Collaborative professional learning: Preliminary results of a case study

Abstract

In recent years, professional collaboration in the teaching profession has been defended as a determinant of excellent teaching. It is essential to share ideas, suggestions, and strategies on how to teach, in an articulated and joint work, to achieve the desired results more effectively. The collaborative work allows increasing the knowledge built through the interaction between the different elements, taking full advantage of the different potentialities of each one of the actors. This paper aims to present the preliminary results of a case study on collaborative teacher learning, which is part of a project that also has an international dimension - of a comparative nature - since it includes 8 case studies, whose main objective is to understand how teachers describe formal and informal opportunities for collaborative professional learning. Therefore, we will present the results of a questionnaire which was applied during 2016-2017, in a school of Northern Region of Portugal, with a sample of 219 teachers (n = 219), distributed by different levels of education.