Virtual communities for
professional development:
Helping teachers map the
territory
in landscapes without bearings
Elizabeth Murphy & Thérèse Laferrière
Murphy, E. & Laferrière, T. (2003). Virtual communities for professional
development: Helping teachers map the territory in landscapes without bearings.
Abstract
This paper illustrates ways in which
teachers can progress in making sense of their practice of working
with online technologies through participation in virtual communities. These
communities are described as reflective of a creative-interpretive and
socio-constructivist approach to teacher professional development. The paper
reports on a study in which teachers participated in an online discussion to
engage in collaborative, reflective practice. Excerpts from the discussion
highlight ways in which teachers make sense of their practices by viewing
problems from multiple perspectives and contexts and by adapting and
reorganising existing conceptions of their practices in light of new
experiences.
The classroom is a place where order prevails. The infusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) creates a zone of uncertainty for both teachers and learners, engaging them in a process of risk and exploration for some time to come. (Bracewell et al., 1998)
De Kerckhove (1997) argues that the Internet constitutes the most comprehensive, innovative and complex communication medium in existence representing the mega-convergence of hypertext, multi-media, virtual reality, neural networks, digital agents and even artificial life. The ecology of such a network can be characterized by three essential elements: interactivity, hypertextuality and connectedness. The Internet is the ultimate decentralizing force that suppresses all distances and all delays. The lack horizon on the Internet leaves its users without a clear sense of boundaries. The notion of personhood is challenged by extending the body's reach and range and through use of hypertext which "turns everybody's memory into everybody else's".
Internet communication is most often asynchronous which results in the element of time playing a less important role than in non-Internet communication. As Newhagen and Rafaeli (1996) observed in relation to time: "The Net stretches the edges of the synchronicity continuum. Communication on the Net travels at unprecedented speed. It can also be consumed at unprecedented delays" (p.2). The Internet can also be characterized as unorganized, uncensored, decentralized and unordered. It provides for non-linear presentation and communication as well as sensory vastness (Ibid.). Another important feature of the Internet is its openness. "On the Net, due to historical reasons perpetuated by the discovery of other functions, the organizing principle is to have no organization, or deliberate, orderly anarchy. The message keeps its own gate, carries its own homing device. The net treats censorship as noise and is designed to work around it" (Ibid., p.2).
When it comes to using the Internet for purposes of teaching and learning, the landscape of the environment contrasts starkly with the environment of the physical classroom. Its vastness as well as the lack of constraints related to time and distance are only some of the characteristics that serve to distinguish this environment from that in which teachers traditionally conduct their practice. This paper is premised on the assumption that, to work effectively in these environments, teachers must be able to make sense of them and they must do this in relation to their existing practice. This process of sense-making is analogous to Kagan's (1992) mapmaking in landscapes without bearings:
A significant characteristic of classroom teaching is its many uncertainties. A teacher cannot continue to orchestrate instruction and maintain control in the highly unpredictable environment of the classroom without knowing whether things are going well; a teacher must be able to identify, label, solve, and evaluate the solutions to problems. Because there are no indisputable external guidelines, teachers create their own, in the form of a personal cohesive pedagogical system that they can support without reservation. In landscape without bearings, teachers create and internalize their own maps. (p.80)
The landscape without bearings described by Kagan becomes even more indeterminate, uncertain and unfamiliar when the focus of understanding is no longer the traditional, physical classroom but instead a virtual classroom. This process of becoming familiar with the unfamiliar territory of the Internet involves rethinking interpretations, transforming meanings and inquiring into the unknown. Teachers can be assisted in this process by professional development opportunities designed to help them master the problematic situation, find bearings, define new maps and make sense of the new environments. To be effective, these opportunities will ideally be highly teacher-as-learner-centered and will promote both individual and collaborative reflection and discussion in order for teachers to share their experiences of working in these new environments. These opportunities should also assist teachers in identifying and finding solutions to the new problems which arise as a result of working in this unfamiliar environment.
The purpose of this
paper is to describe and illustrate an approach to professional
development which is advocated as a means of helping teachers make sense of this unfamiliar environment or landscape without bearings.
It is an approach which is advocated as being well-suited to assisting
teachers in the process of working in new online environments with which they
are unfamiliar and which are very different from those environments in which
they traditionally conduct their practice. This approach is founded in a
perspective on professional practice and development which is described in the
next section of this paper. Following
this section, is a description of a study presented as an example of this approach. The study is illustrative of a kind of professional development that makes use of online environments to
facilitate collaborative reflection in order to help teachers make sense of their practice in online
environments.
Lester (1994, 1995)
distinguishes between two perspectives or models of professional practice:
Model A, the technical-rational model and Model B, the creative-interpretive
model. Both models represent
epistemologies of practice. Model A privileges expert, received knowledge which precedes and
guides action and which is conceived as existing outside of the practitioner
and within the authority of the profession.
Model B privileges personal, contextualized knowledge which informs action, is generated by it and which is situated in the
context of the individual's practice.
According to Model A, problems in the professional world are conceived
as solvable, can be analysed and are capable of yielding to logic and the
application of knowledge. Thus, professional practice can be seen as a
mechanism which involves objectively "applying a body of expert knowledge
to known situations in order to produce rational solutions to problems” (p.1).
In Model B, problems are conceived as messy and interconnected and as products
of complex, dynamic systems. So defined, these problems defy technical solution
and must therefore first be constructed and identified.
Lester's perspective
echoes that of Schön (1987) who described technical
rationality as instrumental problem solving or the application of technical
means to practical purposes. According to this model, the practitioner applies
"theory and technique derived from systematic, preferably scientific
knowledge" (p.4). Schön describes the problems
in this model as "well formed instrumental problems" contrasting them
with "the problems of real-world practice" which do not even present
themselves to practitioners as problems but as "messy, indeterminate
situations". Schön also provides a perspective
on dealing with unique cases of problems or those that do not fall inside the
realm of existing theory or technique. He notes that, with these cases, the
practitioner cannot apply rules from a "store of professional
knowledge" but can only deal with them "by a kind of improvisation,
inventing and testing". Schön groups unique
cases along with problematic situations which are uncertain and those which
present a situation of conflict among values into what he refers to as "indeterminate zones of practice"
(p. 6). He argues in favour of a model of professional practice hinged on
competence versus knowledge for dealing with these zones:
We should start not by asking how to make better use of research-based knowledge but by asking what we can learn from a careful examination of artistry, that is the competence by which practitioners actually handle indeterminate zones of practice-however that competence may relate to technical rationality. (p.13)
Schön's perspective is a useful one in
terms of understanding the practice of teachers who are using online
environments for learning and for teaching. We can think of such practice as
constituting unique cases and as belonging in an indeterminate zone of
practice. The situations in which teachers find themselves when teaching online
do not "fall inside the realm of existing theory or technique". Thus, professional development experiences
designed to assist teachers adapt their practice in these new environments will
ideally privilege reliance, not on a "store of professional" or expert
knowledge, but on teachers' own artistry and competence which they can share
with each other. Such experiences will
be based on the assumption that teachers actively construct their knowledge of
the world of the classroom by fitting their existing perceptions,
interpretations and understanding with knowledge gleaned through new
experiences and through a process of sharing and negotiating interpretations,
experience and understanding with others in a process of collaborative
learning, discussion and debate.
These experiences will, as well, favour collaboration. Collaboration plays a pivotal role in learning and affords opportunities to view multiple perspectives, test alternate and contrary ideas and to appreciate new insights (Duffy & Cunningham, 1996; Riel, 1993). As Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) argue, learning is most effective when it takes place as a collaborative rather than an isolated activity and when it takes place in a context relevant to the learner. The multiple perspectives afforded by a collaborative approach can promote reconstruction and reorganisation of teachers' existing knowledge and conceptions as a result of being exposed to new interpretations. Helping learners hear other arguments, see other perspectives, and reflect on choices made in light of that information enables them to make better decisions (Harrington & Quinn-Leering, 1995). Bereiter (1994) argues that meaning-making and new conceptual structures arise through a dialectic process in which members of a learning community negotiate contradictions and begin to synthesize opposing viewpoints.
Social interaction, collaboration, exposure to opposing or multiple viewpoints, sharing and negotiating interpretations, group reflection: these processes and activities require that the pattern of interaction be, not one-to-many, rather many-to-many. Many-to-many interaction is that which might be promoted in opportunities for dialogue, conversation and discussion. Dialogue has long been valued as an educative experience (Burbules, 1993). Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) describe how through conversation and narratives, ideas can be exchanged and modified and how belief systems can be developed. Cervero, (1988) advocates the use of discussion groups to facilitate exchange of ideas, practices, and solutions to common problems. For these reasons, the discussion is advocated here as a means of supporting the type of professional development promoted in this paper.
Ideally, the discussion will provide opportunities to
promote social interaction,
knowledge sharing, and group problem-solving. Furthermore, it will provide opportunities to
view multiple perspectives and to foster collaborative reflection. The particular characteristics and benefits
of online discussions suggest that they may be well suited to supporting these
types of approaches to professional development. Harasim, (1990) and Blumenfeld
et al. (1996) explain that online learning tools and environments present
unique opportunities for supporting and organising collaborative human
conversation, group interaction and for creating communities of learners. Harrington and Hathaway (1994) argue in favor of computer
conferencing as a means of fostering reflection through dialogue because it
offers a means to allow participants to discuss issues with their peers in a
non-dominating, non-threatening way. Holt et al. (1998) suggest that
"participant reflection may be greater in a Web conference because of the
ability to reread an entire sequence of postings while composing a response"
(p.47).
The opportunities for collaborative
reflection highlight the advantages provided by the time-independence of the
online discussion. However, its place independence also affords many
possibilities the most important of which is the opportunity for collaboration
and the development of communities between individuals in different geographic
areas. Online discussions afford
opportunities for teachers to form virtual learning communities in order to
work with others with the common goal of interpreting and understanding their
practice. They represent logical and appropriate ways of situating and
organising professional development experiences for those teachers who are
experimenting with and trying to make sense of the use of online technologies
in their practice. The following sections illustrate how one
group of teachers came together online to participate in a virtual community
and to benefit from an opportunity to make sense of their practice of working in
landscapes without bearings.
Methodology
From September, 1998 to
June, 1999, 64 teachers from around the
world came together virtually to form a community whose common goal it was to
make sense of their practice of teaching French as a second language using the
Internet. The experience formed part of study centred on teachers' beliefs
about teaching and learning French as a second language in online learning
environments (Murphy, 2000). Data collection techniques relied on a discussion
list in English called CREDO and another in French called CREO. All participants in
the discussion volunteered themselves after having seen the
invitation/announcement sent out to other lists on the Internet. Participants included teachers from grades
kindergarten to 12 with some participation from the post-secondary sector.
While the majority of participants were from
Given that the discussion operated in a context which was virtual, participation was not constrained by geography and it was therefore possible to include in the experience individuals from different social, economic and geographic communities. More importantly they came from varying local communities of practice. In spite of these differences, participants shared an interest in discussing their practice and in sharing their experiences and interpretations of these experiences in a delocalised or distributed context. This interest arose out of a common purpose which was to advance their knowledge about their experiences of online learning and thus inform their practice. It is in this sense that their participation in the discussion list allowed them to become part of a virtual community. Rheingold (1993) defines virtual communities as "social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace" (page 2 of online version). The virtual community of the study did not involve physical or temporal co-presence. Instead, it involved an asynchronous communication and collaboration between a group of teacher learners with the common purpose and goal of making better sense of the relationship between use of new online environments and their existing practice.
In addition to the postings by participants, the
research as moderator, and a teacher of French-as-a-second-language herself, also made 101 postings to the
discussion. Her intervention revolved
around the tasks and roles described by Berge (1995) who categorises the role
of the online moderator or facilitator as pedagogical, social, managerial and
technical. As a moderator or
facilitator, she was actively involved in focusing the discussion, developing
group cohesiveness, questioning, summarising, probing, responding to questions, encouraging participation, unifying
threads and providing feedback (see Meloth and Deering's, "means of assistance" categories, 1994). Therefore, the researcher's participation in the community was
active and reflected a variety of interventions each designed with a different
aim in mind. In addition to the interventions outlined above, the researcher
played a pivotal role in orienting the discussion, keeping it on track,
providing support, maintaining participation and assisting participants in
their efforts to begin to make sense of the new online environments for
learning.
The data collection
process yielded in excess of 300 pages of communication and discussion. From
the data analysis involving keyword coding, there emerged two main categories
of advantages and challenges or problems with regard to the use of the Internet
in the teaching of
French as second language. Within the category of advantages,
there were six sub-categories identified: resources and information, communication and collaboration, real-world learning, motivation,
learning, and teaching. Within the category of challenges were the
sub-categories of curriculum, roles and responsibilities, materials and
information, control and monitoring, training and access and equipment. The scope of this paper does not allow for consideration of all of these
categories. The focus of this paper is
on ways in which teachers can make sense of their practice of teaching with the
Internet through collaborative reflection in virtual communities. For this
reason, the results which are presented in this section are those that illustrate
most vividly how teachers collaboratively reflected on specific problems which
arose for them in the context of using the Internet for the teaching of
French. Thus, results from the
sub-category of control and monitoring were chosen in this regard. Following a presentation of the results
related to control and monitoring are excerpts originating from a variety of the categories which
provide insight into how, for members of this virtual community, making sense
of one's practice involved not only
short-range problem-solving but, as well, comparing and contrasting past or
traditional practices with the new practices which arise as a result of
teaching with the Internet.
Collaborative reflection on the problem of control and monitoring
The issue of control and
monitoring provides an example of a way in which members of a virtual community
socially and collaboratively negotiated meaning and how they made sense of the
online environments which they are using to teach French. The problem also illustrates
how varied contexts and multiple perspectives contributed to the process of
sense-making. Different teachers in different settings approached the problem,
identified it, named it and subsequently responded to it from multiple
perspectives. For some teachers, control and monitoring represented a problem
related to content, i.e. the grammar structures and vocabulary to which
students are exposed while working online: "I try to help my students
learn how to find the answers. With the Internet I don't have control over what
vocabulary is used or the complexity of the grammar structures". Another
teacher identified the problem of control as being related to evaluation and
assessment: "The most difficult part is the control. It is wonderful to let
a student go and discover what s/he may and watch the excitement. But how do
you grade that?" For another
teacher, the problem was identified as one which related to time on task: "I just had them surf on 3 sites and I
thought they would enjoy them and they did, but only for about 5 mins each. It was impossible for me to keep them on track
after they had fulfilled their part of the bargain and investigated the
sites". Teachers also recounted specific anecdotes as illustrative
examples of the way in which the problem of control manifests itself for them:
One other problem is, of course, the
inappropriateness (to put it mildly) of many sites – sites that kids can
stumble upon quite innocently. I was doing a search on
Another teacher explained the problem as one which
related to a need to provide more guidance to students when they are working
online:
I would not have the students do a general search without guidance!
I saw what that could lead to in a music class, where, the music teacher was
doing an activity in the computer lab with my class. Ten minutes before the end
of the class, she decided to let them do a search for the "Spice
Girls" which the students had been requesting. Well, the results of that
search certainly were not appropriate!
The issue of
control in the second‑language classroom was also identified as
problematic in terms of the need to monitor students to ensure that they are
working in and with the French language as opposed to with their mother tongue.
From the perspective of some teachers, monitoring becomes even more essential
on the Internet where so much material is available in English: "For
elementary core French, I must preview sites in order to find visually‑rich
pages with child‑level language; otherwise, kids will go to English sites
and translate later".
The responses provided
to the problems were often as varied and as multi-faceted as the ways in which
teachers named or identified the problems. The following excerpt illustrates
what Schön (1987) described as a means of dealing
with problems by a kind of improvisation, inventing and testing:
I do not conduct many classes in the
computer lab that require random browsing. Usually the students must do a
guided search or I have pre‑selected the sites that they must visit to
find out certain information. During a 40‑minute class it would be
impossible to have much constructive on‑task work completed if students
were permitted to randomly browse sites.
What makes
these responses to problems interesting and useful is that they are
contextualized within
specific situations. Their
responses are as situation-specific as are the ways in which they named the
problems. In this case, members of the
community were not simply applying a body of expert knowledge but knowledge
based on their interpretation of their expereinces.
The following excerpt provides an example of a situation-specific response to a
problem:
...I most often preview the site I
want a pair of students focusing on‑‑‑I also rove around
constantly, and found one day last year a student who had quickly reverted to
his Metallica homepage‑‑‑I hollered
and told him he was off navigating (my chosen site) for at least a week. The
fact that he had to keep his fingers still and go back to the 'old way' of
learning a FL scared the heck out of him, and it never came up again.
Participants in the
study also considered
alternative ways of defining problems and of responding to them.
At the same time, they were presented with conceptions and meanings which
sometimes challenged, confirmed or conflicted with their own interpretations,
meanings and knowledge. It is in this way that participation in the community
also provided an opportunity to challenge the familiar practices of the
physical classroom as part of a process of making more familiar this world of
the virtual classroom. As part of this process of making sense of the practices
related to working online, teachers compared the familiar with the unfamiliar
and the old with the new. To do this, they fit existing perceptions,
interpretations and understanding with knowledge gleaned through new
experiences. They compared ways of thinking and of knowing associated with
teaching without the nouvelles technologies or new technologies. In
the process of making the unfamiliar familiar, members of the community had to
identify the conflict between existing models of their practice and the new
possibilities presented by working in online environments.
These conflicts became
evident in some of the comparisons which involved criticising existing systemic
practices. The following excerpt,
illustrates how the one teacher makes the comparison between the old and the
new or the familiar and the unfamiliar:
Our educational system works against these very valuable but time-eating learning projects. There's the "curriculum to cover" - always more than is ever possible even without the extra projects. Why do just two themes when we can do six? And what's wrong with a system that has kids and teachers running from one subject (sometimes even one room) to the next, with no time to reflect, to process, to - gasp! - relax? It drives me crazy. And as long as teachers are willing to play by those antiquated rules, the nouvelles technologies will remain just that.
At times, this criticism and questioning of existing practices focused less on systemic factors and more so on teachers themselves. This teacher's interpretation of working with the Internet involved questioning the habits of colleagues and of attempting to reconcile existing practices with those which, for this teacher, come into play when teaching and learning with the Internet:
I am considered a nut, albeit a nice, friendly one, by my colleagues. Nose in the computer, out of touch with "reality" and so on and so forth. For years, I tried to convert them, with absolutely no success, but occasionally with some backlash. (…) But they are convinced that the only way to do this effectively is for the teacher to be the almost-only source of input of knowledge. (…)There is an unspoken, perhaps unconscious, distrust of the ability of students to learn on their own... they must be carefully led to knowledge and that knowledge structured according to the priorities of the teacher.
Questioning existing practices involved as well, making sense of the new ways of knowing in relation to old ways of knowing. In the following excerpt, one teacher argues in favor of adopting practices that privilege real-world, authentic learning:
...we have to think Internet as opposed to book learning when we use the Internet. The linear model of learn, answer questions, test, is based on what is manageable for the book and paper form of learning. Actual real-life learning on the job takes place much more diversely and has an actual real application. Therefore why not get students to do more projects based on their real questions about the world, find info. talk to real experts on-line and find their own answers.
Arguments in favor of changing one's way of thinking about "book learning" represent ways in which members of the community took advantage of the discussion to challenge existing ways of conceptualizing their practice. In this regard, some comments were very explicit in their rejection of existing practices and urged teachers to explore new approaches to teaching:
Many of the old school teachers will stick religiously to the text book
and they believe they are on the cutting edge and providing enrichment by
showing a pertinent video in class--to me, that kind of stand-up delivery
classroom is like using a film-strip or a reel to reel tape. It has merit, and
information will certainly be transmitted to the students, but how much more
could be done in that room in the allotted time by using the advances and tools
that are now available to most of us in our schools.
The new
approaches advocated by some of the members highlighted not only a need to
rethink ways of knowing but as well advocated a new perception of the role of
the teacher. In the following excerpt, the use of terms such as
"rut", "dry" and "boring" underlie a criticism of
the traditional role
of the teacher:
I get to vary my teaching style, it pushes me to keep changing--it
is so easy to get into a comfortable rut! I get to offer the students worlds by
visual aid of the computer that I could have never dreamed of by
"normal" teaching methods. I guess it is making me a better teacher
and I am more proud of the product I am delivering--it is now multi-dimensional
rather than dry and boring.
Similarly,
in the following excerpt, one teacher's reference to "a breath of new life" describes a reconceptualisation of
practices that favours, not only a change in the role of the teacher but, as
well, a change in the role of the student:
...the Internet has changed my practice of teaching, by allowing the student more control and therefore encouraging more active learning in the class. As long as a teacher is willing to give up the 'sage on the stage' concept, and become a 'guide on the side',--the technology becomes an asset and not a liability. We needed a breath of new life, teaching had become stagnant, and now we are on the right track, in my humble opinion. I look forward to surfing the net, to make the language current and pertinent.
Discussion
The excerpts presented
are illustrative of some of the ways in which membership in the virtual
community provided teachers with a means to recount and reflect on their
experiences and to share their interpretations of problems and situations in order to
better understand them and make sense of them in relation to their practice.
The excerpts provide some insight into the process of the sense-making and
reveal that teachers engage in constructing,
deconstructing and reconstructing meanings beliefs, interpretations
experiences, problems, attitudes and understandings.
Excerpts
from the category of control and monitoring are indicative of how problems faced
by teachers can come into focus, be contextualised and related to particular
situations. These problems represent unique cases which belong to a zone of
indeterminate practice as well as a complex situation which manifests itself in
many different ways. As such, this
problem illustrates Lester's (1994 ,1995) notion of
problems being messy, interconnected and products of complex dynamic systems.
Participation in the virtual community provided opportunities to view problems
in multiple contexts and to see the different ways in which they might be
identified, named, and potentially resolved. The collaboration presents
occasions to consider alternate perspectives, contrary ideas and new insights
which might sometimes confirm existing conceptions and ideas and other times
challenge them.
Besides
identifying and naming problems, participants also discussed the ways in which
they responded to their problems. Their responses did not involve applying a
body of theory or expert knowledge since such knowledge was not likely to be
applicable or useful in terms of providing a response to all the multiple ways
in which the problem is identified as manifesting itself. The dynamics of the discussion however, did
allow for alternative and tested responses to the situation. The discussion
provided teachers with an opportunity to make explicit their otherwise tacit
knowledge and to share their interpretations of how best to respond to the
reality of using online environments. Teachers were able to bring their knowledge
to a public level where it could be shared with others who, if they found it
applicable to their own situation, could choose to respond to the situation in
a similar way.
Teachers' reflections on the challenge of control and monitoring also illustrate, not only the ways in which teachers identify, name and respond to problems, but how they make sense of the realities of teaching and learning online. We can see how such discussions can help them build knowledge which is new and which is therefore suited to helping them identify and respond to the problems faced in their practice. These responses may remain tentative and may require further testing, invention and improvisation but they nonetheless provide teachers with a multiplicity of perspectives from which to begin to help them interpret their own situation and tailor responses to it.
While we
cannot know or measure how the sharing of these experiences might have
influenced the practice of participating teachers, we can observe from some of
these excerpts that teachers took advantage of their participation in the
community to reflect on and share with others what working with the Internet
meant for their practice. We can remark from these comments, some of the ways
in which the process of sense-making is a referential one in which, to
understand the new, comparisons are made with the old. We can also observe how
the sense-making process involves adapting and reorganising existing
conceptions of one's practices in light of new experiences. In this regard, we
can observe how, in order to make new maps to guide them in the unknown
territory, teachers may first have to question existing maps or existing
interpretations of their practice. Above all, this study presents a form of
professional development for reflective teachers willing to devote time to
think about their practice along with others.
Korzybski (1933) reminds us that a map is not the territory which it represents. In this regard, the sense which teachers make of their practice in the new landscape of the Internet is a highly personal one. It is contextualized within the individual activity, personal knowledge and particular circumstances of each teacher's lived experiences and subsequent interpretation of that experience. At the same time, membership in the virtual community affords an opportunity to become aware of the structure of the maps of others and thus provides a reference point against which individuals can better interpret and compare their experiences and the sense they have made of their new practices.
The sense teachers make
of their experiences or the maps which they begin to define to help them
navigate through the uncertainty of the new landscapes for teaching and
learning are their own. Thus, the process of sense-making is not one which
involves locating or becoming more aware of some existing or true maps to which
they must refer in order to find their way.
In this regard, we are reminded of the complexity of the process of
sense-making and of how highly contextualized and individual the process is. We
are reminded that the map is not the territory that it is but an interpretation
or representation. And this interpretation cannot be but individual and
tentative.
We can conjecture as
well that teachers' own maps will change as the
territory changes and as they accumulate additional experiences. Most
importantly, their maps will change as they provide themselves or are provided
with opportunities to participate in experiences in which they can begin to
articulate their interpretations and to be exposed to the interpretations of
others. Through membership in virtual
professional communities, teachers can engage in collaborative activities of
making sense of their practice in the new online environments for learning. An important role of professional development is to provide
opportunities for teachers to engage systematically and formally in this
very process.
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