2004
Issues and Trends
Charalambos Vrasidas
Intercollege/CAIT
Gene V Glass
Arizona State University
INTRODUCTION
Recent education reform efforts have emphasized teacher professional development and continuing education, and it is widely accepted that a teacher’s development spans an entire career (McIntyre & Byrd, 1998). Among the forces driving a renewed interest in teacher professional development are the use of technology for teaching and learning, a shift of pedagogical approaches toward constructivism, an emphasis on standards driven education, and systems thinking as it applies to career-long teacher education (Means, 1994; Sparks & Hirsh, 1997).
Professional development helps teachers develop the content knowledge and skills they need to succeed in their classrooms. By improving their skills and knowledge, teachers become better prepared to make the right curriculum and instructional decisions. As content areas, teaching approaches, and pedagogies change and develop, teachers must grow and develop over the course of their careers. Pre-service teacher education programs are by no means sufficient to provide teachers all the skills needed to be effective in the classroom. Just as physicians are ill-prepared to practice medicine independently before their residency, so are young teachers to practice teaching.
Professional development can take a variety of shapes: collective or individual development, continuing education, pre-service and in-service education, group work, team curriculum development, peer collaboration, and peer support. Professional development, as Fullan (1991) argued, is “the sum total of formal and informal learning experiences throughout one’s career” (p. 326). Professional development is a growing need as schools move toward reform, and as new policies are established for teacher certification and recertification. Professional development is essential for schools struggling with new accountability measures imposed by state and federal governments.
Some regard teachers as the primary agents for changing education (Akkerman, Lam, & Admiraal, Chapter 15, this volume). Teacher professional development is often cited as a key lever for moving education off dead-center toward a better future. According to the report How Teaching Matters: Bringing the Classroom Back into Discussions of Teacher Quality, “math students whose teachers have received professional development in working with special populations outperform their peers by more than a full grade level, and students whose teachers have received professional development in higher-order thinking skills outperformed their peers by 40% of a grade level” (Wenglinsky, 2000, p. 7).
CHARACTERISTICS OF EFFECTIVE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Much has been discovered in the last five decades about how humans learn. Students learn best when they are actively engaged in meaningful activities; when they collaborate with peers, exchange ideas, and provide and receive peer feedback; when they reflect critically on what they are doing; when they work on real-world, challenging, authentic activities; when their work is constantly evaluated; and when they are intrinsically motivated. But we tend to forget that teachers learn best in these ways too. Good professional development for teachers will resemble the best teaching, as we are beginning to understand it.
Teaching toward understanding and helping students become independent learners require that teachers themselves become thoughtful, independent learners. Research has shown that teachers tend to teach as they were taught (Ball, 1990; Lortie, 1975). Teachers themselves have spent upward of 20 years as students in elementary, secondary, and college classes. Consequently, their experiences as learners are often indelibly etched in their minds and shape their daily teaching. Excellent professional development will provide teachers with opportunities to think like experts in making instructional decisions, structuring learning activities, and employing sound pedagogical strategies under authentic circumstances. Professional development of teachers presents a unique circularity unlike professional development in any other field: the recipients are being taught how to teach; it follows that the teaching itself must exemplify all that is best in pedagogy.
Innovative professional development for teachers will involve opportunities for teachers to share their expertise, learn from peers, and collaborate on real-world projects. Teachers’ needs will be served when they are able to make connections between their work and professional development through continuing education (Darling-Hammond & McLaughlin, 1995). Professional development has traditionally been offered from the top down. Ministries and departments of education in various states and counties decide what needs to be delivered to teachers, and persons at lower levels in the bureaucratic hierarchy are directed to deliver it. Contemporary approaches to professional development, on the other hand, strive to involve all stakeholders in the planning, development, presentation, and evaluation of professional development opportunities for teachers. Effective professional development must be coordinated with broader school improvement efforts rather than be delivered in isolation. And follow-up activities should be structured to ensure that professional development makes a difference.
Good professional development encourages the use of a variety of features related to knowledge, skills, and practice and should focus on deepening one’s content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge (i.e., how individuals learn particular content). Opportunities provided in a professional development program should also promote active learning individually and collectively. It is important that these experiences be united within a coherent framework that provides participants with a clear view of the connections between what they learn during professional development and their practice. Collective participation in professional development is essential for its success (American Institutes for Research, 1999). Professional development must honor the complexity of teachers’ practices, be continuous, coherent, and based on adult learning theory. Moving beyond the simple transmission of knowledge and skills, professional development should allow participants to develop the reflective skills needed to gain new insights into their pedagogical approaches and teaching practice.
MAJOR THEMES IN ONLINE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
One of the more pressing questions faced by the teaching profession today is whether this idealized vision of professional development can be realized “online.” The National Center for Education Statistics conducted a survey in 2000 to examine the status of professional development. For all but one content area of professional development, teachers typically reported that they had spent a day or less on the professional development activity during the 12 months preceding the survey. Furthermore, the majority of the teachers (over 80%) felt that professional development was not linked to a “great extent” to other school improvement activities. Another finding indicated that only between 10 and 15% of the teachers reported that they were given significant follow-up materials or activities. In addition, fewer than one in four teachers felt that their professional development activity significantly improved their teaching (National Center for Education Statistics, 2001). Several of these issues are addressed by online professional development initiatives discussed in this book.
During its early years, distance education was predominantly based on approaches that emphasized a linear and objectivist approach to learning and teaching (Vrasidas, 2000). Such traditional instructional design principles and practices derived from a long tradition of behaviorist models of teaching and learning (Segrave & Holt, 2003). The use of prepackaged material ignored interaction among students and tutors. Distance education practitioners carried with them their objectivist assumptions and beliefs, which were reflected in the design of distance education and teaching practices (Jonassen, Davidson, Collins, Campbell, & Haag, 1995; Vrasidas, 2000). In recent years, there has been a shift in online education toward pedagogical models that value interaction among participants, the social nature of learning, community, and reflection in practice. Online environments are rapidly expanding as a venue for professional development in education, business, and industry. The demands of work and family life for teachers, many of whom are women, underline the need for professional development activities that can be delivered anytime, anywhere. Missing are frameworks grounded in research and evaluation that can provide some direction to the creation and evaluation of online professional development. Research is needed that will help improve distance education theory and practice at all levels. A coordinated, systematic study and evaluation of online professional development will allow designers, developers, researchers, and policymakers to make informed decisions for project development and implementation. This book brings together a diverse group of authors from around the world who have something important to say about the shape and future of online professional development.
The Center for the Application of Information Technologies at Western Illinois University commissioned a study to investigate the status of teacher professional development in the United States (Clark, 2000). The main goal of the study was to examine the use of online technologies to support teacher professional development and to meet the certification needs of teachers. The study looked at leading projects and provided information on key issues in state-sponsored professional development. These issues included professional development providers, technologies used, funding resources, curriculum issues, assessment, policy and administration, and marketing. In several of the programs examined, it was found that the best approach is a combination of face-to-face and online professional development. Other issues had to do with teacher technology skills to participate in online professional development, existing staff development infrastructures, teacher recertification and professional development reform efforts, and school technology infrastructures.
Although online professional development is widely used, there are many barriers to effective participation in such initiatives. One of these is limited teacher access to the Internet, which results in certain groups of teachers being disadvantaged, thus increasing the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” (Clark, 2000). There are several skeptics who question the use of online education (Fabos & Young, 1999; Kellner, 2000; Noble, 1998; Vrasidas & Zembylas, 2003; Zembylas, Vrasidas, & McIsaac, 2002). To properly understand the impact of online education, one needs to examine critically the issues involved from online education projects serving international audiences. Fabos and Young (1999) argued that “just as telecommunications technology is credited with promoting multiculturalism, it has also been blamed for increasing existing inequities on a broader scale” (pp. 233–234). However, we must acknowledge that online professional development offers opportunities that are often not available to many teachers.
One of the main themes guiding the development of online professional development is that of communities of practice. It is argued by several scholars that learning is no longer, if it ever was, an individual but a social activity (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). A social view of learning implies that learners work within a social context and share and co-construct knowledge with others. New technologies, particularly the online environment, allow access to knowledge and expertise that was previously unavailable. Although there is a major shift toward social constructivist approaches to professional development and teacher education, teachers still need to master a set of skills. Professional development needs to strike a balance between individual proficiency and socially shared knowledge and activities (Marx, Blumenfeld, Krajcik, & Soloway, 1998). From the research reported in this volume, perhaps the most prominent theme is the use of “communities of practice” as a design and analytical framework for teacher professional development. The concept of community is fundamental in our understanding of how people learn and how professional development can take place online.
Communities of practice are groups of individuals bound together by what they do and by what they have learned through their mutual participation in these activities. Rules of engagement within a community of practice are constantly renegotiated, although there is a shared repertoire of communal activities, routines, discourses, and the like that members have developed (Wenger, 1998). Thus, communities of practice are being thought of as sites of mutual learning and as important contributors to the success of knowledge-dependent organizations. These communities are known for constantly reinventing and reproducing their structure, role, and meaning. In the last decade or so, there is increasing interest in constructing e-learning spaces to support communities of practice (Ge & McAdoo, Chapter 16, this volume; Kim, 2000; Schlanger & Fusco, 2002; Schwen & Hara, 2003). Listservs, bulletin boards, and course management systems can offer alternative methods for the construction of communities. Dede, Whitehouse, and Brown L’Bahy (2002), for example, refer to how information and communication technologies are facilitating the development of virtual communities for creating, sharing, and mastering knowledge. Among their examples are notable initiatives such as the Teacher Professional Development Institute (TAPPED IN—http://ti2.sri.com/tappedin) and the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF—http://ilf.crlt.indiana.edu). What characterizes communities of practice is a shared commitment to a particular practice, which creates a network that enables and promotes knowledge sharing and professional development (Barab, MaKinster, & Scheckler, in press; Hoadley & Pea, 2002; Wenger, 1998; Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002). The Inquiry Learning Forum is an example of teacher communities used for professional development in which mathematics and science teachers collaborate to create inquiry-based environments for their students (Barab et al., in press).
STAR-Online (Supporting Teachers with Anywhere/Anytime Resources) is a model for continuing education and professional development for teachers that draws on the theoretical ideas of constructivism, situated-distributed cognition, and communities of practice. Teachers can access mentors, colleagues, and resources via a Web-based Virtual Teaching and Learning Community (VTLC) system, which provides interactive, self-paced, and collaborative development. The VTLC is an online staff development model that allows teachers to develop knowledge and skills in the application of educational technology. Through the VTLC, teachers can participate in quality online training modules, access resources and an online portfolio, and communicate with and collaborate with other teachers nationwide. More than 20,000 teachers have benefited from this project. One of its major goals is to develop an online learning community that will provide a comprehensive, collaborative communication system with a rich array of individualized training available to teachers anytime, anywhere— thereby building capacity at individual, classroom, regional, state, and national levels. STAR-Online continues to meet pressing technology needs, overcoming geographic isolation, limited resources, diverse cultures, and students at risk by expanding its content and resources (see http:// www.star-online.org).
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