Why Teachers' Online Professional Learning?

“The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers and principals, since student learning is ultimately the product of what goes on in classrooms” 

PISA 2009: What Makes a School Successful?

   This quotation is closely related to my educational philosophy. I truly believe that teachers and principals have a huge impact on students' learning in K-12 education. I am a skeptic of a uniform school education system that is applied collectively to all students. It is hard to imagine that teaching the same contents at the same rate without understanding the characteristics and background of the individual students will surely help learners to achieve their moral, creative and productive lives as a goal of the U.S. education. To achieve the goal of U.S. education, teachers' should be prepared, and the education system should support teachers' learning.    In the same vein, teachers are also individual learners who should be supported under the educational system. Based on my personal observation of teachers' online communities, teachers mainly share instructional materials, over workload and difficulties. It is also well known that a teaching job is a high-risk group of stress. Likewise, the United States might be having a hard time managing teachers' quality due to various complicated issues.    A systematic solution to the professional development of teachers is to improve the quality of teachers substantially (e.g., knowledge of contents, faculty, empathy, communication skills, etc.) by identifying issues, analyzing phenomena, and developing support methods. Among the above solutions, I thought it would be part of my contribution to identify and analyze teacher learning phenomena and suggest support for them.   My research questions started from these backgrounds. Specific research questions are how teachers behave in online professional learning networks and what their characteristics related to their professional learning. The most apparent reasons that teachers participate in online professional learning are time and space constraints. However, I am sure that there are more valuable benefits for teachers in online professional learning.    Until now, I just studied on teachers' online professional learning by myself, but I am so excited to find useful information from other sources and communicate with people through the rest of activities in knowledge sharing!