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Teacher professional development, technology, and Communities of practice: Are we putting the cart before the horse (2003)
| Venue: | The Information Society |
| Citations: | 71 - 2 self |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Schlager03teacherprofessional,
author = {Mark S. Schlager and Judith Fusco},
title = {Teacher professional development, technology, and Communities of practice: Are we putting the cart before the horse},
journal = {The Information Society},
year = {2003},
pages = {203--220}
}
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Abstract
Practice, then, both shapes and supports learning. We wouldn’t need to labor this point so heavily were it not that unenlightened teaching and training often pulls in the opposite direction. Brown & Duguid (2000, p. 129) Over the past decade, education reform and teacher training projects have spent a great deal of effort to create and support sustainable, scalable online communities of education professionals. For the most part, those communities have been created in isolation from the existing local professional communities within which the teachers practice. We argue that focusing on online technology solely as a mechanism to deliver training and/or create online networks places the cart before the horse by ignoring the Internet’s even greater potential to help support and strengthen local communities of practice within which teachers work. In this paper, we seek guideposts to help education technologists understand the nature of local K-12 education communities of practice—specifically their reciprocal relationship with teacher professional development and instructional improvement interventions—as a prerequisite to designing online sociotechnical infrastructure that supports the professional growth of education professionals.
Keyphrases
professional development education professional online technology education technologist reciprocal relationship brown duguid teacher training project education reform scalable online community local k-12 education community online network great deal opposite direction local community instructional improvement intervention professional growth online sociotechnical infrastructure unenlightened teaching local professional community teacher professional development teacher practice past decade
