Teachers joint planning as a field of learning and professional development

Abstract

Although many teachers’ professional development proposals recognize the formative value of workplace situations, there are few studies that explore in detail what happens when teachers work together on usual tasks of their practice. This paper studies the forms of joint activity between two teachers, one newly arrived at a school and the other with several years of permanence in it, in the level coordination meetings, where they plan the work of their respective class groups. The study is approached from a methodological strategy of case study. An interactivity analysis and a content analysis of the conversations recorded in audio are carried out. The results show the planning meetings between teachers as a field in which it is possible for them to talk and jointly build knowledge about the situations of their practice and, therefore, develop professionally.  Both teachers construct the planning activity by focusing it on the shared selection and characterization of specific teaching and learning tasks that are represented, through their discourse, as “situated activity systems”.  These results have relevant implications for the design and development of teachers’ lifelong learning in the workplace.