Raising the Teacher's Voice and the Ironic Role of Theory Available to Purchase

Teachers must often make special efforts to overcome the silences among them — silences enforced by teachers' subordinate roles and the isolation of the classrooms in which they work. Joseph McDonald traces here the progress of a group of teachers from different high schools who meet regularly to discuss and explore together the insights, uncertainties, and paradoxes that arise from their teaching work. He finds that the group has evolved through three phases — the first concerned mainly with collegiality for its own sake; the second notable for an effort to gain some policy power; and the third distinguished by increasing confidence in claiming policy power on the basis of knowledge generated by teaching practice.