Agency at Scale: Engaging Teacher Choice and Collaboration Through Online Experiences With Project-Based Learning

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: Designing Online Professional Development Toward Creative Production (Table 24)

Abstract

While demand for teacher professional development at scale continues to grow (see Kleiman et al., 2013; Laurillard & Kennedy, 2019; Lindvall, 2017; Lim et al., 2020b), researchers have raised concerns over poorly designed oTPD programs that overlook situated education concerns (Kennedy & Laurillard, 2019) and the importance of teacher voice (Richardson, 2018). In response, this paper presents emergent findings related to Paths PD, an oTPD program specifically designed to amplify teacher choice, collaboration, and agency as teachers learn about Project Based Learning (PBL) (see Barron et al., 1998). We designed the program using Zodiac, an oTPD platform that allows teachers to explore topics independently and creates space for teachers to both collaborate and apply what they learn to their immediate context. Paths PD therefore replicates important elements of PBL: posing open ended problems, situating that problem within the immediate context, embracing student choice, and using student-created artifacts to communicate learning (see Bell, 2010; Blumenfeld et al., 1991; Kokotaski et al., 2016). By relying on PBL design principles, Paths PD addresses the concerns of teacher voice and localizability within oTPD

To investigate the efficacy of Paths PD, we begin by providing an overview of both Paths PD and Zodiac by aligning the design principles behind these tools with Lim et al.’s (2020a) activity theory framework for oTPD. We then address the following research questions: How do teachers engage with the open aspects of Paths PD? And do these choices correlate to an improved sense of self-efficacy and/or collaboration? In turn, we present data from pre- and post-surveys completed by 100 teachers at eight different schools and follow up interviews with 20 of the participating teachers. We used the Teacher Self Efficacy Survey (see Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001) and the Revised School Culture Elements Questionnaire (see Devaney et al., 2012), two validated surveys to measure teacher perceptions of both self-efficacy and collaboration. We specifically focus on self-efficacy here because it serves as a precursor to teacher agency (see Min 2019; Polatcan et al, 2021).

To analyze this data, we conducted a linear regression analysis of both user and survey data to understand the correlation between engaging the system beyond required content (a measure of teacher choice) and a sense of both collaboration and self-efficacy. We then employed a combination of descriptive and pattern coding techniques (see Saldaña, 2015) to analyze the interviews. While data collection is ongoing, we suspect our analysis will reveal (a) a positive correlation between these variables and (b) that the growing sense of self-efficacy and collaboration experienced by teachers directly relates to the reliance on teacher choice and ability to localize PBL provided by Paths PD. This study therefore contributes to extant literature on oTPD by providing a set of design principles (and an oTPD platform that embodies these principles) that can address ongoing issues of localizability and teacher voice within these programs. Future research can therefore build on this study (and this tool) to explore the impact of teacher agency and creative production within oTPD programs.

Authors

• Emma Anderson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Peter J. Woods, Massachusetts Institute of Technology