The Influence of an Online Community of Practice on Professional Development for Online Teaching: Case Study on Kindergartens

Abstract

The unexpected closure of schools, including kindergartens, due to the coronavirus pandemic in the past two years transformed face-to-face teaching into online teaching, which was not a common practice for kindergarten teachers. As research reveal, kindergarten teachers are generally inexperienced in teaching online, so they need ongoing support and interactive professional training like building a community of practice (CoP) for switching to online teaching. Yet, limited research has investigated the impacts of building an online CoP as a teacher professional development approach in early childhood education. Thus, this study examined the effects and sustainable factors of the CoP groups provided by a university for online teaching in early childhood education through intensive training and quadripartite collaboration among kindergarten teachers, teacher trainers, preservice teachers, and eLearning specialists. To have an in-depth investigation, this study employed a case study of three kindergartens, semi-structured interviews with eight kindergarten teachers and three university teacher trainers were conducted via Zoom. Then, multi-sourced data, including artifacts and interview data, were analyzed by thematic analysis based on the CoP Theory to elucidate participants’ experiences of an online CoP as an approach for teacher professional development. Based on the findings, this study revealed that the CoP empowered kindergarten teachers to teach online by (1) developing their technical and leadership skills through (2) building up a supportive network for idea exchanges; and (3) accumulating resources, skills, and tools they needed for online teaching from the domain, community, and practice dimension accordingly. In addition, the findings indicated that content relevance to the school curriculum, availability of time for collaboration, continuous technical support, and self-learning resources are important factors for sustaining the online teaching practices learned from the CoP groups. This study recommended an establishment of an ongoing online CoP for facilitating more sustainable teacher professional development in early childhood settings.