Making Teacher and Researcher Learning Visible: Collaborative Design as a Context for Professional Growth

Abstract

Collaborative design (co-design) involving practitioners and researchers is emerging as a productive context for addressing theoretical as well as practical issues of teaching and learning. Co-design affords learning opportunities for all participants, although the focus has typically been on teachers. In this study, the Interconnected Interactive Model of Professional Growth (IIMPG) serves as a conceptual tool for tracing professional growth pathways of teachers and researchers in co-design contexts. The IIMPG is illustrated through a case study of a teacher and a researcher during a multi-year co-design project. Interactional analyses of their co-design work indicated change in the roles of the teacher and the researcher, knowledge of science inquiry as text-based modeling, and strategies for supporting students in engaging in it. Four years later, the teacher and researcher collaborated in retrospective reflection on their co-design work. Analyses revealed increased awareness of the underlying principles governing the multiple components of the design and how these supported conceptual coherence and interconnected knowledge for students. The multiple lenses and timescales enabled new insights on when, how, and why people learn during collaborative design. The IIMPG served as a generative tool for capturing professional growth pathways for teachers and researchers over iterative co-design cycles.

Acknowledgments

We express our deep appreciation to our colleagues on Project READI and on the Teachers Orchestrating Disciplinary Discourse (TOD²) project who contributed valuable insights and perspectives on the work reported in this chapter.

Additional information

Funding

The preparation of this chapter was supported, in part, by a James S. McDonnell Foundation Teachers as Learners Award [Grant #: 220020517]. Project READI was supported by the Reading for Understanding initiative of the Institute for Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education through [Grant R305F100007] to the University of Illinois at Chicago from July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2016. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the funding agencies.