"We Do More than Discuss Good Ideas": A Close Look at the Development of Professional Capital in an Elementary Education Liaison Group.

In an era when many news media, policy makers, and professionals in the field may consider teacher education "under attack," teacher education programs are being held accountable for increased rigor (Council of Chief State School Officers, 2012). Teacher educators are in a unique position to examine more closely specific practices and teacher education as a profession to enhance program quality and candidate outcomes. Toward that end, we focused on work within a community of practice (Wenger, 1998) for this inquiry. Faculty who work in elementary school settings at least one day per week, serving as liaisons to partner schools and supervising teacher candidates, made up this community. Faculty at this institution worked collaboratively to share leadership and go against the grain of institutional hierarchical structures (Martin, Snow, Osguthorpe, Coll, & Boothe, 2012). They embraced clinical practice as the heart of the teacher education program (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, 2010). Within this context, they created a space for clinical supervisors to share publicly their work with each other and enact change, as they engaged in professional development through the Elementary Education Liaison Group (EELG). This community had evolved from a committee structure into a working community of inquiry over the course of 4 years and involved participants from different positions and perspectives (i.e., tenure-track faculty, administrators, part-time supervisors, and full-time clinical faculty and lecturers in the university). After reviewing the history of the EELG and anecdotal evidence of changes wrought by the EELG, we decided to investigate our practices further, asking what additional professional development and program changes we needed to make. Therefore we designed a systematic investigation of EELG practice and its internal and external influence. Our research questions included the following: (a) How do participants experience the EELG context and its influence on how they learn and develop? (b) How does the elementary education community of practice influence individual and programmatic change? Throughout this article, we describe our theoretical framework for professional development as well as the resulting emphasis on professional capital of a particular group of educators (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012). We outline the research design before describing three key themes connected to teacher educator professional development and its influential outcomes. We end with a focus on professional capital and the power of collective activity to transform teacher educator development and teacher education contexts for program transformation. Theoretical Perspectives As Levine (2011) noted, "we have few models to suggest how programs might promote supervisors' professional growth" (p. 930). Along those lines, Goodwin and Kosnick (2013) highlighted the need for considering what knowledge base effective teacher educators should have. Therefore we undertook this systematic investigation of a collective case centered on the EELG community of practice and its influences on clinical supervisor practice and professional development. In this study, we investigated liaison perspectives on interactions in this community of practice (Wenger, 1998; see also Lave & Wenger, 1991) as well as its influence on developing their practice as teacher educators and effecting program change. Because structures in higher education institutions are often hierarchical, this community was unique in its efforts and power to effect change on individual and institutional levels. Theoretical perspectives that provide the foundation of our inquiry are rooted in social network theory, professional development in community, and learning through inquiry to frame professional development and teacher educator capacity. Reviewing collaborative structures in education communities, we used social network theory as a foundation to frame our community-network connections and potential associations with outcomes (Moolenaar, Sleegers, & Daly, 2012). …