Attending to Problems of Practice: Routines and Resources for Professional Learning in Teachers’ Workplace Interactions

The authors investigate how conversational routines, or the practices by which groups structure work-related talk, function in teacher professional communities to forge, sustain, and support learning and improvement. Audiotaped and videotaped records of teachers’ work group interactions, supplemented by interviews and material artifacts, were collected as part of a 2-year project centered on teacher learning and collegiality at two urban high schools. This analysis focuses on two teacher work groups within the same school. While both groups were committed to improvement and shared a common organizational context, their characteristic conversational routines provided different resources for them to access, conceptualize, and learn from problems of practice. More specifically, the groups differed in the extent to which conversational routines supported the linking of frameworks for teaching to specific instances of practice. An analysis of the broader data set points to significant contextual factors that help account for the differences in the practices of the two groups. The study has implications for fostering workplace learning through more systematic support of professional community.