Meeting agenda matters: promoting reflective dialogue in teacher communities

ABSTRACT

Reflective dialogue as a job-embedded teacher professional learning activity has still been an unexplored area. Little is known about what factors affect its emergence. This study addresses this gap by examining the effect of the frequency of occurrence of particular meeting agendas on the emergence of reflective dialogue in teacher communities as well as what conditions are conducive to promote reflective dialogue. Using a mixed methods research design, first, we created a single-level multiple-indicators multiple-causes model. Through a focus group interview we delved deep into reflective dialogue. In the quantitative part, we found that the conversations on the goals of the school, curriculum, and student learning contributed to the evolution of reflective dialogue among teachers as these topics are more important. As teachers focus more on discussing these three topics, they begin reflecting on their practice through a collaborative dialogue. The follow-up qualitative study revealed that there are more topics that might promote reflective dialogue. Personal and institutional conditions have been revealed as being necessary for creating culture of reflective dialogue. For school leaders, practical solutions to promote reflective dialogue were provided. For researchers, future research directions were suggested to obtain a fuller picture of reflective dialogue across schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional learning
• reflection
• reflective dialogue
• reflective practice
• teacher communities

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editorial team at Professional Development in Education and anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We used the term ‘meeting agenda’ (and sometimes agenda and topic, interchangeably) instead of using ‘school meetings,’ ‘meeting topics,’ or ‘teacher meetings’ for three reasons. First, researchers used the same term in the past (e.g. Louis et al. (1995)). Moreover, in PLCs, teachers are accustomed to the word meeting agendas. Second, Turkish teachers are inclined to use the same term to refer to the topics that will be discussed in meetings. We want to keep the same terminology to carry over the meaning. Third, the sole use of ‘meeting’ would not correspond to what the topics to be discussed in formal language. We wanted to be more specific to focus on ‘the content’ of the meetings, not the meetings themselves.

2. Teachers were asked to report the frequency through these four items. There are varying times that teachers talk about instructional issues. Therefore, the items measure the extent to which the identified meeting agendas occur (or repeat) in the meetings. If teachers talk about these topics, they would report the occurrence and ‘instances’ rather than an exact estimation of the quantity or time (how much it lasts). Moreover, there are only four discussion topics shown to be important. Meeting agenda items do not differentiate other types of topics nor the depth of discussion and the required time to promote reflective dialogue.