Forums, trust, etc.
brian_drayton@TERC.EDU
Thu, 25 Sep 1997 09:45:04 -0400
The exchange is interesting, and now I am thinking as Laurie asked about the LabNet experience. Let me hasten to point out that I am largely recalling LabNet I, which ended in 1993. I have been only an occasional lurker on LabNet II. Labnet I was a smaller group (the numbers here that follow are not exact), around 120 people. They were all physics teachers, and the focus was "What can help me do project enhanced teaching, and what is it anyway?"
The teachers were added in successive years, and there was a core than had been there from the beginning. They were welcoming to the later teachers, so on the whole this age-stratification was productive.
They met at summer workshops, and we had "reunions" at AAPT. We spent a lot of time telling them about their important role in an experiment, and our evaluation team made clea to them that we were going to use their comments etc. to check the validity of our conclusions.
All this is to say that we structured the conversation a lot, providing content areas, a sense of cameraderie, and a sense of purpose. Nevertheless, the participation on the network was rarely higher than 60% annually. What we began to realize was that the network had to be part of a suite of tools for professionaly development, and that depending on the other tools a teacher habitially used, the network would take on correspondingly different values and uses for them.
We also realized that there were aspects of the teachers' practice that they were just not accustomed to talking about in "public." This even means, in small focus groups of colleagues they had known for some years!
Teaching practice is complex, and it is not all explicit in the practitioner's mind, and much of it is provisional or experimental, and the teacher has little time to evaluate all decisions. So there is muich about their practice, I would say, that they have not had time to come to terms with themselves, conceptually or "theoretically", therefore a forum (whether face to face or on-line) feelsfor many people (I believe) too much too soon.
I happen to think that the best use of networks in education is for teachers, not students, but I think the network has to be well situated in a context of discussion and reflection on practice in other media, and as a regular part of the teachers' work habits.
I think this complexity of the relation of practice to principles (What the teacher would like to do vs what they actually enact) may be at the heart of the difference between philatelic listserves and teacher listservs, where the focus is on pedagogy rather than the eschange of resources (for example)
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