Teacher Professional Development, and Online Communities
Teacher Professional Development
& Online Learning Communities
by Greg Shultz & Alex Cuthbert
What Is An Online Learning Community?
Learning communities encourage integrated understanding and develop a common set of criteria for evaluating ideas. We define learning communities as supporting networks of personal relationships that enable the exchange of resources and the development of a common framework for analysis of these resources. Members of the community jointly analyze resources and develop a common set of criteria for evaluating those resources. We define resources as a collection of ideas or interactions that are accessible to community members and can be incorporated into their practice. Communities, with their boundary conditions, niches, and cycles of opportunity, evolve as they organize, transform, and sort resources.
What Are The Range Of Approaches To Teacher Professional Development?
Teachers are best able to develop and improve their science teaching through learning experiences, at both pre-service and in-service levels, that:
- deliberately connect science and pedagogy,
- model effective teaching practices,
- address the needs of teachers as adult learners,
- take place in classrooms and other learning situations, and
- use inquiry, reflection, research, modeling, and guided practice.
(NRC, 1997)
Learning opportunities for teachers:
- Learner-centered environments (to build on strengths, interests, and needs of learners)
- Knowledge-centered environments (focusing on pedagogical content knowledge)
- Assessment-centered environments (testing ideas, trying them with students, receiving feedback)
- Community-centered environments (communities of practice, with teacher collaborations)
(NRC, 2000; see also Methods below)
What Are The Challenges & Opportunities?
- Typical teacher workshops tend to occur once, deal with decontextualized information, and often do not resonate with teacher’s perceived needs.
- The most successful professional development activities are those that are extended over time and encourage development of teachers’ learning communities.
- Teachers are urged to use student-centered, constructivist, depth-versus-breadth approaches in their education classes, but new teachers often see traditional pedagogy in college and in their schools.
- Successful learning for teachers requires a continuum of coordinated efforts that range from pre-service education to early teaching to opportunities for lifelong development as professionals.
(NRC, 2000)
I. Methods
From Ch. 8 ("Teacher Learning") of How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School (NRC, 2000):
A. Quality of Learning Opportunities
1. Learner-centered environments (to build on strengths, interests, and needs of learners)
- teachers usually have no say in what or how they learn in prof. development opportunities
- cases of "Ellen" and "Molly"
- difficulty of tailoring professional development to needs of individual teachers
- technology provides new opportunities for communication and online learning for teachers
2. Knowledge-centered environments
- ideal of focusing on pedagogical content knowledge is not usually met
- difficulty of getting teachers to rethink the nature of their disciplines
- learning how to teach a subject by focusing on one’s own experience as a learner
- teachers accustomed to feeling efficacious, and being in control
- technology enables teachers and students wider access to subject-matter expertise
3. Assessment-centered environments
- teachers testing ideas by trying them out with students, and then receiving feedback
- feedback, especially from teacher colleagues, helps clarify ideas and correct misconceptions
- classroom-based feedback important for implementing new programs
- certification programs designed to help teachers reflect on and improve their practice
4. Community-centered environments
- communities of practice for teachers, w/ collaborations, and participation in educ. research
- teachers share success and failures with pedagogy and curriculum development
- descriptive review: teachers collaboratively reviewing student work constructively
- two major themes from studies of teacher collaborations
* importance of shared experiences/discourse around texts/data about student learning
* necessity of shared decision making, which enables deeper reflection and discussion
B. Action Research
- an approach to professional development w/ teachers working on classroom-based research projects
- example of Bay Area’s PTARG, in collaborative action research called enhanced normal practice
- examined are teachers’ beliefs about learning, their students, and of themselves as learners
- collaborative action research amongst teachers fosters the growth of learning communities
- use of action research as a model of sustained teacher learning is hampered by lack of time/resources
C. Preservice Education
- considerable structural variation amongst teacher education programs
- common components of teacher education programs:
- some subject-matter preparation
- series of foundational courses (e.g. philosophy, sociology, history, psychology of education)
- one or more developmental, learning, and cognitive psychology courses
- methods ("how to") courses
- sequence of field experiences
- collaboration under-emphasized (vs. team approach to problem-based learning in medical schools)
- political factors have strong effects, and hinder innovation in teacher education programs
- National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (1996) identified problems:
- inadequate time in teacher education programs done as part of undergraduate degrees
- fragmentation within teacher education programs: disconnected components
- uninspired teaching methods, lacking hands-on, minds-on experiences
- superficial curriculum, w/ little depth in subject matter or in educational studies
- lifelong learning for teachers is impeded in at least two ways
- message is sent to prospective teachers that educ. research has little to do with schooling
- importance of viewing themselves as subject-matter experts is not emphasized to teachers
- dissonance between student teaching experience and teacher education course work
- new teachers often given the most challenging assignments, partly leading to high turnover rates
II. Design Principles
We recently came up with four design considerations for people creating online learning communities (Cuthbert, Clark, and Linn, 2000):
(a) support the actual practices and daily tasks of the participants
(b) collect experiences and represent them in an accessible and equitable manner
(c) provide a framework to guide the learning process
(d) represent the identities of the community members
There is a wide range of strategies for addressing these design considerations.
III. Models
From pp. 227-228 of How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School (NRC, 2000):
- internet-based communities of teachers exchange info/support for geographically-dispersed teachers
- WWW also enables widespread teacher communication, e.g. via websites of evaluated resources
- teacher communities of practice need environments that generate a "social glue", with
- chances for planned interactions
- tools for joint review and annotation of education resources
- opportunities for online collaborative design activities
- Tapped In (Teacher Professional Development Institute) is a good example
- it integrates synchronous ("live") and asynchronous (e.g. email) communication
- users can store/share documents & interact in an electronic ‘conference center’ environment
- teachers discuss issues, create/share resources, hold workshops, etc. w/ various virtual tools
- teachers can explore resources and engage in live conversations in various public "rooms"
- more than a dozen PD organizations have set up facilities within Tapped In
1. Tapped In (http://www.tappedin.org/)
The CILT (http://www.cilt.org) virtual community for online learning and professional development, based on a MUD (multi-user dungeon) model. "TAPPED IN™ is the online workplace of an international community of education professionals. K-12 teachers and librarians, professional development staff, teacher education faculty and students, and researchers engage in professional development programs and informal collaborative activities with colleagues."
2. Virtual High School (http://vhs.concord.org/home.htm)
The VHS (Virtual High School) project is a collaborative of high schools from around the country. In exchange for contributing a small amount of teaching time, a school in the collaborative can offer its students NetCourses ranging from advanced academic courses to technical and specialized courses.
3. WebCT (http://webct.com/)
Leading group in web-based course design. They have shifted their pitch to be community-based rather than course-based...though their mission statement would make you think their product is more about grading than learning: "Although automatic grading is a gift from the gods and a miracle of modern science, the real beauty of on-line testing is in the statistics that some of the packages generate for you after the test has been taken..."
Their vision of an online community is equally impoverished, being solely information based: "The Online Teaching and Learning community strives to provide information of interest and use to members of the online teaching and learning community. Recognizing how difficult it is to keep up with the massive amount of information circulated daily, we filter it for you with news from the online and distance education world, information about upcoming conferences, updates of ongoing discussions on well-known listservs, detailed site and software reviews, and more..."
4. Computer Strategies (http://www.compstrategies.com/home.html)
"Computer Strategies is a professional development company that provides customized, focused, and relevant coaching on-site and online for teachers. We have a team of curriculum and technology specialists who have designed innovative ways to motivate students and support teachers. We can help you with the challenging process of integrating technology into standards-based curriculum. We use our expertise, experience, and resources to help you every step of the way, from planning to implementation."
5. Connected University (http://www.cu.classroom.com/)
An online learning community from Classroom Connect, "Connected University provides online professional development you can count on for challenging content, maximum interactivity, and unmatched convenience."
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