-- The Inquiry Learning Forum

The Inquiry Learning Forum: Fostering and Sustaining Knowledge Networking To Support A Community Of Science And Mathematics Teachers

Investigators: Sasha Barab, Don Cunningham, Rob Kling, Cathy Brown, Susan Herring Indiana University Contact Sasha A Barab, 201 N. Rose Ave. School of Ed., # 2232, Indiana University Bloomington, IN  47405 sbarab@indiana.edu

NSF Grant # 9980081

Project Overview

This project involves the design and evaluation of the salient features of an electronic knowledge network, the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF), to support a virtual community of in-service and pre-service mathematics and science teachers sharing, improving, and creating inquiry based pedagogical practices. Founded in our previous research and consistent with our pedagogical commitment, we are designing the ILF around a "visiting the classroom" metaphor, with the belief that teachers need to be full participants in and owners of their virtual space. The hallmark of this environment is that teachers with a broad range of experience and expertise will come together in a virtual space to observe, discuss, and reflect upon pedagogical theory and practice anchored to actual teaching vignettes.

Our focus is to provide a means for teachers to improve their practice while situated in the real world of their current or future classroom. We envision a community in which teachers can virtually visit each other's classrooms to observe and discuss approaches to teaching mathematics and science topics and to share artifacts. The ILF is a resource to support continuous professional development. We seek to support a sharing among community members at all stages of skill development ? from master teachers to teachers in training. Even in the case of the more experienced teachers sharing their practice, the goal is not to present a practice to emulate, but rather to provide a vehicle for discussing the practice and advancing the community as well as individual understanding. Through observation, discussion, and reflection, each participant can find his or her own path to continuous professional growth and development.

Three design principles, derived from our theoretical framework (Barab & Duffy, in press; Duffy & Cunningham, 1996), guided our design of the prototype and will continue to guide further development as well as the use of the knowledge network.

1. Visit the classroom. A central strategy in the design and implementation of our knowledge network is guided by the use of video streaming to situate the participants in the social context of the practice of other community members.
2. Foster ownership and participation. We believe that a truly effective professional development environment must be distributed throughout a community of professional practitioners of varied and wide experience and skill who accept responsibility for building and maintaining their environment.
3. Focus on inquiry. Our goal is to foster inquiry, both an inquiry pedagogy for the classroom and teacher inquiry into his or her practices.

The ILF consists of a variety of participant structures, all related to virtually visiting the classroom of other teachers. The home screen of the ILF is shown below in which the classrooms are available through the Visit Classrooms space. When an ILF member selects a specific classroom lesson they can view a videotape of the implemented lesson. Additionally, they can view an overview of the lesson, reflective commentary, descriptions of teaching activity, lesson plans, students examples and connections with both state and national standards. In addition to the Visit Classroom spaces, there are also five other virtual spaces designed to support professional development needs. The ILF Office is the place where new participants can secure a password (the site will be password protected), get help with technology, or make suggestions. News (the bulletin board) provides users with updates on ILF development progress and listings of new additions to the site. The Lounge will host general conferences that are not tied to a particular classroom as well as a space for real-time chat to allow users to communicate with others. The Auditorium is the place where special events can occur.

Generally, these will involve the use of synchronous (chat) discussion with a white board and resources. It will also provide the opportunity for video-casting live or canned presentations for discussion. Any member of the community can hold a workshop, experts can be brought in, or, there may be synchronous discussion of specific issues. The Library is a place where teachers can go to access reference materials of interest, including references on teaching resource materials (software, other classroom artifacts like the graphing calculator, manipulatives, sensory probes), state and national standards, grants, applied research and theory, relevant state initiatives, and other materials the teachers identify as relevant. Finally, My Desk is the teacher's desk (since entry into ILF is password protected, the office is that of the person who logged in) in which she can store bookmarks to resources and classrooms that are of personal relevance and return to those at a later visit.

Research, theory, and the teaching standards of the professions (e.g., NTCM, 1989, in press; AAAS, 1994) have firmly established the importance of an active learning environment in which students are engaged in conversations and inquiry that authentically establish the relevance and meaning of mathematics and science concepts. However, we have seen little shift in mathematical and scientific teaching practices in the K-12 schools (Cuban, 1993; Roup, Gal, Drayton, & Pfister, 1993). This difficulty in change is partly due to the need for new pedagogical models that move from a didactic approach to a learner centered approach (Duffy & Jonnasen, 1992) as well as to the lack of ongoing support for change?support that is situated in and addresses the immediate pedagogical needs of the teachers (Smilie & Conners, 1991). Finally, and most critically, change has been slow simply because the culture of sharing pedagogical strategies is not well established.

Clearly, new models for professional development are needed, models that: (a) foster a culture of sharing, and (b) provide sustained support for teachers (i.e., knowledge networks) as they evaluate both their beliefs and practices. The purpose of this project is to address these needs through a research and development effort on "learning" and "community" models" rather than "instructional" models of professional development (Barab & Duffy, in press).The ILF allows geographically distributed teachers to work together and learn from each other. One of its primary goals is to support teachers in learning to make their tacit knowledge explicit (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). In this way, teachers, both current teachers and pre-service students, can appropriate and evolve the relevant knowledge and skills so as to better develop their own tacit teaching foundations. Further, the ILF redefines teachers’ worlds, enabling them to learn "in context" from outside of their immediate peer group.

The research goal of this project is to understand the principles for fostering, sustaining, and scaling communities of practice in which the value to participants of sharing their practice and entering in the dialogue outweighs the "costs" of participation (e.g., time, technology access; the concerns of letting others view one's teaching). While the effective use of technology in supporting a community of practice is a focus of this research, it is clear that technological environments are only one component of an overall community strategy. Thus, the research looks at the variety of variables that impact the dynamics of the social networks through which teachers seek to improve and share their pedagogical practices. The intent of this research is not to produce abstract measures or scores, but to build a rich story of the historical development of knowledge, resource use, practices, and ILF communities. The research issues, converging at the intersection of pedagogy, technology, social informatics, and learning theory, have important implications for each. An interdisciplinary approach, reflecting this intersection, will characterize the research carried out to address the following research questions.

(1) How can networking and electronic technologies be used to represent and facilitate the sharing and evolution of teaching practices?

(2) What are the taken-as-shared meanings that emerge in the ILF communities and how do those meanings evolve and diffuse into classroom practices?

(3) How do the ILF members structure themselves into communities and how do we promote boundary crossing?

 

Sasha Barab, Jim MaKinster, Julie Moore, & The ILF Design Team. (in press). Designing and Building an Online Community: The Struggle to Support Sociability in the Inquiry Learning Forum.

Sasha Barab, Jim MaKinster, & Rebecca Scheckler. (in press). Designing System Dualities: Building Online Community.