Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog :: The Case of an Online Learning Community in Support of Collaborative Teacher Inquiry

Here is a copy of my dissertation (.doc). I hope you will find it useful. In particular, Chapters 8 (Conclusions) is probably the richest in terms the study's assertions. If you want to cut straight to the chase, I suggest you begin there.

Summary of the Study
Advances in web-based technologies as a form of teacher professional development is an emerging area of study, with a base of published research that can be considered thin (Borko, Whitcomb, and Liston, 2009). This study examined community member interactions within an online learning community to determine the ways participation in an online learning community influenced participants' abilities to (1) deepen their understanding of teacher inquiry/action research, (2) deepen their understanding of coaching educators in the process of teacher inquiry/action research, and (3) deepen their understanding of their own evolving stance toward their coaching practice.

A review of recent and relevant literature associated with teacher professional development, professional learning communities, teacher inquiry/action research, and online teacher professional development was created to situate the study in the extant literature. To narrow the search for studies that offered representative empirical research, each of these constructs was selected as a way of framing this study. An analysis of the literature suggests that given the promise of teacher inquiry/action research to transform educators’ practices and improve schools, as well as advances in thinking about professional learning communities and online learning, it is reasonable to examine the role of a facilitated, online learning environment and how participation in such a focused community of practice can enhance educators’ professional knowledge and skills.

To better understand how an online learning community deepened participants’ understanding of teacher inquiry/action research, coaching teacher inquiry/action research, and a deepened participants' evolving stance toward their coaching practice, I conducted in-depth interviews with participants, thoroughly analyzed the content of participants' interview transcripts and published learning community posts, and triangulated these data sets with the administrative log files associated with the activity on the learning community site in an effort to see what types of patterns of evidence of participant understanding might emerge from these data sources.

The online community examined in this study emerged from ongoing work between the University of Florida and the North East Florida Educational Consortium. Chapter 4 described the history leading up to the online learning community, why this history was important, and how it led to the development of the online learning community that is the object of this study. An understanding of these events is essential to understanding the context within which the online learning community was framed. In addition, this chapter provided a brief introduction to each of the members of the online learning community, as well as an overview of activities and experiences that complimented their participation in the online learning community. An introduction to these participants and an overview of their experiences is essential to understanding the content of discussions that occurred within the online learning community.

The results of this study are reported in three chapters. Chapter 5 provided a detailed description of the online learning community site itself to include specific site elements and functions designed to support sustained interaction among participants. This overview of the site’s design and functionality is essential to understanding how participants were able to engage one another in the online learning community. Given the number of inquiry facilitators, their geographic spread, as well as the limited number of times these coaches were able to meet face-to-face, the need for a means to stay in touch while working with their teacher researchers was clearly warranted. The online learning community site provided key elements that enabled participants to view news and information, respond to site facilitator prompts, post documents and reflections on their blogs, as well as provide replies and comments on each others' posts and announcements. This functionality enabled by the site was the key means of participant engagement that make up the experiences essential to understanding the content of discussions that occurred within the online learning community introduced in Chapters 6 and 7.

In Chapter 6 I described and analyzed four distinct forms of site facilitator activity within the online learning community and these activities' relationship to the deepening of participating coaches' understanding of action research, the deepening of their understanding about facilitating action research, and the deepening of their own evolving stance toward their own coaching practice. These four forms of activity included:  (1) Community Establishment, (2) Invitation to Post, (3) Modeling online learning community participation, and (3) Announcements. The site facilitator emerged as the driving force behind all activity in the online learning community, i.e., "the glue" that connected all participants and actions on the site. A tension was noted regarding the ways in which the site facilitator’s actions both sparked and inhibited coaches’ engagement in the learning community. Given that the role of the facilitator in online teacher professional development is "new and emerging" (Feger & Zibit, 2005, p. 10), more research is warranted to determine the ways in which a site facilitator can best address the different aspects of managing members’ engagement in an online learning community.

The distinct actions of coaches in the online learning community and these actions' relationship to the deepening of inquiry coaches' understanding of action research, the deepening of their understanding about coaching action research, and the deepening of their own evolving stance toward their own coaching practice was examined in Chapter 7. These three actions included: (1) Responding to site facilitator prompts, (2) Commenting, and (3) Peripheral Participation. The findings suggest that if participating coaches did not respond to the site facilitator's prompts, did not supply evidence of what techniques and strategies were working for them in either their own posts or in their comments to one another, then there was no benefit or no knowledge gained by the members of the online learning community. While contributing to the community via responding to prompts and commenting was critical to the value associated with the online learning community, coaches also derived value from observing each others' content on the site without directly adding anything to the conversation. This form of eavesdropping or peripheral participation was also critical to note in terms of how an online learning community can support online teacher professional development.

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I have several articles in the forthcoming that are spun out of the threads of this work. If you seem something you like, please feel free to use it as you see fit. All I ask is you give credit where credit is due. The official citation for this work is:

Sessums, C. D. (2009). The path from insight to action: The case of an online learning community in support of collaborative teacher inquiry. Doctoral dissertation, University of Florida, 2009. Retrieved from http://eduspaces.net/csessums/weblog/687203.html.