Professional Communities and the Artisan Model of Teaching

Joan E. Talbert · Milbrey Wallin McLaughlin

87 citations0/0 files storedTeachers and Teaching

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Teacher Education and Leadership Studies Education Pedagogy and Practices Evaluation of Teaching Practices

Abstract

This paper aims to reconcile tensions between an artisan model of teaching and the call for a collaborative teacher community--offering a vision of an artisan community as a context of innovative practice in contemporary American high schools. In his stunning critique of the 'communitarian movement', Michael Huberman (1993) argued that strong school community most likely undermines teachers' independent artisanship by taking up time and limiting professional judgment. Through the experiences and voices of teachers in high schools we studied in the early 1990s, we argue that artisanship in teaching is influenced, for worse or better, by the character of teachers' professional community. In weak teacher communities, the most innovative teachers were demoralized by a lack of collegial support in addressing needs of non-traditional students; in strong traditional communities, teacher artisanship was squelched or marginalized by the standardized curriculum and assessments that enforced student tracking systems. In contrast, strong collaborative teacher communities engendered artisanship in teaching--by sustaining teachers' commitment to improving practice, through dialog and collaboration around engaging students in school and content, and by sharing and inventing repertoires of effective classroom practice. We illustrate artisan communities at work with brief descriptions of the subject departments and schools we studied that fit this model of professional community. Building on Huberman's analogy between teaching artisanship and jazz improvisation, we conclude by highlighting the fundamental role that community plays in developing musicians' improvisational skills and repertoire of practice.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 87 citations exist upstream.

References

2002Professional communities and the work of high school teaching 1994Thinking in Jazz 1997Doing what matters most : investing in quality teaching 1995Thinking in jazz: the infinite art of improvisation 1991PAYING FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION: NEW EVIDENCE ON HOW AND WHY MONEY MATTERS 1989Primary Teachers Talking: A Study of Teaching As Work 1993Teachers' work : individuals, colleagues, and contexts 1994Realms Of Knowledge: Academic Departments In Secondary Schools

Cited by

2011The effects of teacher collaboration in Grade 9 Applied Mathematics 2016Impact of sustained professional development in STEM on outcome measures in a diverse urban district 2013Professional learning in the lives of teachers: towards a new framework for conceptualising teacher learning 2011A Situative Perspective on Developing Writing Pedagogy in a Teacher Professional Learning Community.2009Talk, planning and decision‐making in interdisciplinary teacher teams: a case study

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.