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ENT Gallery: Developing a Community of Practice
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| Classroom Educators |
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Five elementary-level teachers participated in the online course Teaching to Standards with New Technologies. During the course, the teachers collaborated with Plimoth Plantation educators to develop the Packing for America module. One of those teachers had previously taken an online course and worked with Teaching for Understanding (TfU). All were experienced school-based educators with an interest in history and at least three had done a multi-day unit in their classroom involving Plimoth Plantation in the past.
Despite their wealth of experience, the teachers felt that the museum educators knew much more about the proposed topic than they did, and therefore the teachers were initially unsure if they would have anything to contribute to the project. Also, confusion about what the final version of the product would look like-"an academic document [that would] support an online virtual website" or an actual virtual website-and who would lead them to this goal, contributed to their uncertainty.
The teachers enjoyed working with the 17th-century topic and hearing the perspectives of the museum educators as they collaboratively developed the project. They found commonalities between their own work and the TfU framework, and many saw ways they could incorporate what they were learning in the online course into their daily practice. Several of the teachers wrote that they enjoyed the reflective opportunity that posting online provided. Another teacher liked how the group could all come together with "none of us in the same room."
Though all of the teachers were positive about the course content, the topic of their project, and the interaction between classroom and museum educators, three of the teachers indicated in evaluations that they did not complete the course online (though in most cases they continued to meet with the group offline). Reasons for not completing the course included not having enough time, having to focus on other courses at the same time, and technical difficulties. Lack of access to a computer with a reliable Internet connection was a huge hindrance for many of the teachers.
 Some teachers initially felt uncomfortable using an online forum as a means of communication and learning and that perspective did not change throughout the course. All of the teachers felt that face-to-face interaction was necessary for their group. In addition to the face-to-face meetings held with the whole group, several teachers mentioned that though they became less frequent online contributors, they continued to discuss the readings and the project with fellow teachers offline.
Interestingly, although many of the teachers felt they had not completed the course successfully for one reason or another, the teacher who had taken an online course in the past praised her colleagues for the work they did complete. She felt the discussions this group had had online were far more rich and productive than those in her last course.
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