W10 Q1_Jeong | W10 Q1 | Forum

Option 1:
1)
I would like to think about teacher professional development program. There have been many attempts to leverage the affordances of social media not only to incorporate into the K-12 classroom for successful teaching, but also to enhance professional developments of teachers. As noted in Greenhow et al.’s (2019) article, the use of social media has the benefits of helping teachers develop their own professional learning and improve their quality of teaching.
Accordingly, as one of the proposals, I would like to incorporate social media in a professional development program in a way that gives teachers the opportunity to form teachers’ social networks. As a former teacher, I believe these networks are essential for the sustained professional development of teachers. Teachers are often confined to their classrooms and have difficulty communicating with other teachers. The affordances of social media provide emotional support by making teacher feel connected to other teachers, as well as develop their own profession by connecting with other experienced teachers (Greenhow et al., 2019). Thus, building communities through social media may enable an integral part of “daily teaching practice (Hanraets et al., 2011, p. 97)”.

2)
There are many other challenges that instructors and/or facilitators face when implementing teacher professional development programs (Hanraets et al., 2011). Nevertheless, I believe that one of the roles of the instructor to successfully lead a program using social media is to identify their subject positions (Bartow, 2014) (e.g., teacher as learner, teacher as caring, teacher as change agent etc.) Teachers need to aware of different kinds of positionalities when using social media in their class. Because I think all these subjectivities are linked to one’s own teaching philosophy and beliefs, it would be a good chance for teachers to see the instructors exhibit different subjectivities during the professional development program using social media.