Facilitating Digital Discourse: Teachers as Learners in a Digital Age
Grantee: University of Pennsylvania
Grant Details
| Project Lead | Amy Stornaiuolo Ph.D. |
|---|---|
| Amount | $2,499,399 |
| Year Awarded | |
| Duration | 5 years |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.37717/220020588 |
| Summary |
While research has illustrated the benefits of high quality classroom discussions - and the challenges teachers face in facilitating them - scant research has explored how teachers learn to incorporate digital tools/spaces in classroom discussion. In the proposed project, we examine how secondary English teachers learn to facilitate digital discourse in their classrooms, focusing specifically on one digital discourse practice demonstrated to improve student learning: online discussions. Over the course of a five-year teacher inquiry project between partners affiliated with the National Writing Project (NWP), we study how teachers and literacy education researchers co-design and use a set of discourse moves to deepen learning through online literature discussions in secondary English classrooms. We also study how these tools are taught and scaled to a cohort of novice ELA teachers learning to facilitate high quality online literature discussions. We draw on a distributed cognition approach to understand how teacher cognition develops in relations between individuals, artifacts, and social groups. We investigate what knowledge teachers need to facilitate productive online discussions with students and how teachers respond to students’ changing needs and emerging learning challenges. We explore these questions through a design-based implementation research model anchored in current teacher practices and authentic learning contexts: first with expert teachers at two NWP local sites and then with new teachers who learn to use those moves as tools to support facilitation of online literature discussions. Across iterative design cycles, teachers will develop, use, and learn how to enact digital discourse moves collaboratively.
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