CHAPTER 4: Equal Partners: Teachers and Teacher Educators Learning Together in Professional Learning Communities

In this chapter we explain a model that expands professional learning communities (PLCs) to include teacher educators “learning in and from practice” (Ball & Cohen, 1999) and emphasizes the reciprocal nature of learning for all participants of such communities. Including teacher educators in professional development often risks the creation of an unequal power dynamic in which the teacher educators are perceived as experts and teachers are considered novices (Zeichner & Noffke, 2001). We suggest a different approach in which teacher educators and teachers collaborate as equal partners in learning about English learner instruction. Each brings specific knowledge to the educational problem at hand. Teachers possess the unique understanding of learners, of their curriculum and of the specific classroom context, and teacher educators come to the group with ways to inquire about practice from a theoretical grounding. Engaging in collaborative inquiry, they develop together the requisite knowledge and skills to address the challenges of teaching. In this chapter we describe a collaboration of teachers and teacher educators learning together to apply functional linguistics to the academic language of science in a high school classroom within the context of a larger collaborative learning model.