Assessing the impact of collaborative inquiry on teacher performance and effectiveness

ABSTRACT

This study tests the hypothesis that teacher-led collaborative inquiry cycles, guided by instructional standards, lead to improved teacher performance and effectiveness. We examine the impact of teachers’ self-selection into teacher peer excellence groups (TPEGs), which involves lesson co-planning, peer observation and feedback, and collaborative lesson-plan revision on participating teachers from 14 pilot public schools in Tennessee. Using survey results and statewide administrative data, we apply a propensity score matching strategy, and find that TPEG teachers experience growth in their instruction ratings and value-added scores in the subsequent year, although the longer term impact is attenuated. We contribute to the literature by identifying deprivatized practice and instruction-focused collaboration as key features of teacher communities of practice, highlighting the importance of using standards-based instructional quality measures, linking participation in collaborative inquiry cycles to teacher-level outcomes, and estimating effects applicable to situations in which teachers exercise agency and collaborate voluntarily.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative inquiry
• community of practice
• professional development
• teacher performance
• teacher effectiveness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Saunders et al. (2009) present demographic information on treated and comparison schools and claim that the two groups of schools are statistically similar, but we cannot find results from any tests supporting this claim (e.g., no regressions, t tests).

2 Using printed descriptive statistics, we confirmed this claim independently. Although equivalence in baseline grade-level achievement scores is essential, it does not rule out plausible confounding school-level variables. If Saunders and colleagues (2009) knew that schools volunteered for treatment because of their baseline grade-level achievement scores only, then equivalence in these scores would control for the only reason that schools volunteered for treatment or not. However, we cannot find any evidence that the authors knew why schools chose to volunteer for treatment. It is plausible that school leaders did not volunteer for study participation unless they believed that their teachers would benefit, introducing positive bias.

3 See Hunter (2020) for additional details on Tennessee teacher observation policy.

4 The TVAAS scale ranges from −52.7 to 42.6 with a mean of −0.09 and standard deviation of 6.23.

5 Non-departmentalized elementary grade teachers may receive two TVAAS estimates: one for math and one for RLA. In such cases, we take the mean TVAAS estimate.

6 While matching with replacement increases standard errors, it also decreases the potential for biased estimation.

7 We assume improving teacher and student performance is more difficult when professional or student learners are more diverse (i.e., school- level standard deviations of these performance measures are greater).

8 Moreover, the IPTW used in Step 3 are based on weights developed during Step 2, thus the balance of school-level covariates needs to be assessed using these weights and with teachers as the unit of analysis.

9 We discuss the less conventional 10% level of statistical significance because the consequence of a Type I error (i.e., false rejection of the hypothesis that self-selecting into a TPEG does not affect TVAAS scores) is not severe. Prior work concludes that TPEG teachers report higher engagement levels of instructional collaboration (Cravens et al., 2017). Additionally, the current study finds teacher observation scores were positively affected by teacher self-selection into TPEGs. Thus, self-selecting into a TPEG seems to yield valuable benefits, even if participation does not improve TVAAS scores.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xiu C. Cravens

Xiu C. Cravens is an associate professor of the practice in Education Policy at the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations. Her scholarly work involves qualitative and quantitative analyses of reform policies that are particularly related to the organizational and cultural contexts of schools in the United States and other countries, the role of instructional leaders in a changing policy environment, promising practices in professional development, and the conceptual and methodological challenges of cross-cultural transfer and generalization of leadership theories and their applications.

Seth B. Hunter

Seth B. Hunter is an assistant professor of Education Leadership at George Mason University. His research interests include the intersection of educator (i.e., teacher, principal) professional development and evaluation, educator observation systems and practices, and teacher leadership. To explore these topics Dr Hunter primarily applies econometric techniques to large-scale non-experimental data. Some of his work employs psychometric or qualitative methods.