Case Study of Re-envisioning PD: Enhancing Blended Teaching Competency During COVID-19

Framework

This study adopted Christensen Institute’s (Christensen et al., 2013) definition of blended learning in framing the objectives for professional development sessions. Blended learning is a formal education program which is partly delivered through online with students’ control over their learning and includes supervised components away from home, and the two modalities within a course are connected to provide an integrated learning experience.

A framework for blended teaching competencies was applied in the process of Professional Development (PD) program design (Powell et al., 2014). The framework includes key competencies in three domains: mindsets, adaptive skills, and technical skills. The knowledge of blended teaching competencies can help teachers define their evolving role in blended learning environments and use the competencies in practice.

In addition, this research applied Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework as a theoretical basis for designing and evaluating PD sessions (Koehler & Mishra, 2009; Tanak, 2018). Mishra and Koehler (2009) defined TPACK as integration of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge in which the interactions between and among the components constitute variations in knowledge. As the participants in this study are in-service teachers with years of experience teaching in the field, the study focused on connecting technological knowledge to their current pedagogical and content knowledge. Particularly, the PD sessions emphasized the balance between the technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge to avoid being swayed by edtech products and encourage mindful technology applications with strong pedagogical reasoning to best convey contents to the students.

By connecting with existing subject-based communities of practice (CoP), this project aims at expanding blended teaching knowledge and skills with more teachers. With student-centered blended teaching and learning as the focus, the project will serve as a place for teachers to engage in joint activities to share their knowledge and examples of blended teaching and learning (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015). It also establishes a place for discussions, consulting, and understanding the needs and concerns of blended teaching. Finally, the teachers participating in PD sessions and sharing sessions will develop a shared repertoire of resources, including blended teaching resources, consultation for problems and troubleshooting, and ideas to create a better online learning experience for students (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015).

Methods

To deliver the training sessions to a more significant number of teachers and provide them with an in-depth understanding of effective blended teaching, the researchers and the district office created an 8-hour professional development (PD) program for 15 representative teachers from 12 different subject-based teacher communities. Nine of the participating teachers were middle school teachers, while 5 taught high school students, and one taught the special ed population. Participating teachers taught Science/Tech/HomeEconomics, Math, Korean, English, P.E., Social Studies, and Arts/Music. The participants also represented a wide range of teaching experiences as the following: two had less than five years of experience, one had five to ten, two had 11-15, three had 16-20, one had 21-25, three had 26-30, three had more than 30 years of experiences. The PD was held over three weeks with four sessions, each lasting two-hours in August 2020.

Blended teaching competency and the TPACK knowledge were operationalized in a 5 point likert-scale self-assessment questionnaire consisting of 16 items in total. The questionnaire was delivered before and after the three-week PD session. Five items were adapted from the TPACK framework (Mishra & Koehler, 2009), while 11 items were adapted from the blended teaching competency framework (Powell et al., 2014). Blended teaching competency questionnaires included two mindset , three adaptability to the environment , and six tech skills questions.

Furthermore, from September to November 2020, the participating teachers are in the process of sharing their learnings with their subject-based CoPs in hopes of creating a snowball effect. Thus, as a follow up to the PD sessions, individual consulting is in progress to support the teachers in hosting their sharing sessions.

Results

The 3-week PD session was designed in partnership with the school district, led by expert teachers in blended teaching, and provided an opportunity to empower teachers to initiate bottom-up transformation in blended learning. The detail of the results for each research question is elaborated as follows.

RQ1. The researchers collaborated with the district administrator to design the PD curriculum based on the framework of TPACK and blended teaching competency. By setting key competencies of these frameworks as the core objectives and assessment standards for the PD sessions, the teachers gained insights into knowledge, skills, and attitudes required to create a successfully blended instruction. Two of the researchers and four instructors who are the leading teachers in the field led the PD sessions. The sessions consisted of the following topics and activities:
- Session 1: Designing student-centered blended learning with TPACK framework and self-assessing blended teaching competency
- Session 2: Designing project-based learning in online environments through collaborative instructional design and utilizing online tools to conduct project-based learning in blended teaching
- Session 3: Process-oriented assessment in blended learning, selecting edtech platforms for sustainable student-centered blended teaching, and planning blended lessons using TPACK frameworks activity
- Session 4: Enhancing data literacy and improving digital equity with learning analytics and personalized learning

After each session, the participants were given time to reflect on their learnings. They focused on applying their technological and TPACK knowledge to specific subject areas in preparation for the sharing sessions. As the final project, they developed blended teaching lesson plans for the upcoming semester based on the TPACK framework.

RQ2. First, the questionnaire’s internal reliability was consistent: blended teaching competency (α=.91) and TPACK knowledge (α=.94). Then, to investigate whether the PD sessions enhance blended teaching competencies and the understanding of TPACK, paired t-test was conducted with the pre- and post- PD session questionnaires. There was a significant increase in the score for blended teaching competency before the PD session (M=3.65, SD=.70) and after (M=3.98, SD=.57); t(14)=2.64, p=.02. This result suggests that the PD session enhanced the participating teachers blended teaching competency.

To further investigate the PD session’s impact on the subconstructs of the blended teaching competency (i.e., mindset, adaptive skills, technical skills), a paired t-test was conducted for each sub-construct. While there was a significant increase in adaptive skills before (M=3.80, SD=.68) and after (M=4.08, SD=.44) the PD sessions; t(14)=2.16, p=.048, and in technical skills before (M=3.28, SD=.87) and after (M=3.84, SD=.74); t(14)=4.90, p=.00, there was not a significant difference in the pre- (M=3.87, SD=.95) and post- (M=4.0, SD=.65) mindset scores; t(14)=-.55, p=.59. This indicated that while the PD session could effectively train the teachers to adapt their lessons to the contextual changes by actively applying the technological skills, the 3-week period was insufficient to impact the teaching philosophy to value student-centered lessons. It would be interesting to investigate whether the PD conducted over a longer period could successfully change the teachers’ mindset in subsequent studies.

Similarly, the understanding of TPACK also increased significantly before (M=2.99, SD=.92) and after (M=3.81, SD=.63) the PD session; t(14)=5.03, p=.00. This indicated that the PD session boosted the teacher's understanding of applying technology in balance with contents and pedagogy.

RQ3. To understand the effectiveness of the sharing sessions with subject-based CoPs, data is currently being collected through individual consulting sessions, interviews, and surveys from the participating teachers. We expect to have data collected by December 2020.

Importance

As Korean schools are one of the first to transition to blended learning in response to COVID-19, this case study can provide insights for the global education community on preparing teachers for student-centered blended teaching in socially distanced classrooms. Furthermore, since the PD session has been shown to successfully enhance the blended teaching competencies, this study suggests how to help teachers to flexibly adapt to the unprecedented challenges. The study will also investigate how the participating teachers tailor the PD session materials to their subject needs and share them with their subject-based CoP members. This may contribute to re-envisioning a new model for teacher-initiated and bottom-up transformation in education.

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