Journal of In-service Education, Volume 31, Number 2, 2005

Developing and Sustaining

Professional Dialogue about
Teaching and Learning in Schools

VIVIENNE BAUMFIELD
University of Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
MARIE BUTTERWORTH
Heaton Manor School, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT This article presents empirical evidence from a follow-up study

of schools which had been members of a school-based research
consortium. It offers insight into the work of professional learning
communities at the level of practice and so contributes to the growing
research interest in probing their development. It investigates the extent to
which activities to support professional dialogue that evolved in a school-
based research consortium had been sustained and developed three years
after the period of external funding. It was found that only those activities
most explicitly focused on immediate classroom practice were sustained.
The findings support the view that learning in partnerships and networks is
highly contextualised and consequently not easily transferred.

Introduction

Discussion helps. Watching videos and debating what it was

we were looking at, what it was that was going on. I didnt
realise that I planned as much as I do, I thought it just
happened, and it helps you verbalise what you do. (Leat & Lin,
2003, p. 405)
This teacher is commenting on the value of collaborative research in
making what is often implicit in teachers professional practice explicit
and open to inquiry. Untapping this implicit knowledge, it is argued, will
improve schools:
Teachers, individually and collectively, are in possession of
vast bodies of knowledge relevant to promoting achievement,
but this knowledge is not easy to access. It is rarely written

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down and is difficult to articulate. Mostly it is exemplified in
the day-to-day practices of teachers as they work behind the
closed doors of their classrooms. (Desforges, 2003)
Advocates of collaborative teacher inquiry see the articulation of implicit
knowledge and beliefs about teaching and learning as the first step in the
creation of knowledge, which is at the heart of professional development
and school improvement (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1990). In the short term
the sharing of this knowledge between teachers enables greater access to
learning that is tied to their actual work, what has been termed just-in-
time learning (Lieberman & Grolnick, 1996). In the longer term, it leads to
an interest in engaging with research and evidence from sources outside
their daily experience in schools:
As teachers become more secure about what they know, they
are more willing and able to pick and choose among resources
beyond their classroom doors for what they need to know.
(Lieberman & Grolnick, 1996, p. 32; see also Baumfield &
McGrane, 2003)
The emerging consensus that the quality of education in schools can be
improved by teachers working together on classroom-focused inquiries
(Hopkins, 2000) has led to policy makers in the United Kingdom
promoting collaborative inquiry; the most recent example of this is the
formation of the Network Learning Community initiative by the National
College for School Leadership (www.ncsl.org.uk). Whilst there are
different interpretations of the concept and some variation as to the
terminology (partnerships, consortia, networks, learning communities,
for example), which is not itself without significance (Imants, 2003;
Baumfield & McGrane, in preparation), there is agreement as to the
importance of developing tools of inquiry and reflection that guide
conversation and action. Indicators of success identified by a well-
established partnership in the USA include: A shared vocabulary for
talking about teaching and learning is taking hold within both school and
the university, and the need for dedicated time for collegial conversation,
review and critique, and reflection is becoming acknowledged as well
(Miller, 2001 p. 117). In this article we focus on a model for collaborative
teacher research partnerships in the United Kingdom that pre-dated the
National College for School Leaderships initiative, and investigate the
extent to which the tools of inquiry and reflection to support professional
dialogue that emerged during the project had been sustained and
developed in the schools three years after the period of external funding.
In so doing, it provides empirical evidence which contributes to the
growing research interest in probing the development of professional
learning communities in order to gain greater insight into their work at
the level of practice (Little, 2001; Hipp & Huffman, 2003; Imants, 2003).

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The North East School Based Research Consortium (NESBRC) was

one of four national consortia funded by the Teacher Training Agency
(TTA) and the Centre for British Teachers (CfBT). The goals of the
consortium initiative were (1) to encourage teachers to engage both in
research and with research and evidence about students achievements;
(2) to increase the capacity for high-quality, teacher-focused classroom
research by supporting teacher involvement in the development of
research proposals for external funding; and (3) to develop long-term,
medium-scale data sets to provide evidence about what teachers and
pupils do and how that affects pupil achievement (Cordingley & Bell,
2002). The terms of the initiative required consortia to be made up of six
schools, a local education authority (LEA) and a higher education
institution (HEI) partner. In addition, each consortium had a designated
TTA link officer. The focus of the projects within each consortium,
however, was flexible and negotiated between the participants prior to
submitting the bid for funding. The initiative was funded for three years,
from 1997 to 2000. The NESBRC consisted of six secondary schools, three
LEA partners (because of the geographical spread of the schools) and the
University of Newcastle. Our focus was the investigation of the impact of
thinking skills approaches in the classroom (Baumfield, 2001).
The roots of the consortia can be traced back to the tradition of
teacher research championed by Lawrence Stenhouse in the United
Kingdom (Stenhouse, 1975), although this was not necessarily explicitly
recognised by its promoters and built upon a previous TTA initiative to
fund teacher research grants (Cordingley, 1997). However, the initiative
was located within a heated national debate questioning the quality and
relevance of much existing academic education research. The TTA was
linked to controversial contributions to this debate and was proactive in
campaigning for teacher research as part of a research and evidence
based profession (Hargreaves, 1996; Hammersley, 1997; Hillage et al,
1998). Whilst this debate has no direct bearing on this study, the political
context in which the consortia operated did have implications for how
the initiative was regarded by the wider research community and by
policy makers (Stronach & McNamara, 2002).

Aims of the Study

In the final report of the NESBRC (Baumfield, 2001) we highlighted how
the consortium had broken down the isolation of individual teachers as
they talked together about what they were finding out about how pupils
learn. Involvement also promoted the development of team teaching and
encouraged members to learn from each other as the focus on learning
became more central in the work of the school; as one head teacher
commented, This shift in focus is evident in professional talk within
departments and amongst the senior management team (Baumfield,

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2001, p. 139). School participants reported that the enthusiasm and
enjoyment of teaching generated by the consortium had resulted in a
change in the school culture that was conducive to the development of
new approaches to continuing professional development (CPD): It has
helped to create the right climate in the school for CPD by creating a
collaborative and co-operative ethos that can move things forward for the
whole staff (Baumfield, 2001 p. 140). Being part of a national initiative and
linking up not only with the other schools within the NESBRC but also
with members of the other three consortia also supported the
professional development of the participants, as summed up by one of
the school research coordinators:
The consortium gave credence to what we were already doing
and at the same time required us to make what we were doing
public. Sharing what you are doing helps to make aspects of
your practice explicit and as you encounter different audiences
you articulate your experience in different ways and your own
understanding is developed. (Baumfield, 2001, p. 154)
By the end of the three-year funding period, the NESBRC had developed
specific activities that stimulated and supported professional dialogue
amongst the participants:
the use of video, pupil learning logs and teacher diaries to gather
evidence in collaborative action research projects;
video coaching of colleagues to develop a pedagogy for thinking skills;
using personal construct theory (Kelly, 1955) as a research and
development tool to elicit teacher beliefs about teaching and learning.

We were interested to see if any of these activities were still being used
and to what extent professional dialogue about teaching and learning had
been sustained and developed in the schools.

Research Methods
The Participants
The research was carried out by the original university-based NESBRC
coordinator and a teacher from one of the schools. The six schools in the
NESBRC were all large secondary, mixed comprehensive schools, of
which three taught pupils from 11 to 18 and three were 13-18 high
schools; two of the high schools were voluntary aided Roman Catholic
schools. All six schools served pupils from a range of socio-economic
backgrounds, with one of the 11-18 schools serving a more deprived area
with a higher than average proportion of pupils on free school meals. In
common with many schools in the region, there were few ethnic minority
and English as an Additional Language (EAL) pupils; one of the 11-18

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schools had a specialist unit for hearing impaired pupils. It was the
intention of the original partnership to develop approaches to research
and evidence based practice that were embedded in the culture of the
school and sustained beyond the life of the project.
We wrote to the head teachers of the six secondary schools and the
teacher in each school who had acted as the research coordinator for the
consortium inviting them to participate in a short (10-15 minute)
telephone interview designed to provide an update on developments in
their school since their involvement in the NESBRC. All six schools agreed
to participate in the research. In five of the schools the head teacher was
the same; we were able to interview three of these but in two schools it
was the deputy head teacher who was interviewed. We were also able to
interview the new head teacher of the sixth school. Five of the six school
research coordinators were still on the staff of the schools and one had
left to become a network learning community facilitator for the National
College for School Leadership, and of these we were able to interview
four. In one of the schools, a response to the questions was sent by fax
but this did not come from the original coordinator (although they were
still on the staff) but from a teacher researcher. In the sixth school we
were able to interview the teacher researcher who had been promoted to
take over responsibility for coordinating research across the school. The
teachers interviewed represented a range of subject backgrounds (one
English teacher, one geographer, two scientists, one historian and a
special educational needs teacher) and all had at least 10 years
classroom experience.

The Semi-structured Interview

Prior to the interview we sent the questions we intended to use (see
Appendix) and a copy of the section of the original NESBRC final report
summarising the outcomes of the initiative. The questions followed the
main areas of the final report by looking at work on thinking skills, action
research (although we deliberately did not specify in the question
whether this was individual or collaborative) and CPD. We also included a
question with prompts on the long-term impact of the NESBRC and on
any new partnerships that had been formed. The same questions were
asked of both the research coordinator and head teacher. When devising
the schedule of questions and conducting the interviews we were careful
not to lead respondents by referring directly to any of the specific
activities used in the NESBRC to support professional dialogue. We were
aware that this could be a potential flaw in our design as schools may be
involved in activities but may not mention them in the interviews.
However, we thought it unlikely that the respondents would provide
detailed information on the structures and approaches to CPD, which we
were probing, without referring to specific activities they were using. At

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the very least, omission of activities that had been used in the NESBRC
would suggest that the respondents did not place value on them and that
both the head teacher and school research coordinator were united in
their disregard.
We kept a written record of the answers to the questions and these
were read back to respondents at the end of the interview before asking
for any other comments but the interviews were not audio-recorded. Both
researchers then collated the responses independently and identified
emerging themes and key points using a grounded theory approach
(Strauss & Corbin, 1990). We then discussed the themes/points we had
each identified and negotiated an agreed interpretation of the findings as
evident from the data available in the interview responses. Given the
nature of the questions and the largely descriptive, factual responses
from the informants, there was little difference in interpretation. One of
the teachers was able to comment on the emerging themes and key
points we identified in an earlier draft of this article but we have not
consulted all the informants to validate our interpretation of their
responses.

Findings
We found no discrepancies between the responses from the head
teachers and the research coordinators, with both parties presenting a
consistent view of what had been happening in their schools since the
end of the funding for the NESBRC. All of the schools had continued to
work on implementing thinking skills approaches in the classroom and
this had spread since the NESBRC to include more subject departments.
One of the themes that emerged in the responses was the way in which
the initial focus had developed to incorporate an emphasis on wider
issues in learning:
In certain areas [thinking skills] has developed but also gave a
way of thinking about other learning tools ... not just thinking
skills but learning. (Research coordinator, School C)
The value of having access to more detailed feedback from students was
also highlighted:
feedback from students has transformed practice ... they can
talk about different types of learning. (Research coordinator,
School C)

Respondents in all six schools mentioned a cycle of research and

development to improve teaching and learning and support structures for
collaborative action research projects. Eight of the twelve respondents
offered tentative evidence of positive impact on achievement as

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measured in public examinations, as exemplified by this head teachers

response to a prompt about the impact of their activities on students:
tricky but Key Stage 3 results are up and also GCSE and this is
linked to thinking skills and research so there is an element of
that but hard to isolate one factor. Theres more pupil
awareness of their learning strategies. (Head teacher,
School B)
Head teachers and coordinators commented on a distinct shift in school
culture and the theme of the empowerment of teachers was evident:
Staff are highly motivated and we have a learning culture that
has had a radical effect empowered staff and more
distributed leadership across the school. (Research
coordinator, School A)
The expertise of teachers was acknowledged in the schools and ideas
were shared freely amongst staff (and students):
Informally have a culture where people test things out ... MFL
[Modern Foreign Languages] doing some work testing out the
best learning conditions for their department, for example.
(Head teacher, School D)

... the research culture is changing the school ethos, students

are used more in helping us to improve learning and we are
working together and the structures are beginning to make
sense we are more holistic, centred around teaching and
learning. For example, we use planners differently now, to
review learning rather than targets ... how you learn. (Research
coordinator, School B)
The theme of staff delivery of in-service training (CPD) within school and
to bodies outside the school was also present in responses from all six
schools. Teachers sharing ideas by leading workshops had started during
the NESBRC and was sustained and highly valued by staff:
Whole focus on CPD has changed use teachers from the
partnership, not bought in experts because our own staff can
deliver quality workshops and the ratings (evaluations) for the
training days have gone up significantly. (Research
coordinator, School B)

There are experts but our own staff have expertise. (Deputy
head teacher, School F)
When outside experts were brought in, schools were more confident in
deciding how to use them and they tended to be used in areas of

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identified need as a starting point for more sustained work to be done by
the teachers:
We use the money [for training] to empower our own staff.
(Research coordinator, School C)

The support of senior management for informal meetings to share

practice such as thinking lunches and show and tell sessions, which
featured in the NESBRC, continued. In fact promoting dialogue about
teaching and learning had become more explicit within school structures;
examples offered included calendared meetings, teaching and learning a
fixed item for discussion on all meeting agendas, the CPD programme
linked to research activity, emphasis on research and evidence informed
practice included in selection criteria, and the induction programme for
new staff:
We are maintaining culture of learning, want to be known as a
learning school and all seen as learners. (Head teacher,
School E)

... we have a shared collective language and this goes out in PR

material and is predominant at interviews. (Head teacher,
School D)
Respondents highlighted how the experience of the NESBRC had enabled
them to take advantage of subsequent opportunities. For example, the
role of the research coordinator was recognised as a keystone in
supporting the development of conditions for dialogue about teaching
and learning:
Membership of the consortium took the school forward it
was a catalyst and the school coordinator role was important
in moving us forward. (Head teacher, School B)

Schools were using funding from other initiatives to appoint lead

learners or teacher fellows to develop and extend the research
coordinator role: three of the schools were using Best Practice Research
Scholarships funded by the Department for Education and Skills; one was
using Education Action Zone support; five of the six were now part of
Network Learning Communities and one school was in a Leading Edge
partnership with a research focus.
Of the specific activities developed to stimulate and support
professional dialogue amongst the participants mentioned earlier, the use
of video to gather evidence in collaborative action research projects
featured strongly in a number of responses, as did the use of feedback
from students on their own learning, although no specific reference was
made to pupil learning logs. Indeed, teachers and schools that had not
been particularly active in gathering video evidence in classrooms

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previously now saw it as a valuable tool and appeared confident in its

use. The use of video of teachers in the coaching of colleagues continued
in the two schools that had been active in using this in the NESBRC and
they had further developed coaching to be an integral part of the staff
development programme:
We have calendared the teacher coaching days this year ...
coaching is powerful and we have made sure people can be
free to observe each other and junior staff are coaching more
senior staff. (Head teacher, School B)

In one of these schools they had also successfully introduced coaching to

colleagues in a new partnership school who had no previous experience
of this approach to CPD. However, only one school seems to have taken
up video coaching as a vehicle for CPD since the NESBRC project The use
of personal construct theory appears not to have been sustained even in
the school that had originally developed its use for CPD or been adopted
in any of the other schools as no reference was made to the technique by
any of the respondents.

Discussion
What was sustained and developed in the schools were those activities
most explicitly linked to classroom practice and which focused on pupil
feedback. As others have found, in order to engage teachers, Youve got
to have a compelling idea ... a dust particle around which to coalesce ...
but it must be compelling to the potential coalescees (Lieberman &
Grolnick, 1996, p. 10). The compelling idea for teachers in the six schools
was the opportunity to engage with the students learning more directly
through the classroom-based action research. The preference of teachers
for inquiry directly focused on student learning (Wilson & Wilson, 1998),
and the predominance of the teachers practicality ethic (Doyle &
Ponder, 1977) is well documented. Our findings are also in accordance
with other research on teachers learning in partnerships and networks
where what is important is that Participants have opportunities to grow
and develop in a professional community that focuses on their
development, providing ways of learning that are more in keeping with
their lived professional lives (McLaughlin & Talbert, 1993, p. 9). The
investigation of the impact of teaching strategies on pupil learning
continued to involve and enthuse participants and had broadened to
include both more teachers and a wider range of strategies. Activities
focused more on understanding teacher learning, such as video coaching
and the elicitation of personal constructs of teaching and learning, appear
to be more difficult to sustain and develop in schools. We can offer three
possible explanations of these findings:

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the schools focused on the immediately compelling idea of student

learning because whilst their previous experiences in the NESBRC had
involved activities linked to other aspects of professional learning, this
was not transferred from one context to another;
the schools chose not to sustain and develop those activities, such as
video coaching and the use of personal construct theory, that were
more time consuming, could not be incorporated into daily classroom
life and where the benefits could not be immediately appreciated;
the teachers were averse to exploring issues in teaching and learning
that focused on their teaching rather than on the students learning.
It is likely that a combination of these factors motivated teachers in the
six schools. What is interesting here is that the conditions that had
enabled an activity to be valued were not necessarily sustained or
developed in the period after the end of the project even though the
schools had continued to promote a culture based on professional
dialogue around research and development activities.
Our findings are consistent with the analysis that learning in
partnerships and networks is highly contextualised so that transfer is not
easily achieved: Communities of practice are situated and this means
that we cant simply combine or regroup participants from different
communities without attention to the (re) building of shared language
and understanding (McLaughlin & Zarrow, 2001, p. 98). All six schools
were involving new members of staff and were supporting this through
new partnerships and project funding. This accords with the comment of
one of the school research coordinators, who spoke of the lessons
learned from the NESBRC as providing a baseline from which to grow and
develop a framework for the new directions in which the school was
moving. The same respondent also mentioned the fact that the Learning
Forum for staff in the school had a few false starts but is now very
effective and expanded beyond what it was in the consortium, we now
have a critical mass of staff involved. It may also reflect the impact of
project funding on partnerships as new sponsors create different
expectations of outcomes. The problem of funding has been identified as
one of the key challenges that partnerships and networks face
(Lieberman & Grolnick, 1996) and some people have even described the
finding of funding from outside the collaboration as fatal (Miles, 1978).
We have also found support for the idea that there is a trajectory for
the work of partnerships that dictates which activities may be relevant
and productive at a particular point in time (Cordingley, 2003). Interest in
video coaching and personal construct theory emerged relatively late in
the development of the NESBRC when the need to focus on teachers
beliefs and behaviour as a way of understanding what was happening in
the classroom was recognised by some (but not all) of the teacher
researchers. Facilitators of another of the TTA-funded consortia

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(McNamara & Rogers, 2002) have commented on the importance of

introducing tools and activities at the right time so that the participants
recognise their potential; this was certainly our experience in the
NESBRC. If learning in partnerships and networks is difficult to transfer
across contexts then it follows that new partnerships may appear to
repeat experiences. Movement along a particular trajectory of
development may therefore be intermittent. For some within the
partnership, the repetition may be frustrating as they want to build on
what has been learned and move on to new issues whereas for others
extending the benefits for professional development to individuals is the
priority. The respondents in the interviews did not express any
frustration and were still excited about what was happening in their
schools; for them, the work begun in the consortium was being sustained
and development was seen as broadening involvement and making links
with new external initiatives. The question of whether a tendency to go
back over stages of development and repeat experiences matters may
depend on whether the predominant aim is to promote an ethos of
professional dialogue and inquiry in schools or to produce cumulative,
public knowledge about teaching and learning; a choice between
prioritising enquiry oriented learning or learning oriented research
(Cordingley, 2003). The concern is that it is the requirement to make
knowledge public that creates challenge, and the danger of sustaining a
cycle of inquiry that is rewarding for the individual participants but
repetitive is that whilst it can absorb in the sense of involving teachers, it
may also absorb in the sense of inhibiting change.

Conclusion

It follows, certainly, that the true story of the consortium is

the one thing that cannot be told because it never happened
(not a single true story at least). Any account that seeks to be
comprehensive, then, has to treat partnership and project
development as essentially a thing of differing perspectives.
(Stronach & McNamara, 2002, p. 165)
The interviews conducted three years after the end of the NESBRCs
funding have given some insight into what the schools are doing to
sustain and develop professional dialogue about teaching and learning.
The commitment to fostering a learning community with structures to
support and empower teachers is evident in all six schools. They are
confident that they can provide their own CPD and are more selective
and focused in their identification of sources of outside support; there is
a strong sense of knowing what they want as a school community and
discernment in identifying how to make any new initiative or opportunity
work for them. The fact that the structures are loose and emphasise the

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participation of teachers in adapting projects within a long-term, non-
linear process of professional learning is in accord with the findings of
the Rand Change Agent Study carried out 30 years ago (McLaughlin &
Marsh, 1979) and endorse the value of networks in attempting to shift the
meaning of adult learning away from prescription toward challenging
involvement and problem solving (Lieberman & Grolnick, 1996 p. 40).
However, the need to move beyond highly contextualised knowledge to
sharing evidence of effective teaching and learning with a wider audience
is also recognised as an important aspect of professional learning:
teachers learn when they generate local knowledge of practice by
working within the contexts of inquiry communities to theorize and
construct their work and to connect it to larger social, cultural and
political issues (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1990, p. 48). Hargreaves (1998,
1999) talks of the need to turn teachers habitual classroom tinkerings
into a more trustworthy form of research evidence and to do so requires
a commitment to building systematically on what is already known and
secondly to the publication of methods, data, analysis and findings to
enable public review (Cordingley, 2003).
It would be misleading to place too much weight on the apparent
absence or indeed continuation of particular activities in the six
schools. What this admittedly selective snapshot of life in the schools
provides is evidence of sustained enthusiasm and a breadth of inquiry
into student learning in an environment that values teacher dialogue and
reflection. We have raised some issues for teacher education in so far as
there is evidence of the difficulty of transferring aspects of knowledge
and experience not rooted in the immediacy of the classroom from one
context to another. It is the immediacy of teaching and the potency of
pupil feedback that drives inquiry and this privileges learning about
students learning above learning about teachers teaching, which
requires a switch of focus and a level of resource difficult to achieve
within the daily routine of schools. The absorption in student learning
may engender a degree of personal repetition in the process of
professional learning and this may inhibit the process of connecting
highly contextualised local knowledge to public knowledge. The nature of
the evidence leaves open the question of judging the cumulative weight of
the activities reported and the importance of progression along a
particular research trajectory.

Correspondence
Vivienne Baumfield, Centre for Learning and Teaching, University of
Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, United Kingdom
(viv.baumfield@ncl.ac.uk).

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APPENDIX

Having read through the section of the final report, which findings do
you think still hold true for your school?
Have you continued to work on thinking skills?
In what ways?
Are staff still working on action research?
Which staff and in what ways?

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 DEVELOPING PROFESSIONAL DIALOGUE

What is the current focus of any research and development activity in

your school?
Have you been successful in gaining other funding?
Can you identify any long-term impact of being in the NESBRC?
on students
on staff
on school structures
on school ethos.
In what ways do you organise CPD to support staff?
induction
ITE
To what extent has CPD been affected by your involvement in the
NESBRC?
Are you involved in any new partnerships?
what is the focus of any new links?
Any other comments?

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