Forming a change environment to encourage professional development through a teacher study group

•This teacher study group (TSG) features a university–school partnership.•Teachers are inclined to value practical knowledge grounded in their own contexts.•This TSG has the potential for triggering teachers' changes in beliefs and practices.•The design of the TSG plays a major role in shaping the sequences of teacher change.

This study is grounded in the context of English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) teacher education in Taiwan and aims to promote the potential of teacher study groups. The Interconnected Model of Teacher Professional Growth provides a framework to design this teacher study group and to analyze the learning process as experienced by the participating teachers within the collaborative inquiry. The study illustrates the group's learning process by characterizing the major patterns of the teachers' changes in beliefs and practices. The results support the claim that the design of the teacher study groups plays a major role in shaping various sequences of teacher change.