How can we improve a dialogue about teaching and learning in our school that enables us to have common goals, take collective actions, and study the effect on student learning?
– Carl Glickman

The Teaching and Learning Committee believes that through dialogue, those involved in a school will develop the habits of mind necessary for improved schooling. Additionally, we believe that collective thought is more powerful than the individual thought. Ongoing professional conversation is a driving force in the development of the trust necessary to the restructuring of education. Time to talk, people to talk with, ideas that spark more ideas, and a school climate that invites honest inquiry are necessities for school improvement. Out of the resulting conversation comes the development of authentic relationships, followed by the trust, without which school reform will not take hold.

Rosenholtz (1989) found a reciprocal relationship between teacher collaboration and teacher certainty (efficacy). This means that the greater the collaboration, the stronger teachers' efficacy, which then circles back to strengthen their collaborative efforts. Low efficacy teachers, who used only routine instructional practice, believe that low-achieving students were simply not smart enough to learn. Routine practices were defined as existing in non-collaborative settings. Those embedded in nonroutine (collaborative) technical cultures are more likely to define students' learning potential as alterable and indeterminate. In conclusion, Rosenholtz argued that when collaborative norms undergird achievement-oriented groups, they bring new ideas, fresh ways of looking at things, and a stock of collective knowledge that is more fruitful than any one person's working alone. In other words, collaborative settings stress norms of continuous school- and self-renewal. It is assumed that improvement in teaching is a collective rather than an individual enterprise.

We see more and more indication that fostering a culture of reflection, learning, cooperation, and professionalism among educators outside their classrooms and schools contributes to a similar culture among adults and students within classrooms and schools. Educators who once experience these qualities do not want to relinquish them when they enter the schoolhouse door. A precondition for realizing this potential is for educators to become learners. An outline of a conceptual model for this kind of professional development has been developed by Barth (1990) and is quite different from traditional training models: