Powerful Teacher Learning

What the Theatre Arts Teach about Collaboration

By (author) David Allen

Not available to order

Publication date:

29 July 2013

Length of book:

174 pages

Publisher

R&L Education

ISBN-13: 9781610486835

This book offers an innovative approach to understanding and supporting teacher inquiry groups, Critical Friends Groups, “PLCs,” and other vehicles for the school-wide professional learning community. It takes the reader outside traditional sites of professional development for teachers and into the black box theatres and rehearsal studios of contemporary theatre companies. It investigates the methods and specific tools these theatre artists use to collectively create new works for performance. Drawing on these methods and tools, it provides a model for understanding and improving the practices of teacher learning groups, one that highlights the means, materials, and modes of engagement of a group’s activity.

Applying the model to elementary and high school teacher learning groups, it demonstrates how teachers, coaches, and administrators can use it to foster meaningful professional learning and instructional improvement. The book provides not only new ways of thinking about teacher learning in schools, but also frameworks and specific tools to bring teacher learning as collective creation to life.
Into an era obsessed with describing and prescribing learning and teaching – often in the most desiccated ways – comes a refreshing book, the product of boundary-crossing research. The explanations of the functions of “Exquisite Pressure” and Cumulative Progression” are alone worth the price.