Designing Online Professional Development for Science Teachers Through Building Social Capital

• In Event: Designing Online Experiences to Support Teacher Learning and Professional Development Across Content Areas

Abstract

A fundamental feature of research on effective PD and participation in MOOCs continues to be the relationships that must be cultivated between peers, contexts, and experts despite the fact that designing experiences for relationship building is often challenging (e.g., Darling-Hammond, 2017; Yuan & Kim, 2014). A number of educational scholars have explicitly summoned the need for constructing networked teacher communities where negotiating practice collaboratively can provide a platform for ongoing feedback, reflection, and growth of teacher expertise (Booth, 2012; Lieberman & Mace, 2010; Author, 2018). In this research, we highlight the central notion of social exchange, which is encapsulated in the idea of social capital. As opposed to focusing solely on human capital, i.e., resources developed and used by individuals, social capital is the acquisition of resources through direct and indirect social networks (Coleman, 1988; Lin, 2001).

Leana (2011) suggests that investing in social capital in school reform and improvement efforts is a major missing link related to high teacher dissatisfaction, increased turnover rates, and lower student achievement. We have made similar conclusions in our own research with teachers when learning to use inquiry-based science and technology curriculum (Author et al., 2017), where a higher degree of social capital access led to a significant positive influence on student classroom participation. Based on this work and other recent research (Author, 2018), in this study we wanted to apply a social capital lens to the delivery of a MOOC PD course to see whether we may be able to design collaborative experiences that align better with effective PD characteristics. We used a framework found in Coburn & Russell (2008) to guide our design decisions. The framework includes:
●Tie quality: How many people teachers talk to in relation to project implementation and the frequency of these interactions.
●Trust: How willing teachers are to share information based on their comfort level in the community.
● Depth of interaction: The content of interactions that are more or less related to the project goals whereby exchanges are expected to lead to deeper conversations about practice.
●Access to expertise: The competencies and resources available in teachers’ network connections.

In this exploratory qualitative study, through analyses of discussion forum interactions and teacher interviews, we discuss both the PD activities and findings that illustrate the positive and negative impacts of the social capital design. For example, intentional designs to improve sociability, such as supporting peer exchanges that proffer tried and true classroom activities, likely enabled trust building through interpersonal relations (Ludvigsen et al., 2017). Demonstrating models of classroom enactments from previous project participants provided a level of authenticity and visualizations of what instruction could look like in practice. We believe that this strategy supported the lightening of cognitive load through immediate connections to ideas stored in the long-term memory (Mayer, 2017; Sweller, 2020). Furthermore, we contend that discussion board prompts geared toward negotiating content and implementation challenges promoted feedback and reflection that supported self-regulatory behaviors, while collaborative prompts that promoted interaction supported peer-regulation (Jarvela et al., 2016).

Authors

• Susan A. Yoon, University of Pennsylvania

• Katherine M Miller, University of Pennsylvania

• Jooeun Shim, University of Pennsylvania

• Thomas Richman, The University of Pennsylvania

• Daniel Wendel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Ilana Schoenfeld

• Emma Anderson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Eric D. Klopfer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology