Fostering a Self-Sustaining Professional Learning Community in Online Professional Development

by Rebecca C. Itow

Since 2011, I have been studying ways to help teachers adopt and adapt new practices that value learners’ experience and expertise as they explore new concepts. Often, this necessitates that teachers find ways to reconcile their experience and existing beliefs about knowledge & learning with the underlying assumptions of the new practices so that they can be worked into curricular designs. In Spring 2013, an opportunity arose to redesign the English Language Arts (ELA) courses of a university-run online high school. While the high school was ranked the #2 online high school in the United States, they wanted to update their pedagogy both to attend to the push to foster connected learning in participatory spaces and address accreditors’ concerns about their use of a correspondence model. Dan Hickey suggested I take on this task, enabling me to aid the school in redesigning their courses and to realize the potential of the research I had been doing for the last two years.

In 2012, Dan Hickey and I developed a model for professional development that aims to help teachers use participatory practices in their classrooms. I refined the design principles for what I call participatory professional development, and used them to design a six-week professional development workshop. This workshop provided teachers with the opportunity to learn new pedagogical practices and develop curricula in the kind of participatory space they were asked to design for their students. In the design of the workshop I posed questions and positioned activities intended to foster  a self-sustaining professional learning community. Within the community, the teachers could use one another’s expertise and experiences to make sense of the new pedagogical practices. In this way, teachers would have access to the new practices and could work together to find ways to reconcile them with their existing (and often tacit) beliefs about knowledge.

I wrote a job call announcing the professional development opportunity; it called for teachers who were interested in learning innovative techniques for teaching online to participate in the development of one of four ELA courses and ultimately teach that course. While the call was for four teachers, five who made a good impression were hired: four to design courses and one to provide support and feedback. Participatory practices were new to all of the teachers, and each approached this new model of pedagogy with different degrees of skepticism. One teacher was not very comfortable using technology, but was open to trying the new practices. Another teacher was highly wary of the practices and compared the model to competency-based interventions, but was willing to try them out for herself to see how they worked. Yet another teacher felt that these practices went against everything she had ever been taught, stating she didn’t trust these “faddish” innovations. 

The teachers worked within the learning management system in which they would ultimately conduct their courses. They used the discussion forums as their primary means for communicating with one another. They also met via videoconference using Google Hangouts three times a week during the workshop and once a month when the courses were running. Within the first week, the teachers started sharing their experiences – both classroom related and personal – with one another, peppering their feedback and discussions with personal anecdotes. Friendships formed quickly and, unbeknownst to me at the time, they began contacting one another outside of the professional development setting.

What was particularly interesting was the way the teachers began to use their positions in the community to gain support. One teacher struggled to integrate the practices into her designs, so she deliberately sought assistance from the two teachers she felt most adeptly used them in their work. This, she stated in an interview, helped her both in her immediate need to design curricula and to grow over time. The teacher hired to be a support to the other four had a particular advantage in that she read everyone’s lessons and had the opportunity to see the practices taken up in several different ways. Just before the courses started, she was asked to teach a course because someone else had dropped out. She quickly made adjustments to the course and started teaching. In the second week of the semester, she led a meeting encouraging the teachers to adopt the practices as she had, as she was seeing more engagement than she expected, and that engagement was highly disciplinary (focused on content)  and productive (posed new insights and questions).

The courses used a model of Participatory Learning and Assessment, which focuses on valuing engagement as learning. It engages learners in carefully crafted reflections on their engagement with the concepts, and situates learning in some context that is meaningful to the students. Each student chooses their own context, which acts as a lens for learning. For example, two athletes might each choose their sport, but one might focus their narrative around injuries they sustained and the other might focus on the kinesiology of the activity. All four courses produced more engagement that was both disciplinary and productive than the previous versions of these courses had ever seen. This was an accreditation year for the school, and the accreditation team cited the work in these four courses as a major contributing factor to their awarding of a full five year accreditation. The team recommended that the school continue to develop these more participatory courses and move away from the correspondence model.

This summer, we expanded the professional development to include pre-calculus, history, and biology teachers. Three of the five English teachers have returned and are now acting as mentors to the new teachers. Their participation is helping to sustain the community, and the new teachers are taking advantage of the English teachers’ expertise and experience in designing with these practices. The community discussion is robust, and the teachers are commenting and giving feedback to one another directly on their lessons in the form of comments in Google Docs. The collaborative nature og Google Docs allows for each community member to contribute and offer insights while valuing the author’s designs. Overwhelmingly, the teachers have expressed that they value the community and appreciate the opportunity to draw insights from the group, as they usually design in isolation. Teachers are sharing resources across domains, actively seeking out resources that may be helpful to their colleagues. Once the courses begin, the teachers have expressed the desire to continue meeting regularly, and have stated that they are already contacting each other outside of the professional development.

It has become clear in these workshops that the fostering of a self-sustaining professional learning community is key in supporting the learning of new pedagogical and assessment practices. It also aids in helping teachers integrate those practices into their curricular designs. Interestingly, the teachers have expressed a deep appreciation for the participatory nature of the PD, stating that having so much control over their own learning has made them realize how and when they remove that opportunity for agency from their students. The next iteration of this research will explore this notion of teacher agency further.