Effective professional learning for teachers is fundamental for any school system aiming to make transformative and sustainable change to teacher practice. This paper investigates the efficacy of Twitter as a medium for teachers to participate in professional learning by analysing the tweets of 30 influential users of the popular medium. We find that Twitter primarily acts as a valuable conduit for accessing new and relevant educational resources on the internet and also as a viable means of social support for like-minded educators. The cost effective nature of the microblogging platform ensures that it can act as a medium for sustained professional development, while leaving the individual participants to control and take ownership of the learning. These features align with the current literature associated with the characteristics of effective professional learning.

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'Follow' Me: Networked Professional Learning for Teachers

researchers, educators, and policymakers suggest the use of professional learning communities as one important approach to the improvement of teaching and learning. However, relatively little resea...

Closer to Learning: Social Networks, Trust, and Professional Communities.

Professional learning communities (PLC) have been widely accepted as effective with respect to good atmosphere, adequate leadership practices, and functional working practices. However, the outcomes for school improvement depend on case-specific issues. To identify less culturally and contextually bound issues in 3 PLC settings in Canada, Finland, and Israel, we examined our cases through the notion of “collaborativeness”. It refers to a systematic and shared process consisting of efforts, ideas, and activities that aim at achieving synergy. By combining the 3 data sets and applying a special model, we were able to distinguish, through qualitative content analysis, ingredients of collaborativeness beyond culture and context that we consider particularly essential. The crucial factor proved to be a dynamic relationship between mutual and deep learning, realized through 5 different ways. We further believe that our results could serve other organizations striving for school improvement in other kind...

Collaborativeness as the core of professional learning communities beyond culture and context: evidence from Canada, Finland, and Israel

This article explores an approach to developing organisational and leadership capacity through the development of a professional learning community. This particular community was formed using an approach that integrates the framework of AI with complexity thinking to inform professional learning processes. The experience provides a new perspective on how AI applications can occasion emergence in professional learning, inform leadership of organisations and create a nexus of innovation. Self-organising behaviour is common in the natural world. It is characterised by a collective of independent agents who self-organise in a dynamic manner in order to create emergence, a patterned higher order response to a threat or opportunity. Biologists exploring the group behaviour of many species (fish, ants, bees, birds) have noted that while the collective behaviour of these species is not predictable, neither is it chaotic.

https://www.ir.canterbury.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10092/6136/12629627_2011%20UK%20-%20Appreciative%20Inquiry%20Practitioner_Embedding%20AI%20in%20a%20Complexity%20thinking%20paradigm.pdf?sequence=1

Creating a Professional Learning Community

(2011) Academic Social Networking Brings Web 20 Technologies to the Middle Grades Middle School Journal: Vol 42, Meaningful Learning in 21st Century Schools, pp 12-19

Academic Social Networking Brings Web 2.0 Technologies to the Middle Grades.

Study Guide This study guide is a companion to the book Building a Professional Learning Community at Work: A Guide to the First Year by Parry Graham and William M Ferriter By focusing on the successes and challenges inherent in the process, Building a Professional Learning Community at Work is designed to help teachers and administrators accomplish the difficult task of building a professional learning community from the ground up

/pdf/building-a-professional-learning-community-at-work-a-guide-2kww1v6kc6.pdf

William Ferriter

Papers

Building a Professional Learning Community at Work™: A Guide to the First Year