Developing Supports for Conversations About Teaching: Negotiating Problems of Practice in Researcher-Practitioner Collaborations

• Main Author: Gomez Zaccarelli, Florencia Sofia
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2015
• Subjects: Educational administration; Educational Change; Instructional Improvement; Learning Theories; School administration; Teacher education; Teacher Improvement; Teaching Methods; Teaching Skills
• ISBN: 9781339707709; 1339707705

This is a study of the importance of “problem negotiation” in collaborations between teachers and researchers. The study presents contrasting cases of negotiation involving two different networks of teachers in Chile, each of which was involved in using a web-based tool intended to facilitate conversation about teaching practice. The first phase of this research employs a Design-Based Research (DBR) approach, through which each network engaged with the researcher in iterative cycles of design to shape and improve the tool. In the second phase of the research, the features of problem negotiation in the first stage of the implementation were defined and analyzed. Problem negotiation is the first, and perhaps most important, phase of the Design-Based Implementation Research (DBIR) methodology (Penuel, Coburn, & Gallagher, 2013). This methodology provides guidance in developing interventions for use in practice that are sustainable and scalable (Fishman, Penuel, Allen, Cheng, & Sabelli, 2013). This study contributes to our understanding of DBIR by exploring the negotiation of a problem of practice employing qualitative methods for capturing participants’ perspectives and features of the context that might play a role in the intervention. The analysis used interviews, observations, survey, and document data to investigate the process of negotiating a problem of practice and the evidence of commitment and/or differing views to understand how they affected the success of the intervention. The study took place in the context of a national reform initiative in Chile that has encouraged the emergence of teacher professional networks. Several cycles of design, enactment, analysis, and redesign were used to enhance the tool to support conversations about teaching practice. In the first network, problem negotiation involved top-down coordination with policy-makers and a network coordinator. The researcher introduced the tool and mediated its use by participants. Teacher participation was not consistent, highlighting a potential misalignment on the “problem” being addressed through the intervention. In the second network, problem negotiation was more bottom-up, with all participants engaged in deciding that the intervention was something they wanted to explore in response to a particular problem. The tool use was more independent and involved active participation, suggesting a better understanding of the problem of practice we were addressing. Other key findings of this study include the importance of exploring the contextual features of partners’ realities in researcher-practitioner collaborations and identifying the different dimensions of their contexts, for example, the role of authority figures and the particularities of the practitioner groups such as colleagueship and shared experiences. Overall, this study identified implications for negotiating problems of practice between researchers and practitioners that highlight the brokering role that some actors play in the process. Related to brokering, the study’s implications stress the relevance of negotiating access through key actors, involving different authority figures in problem negotiation, collectively defining goals for the endeavor upon which all partners have agreed, and anticipating expectations that can influence the process of negotiating problems of practice.