As demands to improve teacher quality increase, online professional development programs have proliferated to meet a variety of needs. But little is known about best practices in the design and implementation of these programs. In Online Professional Development for Teachers: Emerging Models and Methods (Harvard Education Press, 2006), Chris Dede, the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and his colleagues analyze the strengths and limitations of selected models of online professional development in areas related to math, science, engineering, and technology. Harvard Education Letter
contributor Andreae Downs spoke with Dede about issues in the design and implementation of online professional development.
How does online professional development compare with face-to-face professional development?
It’s a widely held misconception that any form of online learning is second best to any form of face-to-face learning. What research shows us is that online learning and face-to-face learning complement each other in interesting ways. Some people who are silent in face-to-face professional development sessions find their voice in online interactions, for a variety of reasons. Online learning can also extend time, which is perhaps the most precious resource that teachers have, because it allows them to do professional development when they want, where they want. So it has some strengths that are a really good complement to face-to-face professional development.
But what online learning doesn’t always provide is somebody right down the hall from you. Sometimes you want to get together in the teachers’ lounge with somebody else who’s going through the same experience. If professional development is all online, you lose some emotional and social immediacy. The best professional development is not face-to-face only or online only, it’s both.
What’s the best approach to combining online and face-to-face strategies?
I don’t think that it chunks into topic areas so that, for instance, you would learn subject content face to face and pedagogy online, or vice versa. I think it’s more that face-to-face learning offers a kind of immediacy, especially on the emotional and social level, that builds up intensity, and that online offers a broader set of resources, more flexibility in terms of time, and a chance for people who aren’t good face-to-face to find their voice.
An important advantage of online professional development is the lower costs associated with scaling up. Scalability is very important in professional development, because to change the culture or the policies of an organization, the processes by which teaching and learning take place, a critical mass of teachers has to be willing to take the leap to a different model. If it’s just a few teachers doing things in a new way, it’s not likely to be very successful, because the whole system is set up to work in the traditional fashion. So doing professional development at scale to be transformative is really an important strategy.
Teaching is such a face-to-face profession—how can online learning help to transform that kind of culture?
We don’t have any reason to believe that face-to-face professional development is automatically better at helping teachers transform their roles and practices than online learning is. What we do know is that transformation is an intellectual, emotional, and social process, and that having strong support on all three dimensions is necessary, whether it’s online or face to face.
Online professional development lends itself to kinds of learning that are more powerful for many people than face-to-face learning. It gives people a chance to make sure they have the meaning of what they’re reading or listening to, and then to compose their response. Also, people who are shy, who are reluctant to share their thinking about new ideas in front of their peers, often feel disinhibited online. It’s not quite as intense an experience as face-to-face learning. So when we study participation patterns, we see much richer participation patterns online, often more thoughtful participation patterns than we see face to face. And for transformational change, that’s very important.
What guidance might you provide to administrators selecting online professional development programs?
I think the first thing for an administrator to do is a needs assessment of their own professional development: where it is strong; where they are lacking local expertise or local resources and how to bring that in from the outside; what kinds of learning their teachers seem to enjoy most. With that kind of needs assessment, then it’s possible to look at what’s available online and find a good match: a program that builds on the strengths of what they already have, that’s consistent with their goals, and that’s affordable.
How did you choose the models featured in your book?
I selected 10 high-quality models that had been around long enough that they had a track record, in terms of effectiveness data, and that were quite different from one another, in terms of the knowledge and skills being taught, the technologies used, and the audience (see sidebar "10 Exemplary Models"). I wanted to get a sense of the complete design space within which people are doing online teacher professional development.
Professional development is suited to a wide range of ways of helping teachers. For instance, teachers may feel they were inadequately prepared in terms of their subject matter. Or they may feel that they know the content well, but perhaps they’ve changed careers and not really had the kinds of pedagogical preparation that they would like. New teachers may struggle with classroom management and with basic teaching skills like creating lesson plans or individualized education programs (IEPs). Experienced teachers may wish to move into more of a leadership role. We tried to pick models that addressed all of these dimensions.
What are some of the promising aspects of the models that you looked at?
One model that we looked at is called EdTech Leaders Online. This is a suite of courses from the Educational Development Center (EDC) that trains people from the district to teach online workshops to their colleagues. So in a sense, EDC is training the trainers for online teacher professional development. Districts see it as a way of building their own capacity, rather than having to pay an outside group indefinitely for a service. The leadership dimension to it, too, is something that teachers value.
Another model is the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s WIDE World model. It builds on Teaching for Understanding, an instructional approach that can improve many different kinds of learning. There are a relatively small number of people who understand it deeply. If you were head of a district and you wanted a detailed exposure to Teaching for Understanding, it might be quite difficult to accomplish that face-to-face. But it’s quite easy to accomplish that using WIDE World. Studying WIDE World is helping us to understand how to incorporate a new pedagogy across distance.
The Milwaukee Portal is not only for professional development but also day-to-day work of all types: attendance, IEPs, lesson planning. The original impetus was to provide a supportive place online to help new teachers feel empowered. It expanded to include all teachers and all kinds of district initiatives. It’s been a very interesting experiment in trying to give teachers tools that help to make them more effective.
Some of our model projects are from places that have a lot of digital resources: museums or television stations. There they are taking an existing suite of resources and helping teachers find the material they need and use it effectively within a classroom setting.
What do you see as the next steps in online professional development?
We need to develop a research agenda for online teacher professional development—its effectiveness, its design, the promise of new media. Almost any aspect of an online professional development model is understudied right now, relative to what we know about face-to-face professional development.
What we’re seeing are first-generation models that largely came out of the minds of designers. I’m hoping people will start thinking about what second-generation models should look like. Those models, presumably, will have much more input from teachers, who can provide valuable suggestions about how to make the models more effective. This is a natural evolution that will really increase both the appeal and the impact of online teacher professional development.
