In addition to organizing and facilitating forms of reflective professional development, the project is conducting a sustained research program that examines the influences of this work with teachers on their students' learning. We are identifying and tracing what we call durable linkages among reflective professional development, participating teachers' work, and their students' classroom learning. What we are finding speaks to this question of how teacher knowledge works. In closing, I want to mention three points that I will frame in contrast to misconceptions in how teacher knowledge is conventionally viewed. Although knowledge appears to reside in individual teachers' separate work and experience, this typography masks the fact that the knowledge itself is socially embedded.
Teachers know in relation to their students, their colleagues, their administrators, and so on.
The tools of this knowledge emerge in and through social interactions, which is why truly collegial settings provide a highly effective medium for professional development. Here teachers can and will articulate the tools they use in their work with and to other teachers. The second misconception, which follows from the first, treats teacher knowledge as a product. Again evidence of this mistaken view is widespread. Seen as a product, we act as if teacher knowledge can be packaged and taught in preservice teacher education, can be tested in teacher tests, and can be upgraded through professional development simply by introducing new concepts and ideas.