This ethnographic case study expands the current scholarship that explores how teams of teachers and administrators harness and expand joint capacity to extend better learning opportunities to all students. The study provides insight into how teams of teachers and administrators use student data, collective inquiry, and reflection to derive meaningful research-based teaching strategies in order to meet all students’ learning needs. The research assists education professionals to better understand and recognize how educator teams and collective inquiry engage and energize within sociocultural, organizational, and situated learning settings, and how this totality influences 21st-century learners’ skill development. The research questions driving this study are: What constitutes collective inquiry in a Midwestern rural school district within the implementation of the Ohio Improvement Process? When teachers and administrators work in collaborative teams (District Leadership Team, Building Leadership Teams, and Teacher-Based Teams), how does collective inquiry shape the ways they understand student data, assess student learning, identify student learning needs, and design interventions? When teachers and administrators work in these teams (TBT, BLT and DLT), how do interactions unfold through collective inquiry, are there common characteristics and/or differences in team interactions, and why might these similarities or differences occur? The case study used interviews, observations, documents, and artifacts to elicit primary and secondary source data. Particular attention was given to descriptions of how teachers and administrators worked together to bring about collaborative decisions in order to implement curricula and improve teaching strategies in classrooms, buildings, and the district. The study dissected the roles that social involvement, environment, and expectations play in team meetings, while drawing upon educators’ professional knowledge, experience, and use of student data. Primary data sources in this study consisted of individual and team semi-structured interviews. The questions included participant views on team collaboration, individual and team opinions of the Ohio Improvement Process, the benefits and obstacles of the process, connectedness to colleagues, and the confidence to describe the process to others. Secondary data were collected through observations and field notes of the TBT, BLT, and DLT teams that were interviewed in the focus groups. Themes were confirmed as analysis unfolded in each interview and observation, and were verified by subsequent analyses of the data collected through documents and artifacts. The interpretation of the themes revealed four assertions that captured the experiences of the district and building leadership teams and teacher-based teams within each school building. The assertions include: (1) when a collaborative team adopts a collective inquiry stance, collegial engagement and reflection empower a classroom teacher to adjust their daily teaching practices; (2) school leaders influence the functioning of a collaborative team when they actively participate in the collective inquiry process by modelling leadership behaviors that promote communal decision-making and action; (3) a team-based approach for analyzing formative assessment data assists a classroom teacher to reconstruct a pedagogical skill to deliver a more effective instructional strategy; and (4) authentic collective inquiry is effective and efficient when teams of educators communicate within a network. The findings of this research reflect the need for adjustments in the following areas: time & structure, social interaction, protocols-procedures- and belief systems, leadership, and possible tensions, further discussed following.
Actionable recommendations are offered to education professionals including school administrators, teachers, district personnel, local education agencies, policy makers, university personnel and researchers. They include (1) spending a greater amount of observation and interview time with teacher-based teams, (2) conducting research in different types of school districts, (3) extending the time line for research, (4) inclusion of districts who have tried some kind of team improvement process, (5) conducting research that originates from a different perspective (i.e. depth of structure, leadership, trust), (6) research of teams that grew from mutual needs of both teachers and administrators, as opposed to teams mandated by either the State Board of Education, the superintendent, or the school board, (7) the amount of training teams may need in order to be effective, efficient, and successful, as opposed to those with less training who may fail to develop, and lastly, (8) to observe and analyze those teams that possess natural leaders (i.e., those individuals who are enthusiastic and want to lead, as opposed to those teams who do not have a team member of such nature).