Teacher Study Groups: An Integrative Literature Synthesis

Until recently, existing research on teacher professional development (PD) has largely relied on teacher perceptions and self-reports to evaluate effectiveness. Though more current research has used a diverse array of designs and methodologies to examine impact on teacher knowledge, practice, and student learning, uncertainty regarding the effectiveness of various PD models remains, particularly for these nonperceptive variables. There has been a call in the field to apply a consistent conceptual framework in order to identify critical mechanisms underlying effective models and to support improved theorizing about teaching and learning. Thus, we present an integrated literature synthesis of one collaborative model of PD, teacher study groups (TSGs), in an effort to make sense of the relatively rich body of research that has been performed on this model. We identified 32 studies that examined TSGs’ impact on teacher and student outcomes and synthesized this research using Desimone’s five-factor conceptual framework, which is being increasingly applied across the field. Findings suggest that TSGs are an effective PD model and that there are components of the model not accounted for in the five-factor framework that affect teacher outcomes and student learning. We conclude with a discussion of implications, including limitations of the five-factor framework and ideas for further refinement that situate PD in a vast empirical landscape.

Discourses of the Rural Rust Belt:

This article addresses the ways in which elementary teachers in the rural rust belt both reproduce and contest dominant discourses of schooling, rurality, and poverty in their particular local context. Situated within a 4-year postcritical ethnographic study, this analysis of teacher discourse took part during an embedded, 4-month-long teacher study group. Within this context, the authors examine how the group’s discourse on poverty claimed that inequity was the fault of those experiencing it, as well as that a neoliberal discourse of education emphasized a flattened accountability and growth-only perspective within teacher’s professional interactions. However, through the addition of a spatial lens, they also situate these discourses within a particular rural and rust-belt context. This article teases apart the discursive threads within two teacher study groups, revealing the construction by teachers of their own rural, high-poverty communities as deficient, as well as exploring the complexities of the intersections of these discourses for teachers working in such settings. Their analysis contributes to a more robust understanding of the particular intersecting discourses currently circulating and producing a White-majority, high-poverty rural rust belt where children go to school and are taught by educators with their own complex orientations to schooling, rurality, and poverty.