Download Report: ENGAGEMENT AND DISCOURSE OF EDUCATORS THROUGH ONLINE PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES
Professional learning community (PLC) is a promising strategy for effective professional development because it provides opportunities featuring collaboration, job-embedded contexts, reflection and feedback on practice, and sustained duration of learning. Yet, there are temporal and geographic barriers to designing and implementing a PLC, such as finding shared meeting time and connecting educators across different school/district buildings. The use of an online platform for collaboration and collective learning offers a solution to some of those challenges. The current study details three online PLCs: the Early Literacy District Coaches Online Community, the Statewide Online Mentor Network, and the STEM Teacher Network. The study also attempts to unpack participants’ engagement, in particular their discourse in those social constructive spaces. Using text-mining technique as the primary analytic approach, the findings highlight the strong potential of online PLCs and, in particular, discussion forums as hubs for meeting isolated educators’ professional needs. Practical considerations for improved design and implementation and future research needs are also discussed.
