Within K-12 Schools for School Reform: What Does it Take?

Abstract

We write this chapter as members of the School Portfolio Group, 1 a group of practitioners, from different school sites, who have met for over a decade to cultivate and scaffold reflective practice within ourselves and our colleagues in the context of an organized school reform movement. The School Portfolio Group originally coalesced around the goal of creating school portfolios to document the evidence of the reform work of the faculty and staff of each campus represented by the School Portfolio Group's membership. Each of us has personally experimented with a variety of teacher inquiry approaches and tools over time. Also, we have been positioned on our respective educational landscapes in ways that have enabled us to help nurture the reflective practices of others and ourselves. In this chapter, we blend what is presently available in the literature with our "pooling of…expe-rience and insight" (Schwab 1969a, p. 30) drawn from our close to 100 collective years of teaching students in classrooms. By taking this approach, we merge the authority of the educational canon with our narrative authority (Olson 1995) as teachers formed over time in relationship with children and in community with our teaching colleagues. We begin by nesting the history of reflective practice in three images, each of which has contributed to the emergence and growth of reflective practice in the field of education. We then present a palette of reflective research tools we and others have employed, frequently in concert with one another, in both our individual and collective inquiries. Next, we offer narrative exemplars (Lyons and LaBoskey 2002) that have emerged in the context of our own, our colleagues' and others' reflective practices in order to illuminate how these reflective devices have been instantiated in the field of teaching. Following that, we discuss a number of venues in which teachers like us have developed their reflective capacities. Lastly, we conclude with opportunities and constraints of reflective practice, along with a discussion of issues encountered and awakenings experienced through sustained engagement in reflective inquiry.