From Ambitious Vision to Partially Satisfying Reality: an Evolving Socio-technical Design Supporting Community and Collaborative Learning in Teacher Education the Secondary Teacher Education Program as a Context for Design

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. 2 Introduction Our chapter relates to an ongoing and continuously evolving research and development project that has as its goal the design of a socio-technical system (a technical environment and related social structures and activities) that will constitute a good model for distributed teacher professional development programs conceptualized as knowledge-building communities. We focus primarily on a part of our work that is situated within the Secondary Teacher Education Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We begin by describing the original ambitious vision for this program that we set out to implement, including its theoretical basis. Then we discuss how both our initial failures and the theoretical framework itself led us to more carefully consider how the historical and institutional contexts of such community-building efforts might influence the social processes of learning and teaching within the community. To illuminate this idea, we present a contextual analysis of the program as a prelude to an interaction analysis of a representative discourse from a group learning activity within the program. Throughout our chapter, we consider lessons learned from studies such as these and from our immersion in the experience of designing a socio-technical environment for supporting community-based teacher education. Drawing on these lessons, we describe our modified goal and the latest results of our efforts to develop an online system for structuring and supporting group learning, including the online mentoring of such learning, within teacher education programs. Original Vision Previous work on building learning communities has produced fruitful results. Research demonstrates that collaboration, experimentation, and challenging discourse must be encouraged in order for teacher learning communities to succeed (Little, 1993; Norris, 1994). "Challenging discussions are not very common among teachers, who often equate criticism with personal inadequacies" (Loucks-Horsley, Hewson, Love, & Stiles, 1998). Yet a professional culture necessitates the analyzing, explaining of evidence and communicating criticisms in order to learn. What we advocate for students, teachers need to learn as well (Loucks-Horsley, et al., 1998). Reforms in education are often fundamentally flawed because they do not attempt to alter the 3 structure of classroom discourse (Sarason, 1996). Studies find that using computer support for collaborative learning can drive changes in teacher practices from didactic to constructivist continuous improvement, and results orientation are also important for …