Towards Design-Based Knowledge-Building Practices in Teaching

Abstract: This paper explores knowledge building in a community identified by Bielaczyc and Collins (2006) as a hotbed community—a community in which knowledge creation has taken on a life of its own. The practices of six elementary schoolteachers are analyzed to inform the development of teachers ’ knowledge-building practices and to better understand how teachers develop and sustain innovative knowledge-building practices. Overview Helping teachers learn and develop as professionals is of great consequence to the teaching profession (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005). To address this challenge, a line of research reported below focuses on a shift from “individual ” to “communal ” processes (Shulman & Shulman, 2004; Hammerness, Darling-Hammond, Bransford, Berliner, Cochran-Smith, McDonald, et al., 2005). As argued by Darling-Hammond and McLaughlin (1995), conventional ideas of in-service training or knowledge diffusion need to be replaced by opportunities for knowledge sharing; teachers need to be provided with opportunities to share what they know, discuss what they do not understand and relate new concepts and strategies to their own unique teaching contexts. Accordingly, many designs in relation to community-based teaching-learning have been proposed in response to this change of perspective (e.g., see Grossman, Wineburg, & Woolworth, 2001; Hammerness et al, 2005; Palincsar, Magnusson, Marano, Ford, & Brown, 1998). More recently, however, scholars have further identified the need to transform teacher-learning communities into knowledge-creating or knowledge-building communities (Bielaczyc & Collins, 2006; Chan &amp