Although high quality professional development has become recognized as central to educational improvement we still know little about how to foster meaningful change at the level of the teacher, school and district (Tozer & Horsley, 2006). One promising strategy for fostering change lies in nesting continuous professional development (CPD) within a Communities of Practice (CoP) framework. The concept of Communities of Practice as been viewed as a way to engage teachers in directing the focus and delivery of professional development that is sensitive to their working lives (Craig, 2004; Little, 2002) and as a promising strategy to improve the quality of teaching and teacher education (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005). This study examined how engagement in a Community of Practice over time (two academic years) impacted the assessment practices of physical education teachers within the cohort. This research was positioned within a sociocultural theoretical frame that accepts that teachers bring different values, beliefs, identities, interests, motivations and actions to communities of practice and further, that learning is both situated within and mediated by actions that afford or constrain learning (Levinson, 2000; Lave & Wenger, 1991).
Method
Participants were purposefully drawn from eight schools in Ireland that delivered the Junior Certificate Physical Education Program. In addition to collecting assessment materials generated by the teachers throughout the intervention (both paper versions and those posted electronically), data were collected from 45 minute pre, mid and post semi-structured interviews conducted with all teachers within the CoP and the Program Coordinator. Data were also collected from a mid-point teacher focus group interview and initial questionnaires completed by the teachers.
Analysis/Results
All data generated from the document analyses and verbatim transcriptions were inductively analyzed from an interpretive practice perspective that considers both what and how reality is constructed (Gubrium & Holstein, 2000). Results indicated that teachers' use of assessment and discourses surrounding assessment changed throughout the intervention as a result of the provision of particular activities they engaged in throughout the CPD and collaborative opportunities provided by CoP.
Conclusions
The long term, collaborative nature of an intervention grounded in a CoP provided teachers with repeated opportunities to learn about, discuss and implement various forms of assessments. It also provided teachers with resources previously not available; the provision of which also contributed to the change.