This talk presents a number of perspectives upon a growing learning network of pre-service and early career teachers. The learning network has arisen through a collaboration between a number of Australian universities, with the aim of facilitating support in the transition between pre-service education and the first years of service. The talk is structured to refer to this example in posing questions more general to design for learning networks:
- What is the motivation for developing the learning network? Original research into the need to augment teacher support in Australia.
- How do design of the set, activities and relationships align with participant motivations? Participant ownership and designing for culture (desired within the network) as well as cultural history (of the participants in other networks).
- How does theory influence the design process? Theory-based criticism of the design and allowing this to inform further design.
(more info at http://www.nickkellyresearch.com)
3. • “Altruistic communities”
• Motivation
• League tables of…?
• PageRank
Image credit: Dewy Spider Web by User:Fir0002 Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
4. (Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002)
Behaviour change (Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002)
Theory of reasoned action (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980)
5. Pre-service and early career teachers
• Transition
• Challenges
• Attrition
• Role of support
“The factors with the strongest effect were having a
mentor teacher from one’s subject area and having
common planning or collaboration time with other
teachers in one’s subject area” (Ingersoll, 2012)
6. What is support?
• Mentor
• Orientation program
• Reduced face-to-face
• Follow up from TEP
• Structured observation/reflection
24% primary no support
14% secondary no support
(McKenzie et al 2007)
7. 19% unprompted negative comment
(Kelly et al, 2014)
“Limited support. A mentor teacher was
assigned to me but her workload was such that
there was little time to effectively help. Sink or
swim!”
(Kelly et al, 2014)
8. Who is unsupported?
• Remote teachers
– 27% unsupported (17% for non-remote)
• Insecure employment
– 25% unsupported (15% for supported)
• Dissatisfied
– Approx 30% unsupported (18% for satisfied)
(SiAS data, 2007; n=1862)
12. Email 44 71%
Facebook 29 47%
In Person 22 35%
Telephone 14 23%
Other 3 5%
Twitter 0 0%
How did you stay in touch with university community?
(Kelly et al, 2014; n=62)
13. Design principles (95% agreement):
• Ask questions of experienced teachers
• Easily searchable and moderated FAQ from all
1st year teachers in the country
(N=118, Kelly et al 2014)
23. Design for co-creation of knowledge
• Emergent
• Implied by:
– Media
– Seeding
– First peoples
• Motivation
24.
25. • Role of theory
• Relational agency (Edwards, 2005)
• Resource sharing
• Reflection on practice (Griffiths, 2000)
26. • Reflection on practice (Dewey, Schön)
“…making preconceptions explicit through a
study of autobiographical accounts can enable
pre-service teachers to begin the transformation
of personal experience into personal and
professional knowledge” (Griffiths 2000, p547)
27. Challenges
1. Trust
- Joint reflection (Wopereis et al, 2010)
2. Clarity
- How to ask (Mamykina et al, 2011)
3. Stability
- Responsibility, interiorizing (Gelfuso & Denis, 2014)
…with massification
(Clara et al, 2014)
29. An invitation
2014 S2 – Pilot (USQ + Griffith)
2015 S1 – Expanded pilot (+QUT,+CQU,+UQ,+?)
2015 S2 – Nationwide
Editor's Notes
Hi, my name is Nick Kelly [etc preamble]
I’m going to talk about a few different perspectives on a learning network that we’ve been designing up in Queensland.
I’m really excited about where this is at as we’re just at the point where the pilot is going to happen and teachers across the state are going to start using the platform.
I’m going to structure the talk today into three different sections, and given what we know about the average attention span I’m going to stop and check in with you at the end of each one. It almost feels like a taboo that here doing research in education we do research to show strong evidence that after 15 minutes of passive listening our attention starts to drop off – yet at the same time we’re a part of the academic tradition in which the ability to stand and deliver a one hour lecture is an important test of your intellectual fortitude.
As I said, I’m here to talk about pre-service teachers
-Why are we doing something rather than nothing?
I should add that I’ll use the royal we as there are a bunch of different collaborations going on around this
What is the reason for this work? Where is it coming from.
Secondly I’ll be talking about this as a learning network and how we’ve designed it.
We’re trying to do this right – evidence basis, design based research and a theoretical critique.
Here at CoCo you’ve been doing a lot of work on the architecture of learning networks and you’ll see that I’ve adopted the terminology used by Lucila and Peter in their book, simply because it is a useful way of talking about what we’re doing. This network is only just going into the pilot stage, so a lot of the work that has gone into it is at the level of design.
[As a side note, I was in the supermarket last night and a thought struck me that these are one of the most densely graphically designed spaces on the planet.]
Finally I’ll move into discussion of the potential uses for this community once we get it going
As a part of this I want to extend an invitation to you all to get involved
I want to start by talking about where I’m coming from as a researcher and the broader arc within which this research is taking place
A scenario was posed as a hypothetical by the DG of EQ which I find intriguing.
Altruistic communities as a paradigm that is different to competition – I’ve used scare quotes because there are serious theories that talk about what I’m describing here in hand-waving terms.
Really when I say this is that we’re designing communities by really taking on this question of aligning motivations.
There is an awful lot of belief in competition as a mechanism for promoting efficiency
The latest is the idea of making universities compete against one another
The big idea being that in competition you have to get better at what you’re doing
The idea is that competition applies to individuals competing against one another – it could be framed as creating a motivation for an entity to improve towards some kind of fitness function [football teams, universities, evolution]
However, what if the fitness function was defined in such a way that the fitness of an individual is defined by their ability to act for the benefit of others?
Google PageRank is an example of how this works extremely well in practice. [explain]
Classic fitness function is as plato would have said it – a good knife is a sharp knife which means it has the behaviour that it cuts well
Someone’s standing in a community is based upon how they’ve contributed to the community. And in online communities we can shape this.
Let’s bring this idea into this room right now actually – whyever not?
It’s like the old social experiment… actually, can we do this now? Whyever not?
Turn to the person next to you
Got that?
Okay now, you have to laugh in such a way that you make the person you’re looking at laugh
Okay, so if that works correctly then we just created a kind of a positive feedback loop, and that’s really what we’re trying to setup in the design of a network
To put this on slightly more formal footing, what we want is to align your internal and external motivations so that you want to make a contribution from the outset based on your knowledge, values and attitudes AND the contribution that you make comes back to you.
One way that people get at this is by talking about internal and external motivations and they both need to be addressed for changing behaviour.
Most notably they talk about this in theory of reasoned action, but this is an adaptation applying it to pro-environmental behaviour
What you’re seeing here is just one of a number of such models
I’m staring from the middle here, but I like this as a way to frame the research as even though it’s very much hand-waving I do believe that there is something here that needs more serious attention in the big picture.
I’ve really not told you anything yet about what we’re actually doing, so perhaps that’s a good place to go to.
We’re here in a university, we educate teachers and then send them off into the wild [analogy?]
There is a transition that happens here – they go from a cohort of shared experience and lecturers and a whole support environment out into most likely some kind of employment scenario
Yes pracex helps to reduce the shock of this but it’s the first time that they’ve done it without their supportive community
I’ve been at the ATEA conference these last few days and these are the kinds of things that teachers are talking about – how to develop resilience so that when teachers out there blah
Attrition is a real problem when teachers leave the profession
Problems with rural teachers
Talk about the SiAS survey – what it is, where it comes from and how I’m using it
Talk about the survey we ran
Disaggregating the data
Over 30% not supported
Here I’ve listed a few existing teacher communities
What they have in common is that they aim for size.
It’s a maxim of large communities that the bigger they are the more useful they are – in the sense that the information or the person that you need is in there somewhere, and it just becomes a question of finding them.
Whether or not a community grows however depends on both exposure and utility.
Is this useful to teachers? So I’ll get into that a little more, but first I want to point out the issue of context
These occur within a context. For example, in The Learning Place I as a teacher know that anything that I write is owned by Education Queensland and could be used against me to stop me getting a job. This changes how I use the platform.
This is the question of “top down” communities as opposed to “bottom up” communities
We could frame this as the question of “engagement” – how do teachers become attracted to the community?
Then there is the question of
I would actually argue that in Australia we do not have a working, large scale community of teachers.
So, I would argue that we do not have a functioning large scale community of teachers working in Australia.
Really, this is a design problem.
I used to teach design and one off the first things that we get designers to do is study successful designs and figure out why they work
In this case the model is stack overflow
We don’t actually know an awful lot about how teachers use these websites.
Descriptive stats but not much in the way of analysis.
This is some preliminary data from research that I’m doing with Amy Antonio up at USQ
We know that teachers are using Facebook and we know that from both anecdotal evidence from a number of teacher educators, but also from a survey that I conducted last year of 118 beginning teachers in Queensland.
What this is showing is that teachers are using their Facebook groups mainly for research sharing and resource requesting. Nearly all activity in this one group that we analysed was concerned with sharing resources, commercial offers and requesting resources – in that order.
More on this data this afternoon.
What’s interesting
The goal of this research was to get an idea of how teachers are using
Teachers don’t just come into a community and ask questions
So our design principles are drawn from this and from surveying teachers subsequently that something that would be really useful is to be able to…
This is what we’ve designed our platform to enable and to do it very smoothly and slickly for all involved.
Very quick overview of how and where it gets used
The kinds of social interactions that are suggested and promoted
The kinds of knowledge that are suggested and promoted
We’ve used this methodology to design
Using the framework as a way of analysing and talking about it
So far I’ve been talking about these empirical foundations
Culture of teachers as a profession
Historical as differentiation from other communities – the importance of being a user-driven community
Everything is linked to motivations – perhaps to who it is that most needs the motivation
Link back to the evidence of Ingersoll about the importance of mentors and what students said about wanting to ask questions
A choice was made not to differentiate experienced teachers from other teachers but rather to have this be implicit in experience
Division between people whose main role is asking and people whose main role is answering
Looking at the path of asking a question as this is one of the two main “tasks” that go on in the system
A 30 second rule for asking a question for at least getting into the asking space
This relates back to those initial concepts of how to quantify what is being given to the community
Your value is comes from your value to the community as determined by the community
The role of theory is firstly to guide the design activity – but then to enable a critique of it later.
From Dewey the value of transformative action on the basis of reflection, as distinct from routine or traditional actions
Through to Schon who distinguished types of reflection and their use
The key issue is that reflection can help beginning teachers to gain expertise
This is the key thesis of “the reflective practitioner” – that by reflecting in and on practice professionals can transform their actions
One example of this is given by Griffiths, about how the study of teacher autobiographical accounts helps transform personal experience into professional knowledge.
So we know that we want to have reflection happening within our community.
The goal of the paper that we wrote, and that we plan to subsequently submit to APJTE, is on the challenges that are presented by these large online communities.
These are fundamentally design challenges not insuperable problems.
Firstly, teachers need to be able to trust the community. This is not always the case and is quite difficult to achieve.
Things like culture, presentation – it is a challenge
How this led to changes