Innovations Exchange

Relationships are the connective tissue that binds communities of practice together. Social ties connect a new teacher with a mentor, a special education counselor with her counterpart at another school, and a group of school media specialists collaboratively developing lesson plans for their district. Though we instinctively realize the importance of relationships, they have historically been hard to see. Individuals know their own connections but often have a myopic view of the larger social space they inhabit. Even community administrators are often unaware of the many discussions and relationships among their community members.

As individuals and communities of practice increasingly adopt social media, data about who knows who can be captured, visualized, and analyzed to give us a better understanding of the larger social topology. Exploring this social graph can provide actionable insights to community administrators, marketers, and even community members. Until recently, the exploration of social network data was an important yet esoteric enterprise, limited primarily to Ph.D.s and those with extensive technical know-how. We have been working for several years with a group of colleagues across the nation (see SocialMediaResearchFoundation) to help make social network analysis more accessible to everyday users. Our efforts have been encapsulated in NodeXL (see image below), a free and open-source Excel plug-in that can be used by anyone who can work with a spreadsheet.

NodeXL helps novices acquire network datasets from social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, analyze them using powerful social network metrics, and visualize them using state-of-the-art techniques that help identify important individuals, cliques, and trends. Though some effort is required to internalize “network thinking” and get familiar with NodeXL, our experience teaching students and professionals of all experience levels has convinced us that even nontechnical novices can quickly gain actionable insights about their own networks and those that underlie the communities they help cultivate. (See this paper on the topic.)

Enough talk. Let’s see what a social network looks like and what insights can be gained from it.

Example 1: @openednews Followers

• Identify subgroups of people in the network who are well connected. This particular graph shows three main subgroups (i.e., clusters) identified by colors and grouped into separate boxes (blue, red, and green). These subgroups are automatically identified by the fact that they are more highly interconnected with each other than with the rest of the network. They represent cliques of people or organizations that know one another. In this case, the green subgroup includes prominent education news outlets, the blue subgroup includes research-oriented organizations and individuals, and the red subgroup includes many individual educators, researchers, and education-focused nonprofits.
• Identify important individuals such as those labeled. In this graph, the size of the node is based on the number of Twitter followers, one measure of importance. Notice that some Twitter accounts (e.g., jolinarodriguez, creativecommons) have many Twitter followers but are not well connected to others following @openednews. In contrast, others like usatodaycollege and futurelabedu are popular among @openednews followers, as well as on Twitter globally. Other users have few Twitter followers globally (i.e., they’re small) but are very well connected to other @openednews followers (e.g., bon_education, oercommons, 4cinitiative, edinnovation). Network analysis provides many measures of importance (called “centrality”), for example, popularity (i.e., number of followers), betweenness centrality (people who span across subgroups such as eifdotorg and edinnovation), and eigenvector centrality (people who are well connected to “popular” people). @openednews could use this information to identify people whom they might personally contact or cultivate a relationship with.

What happens when teachers use mobile devices to connect to peers and mentors? This question is the driving force behind the Teachers Learning in Networked Communities 2.0 project that the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) launched this school year as an extension of the Teachers Learning in Networked Communities (TLINC) project.

For more than six years, TLINC has supported partnerships with universities and school districts across the country that focus on teacher preparation. TLINC recognizes that teachers entering the workforce today are used to being part of networked communities outside of school and works to bring that connectedness inside schools. TLINC provides a real-time, 24-hours-a-day/7-days-a-week support network of peers, mentors, higher education faculty, and accomplished classroom veterans. New teachers experience a strong start because they are inducted into professional learning communities that blend face-to-face and online collaboration. This school year, with the support of Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach initiative and partnerships with Kajeet for Education, edWeb.net, and HTC, NCTAF has distributed 200 mobile devices (HTC smartphones and tablets) to teacher candidates at five partner universities, enabling TLINC to “go mobile.”

As with any innovation, our “going mobile” implementation has been exciting, but the process has not been without bumps along the way. Some of the bumps have been great learning moments about the ways schools are organized and what needs to be changed so that professional learning communities of networked teachers can be supported.

There have been some successes in terms of how teacher candidates can use tablets and smartphones to improve their clinical teaching experiences, including having access to e-mail and edWeb.net, the social learning network for TLINC’s online communities; capturing video footage of lessons that are then sent to their clinical faculty at the university; and communicating with peers, mentors, and cooperating teachers. One student teacher at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) described how she was able to record her students (all English language learners [ELLs]) reading aloud. She played the recording back for one of her university professors, who was then able to help her plan some lessons that addressed the sounds that the students were having trouble pronouncing. Another student teacher, also at UTEP, called her tablet her “teacher toolkit,” talking energetically about how she’d been able to download several of the textbooks she needed. She added that she’d made digital flashcards that she used to quiz herself and the other student teachers at her school as they prepared for exams.

During the pilot, three sets of challenges have emerged. The first is the lack of access that school districts provide to nondistrict personnel. A principal goal of both TLINC 1.0 and TLINC 2.0 is to build closer connections between teacher preparation programs and the districts they serve to create seamless preparation and practice. The importance of this goal was underscored when our partner universities told us that districts’ Wi-Fi networks weren’t accessible to student teachers. This is important because the data-heavy work, such as sending video files, needs to be done by means of Wi-Fi because it’s much faster and cheaper than using a mobile network. NCTAF sees this challenge as an area ripe for targeted policy development between colleges of education and their partnering school districts. The conventional understanding of the teaching profession as a solo, artisan practice will change only when both teacher preparation institutions and districts can manage the logistics necessary for teachers to leverage technology’s connective power.

The second set of challenges pertains to engaging college of education faculty members in this networked community supported by advanced mobile technologies. TLINC strives to create a collaborative culture in teacher preparation programs by facilitating collaboration among preservice and novice teachers, supervising teachers, and university faculty in blended face-to-face and online communities of support. We have built a community of site directors who meet online (synchronously and asynchronously). This online forum provides a productive space for faculty to discuss successes and challenges in implementing TLINC. After a slow start, this cross-site collaboration has blossomed, and there is evidence of similar growth within cohorts of teacher candidates who are doing their clinical internships in the same school. Now, however, we need to expand this community forum and engagement to all college of education faculty members who will then be able to collaborate with their students in the use of mobile devices.

The third set of challenges relates to a feeling of “device fatigue” among teacher candidates. Many student teachers already have mobile devices. Why would they use another one? This question is valid. On a practical level, we felt that, for the purposes of evaluating how student teachers used advanced mobile technologies, it would be better if the devices had the same functionality. Our initial thinking was that the shift toward the more collaborative approach that NCTAF is trying to facilitate would be strengthened considerably if participants had devices dedicated to professional learning.

This leads back to one of TLINC’s goals: to develop educators who are ready to enter a networked profession. Think about a businesswoman who works as part of a team and is expected to be in contact with colleagues through a variety of methods. By providing her with professional tools, her company sends a clear message. NCTAF asserts that the same should hold true for teachers and teacher candidates. Achieving this expectation is, in fact, a TLINC 2.0 project goal. We are working to determine which devices and strategies are most useful to student teachers—our preliminary conversations indicate that students find that tablets are useful for staying organized and keeping in touch with colleagues and, unlike phones, do not duplicate functionality.

Professional learning communities are designed to tap into teachers’ desire for professional development targeted to their needs. Mobile devices have the potential to extend that vision, and they will do so when teachers are supported in learning and working as members of a team. We all need to put our heads together to empower our newest teachers in the connective practice that strengthens and benefits professionals working in other sectors.

Sofia Rivkin-Haas is a program manager at the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future.

Successful schools don’t just change test scores. They create organizational conditions that support learning among students and educators. They actively draw upon expertise in their community and reach shared agreements about how to best challenge students over time. They make time to understand, as a team, why and how students are learning and ensure that faculty has the flexibility to make decisions in the best interest of each learner. In addition, they establish an expectation that the approaches they employ will be shared transparently and used as a basis for ongoing improvement. In short, successful schools operate much like successful online communities, as described in Connect and Inspire. A key challenge for improving education in America is to link together such schools and enable others to join their ranks. Online communities of practice can play an important role in documenting and enhancing the collaborative practice essential for successful schools.

Literacy and Learning Exchange Homepage

This month, the National Council of Teachers of English, in partnership with the Ball Foundation and 20 leading organizations committed to the advancement of literacy and learning, announced the creation of the National Center for Literacy Education (NCLE). The goal of NCLE is to improve literacy learning by sharing and strengthening the plans, practices, support systems, and assessments used by successful, innovative communities of practice across the United States. This goal will be accomplished through the Literacy in Learning Exchange (the Exchange), a free online community of practice that will provide cases that show clearly how teams of educators develop powerful teaching and planning processes. More than just sample lesson plans and assessments, the Exchange will describe how to build the conditions and capacity to support sustained literacy learning over time in all school and community settings. Because it links resources and techniques to rich representations of the contexts in which they have been successfully applied, and because its content is enriched through the interactions it mediates, the case may prove to be a crucial genre for online communities of practice that seek to help schools and districts bring collaborative educational practices to scale.

For example, a draft case on the pilot version of the Exchange documents a community of practice at Rowland High School in Rowland Heights, California, that has been working since 2010 to explore the question, “What is the significance of academic vocabulary and how does it impact instructional practices and learning outcomes?” The description of the community’s activities and context is sufficiently detailed to help other schools and districts understand how they might replicate, modify, or build on the work in Rowland Heights. Moving beyond just collecting and implementing best practices to allow time for reflection that connects instructional strategies to teachers’ professional identities has proved critical for the group. This analysis is supported by a series of multimedia companion pieces that can help other educators capitalize on the community’s learning, such as a video that details five principles of vocabulary learning, complemented by excerpts from related research.

Rowland High School Academic Vocabulary Community of Practice Case

The case is not simply a static collection of resources. The Exchange’s community tools allow other educators to discuss and augment the case, sharing their own experiences, uploading related resources, and reporting back about their efforts to use the case materials to guide the development of communities of practice in their own schools. In the course of discussion, members of communities of practice at schools across the United States can support each other, and the persistent record of that support has the potential to benefit yet others. In this way, the value of the case itself will increase as other members of the Exchange use it.

Creating such compelling cases that document cross-subject literacy education communities of practice requires sustained effort. To provide incentives for schools to find the time to share their practices through the Exchange and at demonstration sessions held at national conferences across the county, NCLE will celebrate and support Literacy in Every Classroom Sites. These sites (schools or school systems) will earn badges by committing to share data about how they collaborate across disciplines to support literacy, how practices are changing, and what they are observing about changes in student learning. In return, not only will they be recognized for their work by NCLE and stakeholder organizations, but they also will gain access to a select network of educators and literacy experts who can provide constructive feedback and advice as they work to improve school practices. They also will be eligible to apply for small demonstration grants to fund efforts to widely disseminate their work.

To sustain and broaden the gains observed in participating schools as captured through the cases and online interactions around them, NCLE will fund collaborative research projects and share their findings with policy leaders at local, state, and national levels. Findings will be infused back into participating schools, and implications will be made available to policymakers through peer-reviewed publications, seminars, and colloquies.

As we’ve learned from decades of trying, no single initiative can transform teaching and learning. However, by building an initiative that draws upon a network of resources and expertise from successful schools and professional organizations and supports school teams in making their own choices about how to enrich literacy learning, we can see if “ground-up” improvement efforts can gain a measure of success that has eluded top-down models. We are eager to learn the role case-based online communities of practice can play in the emergence of such educational transformation.

Kent Williamson is executive director of the National Council of Teachers of English and director of the National Center for Literacy Education.

For more than 10 years, the National Science Digital Library (NSDL, officially the National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library) has been active in the aggregation, contextualization, and dissemination of open digital learning content generated through grants from the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies as well as nonprofits such as museums, research laboratories, and professional societies. As with many new technologies, NSDL’s early efforts as a digital library research and development project emphasized the technology as an end product. As we moved into production, we quickly transitioned to a focus on the content and how best to curate resources for effective educational use and reuse. Along the way, as we iterated improvements on both the technology and the content, we built the most valuable contribution of NSDL to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education community—the cross-sector network of education, research, technology, and policy partners and the culture of collaboration that NSDL has carefully cultivated. It is through the shared knowledge of this particular connected community that the new concept of learning resource paradata has emerged as a mechanism to make learning networks even smarter.

From its inception, NSDL was tasked to demonstrate the impact of digital libraries on teacher practice or, if at all possible, on student outcomes. This proved to be challenging in the highly heterogeneous, highly distributed, and relatively anonymous usage environment of the open Web. Outside of a few controlled research studies, online resource providers lacked the proper feedback mechanisms to examine the texture of usage at multiple scales. Evaluation methodologies borrowed from conventional library practices or those used to assess the efficacy of formally adopted curricular materials did not effectively represent the authentic use of open learning content by teachers on the ground. Traditional Web metrics also left us wanting: What does it mean that 100,000 users came to our home page? What does it tell us when an individual user clicks on a resource? Was it useful? Did he or she incorporate it into a lesson? Did he or she adapt it for a different context? How easy was it to implement? What do we need to improve about that resource?

We needed to reconceptualize our notions of impact to match the changing realities of teacher practice. In r