Teachers' sharing of pedagogical experience in a learning environment that supports SRL

Giuliana Dettori and Tania Giannetti
Istituto di Tecnologie Didattiche del CNR
Genova, Italy

Paola Forcheri
Istituto di Matematica Applicata e Tecnologie Informatiche del CNR
Genova, Italy


Continuous professional development of teachers has a central role in diffusing pedagogical innovation in the school system. Current approaches to in-service teacher training, however, mostly rely on episodic interventions, without a suitable overall organization to support innovation through continuous reflective practice, comparison with other teachersŐ issues and achievements, and a shared orientation towards renewal and new proposals. In order to overcome this problem, several authors in the literature suggest implementing in-service teacher training by means of communities of practice that are likely to value and exploit the wealth of competence and experience of their members.

In line with this approach, we designed a collaborative environment (LODE, i.e. Learning Objects Discussion Environment) explicitly addressed to teachers engaged in sharing didactical materials together with methodological considerations and experience of use. LODE was implemented based on the open-source learning management system ATutor, and experimented with in a teacher preparation course. The environment considered is based on a pedagogical conception of LOs that we developed in the past years [Busetti et al. 2004], which highlights how the re-use of educational material among teachers should not be limited to chunks of knowledge and exercises, but should include, as a major element, the methodological orientation and use experience of many teachers. This approach shapes pedagogical re-use as a technological transfer activity to which both the modulesŐ producers and the re-users can actively contribute, and turns it into a valuable occasion for teachers to learn from each other.

The use of LODE gives rise to online communities of peers who learn from each other and with each other without being externally guided or scaffolded. In order for such communities to function effectively and autonomously, their members should be able to self-regulate their own activity and learning in the environment [Butler et al. 2004]. Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) is an issue that has been receiving increasing attention in the literature in the past years. It has been described as a cross-curricular competence whose acquisition facilitates and enhances learning by allowing one to control one's own meta-cognition, motivation and behaviour (as concerns both self-directed and social experiences) in relation to his/her context of activity. Therefore, in the design of LODE, we took into consideration the need to encourage the development of such competence by adding elements and functions expected to provide opportunities to practise self-regulation. In this paper, we present the main features of LODE and analyse its first use outcomes in a pre-service teacher-training course, focusing on the support given to the practice of self-regulation during the learning process.