The extended staff room. Facebook as a professional learning community for L1-teachers
Submitted by:
Christina Olin-Scheller
Abstract:
The recent rapid development of forums on social media where groups of people gather and easily discuss common concerns, have created more informal learning environments for teachers - initiated, designed and entirely driven by the teachers themselves (see e.g. Talbert, 2010). In our study, we have a specific focus on Facebook groups for teachers and our interest is aimed issues related to teachers' continuing professional development of knowledge after completion of teacher training. More specifically we are interested in examining how public subject specific knowledge in an informal learning environment might look like without control from the school management, school boards or school authorities. In our presentation we take 3 Facebook groups directed to L1-teachers as a point of departure and describe the activity within these groups during the period of one year (2015). The empirical material has been analyzed in relation to the theoretical framework of PCK (Shulman, 1987). Our results show that more than half of the contributions to the Facebook groups are made outside regular working hours and that 20% of posts takes place during weekends. 60% of the topics introduced can be categorized as focusing pedagogical content knowledge, mainly by posing questions or offering lesson plans (see speech function Halliday & Matthiessen, 2013). Moreover, 85% of the number of questions posted, get respons. Therefore, Facebook can be regarded as a professional learning community.
Keywords: professional development, Facebook, pedagocical content knowledge, speech functions
Halliday, M.A.K. och Matthiessen, C. (2013). Introduction to Functional Grammar. 4th ed. London & New York: Routledge.
Shulman, L. S. (1987). Knowledge and Teaching. Foundations of the New Reform. Harvard Educational Review, Vol 57/1, p. 1-21.
Talbert, J. E. (2010). Professional learning communities at the crossroads: How systems hinder or engender change. I: Hargreaves, A. et al (red.), Second International Handbook of Educational Change. London: Springer International Handbooks of Education 23, p. 555-571.