41 Learning among colleagues: teacher community and the shared enterprise of education1

In both Norwegian and Hebrew, the verbs “to teach ” and “to learn ” are etymologically inseparable.2 Teaching and learning in these two highly distinct tongues are two sides of the same pedagogical coin. One who teaches is also one who learns. Yet teachers are rarely—on a daily basis—afforded formal or informal opportunities for learning. And teacher education programs do not always prepare future teachers to also be future learners. Most importantly—for the purposes of this chapter—too few teachers are adequately prepared to learn from one another, and too few schools create the conditions where learning from colleagues might be possible. As Seymour Sarason famously noted in his classic 1971 text, The Culture of School and the Problem of Change, teachers cannot possibly create and sustain productive learning environments for students when no such conditions exist for teachers. What do cultures of shared learning, dialogue, deliberation, debate, and community look like? How do such contexts affect teachers and students? How can we prepare future teachers to develop and benefit from profes-sional interactions with colleagues? This chapter reviews past and present conceptions of teacher professional communitie