Community-centered environments involve norms that encourage collaboration
and learning. An important approach to enhancing teacher learning
is to develop communities of practice, an approach that involves collaborative
peer relationships and teachers’ participation in educational research
and practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Examples include the Bay
Area Writing Project (1979); the Cognitively Guided Instruction Project (Carpenter
and Fennema, 1992; Carpenter et al., 1989, 1996); Minstrell and Hunt’s
(Minstrell, 1989) physics and mathematics teacher group; the Annenberg
Critical Friends Project; and Fredericksen and White (1994) “video clubs,”
where teachers share tapes of lessons they have taught and discuss the
strengths and weaknesses of what they see.