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Has Teacher Community Lost its Meaning? Teacher educators need tools to help them think about learning, to design activities and programs that foster it, and to assess results of their work with pre-service and in-service teachers. In this article, order to improve conceptual tools available for design and study of education, I tease apart distinctions among several popular notions of community, clarifying how each can make a distinct contribution to research and practice of development. I also suggest how activity theory general, and writing about third spaces specific, might compliment contributions and limitations of various notions of community. An impressive array of scholars and reformers have called for teachers to overcome their historic isolation through development of teacher professional (McLaughlin T Sergiovanni, 2000). Some call for teachers to work as part of a larger beginning pre-service (Dinsmore & Wenger, 2006; Koeppen, Huey, & Connor, 2000; Kosnick & Beck, 2003). This profusion of community-oriented reforms led Grossman, Wineburg, and Woolworth (2001) to observe that community become an obligatory appendage to educational innovation (p. 492) and to conclude that word has lost its meaning (p. 492). DuFour (2004) similarly concludes that concept of professional learning is in vogue (p. 6) but worries that so many have leapt onto bandwagon that phrase now describes every imaginable combination of individuals with an interest education (p. 6). DuFour also fears that concept of is in danger of losing all meaning (2004, p. 6). Westheimer (1998) found literature on disappointingly vague (p. 3), and warns that without richer and more careful conceptualization, the rhetoric of is rendered ubiquitous and shallow (p. 148). It would be a shame if different notions of blurred together to loosely connote some important kind of collegial learning and comradely spirit that can occur among teachers. Different conceptions of have been essential helping me to understand how a group of preservice supervisors learned their craft (Levine, 2009), and to explore what groups of in-service teachers learned from their collaborative work (Levine & Marcus, press). I have not only used conceptions research. My departmental colleagues and I want to improve how we prepare our preservice teachers to teach specific subject matter to English language learners (ELLs), suffusing understanding about ELLs across many different aspects of preparation rather than asking just one professor and course to address topic. As my colleagues and I try to improve what we know and can do, we're combining insights regarding how inquiry communities and communities of practice promote learning; having distinct models helped us think about role of inquiry and deprivatized practice as we conceptualize our work together and assess our progress. As suggested top five rows of Table 1, most conceptions of do have a common core, i.e., notion that ongoing collaboration among educators produces learning, and this ultimately improves teaching and learning for K-12 students. Different constructs, however, can also focus us on different aspects of learning from collaboration. As suggested by bottom two rows of Table 1, some additional theorizing regarding how individuals may act and learn together offer even more affordances for studying collaborative learning. …
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