Often educational researchers believe that the way to get teacher groups to improve their own teaching is to have them work in groups, share common assessments, look at the results, and choose the approach of the teacher who achieved the most success. Teachers, however, often resist this approach to identifying a "best practice" because it creates a competitive climate in which one teacher will be identified as the best. Conversations about teaching, when they do occur, thus often remain superficial. Teachers most often say to each other that they respect each other's approach; when they do disagree, they focus briefly on ideological differences and then move on to another topic before identifying the specific instructional techniques that work. This dynamic persists in all schools, but particularly in high performing schools in which most students are succeeding, teachers choose to avoid these difficult conversations and thus avoid close examination of their practices.
This study examines a leadership project that strove to draw teachers into fruitful conversations about best practice by diminishing competitiveness within the group. Rather than asking them to compare student performance on common assessments, and identify the teacher whose students did the best, the Principal/Researcher focused teachers on the goal of establishing a common approach to teaching certain math topics. In order to find this common approach, teachers had to examine their practices very closely, adopting some new ones but keeping the ones that worked. Rather than the work of one teacher, the "best practice" that the group members chose was a synthesis of strong teaching methods from all members of the group.
