Online Teaching Communities From Preservice To Proficiency

Claire M. Fontaine

May 31, 2009

Online Teaching Communities from Preservice through Proficiency

Professor Nick Michelli Urban Education Ph.D. Program CUNY Graduate Center Educating Educators Defining the issue

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Transitioning from pre-service preparation to full time work as a classroom teacher presents significant personal and professional challenges to inexperienced educators. Regardless of whether one is working in an urban, suburban or rural context or something in between, the sense of responsibility and feelings of isolation and self-doubt can be overwhelming. New teachers are often assigned to more challenging classes avoided by experienced teachers with seniority privileges. Furthermore, the working conditions in schools can lack collegiality and thus seem hostile to newcomers seeking guidance and support. The frustration experienced by new teachers is a primary cause of the current teacher retention crisis. The teacher retention crisis is not, as is often believed, primarily due to high rates of teacher retirement, increases in student enrollment, or a failure to recruit teachers to work in those schools categorized as lowest performing. Recent studies suggest that it is our apparent inability to retain the most credentialed teachers in our lowest performing schools that has fueled the crisis. According to a November 2008 report of the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), teacher turnover in public schools nationwide costs taxpayers $7.3 billion annually, as 40 to 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession within five years. New York City public schools alone lose about $115 million each year to teacher turnover (CPRE, 2007). Teachers who leave cite serious problems with the instructional, collegial and systemic conditions of their working environment (Futernick, 2007). Schools serving low-income student populations are worse at providing new teachers with mentoring and support. It makes sense that schools with fewer resources in general would also tend to have fewer resources in particular to support the mentoring needs of new teachers. Schools with more resources also tend to present less frustrating working conditions that mitigate the threat of attrition to some extent. This

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“support gap” suffered by new teachers in high poverty schools is linked to lower measures of job satisfaction in the short term and higher rates of new teacher attrition (Johnson, Kardos, Kauffman, Liu & Donaldson, 2004). Comprehensive induction, which refers to an integrated program of high-quality structured mentoring, common planning time, ongoing professional development, and membership in a multi-site network, can staunch attrition to half of what it would be otherwise (Ingersoll & Kralik, 2004). When schools commit to providing high quality comprehensive induction to new teachers, the investment pays off, literally; for every $1 invested, schools see a payoff of $1.66 over a five year period. (Villar & Strong, 2007). However, only one percent of teachers nationwide have access to a comprehensive induction program of the scope outlined above (Smith & Ingersoll, 2004). Furthermore, few states provide fully funded mandated induction programs, in large part because induction has historically been regarded as a district or school responsibility (Britton, Raizen, Paine & Huntley, 2005). The task facing stakeholders, particularly state departments of education, local school districts, and university teacher education programs, is to develop innovative and paradigmbending systems and structures that support new teachers as they make the difficult transition from the pre-service preparation program into full-time positions as classroom teachers across a range of different contexts. Reviewing the literature The existing structures that define the work that takes place in schools are relics of a nineteenth century factory model of teaching and learning. These structures are predicated on the labor needs of an industrial economy, the prevalence of scientific management-inspired approaches to employee management, and behaviorist learning theory - conditions that no longer

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reflect the context and mission of our educational system. What is more, one third of the current teacher workforce are members of the Baby Boom generation. The impending retirement of this generation of teachers will necessitate fundamental changes in how teachers’ roles are conceptualized inside schools if schools hope to attract and retain new teachers of the Millennial generation (Carroll, 2009, p. 46). Coinciding with the demographic shift within the teacher workforce is a similarly dramatic demographic shift in the student population, already underway and already challenging previously dominant school practices premised on the notion that teachers can address the learning needs of all students using the same strategies (DarlingHammond & Bransford, 2005). Schools, Carroll argues, must adapt to their new role as twenty-first century learning organizations. But new teachers today are entering schools where, by in large, they will work independently of their colleagues physically as well as mentally, as if in parallel universes and not just the next classroom over. Although earlier generations of teachers reported finding independence and freedom in working alone, the majority of teachers today now are looking for more collaborative work environments. Lortie’s (1975) landmark sociological study of teachers reveals that in the past teachers expressed a strong preference for solitary labor performed in the privacy of their classroom, but teachers today articulate a growing interest in workplace collegiality, communities of inquiry, and boundary-crossing collaboration. While teachers have attempted to translate prescriptive pedagogical approaches into more constructive learning experiences for students, teachers themselves still enjoy precious few opportunities to work collaboratively and engage in generative thinking and agentive action (Johnson, Berg & Donaldson, 2005).

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May 31, 2009

According to Behrstock and Clifford (2009), the private sector excels at creating opportunities for newer employees to learn the skills of the trade by working in teams with colleagues at all different levels of the organization. While the prospect of a teaching career appeals to many talented young people, particularly since the collapse of the financial sector, teachers’ working environment leaves much to be desired from the perspective of Generation Y, also known as the Millennials. New teachers certainly do not expect schools to remodel themselves after dot com startups, but they are interested in working in organizations that value their potential contributions and find ways of breaking through traditional hierarchies. This is, at a certain level, all about control. It is part of reconstituting teaching as a clinical practice profession in which teachers themselves enjoy a measure of control, and the respect such control implies, over their work. Online communities are one way of enabling teachers to exercise agency and to define for themselves the support they need to do their jobs effectively. The Carnegie Corporation of New York has been the primary proponent of the idea of teaching as a clinical practice profession through its Teachers for a New Era initiative. This reform initiative seeks deep and fundamental change in the organization of teacher education programs, including such areas as “allocation of resources, academic organization, criteria for evaluating participating faculty, internal accountability measures, and relationships with practicing schools” (TNE Prospectus, 2001). Carnegie works with selected colleges and universities nationwide to develop exemplary teacher education programs. These exemplary programs can then serve as models going forward to other institutions of higher education that want to develop state-of-the-art teacher education programs for the standard primary route to employment as a beginning professional teacher.

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To speak of teaching as clinical practice “extends the conversation about the teaching profession beyond institutions of higher education to a wider policy and practice audience” (Alter & Coggshall, 2009, p. 2). It is a way of characterizing the nature of teachers’ work in the classroom by referencing other broad types of work that one might engage in. For example, we customarily categorize occupations into crafts and professions. Crafts are occupations like plumbing or woodworking in which the majority of training occurs on the job, through practice. Professions, such as law or architecture, on the other hand, are occupations that require a substantial course of study before professional practice begins. But the craft-profession dialectic fails to account for occupations in medicine, which typically require advance academic preparation in addition to an ongoing course of study throughout one’s career. The notion of the clinical practice profession adds nuance to the stark craft versus profession dialectic, and if applied to teaching, can point toward a different, better approach to teacher preparation. Alter and Coggshall identify four distinguishing characteristics of a critical practice profession, which they draw from reviewing the literature in teacher and medical education. These are: centrality of clients, knowledge demands, use of evidence and judgement, and community standards. In other words, competency in a clinical practice profession necessitates grounding in a body of academic content knowledge, but the emphasis on judgement and client agency within clinical practice means that this academic preparation must be supplemented with practical context-oriented preparation. Therefore, the education of a clinical practice professional has three basic components: academic grounding; practice-based training; and ongoing learning” (Alter & Coggshall, 2009, p. 3). This third component means that the education of a clinical practice professional is not conceptually limited to the preparation that occurs before an individual’s professional practice begins. Rather, the education of a clinical practice professional

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is conceptualized as beginning in the preservice period, continuing in the early stages of the individual’s professional practice, and extending throughout much of the professional career. Online learning communities and online communities of practice for educators are related to the notion of teaching as a clinical practice profession in two ways. First, both proceed from a common premise that the responsibility for preparing and developing teachers must be shared between institutions of higher education and local school districts. Second, both online communities and conceptions of teaching as clinical practice maintain that teacher learning should be an ongoing process, and as such must be sustained past the initial induction period and into subsequent phases of teachers’ professional development. Historically, institutions of higher education have handled the preservice component and local districts have focused their efforts of providing mentoring services to new teachers and offering professional development opportunities to mid-career educators. Ideally, however, both the institution of higher education and the local school district would expand the scope their involvement to encompass the preservice period through the first few years of induction. Online communities represent an expansion of the role of the university in the induction process insofar as they position teacher education faculty and more experienced graduates of teacher education programs as on-demand just-in-time mentors to new teachers. Dede (2006) argues that online teacher professional development (oTPD) programs represent a more viable model for delivery of mandated professional development services than the traditional model of school-based seminars. According to Dede, Ketelhut, Whitehouse, Breit and McCloskey (2009), Generally, these programs are available to teachers at their convenience and can provide just-in-time assistance. In addition, they often give schools access to experts and archival

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resources that fiscal and logistical constraints would otherwise limit. Furthermore, online professional development programs also are potentially more scalable than those that depend purely on local resources and face to-face interactions. (p. 9) Given the current, rather dismal state of in-service professional development, there is reason to be skeptical of quick-fix solutions. Yet, it is true that schools should be getting more out of their professional development expenditures. In the 1990s, school districts spent the equivalent of $200 per pupil on professional development related expenditures for their teachers (Killeen, Monk, & Plecki, 2002), figures that must be even higher now. Yet teachers still overwhelmingly report frustration with the professional development they are offered. According to Dede et al., professional development programs impose costs in terms of time and resources while not necessarily improving teaching practice. This is because many teacher professional development programs consist of “fragmented, intellectual superficial” seminars (Borko, 2004) and do not provide the ongoing support that might assist teachers in actually implementing new curricula or pedagogies (Barnett, 2002). Teachers dread these sessions and may pass them by daydreaming, doodling or grading, largely because they resent the intrusion of the farce that professional development has become. There are many different forms of online teacher professional development and a great deal of variation in quality among these programs. It will be essential to distinguish among different models for online teacher professional development to ensure that programs are adopted for the right reasons, because they help teachers to improve their teaching practice and create gains in student learning. To the extent that online communities for new teachers promote improvement in these areas, the model can be leveraged into online teacher professional development programs (oTPD) for teachers in all stages of their careers. These online supplements and

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alternatives boast the distinct advantages of fitting into teachers’ packed schedules and offering access to high quality resources that may not be available locally. For example, sometimes new teachers hesitate to ask certain questions of their assigned mentors - questions related to classroom management, for example - for fear that the information about teachers’ self-perceived weaknesses may find its way to the employer and be used against them. An online forum may entail less risk to one’s professional reputation than consultation with a mentor who shares a supervisor with the new teacher. Online communities connect teachers to additional sources of support outside of what is traditionally provided by their employer. Former classmates now working as teachers in a different district, experienced teachers of that subject area in the local schools, paid graduate students interested in community of practice development, teacher education faculty and arts and sciences faculty can all contribute in different ways and help new teachers successfully transition from preservice to inservice teaching. Online learning communities also liberate teachers from any need to wait for a scheduled face-to-face meeting with their assigned mentor to address their issues and concerns. Instead, teachers are empowered to seek out solutions strategies and resources for addressing their problems at their convenience. Ultimately, it seems likely that the online learning community will evolve into a space where teachers seek support related to certain domains of their practice as opposed to other domains where expertise is located at the work site. There are indications that states have already begun to re-conceptualize professional development for teachers. A recent report of the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) entitled Empowering Teachers: A Professional and Collaborative Approach (2008), asserts the need to “shift the focus from continuing

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education credits and stand alone courses to a comprehensive approach to professional learning” (p. 3). SETDA recommends three methods that states can take advantage of to enhance their capacity to provide ongoing, relevant and continuous learning opportunities for teachers: online learning communities, education portals, and mentoring. SETDA characterizes online learning communities as spaces for teachers to exchange resources, and education portals as one-stop sites for diverse users like teachers, parents and administrators to access needed resources related to classroom instruction. Perhaps the ideal online teacher community would find ways of addressing all three of the aforementioned avenues of effective professional development. Profile of Tapped In Teachers Learning in Networked Communities (TLINC) is a demonstration project of National Commission for Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF). One of the project’s central goals is to encourage and enable university teacher education programs to participate with local school districts in the work of supporting and socializing new teachers as they transition from preservice preparation to full classroom teaching. TLINC connects preservice teachers and new classroom teachers to university faculty, peers and colleagues, and accomplished educators in an online learning community using the Tapped In platform. Facilitating reflective practice and resource sharing, Tapped In aims to accelerate the development of professional proficiency and improve the retention rates of early career educators by supplementing the support new teachers already receive in face-to-face mentoring situations. Tapped In has existed in its current form since 2002 when it was rereleased after an extensive redesign. Before the redesign, from 1996 to 2002, the community took the form of a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), a “network-accessible, multi-participant, user-extensible virtual reality whose user interface is entirely textual” (Curtis, 1992). By way of further description,

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A MUD is a software program that accepts “connections” from multiple users across some kind of network (e.g., telephone lines or the Internet) and provides to each user access to a shared database of “rooms,” “exits,” and other objects. Each user browses and manipulates this database from “inside” one of those rooms, seeing only those objects that are in the same room and moving from room to room mostly via the exits that connect them. A MUD, therefore, is a kind of virtual reality, an electronically-represented “place” that users can visit. (Curtis, 1992, p. 1) While the Tapped In development team “chose open-source, Java-based solutions... to implement a redesigned system that would be robust, versatile and scalable” (Farooq, Schank, Harris, Fusco & Schlager, 2007, p. 9), even the new iteration of Tapped In continues to rely heavily on a spatial metaphor, substituting a college campus for the dungeon. Figure 1 is a screenshot of the schematic Tapped In uses to represent itself which illustrates this metaphor in action.

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May 31, 2009 Figure 1: Tapped In Campus Map

One of the salient challenges that NCTAF has identified through its TLINC project is the difficulty of transitioning from a heavily supported model to a self-sustaining model of community computing (Farooq et al., 2007). Community computing refers to the as “sociotechnical interventions and infrastructures that support community interactions and civic activities among people sharing common resources” (p. 3). Problems arise in community computing when the technological infrastructure does not meet the requirements of end users. For example, imagine that a user comes across a forum in which teachers are discussing ways of using video in the social studies classroom. Ideally, teachers would be able to embed videos from Vimeo or TeacherTube in the forum, just as they might embed videos in a personal blog. But perhaps the forum is not a rich media environment with embedding capabilities. In this case, users cannot view the video inside the site. They will instead have to cut and paste the URL of the recommended video into a different browser window. This limitation of the technological infrastructure detracts from the viability of the community because it directs traffic outside of the site rather than generating traffic within the site. High traffic environments have a way of generating more traffic still. Community computing projects can also struggle to generate sufficient social capital to support significant contributions by members of the community. Imagine, for instance, that one user is debating whether to join in a conversation taking place in a forum. The forum conversation surrounds a new teacher who has appealed to the community for strategies and systems that will help her maintain a degree of order and focus when she brings her classes of 30 eighth graders to the computer lab. She does not have access to a projector and only 23 of the computers are operational. The first user might have useful experiences and ideas to relate, but

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she may also be a prolific blogger who participates in various online communities and aggregates her distributed participation using a blog. She would like to extract content from the site, the record of her participation, using an RSS feed. If this feature is not offered, she may be dissuaded from spending too much time in this community and may elect instead to focus her participation in communities whose environments support data transportability. It will be difficult to sustain a critical mass of users over time if conditions like these are present. If a given infrastructure fails to support the types of activities users are interested in engaging in or fails to provide meaningful support within a reasonable frame of time, then users will abandon the community and find another, more active and better supported, community of users. These conditions - of a mismatch between end user applications and the technological infrastructure of a community computer initiative - are most likely to prevail when “community activities and practices are supplied hierarchically, such as by formal institutions, instead of developing organically and being maintained by the community” (Farooq et al., p. 3). According to Rheingold (1993), this can create an impression among users that the environment does not belong to the users but instead to the institution, which tends to depress participation rates. Underutilization limits the vibrancy of the community and ultimately portends its erasure. Schlager and Fusco (2004) discuss general principles which they believe should be used to guide technological design and development of online communities of practice for teacher professional development. Their three design strategies include: investing in bonding social capital to maintain feedback loops between community end users and designers; providing multiple online gathering places for engagement with a range of community end users; and reinforcing leadership roles organically from within the community.

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Farooq et al. (2007) adopt a participatory approach to engaging users in the design of a community computing infrastructure developed through an institutional initiative. They report on their successful approach to facilitating communicating between end users and developers. They implement four channels of communication including contact and bug forms, a needed features group, a task list and a help desk staffed by community volunteers and leaders. Recommendations States can take measures to support the development of online communities of practice and online teacher professional development programs. They can, for instance, provide grants to researchers studying successful ways of leveraging the networked community to enhance teaching practice, retain qualified teachers, and promote student achievement. States can also work in collaboration with teacher education faculty to reexamine the state-mandated preparation and coursework requirements to include participation in an online community of practice. States can also provide incentives to individual schools that tend to hire graduates of a particular teacher education program to deepen their involvement with the institution of higher education by agreeing to provide a clinical setting for preservice teachers. The additional opportunity for collaborative discourse across institutional boundaries is another way of strengthening the relationship between institutions of higher education and local school districts. Finally, states can allocate resources to support comprehensive induction and continued professional development activities grounded in practice, including online learning communities and online communities of practice for teachers. States, districts and schools can take certain steps to help teachers capitalize on their online professional development activities, and to translate these experiences into their teaching practice. They might, for instance, create instructional technology mentor positions that are

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designed to support teachers in incorporating new practices and resources into their instruction, as recommended by SETDA. They might also link education portals to online communities. Education portals are powerful engines promoting equity of access to all teachers regardless of the supports offered or withheld by their home district. Developed using federal funds in combination with state funding sources, education portals represent a rich resource repository which could become even more useful as databases of practice linked to online communities in which teachers discuss ways of making best use of the curricular and instructional resources. States should also allocate funds alongside the federal government for research into the effectiveness of job-embedded professional development for improving the retention rates of new teachers and linking new teacher practices with enhanced student learning outcomes. School district professional development leaders should work to cultivate relationships with higher education institutions. Insofar as they identify ongoing learning and the integration of technology into instruction as desirable teaching practices, school district professional development leaders should advocate for folding these aims into the mission statements and curricula of teacher education programs. Public school administrators should commit to fully funding comprehensive induction programs and ongoing professional development programs when states and school districts fail to appropriate sufficient funds for these purposes. Administrators should consider applying a portion of their technology budgets to teacher professional development, especially in light of the fact that vast increases in technology expenditures in recent years have gone underutilized in schools, because insufficient resources have been set aside to help teachers develop the capacity to make use of these new tools. Furthermore, administrators should seek more input from

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teachers about their professional development needs and interests before deciding upon the shape and scope of professional learning opportunities they will make available to teachers. They should then back up their professional development programs with an authentic commitment to sustainable professional development expressed through their firm support of teachers’ efforts to implement changes to their teaching practice in connection to their professional learning. Institutions of higher education should provide transitional support to graduates of their teacher education programs. They should supply this support online because these new teachers work in geographically disparate areas and have many competing claims on their time. But they should adopt existing platforms aligned to their needs rather than developing infrastructure inhouse, which requires ongoing investment of significant financial and human capital resources. Just as online communities can fail to take root if they are not grounded in the needs of the community, they can also fall prey to budget shortfalls. Unless funded initiatives achieve sustainability, the loss of financial and human capital resources to maintain the infrastructure will cause the community to wither. Implementation Basically, I am suggesting that institutions of higher education should redirect their attention from the development of in-house platforms (Farooq et al., 2007; Schlager & Fusco, 2004) to the extension of widely used platforms. But perhaps these robust efforts at making a community computing infrastructure responsive to the needs and desires of the community are misplaced. To elaborate, when the development process for Tapped In was beginning, there was a dearth of viable models of online communities. Thirteen years later, online platforms for social networking, resource sharing and collaboration continue to proliferate. Despite the significant investment of time and resources that has already been devoted to Tapped In, it no longer makes

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sense to devote limited financial and human capital resources to the maintenance of the infrastructure when so many viable alternatives already exist. One peculiarity of the online teacher communities explored in the existing literature is their reliance on metaphors for virtual space. Tapped In presents itself as a metaphorical campus, as depicted in Figure 1. Another example, depicted in Figure 2 is BEST: Beginning and Establishing Successful Teachers, an online community of practice for common branch teachers. This project of the Faculty of Education at the University of Wollongong in Australia, relies on the metaphor of an internet cafe for its backstory (Herrington, Herrington, Kervin & Ferry, 2006).

Figure 2: Homepage of Beginning and Establishing Successful Teachers website

Both of these projects fail to appreciate that users are by now sufficiently familiar with the premise of virtual environments that it is no longer necessary to liken them to physical spaces. Prospective teachers entering through the primary traditional pathway of undergraduate study are members of the Millennial generation. The idea of online spaces is practically mundane to this

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audience. No conceptual leap is required, and so the campus metaphor adds little to their experience. In fact, the metaphorical overlay may depress participation rates among the Millennial demographic because it suggests that the community is not attuned to current practices and thus not likely to address their concerns. Institutions of higher education that want to expand their role in the induction of new teachers will extract maximum benefit from their investment by selecting an existing platform with a vibrant critical mass of existing users and a robust and supportive community. More specifically, I would recommend: 1) LinkedIn with Huddle; 2) Ning; 3) Learn Central. These may prove to be equally if not more viable platforms. For example, LinkedIn, when integrated with a Huddle workspace, offer the same range of functionality as Tapped In.

Figure 3: Group-related functionality on LinkedIn

It offers opportunities for communication with individuals and whole networks through the LinkedIn interface, as well as opportunities for resource sharing and collaboration similar to the Group function of Tapped In through the Huddle workspace.

Figure 4: Personal and group workspace environment in Huddle through LinkedIn

LinkedIn is already a popular site for professional social networking. Aesthetically, it is cleaner and has a more professional feel than Tapped In.

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Figure 5: Tapped In personal office

Ning offers a dynamic environment for user created social networks, and it boasts a particularly large following in education-related fields. But the most promising alternative may be Learn Central, a nascent social learning network for education, now in beta release. Users will have to decide on the appropriate platform by assessing the goals of the project and then testing out various options. As the needs of the community evolve, project managers can simply move their community to a more appropriate platform. According to Lenhart (2009), 75% of adults 18-24 currently use social network websites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Use of social network websites is also rising among adults in general. For example, the share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years -- from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project's December 2008 tracking survey. Many other users may be considering creating a profile on a social network site, but may need some encouragement to actually do so. Also, it can be very time consuming proposition to maintain engagement with multiple online communities. Communities of practice are more likely to develop into robust, vibrant and expansive communities when they are not positioned in competition with services which new teachers are already making use of in their personal and professional lives. Given the time constraints facing teachers, online teacher communities can maximize traffic by adopting platforms which many teachers already use for personal and professional purposes, or platforms that integrate well with teachers’ existing online identities.

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Bibliography Alter, J. & Coggshall, J. (2009). Teaching as a clinical practice profession: Implications for teacher preparation and state policy. New York Comprehensive Center, National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality. Retrieved May 26, 2009 from http://www.tqsource.org/publications/clinicalPractice.pdf. Anderson, J. Q., & Rainie, H. (2008). The future of the internet III. Washington, D.C.: Pew Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved May 30, 2009 from http://pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_FutureInternet3.pdf. Barab, S. A., Kling, R., & Gray, J. H. (2004). Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning. Learning in doing. New York: Cambridge University Press. Retrieved May 25, 2009 from http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521817552. Barnett, M. (2002). Issues and trends concerning electronic networking technologies for teacher professional development: A critical review of the literature. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA. Behrstock, E. & Clifford, M. (2009). Leading teachers from Generation Y: Emerging strategies for school leaders. National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality. Retrieved May 28, 2009 from http://www.tqsource.org/publications/gen_y.php. Borko, H. (2004). Professional development and teacher learning: Mapping the terrain. Educational Researcher, 33 (8), 3-15. Britton, E., Raizen, S., Paine, L., & Huntley, M. A. (2000). More swimming, less sinking: Perspectives on teacher induction in the U.S. and abroad. Paper prepared for the March 6-7 meeting of the National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century. Washington, DC: WestEd. Retrieved May 27, 2009 from http://www.wested.org/online_pubs/teacherinduction/ Carroll, T. G. (2009). Teaching for the Future. In B.S. Wehling & C. Schneider (Eds.), Building

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a Twenty-First Century U.S. Educational System. Washington, DC: National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE). (2007). New York: Preparing Teachers for a New Era. In Teachers for a New Era: Designing Policy Environments to Support High-Quality Teacher Preparation. Philadelphia, PA. Curtis, P. (1992). Mudding: Social phenomena in text-based virtual realities. Technical report, Xerox PARC, 1992. Retrieved May 27, 2009 from http://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/MOO_MUD_IRC/curtis_mudding.article. Darling-Hammond, L., & Bransford, J. (2005). Preparing teachers for a changing world: What teachers should learn and be able to do. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Dede, C. (2006). Online professional development for teachers: Emerging models and methods. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. Dede, C., Ketelhut, D. J., Whitehouse, P., Breit, L., & McCloskey, E. M. (2009). A Research Agenda for Online Teacher Professional Development. Journal of Teacher Education, 60 (1), 8-19. Retrieved May 26, 2009 from http://jte.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/60/1/8. Facebook. Accessed May 31, 2009 at http://facebook.com. Farooq, U., Schank, P., Harris, A., Fusco, J., & Schlager, M. (2007). Sustaining a Community Computing Infrastructure for Online Teacher Professional Development: A Case Study of Designing Tapped In. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 16 (4-5), 397429. Retrieved May 26, 2009 from http://www.springerlink.com.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/content/r541656187358884/. Futernick, K. (2007). A Possible Dream: Retaining California Teachers So All Students Learn. California State University Center for Teacher Quality. Retrieved May 28, 2009 from http://www.calstate.edu/teacherquality/documents/possible_dream.pdf. Herrington, A., Herrington, J., Kervin, L., & Ferry, B. (2006). The Design of an Online Community of Practice for Beginning Teachers. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 6 (1). Retrieved May 27, 2009 from http://www.citejournal.org/vol6/iss1/general/article1.cfm. Huddle. Accessed May 31, 2009 at http://huddle.net/. Ingersoll, R. M. & Kralik, J. M. (2004). The Impact of Mentoring on Teacher Retention: What the Research Says. ECS Research Review. Johnson, S. M., Berg, J. H. & Donaldson, M. L. (2005). Who stays in teaching and why:

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review of the literature on teacher retention. Cambridge, MA: Project on the Generation of Teachers, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Retrieved May 25, 2009, from http://www.aarp.org/nrta/teaching.html.

Johnson, S. M., Kardos, S. M., Kauffman, D., Liu, E. & Donaldson, M. L. (2004). The Support Gap: New Teachers’ Early Experiences in High-Income and Low-Income Schools. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 12 (61). Retrieved May 25, 2009 from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v12n61/. Killeen, K. M., Monk, D. H., & Plecki, M. L. (2002). School District Spending on Professional Development: Insights Available from National Data (1992-1998). Journal of Education Finance, 28 (1), 25-50. Learn Central. Accessed May 31, 2009 at http://learncentral.org/. Lenhart, A. (2009, January). Adults and Social Network Websites. Washington, D.C.: Pew Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved May 30, 2009 from http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/Adults-and-Social-Network-Websites.aspx LinkedIn. Accessed May 31, 2009 at http://linkedin.com. Lortie, D. C. (1975). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ning. Accessed May 31, 2009 at http://ning.com. Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Schlager, M. and Fusco, J. (2004). Teacher professional development, technology, and communities of practice: Are we putting the cart before the horse? In S. Barab, R. Kling and J. Gray (Eds.), Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning (pp. 120-153). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. SETDA (State Educational Technology Directors Association). (2008). Empowering Teachers: A Professional and Collaborative Approach. In Class of 2020: Action Plan for Education. Retrieved May 29, 2009 from http://www.setda.org/web/guest/2020/professional-development. Smith, T. M., & Ingersoll, R. M. (2004). What Are the Effects of Induction and Mentoring on Beginning Teacher Turnover? Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 26 (3), 681-714. Social Media Classroom. Accessed May 31, 2009 at http://socialmediaclassroom.org. Tapped In. Accessed May 31, 2009 at http://tappedin.org

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Claire M. Fontaine

May 31, 2009

TNE Prospectus. (2001). Teachers for a new era: A national initiative to improve the quality of teaching. New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York. Retrieved May 29, 2009 from http://www.teachersforanewera.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.prospectus. Teachers Learning in Networked Communities (TLINC). National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. Retrieved May 25, 2009 from http://www.nctaf.org/resources/demonstration_projects/t-linc. Villar, A., & Strong, M. (2007). Is Mentoring Worth the Money? A Benefit-Cost Analysis and Five-Year Rate of Return of a Comprehensive Mentoring Program for Beginning Teachers. ERS Spectrum, 25 (3), 1-17. Retrieved May 25, 2009 from http://www.mentoringeducators.org/images/Research/Spectrum_Villar_Strong2.pdf.

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