Initiating and Sustaining a Culture of Inquiry in a Teacher Leadership Program.

How can teacher educators initiate and sustain a culture of inquiry among participants in a graduate program? This was the core issue in the design of a new Masters degree program that emphasized teacher leadership. As the faculty discussed desirable features of the program, agreement emerged that the core courses should build teachers' capacities to inquire into their own teaching practices and student learning. Because inquiry was seen as a central component of teacher education, professional development, and school improvement (Valli, 2000; van Zee, 1998), program faculty placed high priority on modeling a culture of inquiry in program design and publicly engaging in classroom inquiry and action research ourselves (Valli & Price, 2000; van Zee, 2000). Thinking about what data to gather and how to interpret these data are critical elements in developing expertise in inquiring into one's own teaching practices (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993; Hubbard & Power, 1993, 1999; Mills, 2003). Such inquiries may provide information about teaching and learning that would not be obtainable any other way. The potential of such research for reforming practices was realized early in the last century by Dewey, who wrote that teaching strategy becomes a matter of finding the conditions which call out self-educative activity, or learning, and of cooperating with the activities of the pupils so that they have learning as their consequence . A series of constantly multiplying careful reports on conditions which experience has shown in actual cases to be favorable or unfavorable to learning would revolutionize the whole subject of method. (1928/1956, p. 125-126) More recently, Shulman (2004) has called for teachers at all levels to document the wisdom of their practices. By making their findings public, teachers have the potential to influence the thinking and practices of colleagues and other educators. Although the status of teacher research has been debated (Richardson, 1994; Wilson, 1995; Wong, 1995a, 1995b), there is agreement that such research can be helpful to individual teachers in improving their own practice (Price & Valli, 2005; Zeichner, 1993). Teacher research findings typically apply only to the setting in which the research is conducted but may be informative to others who find the research questions, data, and interpretations to be relevant to their own settings. Lincoln and Guba (1985; 2000) proposed that "trustworthiness" and "transferability" are suitable criteria to judge quality in contexts where reliability and generalizability are inappropriate. Discussions about what kinds of data to collect and how to collect, refine, and interpret a wide variety of data can increase the trustworthiness of research that teachers conduct. Such discussions also may increase the transferability of such studies if colleagues find the knowledge generated to be useful and relevant. The use of such research processes for good decision-making in schools underlies the focus of this program on instructional leadership. Because of this agreed-upon focus, design issues that needed to be addressed included creating opportunities for participants to formulate and explore questions, develop arguments based on evidence, recognize and address ethical concerns when researching while teaching, and share findings with others. Now in the fifth year of the program, we decided it was time to publicly document how we were teaching and studying the core courses. We also decided to query current participants and graduates about their experiences. Questions of primary interest were: * How do we, the instructors, initiate and sustain a culture of inquiry in core courses? * How do current participants and graduates perceive the program? In the following sections, we describe our collaborative research on this study, give an overview of the program and courses, and provide findings of perceived program impact on teaching practice, leadership, and student learning. …