Designing on-line communities to enhance teacher professional development

Introduction Despite the interest in fostering new intentional online communities that support learning, online professional development is still a rarity and often not well understood (Barab, 2003). Many on-line communities are emerging in the wake of social networking tools, but how these environments benefit knowledge construction is unclear. In the Web 2.0 era, it seems only natural that the teaching profession, as a community, would identify the need for more technology-enhanced ways of sharing knowledge, social exchange and collaborating on effective strategies for student learning. This paper reports research on the use of the wiki tools and an accompanying Web site to create a teacher professional community focused on teacher learning. By engaging teachers in legitimate practices of planning, enactment and reflection within a community of peers, their study aims to establish a successful design for online communities of practice. This design-based research study, follows nine science teacher participants with different areas of domain specialties (such as biology, physics or chemistry) and different years of experience, as they co-design a technology-enriched project-based lesson for their courses. We explored the impact of scaffolded reflections and peer exchange in four phases: teacher background, lesson planning, enactment and revision. The teachers were prompted for reflection at regular intervals throughout the design process, and then participated in face-toface and on-line collaborative activities that examined their lesson design, their enactment and their students’ learning. These nine teachers established a community with both online and offline components and were committed to improving their practices, to developing their knowledge, to introducing innovative technologies to their science classrooms, and to improving their students’ learning.