Contents

Teacher Education
CoT
CEC
ILF (NSF Project)

Teacher Education: Inquiry Learning Forum

URL: http://ilf.crlt.indiana.edu

The Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF) is a Web based, professional development system designed to support a community of in-service and pre-service mathematics and science teachers sharing, improving, and creating inquiry based pedagogical practices.

Context	The Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF) is a Web based, professional development system designed to support a community of in-service and pre-service mathematics and science teachers sharing, improving, and creating inquiry based pedagogical practices. The ILF design centers on the vision of a community in which teachers can virtually visit each other's classrooms to observe and discuss approaches to teaching mathematics and science topics. The ILF website is meant to support a distributed group of teachers in making their tacit knowledge and beliefs involved in their teaching explicit so that it can be shared with others and, in turn, to aid teachers in making that explicit knowledge a tacit part of their practice. In other words, the ILF supports the observation and reflection on actual classroom experiences.
Conditions	The ILF is a National Science Foundation funded project and consists of a large design and research component. The ILF encourages teachers to teach through inquiry-based teaching, yet this is counter to how many teachers were trained to teach. Therefore, a major challenge in this project is to develop a site that is user friendly and supports teachers in critically reflecting on their own teaching.
Scope	This project is funded until the Spring/Summer 2002. Currently the ILF has over 1000 members. At the conclusion of the funded aspect of the project it is expected that the ILF will continue to be used in pre-service classrooms. I plan to integrate the ILF into my teaching at any university where I am teaching. This project is currently on-going and this term I am investigating how the ILF can be integrating into a pre-service classroom.
Role	I am a member of both the design and research team. In that dual role my major contribution to the project has been meeting with teachers in their classroom and introducing them to the ILF. I have also worked with faculty from other universities to connect our pre-service teachers with one another. I have worked with in-service teachers and pre-service teachers concerning how to use the ILF, and I am currently examining how to integrate the ILF into pre-service classrooms.

Project Papers:

Barnett, M., Harwood, W., Keating, T., & Saam, J. (in press). Using emerging technologies to bridge the gap between university theory and classroom practice: Challenges and successes. To be published in the 2002 special issue of School Science and Mathematics on Collaborations in Higher Education: Visionary Academics.

Conference Presentations:

Barnett, M. (20002). Issues and trends concerning electronic networking technologies for teacher professional development: A critical review of the literature. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association, New Orleans, LA.