Promoting Scholarly Conversations among in-Service Teachers in an Online Graduate Program
Abstract: To enhance the rigor of collaborative learning, we have designed Scholarly Conversations based on the knowledge building principles (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006) and implemented them in a graduate course which supports k12 teachers' professional development. During the 6-week course, students were divided into groups and were required to complete two Scholarly Conversations. A high performing group who demonstrated success on Scholarly Conversations was selected for this study. A coding scheme, developed from preliminarily studies (Cai, 2017a & 2017b), was applied to analyze the data generated from this group in order to determine the extent to which the students were engaged in Scholarly Conversations and to identify the strategies they used for collaboration, as well as whether the patterns of their conversations, if any, evolved over time. Empirical evidence generated from this study will increase our understanding of how k12 teachers interact with each other in an online graduate course, and therefore, have implications for designing online environments that promote collaboration among k12 teachers.