ED-MEDIA 1999 Proceedings Book - Association for the ...

A knowledge integration approach to professional development:
Enabling teachers to succeed in adopting new practices
Jim Slotta, University of California at Berkeley
The Web-based Integrated Science Environment provides science teachers with powerful new tools and approaches
to bring knowledge integration activities into their classrooms. However, even when presented with a well-designed
technology like WISE, teachers require significant levels of support to adopt new pedagogical concepts and
methods. For example, teachers need to understand that technology is not an end in itself, and that the Internet must
be used carefully to promote learning. Also, despite advances in our development of pedagogical approaches that
promote conceptual change (see Linn, 1992, Slotta and Chi, 1997), the majority of middle school and high school
science teachers still employ more traditional approaches to teaching science. (Poole and Page, 1996) Thus, teacher
professional development has emerged as an essential component of our research in the WISE project. In order to
support teachers with powerful instructional technologies, we must help them gain new understandings about
effective curriculum activities and classroom practices.
This challenge has provided us with the incentive and opportunity to research effective approaches to
professional development that empower teachers with new ideas and approaches. We designed an on-line
community to help teachers learn about the WISE pedagogy and technology as they prepared to use it in their own
classrooms. This community was designed as a self-sustaining professional development resource for its members,
who continue their interactions during and after the school year. It has also served as a research tool, enabling us to
understand teachers' initial ideas about using the Internet in their classrooms, as well as the effectiveness of our
materials and approaches. Our professional development curriculum is delivered via the Internet, by means of this
WISE on-line community, and consists of the following three components:
(1) The WISE Teacher NetCourse that scaffolds teachers as they gain understanding of our pedagogical
framework, known as Scaffolded Knowledge Integration. The NetCourse is delivered in the form of a WISE
Curriculum Project (Figure 1) where teachers learn about our technology and approaches by actually using it.
(2) Teachers join the WISE On-line Community where they receive feedback and support from other teachers as
well as from WISE on-line mentors. The community supports electronic discussions (Figure 2) to help
teachers in their own process of knowledge integration, as they explore new ideas about professional practice.
We have applied our framework of scaffolded knowledge integration in designing the materials for this
community – seeking to connect to all teachers’ ideas and support their creation of personal understanding
(3) WISE Project Forums have been developed to help teachers succeed in using specific WISE Curriculum
Projects in their classroom. Each Project Forum includes a wide array of specific supports to help teachers
succeed. For the WISE Deformed Frogs Project, shown in Figure 2, we provide links to a demo of the
curriculum, explicit lesson plans and example student work, electronic discussions about how to help students
succeed with the project, and the WISE classroom management tools (e.g., for assessment and student work).
Figure 1. WISE Teacher NetCourse
Figue 2. On-line discussions within the community