Collaborative Professional Learning and Differentiated Teacher Practice: Learning by Design in Greece

Abstract

The Learning by Design approach (Kalantzis & Cope, 2005) was introduced to Greece as a process for transforming teachers’ professional learning by enabling greater collaboration and reflection on their part. This chapter presents an action research pilot project co-funded by the European Social Fund and the Greek Pedagogical Institute (MIS 295379) in 2011. The pilot program was implemented in 9 schools from three different localities (Athens, Patras and Rhodes) in Greece with a total of 43 participating teachers. The research data presented in this chapter capture reflective comments and survey findings which emerged during the initial, interim and final evaluation phases of the project (Arvanitis, 2011). Overall, teachers in the trial valued the process of working in school-based reflexive learning teams emphasizing joint planning, critical professional reflection (relevant to their daily work and student achievements) and sharing. Also, the professional exchange generated by Learning by Design and its social media affordances allowed teachers to reposition themselves and to rethink their professional learning as a series of spaces for professional communication, documentation and exchange that are live, asynchronous, reflexive, collaborative and multimodal. Finally, the explicit prospective and retrospective documentation of teaching methods, in other words the scaffolding and weaving of activities, was better understood as a means of differentiating teaching and documenting effective learning to harness students’ diversity.