Reconstructing professional learning community as collective creation

Abstract

The article presents a cross-domain inquiry into schoolwide professional learning community. It examines tensions in how professional learning community is conceptualized and how it is enacted in the processes of teacher groups. Drawing on a study of contemporary theatre arts practices, it proposes a model of collective creation that highlights three interacting elements of a group’s activity: means, materials, and modes of engagement. The article conducts a paired analysis of a primary school teacher group meeting. In the first analysis, it investigates how the group’s discussion reveals features of professional learning community, especially collaboration, inquiry, and collective responsibility for student learning, as well as tensions in how these are enacted. In the second, it considers how the discussion manifests elements of collective creation, and proposes how these could be strengthened. The article argues for a reconceptualization of professional learning community that preserves the features identified above but extends these through the collective creation of instructional and conceptual resources for teacher learning and instructional improvement.

Keywords

Collaboration teacher community teacher inquiry

‘Should we be using the image of community at all?’ Judith Warren Little’s question was a provocative one, especially given the venue, a symposium titled ‘Teacher Communities in Secondary Education: How Teachers Work and Learn Together’.¹ It resonated, uncomfortably, for researchers and practitioners in the audience who had studied, participated in, and advocated for teacher learning community as the primary vehicle for teachers’ professional development and instructional improvement.

Little’s question responds to fissures in the conceptualization of schoolwide professional learning community as a site of reflection on practice and collaboration in support of student learning. These have to do with the purpose for professional community itself; how teacher groups enact the purpose; and ownership of these efforts. Is the purpose to develop trusting collegial relationships that provide a foundation for teacher learning and instructional improvement or to enable a more narrow acquisition of craft knowledge and skills (Stoll, Bolam, McMahon, Wallace, & Thomas, 2006)? Do the practices of teacher groups that enact professional learning community emphasize reflection on problems of teaching and learning or the alignment of instructional practice with predetermined instructional goals (Hargreaves, 2007)? Do teachers determine the focus for their collective work or is their collaboration ‘contrived’ to advance administrative or system-imposed goals (Hargreaves & Dawe, 1990)?

Wood (2007) has summarized these questions as the tension between ‘building relationships’ and ‘accomplishing work’ (p. 723). Necessarily a false dichotomy, this opposition invites new perspectives on how teacher learning and instructional improvement are enacted in schools and how they can be enacted more effectively. One promising methodology to address such questions is cross-professional inquiry, that is, the examination of analogous practices in other professions in order to derive lessons for our own. In her comments cited above, Little proposed that educators consider as an alternative image for teacher learning in schools that of the ‘cross-functional team’, a model for improving product development and performance in industry, health care, and social services that combines representatives of diverse functions and tenure within an organization (McDonough, 2003; Randel & Jaussi, 2003).

Undoubtedly, there is much educators might learn from organizational models from business and industry. In this article, however, I investigate another analogy for teacher learning in schools: the practices of contemporary theatre artists and companies whose methods for developing performances are fundamentally collaborative. There is much to recommend such an analogy: like professional learning community, as conceptualized, collective creation in theatre arts relies on collaboration and trusting collegial relationships. Its methods for creating new works for performance (plays, dances, etc.) are fundamentally inquiry-based. And its products are meant to integrate the learning of participants and make that learning available for others – in theatre arts, these are audiences; in professional learning community, students and other teachers.

Drawing on a study of contemporary theatre artists’ practices, I propose a model for collective creation and apply it to the activity of a teacher group. The model highlights three elements: means, materials, and modes of engagement. Means describes the structures and tools theatre artists (and theatre arts companies) employ to initiate and guide their processes of collective creation; materials, the diverse resources they identify and generate to contribute to collective creation; and modes of engagement, the orientation or stance of participants to one another and to their collective activity.

I analyze a vignette from a primary school teacher group twice. First, I employ the conceptualization of professional learning community (discussed below) to reveal how the group’s activity reflects its features, as well as tensions in purposes for professional community and how they are enacted in process. Second, I apply the model for collective creation to demonstrate how the group’s activity manifests the elements identified above: means, materials, modes of engagement. I demonstrate that collective creation provides conceptual and practical resources to reconstruct schoolwide professional learning community so that it preserves its emphasis on trust, collaboration, and reflection on practice and becomes more generative of teachers’ professional learning and instructional improvement.

In the sections that follow, I examine the conceptualization of schoolwide professional learning community and emergent tensions in its purposes. I demonstrate how these tensions are reflected in the practices of the teacher groups that are the vehicles for professional community, as well as in relation to the outcomes or products of the groups’ activity. Then, I examine collaborative practices in the theatre arts and articulate a model for collective creation in teacher learning groups. These inquiries set the stage for the episode from a teacher inquiry and the paired analyses that follow it.

Community and its discontent

The image of school as a community has been with us at least since Dewey’s (1897) declaration that ‘education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of school as a form of community life’ (p. 8). The image of teachers as a community within a school is much more recent, gaining prominence only in the last two decades. It represents a profound shift in approaches to teachers’ professional development from those that focus on the individual teacher and are often removed from the school itself, such as training workshops, courses, and institutes, to those that emphasize teachers learning with colleagues and within the ongoing work of their school. This reconceptualization of teachers’ work in schools has challenged the endemic professional norm of ‘privacy’, which viewed teaching as a largely individual practice (Little, 1990). It also legitimized the interactions with students and with colleagues as critical sources for professional learning, in other words ‘learning in and from practice’ (Ball & Cohen, 1999).

These shifts in thinking about professional development have taken clearest form in the formulation of schoolwide ‘professional learning community’ (PLC). While the concept is interpreted and enacted differently in different contexts, there is broad agreement in the literature that it demonstrates these features: 1) a shared vision and sense of purpose related to student learning; 2) collaboration; 3) reflective or inquiry-based dialog; and 4) collective responsibility for student learning (Grossman, Wineburg, & Woolworth, 2001; Hord, 1997; Stevens & Kahne, 2006; Stoll & Louis, 2007).

The expansion of PLC as a model for professional learning in the United States, Europe, Australia, and other locales has dovetailed with an increased understanding of the importance of social capital to school change and instructional improvement. Social capital describes the quality of relationships within a school, in particular, trusting and respectful relationships among teachers and administrators (Bryk & Schneider, 2002). While social capital is considered to be a necessary precondition for PLC (Mulford, 2007), it also develops through deliberate use of reflective practices, such as reflecting on critical incidents (Nakamura & Yorks, 2011) and appreciative inquiry (Calabrese, 2006).

The expansion has also coincided with the demand for greater accountability for schools and teachers for their students’ academic achievement. Accountability has often been equated by policy-makers, the media, and the public with results on standardized assessments that allow for ready comparisons of results between schools, and sometimes between teachers within schools (Koretz, 2008). These accountability demands have influenced understandings about purposes for PLC, the practices of groups through which groups enact these purposes, and direction of these efforts.

Greater and greater emphasis is placed on the analysis of student achievement data, often derived from the standardized tests, in order to formulate instruction that will improve achievement as measured by the same instruments. Supervisors establish the parameters for groups’ discussion (Hargreaves, 2007 Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012), for example, encouraging or requiring them to focus on how to ‘adjust teaching, re-teach, and follow up on failing students’ (Marshall, 2009). This version of school leadership contrasts strongly with the ‘trust and belief in both teacher professionalism and teacher leadership’ (Crowther, 2011, p. 101) that promotes teachers’ autonomy in determining the problems of teaching and learning on which to focus–and how best to do so.

Given such competing visions for schoolwide purposes for PLC and its ownership, it is not surprising that the processes of engagement through which it has been enacted have been the object of investigation and critique.

Problems with processes

However it is defined (and by whomever), schoolwide PLC is realized through the day-to-day practices of regularly meeting groups of teachers referred to variously as inquiry groups, critical friends groups, or simply ‘PLCs’. These groups engage in a variety of practices intended to foster professional learning and instructional improvement. Researchers have begun to identify some of the practices that contribute to more effective implementation of PLC, in relation to teacher learning and instructional improvement, including linking external expertise to school-based activity of teachers, observation and feedback, processes to encourage dialog, and processes to support teachers in embedding practices in their classroom instruction (Stoll et al., 2006). These practices are facilitated by the use of tools, including inquiry cycles, rubrics specifying criteria for analyzing student work samples, and discussion protocols.

Discussion protocols, in particular, as ‘processes to encourage dialog’, have gained currency. Protocols structure discussions for particular purposes, for example, providing feedback to a peer on a project or task for students, investigating a problem of practice, or analyzing student work samples, often in relation to learning goals or curriculum standards (Easton, 2009; Little, Gearhart, Curry, & Kafka, 2003). Protocols specify steps for the discussion, as well as norms for teachers’ participation. In doing so, they seek to create a climate of trust and ‘safety’ within which participants expose their instructional practices to analysis and feedback. Without such ‘safe spaces’, it is argued, instructional practice will remain private and thus closed to inquiry and improvement (Breidenstein, Fahey, Glickman, & Hensley, 2012; Brown, 2009; McDonald, Zydney, Dichter, & McDonald, 2012).

As their use becomes more common, researchers have investigated how the groups use the protocols and the qualities of the professional discussions they support. Some researchers find teacher groups are more concerned with the process, that is, following a particular protocol’s steps, than with the substance of the discussion it is meant to facilitate, that is, issues directly related to student learning itself (Little & Curry, 2008 Timperley & Earl, 2009). In addition, the quality of professional discourse within protocol-supported discussions has been characterized as often ‘shallow’ (Curry, 2008) or lacking in focus on ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ (Bausmith & Barry, 2011). The critiques, thus, echo the tensions in the purposes for PLC introduced earlier: are the protocols tools for building trusting collegial relationships or for getting work done? If it is the latter (or both), what kind of work should it be?

Missing products

The critiques are largely silent on the outcomes or products of the groups’ activity. Without a greater clarity about what it is groups are to produce, we are less likely to resolve the tension in purpose introduced earlier and to address its impact on processes to enact these purposes within the group’s activity. This silence invites new ways of examining the teacher learning processes in schools, including cross-professional studies like this one.

Theatre arts represent a promising domain for analogous study of teacher learning, in part because process is scrutinized in relation to products, that is, the performance of a play or other theatrical work. Of course, the products of teacher groups will be qualitatively different than those of theatre arts companies. In this article, I identify two categories of products for teacher groups: instructional resources, such as instructional strategies, student tasks, and assessment instruments; and conceptual resources, such as inquiry questions, analytical categories for student learning, graphical representations, and metaphors. The categories are not sealed: a conceptual resource, such as an analytical category for types of student writing can foster generation of specific instructional strategies to support students’ writing development; using an assessment instrument for critical thinking can provoke inquiry questions about types of thinking involved in different tasks.

Like theatre arts performances, the instructional and conceptual resources that teacher groups create integrate and embody the learning experiences of the groups and make these available for application, both within individual teachers’ classrooms and within the ongoing learning of the group. In the next section, the focus shifts to the practices of contemporary theatre artists in order to develop a model for collective creation. The model will supply a tool for analyzing activity within teacher groups and, ultimately, for proposing more productive ways to enact schoolwide PLC.

Collective creation in theatre arts

How do theatre artists create? The question is audacious and beyond one researcher’s capacities. By focusing more narrowly on the practices of contemporary theatre artists engaged in processes of collective creation, however, it becomes possible to articulate key elements that might transfer to other domains, including teacher learning. The term ‘collective creation’ denotes methods of creating new work for performance, for instance a play or dance, through the collaborative activity of performers (actors or dancers), director, and designers (Chen, Pulinkala, & Robinson 2010). Sometimes referred to as ‘actors theatre’ or ‘devised theatre’ (Oddey, 1996), collective creation operates in stark contrast to the more familiar ‘transmission model’ of theatrical production in which the playwright creates a script; the director communicates to actors how it will be performed; the actors perform the script for an audience (Knowles, 2004). In collective creation, the script for performance instead emerges from the collective activity of the actors, director, and designers.

Companies use different processes to organize and support collective creation. These include the influential RSVP (Resources-Scoring-Valuaction-Performance) Cycles, developed by Lawrence Halprin and popularized by the choreographer Anna Halprin (Halprin & Burns, 1974; Worth & Poyner, 2004); Theatre of the Oppressed and other methods of director and educator Augusto Boal (1979, 2002) for confronting oppression; and the Viewpoints and Composition methods of directors Anne Bogart and Tina Landau (2005). These processes have in common an explicit emphasis on the means, materials, and modes of engagement the artists employ and enact – the three elements of the model for collective creation employed in this article (see Figure 1). I define each below.

Figure 1.

A model for collective creation.

Theatre artists employ specific tools and structures, or means, to support their processes of creation. One simple but powerful tool is the question the company poses to initiate the process. For instance, in a devised theatre workshop in which I participated, Ghost Road Company director Katharine Noon introduced the question: ‘What do we choose to pay attention to – and choose to ignore?’ The initiating question, like the one above, spurs the company members to gather resources of many kinds that might become materials for the composition of the work.

The category of materials, for theatre artists, is expansive, including texts, images, movement, music, and many others. In the RSVP Cycles, resources are defined as all the ‘basic materials we have at our disposal’; these include ‘both human and physical resources and their motivation and aims’ (Worth and Poyner, 2004, p. 112). Thus, emotions, ideas, and metaphors are as vital to the creation process as text, music, costumes, or props. Dewey (1934) similarly distinguished ‘inner’ materials from ‘outer’ materials, but maintained that both were essential for creating and perceiving art.

To identify and generate materials, theatre artists use a variety of tools – taking us back to means. In the Ghost Road Company workshop, we used freewriting exercises to generate images, memories, and stories that related to the question about what gets noticed. We also gathered images from magazines, newspapers, and Internet sources that somehow responded to the question. Some of these images, in turn, became provocations for more freewriting and other exercises. (Figure 2 illustrates members of the Ghost Road Company and Studium Teatralne from Warsaw exploring images at an early stage in the collaboration.)

Figure 2.

Ghost Road Company members explore images.

Materials are deployed in different ways for different purposes, again using specific tools. In the Composition method of Bogart and Landau (2005; Cummings, 2006) groups create and deliver short specific performances, called compositions. Each group’s composition must incorporate a number of specified elements, or ‘ingredients’, for example, set number of sections, use of a text, images, gestures, a song, and so on. These exercises generate new ideas, dialogue, movements, etc., that may be used in the ongoing development of the piece for performance – what Bogart and Landau (2005) refer to as the ‘vocabulary that will be used in any given piece’ (pp. 12–13). Thus, theatre artists explore materials to generate new materials.

In the RSVP Cycles, theatre artists employ ‘scores’ as frameworks for their collaborative activity (Halprin & Burns, 1974, p. 33). Depending on the medium and the work being created, a score might be musical, graphical (e.g. a map or chart), or verbal (e.g. a list or outline). For collective creation, the score must ‘open’ enough to allow participants their own input, ideas, and objectives; in other words, it initiates and guides without imposing predetermined ends. To do the latter would stifle creation.

As with means and materials, theatre artists are explicit about their orientation to each other and to their collective activity at any given moment, in other words, their modes of engagement. In fact, there is no single mode that describes collective creation; below, I discuss two that are particularly relevant to the work of teacher learning groups: complementarity and critical self-reflection, illustrated here by the theatrical practices “Yes and . . .” and Valuaction.

The phrase “Yes, and . . .” is familiar to anyone who has participated in improvisational (improv) theatre activities. In improv, each actor must figuratively respond “Yes, and . . .” to her collaborators, that is, to accept and elaborate the ‘offer’ her collaborator makes, whether it takes the form of a question, comment, exclamation, gesture, etc. When an actor rejects a collaborator’s offer to introduce what she imagines is a dazzling new idea or movement, the piece invariably fails; activity that is cumulatively ‘extending . . . heightening, and raising the stakes’ (Sawyer, 2003, pp. 94–95) grinds to a halt. This mode depends on – and, in some ways, teaches – a heightened attention to one’s collaborators’ words, gestures, expressions, and so on.

Valuaction, a component of the RSVP Cycles, is intended to spur the collaborators’ critical self-reflection on their process, incorporating ‘appreciation, feedback, value building and decision-making’ (Halprin & Kaplan, 1995, p. 23). It conflates the terms ‘value’ and ‘action’, signaling the fundamentally generative purposes for theatre artists’ reflection practices. Some Valuaction questions a company might use to reflect on the performance of a piece (at any stage of the creation process) include:

What worked well?

What would you like to develop further?

What new resources (e.g. themes, movement activities or qualities) have arisen from the score?

Is the score clear? Does it need to be more open or more closed?

Where do you go from here? (Worth & Poyner, 2004, pp. 178–179)

Like those used by Noon, Bogart and Landau (2005), and other theatre artists, these questions expose the degree of specificity through which theatre artists conduct critical self-reflection. Without identifying specific elements that may become materials for future use, reflection is an empty exercise.

Reflection also depends upon participants’ willingness to expose their practice, individually and collectively, to others for feedback. This demands a degree of risk-taking that is antithetical to ‘safety’ (Bogart, 2001). Theatre artists’ processes of collective creation actively invite missteps – even embarrassment. They recognize that most of what is developed in process of creation will be abandoned – and that this is worthwhile if it also generates other elements that become materials in the creation of a piece for performance. For an individual to hold onto a cherished line, gesture, movement, or idea gets in the way of collective creation.

An episode of teacher learning

How do these lessons from theatre arts relate to teachers’ learning and instructional improvement? In this section, I present an episode from a study of teacher learning groups in a primary school to examine how differently schoolwide professional learning community – as conceptualized and enacted – and collective creation function as analytical frameworks for a teacher group’s activity.

The group whose work I present below was composed of eight pre-K to sixth-grade teachers in an urban primary school. The school was participating in a university-school partnership intended to develop tools for teachers’ collaborative assessment and improvement of their instructional practices. As a researcher on the study, I documented the group’s meetings and collaborated with Laura, the group’s designated ‘teacher facilitator’, in planning meetings and facilitating meeting segments (for example, the discussion below).

The episode comes from a December meeting during the group’s first year of working together. Earlier in the year, using an inquiry cycle developed by the research project (Figure 3), the teachers had identified individual inquiry questions about their instruction and student learning. For example, Gail (kindergarten), asked ‘How does play in a school classroom impact students’ learning?’ Laura (third grade): ‘How can I align my teaching style with the [state curriculum] frameworks in social studies?’ And Maureen (third grade): ‘How can I bring the arts back into my classroom?’ To address these questions, teachers identified artifacts from their classrooms, including samples of student work, writing prompts, assessment instruments, and others, and brought these to the group’s meetings.

Figure 3.

Inquiry cycle.

To structure and focus their meetings, the group employed facilitated protocols that specified steps for the discussion, including the ‘Mini-Protocol’ used in the episode below. This protocol was designed to support brief (approximately 10-minute) discussions of the teachers’ questions in relation to the artifacts they had brought from their classrooms; as in the episode below, these discussions often extended to 25 minutes or more. The steps of the protocol are:

Presenter reminds group of his/her inquiry question and briefly describes artifacts.

Presenter reflects on what artifacts may tell him/her about the inquiry question.

Full group (including presenter) reflects on what artifacts may tell it about the inquiry question.

At this point in the year, I was facilitating most of the group’s meetings; as the year progressed, Laura took over much of the facilitation. The vignette was constructed from the transcript of an audiotaped record of the meeting and my field notes. The teachers’ names are pseudonyms.

‘Bringing the arts back in’

In reviewing the purposes for the Mini-Protocol, I reminded the group that the protocol ‘gives us a structure to just show what you brought, say a little bit about why you brought it and what it might tell you about your question. And then get a little bit of feedback from others about the same question – what does it tell us?’ I invited Maureen, who had agreed to present artifacts from her classroom, to tell us what she had brought.

Maureen placed three papier-mache masks on the table in front of her, joking:

We brought Michael Myers [character from Halloween movies] for you and the devil. [Laughs.] No. These are self-portraits that the students were able to develop by different means. My question pertained to how can I bring the arts back into my classroom because I feel with the [state curriculum mandates] I have lost touch with using the arts.

She told the group that, along with teaching interns from the local university, she had ‘brainstormed’ a different way to approach the self-portrait activity students usually did on paper. As she reflected on her motivation for selecting the materials to present, Maureen referred to a discussion in Sara’s presentation earlier in the meeting:

I felt I brought the arts back, but then I sat and I thought about it this morning listening to Laura and Sara [asking], ‘But where is my evidence of learning?’ So, I guess I question that part of how can I bring the arts back into my classroom [Maureen’s initial inquiry question] in showing that there is learning, the learning process is going on? But, then I can [say], well they have learned how to use different art means to express themselves. I could look at the [curriculum frameworks] in that sense. They were able to express themselves in different ways.

Maureen described how a number of students seemed to have based their self-portraits on Pokémon characters. She pointed to a nearly blank white mask with small specks of red:

I wasn’t quite sure what this child was thinking; the boy who did it is one who is very quiet and shy. I could read a lot into it, too. There is nothing there [referring to mask] really. And in his home life sometimes, it could be a little scary, so I wonder if that is why there are some spots of blood [or] if he was really thinking because it was around Halloween . . . kind of Michael Myers . . . .

I asked the group to take up the question of what the artifacts may say to them about Maureen’s inquiry question. Dora commented: ‘Your idea of self-portrait, that is very creative. It may be how I would [do it] if I was to copy . . .’ The other teachers laughed. Dora also suggested the project could be ‘a springboard for the writer’s journal . . . their first entry could be about their mask, why they did it the way they did. And right there you integrate it into the language arts [curriculum frameworks].’

Laura commented:

I really like this idea. I thought they came out neat, but then I [thought], well what did they learn? I think what you have to think about is what are you hoping a child learns from a self-portrait? This is just a variation on a theme. . . . I mean we all do some kind of a self-portrait, they draw themselves. . . . I mean you’ve gone beyond what you expect from a standard self-portrait and you have seen tremendous creativity . . . . I am not really sure why this child saw himself as Pokémon, and I . . .

Maureen:

But he loves . . . I mean he is . . .

Dora:

So it’s just a part of himself?

Sara:

So he wants to be Pikachu [Pokémon character]? [Laughter.]

Cate:

And then again, you weren’t putting limitations on them and telling them it had to look just like them?

Maureen:

No, but [I] do introduce them as self-portrait masks. These are to be about you, and you can do what you want with them and how you would introduce yourself.

Sara:

Well, I think that you could learn some pretty scary things.

Cate:

It makes me nervous.

Dora:

Maybe, you know, we are getting scared for nothing . . .

Laura:

It would be interesting to see if they looked anything like that if it wasn’t at that time of year [Halloween].

Gail:

We have made them do self-portraits for so many years that by the time they get to your grade level, the self-portrait face, they aren’t really drawing themselves. This has given them an opportunity to express themselves. So if this young man is into Pokémon, this is his way of expressing himself where he would not do it on a piece of paper when we said, you know: draw your self-portrait. So, I think this is definitely an extension into their learning.

Laura suggested that Maureen ask students themselves to reflect in writing on whether this was a better way ‘for me to allow you to do a self-portrait . . . than, say, a pencil sketch?’ She added: ‘We always feel like we need to – everything has to be – we are accountable to all of it. But I think it would be neat to see what they thought . . . ’

Maureen described one special needs student’s participation in the project. ‘He has no fine motor/gross motor skills [yet] he held the paintbrush. I mean as clumsy as the hand was holding it, he painted it.’ Other teachers nodded appreciatively.

I proposed that this would be a good place to pause before the next presenter’s protocol, adding, ‘Sometimes this protocol opens up more questions than it really answers.’

Two takes on teacher learning

How does the episode display features of schoolwide professional learning community, as well as the tensions in purpose and enactment of processes introduced earlier? How does the model of collective creation allow us to see the group’s activity in a different light and propose ways it might be more generative of teacher learning and instructional improvement? In the sections below, I analyze the episode twice, first applying the lens of PLC, then of collective creation.

As an episode of professional learning community

The group’s discussion reflects the features of schoolwide PLC introduced above: collective responsibility for students’ learning, reflective dialogue, and collaboration. It also exposes tensions in purpose for PLC, and how these influence how the features are enacted in the group’s activity.

Collective responsibility for students’ learning is evident in the empathetic attention colleagues devote to Maureen’s problem, as well as the suggestions they offer her for addressing it. It is also manifest in the emotional content of the meeting, particularly in the frustration Maureen and her colleagues express in relation, on the one hand, to the perceived need to satisfy the state’s curriculum mandates and, on the other, to their desire to provide instruction they believe is effective (and perhaps enjoyable) for students. This frustration surfaces at the beginning of the discussion in Maureen’s desire to ‘bring the arts back’ (emphasis mine) into her instruction, and reemerges strongly at its conclusion in Laura’s frustration that, ‘We [teachers] always feel like we need to – everything has to be – we are accountable to all of it.’

The episode also demonstrates elements of reflective dialog. For Dewey (1933) reflective thought always responds to a ‘genuine problem or question’ (p. 9). There is no doubt that the group’s discussion is centered by a genuine problem for Maureen and the group as a whole. Initially, Maureen presents the problem as one of ‘bringing the arts back into my classroom in showing that there is learning, the learning process is going on’. In other words, how to include arts-based activities in ways that will promote student learning in demonstrable ways. She complicates the problem by relating the students’ work to the curriculum frameworks’ inclusion of student self-expression as a goal: ‘They were able to express themselves in different ways.’ In this restatement of the problem, student learning becomes defined in relation to the frameworks.

The questions of how learning is defined and who defines it affect the group’s shared vision and sense of purpose in relation to student learning. Is it to understand how students learn and what supports that learning best? Or is it to demonstrate students are learning in relation to the state-mandated curriculum frameworks? Of these, only the former requires another feature of PLC, reflective dialog.

Reflection, pace Dewey, also requires a re-examination, or reconstruction, of the problematic situation. In the group’s discussion, the re-examination takes several principle forms: 1) Maureen recounts her motivation for the project and how she developed it with the student teacher interns; 2) Maureen offers commentary on individual students’ realizations of the project (e.g. on the student who created the nearly blank mask); and 3) other teachers in the group ask questions and speculate about what students were expressing through the creation of their masks (especially in relation to the ‘Pikachu’ mask).

There is less evidence that the discussion fulfills another of Dewey’s criteria of reflection, that is, that the re-examination of past experience becomes a means to formulate present or future actions. This gap affects the nature and outcome of the group’s collaboration. While Dora and Laura offer suggestions for ways Maureen could integrate the mask project with student writing, these are largely unformed; in fact, they precede much of the re-examination of the problematic situation described above. It is not at all clear that Maureen, or the group as a whole, leaves the discussion with a deeper understanding of the problem or with a robust instructional strategy with which to address it. Inquiry and collaboration are both rendered incomplete.

Building relationships and accomplishing work. Evoking the tension described above in the purpose for PLC and how it is enacted in process, the group’s activity can be seen as building or maintaining trusting relationships and, at the same time, accomplishing work. These purposes conflict and coalesce in its practices.

From Dora’s early comment that she would like to ‘copy’ the mask project to Gail’s comments about how the project gave students the opportunity to express themselves, the group affirms Maureen and her instructional practices (embodied in the mask project). These comments signal a trusting, supportive climate for the group’s activity. It is a climate that provides the emotional ‘safety’ for Maureen to expose instructional problems to her colleagues – including her doubts about the mask project as a vehicle for student learning, evident in her question: ‘Can I [say], well they have learned how to use different means to express themselves?’

Maureen’s question invites critical analysis of the student learning embodied in the mask project. However, the closest a colleague comes to offering a critique that might pierce the prevailing climate is Laura’s question, framed as a suggestion: ‘I think what you [Maureen] have to think about is what are you hoping a child learns from a self-portrait?’ No sooner does Laura ask the question, though, than she offers a justification for the mask project in terms of self-portraits as a regular part of the curriculum. In effect, she buries the question in more affirming comments, making it less likely that Maureen will view this as criticism – or address it at all. An atmosphere of collegial support and safety is maintained, and the question of what students learn from the project is not taken up.

What kind of work does the climate of trust and safety enable? I would suggest that here the primary work of the group is the validation of practice. The group justifies instructional practices it values, such as Maureen’s arts-based projects, in the face of mandated curriculum standards. The work of validation is at odds with the work of reflective dialog: questions, like Laura’s, about what students might learn from the project are short-circuited by the insistence that they are learning, signaled by Gail’s comment: ‘I think this is definitely an extension into their learning’ (emphasis added). The supportive relationships provide defense from outside pressures rather than a foundation for reflective thinking and dialogue.

Returning to Dewey (1916): reflective thinking responds to a problem that is not only ‘genuine’ but also one the learner (here the group) is interested in ‘for its own sake’ (p. 163). The group’s activity is shaped by the felt pressure to satisfy what is perceived to be the state’s interest, as expressed in the curriculum frameworks. Problem solving becomes less focused on a problem of learning and more on a problem of alignment (or compliance). The uneasy balance between reflecting on problems of genuine interest to the group, such as what the masks reveal about their creators that other forms of self-portrait do not, and validating practices in the face of outside forces attenuates the potential for learning and instructional improvement.

As an episode of collective creation

How differently does the episode of teacher learning appear through the lens of collective creation, in other words, the means, materials, and modes of engagement of the group’s activity?

If we begin with means, several distinct but related structures and tools used to initiate and guide the group’s activity become visible. First, the group uses an inquiry cycle to sequence and organize its work over time: earlier meetings focused on developing inquiry questions, this one on examining artifacts from the teachers’ classrooms in order to address the questions.

The inquiry questions, like those identified by theatre artists (e.g. ‘What do we choose to pay attention to – and choose to ignore?’), are themselves tools to initiate and focus the teachers’ learning process. Maureen’s question prompts a discussion centered on student art making and student learning. In fact, in her opening comments, she elaborates her initial inquiry question, ‘How can I bring the arts back into my classroom?’ to include a new element: ‘in showing . . . how the learning process is going on’. This addendum seems to capture the group’s interest and provokes discussion about what students learn through creating the self-portrait masks – precisely the outcome theatre artists hope for their questions (Bogart, 2001; Noon, interview, 29 July 2011).

Like the steps of making compositions used by theatre artists to explore possible responses to an initiating question, the Mini-Protocol serves as a tool to facilitate exploration of the artifacts (masks) Maureen has brought from her classroom and how they relate to her inquiry question. Considered as a ‘score’ (an element of the RSVP Cycles) to initiate and guide collaboration, the purpose appears to be to invite input on the presenting teacher’s question and artifacts. Unlike a score, however, the protocol as employed here does not clearly communicate an expectation that there be a product of some kind for the discussion.

The initial materials evident in the group’s discussion are the self-portrait masks and Maureen’s account of how she came do to the assignment (i.e., ‘brainstorming’ with teaching interns). It is clear from the group’s response that the masks are compelling materials. In relating to the ‘Pikachu’ mask, especially, the group rapidly generates new questions: Does the student see the Pokémon character as part of himself? Does he want to be the character? Does he simply love the character? While these questions, and the hypotheses that may motivate them, offer new possibilities for exploration, none are taken up; nor does the Mini-Protocol encourage the group to do so.

Another kind of material is Maureen’s brief description of the boy who created one of the masks (described as nearly blank with only drops of red). She wonders aloud whether the mask relates to his home life (‘a little scary’) or was it just a response to Halloween? For theatre artists, emotional responses such as these are equally essential to collective creation as more directly observable objects and phenomena – they constitute one form of Dewey’s (1934) ‘inner materials’. Indeed, Maureen’s and other teachers’ visceral responses to the masks prompt Sara’s comment: ‘I think that you could learn some pretty scary things [about students].’ While unexplored, this statement might well have suggested a direction for further inquiry.

In relation to modes of engagement, at times the group’s activity reflects theatre artists’ emphasis on complementarity, as evinced through the operating principle of “Yes, and . . .”. For instance, in this exchange, each teacher, in turn, accepts and then elaborates, in some fashion, her colleague’s ‘offer’. My commentary, in brackets, indicates how each response complements its predecessor:

Sara:

So he wants to be Pikachu? [Question]

Maureen:

No, but [I] do introduce them as self-portrait masks. These are to be about you, and you can do what you want with them and how you would introduce yourself. [Elaboration of purpose of assignment]

Sara:

Well, I think that you could learn some pretty scary things. [Interpretation of consequence of assignment]

Cate:

It makes me nervous. [Emotional response to Sara’s observation]

Dora:

Maybe, you know, we are getting scared for nothing . . . . [Proposal for alternative interpretation]

Laura:

It would be interesting to see if they looked anything like that if it wasn’t at that time of year [Halloween]. [Proposal of means to test alternative interpretation]

Gail:

We have made them do self-portraits for so many years that by the time they get your grade level, the self-portrait face they aren’t really drawing themselves. This has given them the opportunity to express themselves. So if this young man is into Pokémon, this is his way of expressing himself where he would not do it on a piece of paper when we said, you know, Draw your self-portrait. [Contextualizing proposal within curriculum]

What breaks the chain of “Yes, and . . .” is Gail’s final comment (cited earlier): ‘So I think this is definitely an extension into their learning.’ Whatever possibilities for exploration and, ultimately, the composition of resources that might be generated – for instance, a more defined question about what students express through masks that they do not through drawing (or writing) – are effectively foreclosed.

Gail’s comment signals a change in the mode of engagement itself, from exploration, to validation, which I identified in the earlier analysis as the ‘work’ the group is accomplishing. This is a return to the mode initiated by Maureen’s earliest comments, in essence, asking the group whether the mask project allowed her to see student learning. Laura’s final comment suggests one of the reasons validation of practice in the face of external pressures, that is, the state’s curriculum mandates, was so often the dominant mode in the group’s meetings: ‘We always feel like we need to –everything has to be – we are accountable for all of it.’

Of the mode of critical self-reflection, exemplified by Valuaction in theatre arts, there is little evidence in the group’s activity. That mode requires explicit identification of specific elements from the mask project, or the group’s discussion of it, that might become materials for new resources for instructional improvement. Nor does the group engage in the kinds of ‘appreciation, feedback, value building and decision-making’ (Halprin & Kaplan, 1995, p. 23) that might contribute to improving its own learning process. The emphasis in the group’s discussion is more on appreciation than the other components of Valuaction, in particular the decision-making that would contribute to the creation of robust instructional or conceptual resources for application in the teachers’ classrooms or the group’s continued learning process.

The possibility of products

Through the lens of collective creation, the episode represents a beginning exploration of questions related to what happens when a teacher includes in her instruction opportunities for students’ creative self-expression. Even in such a brief interaction, we glimpse possibilities for products that might be generated through more sustained exploration and creation. These include both instructional resources, such as, tasks that support students’ self-expression or creativity and rubrics that help teachers to provide students with feedback in relation to these tasks, and conceptual resources, such as frameworks for developing creative tasks and inquiry questions about what students learn through creative self-expression. These potential products suggest forms of activity the group might undertake if it were to approach its work as collective creation, in particular, adopting or strengthening the modes of complementarity (“Yes, and . . .”) and critical self-reflection (Valuaction). Doing so would involve the kind of critical self-reflection on its processes that theatre arts companies regularly engage in.

The framework for collective creation introduced above might serve as a useful tool for such an undertaking. In reflecting on its means, for instance, the group might ask how the protocol served (as a score) to facilitate both the exploration of materials and the composition of meaningful instructional or conceptual resources. In other words, was it too ‘open’ to encourage creation of resources? In reflecting on its use of materials, the group might ask what additional materials would be useful in addressing the identified problem or question; for example, drawings and written texts intended to promote students’ self-expression? In relation to modes of engagement, the group might ask how it could extend episodes of complementarity (“Yes, and . . .”) and resist impulses to validate, rather than explore, the practices under discussion.

If we heed the examples of theatre artists, an investment in critical self-reflection will reward participants in the development of meaningful products for the teachers’ professional learning, as well as for their classroom instruction.

Conclusion

A company of actors – in relation to the work that they are performing – is a community. (Chaikin, 1972, p. 28)

To Judith Warren Little’s question of whether we should be using the image of community for teacher learning in schools, this article responds, in the language of theatre arts, “Yes, and . . .”

Professional learning community as a construct has refocused educators on the learning that can happen right there in their own school and with their own colleagues. It has validated reflective dialog and inquiry as legitimate forms of professional development – opposing these to the one-way transmission of information that had so often counted as ‘PD’. And it has underscored teachers’ responsibility for their colleagues’ learning as well as for their own, eschewing the familiar attitude of every teacher for himself or herself within the sanctuary of his or her classroom. It has also affirmed the professional status of teachers’ interactions with colleagues, seeking to reverse a legacy view of teaching as the acquisition and exercise of narrowly defined technical skills rather than the development and deployment of professional knowledge and judgment (Lagemann, 2000).

In how it has often been enacted in the processes of teacher groups within schools, however, the model for PLC, has not been generative of the conceptual and instructional resources for meaningful and robust teacher learning and instructional improvement. This article argues that the conceptualization of community can be complemented, or integrated, with a more productive metaphor and set of practices, that of collective creation.

It is not accidental that theatre artists speak about collaboration in companies rather than in communities. The emphasis is on making rather than being together – not surprising given the existential (and often financial) necessity of producing work to be performed. In teacher groups, collaboration is often equated with the supportive and trusting collegial relationships, and a safe climate in which to expose and reflect on participants’ instructional practice (and questions about it). Theatre artists do not value support and trust any less than teachers do; however, in their processes for collective creation, such as the RSVP Cycles or steps for creating compositions, they enact these through a heightened attention to how they respond to, and elaborate, one another’s offers (“Yes, and . . .”) and in how they engage in critical self-reflection (Valuaction). The effectiveness of all these is assessed in how well they support the creation of work.

Relationships and reflection, for theatre artists, are understood in relation to producing something; their value lies in the capacity to generate materials that may contribute to the development of a piece for performance. Reflective practices, such as Valuaction, thus point to very specific elements – moments, images, dialog, etc. – in the performers’ activity that may provide ‘vocabulary’ for the ongoing development of a work for performance. In other words, theatre artists reflect in order to create. For the same reason, theatre artists’ interactions are shaped by the mode of “Yes, and . . .”, not as uncritical acceptance, or affirmation, but a commitment to close attention and responsiveness to their collaborators.

That teachers in learning groups can enact these features of collaboration was glimpsed, if only briefly, in the episode of “Yes, and . . .” from the group’s discussion above. For groups to sustain and harness them in ways that generate resources for their professional learning and instructional improvement, however, will require critical self-reflection on the modes of their collective activity, as well as on the means they use to guide it and the materials that enrich it.

It will also require a reappraisal of the ownership and direction for the group’s efforts. When these are expended to satisfy external demands, for example a state’s accountability system or a principal’s demand for improved test scores, then a mode of validation is predictable. When the work of the group is understood to be the production of the instructional and conceptual resources that respond to genuine problems of the participants, modes of engagement characterized by “Yes, and . . .” and Valuaction are far more likely. And the work of critical reflection that leads to changes in thinking and practice is underway.

We need not jettison community as an image for teacher learning in schools if we reconstruct it as the work of creating the resources that promote teachers’ professional learning and support instructional improvement. If we are open to doing so, we can learn much from how theatre artists practice sustained, explicit, and self-critical attention to the means, materials, and modes of their collective activity, and how these support the creation of meaningful products. To be sure, the means, materials, modes of engagement, and certainly the products, will be qualitatively different for teachers than for actors and directors. The quality of attention we give to them must be equally fine.

Footnotes

Notes

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