The Clearing House, 83: 175–179, 2010Copyright C© Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0009-8655 print; 1939-912X onlineDOI: 10.1080/00098650903505498

Leading Deep Conversations inCollaborative Inquiry Groups

TAMARA HOLMLUND NELSON, ANGIE DEUEL, DAVID SLAVIT, and ANNE KENNEDY

Abstract: Collaborative inquiry groups, such as profes-sional learning communities and lesson study groups,are proliferating in schools across the United States.In whatever form, the potential for impacting studentlearning through this collaborative work is expanded orlimited by the nature of teachers’ conversations. Polite,congenial conversations remain superficially focused onsharing stories of practice, whereas collegial dialogueprobes more deeply into teaching and learning. Exam-ples of talk taken from collaborative teacher inquirygroups are used to illustrate these important differences.Specific recommendations are provided, including therole that teacher leaders can play in adopting and mod-eling specific strategies that support the use of moresubstantive professional conversation.

Keywords: professional dialogue, collaborative inquiry,professional learning community

W hen the teachers in the Grays Bay professionallearning community (PLC) took a moment to

look back on their year of collaborative work, one stated:

[We are] struggling with having professional inquiry dis-cussions, digging into a problem, finding out what is atissue with the students, looking at what the professionalresearch says about it, getting in deep. Sometimes, it’slike there is just a resistance to want to dig deep profes-sionally into these issues.

The lead teachers of this group were frustrated by thegroup’s tendency to detour away from critical discus-

Dr. Tamara Holmlund Nelson is an associate professor of science education in theDepartment of Teaching and Learning at Washington State University, Vancouver,

WA and PI on an NSF-funded research project known as Supporting Teacher Research:Inquiry, Dialogue, & Engagement (STRIDE). Dr. Angie Deuel, PhD, is a research

associate on the STRIDE project, Vancouver, WA.Dr. David Slavit is a professor of mathematics education at Washington State

University, Vancouver, WA and a Co-PI on the STRIDE project. Anne Kennedy is thedirector of the Science and Mathematics Education Resource Center at ESD 112,

Vancouver, WA, and a Co-PI on STRIDE.

sions about their students’ abilities to write scientificconclusions. In another school, the teacher leader ofthe Cedar Grove PLC expressed a similar concern thathis colleagues only skimmed the surface when explor-ing teaching-learning relationships and avoided askingor responding to questions that probed or attempted tochange the status quo.

These science teacher leaders and colleagues wereengaged in collaborative inquiry, a collective enactmentof action research. They were dedicated to examiningstudent thinking and understanding how their teachingdecisions and actions influenced students’ learning.However, engaging in substantive and specific dialogueabout teaching and learning is uncommon in U.S.schools. Teachers in the United States have little time toengage in professional dialogue; times when teachersdo come together are most commonly staff meetings,professional development events, and hurried lunchbreaks. In these venues, information may be sharedand ideas elicited, but dialogue about the connectionsbetween the specifics of teachers’ practices and whatstudents know and can do is not typical. Alternatively,collaborative inquiry groups (such as PLCs, criticalfriends groups, and lesson study groups) involve educa-tors in a cycle of inquiry in which they develop a sharedvision for student learning and use various forms ofstudent data to identify gaps between this vision andstudent learning. Based on their analysis, teachers iden-tify a specific and narrow inquiry focus (e.g., improvingstudents’ abilities to interpret data from scientific ex-periments), make changes in classroom practices, and

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collect and analyze classroom-based data to examineimpacts on student learning. These findings informfurther actions for a cycle of continuous improvement.Critical to the impact of collaborative inquiry groupson improving student learning is teachers’ willingnessto engage in conversations that are less about sharingactivities, information, and student anecdotes andmore about raising and pursuing questions aboutlearning goals, instructional practices, and all students’attainment of their agreed-upon goals. The facilitationof these conversations is often dependent upon theteachers themselves, because funding for or availabilityof knowledgeable external facilitators is rare.

As professional development providers and re-searchers, we are interested in understanding howteacher groups might learn to have what Himley (1991)calls “deep talk”:

Essentially this kind of talk asks participants to engagein a process of collaboratively generated meaning thattakes place over a relatively long period of time. . . . Thisreflective or descriptive process enables participants tosee and re-see that shared focus of interest in view of anever-enlarging web of comments, tensions, connections,connotations, differences, oppositions. (59)

To better understand the support that teacher lead-ers need to foster professional dialogue, we partneredwith PLC lead teachers as co-researchers. The repeatedimpasses they faced when trying to shift PLC conversa-tions from a form of polite sharing of teaching strate-gies to deeper conversations about teaching-learningconnections became very apparent to us as participantobservers in their collaborative inquiry groups. In thefollowing sections, we discuss what we have come tounderstand about the discursive challenges of enactingcollaborative teacher inquiry and offer ideas that canhelp collaborative groups move toward more substan-tive dialogue.

Congenial Conversations and the Avoidanceof Conflict

Based on our work with over thirty PLCs engaged incollaborative inquiry, we see this conversational shiftfrom sharing to inquiring as essential if collaborativeteacher groups are to have an impact on improvingteaching and student learning. However, even whenschools give teachers time to come together for col-laborative inquiry, at least two factors hinder deepconversation—a traditional school culture of conge-niality and teachers’ inexperience with evidence-baseddialogue.

Congenial school cultures (Lieberman and Miller2008) preserve the status quo. Norms of privacy, long-established as part of school culture, are protected whenteachers avoid asking each other questions that probeinto the nature of what students learn as a result of spe-cific instructional practices. Probing another’s ideas and

actions reveals differences in beliefs and values and canlead to personal and emotional conflicts. These conflictsare nonproductive and can generate mistrust and fearthat fosters resistance to collaborative inquiry (Uline,Tschannen-Moran, and Perez 2003). To avoid theseemotional or affective conflicts, teachers often workhard to maintain congenial conversations characterizedby generalities about instructional practices and asser-tions about student learning that are unsupported byempirical evidence. Shifting from these congenial butrelatively superficial conversations to dialogue that ismore productive for improving student learning entailsrisk-taking and trust.

Congenial conversations deliberately avoid “faultlines” (Grossman, Wineburg, and Woolworth 2001)—those fundamental differences amongst any group ofpeople that can be ignored when conversations remainpleasantly general but are eventually exposed as peopletry to understand the meaning of others’ words or ac-tions. When teachers simply share ideas with each other,fault lines can be avoided, because an examination ofthe value of those ideas remains private. For example,in a PLC focused on improving students’ use of scien-tific vocabulary in class discussions, each teacher mayshare his or her strategy for teaching new vocabulary.Each person can privately judge this strategy againsttheir beliefs about learning and teaching and decidewhether to adopt, adapt, or reject the strategy offered.Technical questions may be asked, such as how oftenor at what point in a new unit this approach should beimplemented. More critical questions about how thisapproach impacts students’ understandings or what ev-idence the teacher has to support a claim of effectivenessare avoided. Someone in the group may not even agreethat teaching vocabulary should be the group’s focus,but he or she will go along with the decision to avoidconflict. As a result, everyone remains friendly, but littleis accomplished with respect to substantively improvingteaching and learning.

Learning How to Foster CollegialConversations

Although some people have a natural inclination to-ward asking questions that help a group get beyonda superficial sharing of ideas, it is a rare group that ischaracterized by this practice. However, productive col-laborative inquiry is characterized by a willingness toinvestigate teaching-learning connections and to iden-tify and negotiate differences and similarities in beliefsabout what constitutes good teaching and meaningfullearning. Skilled leaders can facilitate groups in the useof collaborative norms, protocols, and group-generatedsets of questions (see appendix) that build the group’scapacity for using conflicting views as starting points fordeveloping shared meanings. When teachers approachconflict as an intellectual challenge rather than an

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affective or emotional event, differences generate deeperinquiry and professional learning as opposed to threatsto professional identity.

Intentional and transparent steps are needed to shiftfrom congenial to collegial conversations. Just as teach-ers must constantly model and discuss what they ex-pect their students to do, teacher leaders need to modelstrategies for productive conversations and help thegroup reflect on the results. One strategy is to distin-guish between what Garmston and Wellman (1999)designate as “dialogue” and “discussion.” Although theterms that you choose are unimportant, recognizingthe differing purposes of different kinds of talk andintentionally using one or the other can support agroup’s engagement in productive conversation. Dia-logue occurs when people actively try to understandothers’ meanings by asking questions, posing counter-examples, and suspending judgment; Wells (1999) callsthis a “willingness to wonder.” Discussion comes after ex-ploratory dialogue has occurred, when people are readyto advocate for an idea and come to a decision for action.

Naming the type of conversation that is needed helpsa group set expectations for the meeting. For example,when teachers are wondering about the best way to as-sess students’ understandings about a given concept, di-alogue might entail exploring questions such as, “Whatdo we expect students to say?” “Are there different waysstudents might express their understanding?” or “Whatare different ways of eliciting students’ ideas?” The ex-pected outcome would relate to a richer understand-ing of the learning expectations and varied assessmentopportunities. At some point, the exploration needs toshift to making a decision about what will actually bedone. The group will then employ discussion by explic-itly stating that the next desired outcome is to decideupon the assessment tool and determine when teacherswill conduct the assessment. The conversation may en-tail some cognitive conflict as people make cases for dif-ferent approaches. Because these differences were pre-viously examined, the decision will be based not onpersonal attachments to particular strategies, but on aclear understanding of the pros and cons of each choice.

Whereas congenial conversations are characterized byconflict avoidance and reassurances that activities andproblems are normal, collegial conversations are distin-guished by “honest talk” (Lieberman and Miller 2008)and “consequential conversations” (Little and Horn2007). Because it does often feel risky to open one’spractices to scrutiny, explicit attention to collaborativenorms can contribute to an environment of trust andrespect (Garmston and Wellman 1999). These normsfocus specifically on group communication. One groupwith which we worked talked explicitly about a needto trust that each could voice their uncertainties with-out fear of retaliation. A teacher named Grace expressedthis idea this way,

Really the idea here is that we can talk about whatever weneed to talk about in our classrooms and not feel like ifI come in and say, “Look, I’m just not getting somethingand I’m wondering what you guys can help me with,”that it’s not going to end up going back to someone elseand I’m going to get someone knocking on my doorsaying, “I hear you stink as a teacher.”

A shift from congenial to collegial conversations canalso be supported by using protocols that provide pro-cesses for eliciting ideas and feedback from all groupmembers. Formal protocols (see National School Re-form Facutly Website n.d.) can support the potentiallyrisky business of collaboratively examining students’work and relating these practices to instruction (as op-posed to anecdotal stories of student achievement).However, if group members do not give explicit atten-tion to the nature of their conversational interactionsas described previously, then simply following the stepsof a protocol will do little to support honest dialogueabout important questions. Also, teachers frequently tellus that these formal protocols feel artificial and awk-ward, as if they were trying to speak in a newly studiedlanguage. Another possibility is for teacher groups togenerate a set of questions that can be posted and ref-erenced to stimulate deeper discussion (see appendix).Teacher leaders can model the use of these questions bydeliberately referring to the list and selecting an appro-priate question. The collectively generated and publiclydisplayed list provides a foundation for a culture of in-quiry, in which any group member can pose a questionto influence the nature of the conversation. There isgreat potential for these questions to shift a conversa-tion from simply sharing stories of practice to question-ing the reasons for impacts of instructional actions andusing classroom-based data to respond to those ques-tions. One successful strategy for motivating the use ofconversational protocols is to have the group reflect ontheir processes and progress at the end of the meetingto help determine whether the group’s conversationsmake a difference or not.

Looking Closely at a Deep ConversationIt is much easier to describe the characteristics of col-

legial conversations than to enact these characteristicsin real life. A brief excerpt from a conversation amongsta group of high school science teachers provides anillustration. Teachers in the Alder Creek PLC often en-gaged in deep conversations as they sought to improvetheir students’ abilities to make and interpret data ta-bles and graphs using data from science experiments.As they worked to identify the problems students ex-hibited when working with graphs, Melody posed aquestion about their expectations for student under-standing: “I’m wondering if we want [students to say]‘increasing and decreasing’ or ‘directly and inversely’?Because are we looking for patterns or are we looking for

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relationships? Perhaps I’m misunderstanding . . .” Fourothers took turns in responding and clarifying:

Cheryl: No, I think depending on what subject, you’relooking for different words. Because I think if you’reusing a lot of math you’re looking—Lauren: We’re looking at a lot of relationships.McKenzie: More probably in physical science than we do[in biology].Mason: So you see there’s a lot of inversely—and quanti-tative versus qualitative . . .

Cheryl followed with another question that con-nected expectations to teaching: “I guess that leads toanother question—how do we want to teach them? Dowe want to teach them ‘increasing or decreasing’ or dowe want to teach them ‘indirectly or directly’?”

This short exchange reveals some important aspects ofdeep conversations. First, Melody framed her statementas a question rather than an assertion, which invited per-spectives from others. Cheryl, the group leader, openedthis inquiry for further investigation by connecting thegroup’s expectations to their actual teaching practices.Again, rather than asserting that their approach shouldbe one way or the other, her question opened up oppor-tunities to explore what each teacher was doing differ-ently in his or her respective class and how these prac-tices linked to student learning (and possible studentconfusion). One can imagine this conversation goingin a different direction if the PLC environment was notbased on trust and respect, or if the teachers’ normalway of talking was to assume that they were alreadyusing the most effective strategy.

Energizing Shared Leadership for DeepConversations About Teaching and Learning

Although there are no quick fixes for increasingthe depth of dialogue in collaborative teacher inquirygroups, teacher leadership is a critical factor. Muchfaith must be placed on the power of professional col-laboration to positively impact teaching and learning.Yet the challenges of collaborative inquiry are well-documented (McLaughlin and Talbert 2006). Becauseof the twin constraints of money and expertise, fewteacher groups have access to sustained external facil-itation. The teachers most invested in these collabora-tive processes must try themselves to figure out how tolead their colleagues into deep and productive conver-sations. Key elements to breaking the habit of congenialconversation include the support and engagement of allgroup members in:

• Asking and answering probing questions about thereasons for, impacts of, and evidence that supportsimplementing specific instructional decisions;

• Recognizing the value of cognitive conflict as a way togain a deeper understanding about the complexitiesof teaching and learning;

• Being intentional about and accountable for the na-ture of the dialogue in collaborative group work; and

• Accessing and using tools (e.g., protocols and ques-tion prompts) to support a shift from congenial tocollegial conversations.

Individual teacher leaders play an important role inguiding their groups’ conversations toward substantiveand specific dialogue about teaching and learning. How-ever, if these shifts in teacher talk are to be made and sus-tained at the school level, all teachers must contribute todeep conversations grounded in a cycle of questioning,reflecting on evidence, and taking action.

REFERENCES

Garmston, R. J., and B. M. Wellman. 1999. The adaptive school: A source-book for developing collaborative groups. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon.

Grossman, P. L., S. Wineburg, and S. Woolworth. 2001. Towarda theory of teacher community. Teachers College Record 103 (6):942–1012.

Himley, M. 1991. Shared Territory: Understanding children’s writing asworks. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lieberman, A., and L. Miller, eds. 2008. Teachers in professional commu-nities. New York: Teachers College Press.

Little, J. W., and I. S. Horn. 2007. Normalizing problems of practice:Converting routine conversation into a resource for professionallearning in professional communities. In Professional learning com-munities: Divergence, depth and dilemmas, ed. L. Stoll and K. S. Louis,79–92. Berkshire, UK: Open University Press.

McLaughlin, M. W., and J. E. Talbert. 2006. Building school-based teacherlearning communities. New York: Teachers College Press.

National School Reform Faculty Website. n.d. http://www.nsrfharmony.org/protocols.html.

Uline, C. L., M. Tschannen-Moran, and L. Perez. 2003. Constructiveconflict: How controversy can contribute to school improvement.Teachers College Record 5 (5): 782–816.

Wells, G. 1999. Dialogic inquiry: Towards a sociocultural practice andtheory of education. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

APPENDIX. Sample Question Sets for FramingDeeper Conversations in Teacher InquiryGroups

Examining Instructional Practices

• Why are these meaningful learning goals?• If we all teach this concept differently, what implica-

tions are there for student understanding of (relatedvocabulary, processes, subsequent concept building)?

• How do these lessons address students’ misconcep-tions?

Learning Expectations Represented in Student Work

• When students understand this, what will it sound orlook like?

• What are our expectations for struggling students? Foradvanced students?

• What are misconceptions we might expect to see instudents’ work?

• What other ways might students represent their un-derstandings?

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Identifying Patterns in Student Work

• What do you see or hear that suggests stu-dents understand /almost understand/do not under-stand?

• Which students are understanding/almost under-standing/not understanding? What does that tell us?

• What do you see or hear that you did not expect tofind?

Connecting Student Work to Practice

• How do students’ responses relate to the lessontaught?

• Why did I/you teach it this way? Are there otheroptions? Why consider another option?

• What patterns in students’ work suggest I/we shouldcontinue what teaching this way, make some modifi-cations, or try to use a different approach?

Examining Assessment Practices

• What does this form of assessment show us?• What information about students’ understandings

does this assessment not provide?• What are alternative forms of assessments that might

reveal more/other/all students’ understandings?

Reflection on Group Processes

• What does this conversation lead us to do next?• Do I/we understand students’ thinking in a new way?

How?• Do we need outside help with anything? What?• How did our conversation challenge me? Make me

uncomfortable? What did I like? What don’t I wantto repeat?

• Do we need a tool to guide the way we talk aboutassessment/student learning/teaching next time?

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