooms” (p. 157). Oftentimes,
these learning events are mediated by peer teacher “coaches” who engage
colleagues in what has been called a “local proof route” to teacher learning
(Lewis, Perry, & Murata, 2006), focused on “small trials” where educators
with shared problems can “learn from small mistakes rather than large ones”
(Morris & Hiebert, 2011, p. 6). Such “job-embedded coaching” is often
Section 6.2
The Fundamental Dilemma of Teacher Leader-facilitated Professional Development
designed to build capacity among willing teachers and to create exis-
tence proofs that could be used to demonstrate high-quality practice
to others . . . [using] local practice and individual learning to foster
organizational learning, moving learning processes beyond abstrac-
tions into practical activities. (Gallucci, 2008, pp. 555–565)
In addition to concretizing policy and theory of what
should
happen in what
is
happening, situated and social teacher learning allows teachers to learn from
and with people who can not only say they have worked with students but
are still working with students, seeking to improve instruction in actual class-
room settings (see also Intrator & Kunzman, 2009).
This sociocultural framework helped us better examine the ways in which
the HTLs brought the studio classroom to life (Research Question 1), as well
as the obstacles to rooting teacher learning in peer collaborative practice
(Research Question 2). Additionally, it provided a helpful lens through which
to explore the potential impact of teacher leader “modeling” in naturalistic set-
tings (Research Question 3) and whether, overall, a trial-and-error approach
to teacher learning could be enhanced by localized HTL studio classroom
activities.
Method
In light of the documented gaps between idealized visions of teacher lead-
ership and the actual work of teacher leaders within schools, this study’s
primary research questions examined studio classroom manifestations and
impact, as well as the related supports and obstacles to HTLs. As such, it seeks
to answer the call for “close in, fine grained studies” of teacher leadership
(Coburn & Russell, 2008, p. 226) by focusing on one specific model of teacher
leadership rather than the broad “distributed leadership” category. Our quali-
tative inquiry held the primary goal of understanding the beliefs and practices
of HTLs and their administrators in relation to the studio classroom across
schools and within districts. Participants, as well as data collection and ana-
