Teacher Knowledge and Teacher Learning for
Pedagogical Innovation with ICT
Nancy Law
University of Hong Kong
Email: nlaw@hku.hk
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Institute of
Education, University of London, 5-8 September 2007
Abstract
Teacher professional development has been identified as an important strategic
component in any curriculum or pedagogical initiative as such changes call for new
teacher knowledge and competence. ICT supported pedagogical innovations have
attracted increasing attention from policy makers as well as practitioners in school
education as well as from educational researchers. It is important to understand what
challenges in knowledge (which is used in a broad sense to include skills for
competent performance) teachers face in implementing and sustaining ICT
supported pedagogical innovations in their own practices and what impacts different
organizational and support mechanisms at the innovation level may have on teacher
learning. This paper reports on an exploration of these issues using the case studies
of ICT supported pedagogical innovations collected in the Second Information
Technology in Education Study Module 2 (SITES M2). The analysis throws
important light on understanding the interaction between pedagogical design of
ICT-supported innovations, social infrastructure for change and the requisite teacher
knowledge for effective implementation. Implications for policy and strategic
planning of ICT integration and for the provision of professional development
opportunities for teachers will be discussed.
SITES M2
SITES M2 was an international comparative study of case studies of pedagogical innovations
using technology involving 28 countries conducted under the auspices of the International
Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (Kozma, 2003). An important
aspect of pedagogical innovation is the change in the roles played by the teachers and the
students away from the traditional instructor-receptive learner model. (Law, 2004) analyzed the
pedagogical organization and the roles played by the teachers in 130 of the case studies collected
in SITES M2. It was found that these practices can be categorized into six types, scientific
investigations, project work, media productions, virtual schools or online courses, task-based
learning and expository teaching. Furthermore, there appears to be an interaction between the
practice type and the roles played by the teachers though the relationship was not definitive.
Teachers were found to be more likely to play facilitative roles in scientific investigations,
projects and media productions while the teachers’ roles in task-based learning and expository
teaching were essentially didactic and traditional. Roles of the teachers in virtual schools and
online courses were the most highly variable, ranging from highly innovative to very traditional.
In addition to examining the ways learning and teaching were organized in the SITES case
studies, Law (2003) identified six dimensions (or aspects) of change of classroom practices along
which cases could be compared in terms of the extent of innovativeness. These six dimensions
are: intended learning objectives of the classroom practice, pedagogical role(s) of the teacher,
1
role(s) of the learner, nature and sophistication of the ICT used, connectedness of the classroom
and learning outcomes exhibited by the learner. It can be seen that significant changes took place
in addition to the integration of ICT into the learning process. It is argued here that these
innovations can in fact be seen as disruptions where ICT played an important role. In the book The
innovator's dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail, Christensen (1997) introduced the
concepts of sustaining and disruptive technologies. The former refers to technologies that
foster improved performance of existing, established products while the latter refers to
technologies that are less well developed and weaken established products in mainstream
markets but have features that address specific needs in a newly emerging, fringe market. The
distinction between sustaining v.s. disruptive technology lies in the market to which the
technology serves. The concept of disruptive technology so defined may not immediately apply
to education since we are interested in exploring the impact of ICT in publicly funded schools,
and not the impact of ICT on a different “education market” such as home schooling, learning
centres, etc. Instead, the relationship between technology and pedagogical practices can be
conceptualized as sustaining or subversive, depending on whether the use of the technology is aimed
to strengthen existing pedagogical processes to better achieve existing curriculum goals or to
bring about new goals, new processes and new relationships. It is important to note here that the
categorization of sustaining or subversive uses of technology does not depend on the technology
alone, but also on the intended use of the technology in the specific educational context.
What does it take for a teacher to be able to leverage ICT for pedagogical innovations such as
the one described in the previous section? Clearly there is a lot of new knowledge involved.
Mishra & Koehoer (2006) extended Shulman’s (1986) theory about teacher knowledge (which
argues that a competent teacher would need to have content knowledge (CK), pedagogical
knowledge (PK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for ICT-using pedagogical
situations. It has been proposed that in addition to technological knowledge (TK) which is
expected of the teacher when ICT is used, three further kinds of new knowledge (technological
content knowledge (TCK), technological pedagogical knowledge (TPK) and technological
pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK) are required in order that teachers can be capable of
“understanding and negotiating the relationships between these three components of [technological, content
and pedagogical] knowledge” for true technology integration (ibid, p.134). However this
framework is not sufficient to encompass what it takes for a teacher to be able to make use of
ICT to undertake pedagogical innovations. It is found that in many of the innovations analyzed,
the teachers have to grapple with new content knowledge (CK) in order to achieve new curriculum
goals. The teacher also have to master new pedagogical knowledge and skills (PK) in implementing
the new pedagogical approaches that emphasize inquiry, collaboration and learning with and
from peers and experts beyond the classroom walls. Furthermore, facilitating collaboration and
inquiry in new content areas require new pedagogical content knowledge (PCK).
In innovating, a teacher is also an agent of disruption (or innovation). To leverage ICT as a
disruptive force, requires courage and motivation. Hence, a most important issue to be addressed
in relation to teacher learning for pedagogical innovation is not what needs to be learnt, but why
a teacher would want to learn? What motivates a teacher to put in so much cognitive,
metacognitive and socio-emotional energy to make the change happen? The answer has to lie in
the professional value and epistemological belief of the teacher, and these can only be cultivated .
through the social, institutional and professional milieu within which the teacher lives and work.
Values and beliefs cannot be learnt through instruction and changes can only take place through
deeply engaging experiences over an extended period of time. Innovation is an emerging process
both for the individual teacher(s) as well as the institution(s) involved. Figure 1 presents the
framework for conceptualizing teacher learning for ICT-supported pedagogical innovation
presented above.
2
Cognitive capacity
Metaognitive
capacity for
inquiry and
autonomous
learning
TK
TCK
Inquiry, change
and improvement
TPK
TPCK
CK
PCK
PK
Sociometacognitive
capacity for
knowledge
building
Social and
communication
skills and
“know-who”
knowledge
What needs to be learnt
to innovate with ICT
Students’ learning outcomes 21st Century skills
The driving force for learning
Educational Values
Epistemological beliefs
Social, institutional and professional community(ies) in which the teacher is situated.
Figure 1. A Diagrammatic representation of the different capacities required for ICT-supported
pedagogical innovation and contextual influences on teacher learning.
3
The above analysis and proposed framework have implications on understanding the interaction
between the pedagogical design of ICT-supported innovations, social infrastructure for change
and the design for teacher professional development. To be able to innovate teacher learning
need to go beyond acquiring knowledge to develop meta-cognitive, social and
socio-metacognitive capacities for innovation. Further, professional development must address
issues of values and beliefs which provide the orientation and motivation for teacher learning.
Reference:
Christensen, C. M. (1997). The Innovator's Dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail:
Harvard Business School Press.
Kozma, R. (Ed.). (2003). Technology, Innovation, and Educational Change: A Global Perspective. Eugene,
OR: ISTE.
Law, N., & Plomp, T. (2003). Curriculum and Staff Development for ICT in Education. In T.
Plomp, R. Anderson, N. Law & A. Quale (Ed.), Cross-national Information and Communication
Technology Policy and Practices in Education (pp. 15-30). Greenwich, CT: Information Age
Publishing Inc.
Law, N. (2004). Teachers and Teaching Innovations in a Connected World. In A. Brown & N.
Davis (Eds.), Digital Technology, Communities and Education (pp. 145-163). London: Routledge
Falmer.
Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. (2006). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework
for Teacher Knowledge. The Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017-1054.
Shulman, L. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational
Researcher, 15 (2), 4-14.
An extended version of this paper will appear in:
Law, N. (2008). Teacher learning beyond knowledge for pedagogical innovations with ICT. In
Voogt, J. & Knezek, G. (Eds.) International Handbook for Information Technology in Education.
Springer.
4