Conference Overview

Need
Currently, many initiatives in online teacher professional development (oTPD) are serving large numbers of educators while consuming substantial resources.  Relatively little is known, however, about best practices for the design and implementation of these oTPD initiatives.  At the moment, oTPD programs are quite diverse in their purposes, curricula, and methods.  A range of objectives for educational improvement underlie these oTPD ventures, such as introducing new curricula, altering teachers’ instructional and assessment practices, changing school organization and culture, and enhancing relationships between school and community.  To achieve the goal of making schooling more effective, oTPD programs also diverge in the type and balance of content and skills taught, which can include subject matter knowledge for teaching, understanding student thinking, instructional practices, assessment practices, classroom management, epistemic perspective (e.g., multiculturalism, universal design for learning), and the leadership of educational improvement.

Likewise, a range of methods for individual and collaborative teacher learning underlie various oTPD models, including reading and discussing the research literature, trying out new approaches in the classroom and reflecting on what happens, sharing best practices with other teachers who have similar professional roles, viewing annotated videocases of practice, interacting with subject-matter experts, exploring libraries of resources, or having a mentoring relationship with an expert teacher.  For these various pedagogical approaches, the roles played by instructors, facilitators, subject-matter experts or mentors vary, as do the assumptions, theories, or research about learning that provides the rationale for that oTPD model’s pedagogical approach.

Further, oTPD programs can deliver their instruction completely online or use a blended/hybrid approach that includes some face-to-face interaction.  A variety of technologies are available as delivery media, from downloaded texts to annotated videocases, and these interactive media enable participant interaction either synchronously or asynchronously.  In addition, these technologies add new capabilities to collect rich, real-time assessment data on participants’ learning that can formatively guide instruction and also can provide summative information on learning outcomes.

How to measure the educational effectiveness of an oTPD program is a challenge designers face. How should implementers define “success” for an oTPD program, and what evidence should they collect to determine whether the program has reached its objectives?  Effectiveness includes issues of scalability, sustainability, and cost-benefit; assessing “impact” (the degree of transformation in practice) and “reach” (the number of teachers and organizations influenced) are important, but difficult.

Faced with this array of design, implementation, and evaluation choices, many organizations using or planning to initiate oTPD are confused and overwhelmed.  These groups—developers of conventional teacher professional development, designers and practitioners for all types of distance education, and policymakers and researchers in general—would benefit from research findings that contrast current outcomes from exemplary projects, build collective insights from these results, and propose key themes and related methodologies for studying the evolution of effective oTPD models.

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Purpose
To accomplish these purposes, the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) is hosting a small scholarly conference on “Evolving a Research Agenda for Online Teacher Professional Development,” co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation’s Division of Elementary, Secondary and Informal Education.  For decades, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE) has energetically engaged the challenges and opportunities of new models for educational improvement.  HGSE is particularly concerned with issues endemic to the education of at-risk students, studying ways innovations can advance equity, excellence, and diversity.  This is the third in a series of planned HGSE conferences centered on the theme of “ Usable Knowledge: Linking Research and Practice.”

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Content
About ninety people will participate in this research conference, by invitation only.  Prior to the conference, ten of the researchers participating will develop commissioned papers about their work that all attendees will read in advance.  Each of these papers will describe an exemplary oTPD model with a substantial record of success; these will provide the foci for initial Conference sessions.  At the start of these sessions, the scholar will give a brief summary of his or her paper, and an educator involved in that implementation will present field-based perspectives on this conceptual framework.  The remainder of the session will center on attendees discussing the strengths and limits of that model for oTPD.

After the conference sessions presenting the models, subsequent sessions will focus on identifying similarities and differences among these models and their underlying theories, as well as on delineating the implications of this comparative analysis for educational practice and policy.  Also, participants will examine alternative methodologies that document and explain the contextual interdependence of interventions and settings.  Based on this, the group will develop an agenda for further research needed on this topic.

HGSE faculty (including Joe Blatt, Kitty Boles, David Dockterman, James Honan, Vicki Jacobs, Wendy Luttrell, Susan Moore-Johnson, Kay Merseth, Richard Murnane, David Rose, Steven Seidel, Richard Weissbourd, Isa Zimmerman) will participate in the two days of conference activities and aid in orchestrating the various synthesis discussions on comparative frameworks, methodologies, and research agenda.

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Contribution
Through aiding with policy formulation and by providing examples of best practices, the insights from this conference will aid policymakers and practitioners to meet their responsibilities under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization and the No Child Left Behind legislation.  The research community will also benefit through the dissemination of sophisticated models and methods for online teacher professional development, teacher education in general, and distance education for all types of professionals.

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Intended Audiences
The audience for conference outcomes is a broad range of practitioners, scholars, and policymakers seeking insights on enabling large-scale, effective teacher preparation, induction, and professional development.  The conference volume will have five target audiences:

1. Faculty members who teach courses on teacher professional development or teacher education;
2. Faculty members who teach courses on learning technologies or distance education;
3. Practitioners and policymakers seeking insights about teacher professional development and distance education;
4. Vendors seeking to understand how to develop a substantial market share in online education;
5. Researchers and evaluators seeking sophisticated models and methods for studying online learning.

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Dissemination
A major publisher will market a conference volume containing the commissioned papers, a comparative analysis of the exemplary oTPD projects presented and their underlying models, and a research agenda for the evolution of oTPD (this last commissioned by the National Science Foundation).  In addition, a post-conference website will provide online archives about this initiative, and the organizers will present research findings at a variety of major national professional conferences in teacher professional development, educational technology, and distance education.

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