Learning from Peers on a Large Scale

Teachers in the United States are encouraged to continuously improve their teaching practice, and one method of doing so is learning from peers. Learning from peers can take many forms, such as pursuing formal or informal collaboration, accessing research results through professional networks, or seeking guidance from peers about interventions and instructional strategies. Many opportunities for peer-to-peer learning occur through one-on-one or small-group interactions. Larger-scale opportunities for learning, such as conferences and online communities, may be useful channels for building peer connections, but are unlikely to provide teachers with systematic information about what their peers are doing nationally. Researchers know little about the extent to which teachers would find national survey data about their peers' teaching practice useful, as little research exists on which topics might be perceived as useful for reflection and improvement. In addition, researchers do not know how school characteristics affect teachers' perceptions of the usefulness of such information. Nationally representative data from the RAND Corporation's web-based American Teacher Panel survey provide insight into the degree to which teachers believe national survey data would be useful for thinking about how they could improve their practice and the extent to which their perceptions vary by school characteristics.