Is Teaching Practice an Activity That Individuals Can Enact? The Case of Project Based Learning

While long recognized as a promising instructional reform, Project-Based Learning (PBL) remains uncommon in U.S. classrooms. This article investigates the outcomes of a practice-based professional development (PD) focused on supporting middle and high school teachers to develop and enact a set of teaching practices for PBL. Grounded in cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), we analyzed teacher interviews and portfolios of practice and found striking patterns in how teachers described each of the PBL practices that were focused on in the PD. While teachers described certain PBL teaching practices as things they did on their own, they described other teaching practices as being significantly enabled or constrained by their school and community. For almost all participating teachers it was the PBL teaching practices that were most countercultural to historical schooling practices that teachers' described as being significantly influenced by communities. Out of these findings, we argue that if professional learning seeks to spark radical transformations in instructional practice, teaching practice itself may need to be reconceptualized as a communal activity rather than an individual one. The authors examine the implications of this reconceptualization for both theory and designs for professional learning.