The North Carolina Association of Colleges and Teacher Educators Invited Duke University and America Learns to Share how the America Learns Network Can Support Teacher Preparation Programs.

Summary
In August 2007, the North Carolina Association of Colleges and Teacher Educators invited Duke University and America Learns representatives to share their experiences in the first pilot of the America Learns Network in a teacher preparation program.

Following is a synopsis of the presentation that was made at NC-ACTE's 25th Annual Teacher Education Forum on September 21st.  The synopsis was initially written by Dr. David Malone at Duke and was abridged by America Learns for this page.  America Learns has added "call outs" to highlight specific portions of the document.

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Presentation Title
An Internet Based Approach to Supporting the Initial Field Experiences of Prospective Teachers: Fostering Learning Through Technology

Abstract
Today’s teacher education students are “digital natives” who have a high level of comfort with using technology both to communicate and to acquire information. Participants will see a demonstration of the national America Learns Network and how to use the Network as a means of incorporating technology to support learning. 

Rationale & Purpose
When we think about the theme of the 25th Annual Teacher Education Forum: The Educational Landscape: Developing Learning Communities, we need to be mindful of the changing landscape of education. The teacher education students who come to us today are not the same as those who were in our programs even a decade ago. Students today enter our programs with a very high level of comfort and skill in using all forms of technology to communicate, to acquire knowledge, to manipulate and process information, and to create products of learning. If we follow the maxim “start where the learner is” then we, as teacher educators, need to do a better job of meeting our students where they are… which means using technology to support the learning of prospective teachers.

Similarly, if we think about the theme of Developing Learning Communities, we need to reflect on the ways learning communities are formed and sustained. We need to ask ourselves questions such as: What role can technology play in fostering communication within a learning community? At what point does technology cease to facilitate community building and begin to impede real community?  How might learning from peer to peer, faculty to student, and mentor teacher to prospective teacher be best supported by technology?

We believe that teacher educators can a make a difference in the educational landscape by finding creative ways to take advantage of college students’ enthusiasm for and skill in using technology. While not a panacea for all the difficult challenges teacher educators face, innovative uses of technology have the potential to increase student motivation, facilitate greater communication among all individuals involved in the teacher preparation process (including parents and families), and, paradoxically, provide faculty even more time for face-to-face interactions by freeing them from some of the time consuming record-keeping duties that faculty are often responsible for.

Between January and May 2007, the Duke University Teacher Preparation Program piloted an internet-based approach to providing support to undergraduate prospective teachers who were engaged in initial field experiences in local schools. This internet-based approach was developed by America Learns (http://americalearns.net/) whose core work involves helping organizations track, evaluate, and provide ongoing guidance and support to educators and mentors.  America Learns works with universities, community-based nonprofits, after school programs, schools, and school districts. The Network reaches more than 12,000 students nationwide.

Our purposes at Duke in collaborating with America Learns included:

1. determining whether this internet-based approach could play a meaningful role in helping us support pre-service teachers as they completed initial field experiences.
    

2. determining whether using this approach would help us to build a stronger learning community in which resources and communication would be shared by all involved including peer to peer, faculty to student, and teacher to prospective teacher.
    

3. determining if this approach would provide us with more efficient and effective monitoring, record keeping, and data analysis.
    

4. determining if this approach might be helpful in collecting data for research purposes and for the purposes of strengthening our NCATE-based assessment system.

Description of the information to be presented.
This presentation will track the decisions that led the Duke University Teacher Preparation Program to seek an internet-based approach to supporting student learning, our choice to pilot the services offered by the America Learns Network, what we learned from the pilot, and how we intend to modify the resources provided by America Learns to better match the needs and values of our teacher preparation program. We will also discuss how we are moving forward with the use of this service during the 2007-2008 academic year. Participants in the session will see a demonstration of the America Learns Network and discuss the Network’s ability to build and facilitate a learning community among college’s students, faculty, and mentor teachers. We will also explore the potential for building relationships between students at one college and students at other colleges nationwide, as well as among teachers, pre-service teachers, and tutors from around the country that use the America Learns Network. Participants will complete a self-evaluation of their own technology comfort level and use. We will conclude the session by having participants brainstorm ideas and develop action plans for more effectively incorporating technology into their own teacher education programs.

One of the challenges we believe many teacher education programs face is the need to provide prospective teachers with “close-to-real-time” feedback on the reflections and observations they have after engaging in field-work in local schools. This type of feedback may occur on a more frequent basis in culminating field experiences and senior-year student teaching internships. It is, however, our hypothesis that undergraduates enrolled in introductory teacher education courses that include an initial school-based learning experience may not always receive the types of immediate feedback that could be most beneficial to them.

Although most college students and faculty have access to web services such as Blackboard forums that are designed to facilitate student-to-student learning, many students respond in limited ways to the discussion boards and online forums provided by Blackboard. And these types of online forums often demand a significant amount of faculty time and effort in terms of monitoring and providing feedback. We piloted the use of the America Learns Network to determine if it could help us accomplish the goals described above without simply creating an “add-on” responsibility and chore for students and faculty. We tried to accomplish this by taking an instructional activity our students were already doing (writing reflection logs twice a week) and using the America Learns Network as a means of providing students not only with targeted and timely feedback, but with an online community of learners that could support them in their efforts to become effective teachers....

Over time we are [using features of the America Learns Network to establish] a database full of valuable resources for prospective teachers. These resources come from pre-service teachers at Duke, pre-service teachers and tutors that America Learns serves nationwide, America Learns strategy developers and America Learns strategy development partners. This process of establishing a learning community with a shared purpose of pooling resources, allows us to not only build, but also constantly access our collective institutional memory of high quality teaching strategies developed and successfully used in our community.

The pilot revealed an additional benefit. Faculty members, administrators, and program staff members began using the data collected from the online reflection logs to complete statistical analyses and to create charts and graphs for report making. Analysis of data could be complete over any period of time. Faculty and administrators used these data to keep track of everything from which students were completing their fieldwork responsibilities in a timely manner to what patterns and themes were emerging within the students’ reflections. Since the pilot program was exploratory in nature, faculty members did not take full advantage of all the possible ways data could be utilized. We anticipate that as we go forward faculty members will begin using these data to align classroom content with students’ immediate learning needs.

Conclusion and synthesis.
By incorporating reflection/journaling, basic record-keeping, data collection, pooling of lesson plans, strategy capturing, and peer to peer sharing into a single, familiar process (the completion of an online reflection log), we believe we were able to facilitate learning among undergraduates who are prospective teachers. Perhaps as importantly, we believe we created a learning community between our students and students at other universities nationwide. Today’s teacher education students are “digital natives” who have a high level of comfort with using technology both to communicate and to acquire information. In order to most effectively reach and teach them, we must continue to discover ways to integrate technology into teacher education.