Cravens, X., Drake, T. A., Goldring, E., & Schuermann, P. (2017)

Journal of Educational Administration
Teacher peer excellence groups (TPEGs): Building communities of practice for

instructional improvement
Xiu Cravens, Timothy A. Drake, Ellen Goldring, Patrick Schuermann,
Article information:
To cite this document:
Xiu Cravens, Timothy A. Drake, Ellen Goldring, Patrick Schuermann, (2017) "Teacher peer excellence
groups (TPEGs): Building communities of practice for instructional improvement", Journal of
Educational Administration, Vol. 55 Issue: 5, pp.526-551, https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-08-2016-0095
Permanent link to this document:
Downloaded by Professor Xiu Cravens At 07:17 02 August 2017 (PT)
https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-08-2016-0095
Downloaded on: 02 August 2017, At: 07:17 (PT)
References: this document contains references to 72 other documents.
To copy this document: permissions@emeraldinsight.com
The fulltext of this document has been downloaded 16 times since 2017*
Access to this document was granted through an Emerald subscription provided by
Token:Eprints:WTUYSDGPEQJNIYSXYSHS:
For Authors
If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald
for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission
guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information.
About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.com
Emerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company
manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as
well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and
services.
Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the
Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for
digital archive preservation.
*Related content and download information correct at time of download.

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0957-8234.htm
JEA
55,5 Teacher peer excellence
groups (TPEGs)
Building communities of practice for
526 instructional improvement
Received 28 August 2016
Xiu Cravens
Revised 28 December 2016 College of Education and Human Development,
29 December 2016
Accepted 4 January 2017 Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
Timothy A. Drake
Education Leadership, Policy, and Human Development,
North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
Ellen Goldring
College of Education and Human Development,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA, and
Patrick Schuermann
Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the viability of implementing a protocol-guided model
designed to provide structure and focus for teacher collaboration from Shanghai in today’s US public schools.
The authors examine whether the new model, Teacher Peer Excellence Group (TPEG), fosters the desired key
features of productive communities of practice where teachers can jointly construct, transform, preserve,
and continuously deepen the meaning of effective teaching. The authors also explore the extent to which
existing school conditions – principal instructional leadership, trust, teacher efficacy, and teachers’ sense of
school-wide professional community – enable or moderate the desired outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach – Data for this paper are drawn from a series of surveys administered to
teachers from 24 pilot schools in six school districts over two school years. Descriptive and multilevel
modeling analyses are conducted.
Findings – The findings provide encouraging evidence that, given sufficient support and guidance, teachers
report higher levels of engagement in deprivatized practice and instructional collaboration. These findings
also hold after controlling for key enabling conditions and school characteristics.
Social implications – The TPEG approach challenges school leaders to take on the responsibilities of
helping teachers make their practice public, sharable, and better – three critical objectives in the shift to
develop the profession of teaching.
Originality/value – The indication of TPEG model’s positive impact on strengthening the features of
communities of practice in selected public schools provides the impetus for further efforts in understanding
the transformational changes needed and challenges ahead at the classroom, school, and district levels.
Keywords Instructional leadership, Teacher professional development, Community of practice
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Research suggests that variation in student-learning outcomes is partially attributable to the
structure, focus, and quality of teachers’ work, much of which may be observable and subject
to both external stimuli for improvement and internal drive for professional-community
Journal of Educational
Administration building (Bruce and Ross, 2008; Levine and Marcus, 2010; Louis et al., 1996). Today the idea
Vol. 55 No. 5, 2017
pp. 526-551
that teacher collaboration contributes to instructional improvement is widely accepted by
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0957-8234
schools and districts, where more resources and time have been designated to encourage
DOI 10.1108/JEA-08-2016-0095 teachers to work together, and various pathways have been explored to create collective
learning opportunities (Desimone, 2009; Louis et al., 1996; Youngs and King, 2002). Teacher peer
Despite significant and continued efforts, however, states, districts, and schools have not seen excellence
consistent and sustainable effect on the improvement of practice in the average classroom groups
(Hiebert et al., 2002; Levine and Marcus, 2010).
The notion of communities of practice specifically describes how teachers jointly
construct, transform, preserve, and continuously deepen the meaning of effective teaching
(Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). In recent years, researchers have focused on 527
communities of practice because such communities are considered as a potentially
effective and malleable approach to optimize instructional conditions for student learning
(Leithwood et al., 2004). Researchers, practitioners, and policy makers converge on the
realization that teachers must engage in ongoing professional development that is of high
relevance to instructional practice and more importantly, sustainable with peer-to-peer
networking and support (Hattie, 2015a, b; Penuel et al., 2009).
It is increasingly clear that simply carving out time for teachers to work together
is only the beginning of constructing meaningful communities of practice (Coburn and

Russell 2008; Jackson and Cobb, 2013). Researchers who study US and international
systems argue that teacher collaboration in communities of practice must aim to build a
shared, accessible, and growing knowledge base for the teaching profession; furthermore,
teachers must actively participate in and contribute to the development of this knowledge
community (Hiebert et al., 2002; Horn, 2005).
Literature highlights that effective communities of practice must be deeply rooted in the
academic and social learning goals of the schools (Darling-Hammond and Sykes, 1999;
Goldring et al., 2009). More specifically, among various forms of teacher professional
development, those that are focused on student learning, specific to content and pedagogy,
linked to curriculum, and school-based, tend to yield the best results (Garet et al., 2001;
Joyce et al., 1993; Loucks-Horsley et al., 1998; Louis, 2007; Printy, 2008). Furthermore,
the effect of professional development is more likely to be deeper and more sustainable
when teachers are given the opportunity to collaborate and draw from a shared and
accumulative growing knowledge base (Hiebert et al., 2002; Lave and Wenger, 1991;
Little, 2002; Printy, 2008).
With a deep culture and long history of teaching as an individual act with a high degree
of autonomy and isolation from colleagues in US schools (Lortie, 1975; McLaughlin and
Talbert, 2001), however, it is very challenging to elevate teaching from anecdotal personal
experience to the collectively transparent, reliable, and validated professional level.
Teachers, principals, and district administrators not only need good examples that can help
them visualize new ways of thinking about collaboration, but also actionable and
operationalizable models, with user-friendly structures and protocols, that can help them
construct and sustain communities of practice for instructional improvement.
In their article about building a knowledge base for the teaching profession,
Hiebert et al. (2002) wondered whether it would ever be possibly to create an infrastructure
that enables teacher collaboration to generate useful and trustworthy knowledge for
teaching in the USA. In offering a glimpse into the “future,” they stated:
If a new system were to emerge, it would institutionalize, in a cultural sense, a new set of
professional development opportunities for teachers and a new means of producing and verifying
professional knowledge. In this new space, teachers would be able to employ the methods of
replication and observation across multiple trials to produce rigorous tests of quality and effects.
Sometimes they would test practices developed by other teachers, and sometimes they would test
ideas generated in the research community. Over time, the observations and replications of
teachers in the schools would become a common pathway through which promising ideas were
tested and refined before they found their way into the nation’s classrooms. And, as intentions
became reality in classrooms, a new kind of knowledge about improving classroom practice
JEA would emerge, a knowledge that would accumulate into a professional knowledge base for
55,5 teaching and support long-term continuing improvement in teaching (p. 12).
Our paper describes the implementation process and early results of a pilot program that
aims to answer this call for action. Specifically, the program works with school principals to
build Teacher Peer Excellence Groups (TPEGs) as communities of practice. With important
non-negotiable objectives in mind, the TPEG model is designed to capture the key
528 characteristics of the “Japanese lesson study” and “Shanghai teaching-study group” models,
then customize them for US schools (Hiebert et al., 2002; OECD, 2010; Wang, 2013).
We examine whether the TPEG model fosters the desired features of productive
communities of practice, and the extent to which existing school conditions enable or
moderate the effectiveness of TPEG implementation.
Communities of practice for instructional improvement

What are the fundamental aspects of productive communities of practice? A rich set of
perspectives is available from literature generated in recent decades. Much has also been
discussed about the optimal environment that may foster and sustain the impact of
structural changes and support teacher collaboration that lead to instructional
improvement. While largely conceptual and exploratory, previous studies have helped
put together a multifaceted picture depicting the purpose, outcome features, and enabling
school conditions for such communities.
Purpose and outcome features

The concept of community building for the teaching profession has been around since the
early 1980s. Bryk and Driscoll found that teachers in communally organized schools, schools
with close collegial relations among teachers, reported high levels of morale and satisfaction.
McLaughlin and Talbert (1993) in their studies found that “teachers’ responses to today’s
students and notions of good teaching practice are heavily mediated by the character of the
professional communities in which they work” (p. 8). Susan Moore Johnson (1990) found that
teachers indicated that school-based collegiality and community are important to help them
meet personal, instructional, and organizational needs. These findings emphasize the
educative importance of social resources in the school, which is also referred to as school-wide
professional community or professional learning community.
If and how teachers work together are important questions for schools embarking on the
path of improvement. They capture the extent to which teachers cooperate, coordinate, and
learn from each other to improve instruction and develop the curriculum (Louis et al., 1996;
Wahlstrom and Louis, 2008). Respectful discourse within the teacher communities is critical
for continuous self-assessment – of one’s own teaching practice, of one’s own management
of the school and classroom, of the school-wide commitment to and engagement in
furthering professional development and alignment to challenging instruction, and of
coherence of schooling activities with the school’s mission and goals (Newmann et al., 2000).
It is a vital feature of school capacity that has been linked to instructional conditions that
boost student achievement (Lee and Smith, 1996; Leithwood et al., 2004; Louis et al., 1996;
Louis, 2007; Youngs and King, 2002).
With more than two decades of research that suggest community building among teachers
matter, however, relatively fewer studies have been conducted to examine the structure and
focus of teacher collaboration (Coburn and Russell, 2008; Horn and Little, 2010). On this front,
communities of practice is a more specific concept and term developed by
Lave and Wenger (1991) to describe a shared enterprise where individuals can engage with
their peers. Previous research, largely qualitative, indicates that intentionally focusing and
structuring teachers’ collaboration leads to productive learning communities. The key steps
are: individual and group learning with access to peer observation, active participation in Teacher peer
practices, and co-construction of new or improved practices (Levine and Marcus, 2010; excellence
Printy, 2008). In such communities of practice, members have common understanding and groups
knowledge to share with one another. Implementing such steps, however, requires
teachers in these communities to make significant shifts both mentally and behaviorally.
There are two important and rather straightforward signposts of productive communities
of practice: first, collaboration is focused on instruction; and second, teaching is more 529
transparent and deprivatized.
Instruction-focused collaboration. When teachers’ work is created with the intent of public
examination, open for discussion, verification, and refutation or modification, collaboration
ensures that what is discovered will be communicable. Collaboration is essential here not
because it provides teachers with social support groups, but because it mandates their
participants to maintain a sharp focus on instruction. Teachers are more likely to learn and
grown if their collaboration is embedded in the classroom context and constructed through
shared experience and practice (Bruce et al., 2010; Goddard et al., 2007; Printy, 2008;
Ross et al., 2006). The extents to which teachers focus on instructional methods, activities,
and the evaluation of curriculum are most essential (Goddard et al., 2007). Furthermore, it is
important that the collaboration sustains iterative cycles of goal setting/planning,
practicing, and reflecting to ensure that skills and knowledge are shared and improved
upon. As a result, the classroom will become the primary testing ground for continuous
improvement of teaching.
Deprivatized practice. Little (2002) points out that the transparency with which teachers
represent their practice sets the expectation for teachers to learn from their collaborative
work. Such work is further defined by the specificity and completeness with which they
publicly share what they do. “See your colleagues’ work and let them see yours,” begins a
conversation that is grounded in classroom instruction (Bruce et al., 2010). Teachers need to
be comfortable with operating in a system that allows them to treat ideas for teaching as
objects that can be shared and examined publicly, and participate in improving ideas that
can be stored and accumulated and passed along to the next iteration or next group of
teachers. The results of such dialogues, when depicted with clarity and concrete detail and
stored and shared, serve as a resource for individual and collective learning (Snow, 2001).
For example, at the grassroots level, subject-based “teaching-study groups” are the driving
force for instructional quality and improvement in Shanghai and many parts of China.
Structured and teacher-led collaboration not only guides for teaching activities, but also
provides a platform for formative assessment and development for instructional knowledge
and skills. In Shanghai, conducting cross-school teaching study serves as an extension of
the school-based teacher collaboration, which consists of three parts: first, peer classroom
observation, second, explanation of the lesson given by the teacher who teaches the lesson,
which usually includes topics on the considerations given to planning the particular lesson,
what alterations (compared with the lesson plan) have been made during the process of the
lesson and why they are necessary, and what evaluation the teacher himself/herself gives
about this lesson, and third, analysis, comments, and suggestions made by other teachers.
This process is widely practiced, and largely seen as the self-examining, self-propelling, and
self-improving mechanism within each school for effective instruction (Wang, 2013).
Enabling school conditions

Making teacher practice more public and transparent faces certain challenges due to its
opposition to structural and cultural norms in American schools. Perhaps the most apparent
difficulties arise from the vulnerability associated with deprivatizing classrooms, the
tension between autonomy and collaboration, and most dauntingly, time and space
JEA constraints (Akiba and Wilkinson, 2016; Knapp, 2003; Lee, 2008; Puchner and Taylor, 2006;
55,5 Stoll et al., 2006). Schools must develop collaborative learning teams with the constraints
and advantages of specific system contexts in mind. As Hattie (2015a, b, p. 24) pointed out,
the focus of collaboration needs to be on “the evidence of impact, common understandings of
what impact means, the evidence and ways to know about the magnitude of this impact, and
how the impact is shared across many groups of students.” To be successful, just providing
530 time and structural adjustment for learning is not sufficient. Key questions must be asked
such as how collaborative time is used, what the roles of expert teachers are, and the support
that school and district leaders provide for ongoing collaboration. The key tasks for school
leaders are to promote cultures that value evidence, create environments more focused on
trust than accountability, harness and spread expertise, and work with staff to evaluate the
impact of their practice on learning (Goldring et al., 2009; Hattie, 2015b). It is therefore
important to identify enabling conditions at the school and district levels for constructing
communities with instruction-focused collaboration and deprivatized practice. Based on the
available literature, we have identified four essential aspects – principal instructional
leadership, teachers’ sense of school-wide professional community, teacher trust, and

teacher efficacy.
Principal instructional leadership. Research indicates that school leaders can improve
teacher quality by building professional communities or communities of practice
(Louis et al., 1996; Printy, 2008). Instructional leadership are demonstrated through
developing a clear school mission, systematically monitoring student progress, actively
coordinating the curriculum, protecting instructional time from interruptions, and maintaining
high standards for teachers and students (Hallinger and Murphy, 1986). Principal
instructional leadership, more specifically, is an important element of successfully building
teacher collaboration (Goldring et al., 2009; Hallinger and Heck, 2010; Leithwood et al., 2004).
Several studies have shown the value of leadership in establishing effective school
improvement efforts, both in terms of setting the school’s vision and mission as well as
providing instructional direction (Louis et al., 1996). Clearly, effective and sustainable
communities of practice are strongly connected with school leadership (Bruggencate et al.,
2012; Robinson et al., 2008). An important responsibility of principals who are instructional
leaders is to ensure equity in access to effective pedagogy by all students, not just those who
are high performing. They play a central role in cultivating a school culture of learning and
professional behavior, where integrated professional communities become the self-propelling
mechanism that improves teaching and student learning. Research indicates that principal
leadership is one of the determining factors for the level and quality of professional
community (Bryk et al., 1999). Coburn (2001) identifies two ways that principals influence
teacher’s work, by shaping how policy is communicated to teachers, and by participating in
sense-making activities for teachers during implementation of new policies. Young (2006)
considers agenda setting and addressing both depth and breadth of teacher collaboration as
the key responsibilities of principal leadership. Printy (2008) further delineates the influence of
principal leadership on communities of practices by the following: leaders establish a rational
for learning, create conditions for rich interactions and broad-based learning opportunities,
scaffold teachers’ knowledge development by partnering teachers strategically, and provide
learning structure with guided activities. Principal and system leadership plays a pivotal role
in securing and sustaining enabling conditions for successful communities of practice in their
schools, while re-culturing and realignment of the PD system and its associated resources at
the district level are also essential.
Teachers’ sense of school-wide professional community. Professional community is
“a special environment within which teachers work together to improve their practice and
improve student learning” (Louis et al., 1996, p. 37). It is an environment that teachers feel
both valued and being held accountable (Lee and Smith, 1996; Louis et al., 1996; Youngs and Teacher peer
King, 2002). While there is no simple checklist or template that will ever adequately provide excellence
the construction of professional communities (Little, 2002), Youngs and King (2002) define a groups
strong teacher professional community by shared goals for student learning; meaningful
collaboration among faculty members; in-depth inquiry into assumptions, evidence, and
alternative solutions to problems; and opportunities for teachers to exert influence over their
work. Similar definitions are drawn from a number of scholarly studies on how professional 531
community affects classroom practices and student outcome (Bryk and Schneider, 2002;
Desimone, 2009; Lee and Smith, 1996). With this definition, we posit that a school-wide
professional community, as perceived by their teachers, is an important pre-condition for
building and sustaining communities of practice for instructional improvement.
Teacher trust. Productive communities of practice must be built on trust. “Relational
trust is mostly likely to arise in schools when both faculty and students wish to be there”
(Bryk and Schneider, 2002, p. 142). Teachers who trust their colleagues may be more
proactive and participate more in solving problems and advancing learning agendas.
While having strong communities of practice is one of the most important features
of school culture that foster teacher satisfaction, effectiveness, and even retention, the level
of trust and risk-taking required to elevate teaching from isolated activity to the
public sphere of communities of practice (Fullan, 2007) may be very daunting to many
teachers. In particular, the current climate of increasing external accountability may cause
teachers to feel more vulnerable to outside observations of their teaching practice,
and less willing to critique their peers on the quality and effectiveness of their instruction.
Research evidences also reveal that even when conditions are more favorable and
implementation strategies are highly supportive, the cultural of privacy and conflict
avoidance could be so prevalent that many teachers might retreat to their isolated
classrooms (Fullan et al., 2006).
Teacher efficacy. As a social cognitive theory founded by Albert Bandura (1982, 2001),
teacher efficacy is essentially teachers’ self-assessment of their ability to facilitate and support
student learning. Teachers with high teacher efficacy believe that they can positively impact
the outcome of student learning despite challenging circumstances such as shortage of
resources, time, and disadvantaged student populations. Research that connects teacher
efficacy with instructional improvement reveals that teachers with high efficacy are more
likely to persist to meet teaching goals when faced with obstacles; are more likely to
experiment with effective yet challenging instructional strategies such as student-directed
methods; and are more likely to collaborate with other teachers (Bruce and Ross, 2008;
Goddard et al., 2004; Tschannen-Moran and Hoy, 2001). Levine and Marcus (2010, p. 1599)
identify four main sources of teacher efficacy: “[…] mastery experiences (direct teaching
experiences that are challenging but highly successful); vicarious experiences (watching peers
of similar ability levels teach challenging ideas with high success); physiological and
emotional states (feelings of success and confidence); and social and verbal persuasion
(receiving positive feedback from students, peers and superiors).” With strong content
knowledge and instructional skills, teachers will have more confidence that grows with more
classroom mastery experiences. Furthermore, previous research also shows a strong
connection between teacher efficacy and teacher professional learning opportunities
(Levine and Marcus, 2010; Bruce et al., 2010). Teacher efficacy has also been seen through
the social capital lens (Spillane et al., 2015), where strong peer-to-peer connection can enhance
commitment to a community and contribute to a sense of belonging and efficacy
(Grodsky and Gamoran, 2003). Furthermore, research studies show that teachers who have
more effective peers are more effective themselves, and peer learning might account for up to
20 percent of the variation in their instructional effectiveness (Goldhaber and Hansen, 2010).
JEA Essentially, a virtuous cycle is created between efficacy and professional learning: teachers’
55,5 competence level increases with professional learning embedded in direct classroom
experiences; higher mastery also propels keener senses in identifying deficiencies in
instructional effectiveness and hence stronger desires for instructional improvement
(Bruce and Ross, 2008; Bruce et al., 2010; Puchner and Taylor, 2006).
532 The TPEG model

TPEG design and state context
The TPEG model is based on the Shanghai practice (OECD, 2010; Wang, 2013) that
improves student-learning outcomes through teacher engagement in a collaborative and
personalized system of ongoing support and professional development. It includes teams of
teachers, organized by subject matter or grade levels, participating in iterative cycles of
collaborative teacher lesson planning, peer observations, peer feedback, and lesson revision.
The TPEG model aims to build a formal and community-based learning infrastructure that
is grounded in classroom practice using iterative cycles of teacher planning, practice, and
reflection. It is a disciplined collaborative inquiry approach that captures the fundamental
elements of building a professional knowledge base for teaching: the practice of teaching is
made public through peer observations, lesson planning, and feedback; the product of
collective work on improving classroom teaching is cumulative, accessible, and sharable
with other teachers; and there is a mechanism for validation and improvement based on
expertise (Hiebert et al., 2002). These elements are also well reflected in other international
models of teacher collaboration such as the Japanese lesson study (Hiebert et al., 2002;
Jensen, 2012; Leithwood et al., 2010).
Educational experts attributed the remarkable performance of Shanghai’s students to
successful educational reform that started in the early 1980s, where there was “devoted
professional attention to teaching and learning amidst all the administrative chores and
political issues” (p. 89) by educators and a rigorous framework for sustaining school-level
communities of practice for teaching through the operation of “teaching-study groups”
(OECD, 2010). In Shanghai, this model has succeeded in raising teacher and student
performance across the board; as evidenced by the number of disadvantaged students who
excel in Shanghai schools, despite their background, being twice as high as in the USA
( Jensen et al., 2016; OECD, 2010; Yang, 2008).
The TPEG process is designed to be owned and led by teachers with important supports
provided by the principal. Conceptually, the desired outcomes of successful TPEGs include
the deprivatization of teacher practice through peer observations, collaborative planning,
giving and receiving actionable feedback, and holding each other accountable for
implementing improvement measures. More importantly, each step includes specific
instructional objectives that are aligned with measurable external accountability outcomes
(see Figure 1).
TPEG pilot sites

The TPEG model was first piloted in a southern US state and in partnership with an
independent, nonprofit, and non-partisan advocacy and research institution to identify
districts that would be optimal collaborators in a statewide endeavor in the 2013-2014 school
year. Purposively, principals in six districts were identified through a weighted criteria
selection process that took into account teacher value-added growth and state standardized
test performance. This process also factored in attendance rates and socioeconomic status.
To make the final determination of the specific principals for the project, district leaders
were consulted to ensure that, in addition to having highly effective ratings, the principals
were individuals likely to be willing to participate in a program seeking to develop shared
Public Teacher peer
(Deprivatized Practice) excellence
Lesson groups
Planning
533
Teacher Peer
Lesson Excellence
Group (TPEGTM) Observation
Refinement
Learning
Cycle
Feedback Figure 1.
Validated for Storable and The TPEG model
Improvement Shareable
leadership and teacher capacity. In all, a total of three schools were chosen per district,
making a total of 18 participant schools. Principals were asked to form at least two TPEG
groups, one focused on Math and another focused on English/Language Arts. Principals
were also given the option to make their groups within or across grade level.
For school year 2014-2015, the implementation was expanded and further developed
within two of the original six districts, one urban and one rural. In the urban county,
three schools were added to the initial three. In the rural county, the TPEG model was
expanded district-wide, which included six schools new to the TPEG model, alongside the
three initial schools. These two counties were chosen for several reasons. First,
the implementation of the TPEG model received strong support in 2013-2014 from the
district leaders in these two systems. Second, early implementation of the TPEG model
was outstanding in the six current participating schools based on preset output/outcome
measures, such as increased collegiality and collaboration around core instructional and
content-related competencies, high levels of trust among grade level and subject area
TPEG teams, and improvement in knowledge about and enhanced practice in
domains aligned with the TN TEAM rubric. Finally, these two counties, one urban and
relatively large and the other, an adjacent neighbor, rural and small, offered sufficient
diversity in school size, student SES compositions, teacher workforce capacity,
and administrative structure to serve as viable places for the further development and
validation of the TPEG model.
TPEG implementation
During each of the implementation years, principals began implementing the TPEG process
at the start of the school year. After a few weeks of initial implementation, participating
principals or assistant principals went to Shanghai, China, and spent a weeklong study tour
on the multilevel and multifaceted “Shanghai Model” ( Jensen, 2012; Wang, 2013). The study
tour was carefully designed by the researchers for the participants to focus on the structure
and focus of collaboration among the Chinese teachers, and to discuss the rationale for,
implementation of, and challenges to each key element of the process. Many found this
experience to be very helpful and adjusted the implementation of their TPEG processes to
not only more closely reflect the non-negotiable objectives of the TPEG model, but better
adapted to the local needs at their own schools. In the following months, each TPEG
JEA conducted multiple “cycles” of lesson planning, observation, feedback, and lesson revision.
55,5 Specific lengths of each cycle varied from once a week to every six weeks. The frequency of
peer observations also varied from school to school. Cycle documents were submitted to the
university research team for content analysis and feedback.
Research questions
534 In this paper, we study the viability of implementing a protocol-guided model designed to
capture the essence of effective communities of practice in today’s US public schools.
We constructed a conceptual framework based on the review of the literature (see Figure 2)
to guide our analyses of how TPEGs operate and impact important learning outcomes.
We highlight that that the TPEG model aims to provide structure and focus to teacher
collaboration with three non-negotiable objectives for the communities of practice – public;
shareable and storable; and with a mechanism to verify and validate instructional
improvement. We situate the implementation, development, and measurement of the impact
of TPEGs in the context of important school enabling conditions such as principal

instructional leadership, teacher trust, teacher efficacy, and teachers’ sense of school-wide
professional community. We hypothesize that, given careful considerations of the
non-negotiable objectives, TPEGs will lead to desired signposts of effective communities of
practice – higher levels of instructional-focused instruction and deprivatized practice.
We also conjecture that optimal school enabling conditions may strengthen the impact of
TPEGS. Specifically, we ask the following research questions:
RQ1. Are there differences in the pre-post change of instruction-focused collaboration
levels between TPEG and “regular” teachers?
RQ2. Are TPEG teachers more comfortable with deprivatized teaching practices and
more engaged in such practices compared with “regular” teachers? Do and to what
Building Communities of Practice
Enabling
Conditions Outcomes
• Instructional Lesson
Leadership Planning
• Instructional
• School-wide Collaboration
Professional Lesson
Observation
Refinement TPEGTM
Community
• Deprivatized
• Trust Feedback
Practice
• Efficacy
Figure 2. Instructional
Conceptual
Improvement
relationship
extent are pre-existing conditions of principal instructional leadership, teacher Teacher peer
trust, teacher efficacy, and teachers’ sense of school-wide professional community excellence
associated with the TPEG effect? groups
RQ3. Which instructional practices are most improved as reported by TPEG teachers?
How does this vary by important school characteristics?
535
Methods
Data
Data for this paper are drawn from a series of surveys administered to teachers during the
2013-2014 and 2014-2015 school years. The pre-surveys were administered in the fall of 2013
and 2014, and asked teachers to reflect upon the previous school year and answer a variety
of questions on their own teaching practices, school climate and culture, teacher trust and
efficacy, and principal instructional leadership. Additionally, the pre-surveys asked
respondents questions related to their engagement in deprivatized teacher practice,

including joint lesson planning, peer observation of classroom practice, peer feedback, and
lesson refinement. The post-surveys were administered in the following springs and
included two important additions. First, we added a question on teachers’ comfort with
practices associated with deprivatization and their actual engagement in such practices.
Second, we added a set of items for TPEG teachers to gauge the extent to which they
believed that the TPEG process improved specific classroom practices and school outcomes.
(More information on these items can be found in the “Measures” section below.)
Table I summarizes the number of teachers and TPEG participants by school.
Overall, a total of 202 teachers (29 percent) participated in the TPEG process during the
2013-2014 school year. The number of teachers and TPEG teams varied between schools,
with as few as 12 percent participating in one school, to every teacher participating in
another. Generally, however, most principals formed two TPEG teams based on the
requirements above.
A total of 390 teachers in 15 of the 18 participant schools responded to pre-survey in
2013-2014, with an overall response rate of 68 percent for respondent schools (Table II).
For the post-survey, a total of 417 teachers from all 18 schools completed the survey
(61 percent response rate). The three schools that did not participate in the pre-survey were,
on average, higher achieving with fewer students receiving free/reduced price lunch. Of the
601 unique survey respondents, a total of 170 TPEG participants completed at least one
survey, representing about 84 percent of all TPEG teachers. The remaining 436 teachers
represented about 90 percent of all non-TPEG teachers.
All nine new schools participated in the pre- and post-survey in the 2014-2015 school
year. The response rates for the pre- and post-surveys were 93.6 and 62.6 percent,
respectively. In total, 98 TPEG teachers responded to at least one of the surveys,
representing about 90 percent of all TPEG teachers. For non-TPEG teachers, 239 teachers
responded to at least one survey, representing about 85 percent of all non-TPEG teachers.
Measures
Measures for the study were developed in three steps to take into account both the
theoretical underpinnings and empirical evidences (Ang, 2005). We started with the
conceptual framework and theoretical assumptions behind the TPEG model, and identified
available sources for survey items for specific constructs from existing studies. Second,
given that the TPEG implementation is new to the US school contexts, we developed survey
items to specifically fit the expectation of possible reaction, influence, and impact.
The pre-post surveys were then piloted and revised before being distributed. Finally,
we conducted exploratory factor analyses (EFA) with actual teachers’ survey responses to
JEA 2013-2014 2014-2015
55,5 Teachers TPEG Teachers TPEG
School All (n) TPEG (n) % All (n) TPEG (n) %
Autumn Brook Middle 25 6 24 25 13 52

Bellbrook Elementary 44 8 18 43 2 5
Birch Grove Middle 25 10 40 29 29 100
536 Blossomdale Elementary 25 6 24 30 12 40
Bluffdale Elementary 43 7 16 45 13 29
Canyon Ridge Elementary 50 33 66 43 27 63
Clovewell Elementary 54 7 13 54 0 0
Fair Lane Middle 54 6 11 56 4 7
Fox Valley Elementary 39 6 15 40 0 0
Lily Wood Elementary 52 9 17 54 54 100
Mapleside Elementary 22 12 55 22 0 0
Pinsmith Elementary 25 6 24 25 0 0
Queens Way Elementary 21 12 57 22 18 82

Rock Grove Elementary 41 12 29 41 25 61
Rockwright Middle 54 11 20 46 46 100
Snellford Elementary 36 36 100 35 35 100
Snow Fort Middle 36 8 22 36 0 0
Spruce Creek Elementary 21 7 33 26 7 27
Cedar Rapids Elementary – – – 27 23 85
Ridgeway School – – – 47 12 26
Green Hope Elementary – – – 29 12 41
Linden Park Elementary – – – 37 8 22
A.B. Fort High School – – – 56 14 25
Trailview Middle – – – 46 10 22
Hayward Middle – – – 61 8 13
Table I. Missionvale Elementary – – – 20 12 60
Summary of TPEG Piedmont Middle – – – 66 9 14
participants, by school Total 667 202 33 1,061 393 40
2013-2014 2014-2015
Pre-Survey Post-Survey Pre-Survey Post-Survey
Table II. Observations (matched) 390 417 (323) 278 217 (97)
Summary of survey Response rate (%) 68 61 93.6 73.1
response rates Total schools 15 18 9 9
identify patterns that could be used to confirm and further operationalize the measures
included in this study. To generate the factors, we pooled both years of survey data. For the
enabling conditions, we conducted the factor analysis on all of the pre-surveys completed in
either implementation year; for the outcome measures, we conducted a separate factor
analysis on the post-survey responses across both implementation years.
Using the standard approach of retaining factors with eigenvalues greater than 1.0, we
found seven underlying constructs emerged from the data – three outcome measures and
four enabling conditions. To aid in the identification of patterns of loadings across factors,
we used promax rotation. One consequence of this rotation is that the rotated factors are
allowed to correlate with one another, since we believe that the underlying constructs are
interconnected. A summary of each measure is listed in Table III and the formation of
survey items can be found in the Appendix.
Survey
Teacher peer
Survey items Scale Mean (SD) α excellence
groups
Dependent variables
RQ1. Instruction-focused Pre-post 11 “Never” ¼ 1 0.12 (0.69) 0.89
collaboration difference “One to two times per semester” ¼ 2
“One to two times per month” ¼ 3
“One to two times per week” ¼ 4 537
RQ2. comfort with Post-survey 9 Sliding scale from 0 to 100 78.19 (17.39) 0.87
deprivatized practice
RQ2. engagement with Post-survey 4 “Never” ¼ 1 2.08 (0.70) 0.90
deprivatized practice “One to two times per semester” ¼ 2
“One to two times per month” ¼ 3
“One to two times per week” ¼ 4
RQ3. instructional and Post-survey 12 “Not at all” ¼ 1 – –
achievement outcomesa “Very little” ¼ 2
“Somewhat” ¼ 3
“To a great extent” ¼ 4
Independent variables
Principal instructional Pre-survey 8 “Strongly disagree” ¼ 1 3.04 (0.67) 0.94
leadership “Disagree” ¼ 2
“Agree” ¼ 3
“Strongly agree” ¼ 4
Professional community Pre-survey 9 “Strongly disagree” ¼ 1 2.78 (0.53) 0.82
“Disagree” ¼ 2
“Agree” ¼ 3
Teacher trust Pre-survey 7 “Strongly disagree” ¼ 1 2.58 (0.63) 0.84
“Disagree” ¼ 2
“Agree” ¼ 3
Teacher efficacy Pre-survey 5 “Strongly disagree” ¼ 1 3.23 (0.43) 0.79
“Disagree” ¼ 2
“Agree” ¼ 3
Notes: Data pooled across both academic years 2013-2014 and 2014-2015. aNo factor analysis conducted;
survey items will be used to provide descriptive results for RQ3 Table III.
Source: Authors’ calculations Summary of measures
Dependent variables. Based on the triangulation among conceptual definitions, available

survey items, and EFA results, three outcome measures were developed to address the first
three research questions: instruction-focused collaboration (Q1), comfort with deprivatized
practice (Q2), and engagement in deprivatized practice (Q3). The instruction-focused
collaboration variable is composed of 13 items that are rated on a four-item Likert scale
ranging from “never” to “one to two times per week,” asking teachers the extent to which
they collaborated with other teachers on various instructional practices. We then calculate
the difference between the pre- and post-survey results to capture the change in levels of
instruction-focused collaboration before and after the TPEG participation. The mean of this
scale is 0.12 and the standard deviation is 0.69, with an α coefficient of 0.89. The nine survey
items that construct the comfort with deprivatized practice variable all come from one set of
post-survey scale where respondents were asked to use a sliding scale from 0 to 100 to rate
their comfort with engaging in a range of practices such as providing and receiving
feedback from other teachers. The mean of this scale is 78.19 and a standard deviation of
17.39, with an α coefficient of 0.87. And finally, our third variable, engagement in
JEA deprivatized practice, included four items from a set of post-survey questions on teachers’
55,5 reported engagement in co-developed lesson planning, peer observation, and peer feedback.
The items all had a common four-item Likert scale ranging from “never” to “one to two times
per week.” The mean of this scale is 2.08 and a standard deviation of 0.70, with an
α coefficient of 0.90.
The outcome variables used to examine our third research question – the relationship
538 between TPEG participation and changes in instructional practice and student
achievement – come from a survey scale with 12 items rated on a Likert scale from
“not at all” to “a great extent.” Since we only asked TPEG teachers to respond to this
question, we did not conduct a factor analysis to create a single outcome measure; rather,
we present the average teacher rating on each of these 12 items.
Independent variable: TPEG participation. Teachers were asked about their participation
in a TPEG team in both the pre- and post-surveys. Teachers who answered “Yes” in either
survey were coded as a TPEG member, although discrepancies between the pre- and
post-surveys were minimal and did not include any teachers who reported TPEG
participation in the pre-survey only (i.e. there were no teachers who transferred out
of a TPEG group).
Independent variables: enabling conditions. The factor analysis on the pre-survey items
resulted in four factors which we labeled principal instructional leadership, sense of school-
wide professional community, teacher trust, and teacher efficacy. The first factor, principal
instructional leadership, is composed of eight survey items that come from two survey
questions with a common Likert scale ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”
These items all generally related to principal leadership. The mean for this factor is 3.04 and
a standard deviation of 0.67. The α coefficient is 0.94. The sense of school-wide professional
community factor is composed of nine survey items that come from two survey questions
related to teachers’ sense of a professional community. The factor has a mean of 2.78 and a
standard deviation of 0.53, with an α coefficient of 0.82. Both of the survey questions used
for this factor have the same Likert scale ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly
agree.” We labeled the third factor teacher trust. It comes from two survey questions with
seven items in total and the same Likert scale as the other two factors. The mean for this
factor is 2.58 and a standard deviation of 0.63. The α coefficient is 0.84. The final factor,
teacher efficacy, contains five survey items from two survey questions with the same Likert
scale as above. The mean for this factor is 3.23 and a standard deviation of 0.79, with an
α coefficient of 0.79. The correlations between these factors are positive and moderately
strong, ranging from 0.31 to 0.49.
Independent variables: school-level moderators. We also include a set of school-level
variables to capture inter-school differences. These include a variety of measures related to
student achievement and demographics, as well as a measure that captures school level.
Analytic strategy
Our analysis proceeds in two stages. For RQ1 and RQ2, we use a multilevel model (MLM) to
estimate the following:
Level 1: teachers
TPEG Outcomeij ¼ b0j þb1j TPEGij þbkj Enabling Conditionsij þbnj Schoolj þeij
Level 2: schools
b0j ¼ g00 þu0j

b1j ¼ g10 Teacher peer
excellence
bkj ¼ gk0 groups
bnj ¼ gn0
539
where TPEG Outcome is one of the three dependent variables: instruction-focused
collaboration (pre-post change), comfort with deprivatized practice, and engagement in
deprivatized practice, as defined above. TPEG is the binary variable: 1 if the teacher was
ever a TPEG participant, 0 if not. Enabling Conditions are four independent variables:
instructional leadership, sense of school-wide professional community, teacher trust, and
teacher efficacy as defined above. School represents the seven independent variables:
percent proficient/advanced on state standardized math test; percent proficient/advanced on
state standardized reading test; percent of Hispanic students; percent of African-American

students; percent limited English proficient; percent free/reduced price lunch; middle or high
school dummy.
The MLMs were fitted using restricted maximum likelihood estimation. We estimated
the models using a “build-up” procedure by introducing each block of level 1 and level 2
covariates and comparing model fit. For each model, we calculated the intraclass correlation
(Snijders and Bosker, 2011) and the estimated amount of between- and within-school
variation explained by the predictors (Raudenbush and Bryk, 2002).
To answer our third research question, we examine average teachers’ ratings on a
number of different survey items related to participation in TPEG and instructional
improvement. These items include the variety of pedagogical approaches that they use in
your classroom; their own content understanding; their formal teacher observation scores;
student learning; their overall effectiveness as a teacher; their contributions to the
performance of students across multiple grade levels and subject areas in their school; an
increase in overall levels of teacher effectiveness in their school; a decrease in the gap
between higher performing and lower performing teachers in their school; the culture of
trust in their school; the opportunity to make the practice of teaching “public” in their school;
the amount of effective teaching strategies they have access to in their school; and a process
for continual professional development as an educator. Though descriptive, these
descriptive results allow us to see the relative reported benefits of the TPEG process, as well
as examine if these are moderated by important school characteristics.
Findings
RQ1 – TPEG participation and changes in instructional collaboration
For our first research question, we ask whether participation in the TPEG process leads to
differential changes in instruction-focused collaboration. We first note that teachers
reported high levels of instruction-focused collaboration at the start of the school year;
that is, on a scale of 1 (i.e. no collaboration) to 4 (one to two times per week), teachers
reported an average of 3.14. In addition, teachers’ levels of collaboration increased across
the school year by an average of 0.11 points. Responding teachers reported the greatest
changes in collaboration with respect to modifying instructions, joint lesson planning,
and developing an understanding of content, all of which are important elements of the
TPEG process.
To further examine whether these changes might be attributable to TPEG participation,
we estimate the MLM model outlined above, with the pre-post change in instruction-focused
collaboration scale as our dependent variable. As a reminder, we use the pre-post difference
to account for teachers’ previous levels of collaboration to examine whether the TPEG
JEA process has a differential and positive impact on teachers’ collaborative practices. Table IV
55,5 summarizes the estimated model coefficients. The null model (model 1) suggests that about
9 percent of the variation in instruction-focused collaboration can be explained by
differences between schools, with an average difference across all teachers of about 0.11
( p ¼ 0.06). After including an indicator variable for TPEG participation, we find that TPEG
participants across both implementation years reported, on average, a difference of 0.19
540 points in collaborative instructional practices ( p o0.01) during their implementation year,
or nearly a third of standard deviation. Furthermore, this result holds after controlling for
key enabling conditions and other important school characteristics.
We also find that teachers’ perceptions of their principals’ instructional leadership
positively predicted changes in their instructional collaboration. Specifically, teachers who
indicated higher agreement on the principal instructional leadership scale[1] were more
likely to have larger changes in their pre-post difference in instruction-focused collaboration.
In recent years many states, Tennessee included, have implemented comprehensive teacher
evaluation procedures, which require building-level administrators to conduct observations,

provide feedback, and assign evaluation scores for teacher classroom instructions. One of
the unintended consequences, however, is that many principals find themselves struggle
with having sufficient time and content pedagogical knowledge to fulfill this responsibility.
It is therefore imperative to create instructional leadership capacity by engaging more
teachers in leadership roles. To diffuse and maximize the positive impact of teacher
expertise within a school, principals must put their priorities on identifying instructional
excellence, forming effective communities of practice, and empowering teacher leaders so
that they have the resources, especially time, to work closely with their peers. In essence,
successful TPEG implementation requires principal instructional leadership. Meanwhile,
TPEGs also serve as channels for distributed leadership.
Interestingly, both sense of school-wide professional community and teacher trust show
negative associations with pre-post changes in instructional collaboration. It could be the
Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4
Fixed effects
Level 1 (teacher)
Intercept 0.11 (0.06)**** 0.04 (0.07) 0.42 (0.31) 0.30 (1.19)
TPEG – 0.19 (0.07)** 0.15 (0.07)* 0.16 (0.07)*
Instructional leadership – – 0.16 (0.07)** 0.18 (0.06)**
Professional community – – −0.21 (0.09)* −0.21 (0.09)*
Teacher trust – – −0.19 (0.07)** −0.22 (0.07)**
Teacher efficacy – – 0.07 (0.10) 0.09 (0.09)
Level 2 (school)
Middle/high school – – – 0.50 (0.18)**
Other school controls No No No Yes
Random effects
Residual (within schools) 0.47 0.46 0.45 0.45
Intercept (between schools) 0.05 0.05 0.04 0.04
Intraclass correlation 0.09 0.10 0.09 0.08
Adjusted R2 within – 0.02 0.04 0.04
Adjusted R2 between – – – 0.26
Number of groups 23 23 23 23
Table IV.
Model summaries: Number of observations 420 420 420 420
DV ¼ changes in Notes: Data pooled from both implementation years. Standard errors in parentheses. Other school controls
instruction-focused include: % proficient math and reading, % LEP, % free-reduced lunch, % minority, % SPED. *p o0.05;
collaboration **p o 0.01; ****p o0.10
result of the positive and moderate inter-correlations between teacher trust, school-wide Teacher peer
professional community, and instruction-focused collaboration. One might hypothesize that excellence
schools with pre-existing strong professional community and teacher trust might be more groups
advanced in instructional collaboration and therefore report less pre-post change.
Model 4 also suggests that teachers in middle and high schools reported a higher average
difference of 0.50 points than their elementary school counterparts; that is, middle and high
school teachers seemed to grow more in their instruction-focused collaboration throughout 541
the implementation years, a result that may be partially attributable to their lower reported
average on the pre-survey. It is also plausible that departmentalized instruction in most
middle and high schools are more conducive for implementing TPEG-like activities that are
organized by subject matter expertise.
RQ2 – teacher comfort with and engagement in deprivatized teaching practices

Our second research question examines teacher-reported comfort with and engagement in
practices associated with deprivatization after TPEG implementation (see Appendix for survey
items). On average, teachers felt most comfortable with collaboratively developing lesson plans,
making work products available to other teachers, and receiving feedback about their teaching
practice. More specifically, on a sliding scale from 0 to 100, teachers rated these items above 80.
Other practices that teachers were least comfortable engaging in were trying new/innovative
approaches (mean ¼ 68.1) while being observed by other teachers and providing feedback to
teachers about their teaching practice (mean ¼ 63.1). With respect to teachers’ reported
engagement in co-developed lesson planning, peer observation, and peer feedback, teachers
reported relatively low engagement with all of these practices (on average about one to two
times per semester). Across all items, the highest engagement was in providing feedback, and
the lowest was in receiving feedback from other teachers.
To examine whether these scales vary by TPEG participation, we estimated MLM
predicting teacher-reported comfort with deprivatized teaching practices (Table V). In Model 1,
Fixed effects
Level 1 (teacher)
Intercept 80.17 (1.21)*** 76.91 (1.37)*** 67.05 (6.60)*** 70.93 (22.60)**
TPEG – 8.58 (1.51)*** 8.37 (1.51)*** 8.54 (1.53)***
Instructional leadership – – 4.05 (1.43)** 3.60 (1.50)*
Professional community – – 0.13 (1.95) 0.26 (1.98)
Teacher trust – – −1.17 (1.51) −0.79 (1.60)
Teacher efficacy – – 0.03 (2.09) −0.43 (2.15)
Level 2 (school)
Middle/high school – – – 2.32 (2.92)
Random effects
2
Adjusted R within – 0.08 0.08 0.07
Adjusted R2 between – – – 0.02
Number of observations 409 409 409 409 Table V.
Notes: Data pooled from both implementation years. Standard errors in parentheses. Other school controls Model summaries:
include: % proficient math and reading, % LEP, % free-reduced lunch, % minority, % SPED. *po 0.05; DV ¼ comfort with
**p o0.01; ***p o0.001 deprivatized practice
JEA we find that 7 percent of the variation in teachers’ comfort with deprivatized practice is
55,5 attributable to between-school variation, with an average level of comfort of about 80 points
(scale ¼ 0 to 100; po0.001). Models 2-4 suggest that TPEG teachers, on average, report a
significant difference of about 8.5 points in their comfort with deprivatized practices
( po0.001). We also find that principal instructional leadership positively predicts teachers
comfort with deprivatized teaching practices. None of the other enabling conditions or school
542 characteristics are associated with teacher-reported levels of comfort with deprivatized
teaching practices.
Table VI summarizes MLMs predicting teachers-reported engagement in deprivatized
practice. As a reminder, this scale includes teachers reporting on the frequency with which
they engage in behaviors related to observing other teachers teaching, providing
feedback, being observed by other teachers, and receiving feedback – all core components
of the TPEG model (Figures 1 and 3). As expected, TPEG teachers across both
implementation years reported an average significant difference of about 0.94 points
( p o 0.001) on the scale of 1 to 4, which represents about a 1.36 standard deviation
difference in engagement (Model 2). This result holds even after controlling for the key
enabling conditions and school context factors, all of which are not statistically
significant. Thus, both Tables V and VI suggest that compared with non-TPEG teachers,
TPEG teachers reported higher levels of comfort with and engagement in practices
associated with deprivatization.
RQ3 – perceptions of improved instructional practice by TPEG teachers

To examine the extent to which TPEG teachers believed that their participation improved
specific instructional practices, we report the mean rating on each of the 12 items, ranking
them from high to low. Figure 3 provides a bar chart with the mean values and their 95%
confidence interval. As evident from this figure, teachers across both implementation years
felt that the TPEG process provided them with a process for continual professional
Fixed effects
Level 1 (teacher)
Intercept 2.09 (0.06)*** 1.73 (0.05)*** 1.86 (0.26)*** 2.34 (1.04)*
TPEG – 0.94 (0.06)*** 0.93 (0.06)*** 0.94 (0.06)***
Instructional leadership – – 0.05 (0.06) 0.06 (0.06)
Professional community – – 0.02 (0.08) 0.03 (0.08)
Teacher trust – – −0.04 (0.06) −0.05 (0.06)
Teacher efficacy – – −0.08 (0.08) −0.06 (0.08)
Level 2 (school)
Middle/high School – – – 0.08 (0.18)
Random effects
Adjusted R2 within – 0.38 0.38 0.38
2
Adjusted R between – – – 0.16
Table VI. Number of observations 417 417 417 417
Model summaries: Notes: Data pooled from both implementation years. Standard errors in parentheses. Other school controls
DV ¼ engagement in include: % proficient math and reading, % LEP, % free-reduced lunch, % minority, % SPED. *p o0.05;
deprivatized practice ***p o0.001
Process for continual PD Teacher peer
The variety of pedagogical approaches that you use in your classroom excellence
Student learning groups
Your overall effectiveness as a teacher
Opportunity to make the practice of teaching public
Amount of effective teaching strategies R can access

543
The culture of trust in your school
An increase in overall levels of teacher effectiveness in your school
Your own content understanding
Your TEAM observation scores
Contributions to the performance of students across multiple grades/subjects
A decrease in gap between higher and lower performing tchers

Not at all (1) Very little (2) Somewhat (3) To a great

extent (4)
3.3**
Process for continual PD 3.0
3.2
The variety of pedagogical approaches that you use in your classroom 3.1
3.2
Student learning 3.1
3.2*
Your overall effectiveness as a teacher 3.0
3.2**
Opportunity to make the practice of teaching public 2.9
3.1**
Amount of effective teaching strategies R can access 2.9
3.1*
The culture of trust in your school 2.8
3.1*
An increase in overall levels of teacher effectiveness in your school 2.8
Your own content understanding 3.1***
2.7
Your TEAM observation scores 3.0*
2.8
Contributions to the performance of students across multiple grades/subjects 2.9
2.7
A decrease in gap between higher and lower performing tchers 2.8
2.7
Not at all (1) Very little (2) Somewhat (3) To a great

extent (4)
Figure 3.
Elementary Middle/High
Average TPEG
School TPEG School TPEG teacher ratings of
Teachers Teachers instructional
Notes: 95% confidence intervals are represented by parentheses in the top figure. *p <0.05; improvement, all
teachers and by
**p< 0.01; ***p<0.001 school level
Source: Authors’ calculations
development, increased the variety of pedagogical strategies they employed, improved

student learning, and improved their overall effectiveness.
To examine the extent to which these areas varied by important school
characteristics, we ran a series of t-tests conditioned on: school level (elementary,
middle); FRPL (below or above the median); location (urban, rural); and average
achievement (below or above the median). None of these relationships showed consistent
and significant differences except for school level. Figure 3 is a bar chart of the estimated
mean scores for these instructional improvement measures, conditioned on school level.
The dark bars represent elementary schools and the lighter bars represent middle
schools. As evident from this figure, elementary school teachers consistently reported
higher reported levels of improvement in instructional practices.
JEA Limitations. There are a number of important limitations to this study. First, teachers
55,5 were not randomly assigned to participate in the TPEG process. As a result, TPEG teachers
may by systematically different than non-TPEG teachers in both observable and
unobservable ways. In particular, TPEG teachers may be more predisposed to collaborate
and feel comfortable with and engage in practices associated with deprivatization.
Thus, while our models would attribute differences in these outcomes to TPEG, it would
544 really be a reflection of the underlying differences between these two groups.
Therefore, we conducted a series of t-tests to examine the pre-survey differences in
these outcome variables. We found that TPEG teachers were more likely to report using
practices associated with instruction-focused collaboration (t ¼ 0.13, p ¼ 0.08), but we
found no difference in either teachers’ comfort with (t ¼ −1.75, p ¼ 0.59) or engagement in
(t ¼ 0.05, p ¼ 0.43) deprivatized practice. As a result, we decided to use a change measure
of instruction-focused collaboration to try to account for these differences. With respect to
the teachers’ perceptions of principal instructional leadership, professional community,
teacher trust, and teacher efficacy, we found no significant differences between TPEG and
non-TPEG teachers. While these tests for differences allay some of our concern about
selection bias, there still may be unobservable characteristics of TPEG teachers not
accounted for in these measures that may contribute to estimated differences in our
outcome measures.
A second limitation relates to teacher non-response to our pre- and post-surveys.
In particular, teachers who participated in the TPEG process may be more predisposed to
answer the survey because of the familiarity with the research team and project.
As mentioned above, nearly equal percentages of TPEG and non-TPEG teachers
participated in the survey in both years of data collection, leading us to believe that there
should not be any systematic differences between the two groups. The three schools not
included in the final analysis due to missing pre-surveys seem to represent schools that are
more affluent and higher achieving than those included in the analysis.
A final limitation is reflected in the nature of this pilot study. Qualitative interviews and
focus groups suggest that TPEG implementation varied widely by school. Although our
analyses will address these inter- and intra-school differences, it is important to recognize
that TPEG participation is not reflective of a single design or model; rather, schools varied
in the composition of their groups, as well as the number and length of TPEG cycles.
Future work will examine the relationship between these differences and TPEG outcomes.
In future work we also plan to link the TPEG process to more concrete evidence of
instructional improvement, such as teachers’ formal observation scores.
Discussion and implications

Existing literature highlights instruction-focused collaboration and deprivatized practice as
desired features of productive communities of practice. However, efforts to building more
collaborative communities of practice must be considered in the context of school
conditions. Among them, research indicates that principal instructional leadership, teacher
trust, teachers’ sense of school-wide professional community, and teacher efficacy may help
foster and sustain the impact of PD interventions.
Our findings from two years of implementation of the TPEG model provide encouraging
evidence that, given sufficient support and guidance, teachers can construct productive
learning communities. We see consistent positive and statistically significant result across
all three key signposts – increases in instructional collaboration, comfort with deprivatized
teaching practice, and engagement in deprivatized teaching practice (with a particularly
large 1.38 standard deviation average difference). These findings hold after controlling for
key enabling conditions and school characteristics.
We find some, though not on all fronts, affirmation of the importance of enabling school Teacher peer
conditions for building productive communities of practice. Among them, principal excellence
instructional leadership stands out as a key condition for teachers to feel more comfortable groups
with deprivatized practice and to actually take their teaching public. These findings highlight
the pivotal role of principals in setting learning priorities, forming teams with expertise,
and providing instructional resources. Furthermore, schools that have been able to expand
and deepen their TPEGs have demonstrated the positive impact of situational and distributive 545
leadership where principals provide both flexibility and support for their teacher leaders.
Such leadership requires principals to make scheduling and human resource allocation
adjustments and be creative in their use time to accommodate and support the TPEGs in their
schools, and to assist teachers in learning lesson planning, observation, and feedback skills
(Goldring et al., 2009; Hallinger and Heck, 2010; Leithwood et al., 2004).
Based on data from the pilot schools, we find that school context (i.e. prior achievement,
student SES demographics, school size, etc.) does not directly predict variation in the
intended outcomes of the TPEG model. However, while TPEG teachers consistently report
being more comfortable with deprivatized teaching practices and more engaged in such
practices compared with “regular” teachers, changing the structure and focus of traditional
teaching is challenging. For example, our analysis indicate that middle and high school
teachers tend to have a lower average start on these measures but report higher average
gains in instructional collaboration. We also find that in elementary schools where teachers
are more confined to their classrooms and less specialized, teachers report less engagement
in deprivatized teaching and less instructional collaboration. The same difficulty is also
detected among schools with lower SES student populations, where teachers may have to
devote more time to non-academic concerns for the students and their families.
It is important to note that, while diverse in school size, grade levels, urban/rural setting,
and student background characteristics, the pilot schools were identified purposively with
proven records of commitment to school improvement. It is plausible that important
enabling school conditions such as trust and teacher efficacy are more in place and less
varied relative to other schools. Moreover, as we find positive gain of instructional
collaboration among TPEG teachers as compared to their “regular” peers, we also see that
teachers’ sense of school-wide professional community in the previous year is a significant
predictor for the TPEG success. Once again this is a reminder that collaboration and teacher
development are closely interconnected and mutually reinforcing activities.
When investigating which instructional practices are most improved as reported by
TPEG teachers, we find that teachers make a strong connection between their participation
in the newly structured communities of practice and improved classroom teaching for their
students. TPEG teachers have positive views about the extent to which TPEG provided
them with a process for continual PD, increased the variety of pedagogical methods used
and their overall effectiveness, and increased student learning. There are significant
differences by school level, with elementary school teachers finding that the process was
more beneficial. However, better alignment of curriculum content and pedagogically
addressing the diverse learning needs of students remain as top concerns.
The TPEG approach challenges school leaders to take on the responsibilities of helping
teachers make their practice public, sharable, and better – three critical objectives in the
shift to develop the profession of teaching. The indication of TPEG model’s positive impact
on strengthening the features of communities of practice in selected public schools provides
the impetus for further efforts in understanding the transformational changes needed and
challenges ahead at the classroom, school, and district levels. In a recent study of Florida’s
statewide implementation of the lesson study to align state standards with the Common
Core Standards, Akiba and Wilkinson (2016) conducted an extensive mixed-method study
and found that the implementation of lesson study model was limited to shortened and
JEA simplified versions, and hampered by the lack of systemic capacity building for key
55,5 stakeholders to understand the importance of integrating the new model with the existing
organizational structures and routines of teacher professional development.
Will TPEG live on without grant-funded technical assistance? Through surveys,
interviews, and focus groups, ongoing efforts are being made to track both challenges and
necessary enabling conditions in the pilot schools’ continuous effort to sustain this new form
546 of teacher collaboration. Our study echoes the call that improving instructional effectiveness
involves system-wide community building. Our next steps involve working with state and
district administrators to deepen the understanding of the TPEG model by participating
teachers for personalized learning; fine-tuning instruments, templates, and other necessary
tools for the TPEG work as important building blocks; charting pathways to identifying,
supporting, and growing teaching experts who will take the leadership in peer learning; and
building structural alignment that aims at “re-culturing” professional development,
coaching, evaluation, and allocation of resources for the effective transfer of practitioner
knowledge to professional knowledge at the district and state levels.

To date, the TPEG model has also been adopted by several statewide teacher leadership
initiatives as a tool to organize collaborative inquiries. The long-term goal is to identify
effective teacher leadership and principal leadership practices that support and foster
communities of practice, and to assess the viability of taking the TPEG model deeper into
system-wide professional redesign and integration.
Note
1. This scale included teachers’ level of agreement (i.e., “strongly disagree” ¼ 1, “disagree” ¼ 2,
“agree” ¼ 3, “strongly agree” ¼ 4) with the following items: teachers had influence over what goes
on at school (mean 2.68); my principal respected teachers in this school (mean 3.20); my principal
had confidence in the expertise of teachers (mean 3.22); I felt comfortable going to the principal w/
questions (mean 3.17); my principal could be counted on to help teachers (mean 3.19); it was okay in
this school to discuss feelings, etc. w/principal (mean 3.03); my principal took interest in PD of
teachers (mean 3.25); and my principal makes the school run smoothly (mean 3.22).
References
Akiba, M. and Wilkinson, B. (2016), “Adopting an international innovation for teacher professional
development: state and district approaches to lesson study in Florida”, Journal of Teacher
Education, Vol. 67 No. 1, pp. 74-93.
Ang, R.P. (2005), “Development and validation of the teacher-student relationship inventory using
exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis”, The Journal of Experimental Education, Vol. 74
No. 1, pp. 55-74.
Bandura, A. (1982), “Self-efficacy mechanism in human agency”, American Psychologist, Vol. 37 No. 2,
pp. 122-147.
Bandura, A. (2001), “Social cognitive theory: an agentic perspective”, Annual Review of Psychology,
Vol. 52 No. 1, pp. 1-26.
Bruce, C.D. and Ross, J.A. (2008), “A model for increasing reform implementation and teacher efficacy:
teacher peer coaching in grade 3 and 6 mathematics”, Canadian Journal of Education, Vol. 31
No. 2, pp. 346-370.
Bruce, C.D., Esmonde, I., Ross, J., Dookie, L. and Beatty, R. (2010), “The effects of sustained classroom-
embedded teacher professional learning on teacher efficacy and related student achievement”,
Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol. 26 No. 8, pp. 1598-1608.
Bruggencate, G.T., Luyten, H., Scheerens, J. and Sleegers, P. (2012), “Modeling the influence of school
leaders on student achievement: how can school leaders make a difference?”, Educational
Administration Quarterly, Vol. 48 No. 4, pp. 699-732.
Bryk, A. and Schneider, B. (2002), Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement, Russell Sage Teacher peer
Foundation, New York, NY. excellence
Bryk, A., Camburn, E. and Louis, K.S. (1999), “Professional community in Chicago elementary schools: groups
facilitating factors and organizational consequences”, Educational Administration Quarterly,
Vol. 35 No. 5, pp. 751-781.
Coburn, C.E. (2001), “Collective sensemaking about reading: How teachers mediate reading policy in
their professional communities”, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Vol. 23 No. 2,
pp. 145-170.
547
Coburn, C.E. and Russell, J.L. (2008), “District policy and teachers’ social networks”, Educational
Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Vol. 30 No. 3, pp. 203-235.
Darling-Hammond, L. and Sykes, G. (1999), Teaching as the Learning Profession: Handbook of Policy
and Practice. Jossey-Bass Education Series, Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, San Francisco, CA.
Desimone, L.M. (2009), “Improving impact studies of teachers’ professional development:
toward better conceptualizations and measures”, Educational Researcher, Vol. 38 No. 3, pp. 181-199.
Fullan, M. (2007), “Change the terms for teacher learning”, Journal of Staff Development, Vol. 28 No. 30,
pp. 35-36.
Fullan, M., Hill, P. and Crevola, C. (2006), Breakthrough, Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Garet, M.S., Porter, A.C., Desimone, L., Birman, B.F. and Yoon, K.S. (2001), “What makes professional
development effective? Results from a national sample of teachers”, American Educational
Research Journal, Vol. 38 No. 4, pp. 915-945.
Goddard, R.D., Hoy, W.K. and Woolfolk Hoy, A. (2004), “Collective efficacy beliefs: theoretical
developments, empirical evidence, and future directions”, Educational Researcher, Vol. 33 No. 3,
pp. 3-13.
Goddard, Y.L., Goddard, R.D. and Tschannen-Moran, M. (2007), “A theoretical and empirical
investigation of teacher collaboration for school improvement and student achievement in
public elementary schools”, Teachers College Record, Vol. 109 No. 4, pp. 877-896.
Goldring, E., Porter, A., Murphy, J., Elliott, S.N. and Cravens, X. (2009), “Assessing learning-centered
leadership: connections to research, professional standards, and current practices”, Leadership
and Policy in Schools, Vol. 8 No. 1, pp. 1-26.
Goldhaber, D. and Hansen, M. (2010), “Using performance on the job to inform teacher tenure
decisions”, American Economic Review, Vol. 100 No. 2, pp. 250-255.
Grodsky, E. and Gamoran, A. (2003), “The relationship between professional development and
professional community in American schools”, School Effectiveness and School Improvement,
Vol. 14 No. 1, pp. 1-29.
Hallinger, P. and Heck, R. (2010), “Leadership for learning: does collaborative leadership make a
difference in school improvement?”, Educational Management Administration and Leadership,
Vol. 38 No. 6, pp. 654 -678.
Hallinger, P. and Murphy, J.F. (1986), “The social context of effective schools”, American Journal of
Hattie, J. (2015a), What Works Best in Education: The Politics of Collaborative Expertise, Pearson,
London.
Hattie, J. (2015b), What Doesn’t Work in Education: The Politics of Distraction, Pearson, London.
Hiebert, J., Gallimore, R. and Stigler, J.W. (2002), “A knowledge base for the teaching profession:
what would it look like and how can we get one?”, Educational Researcher, Vol. 31 No. 5,
pp. 3-15.
Horn, I.S. (2005), “Learning on the job: a situated account of teacher learning in high school
mathematics departments”, Cognition and Instruction, Vol. 23 No. 2, pp. 207-236.
Horn, I.S. and Little, J.W. (2010), “Attending to problems of practice: routines and resources for
professional learning in teachers’ workplace interactions”, American Educational Research
Journal, Vol. 47 No. 1, pp. 181-217.
JEA Jackson, K. and Cobb, P. (2013), “Coordinating professional development across contexts and role
55,5 groups”, in Evans, M. (Ed.), Teacher Education and Pedagogy: Theory, Policy and Practice,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 80-99.
Jensen, B., Hunter, A., Sonnemann, J. and Burns, T. (2012), “Catching up: learning from the best school
systems in East Asia”, Grattan Institute.
Jensen, B., Sonnemann, J., Roberts-Hull, K. and Hunter, A. (2016), Beyond PD: Teacher Professional
548 Learning in High-Performing Systems, National Center on Education and the Economy,
Washington, DC, pp. 1-66.
Joyce, B., Wolf, J. and Calhoun, E. (1993), The Self-Renewing School, Association for Supervision and
Curriculum Development, Alexandria, VA.
Johnson, S.M. (1990), Teachers at Work: Achieving Success in Our Schools, Harper Collins Publishers,
Scranton, PA.
Knapp, M.S. (2003), “Chapter 4: Professional development as a policy pathway”, Review of Research in
Lave, J.F. and Wenger, E. (1991), Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge
University Press, New York, NY.
Lee, J. (2008), “A Hong Kong case of lesson study – benefits and concerns”, Teaching and Teacher
Lee, V.E. and Smith, J.B. (1996), “Collective responsibility for learning and its effects on gains in
achievement for early secondary school students”, American Journal of Education, Vol. 104
No. 2, pp. 103-147.
Leithwood, K., Louis, K.S., Anderson, S. and Wahlsttom, K. (2004), Review of Research: How Leadership
Influences Student Learning, Wallace Foundation, New York, NY.
Leithwood, K., Louis, K.S., Wahlstrom, K., Anderson, S., Mascall, B. and Gordon, M. (2010),
“How successful leadership influences student learning: the second installment of a longer
story”, Second International Handbook of Educational Change, Springer, pp. 611-629.
Levine, T.H. and Marcus, A.S. (2010), “How the structure and focus of teachers’ collaborative activities
facilitate and constrain teacher learning”, Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol. 26 No. 3,
pp. 389-398.
Little, J.W. (2002), “Locating learning in teachers’ communities of practice: opening up problems of analysis in
records of everyday work”, Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol. 18 No. 7, pp. 917-946.
Lortie, D.C. (1975), Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Loucks-Horsley, S., Hewson, P.W., Love, N. and Stiles, K.E. (1998), Designing Professional Development
for Teachers of Science and Mathematics, Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Louis, K.S. (2007), “Changing the culture of schools: professional community, organizational learning,
and trust”, Journal of School Leadership, Vol. 16 No. 5, pp. 477-487.
Louis, K.S., Marks, H.M. and Kruse, S. (1996), “Teachers’ professional community in restructuring
schools”, American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 33 No. 4, pp. 757 -798.
McLaughlin, M.W. and Talbert, J.E. (1993), “Contexts that matter for teaching and learning: strategic
opportunities for meeting the nation's educational goals”.
McLaughlin, M.W. and Talbert, J.E. (2001), Professional Communities and the Work of High School
Teaching, University of Chicago Press.
Newmann, F.M., King, M.B. and Youngs, P. (2000), “Professional development that addresses school
capacity: lessons from urban elementary schools”, American Journal of Education, Vol. 108
No. 4, pp. 259-299.
OECD (2010), “Strong performers and successful reformers in education: lessons from PISA
for the United States”, available at: www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/32/50/46623978.pdf (accessed
July 30, 2015).
Penuel, W., Riel, M., Krause, A. and Frank, K. (2009), “Analyzing teachers’ professional interactions in a Teacher peer
school as social capital: a social network approach”, The Teachers College Record, Vol. 111 No. 1, excellence
pp. 124-163.
groups
Printy, S. (2008), “Leadership for teacher learning: a community of practice perspective”, Educational
Administration Quarterly, Vol. 44 No. 2, pp. 187-226.
Puchner, L. and Taylor, A. (2006), “Lesson study, collaboration and teacher efficacy: stories from two school-
based math lesson study groups”, Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol. 22 No. 7, pp. 922-934. 549
Raudenbush, S.W. and Bryk, A.S. (2002), Hierarchical Linear Models: Applications and Data Analysis
Methods, Sage Publications, Inc., Thousand Oaks, CA.
Robinson, V., Lloyd, C. and Rowe, K. (2008), “The impact of leadership on student outcomes: an
analysis of the differential effects of leadership types”, Educational Administration Quarterly,
Vol. 44 No. 5, pp. 635-674.
Ross, J.A., Bruce, C.D. and Hogaboam-Gray, A. (2006), “The impact of a professional development
program on student achievement in grade 6 mathematics”, Journal of Mathematics Teacher

Snijders, T.A.B. and Bosker, R.J. (2011), Multilevel Analysis, Sage Publications, Inc., London.
Snow, C.E. (2001), “Knowing what we know: children, teachers, researchers”, Educational Researcher,
Vol. 30 No. 7, pp. 3-9.
Spillane, J.P., Hopkins, M. and Sweet, T.M. (2015), “Intra-and interschool interactions about instruction:
exploring the conditions for social capital development”, American Journal of Education,
Vol. 122 No. 1, pp. 71-110.
Stoll, L., Bolam, R., McMahon, A., Wallace, M. and Thomas, S. (2006), “Professional learning communities:
a review of the literature”, Journal of Educational Change, Vol. 7 No. 4, pp. 221-258.
Tschannen-Moran, M. and Hoy, A.W. (2001), “Teacher efficacy: capturing an elusive construct”,
Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol. 17 No. 7, pp. 783-805.
Wahlstrom, K.L. and Louis, K.S. (2008), “How teachers experience principal leadership: the roles of
professional community, trust, efficacy, and shared responsibility”, Educational Administration
Quarterly, Vol. 44 No. 4, pp. 458-495.
Wang, J. (2013), “Introduction of school-based teacher professional development in China”,
paper presented at the Asia Leadership Roundtable, Shanghai.
Wenger, E. (1998), Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge University
Press, New York, NY.
Yang, X. (2008), School Management Innovation: Focusing on Improving Classroom Instruction and
Teacher Development, Bureau of Education, Shanghai.
Young, V. (2006), “Teachers’ use of data: loose coupling, agenda setting, and team norms”, American
Journal of Education, Vol. 112 No. 4, pp. 521-548.
Youngs, P. and King, M.B. (2002), “Principal leadership for professional development to build school
capacity”, Educational Administration Quarterly, Vol. 38 No. 5, pp. 643-670.
Further reading
Bryk, A.S. and Driscoll, M.E. (1985), An Empirical Investigation of the School as Community, University
of Chicago, Chicago, IL.
Corbin, J.M. and Strauss, A.L. (2008), Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for
Developing Grounded Theory, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
DuFour, R. (2004), “What is a professional learning community?”, Educational Leadership, Vol. 61 No. 8,
pp. 6-11.
Goldring, E. and Cravens, X.C. (2007), “Teachers’ academic focus on learning in charter and non-charter
schools”, in Berends, M., Springer, M.G. and Walberg, H.J. (Eds), Charter School Outcomes,
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., New York, NY, pp. 39-60.
JEA Johnson, S.M. and Birkeland, S.E. (2003), “Pursuing a ‘sense of success’: new teachers explain their
55,5 career decisions”, American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 40 No. 3, pp. 581-617.
Pintrich, P.R. and Schunk, D.H. (2002), Motivation in Education: Theory, Research, and Application,
2nd ed., Merrill/Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.
Appendix
550 (1) Factor 1 – instruction-focused collaboration:
• How often teaches collaborate on: key ideas in a particular lesson or unit.
• How often teaches collaborate on: possible ways in which students can solve a
particular problem.
• How often teaches collaborate on: student difficulty.
• How often teaches collaborate on: joint lesson planning.
• How often teaches collaborate on: share teaching materials.

• How often teaches collaborate on: match curriculum and standards.
• How often teaches collaborate on: developing understanding of content.
• How often teaches collaborate on: modifying instructions.
• How often teaches collaborate on: developing class activities for objective.
• How often teaches collaborate on: creating common HW.
• How often teaches collaborate on: creating common tests/quizzes.
(2) Factor 2 – comfort with deprivatized practice:
• How comfortable are you: collaboratively developing a lesson plan with other teachers.
• How comfortable are you: making work products (e.g. lesson plans) available to other teachers.
• How comfortable are you: receiving feedback about your teaching practice.
• How comfortable are you: discussing effective teaching practice using vocabulary from
the TEAM rubric.
• How comfortable are you: discussing effective teaching practice using the Common
Core standards.
• How comfortable are you: openness to being observed by school administrators.
• How comfortable are you: openness to being observed by other teachers.
• How comfortable are you: trying out new/innovative practices while being observed by
other teachers.
• How comfortable are you: providing feedback to other teachers about their teaching practice.
(3) Factor 3 – engagement in deprivatized practice:
• How often did you: observe other teachers teaching.
• How often did you: provide feedback to other teachers.
• How often did you: be observed by other teachers.
• How often did you: receive feedback from other teachers.
(4) Factor 4 – principal instructional leadership:
• Teachers had influence over what goes on at school.
• My principal respected teachers in this school.
• My principal had confidence in the expertise of teachers. Teacher peer
• I felt comfortable going to the principal with questions. excellence
• My principal could be counted on to help teachers. groups
• It was OK in this school to discuss feelings, etc., with principal.
• My principal took interest in PD of teachers.
• My principal makes the school run smoothly.
551
(5) Factor 5 – sense of school-wide professional community:
• Teachers were willing to follow others who took lead in improvement efforts.
• Teachers made effort to coordinate teaching with other grade levels.
• Teachers had knowledge of the instruction used by other teachers.
•
Teachers had detailed knowledge of the content.

• Teachers had access to expertise outside the school.
• Teachers had sufficient time to work together.
• When teachers met, we used time productively.
• We felt as if we owned the instructional program.
• We had the authority to do what we knew was needed.
(6) Factor 6 – teacher trust:
• When conflicts arise, we retreated to our classrooms.
• OK to discuss feelings, worries, and frustrations with others.
• OK to offer help to colleagues.
• Teachers felt comfortable sharing data openly.
• Teachers trusted each other.
• Teachers cared about their colleagues.
• Teachers took responsibility for helping each other.
(7) Factor 7 – teacher efficacy:
• Teachers with high levels of effectiveness in instructional strategies.
• Teachers with mastery in curriculum content in my school.
• Teachers with demonstrated effectiveness could lead improvement efforts.
• Teachers took responsibility for student behavior.
• Teachers took responsibility for student learning.
Corresponding author
Xiu Cravens can be contacted at: xiu.cravens@vanderbilt.edu
For instructions on how to order reprints of this article, please visit our website:
www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/licensing/reprints.htm
Or contact us for further details: permissions@emeraldinsight.com

Cravens, X., Drake, T. A., Goldring, E., & Schuermann, P. (2017)

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Cravens, X., Drake, T. A., Goldring, E., & Schuermann, P. (2017)

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Journal of Educational Administration

Teacher peer excellence groups (TPEGs): Building communities of practice for

*Related content and download information correct at time of download.

is only the beginning of constructing meaningful communities of practice (Coburn and

Communities of practice for instructional improvement

Purpose and outcome features

Enabling school conditions

leadership, teachers’ sense of school-wide professional community, teacher trust, and

532 The TPEG model

TPEG pilot sites

of TPEGs in the context of important school enabling conditions such as principal

Building Communities of Practice

respondents questions related to their engagement in deprivatized teacher practice,

Autumn Brook Middle 25 6 24 25 13 52

Queens Way Elementary 21 12 57 22 18 82

Dependent variables. Based on the triangulation among conceptual definitions, available

b0j ¼ g00 þu0j

state standardized reading test; percent of Hispanic students; percent of African-American

evaluation procedures, which require building-level administrators to conduct observations,

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4

RQ2 – teacher comfort with and engagement in deprivatized teaching practices

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4

RQ3 – perceptions of improved instructional practice by TPEG teachers

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4

Opportunity to make the practice of teaching public

Amount of effective teaching strategies R can access

An increase in overall levels of teacher effectiveness in your school

Your own content understanding

Your TEAM observation scores

Contributions to the performance of students across multiple grades/subjects

A decrease in gap between higher and lower performing tchers

Not at all (1) Very little (2) Somewhat (3) To a great

Not at all (1) Very little (2) Somewhat (3) To a great

development, increased the variety of pedagogical strategies they employed, improved

Discussion and implications

knowledge to professional knowledge at the district and state levels.

Education, Vol. 9 No. 6, pp. 551-577.

• How often teaches collaborate on: share teaching materials.

Teachers had detailed knowledge of the content.

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi