Elementary teachers' opportunities for learning: An ethnographic study of professional development.

Abstract

Current educational reforms call upon teachers to improve their practices; as generalists, elementary teachers must do so within the myriad areas for which they are responsible. Using ethnographic and discourse analytic methods this study investigates elementary teachers' opportunities for learning through their school-based professional development. This study documents relationships between their learning opportunities and the professional development community the teachers build and sustain, drawing upon extensive data collected over the course of a school year at an elementary school in Northern California. Data include video of professional development sessions, interviews, fieldnotes, and documents. Innovative conceptual frameworks were developed for the analysis of these data. The frameworks demonstrate promise for further application in research and practice. These include: the <italic>Professional Development Task Structure Analysis Guide</italic>, the <italic>Facets and Foci Matrix</italic>, and the <italic>Professional Development Tasks Framework</italic>. Respectively, these frameworks enabled the analysis and interpretation of the instructional and epistemic patterns of instructional tasks used to teach teachers, the topics elementary teachers discussed during professional development, and the variety of ways teachers' opportunities for learning were diminished by design and enactment. Illustrative vignettes used throughout the report enable an understanding of this unique and complex interactional context and a determination of the extent to which findings might be generalizable to other educational contexts. In the literature, one often sees professional development described as incoherent and fragmented. This work, however, reveals the limitations of that characterization as one-sided and oversimplified. Findings from this longitudinal investigation of the structures and content reveal the dual nature of elementary teachers' school-based professional development---at once incoherent and coherent, which, nevertheless, supported teachers in learning their professional responsibilities and knowledge. Furthermore, the findings indicate that fragmentation both benefited and constrained teachers' opportunities for learning. This study concludes with suggestions for the application of this work, specifically for addressing issues of educational equity within professional development.