The TeleLearning Professional Development School is a concept anchored in a multi-site network of teacher educators from Faculties of Education in Canada engaged in collaborative research with practitioners working on effective integration of telelearning activities in partner associated schools. It is a research activity of the TeleLearning Network of Centres of Excellence, funded in September 1995 through the Social Science Research Council of Canada, which aims at building new models of professional development and teacher education that are required today to address the new needs for technology knowledge and use of technology of practicing and graduating school teachers.

The TL*PDS is growing out of two major realities: physical PDSs (professional development schools where there is substantial use of technology for teaching and learning) and virtual PDWs (professional development webs constructed at each site, using various telelearning tools (e.g., the www, on-line discussion forums), linked to one another, and which support and reflect the activities occuring in the PDSs). The two Canadian official languages are spoken in the TL*PDS (English and French).

Establishing communities of learners around the teaching professional and student-teacher supported by networked computers is one major component of the new model we are designing. As we implement this model, within each learning community, there are high school learners, student-teachers, school-based and university-based teachers that are interacting in increasingly differentiated ways. As in other communities of learners (Brown, 1997), we base our design on agency, reflection, collaboration, and culture.

To establish networked learning communities in teacher education that contribute to shape emerging practices is a work of design fostered and documented through our research activities. It is, in the words of Banathy (1994), a "future-creating disciplined inquiry".

References

Brown, A.L.,1997, Transforming schools into communities of thinking and learning about serious matters. American Psychologist, 52, 4, 399-413.

NCATE Professional Development Schools Standards Project

ISTE Background Paper on Professional Development
Laferrière, T. (1997). A Six-Phase Tentative Model for Professional Development. ICTE Proceedings.

Related on-line professional development communities

• Teacher Professional Development Institute (Tapped In)
  
• The Learning Resource Server of the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)
  
• University of Twente
  • Center for Telematics and Information Technology
    
• Teacher Enhancement Electronic Communications Hall - TEECH - "an electronic community set up to foster collaboration among leaders in teacher development". Housed at TERC, this project is funded by the National Science Foundation.
  
• The Concord Consortium "is conducting a wide variety of dynamic projects that define the forefront of educational reform and technological advancement".
  
• Professional Development (Vanderbilt U)
  • Learning Technology Center (Vanderbilt)
    
• The Electronic Community of the Appalachian State University
  
• Teacher Educator Network (Cyberfac/Tednet Project)

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Last update: October 30, 1998