Teacher’s Twitter Levels of Participation and Depth of Reflection on Pedagogical Practices

Abstract

Teachers need to be connected to other teachers for their professional development and some do this through social media sharing that can be seen through educational hashtags across Twitter. Teachers from different cultural experiences, states, and countries communicate and reflect on educational topics. The purpose of this study was to explore how nine K-12 teachers’ levels of participation on Twitter influenced their reflection on pedagogical practices. The conceptual framework was based on a depth of reflection model and Fischer’s richer ecologies of participation model. The data were collected from interviews, reflective journals, and teachers' Tweets. Then, two levels of coding (a priori coding and emergent codes) were applied to analyze the data collected. The results showed how teachers participated on Twitter and the different levels of participation. The levels of participation included the following teachers’ roles: lurkers, contributors, consumers, curators, meta-designers, or moderators. The teachers' Tweets about building professional identity, exchanging ideas, learning new skills, and professional connectedness were also described and analyzed. Teachers’ connectedness on Twitter showed a depth of reflection among the following levels: critical reflection, reflection, understanding, and non-reflective/ descriptive. The study can help districts and school administrators to evaluate the power of teachers' tweets on social media as a tool for personal growth, professional engagement, and learning.