ICT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT BY ENCOURAGING COMMUNITIES AND NETWORKS ACROSS FIVE CLOSELY LOCATED K12 SCHOOLS

摘要

Many studies have found that participation in teacher communities is an essential part of professional development. Such professional development could be described as a relational-responsive approach to change because thoughts and activities emerge inside relationships rather than outside or planned beforehand. Most research has focused on teacher communities within schools. One of the weaknesses of the community perspective is that each community creates epistemic barriers between different communities. For example, a mathematics teacher community and physical education teacher community might describe and understand their use of ICT in different ways, although they share a common interest, i.e. to improve learning. Thus, a key challenge is to coordinate the knowledge produced in different communities. Individuals and communities can be connected through networks, inside and across schools. The aim of this paper is to explore how the encouragement of communities and networks could contribute to ICT professional development across schools. This paper is based on a project, carried out during 2013-2015, with the purpose to encourage ICT professional development across five Swedish K12 schools. These schools are located in a quite small geographical area, within walking distance from each other, and all activities and meetings for the teachers were conducted at these schools. The authors of this paper participated as action researchers, and encouraged the formation of a school leader community and lead teacher community. The school leader community included two or three school leaders from each school and the lead teacher community included one or two lead teachers from each school. The lead teachers mainly worked as teachers but were also expected to support and encourage ICT professional development. They organized conferences and workshops, inspired by the TeachMeet model, and complemented with opportunities for reflection for the teachers in the five schools. There were about 230 teachers working in the five schools, representing all grades and subject disciplines. All seven participants of the lead teacher community were interviewed. Each semi-structured interview was about one hour and was subsequently recorded and transcribed. The lead teacher community played a central role, but ICT professional development was dependent on the interplay of different types of communities and networks. We identified six examples of communities and networks: (a) School leader community: A community with the shared common purpose to make joint decisions that were necessary in order to enable ICT professional development across the five schools; (b) Online teacher network: The lead teachers primarily gained inspiration by following other teachers by using social media; (c) Lead teacher community: A community with the shared common purpose of organizing large-scale professional development in conferences and workshops; (d) Teacher network: The teachers of the five schools were loosely connected in a network with the common purpose of sharing experience of using ICT in pedagogical practice; (e) Intra-school teacher community: Some teachers worked in intra-school teacher communities with the common purpose of improving their use of ICT in pedagogical practice, based on what was learnt during the conferences and workshops; (f) Inter-school teacher network: Teachers belonging to smaller subject disciplines, such as home economics and physical education, jointly formed inter-school networks with the common purpose of sharing experience of using ICT in subject-specific pedagogical practice. The study illustrates that ICT professional development across the five schools was dependent on different types of communities and networks. It was evident that the organization of joint activities also contributed to learning in unexpected ways, such as spontaneously initiated intra-school teacher communities and inter-school teacher networks. Examples of cha