Secondary and Special Education

This column features essays written by current middle school and high school teachers, media specialists, librarians, literacy coaches, curriculum specialists, administrators, preservice teachers, teacher educators, and adolescent and adult learners. They highlight diverse perspectives on teaching and/or learning with literacies to inspire reader reflection.

This qualitative study was prompted by initiatives that addressed the need for teachers to engage in professional development that enables them to be 21st century ready. Recommendations put forth by government and business have stressed that professional development foster connected teaching and create networked educators by emphasizing peer-to-peer collaboration and sharing. Despite this focus, little attention has been paid to the role that regular teachers play in becoming professional developers for their colleagues. My study investigated how four K-12 teachers, that I termed “knowledge broker teachers,” created new pathways for informal, teacher professional development in their schools.

Extending on the concept of “knowledge brokers” from business studies, knowledge broker teachers serve as an informal source of professional development, moving knowledge from those who have it to those who need it. This study’s purpose was to examine examined how knowledge broker teachers built and shared their knowledge, and to identify their attributes. I applied a situated learning approach to frame this study, emphasizing the social nature of learning. Participants included four K-12 knowledge broker teachers and 12 of their teacher colleagues with whom they shared knowledge. Data collection included the use of interviews with participants and screen casts of the knowledge broker teachers’ online activity. Data analysis employed open coding to generate categories, then themes.
Three findings about knowledge broker teachers emerged: brokers, brokering, and brokerage. Brokers encompassed the context-dependent ways the four knowledge broker teachers shape-shifted and assumed different personas (e.g. knower-learner, comrade, cheerleader, shrinking violet) enabling them to be knowledge broker teachers. Brokering entailed the processes they used to build and share knowledge. These included processes of making connections through online and face to face opportunities, taking advantage of moments of kismet, and tailoring knowledge to match their colleagues’ ability. Brokerage involved the actions that affected the quality of social relationships and the emergence of trust between the knowledge broker teachers and their colleagues. Brokerage actions presented by the knowledge broker teachers included giving and taking knowledge with colleagues, recognizing and honoring their colleagues’ potential, and being expected to go above and beyond.

My study recognized the existence of knowledge broker teachers and their effect on informal professional development. However, given the findings, formalizing their roles in schools may have a detrimental effect on their ability to build and share knowledge. Considering ways to leverage these findings may provide new ways for thinking about informal teacher professional development.

This article explores findings from a two-year study of the Expeditionary Learning (EL) professional development program for teachers. Using case study qualitative methods, we present findings about how EL meets the challenge of preparing teachers to teach in innovative ways. We investigate how EL structures experiential professional development for its teachers, the strengths and challenges of these experiences, and how the experiences affect teachers' implementation of professional development in their classrooms.

This article focuses on one theory of school reform that seeks to counteract insularity among teachers with respect to questions of what to teach and how. It networks teachers across schools and gives them access to outside expertise in their content areas. In this approach teacher learning happens within a series of face-to-face and virtual meetings, sometimes over many years. In this article, we focus on teacher networking and, more specifically, on how teacher networks design for teacher learning. By describing several dynamic tensions inherent in the designs of a sample of teacher networks, and by raising questions about these tensions and their relation to teacher learning, we hope to contribute toward the building of a theory of effective network design. We illustrate these design concepts with references to the work of seven networks that aim to revamp teachers' knowledge in the humanities. In the final section of the article, we offer several sets of questions that derive from our analysis and that might form the basis for further research.