Cultivating a Community of Practice amongst Smart School Teachers: Problems and Challenges

1. Cultivating a Community of Practice amongst Smart School Teachers: Problems and Challenges Puvaneswary Murugaiah Thang Siew Ming Hazita Azman Carol Hall Radha Nambiar Azizah Yaa’cob

2. INTRODUCTION • The e-CPDelt Vision 2020 model • Collaborative participation - community of practice (CoP).

3. COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE • Wenger (1998) defined a CoP as: …a group of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. • Knowledge building via interactions

4. COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE Wenger (1998) elaborated: • CoPs are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning … a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on a problem, a clique of students defining their identity in the school, a group of first-time managers helping each other to cope…

5. Virtual Community of Practice • Hunter (2002) – a VCoP is a group of people who interact with each other, learn from each other’s work, and provide knowledge resources to the group related to certain agreed-upon topics of shared interest online

6. KEY COMPONENTS OF A CoP 1. Mutual engagement – mutually engage in activities related to daily practices • - have opportunities to contribute and react to decisions related to practice

7. KEY COMPONENTS OF A CoP 2. Shared repertoire of practices – all members share similar practices - their practices continually change as they gain more experience by sharing

8. KEY COMPONENTS OF A CoP 3. Joint enterprise – shared goals of a community - members are both learners and practitioners - focus on achieving common goal; e.g. improving instructional methods

9. Cultivation of a CoP via e-CPDelt Media Mix: Blogs, VIP Teacher Collaboration MentorSupport Amount & Type of Online Interaction Development of Cognitive Presence, Social Presence Forming a Community

10. Problems Poor response to blog activity – till Feb. 1

11. Participation • Read & contribute • Read contributions • Neither read nor contribute Active participation = sense of belonging and community

12. Mentors’ Reactions • Examine reasons for poor participation • Propose ways to overcome the problem i. Online discussion ii. Brainstorming workshop

13. Mentors’ Perspective on Contributing Factors • Lack of trust and closeness - between teachers M6: They seem to lack confidence about the quality of what they post. Five teachers said their biggest worry was they were not very sure whether their posting would be interesting enough for the other teachers. They feel they need to think of something good to put up; if not they would be embarrassed…because they don’t know each other well.

14. Mentors’ Perspective on Contributing Factors • Lack of rapport - with mentors M3: I strongly feel that we need to establish good rapport with the teachers as they need encouragement to proceed with this ‘new’ way of sharing and learning practice.

15. Mentors’ Perspective on Contributing Factors • Task – too general M5: I think we may have been a little ambitious in asking them to come out with blog entries out of nothing. • Relevance of task M7: They can’t see how they can benefit from just blog entries and discussion as well as the VIP. M5: Perhaps they don’t see the relevance of what they are doing to their own professional development.

16. Mentors’ Perspective on Contributing Factors • Time constraint M3: The teachers were busy with examinations and administrative work: SPM marking in November and December and new school term in January. • Internet availability and accessibility problems M3: Some of the teachers informed me that they had problems with the internet connection in their schools. One teacher doesn’t have internet at home.

17. Proposed Immediate Measures 1. Submit more blog postings • M9: to promote more sharing is to share yourselves….make more postings, commenting and encouraging views from others… this will encourage greater rapport and genuine emotional as well as intellectual contact which most people find more rewarding

18. Proposed Immediate Measures 2. Informal face-to-face meeting • M5: We need to investigate what is the issue with the teachers, in my opinion. Why are they not participating? They seemed interested in the initial stage itself so what is the problem now. Perhaps we need to have another face to face session and using whatever we already have in the blogs point out the relevance of this project to what they are doing. Once they see the value of what some have done it might help.

19. Contributing Factors – Mentors’ & Teachers’ Perspectives • Contributing Factors: - Lack of trust/closeness • Task-related problems • Time Constraints • Technical glitches • Congruent with that of teachers’

20. Teachers’ Perspective on Contributing Factors • Lack of rapport/trust E2: I think it boils down to being afraid to show our weaknesses. Not sharing because we’re afraid that people will judge us. We think that people will analyse us, judge us…this shouldn’t be done, they should not have a lesson conducted this way. Probably because of that, we are very careful of what we write. You see, we are not from the same schools, we do not know each other, their backgrounds.

21. Teachers’ Perspective on Contributing Factors • Task: Relevance of information E1: I think one of the things is we are all teaching different levels. Sometimes when we want ideas, we realize our friends are not teaching that particular level. They can’t give us ideas for that level.

22. Teachers’ Perspective on Contributing Factors • Task: Doubts on expected outcomes E1: When we saw member X’s comments, we thought that’s what’s expected of us. I was afraid if I were to write something simple, it’s way far from her standard. I printed out the tasks and was wondering how to write….must be long and formal.

23. Teachers’ Perspective on Contributing Factors • Time Constraint • Burdened with administrative and other duties S4: We don’t have enough time because we have a lot of duties in school. For example, in my school there are a lot of functions and teachers have to work for the functions. Also a lot of paperwork… - Slow response Mt1: Either there is no response or it is very late in coming… and mostly they don’t comment. Instead they ask questions.

24. Teachers’ Perspective on Contributing Factors • ICT & technology glitches Mt2: When someone sends a message, there’s no alert system in our e-mail, like some others. E3: I keep forgetting the address. S1: We have our own building without any facilities, computers. So for any facilities we have to come to the main block. By the time we come to the main building either a teacher is using the computers or the computers have broken down. Always break down.

25. Teachers’ Perspective on Contributing Factors • Work climate E1: We worry about what the administrators will say. You see, like you ask me a problem, what problems I face in the IT class. Sometimes the students will go to other websites when I tell them not to…I get very tired scolding them. Of course, I don’t want to put this in the problems that I face. Then the principal might say, ‘why do you want others to know about the problems we face in the school’. That’s our fear.

26. Ways to Reduce Problems • Support – social networking, emotional, technical • Task-related problems – teachers’ views • Time constraint - subjective

27. Impact of Measures Taken Significant increase in the number of blog postings. * Parentheses – number prior to actions taken

28. Challenges • How to sustain the community well? • Paradigmatic • Purposes and needs must be balanced • Independence rather than dependence • ‘at what point does a vision of empowerment become a vision that directs teachers to empowerment?’ Pedretti (2002)

29. Challenges • Designed vs emergent community • Communities are natural • Developing VCoPs, need facilitation • Initial design plans vs what happens in real practice • Dealing with problems peculiar to online interactions

30. Conclusion • Cultivating a CoP via e-CPDelt – hope or hype? • Hope – to build a community that would promote CPD for teachers, by teachers? • Hype - with little chance of success? • Based on progress thus far, a CoP is being cultivated and there’s hope it would be a reality