Teacher Study Groups: In Search of Teaching Freedom

By looking at teacher collaborative structures in an urban public elementary school, this article demonstrates how, in the face of top-down school decisions under the pressures of high-stakes testing and assessment-driven curriculum, teachers can find the power and freedom for creative and effective pedagogy to flourish. We describe how teachers at PS165 created the spaces for working together and how these spaces brought new opportunities for (a) problematizing and prioritizing the issues they faced in classrooms, (b) reinventing and expanding their sense of self as individuals in the collaboration, (c) growing beyond their personal space and engaging intellectually in public forums, (d) shifting their ways of seeing teaching, and (e) ensuring sustainability of the ways of engaging in professional development through mentoring and taking ownership of the structures for collaboration. We include personal stories and/or reflections of six teachers and their experiences with study groups and theorize on the potential elements of a professional development model for other schools to build on and for the teaching profession to reflect upon. (Contains 1 figure.)