Systemic professional learning through collaborative inquiry: Examining teachers' perspectives

Abstract Collaborative Inquiry (CI) engages teachers to jointly inquire into a shared problem of practice. The majority of CI research presents qualitative case studies of individual collaborative inquires; few studies directly examine teachers' responses to CI through a large-scale study across an entire system of education. To examine teachers' perspectives on the impact and functionality of CI as professional learning, we surveyed 292 elementary teachers across 15 school districts and conducted 6 focus groups with teachers who had been involved in CI. We report the factors that enhance and inhibit teacher experiences of CI and significant outcomes from a teacher perspective.