Developing Supports for Conversations About Teaching: Negotiating Problems of Practice in Researcher-Practitioner Collaborations.

This is a study of the importance of “problem negotiation” in collaborations between teachers and researchers. The study presents contrasting cases of negotiation involving two different teacher networks in Chile, each of which was involved in using a web-based tool intended to facilitate conversation about teaching practice. The first phase of this research employs a Design-Based Research (DBR) approach, through which each network engaged with the researcher in iterative cycles of design to shape and improve the tool. In the second phase of the research, the features of problem negotiation in the first stage of the implementation were defined and analyzed using a Design-Based Implementation Research (DBIR) perspective. This study contributes to our understanding of DBIR by exploring the negotiation of a problem of practice employing qualitative methods. The analysis used interviews, observations, survey, and document data to investigate the process of negotiating a problem of practice and the evidence of commitment and/or differing views to understand how they affected the success of the intervention. The study took place in the context of a national reform initiative in Chile. In the first network, problem negotiation involved top-down coordination with policy-makers and a network coordinator. Teacher participation was not consistent, highlighting a potential misalignment on the “problem” being addressed through the intervention. In the second network, problem negotiation was more bottom-up, with all participants engaged in deciding that the intervention was something they wanted to explore in response to a particular problem. The tool use was more independent and involved active participation, suggesting a better understanding of the problem of practice being addressed. Other key findings of this study include the importance of exploring the contextual features of partners’ realities in researcher-practitioner collaborations. Overall, this study identified implications for negotiating problems of practice between researchers and practitioners that highlight the brokering role that some actors play. The study’s implications stress the relevance of negotiating access through key actors, involving different authority figures in problem negotiation, collectively defining goals for the endeavor upon which all partners have agreed, and anticipating expectations that can influence the process of negotiating problems of practice.PhDEducational StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113367/1/fgomezz_1.pd