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This article was downloaded by: [The University Of Melbourne Libraries]On: 09 October 2014, At: 20:06Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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Beginning teachers’ use of onlineresources and communitiesJulie A. Moore a & Boyoung Chae aa The University of Georgia , USAPublished online: 06 Jun 2007.
To cite this article: Julie A. Moore & Boyoung Chae (2007) Beginning teachers’ use of onlineresources and communities, Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 16:2, 215-224, DOI:10.1080/14759390701406844
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Technology, Pedagogy and EducationVol. 16, No. 2, July 2007, pp. 215–224
ISSN 1475-939X (print)/ISSN 1747-5139 (online)/07/020215–10© 2007 Association for Information Technology in Teacher EducationDOI: 10.1080/14759390701406844
Beginning teachers’ use of online resources and communitiesJulie A. Moore and Boyoung Chae*The University of Georgia, USATaylor and FrancisRTPE_A_240569.sgm10.1080/14759390701406844Technology, Pedagogy and Education1475-939X (print)/1747-5139 (online)Original Article2007Taylor & Francis162000000July [email protected]
The purpose of this study is to understand how beginning teachers actually utilize online resourcesin their everyday teaching contexts. Using a qualitative interview study design, the researchers inves-tigated beginning teachers’ use of online resources in three dimensions: professional tasks,emotional/personal support, and teaching practice. The findings revealed that the teachers’ primaryapproach to find the necessary resources was through the use of online search engines. Only a verysmall number of participants went beyond simply finding ideas. Also, it was found that the partici-pants do not seek help from online resources for emotional and personal support, although they oftenfeel overwhelmed and in need of such support. In sum, beginning teachers’ actual use of onlineresources remains at a superficial level. Furthermore, there is a number of competing resources, suchas colleagues, family and self-reflection, vying for very limited amounts of teachers’ time.
Teacher shortage has been a chronic issue since the 1980s, boosted by continuouslybooming school enrollment levels along with recent waves of immigration (NationalCommission on Teaching and America’s Future, 1996). Particularly disconcerting isthe attrition of new teachers. Several national reports indicate that the attrition of newteachers might be an important factor related to the teacher shortage phenomenon(National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 2002; Luekens et al.,2004). Although it is difficult to state an accurate attrition rate due to compoundingfactors (Zumwalt & Craig, 2005), the estimated rate of cumulative attrition amongbeginning teachers is startling. Ingersoll’s (2002) analysis on the data from the Schoolsand Staffing Survey, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, esti-mated that 29% of beginning teachers have left the teaching profession within threeyears, and after five years, almost 40% are moving out of the teaching ranks. Anothernation-wide study also shows that among college graduates who began teaching by1993–94, nearly 20% had left their professions within three years (Education Week,2000).
*Department of Educational Psychology & Instructional Technology, The University of Georgia,Athens, GA 30605, USA. Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
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In response to this daunting rate of beginning teachers’ attrition, there have beennumerous efforts to investigate why beginning teachers leave. The identified prob-lems were not only due to salary and working conditions, but also to the complexcondition in which beginning teachers are uniquely situated: new teachers struggle intheir everyday efforts to manage a classroom environment, to better understand theirown subject matter, to find effective learning methods for students and to meet theirstudents’ individual needs (Carver & Katz, 2004). This complexity of problematicsituations often leaves beginning teachers feeling overwhelmed and inadequate andconsequently results in their departure from the profession.
Online resources have been suggested as a way to meet the variety of beginningteachers’ needs (DeWert & Cory, 1998; Moore & Wise, 2004). Additionally,collaboration tools, such as online learning communities, are being developed as aninnovative solution to problems associated with professional development, which isparticularly useful for beginning teachers.
Recent studies, however, have primarily focused on identifying the usefulness ofindividual online resources for beginning teachers (e.g. Justice & Espinoza, 1999;Davis & Resta, 2002; DeWert et al., 2003). While this line of research provides mean-ingful information on the usefulness of an online tool per se, there is still a substantiallack of data on how beginning teachers actually use online resources in their profes-sional practices. We need to have some general sense of their utilization of onlineresources, such as what they prefer, when they use these resources, why they use themor how satisfying they are. In other words, we need to seek the whole picture of begin-ning teachers and their online resource use, not merely evaluate the usefulness of oneisolated online resource. In this study, therefore, we attempt to understand howbeginning teachers actually use online resources and online communities in theirprofessional practices.
From the preceding discussion, the following research questions are investigated inthis study:
1. To what extent do beginning teachers use online resources/online communitiesfor help with their professional tasks?
2. To what extent do beginning teachers use online resources/communities for theiremotional and personal support?
3. To what extent do beginning teachers use online resources/communities for helpin improving their practice?
While certainly online communities could be considered one of many types ofonline resources, we purposefully distinguish between the two in this study in orderto get as clear a picture as possible about beginning teachers’ use of online support.
Related literature
This research draws upon three critical areas of the existing literature: teachers’professional development, online resource use and beginning teachers’ needs. Inprofessional development, it is well established that teachers’ full participation and
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Beginning teachers’ use of online resources and communities 217
ownership of the program is the key to successful professional development experi-ences (Hawley & Valli, 1999). Certainly, online resources now allow wider accessand participation in professional growth experiences. Specifically, the ‘just-in-time’(Wilson & Stacey, 2003, p. 546) aspect of online resources is critical in providingsupport for teachers’ activities and leadership (Stuckey et al., 2001). However, begin-ning teachers have a unique set of support needs, different from those of their veterancounterparts. Research indicates that beginning teachers have three areas of needs:personal and emotional support, task-based support and critical reflection on teach-ing practice (Stansbury & Zimmerman, 2002). With increased attention to teacherinduction in recent years, many schools have implemented mentoring programs tohelp beginning teachers make the transition to professional practice. However, tradi-tional mentoring programs for beginning teachers have focused primarily onemotional and task-based support while being weak on supporting critical reflectionon teaching practice (Wang & Odell, 2002). In contrast, online resources, due totheir comprehensive nature, may be able to address beginning teachers’ needs on alllevels (Moore & Wise, 2004). The linkage of these three domains suggests thatonline resources and communities may be useful in meeting beginning teachers’unique needs.
Method
Data collection
Employing a qualitative interview study design (deMarrais, 2004), data collectionwas carried out between May 2005 and October 2005. Due to the geographicaldispersion of participants, data collection in this study was conducted primarilythrough phone interviews. Invitation letters and emails (where obtainable) were sentto potential participants during the spring of 2005 and again the following fall.
The interview was semi-structured and was designed to capture beginning teachers’perceptions of professional needs and issues, and their strategies (particularly in rela-tion to online resources and communities) employed to meet those needs. Interviewquestions focused on understanding beginning teachers’ needs in three dimensions:(1) needs in relation to professional tasks; (2) needs for emotional and personalsupport; and (3) needs in relation to teaching practice. Teachers were asked to firstillustrate their own needs based on these dimensions, and then describe their respectiveapproaches in dealing with such needs, and finally report their respective utilizationof online resources as a support or solution.
Participants
A criterion sampling (Patton, 2001) strategy was used to select participants withparticular characteristics. Participants in this study are all teachers in Indiana who arein their first five years of teaching. Additionally, participants in this study wereinvolved in a teachers’ online community, the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF), during
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218 J. A. Moore and B. Chae
their pre-service teacher education experience. Since study participants used the ILFin their pre-service classes, we are assured that they have had at least minimal expe-rience with online resources and communities, and thus should be technologicallyproficient in accessing and using online resources and communities. We did notinclude criteria based on subject matter or grade level taught.
A list of potential study participants was generated from pre-service classes that setup a group in the small group space in the ILF. As the vast majority of teacher candi-dates graduating from teacher education programs in Indiana stay in Indiana, we tookthat member list to a publicly accessible database of the Indiana Department ofEducation to achieve two purposes: (1) to identify if the potential participant hadreceived a teaching license in the state and (2) to determine their current place ofemployment.
Those that met our criteria were invited to participate in the study via a letter ofinvitation, with an email follow-up during the spring of 2005. This invitation processwas repeated at the beginning of the school year in the fall of 2005. In all, only ninebeginning teachers responded to our request, all of them secondary school teachers(one middle school, eight high school). As the ILF was geared specifically towardsmath and science teachers, it is understandable that a large majority of potentialparticipants would be in secondary classrooms in a specific subject area. While notthe numbers we had hoped, this response rate could be interpreted as an indicator ofthe pressures and time commitments required of those just entering the teachingprofession.
Data analysis
Upon collection, the data were analyzed using a domain analysis method (Spradley,1979) to search for meaningful patterns. Domain analysis is one form of ethnographicanalysis that is strongly grounded in inductive analysis. Employing this method, thedata were categorized into appropriate analytical contexts to search for the meaningsbeginning teachers make of their own lives. Starting from identifying three hypothet-ical domains, superordinate and subordinate categories were created based on similarsemantic relationships.
Having used a semi-structured interview protocol, data were likely to be dispersedaround the themes of the protocol. Thus, for the first step of the analysis, the datawere parsed to be analyzed based on three domains, which were three dimensions ofinterview questions: professional tasks, emotional and personal support, and criticalreflection on teaching practice. Interview transcriptions were color coded based onthese domains while marking symbolic testimonials from the participants. After thispreliminary categorization, subordinate categories were identified for each domain:beginning teachers’ needs, their approaches in dealing with such needs, and theirrespective utilization of online resources as a support.
Once the three main domains containing the three sub-categories emerged, wereread all the teacher interviews to code each participant’s transcription based on thiscategorization. Naturally, each interview has nine different units of the analysis. After
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Beginning teachers’ use of online resources and communities 219
completing the coding for each interview, the data were summarized by retrieving therelevant evidence from each interview by category and we outlined the findings basedon the three domains we initially identified. During this summarizing process, thetestimonials that were marked up earlier were inserted in a summary.
Findings
In this section, we will present the findings of the study. Our findings parallel thethemes of three research questions in this study: The extent of beginning teachers’ useof online resources/communities to help with (1) professional tasks; (2) emotional/personal support; and (3) improving teaching practice. For each section of the find-ings, we first describe beginning teachers’ needs, followed by their usual approach todeal with such needs. Subsequently, we identify, among those approaches, the extentto which online resources and communities are being utilized.
Professional tasks
Beginning teachers’ needs. Teachers’ professional tasks generally involve their every-day job assignments, such as grading papers, teaching lessons, meeting parents ormanaging students’ behavior. Consistent with other research about beginning teach-ers (Stansbury & Zimmerman, 2000), the teachers in this study identified classroommanagement and student discipline as their top concerns. Other professional taskstruggles included motivating students, pacing instruction, and transitions betweenclassroom activities. Additionally, these beginning teachers had problems in workingwith a diverse student population, especially those with special needs or from lowsocioeconomic backgrounds.
Approaches used to address needs. In order to receive support for these professionaltasks, the majority of beginning teachers indicated that they go to their colleagueswhom they trust, such as mentor teachers, assistant principals, next-door teachers,same-subject teachers or department heads. Mentor teachers in particular werementioned as useful human resources for help, but some indicated that their mentorteachers do not teach the same subject, and are thus unable to give advice for subject-specific issues. Participants also often seek help from the special education teachersfor issues around students with special needs.
In addition to seeking help from their colleagues, these beginning teachers turn tovarious human resources, including groups of friends from the same college, teachersfrom professional organizations (e.g. science teachers association) and teaching guidebooks (e.g. First Year of Teaching) for advice and ideas.
Online resources and communities used. The Internet as a source of information andideas is an important means to help these teachers with their professional tasks. Many
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use the Internet on a daily basis to search for lesson plans, classroom activities orstudent management techniques. While several participants were able to identifyspecific sites that they visited or had bookmarked, their primary approach to findingresources is to utilize online search engines such as Google. Only a very small numberof our participants go beyond simply finding ideas by looking for online activities fortheir students to use. They mostly indicated that they engage in ‘no chat or anything’and online communications are limited by simple email exchanges or email newslet-ters from list-servs of professional associations. Online communities are rarely consid-ered as resources for this area of need. Only one participant, who considers herself aninformation researcher/investigator, indicated that she is actively involved in severalonline communities. Additionally, the state’s web site is occasionally used to searchfor information regarding standards or requirements.
Emotional/personal support
Beginning teachers’ needs. Emotional/personal support refers to teachers’ needs foremotional/personal support in the affective domain, such as teachers’ feelings ofloneliness, isolation, frustration or being overwhelmed. As a newcomer in a new envi-ronment and culture, beginning teachers encounter a mixture of emotional ups anddowns. The most often reported emotional/personal support need was frustration atnot being able to reach unmotivated children and help them succeed. Outside of this,other needs in this area were varied. Beginning teachers in this study expressed variousemotional and personal stress, including lack of sufficient preparation, the difficultyof time management, being assigned difficult classes, having large numbers of studentsand having insufficient support for classes comprising students who have special needs.One teacher in particular entered the school halfway through the academic year andwas extremely frustrated with the difficulties associated with taking over a class in mid-stream, including student discipline, differing expectations of different teachers andhaving little time to prepare for the teaching assignment. Of note, these teachers alsooften felt isolated in their working environment without appropriate support. Oneteacher noted, ‘As a new teacher I felt like I was just kind of thrown into it. We didn’thave very good communication with administrators about what we are supposed todo. There were only two people hired and it was kind of like we are forgotten.’
Another particular issue was associated with beginning teachers’ frustration withvarious ability levels of students. The majority of our participants are experiencingdifficulty working with special needs children and one participant noted that 90% ofher students have special needs, when she has never been trained before in this regard.Additionally, teachers’ fear of being ineffective in the classroom appeared to be amajor struggle as well. They are often worried if students do not trust them, feelingthat they did not do something well.
Approaches used to address needs. When seeking emotional or personal support,teachers in our study overwhelmingly choose to turn to nearby, trusted advisers.
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Often, they keep their problems to themselves or turn only to teachers outside theirrespective working contexts, friends or family members. Family members who mostlywere/have been teachers are the major human resource that beginning teachers seekfor help. Only a small number of teachers consult their colleagues at work such asassistant principals, same-subject teachers and teachers from their teaching team.Other resources these teachers use to get emotional support include engaging inphysical activity, doing self-checking and using journaling as a form of self-reflection.
Online resources and communities used. The study participants do not seek help fromonline resources for emotional and personal support, other than occasionally readingan inspiring story posted on the Web. Many use email for emotional help, but mostlywith people they already know, not to virtually connect to new people. However,several participants indicated that when they do encounter other teachers’ personalaccounts on the Web they find it very helpful and felt that it was ‘good to see thatothers go through the same thing.’
Improving teaching practice
Beginning teachers’ needs. The term ‘teaching practice’ is used to indicate thespecific activities related to helping students learn. While there may be overlap with‘professional tasks’ as stated above (and certainly, our participants saw overlapbetween these two with regards to classroom management), to ‘improve teachingpractice’ means to improve teaching skills, teaching styles, classroom lessons andinteractions with students. Beginning teachers expressed their desires to improvetheir teaching practices in several ways. Most participants mentioned classroommanagement as the teaching practice they would like to improve most. While theauthors interpret classroom management as an area of need more in line with‘professional tasks’ than ‘teaching practice,’ the teachers in this study reported class-room management as their top issue in both categories, indicating, perhaps, theimportance of it in their work. Other areas of improvement include discoveringbetter pedagogical strategies, finding ways to keep their students actively involved inlearning and incorporating creative ways to motivate apathetic students. Theseteachers also want to improve their abilities to teach each student based on his or herindividual learning style. A few mentioned the need to integrate more technologiesinto their teaching. One pattern that was particularly evident among beginningteachers in terms of their respective teaching practices was that they want to trysomething ‘different.’ The majority of them believe that there could be better andmore creative ways to teach their subjects and were very willing to try them in theirclasses. In the process, they hoped that it would bring about positive influences to theclass, especially in regards to students’ motivation. One teacher noted that he is‘very, VERY motivated to find as many online activities as [he] can, or just activitiesthrough Internet … [He] really [is] interested in finding other people’s ideas—find-ing out what more experienced teachers have learned.’
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Approaches used to address needs. Beginning teachers in this study turned to theircolleagues, students (via surveys or discussions) and inward to themselves through self-reflection, to improve or critically reflect on their teaching practices. Collaboratingwith colleagues is a very useful avenue for improving teaching practice. For example,one participant noted that she usually works with all same-subject teachers to developbetter classroom activities. Another participant and her colleagues observe the classesof each other and exchange feedback, which she finds very helpful.
A few participants keep a teaching journal to record their experiences, future goalsor new ideas as a self-reflection tool. Some attend more formal education, such asgraduate school, conferences or summer workshops.
Online resources and communities used. The way these beginning teachers utilizeonline resources and communities to improve their teaching practice is very similarto the way they use online resources and communities to support their professionaltasks. Online resources were mentioned by most as a way to get new ideas, but noparticipant indicated that they shared their practices (either via stories, videos or exam-ples of their work) online in an effort to improve or critically reflect on their own prac-tice. Again, Google was the main pathway to explore new lessons and classroomactivities, although several had bookmarked subject-specific sites to which theyreturned. One teacher expressed some frustration with being only semi-successful infinding resources through Google and indicated that she would like to find a compre-hensive database of activities related to her subject. Online communities were notmentioned at all as a resource or means to either reflect on or improve teaching practice.
Conclusion and discussion
While online resources and communities are suggested by some as a solution to isola-tion experienced by beginning teachers, these initial findings indicate that beginningteachers have yet to embrace this notion. While these beginning teachers utilize onlineresources on a daily basis, they do not use online communities to connect with otherteachers as a means of meeting their various needs, often indicated by the statement‘no chat or anything’.
Although their level of using the Internet remains superficial up to now (primarilyto search for lesson plans and ideas), we still believe there is potential for beginningteachers to use online resources and communities to a greater extent. All beginningteachers in this study were fairly confident in using online resources and have consid-erable experience in finding educational materials. None of our participants sufferedfrom ineffective Internet connection or lack of technological equipment at school.This indicates that they do not have traditional barriers that hinder teachers’ use oftechnology, such as insufficient computer support, teachers’ lack of computer exper-tise or teachers’ computer anxiety. In addition, the majority of our participantsemphasized that they search for ‘something new’ that can spark the students’ interest,which tells us that they could be quite enthusiastic of trying new tools as well.
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Beginning teachers’ use of online resources and communities 223
The teachers participating in this study ‘grew up’ with the Internet during the late1990s and early 2000s. During this time, the Internet was primarily a repository ofvast resources and information. Thus, these teachers did not experience as teenagersor college students the now very popular use of the Internet as social networking tool(i.e. Facebook, MySpace and Friendster). Therefore, the participants in this studyuse the Internet in a way that very accurately reflects their use of the Internet in theirformative years, turning to it as a primary means of information and resource seekingbut not as a way to connect with others. While all of them used an online communityas pre-service teachers this was a single foray into the newly emerging world of onlinecommunities. Their experience with the Inquiry Learning Forum represented thecutting edge use of the Internet at that time. While these beginning teachers will haveto extend their vision of the Internet as a social networking tool to be willing toexplore online communities as a means for support, their current openness to newideas suggests that this shift is probable. Additionally, incoming teachers in the nextfew years will have no such barriers. They will have used the Internet in theirpersonal lives as a networking tool and will likely be more open to using onlinecommunities to meet their unique needs as beginning teachers. In sum, beginningteachers appear to have considerable proficiencies in using online resources, havepositive attitudes toward new technologies and have proper technological equip-ment. With online communities becoming more prevalent in other facets of life, webelieve that it may be just a matter of time before the Internet is viewed not only as away to connect to meaningful resources but as a meaningful way to connect to othersas well.
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