Our study highlights that teachers can cultivate their PLNs in a variety of ways to support their disparate interests, needs, and aims for professional growth. Unlike PD days, one-size-fits-all workshops, or yearly conferences, teacher learning through PLNs can happen anytime and anywhere, and it can occur with hundreds or thousands of far-flung educators. While teaching and learning are often conceived of as social processes, isolation and individualism within educational systems can restrict social activity and learning. Adapting to and evolving with dynamic and shifting educational landscapes poses challenges that can be overwhelming for teachers and contribute to burnout
(Grayson & Alvarez, 2008). PLNs might offer teachers emotional support as they seek to grow as professionals in their practice and attitudes for teaching and learning. The flexibility of PLNs allows teachers to adapt their learning experiences based on the contexts in which they work, and also offers opportunities for engagement, participation, and even community that extend beyond the walls of schools.
Considering the aforementioned benefits of PLN activities, teachers,
administrators, and researchers should explore the potential of PLNs in shaping teaching and learning. Our recommendation aligns with Macià and García’s (2016) suggestion that
further studies are needed to examine, “how these networks influence the depth of teachers' learning and reflection” (p. 305). Teachers should aim to improve their PLN experiences through continual reflection and evaluation. Such a process might prompt teachers to, for example, recognize a weakness in their own processes and address shortcomings. Reflection has long been deemed integral to teachers’ professional growth (Schön, 1983) and this is particularly true given the ever-changing educational terrain (Nagle, 2009). The colleagues and digital tools that make up PLNs can offer teachers means for support for affective, social, cognitive, and identity growth that meet the holistic needs of teachers. We agree with authors of previous studies about PLNs and online networks who have suggested that comparative and longitudinal studies that examine changes in teaching behavior, which occur concurrently with engagement in PLN activities, could offer important insights (Macià & García, 2016; Visser, Evering, and Barrett, 2014).
Researchers should also further explore the relationship between teachers’ PLN activities and students’ learning. A number of teachers in our study reported that their uses of new teaching strategies, resources, digital tools, and activities from their PLNs positively influenced students’ learning. A few participants also believed that modeling how to learn with a PLN encouraged students to change the way they learned. However, educators should generally avoid taking a simple cause-and-effect approach when examining the impact of teacher learning on students’ learning within such complex learning systems (Opfer & Pedder, 2011). Some participants found it hard to make a direct connection between what they learned from their PLNs and learning by students,
but this does not necessarily mean that worthwhile changes did not occur. Since establishing whether teacher participation in PLNs may have an impact on students' learning can be difficult, we recommend approaching PLNs as complex systems that meet the diverse needs of whole teachers. By taking such a view, researchers and educators might be able to better recognize the different benefits or even shortcomings that come from PLN uses.
Like other researchers who have explored teacher learning in PLNs and online networks (Macià & García, 2016; Visser, Evering, & Barrett, 2014), we recommend that P-12 administrators and other decision-makers (e.g., superintendents, lawmakers)
encourage teachers to build PLNs as a way of developing their craft. Administrators could do this by drawing on digital leaders within their schools, engaging in PLN activities themselves, cultivating local networks for educators, and supporting or potentially incentivizing PLN participation. For example, teachers in the Burlington School District in Massachusetts can earn professional development points and inservice credits for attending district-sponsored informal and formal sessions (e.g., How to Use Twitter) that support the growth of their PLNs (Larkin, 2013). Because many districts offer limited types of PD for continuing education credit, policy makers may want to consider creating more inclusive definitions of professional learning that encompass participant-driven, voluntary professional activities. Some school systems provide guidance to teachers on how they can document their PLN activities to earn required re-certification points that are part of teacher licensure systems (see the Albemarle County Public Schools (2016) “Do It Yourself PD” web resources). Such efforts make sense
given that many educators indicate a lack of incentives as a barrier to their participation in professional development (OECD, 2014).
However, it is likely that tensions will also emerge as teachers seek to receive credit for informal learning from top-down, bureaucratic structures such as licensure regimes and professional development regulations. Leaders who seek to encourage or recognize teacher self-directed learning must be careful not to unintentionally taint the personalized and organic nature of PLNs. Administrators who require participation in digital networks should be careful not to distort the nature of online environments in miseducative ways that inhibit future learning opportunities. Similarly, teachers should probably not expect to earn district credit for all PLN activities; teachers should work with administrators to determine which aspects of PLN learning could best be integrated into larger PD systems.
We hope researchers can build upon this study to address gaps that remain in the literature. Our findings suggest that PLNs are complex systems of people, digital tools, and resources. Approaching teachers’ PLNs as complex and multifaceted systems (e.g., Davis & Sumara, 2006; Morrison, 2006; Opfer & Pedder, 2011) can help educators avoid simplistic process-product research paradigms that are inadequate for the phenomenon (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1991). Future studies are also needed to explore how teachers learn to cultivate their PLNs, how they navigate the interactions among the various components in their PLNs, and how teachers’ online and off-line professional activities interact, relate, and shape learning. Additionally, because our study focused on teachers’
perceptions of how PLN experiences shaped their practices and student learning, further
research is needed to explore whether these changes in teaching and learning were sustained and ongoing or whether they were only one-time, short-term changes.
Comparative international research could potentially shed light upon opportunities and challenges associated with PLNs that our research did not illuminate. In the past, teachers have had only very limited opportunities to interact with colleagues from other regions and cultures, and research on what happens in and results from such collaborations could be of great value to the education field.
In some cases, the technologies that are commonly utilized to build PLNs have actually been shown to expose users to a wider set of perspectives (Kop, 2012; Messing
& Westwood 2012, Morris & Morris, 2013), and although our survey did not directly address this issue, a small number of our respondents (n=11) mentioned being exposed to diverse points-of-view. However, given existing critiques of new technologies as
functioning as “filter bubbles” (Pariser, 2011) that limit users’ interaction with diverse perspectives, future research could explore to what extent PLNs do or do not function in this manner. Moreover, while some of our respondents mentioned connecting to and with people from different nations and cultures who could offer unique perspectives, they did not delve into the quantity (e.g., number of nations or cultures) and the quality (e.g., depth of intercultural learning) of their interactions. Further research should explore whether PLNs can enhance the cosmopolitan growth of teachers and their students (Banks, 2004).
This study also raises a number of questions such as: how can schools and researchers evaluate and support uses of PLNs for the growth of teachers and students?
How does such self-directed learning activity relate to the culture and goals of the schools and districts within which educators work? And, given the potentially ephemeral nature of online connections, will participants withdraw when their beliefs are challenged or when collaboration becomes difficult, rather than persisting through and overcoming such barriers? Researchers and educators should continue to investigate such questions if PLNs are to mediate professional growth that is effective and sustainable. For example, while drawing a direct line between teacher learning and student learning is challenging (Guskey, 2000), educators and researchers should aim to identify factors and practices that strengthen the relationship between the two. For the future of the development of teachers, educators and researchers should explore how teachers’ PLN activities can and cannot be supported, improved, and extended.
9. Conclusion
We live in an era of rapid technological and educational change, and adapting and responding to this shifting landscape requires new knowledge, skills, and dispositions.
Such variability means that the work of teachers is in flux, and the process of learning to teach should be flexible and adaptive to support this process. Educators’ responses to such conditions must be multifaceted and persistent. Of course, PLNs offer no panacea or easy fix to the many educational challenges of our time. Despite largely positive
responses from P-12 teachers, we identified voids and shortcomings in our data, which led us to ask numerous questions for educators, researchers, and ourselves.
However, the results from this study also offer a rejoinder for teachers who seek to meet their diverse, interconnected, and holistic needs. Participants enthusiastically
described their PLNs as diverse and multifaceted networks of people, communities, tools, platforms, resources and sites. Moreover, our respondents conveyed affective, social, cognitive, and identity benefits of PLN experiences. While traditional teacher PD is often organized to meet specific needs or aims (Kennedy, 2016), which can be valuable, a strength of PLNs is that teachers are able to consider and meet the contextual demands for their situation. PLNs not only seemed to help participants meet specific pedagogic or emotional needs, but their networks also allowed many educators to forge, and move towards, new conceptions of their professional identities. Despite some vague and teacher-centered answers, many other teachers were able to extend the benefits from and in PLNs to their students in numerous ways. By teachers’ accounts, PLN activities helped engage them in a continuous process of teacher growth that we believe can be a boon to a field not often accorded professional dignity (Apple, 2009; Goldstein, 2014).
PLN activities seemed to offer many teachers in our sample professional refuge.
Teachers spoke enthusiastically of their PLN experiences as causing them to be
“consistently positive every day now,” “excited about teaching again,” and “more relevant, more energized, more engaged than I've been in 10 years.” They also extolled the benefits of their PLN experiences, saying, for example, that PLNs brought “dignity in the profession” through “the beauty of empowerment” in the “reciprocal neighborhood of learning” where teachers “are so much stronger as a woven rope pulling together,
working together, rather than one single thread . . .” If it is true as our Canadian teacher contended that “together we are better,” then it seems worth the time and energy of those
in education to continue to explore the potential of PLNs to meet teachers’ diverse and holistic needs.
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