Integrating a space for teacher interaction into an educative curriculum: design principles and teachers’ use of the iPlan tool

ABSTRACT

Implementation of reform curricula requires teachers to adopt new approaches to teaching. Research has provided promising results about the influence of educative curriculum on teachers’ learning and instruction. However, this approach generally focuses on teachers as isolated learners. Using a design-based research approach, the authors developed a web-based tool, iPlan, which provides access to educative curriculum materials in an online interactive learning platform. iPlan encourages social interaction among teachers, in particular their modifications and reflections on teaching with the curriculum materials. The authors describe design principles, assessing successful and unsuccessful aspects of the resulting platform through semi-structured interviews with teachers within the context of implementation of a high school biology curriculum. Analysis of the interviews revealed which structures of this online platform were used by the teachers, as well as why and how they were used. The study provides implications for designing educative and online systems for teacher learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Educative curriculum
• online teacher learning
• design-based research
• teacher learning
• reform curriculum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under the Grant [DRL-1027629].

Notes on contributors

Miray Tekkumru-Kisa

Miray Tekkumru-Kisa is an Assistant Professor in Science Education in the School of Teacher Education at Florida State University (FSU). She holds joint appointments at the Florida Center for Research in STEM (FCR-STEM) and at FSU-Teach Science and Mathematics Teacher Preparation Program. Dr Tekkumru-Kisa’s research focuses on designing for and studying teacher learning, and instructional quality for ambitious and equitable teaching in science classrooms.

Christian Schunn

Christian Schunn is a Senior Scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center and a Professor of Psychology, Learning Sciences and Policy, and Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr Schunn directs a number of research projects studying expert engineering and science teams, and building innovative technology-supported STEM curricula.