Moving Beyond Talk

Corbett, D., Smith, D., Wilson, B. (2009). Moving Beyond Talk. Educational Leadership.
February 2009, Vol. 66 No. 5, 20-25.

Moving Beyond Talk

Moving Beyond Talk, is a journal article that focuses on teacher learning communities, or collaborative learning communities (CLCs) as used in this article. Three urban New Jersey school districts were selected to participate in a five-year project supported and funded by the Philanthropic Initiative, not the school’s themselves. Specialists from the National School Reform Faculty trained internal facilitators who launched CLCs in these three schools. The purpose of this project was to use the school as a community to further incorporate cross-categorical methods for teaching. Teachers met with one another on different ways of teaching, and to incorporate more than one subject into a lesson or class. For example, using reading strategies in math instruction by visualizing, asking questions, and predicting was a prime example of combining two subjects. In the article, Corbett, Smith, and Wilson reported (2009) “teachers repeatedly mentioned six conditions that heightened the quality of learning in collaborative communities: a preexisting supportive culture, time to meet, satisfying processes, voluntary participation, support from principals, and a cadre of trained facilitators.” (p. 22). After the funding of the five year project was complete, many of the teachers became internal facilitators and kept the program running...

Moving Beyond Talk

Login

Join