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Online Communities of Practice and their Role in the Professional Development of Teachers

Jennifer Duncan-Howell   

Teachers are required to constantly change their pedagogy throughout their career, either in response to new theoretical approaches or new technological innovations.

Transcript

Interviewer: I’d like to welcome Jennifer Duncan Howell, welcome Jennifer

Jennifer Duncan-Howell: Thank you very much, lovely to be here

Interviewer: Jennifer can you please share with us what your research is about?

Jennifer Duncan-Howell: The research title was On Line Communities of Practice and their role in the Professional Development of Teachers so I was investigating that on line communities due to their availability and the activities and the interactions they afford presented as a form of continuous professional development for teachers that they could have access to.

Interviewer:    And what were the findings of your Research?

Jennifer Duncan-Howell: Well the findings…….there were 4 key findings all together, the first one found that due to the uninterrupted nature of on line communities they did present as a source of on going continuous professional development for teachers and this was an important role as the resource was able to accommodate the constant need for change that teachers face every day in their profession. 

The second finding was that participation in the on line community represented meaningful and authentic PD so it was diverse according to the needs of the members and it was also personally relevant authentic and contextualised for each of the teachers so this placed great value on it as a source of PD.

The third finding was that membership to an on line community could help build and maintain professional relationships so the relationships aren’t constrained by location anymore where previously teachers would be really forming relationships with people in their own personal schools, now these communities would help them facilitate relationships on a global scale so they could have access to teachers maybe in another State or overseas and get many many different perspectives.

And then the final one was that teachers are seeking changes to their practices that result in positive change to student learning and the on line communities provided a forum where they could discuss potential ideas for change, get feedback from teachers, find out if it did actually work and then go away implement it in their classroom and come back and discuss what happened so it was a great forum for actually providing changeable evidence of positive improvement in student learning.

Interviewer: And lastly what are the implications of your Research?

Jennifer Duncan-Howell: Well I think the implications were significance it lies in the fact that there were many changes being felt by the profession due to the introduction of information communication technologies and we now have student body that is very savvy on ICT and we also now have a teaching profession that is incredibly IT skilled so we have to continually think of new ways, well how can we harness these skills and how can we also harness the fact that we have the Internet at home or we have the Internet at school so the significance....one of the key significance was that we’re harnessing all of this new knowledge and all of these new facilities and using it for professional learning which hasn’t been done before and the second significance lies in professional development for teachers because it’s been largely reported by research that teachers are very dissatisfied of current PD programs, they’re not resulting in teacher……in effected change to their teaching practices, they’re very..…what’s the best word to use…….probably they’re very disgruntled with the types of programs that are available to them, they’re either very theory based or they’re based on content that hasn’t been decided by themselves so this is more personalised learning and more relevant to their needs and what they would like to learn.

Interviewer: Okay that’s great.  We might just go back because we’ve got time if you can just maybe expand a little bit more on just the research topic and the background behind that a bit more

Jennifer Duncan-Howell: Okay alright well

Interviewer: This is going to be edited and everything

Jennifer Duncan-Howell: Absolutely well there’s a few things behind the actual research, on line communities appear to be increasingly used by teachers for professional learning, not only professional learning but support, guidance, inspiration and their membership to these are voluntary and it’s quite phenomenal the number of teachers who are independently going out and joining these communities and this is evidenced by the sheer number of them that exist and the fact that apart from perhaps Australia and the United Kingdom there isn’t any organising body behind it, these could be just small chat groups attached to Yahoo websites or it just shows there is a motivation there to engage in professional learning so that was one of the inspirations behind the study to try to explain and to try to work out how this can be used in a meaningful way.  It was also to determine was it actual meaningful learning occurring in there, were they just chatting like in a staff room and was it really learning or was it just friendship and support.  So the research was conducted as a multiple explanatory case study and we used 3 on line communities, a local State one based in South Australia for English teachers so subject specific, a national Australian community called Oz Teachers Net and the third one is a UK based community which comes out of  /?/ called Top Teachers which is a group of teachers interested in IT and so they’re sort of broader the perspective enabled us to see what was happening not only in Australia but overseas as well and see if there were any similarities and one of the innovations of the study was that because we are looking at on line learning, we used on line methods of data collection.  So we developed an on line survey tool which we used initially and that went out to all members of the 3 communities, then we actually analysed the community transcripts, so all of the transcripts from all the community discussions, so we analysed those using content analysis so that was where we were unpacking the content of the community, what was actually going on, what were they talking about, was it genuine learning, was it meaningful or was it just gossip and chat and then the final one we developed an on line forum and pulled together a focus group from all 3 communities so we could just narrow down and just re-analyse some of the aims in the research questions that came out.

Interviewer: So thank you very much for your time Jennifer and thanks for sharing your research with us.

Jennifer Duncan-Howell: You’re very welcome