Tracing Teacher Collaborative Learning and Innovation Adoption: a Case Study in an Inquiry Learning Platform

Abstract

Social processes play an important role in teachers' ongoing professional learning: through interactions with peers and experts to solve problems or co-create materials, teachers internalize knowledge developed in their communities. However, these social processes and their influence on teachers' learning (i.e., adopting new practices) are notoriously hard to study, given their implicit and informal nature. In this paper, we apply the Knowledge Appropriation Model (KAM) to trace how different social processes relate with the implementation of pedagogical innovations in the classroom (as a marker of professional learning), through the analysis of more than 20,000 artifacts from Go-Lab, an online community to support inquiry-based learning. Our results not only show how different social processes like sharing or co-creation seem to be related to increased classroom implementation. Also, they provide insights on how we can use traces from digital co-creation platforms, to better understand the social dimension of professional learning.