Communities of Practice in FE

An opportunity to have your voice heard in some new and upcoming research!

I am a current Doctorate in Education student at Liverpool John Moore’s University. Would you be willing to give me 20 minutes of your time to offer some of your knowledge about PDNorth/FE Tapestry and your teaching expertise in English, Maths and ESOL by participating in a short online survey? The information gathered through this survey will be used for my thesis and to help inform future research directions within this area.

The purpose of the research is to understand teachers’ views and actions related to professional learning within an FE teacher’s Communities of Practice (CoP), whilst bringing together Boyer’s scholarship and distinct areas of CPD which will help to develop and recognise a devolved CPD framework, that operates around Boyer’s (1990) scholarship principles.

Please click the link to conduct the Survey:

If you are willing to volunteer also to participate in a subsequent online Microsoft Teams interview, to be undertaken within the next three months at your convenience, please include your email within the Survey.

Read further if you would like more details:

Study Title: A case study to investigate effective teachers’ professional development within the Further Education Sector (FES) and the emerging role of virtual Communities of Practice (CoP) as a vehicle for teachers’ Continuous Professional Development (CPD). 

The goal of the present study is to explore an online CoP as a vehicle for the professional development of FE teachers. Many FE practitioners who are engaging in scholarship, are finding that they are working in isolation. Within education, online CoP’s have become significantly more prominent as a strategy for knowledge management and teachers’ CPD, and judging by their effectiveness, have become important (The Education and Training Foundation, 2021). Within the Further Education Sector, literature has reported that sharing good practices and developing teachers’ practices results in changes in teacher practice, which leads to improved student learning outcomes (Ball, 2013). Within the last few years, CoPs have become virtual spaces because of the pandemic; these communities have become more prominent during the recent switch to remote learning (Exley, 2021). Virtual CoPs are increasingly seen as spaces for promoting innovation, developing social capital, and spreading tacit knowledge within a group (Chikh and Berkani, 2010). The CoP framework is a crucial means of understanding how collaborative interactions lead to learning and change.

Utilising Boyer’s (1990) notion of scholarship offers a way to guide teachers in the development of their interests and application to practice, and a way of thinking about what it means to develop as a teacher within FE. Boyer (1990) classified different types of activities in which scholars are engaged.

• The application scholarship involves solving problems within the academic community and the wider social context
• The scholarship of integration, seeing connections across discipline.
• The scholarship of teaching by keeping updated with developments in the sector, sharing good practice in one’s vocational specialist fields, and reflective evaluation of own practice.
• The scholarship of discovery through original research generates new knowledge.

Boyer (1990) argues that the four domains are collectively described as academic engagement with the important point of broadening and developing connections with communities. Boyer (1990) claims that scholars do not work successfully in isolation and that there is a need to bring them together.

Specific Objectives

The research will seek to achieve the following objectives:

1.     Outline the impact on Further Education teachers undertaking online CPD within CoP’s

2.     Explore FE teachers’ views about and interactions within online virtual communities of practice

3.     Review the barriers within the online CoP which impact professional development

4.     Using Boyer’s (1990) domains of scholarship to explore and define the professional development undertaken by FE teachers within an online Community of Practice

The purpose of the research is to better understand teachers’ views and actions relating to professional learning within an FE teacher’s CoP. Bringing together Boyer’s scholarship and distinct areas of CPD will help to develop and recognise a devolved CPD framework, that operates around Boyer’s (1990) scholarship principles.

Please click the link to conduct the Survey:

If you are willing to volunteer also to participate in a subsequent online Microsoft Teams interview, to be undertaken within the next three months at your convenience, please include your email within the Survey.