It will come as no surprise that one of the goals of Connected Educator Month is to get more educators connected. We hope to entice some of the 75 percent of educators who are not members of an online community of practice to join one, and to convince some of the 92 percent of educators who are not on Twitter to begin building a personal learning network. In a smart blog post earlier today, Tom Whitby explains why this is such a challenge: The most efficient mechanisms for engaging with educators during Connected Educator Month are the ones  we would like to introduce to more educators.  But we are not going to reach the unconnected using them. For example, we may have a rich and vital Twitter conversation going on, as this social network diagram by Marc Smith suggests, but it is invisible to people who are not on Twitter.

Whitby suggests that we may have to look beyond social media and online events to “print media, television and radio, and articles in journals, newspapers and magazines” to reach educators who are not yet connected. But even if we are successful there, he suggests, there is a deeper cultural challenge, which he explains as follows:

We are not a profession of connected educators. We are content experts with access to content that we are not accessing. We are advocates of ideas with the ability to share ideas that we are not sharing. We are creators without using the ability we have to create for an authentic audience of millions who could benefit by our creations. We fight for the status quo of comfort and compliance. This doesn’t make sense to many of you — those of us who are connected.

Most educators do not see sharing their practice beyond the walls of their schools or even their classrooms as a primary professional responsibility. And many have been taught that seeking support, resources, and guidance in social spaces that are not strictly private signals weakness or even incompetence. The challenge of bringing them online is not simply a lack of awareness, technical skill, or time; it is about core professional identity.

A social network diagram of #ce12/#cem12 tweets created by Marc Smith

Even with hundreds of organizations and thousands of individual connected educators hosting hundreds of events and composing thousands of tweets and blog posts, it may be unreasonable to expect that this first Connected Educator Month will decisively turn the tide. We certainly are beginning to see educators learning and collaborating online for the first time this month. This likely is the result of a combination of the grassroots efforts of connected educators working in their schools and districts, outreach by organizations to educators whose only online presence may be an e-mail address, and coverage in the press (some of which is tracked here). While it is too early to be able to accurately estimate numbers, it is fair to assume that collectively we will have engaged only a fraction of the millions of educators who could benefit by becoming connected.

Organizing already connected educators and the organizations that support them may very well be a necessary first step towards the eventual sea change we seek.  Because making connected educators the norm rather than the exception requires not just a change in behavior but also in identity, it is critical to make what it is like to live that new identity increasingly visible. We connected educators need to become clearer about what we value about learning and collaborating online, how it is making our professional lives more exciting and fulfilling, and how it is changing our practice in a way that enables us to better support our students’ learning and development. We need to become better able to account for the full range of opportunities to engage with each other,; with resources,; and with experts, parents, and members of our communities who have something to contribute.

In the process of mapping out our shared identity as connected educators and developing a shared awareness of the full range of opportunities to connect—through the organizations, companies, and grassroots networks that enable these opportunities during Connected Educator Month—we are building a network we can mobilize well beyond August 31. By the end of Connected Educator Month, our collective investment in the shared project of building a more connected, collaborative profession will have deepened and our understanding of our capabilities will have broadened. Already, we are seeing organizations in this space promote each other’s work and partner to host activities and events to an unprecedented extent.

After Connected Educator Month, we hope to build on the considerable investment many of us have made to engage educators who remain unconnected, keeping in mind the depth of that challenge. First, the Connected Educator initiative will spend the next several months archiving and synthesizing many of the conversations and resources you have all generated during Connected Educator Month. Through the Connected Educator Month proceedings and a new edition of Connect & Inspire, we plan to offer a map of opportunities for connected learning to educators and examples of how they are being utilized that can help us all communicate the value of educators learning and collaborating online to our not-yet-connected colleagues.

Second, we hope that the organizations that have participated in Connected Educator Month will have seen sufficient value in what we achieved collectively in August to join together to decide how to do it again next year with even more impact. These organizations include not just those with a primary focus on technology or connected learning, but many broad-based organizations that have the capability to reach hundreds of thousands of educators who are not yet learning and collaborating online. These organizations include unions, subject- and role-focused professional organizations, districts, and state education agencies. In many cases, these organizations are dipping their toes in this year. Next year, we hope they will jump in headfirst.

With a map of opportunities for connected learning online, rich accounts of the practice of connected educators, and the backing of a diverse group of organizations with reach, we can make the argument that being a connected educator is not simply a desirable add-on to the real work of helping students learn. It is integral to the future of the profession.

Darren Cambridge, Ph.D., is senior consultant, education technology and online communities of practice at the American Institutes for Research in Washington, DC, where he serves as project director for the U.S. Department of Education’s Connected Educators project and advises a range of government, university, and corporate clients on learning technology and professional learning. Cambridge won the 2012 Digital Media and Learning Faculty Prize for Electronic Portfolios for Lifelong Learning and Assessment (Jossey-Bass, 2010). His work appears in a wide range of scholarly journals and books.

We want a team to think about action research as a collaborative endeavor, where principals and teachers work together to improve something over time. It’s not just about gathering data, it’s about working hard to improve something. Maybe you see a need to improve writing in the building, and you’re going to figure out whether there’s a way to take a techno-constructivist approach to strengthening students’ writing skills. Maybe you feel the culture of your school is very mired in antiquated approaches to teaching and learning, and you want to build a new culture of innovation and collaboration, so you’re going to develop your project around that goal.

Our experience over the last five years demonstrates that action research supported by and shared through an online community of practice is a good strategy to help participants focus on 21st century collaboration and teaching ideas, so long as the project is their own conception: They choose the topic and goal. Using collaborative action research projects to support learning and engagement is an idea that could be adapted by other professional development-oriented communities, but expect some resistance if you choose this strategy.

In PLP, we don’t want our online communities of practice to function as a one-size-fits-all model.  We don’t say, “This is your template, this is what we want you to do.” Instead, we want to help team members begin to think like researchers. Many of the teams get really frustrated when we reveal that we’re not going to tell them what to do. They don’t like deciding what it’s supposed to be about. Deep collegial work—the kind that asks teachers to be researchers, to be curriculum designers, to empower themselves as a group—that’s not something that naturally aligns with the traditional school culture that’s still alive in many schools.

That’s why ongoing engagement with PLP staff and with other teams through our online communities is essential. In dialogue in the communities, we do help individual teams try to “find” their projects. We do push back when we think the project isn’t ambitious enough or doesn’t drill deep enough. But we don’t hold any hands. On our Voices blog one of our team leaders shared this story:

“Our first idea was entirely too broad. When we presented it during an Elluminate session with our cohort, we got shot down – hard. We were angry, frustrated, and went back to our corner sulking and fuming… for a day. Then we took a deep breath, pulled together, and got down to business. What emerged from that point was an incredibly successful effort.”

Another team wanted to improve student engagement. They first had to identify what engagement is. It turned out that they all had different ideas about what the term meant. In order to forge a common understanding grounded in evidence, they chose to identify the key factors associated with whether or not students become engaged. There were five members of the team, all teachers, and they isolated some key factors and went into their own classrooms to find out how important each factor was to engagement. They came out with some pretty powerful findings. They found that student engagement increases when we give kids authentic tasks to accomplish. Passion or interest was another key factor: When the students had the opportunity to approach new content or new skills through a strong personal interest or passion, engagement deepened. As we interacted with them in our online community spaces over the course of the project, we found it rewarding to listen to this team talk and share what they discovered with other people, to hear them thinking through some ideas about building engagement across their school.

Those of us who have spent years examining pedagogical research might not be surprised by their findings, but to be able to confirm research through classroom practice is huge for teachers, who are constantly hearing one side say something is effective and the other side say it’s not. Generalized pedagogical principles need to be checked against and integrated into the “local knowledge” of teaching and learning that is part of the school culture. The proof is in the classroom—that’s what action research is all about. And thanks to their PLP work together, these teachers went on to create a legacy for their school.

In most cases, to yield results like these, teams of teachers (with or without a principal involved) have to go through some re-acculturation. They have to push themselves way past their comfort level to collaborate deeply on an important topic. But, as we know, whenever you DO dig deeper—whenever you make the journey and expend the energy it takes to reach the destination—you come to a place of great satisfaction and new insight.

These projects start out because we push teams to do them. We announce that there will be a culminating event where they’ll showcase their project in a virtual gathering of their peers. So there’s an accountability factor: They don’t want to show up empty-handed. But that’s most often just the catalyst that gets them started. The best projects pull in people at the school who are not even on the team. They just want to get involved because they find the collaboration—the action research piece—intriguing and potentially useful. Quite often, if you visit a school a year or two later, someone can show you evidence of the long-term impact.

For example, Hampton Roads Academy offered no professional development for teachers related to 21st century learning prior to a team of six teachers from the school conducting a year-long action research project through a PLP-connected learning community. The research revealed the need for better faculty collaboration across divisions, which they were able to achieve through using such tools as Ning for social networking and Diigo for social bookmarking. Teachers are now not just actively using these tools to learn together but also with their students, and the school has instituted a range of ongoing, formal opportunities for professional development related to using emerging technologies in the classroom. Patti Grayson, a third grade teacher and one of the original team members, is now a popular blogger and is heading a team of division and department heads to help them become connected educators.

One thing that designers of communities of practice can do—and we need to build this into our PLP design in more overt ways—is help teachers discover the potential they have to empower themselves. Once this realization becomes widespread, teaching will become a real profession. This transformation is happening already in some settings and communities. As teachers gain collective efficacy, they begin to police themselves, and they start to draw on the well of wisdom that their collective experiences represent.

We need many more teachers doing this, because nobody who drops by to watch them teach and determine “what works” is ever going to have the depth of understanding that comes from years of reflective classroom practice. Nobody else will need to tell them “what works.”

But the challenge standing in the way of that empowerment is building in reflection as a routine part of practice. Teacher reflection is so important and still so scarce in so many schools, that it ought to be a priority for any community of practice aimed at improving pedagogy. Action research in connected learning communities is a key means for enabling a deepened reflective teaching practice that empowers educators.

Sheryl Nussbaum Beach is co-founder of Powerful Learning Practice and a 20-year educator with experiences as a classroom teacher, technology coach, charter school principal, district administrator, and digital learning consultant.

As individuals and communities of practice increasingly adopt social media, data about who knows who can be captured, visualized, and analyzed to give us a better understanding of the larger social topology. Exploring this social graph can provide actionable insights to community administrators, marketers, and even community members. Until recently, the exploration of social network data was an important yet esoteric enterprise, limited primarily to Ph.D.s and those with extensive technical know-how. We have been working for several years with a group of colleagues across the nation (see SocialMediaResearchFoundation) to help make social network analysis more accessible to everyday users. Our efforts have been encapsulated in NodeXL (see image below), a free and open-source Excel plug-in that can be used by anyone who can work with a spreadsheet.

NodeXL helps novices acquire network datasets from social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, analyze them using powerful social network metrics, and visualize them using state-of-the-art techniques that help identify important individuals, cliques, and trends. Though some effort is required to internalize “network thinking” and get familiar with NodeXL, our experience teaching students and professionals of all experience levels has convinced us that even nontechnical novices can quickly gain actionable insights about their own networks and those that underlie the communities they help cultivate. (See this paper on the topic.)

Enough talk. Let’s see what a social network looks like and what insights can be gained from it.

Example 1: @openednews Followers

• Identify subgroups of people in the network who are well connected. This particular graph shows three main subgroups (i.e., clusters) identified by colors and grouped into separate boxes (blue, red, and green). These subgroups are automatically identified by the fact that they are more highly interconnected with each other than with the rest of the network. They represent cliques of people or organizations that know one another. In this case, the green subgroup includes prominent education news outlets, the blue subgroup includes research-oriented organizations and individuals, and the red subgroup includes many individual educators, researchers, and education-focused nonprofits.
• Identify important individuals such as those labeled. In this graph, the size of the node is based on the number of Twitter followers, one measure of importance. Notice that some Twitter accounts (e.g., jolinarodriguez, creativecommons) have many Twitter followers but are not well connected to others following @openednews. In contrast, others like usatodaycollege and futurelabedu are popular among @openednews followers, as well as on Twitter globally. Other users have few Twitter followers globally (i.e., they’re small) but are very well connected to other @openednews followers (e.g., bon_education, oercommons, 4cinitiative, edinnovation). Network analysis provides many measures of importance (called “centrality”), for example, popularity (i.e., number of followers), betweenness centrality (people who span across subgroups such as eifdotorg and edinnovation), and eigenvector centrality (people who are well connected to “popular” people). @openednews could use this information to identify people whom they might personally contact or cultivate a relationship with.

For more than six years, TLINC has supported partnerships with universities and school districts across the country that focus on teacher preparation. TLINC recognizes that teachers entering the workforce today are used to being part of networked communities outside of school and works to bring that connectedness inside schools. TLINC provides a real-time, 24-hours-a-day/7-days-a-week support network of peers, mentors, higher education faculty, and accomplished classroom veterans. New teachers experience a strong start because they are inducted into professional learning communities that blend face-to-face and online collaboration. This school year, with the support of Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach initiative and partnerships with Kajeet for Education, edWeb.net, and HTC, NCTAF has distributed 200 mobile devices (HTC smartphones and tablets) to teacher candidates at five partner universities, enabling TLINC to “go mobile.”

As with any innovation, our “going mobile” implementation has been exciting, but the process has not been without bumps along the way. Some of the bumps have been great learning moments about the ways schools are organized and what needs to be changed so that professional learning communities of networked teachers can be supported.

There have been some successes in terms of how teacher candidates can use tablets and smartphones to improve their clinical teaching experiences, including having access to e-mail and edWeb.net, the social learning network for TLINC’s online communities; capturing video footage of lessons that are then sent to their clinical faculty at the university; and communicating with peers, mentors, and cooperating teachers. One student teacher at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) described how she was able to record her students (all English language learners [ELLs]) reading aloud. She played the recording back for one of her university professors, who was then able to help her plan some lessons that addressed the sounds that the students were having trouble pronouncing. Another student teacher, also at UTEP, called her tablet her “teacher toolkit,” talking energetically about how she’d been able to download several of the textbooks she needed. She added that she’d made digital flashcards that she used to quiz herself and the other student teachers at her school as they prepared for exams.

During the pilot, three sets of challenges have emerged. The first is the lack of access that school districts provide to nondistrict personnel. A principal goal of both TLINC 1.0 and TLINC 2.0 is to build closer connections between teacher preparation programs and the districts they serve to create seamless preparation and practice. The importance of this goal was underscored when our partner universities told us that districts’ Wi-Fi networks weren’t accessible to student teachers. This is important because the data-heavy work, such as sending video files, needs to be done by means of Wi-Fi because it’s much faster and cheaper than using a mobile network. NCTAF sees this challenge as an area ripe for targeted policy development between colleges of education and their partnering school districts. The conventional understanding of the teaching profession as a solo, artisan practice will change only when both teacher preparation institutions and districts can manage the logistics necessary for teachers to leverage technology’s connective power.

The second set of challenges pertains to engaging college of education faculty members in this networked community supported by advanced mobile technologies. TLINC strives to create a collaborative culture in teacher preparation programs by facilitating collaboration among preservice and novice teachers, supervising teachers, and university faculty in blended face-to-face and online communities of support. We have built a community of site directors who meet online (synchronously and asynchronously). This online forum provides a productive space for faculty to discuss successes and challenges in implementing TLINC. After a slow start, this cross-site collaboration has blossomed, and there is evidence of similar growth within cohorts of teacher candidates who are doing their clinical internships in the same school. Now, however, we need to expand this community forum and engagement to all college of education faculty members who will then be able to collaborate with their students in the use of mobile devices.

The third set of challenges relates to a feeling of “device fatigue” among teacher candidates. Many student teachers already have mobile devices. Why would they use another one? This question is valid. On a practical level, we felt that, for the purposes of evaluating how student teachers used advanced mobile technologies, it would be better if the devices had the same functionality. Our initial thinking was that the shift toward the more collaborative approach that NCTAF is trying to facilitate would be strengthened considerably if participants had devices dedicated to professional learning.

This leads back to one of TLINC’s goals: to develop educators who are ready to enter a networked profession. Think about a businesswoman who works as part of a team and is expected to be in contact with colleagues through a variety of methods. By providing her with professional tools, her company sends a clear message. NCTAF asserts that the same should hold true for teachers and teacher candidates. Achieving this expectation is, in fact, a TLINC 2.0 project goal. We are working to determine which devices and strategies are most useful to student teachers—our preliminary conversations indicate that students find that tablets are useful for staying organized and keeping in touch with colleagues and, unlike phones, do not duplicate functionality.

Professional learning communities are designed to tap into teachers’ desire for professional development targeted to their needs. Mobile devices have the potential to extend that vision, and they will do so when teachers are supported in learning and working as members of a team. We all need to put our heads together to empower our newest teachers in the connective practice that strengthens and benefits professionals working in other sectors.

Sofia Rivkin-Haas is a program manager at the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future.

Literacy and Learning Exchange Homepage

This month, the National Council of Teachers of English, in partnership with the Ball Foundation and 20 leading organizations committed to the advancement of literacy and learning, announced the creation of the National Center for Literacy Education (NCLE). The goal of NCLE is to improve literacy learning by sharing and strengthening the plans, practices, support systems, and assessments used by successful, innovative communities of practice across the United States. This goal will be accomplished through the Literacy in Learning Exchange (the Exchange), a free online community of practice that will provide cases that show clearly how teams of educators develop powerful teaching and planning processes. More than just sample lesson plans and assessments, the Exchange will describe how to build the conditions and capacity to support sustained literacy learning over time in all school and community settings. Because it links resources and techniques to rich representations of the contexts in which they have been successfully applied, and because its content is enriched through the interactions it mediates, the case may prove to be a crucial genre for online communities of practice that seek to help schools and districts bring collaborative educational practices to scale.

For example, a draft case on the pilot version of the Exchange documents a community of practice at Rowland High School in Rowland Heights, California, that has been working since 2010 to explore the question, “What is the significance of academic vocabulary and how does it impact instructional practices and learning outcomes?” The description of the community’s activities and context is sufficiently detailed to help other schools and districts understand how they might replicate, modify, or build on the work in Rowland Heights. Moving beyond just collecting and implementing best practices to allow time for reflection that connects instructional strategies to teachers’ professional identities has proved critical for the group. This analysis is supported by a series of multimedia companion pieces that can help other educators capitalize on the community’s learning, such as a video that details five principles of vocabulary learning, complemented by excerpts from related research.

Rowland High School Academic Vocabulary Community of Practice Case

The case is not simply a static collection of resources. The Exchange’s community tools allow other educators to discuss and augment the case, sharing their own experiences, uploading related resources, and reporting back about their efforts to use the case materials to guide the development of communities of practice in their own schools. In the course of discussion, members of communities of practice at schools across the United States can support each other, and the persistent record of that support has the potential to benefit yet others. In this way, the value of the case itself will increase as other members of the Exchange use it.

Creating such compelling cases that document cross-subject literacy education communities of practice requires sustained effort. To provide incentives for schools to find the time to share their practices through the Exchange and at demonstration sessions held at national conferences across the county, NCLE will celebrate and support Literacy in Every Classroom Sites. These sites (schools or school systems) will earn badges by committing to share data about how they collaborate across disciplines to support literacy, how practices are changing, and what they are observing about changes in student learning. In return, not only will they be recognized for their work by NCLE and stakeholder organizations, but they also will gain access to a select network of educators and literacy experts who can provide constructive feedback and advice as they work to improve school practices. They also will be eligible to apply for small demonstration grants to fund efforts to widely disseminate their work.

To sustain and broaden the gains observed in participating schools as captured through the cases and online interactions around them, NCLE will fund collaborative research projects and share their findings with policy leaders at local, state, and national levels. Findings will be infused back into participating schools, and implications will be made available to policymakers through peer-reviewed publications, seminars, and colloquies.

As we’ve learned from decades of trying, no single initiative can transform teaching and learning. However, by building an initiative that draws upon a network of resources and expertise from successful schools and professional organizations and supports school teams in making their own choices about how to enrich literacy learning, we can see if “ground-up” improvement efforts can gain a measure of success that has eluded top-down models. We are eager to learn the role case-based online communities of practice can play in the emergence of such educational transformation.

Kent Williamson is executive director of the National Council of Teachers of English and director of the National Center for Literacy Education.

From its inception, NSDL was tasked to demonstrate the impact of digital libraries on teacher practice or, if at all possible, on student outcomes. This proved to be challenging in the highly heterogeneous, highly distributed, and relatively anonymous usage environment of the open Web. Outside of a few controlled research studies, online resource providers lacked the proper feedback mechanisms to examine the texture of usage at multiple scales. Evaluation methodologies borrowed from conventional library practices or those used to assess the efficacy of formally adopted curricular materials did not effectively represent the authentic use of open learning content by teachers on the ground. Traditional Web metrics also left us wanting: What does it mean that 100,000 users came to our home page? What does it tell us when an individual user clicks on a resource? Was it useful? Did he or she incorporate it into a lesson? Did he or she adapt it for a different context? How easy was it to implement? What do we need to improve about that resource?

We needed to reconceptualize our notions of impact to match the changing realities of teacher practice. In response, we have begun to focus on the online educator communities where new practices are nucleating and where teachers are rapidly expanding their consumption and production of expert-generated, peer-generated, and self-authored content.

The rapid speciation of online communities of practice allows for authentic examination of digital resources as they are being discovered, created, and used by educators. As teachers increasingly interact around digital content in complex collaboration environments online, we have an opportunity to surface this collective knowledge production about what is working and what needs are going unmet with regard to the current generation of digital learning resources—and to meaningfully inform the requirements setting for the next generation of learning tools. Most important, we can now gather that intelligence as it emerges across diverse platforms, aggregate and interpret it, and feed it back into the workflows of user communities as a new layer of data to inform their decision making around digital content.

NSDL launched the STEM Exchange as a means to mobilize content into the hands of educators through online communities and to establish return feedback loops of data created by the activities of communities around that content—a type of data we have defined as paradata, adapting the term from its application in the social sciences. The concept of learning resource paradata is grounded in the premise that teachers trust teachers to understand and inform what might be most useful to a particular pedagogical context. Paradata provides a mechanism to openly exchange data about how resources are discovered, assessed for utility, and integrated into the processes of designing learning experiences. Each of the individual and collective actions of favoriting, foldering, rating, sharing, remixing, embedding, and embellishing that are the hallmarks of today’s teacher workflow around digital content are points of paradata that can serve as indicators about resource utility and emerging teacher practices. This is an idea best served at scale and will realize its potential only by connecting online communities with each other and allowing emergent knowledge from real-world applications to continually accrete as shared content diffuses across networked platforms.

To accelerate that diffusion, and our collective understanding of it, the NSDL STEM Exchange is sharing its underlying concepts and ideas with the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Defense to seed the development of the Learning Registry, a new initiative that is building a common technical infrastructure for exchanging descriptive information and usage data about learning resources from federal agencies, nonprofits, and commercial providers alike. Like other smart systems, the Learning Registry’s capacity for meaningful pattern identification will be enhanced as it scales up. The more connected communities that utilize the Learning Registry to discover and share content, and then give back anonymized and aggregated paradata, the greater our collective intelligence will be—and the more our actual needs and demands will drive what digital content becomes. We are no longer constrained to narrowly sourced, one size fits all, or a 10-year adoption cycle.

As we gain the ability to know, not just that a resource exists, but that …

Teachers at the high school level integrated Resources X and Y into a unit tagged as Force & Motion on the American Association of Physics Teachers website.

189 middle-level teachers registered with PBS Learning Media favorited Animation Z in the month of September.

Master teachers in the CTE Online community aligned Podcast A to California State Standard B and Mathematics Common Core standard C.

One Better Lesson community member in the Flipped Classroom group created Slideshow D and assigned it Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 3.0.

75 Florida teachers at the CPALMS portal recommend Educational Gaming Site E for use with English language learners.

… we may gain insights into the nature of online communities themselves and the role of online collaborations in redefining the teaching profession for the digital age.

The Learning Registry is launched this week in beta version. It has already gathered a vibrant open community of collaborators beyond NSDL, including content providers, learning communities, and technical tool developers. I encourage you to recognize these early adopters and join forces with us. Learn how your knowledge network or online community can participate at the Learning Registry website, and let us know what you think as paradata begins appearing in your own online workflows.

Susan Van Gundy is the director of Education and Strategic Partnerships
for the National Science Digital Library, and project lead for the STEM
Exchange (http://nsdlnetwork.org/stemexchange).

Homepage of the Learning Center: Presents how to explore learning opportunities by learning preference, topic area, or state standards. Shows top activity community participants that week, and what they do to earn their next badge.

In April of 2008, NSTA launched an electronic professional development portal called the NSTA Learning Center. It serves as our national online “homebase” to support the 3 million K-12 teachers of science in the United States be more competent and confident in the subject subjects they teach. We currently have over 86,000 active users spending hours each week working through 7,000 learning resources and opportunities. Of the many factors that have contributed to the success of the Learning Center, two stand out: The quality and diversity of content we make available to teachers and the incentive systems we have developed to engage them in community interaction around them.

Over the last three and half years, the quantity and variety of professional learning materials on the portal has blossomed. Initially offering 6-12 week instructor-moderated online courses in science education by third party institutions, the Learning Center now incorporates on-demand, self-directed experiences that provide just-in-time learning called Science Objects and their related SciPacks. These compliment the synchronous web seminars that bring cutting edge science content updates and engaging student support activities to teachers. NSTA has offered these online events for free since 2004 in collaboration with the mission-based federal agencies, such as NSF, NASA, and NOAA.  These learning opportunities are in addition to the over 4,000 e-NSTA Journal Articles (over 910+ free), and over 815 NSTA Press e-book chapters (over 200+ free)  that are available to anyone registers their name and email at the portal: you do not need to be a member of NSTA.

Learning Center Profile: Lists badges earned and available to be earned and donations made on the teacher’s behalf as a reward for participation

The incentive system we integrated into the Learning Center along with our community discussion forum in November of 2010 is helping to deepen engagement with these plentiful resources. The new capabilities of the discussion forum enable science teachers not just to consume content but to curate it based on their own expertise and interests and to progress through it in community with other learners. The new system includes over 40 initial badges and a series of points teachers may earn for various activities and online learning achievements. Teachers may earn points for simple, yet thoughtful community and learning activities such as diagnosing their learning needs using our PD Indexer tool, or aggregating personal digital resources and creating collections—coupling them with NSTA e-PD resources—to share with others online.

Other badges signify more sustained engagement with the portal, carrying more weight and earning more points. The badge requirements help define paths through numerous learning resources and experiences available on the site for teachers, both paths defined by NSTA and by the teachers themselves. For example, teachers can receive badges for completing 10-hour self-directed web modules called NSTA SciPacks after passing a final assessment. Passing all the SciPack web modules within a particular science discipline (i.e., physical science) permits them to earn a SciPack “Ultimator” badge. Some states with a university partner award graduate credit for every two SciPacks passed, while others pay teachers cash for their time if part of a union contract agreement. Other significant point opportunities are linked to teachers creating and completing long-term professional development plans that are linked to their personal portfolios, which include teacher reflections and evidences of growth such as samples of student work, or certificates from other PD experiences.

Leaderboard: National leader boards highlight upcoming learning opportunities as well as link to other high activity boards, and those learning achievements (SciPacks Power Users). District leader boards are a way to localize and incentivize activity so all that are featured know each other in the same community.

In the future, with funding from NASA and the NSF, we are researching which community affordances are of most worth to teachers: How does accessing high-impact content and engaging socially through a range of psycho-emotional roles, appropriately documented and incentivized, provide opportunities for teachers to increase their professional standing? Our badge system, which includes local and national leader boards, provides one incentive for participating in such activity, and teachers’ badges and other achievements are documented via a professional profile that provides recognition within their professional learning community. Further innovative rewards are on the horizon, such as redeeming earned points for NSTA Gear, being entered in sweepstake opportunities for free conference attendance, and donations made automatically on behalf of the teacher by NSTA (through a third-party entity) that are aligned with our government partners efforts and our education mission. We expect the research in progress will show that badges and other innovative incentives can be key means for increasing engagement, but also that deep engagement and powerful content go hand in hand.

Al Byers is Assistant Executive Director of Government Partnerships and E‑learning at the National Science Teachers Association.

Schools and districts often assume educators will develop and use PLNs and participate in online communities of practice outside of the school day. However, teacher participation in afterschool professional development opportunities is often uneven, and lack of time is a common explanation. This is completely understandable, as many teachers are involved with students after school through athletics, extracurricular activities, and providing extra help, not to mention grading and getting materials ready for the next day. During a conversation with teacher leaders last year about improving how meaningful professional development is offered, a model from the business world was suggested: Training and other professional growth activities would be embedded within the school day.

After I thought about it and had some discussion with colleagues in New Jersey, the light bulb went on for me. I quickly realized that the current school schedule presented the perfect solution to offering meaningful professional development during the day in the form of noninstructional duties, which are otherwise often a waste of time. The plan that my administrative team and I have developed drastically reduces the amount of noninstructional duties the teachers have, such as lunch, hall, or in-school suspension duty. It also reduces the periods during the week that staff members are tied up with those duties. This change has freed up virtually every teacher at New Milford High School for 48 minutes, two or three times per week depending on the semester.

During this professional growth period, staff members will create innovative learning activities, develop interdisciplinary projects, attend webinars, view research-based videos, and engage in online communities of practice as a means to further their professional growth. At the heart of the professional development piece is PD 360 and the Teacher Learning Community, both of which have robust online communities of practice embedded into their platforms. We are ecstatic about this more effective use of time.

As part of a yearlong action plan goal, teachers will document their learning journey by keeping a journal on the activities that they engage in during this allotted time. Within each entry, they must explain how the specific activity is being implemented into practice to improve teaching and learning. The journals will be incorporated into portfolios that teachers will present at their end-of-year evaluation conferences. Other portfolio pieces might include examples of projects and innovative learning activities that were developed over the course of the year using knowledge and ideas gained from webinars, videos, and participation in online communities of practice.

I believe that New Milford High School’s new professional development program will bear fruit because it offers educators dedicated professional learning time during the school day, flexibility to invest that time as it fits their goals, and a means to document and be recognized for excellence in putting that learning into practice in the classroom. In order for schools and districts to support educators’ lifelong learning in the service of improved student learning, such systems must move from being the exception to being the rule.

Eric Scheninger is Principal of New Milford High School in Bergan County, NJ.
Learn more about his work at ericscheninger.com.

What if an educator could complete a simple self-assessment (developed with the wisdom of assessment-based services like PatientsLikeMe and eHarmony) and have an initial PLN generated for them?   This could include a collection of people drawn from a mentor network created for the service, communities, and content resources gathered in a visually accessible and appealing format, based on their specific needs. The collection could regularly reach out (not just wait to be used) in the case of new teachers most likely to be overwhelmed, but at the same time be fully customizable, and evolve based on use. Given the high costs of current teacher attrition, shouldn’t there be a viable “business model” to get a pretty robust, ambitious vision of something like this created? We’d love to get your thoughts and comments on all of the above–maybe there are ways we can push this forward together..