Pixel International Conferences

The hidden agenda of PUSTULKA Project which I presented at Pixel 2019 Conference was forming a collaborative innovation network (COIN). At that time, I was hoping to encourage teachers to collaborate by contributing content to the language testing software (PUSTULKA) which I developed. That ambitious plan did not exactly succeed. In the meantime, however, I have settled as the Director of the Language Centre at my university and the pandemic started. These two conditions helped me launch “SiC!” (Sharing is Caring) project in October 2020. Its aim was to gather a cyberteam of almost 60 teachers of seven different languages in regular monthly or bi-monthly online meetings and:

• share our experience,
• build the sense of community and good relations,
• onboard new staff
• develop digital competence, and
• creatively respond to new challenges and threats.

During my presentation I will talk about the details showing how the meetings were organised, what topics were discussed and what benefits were gained. All in all, after one academic year of its existence our COIN inspired some of my staff to share their know-how, coordinate work of smaller size teams, contributed to professional and personal development of many of us, built trust and broke the ice in our relations. My personal impression is that we go out of the lockdown more tight knit, with more casual relations, less jealous of our know-how, happy to support one another.

Keywords: community of practice; collaborative innovation network; COIN; professional development; collaboration; sharing.

References:

[1] B. Boyle, I. Lamprianou, T. Boyle, A longitudinal study of teacher change: what makes professional development effective? Report of the second year of the study School Effectiveness and School Improvements, 16 (2005), pp. 1-27
[2] R. H. Hofman, B. J. Dijkstra, Effective teacher professionalization in networks?, Teaching and Teacher Education, Volume 26, Issue 4, (2010), pp. 1031-1040,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2009.10.046
[3] K. Patton, M. Parker, Teacher education communities of practice: More than a culture of collaboration, Teaching and Teacher Education, Volume 67, (2017), pp. 351-360,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.06.013.
[4] J. Paul, C. Vallente, Framing pre-service English language teachers’ identity formation within the theory of alignment as mode of belonging in community of practice, Teaching and Teacher Education, Volume 96, (2020)
[5] Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511803932