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.