More than Social Media: Using Twitter with Preservice Teachers as a Means of Reflection and Engagement in Communities of Practice.

English teacher education programs often look for ways to help preservice teachers engage in critical reflection, participate in communities of practice, and write for authentic audiences in order to be able to teach in the 21st century. In this article, the authors describe how they used Twitter to provide opportunities for reflection and collaboration during methods courses in two English education programs. The authors examined the affordances and limitations of using Twitter in methods courses and suggest revisions to help other teacher educators consider ways to use Twitter in their own courses. Specifically, the authors suggest that Twitter is useful for ongoing reflection and provides potential for preservice teachers to engage with larger communities of practice outside of their own institution; however, preservice teachers may need scaffolding and guidance for developing critical reflection skills and maintaining involvement in communities of practice. This self-study describes the attempts of authors Susanna Benko and Megan Guise as English educators working to integrate Twitter into their methods courses and investigates different opportunities that Twitter provided for preservice teachers. We describe these attempts from multiple perspectives—both from English educators (Susanna and Megan) and preservice teachers enrolled in teacher preparation courses (third and fourth authors Casey Earl and Witny Gill). Specifically, we focus on the ways in which Twitter provided preservice teachers with opportunities to reflect on their own teaching, engage with communities of practice, and write for an authentic audience. These reflections may provide blueprints for implementing a similar assignment and provide a rationale for Twitter’s usefulness as a tool to integrate into teacher education. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 16(1) 2 Reflecting, Connecting, and Writing Through Tweeting The Essentials of Twitter Twitter, an online social networking platform, was created in 2006 in San Francisco, California. When joining Twitter, users are asked to create a username, follow other users, and have other users follow them. [Editor’s Note: For website URLs, see the Resources section at the end of this paper. ] Users may choose to use Twitter simply to follow other people that they find interesting or relevant. They may also choose to tweet, posting bursts of information no more than 140-characters long—including photos, videos, and links to websites—making these tweets public or visible to a select network. Tweeting also includes its own set of symbols and language. For example, hashtags (#) are a way to group together tweets by topic, and “@username” is used to mention a specific person on Twitter or to reply directly to a person on Twitter. “RT” is used in front of a Tweet that has been retweeted. Applications for smartphones (e.g., TweetDeck and Tweetcaster) allow Twitter users to gain access to their account and to organize their tweets and the tweets of people they follow. Other tools useful for those who tweet include URL shortening services such as tinyurl,bit.ly, and goo.gl. Twitter also automatically shortens a URL to 22 characters when typed into the tweet box. In the sections that follow, we provide a brief review of research on critical reflection, communities of practice, and teachers as writers, integrating research on educational uses of Twitter within each section. Reflecting in Teacher Education Reflective thinking has long been considered an important part of teacher education. In his argument for reflection as a critical part of quality instruction, Amboi (2006) called reflection “a quintessential element that breathes life to high quality teaching” (p. 24). Dewey (1933) wrote about reflective thinking—thinking that is grounded in a problem, a question, or unknown, which leads to “an act of searching, hunting, inquiring to find material that will resolve the doubt, settle and dispose of the perplexity” (p. 12). In teacher education, preservice teachers often bring many questions—and plenty of doubt— to their coursework and student teaching. By promoting reflective thinking in teacher preparation programs, teacher educators can help their preservice teachers become active, careful thinkers who make deliberate, purposeful choices. Reflections—by way of journals, weblogs, or other forms—have been commonly incorporated into teacher preparation programs in both coursework (Bull, Bull, & Kajder, 2003) and student teaching (Collier, 1999). Research studies examining the use of Twitter as a tool for reflection in teacher education programs have found that tweeting can help to develop reflective thinking by allowing preservice teachers to reflect upon “not just whatthey did, but why and how” (Wright, 2010, p. 262). Regardless of the platform for reflection, prior research on the incorporation of reflection in teacher preparation programs has identified the challenge of balancing open-ended reflection with preservice teachers’ desire for concrete structures for their reflections, for example, specific prompts, and page limits (Shoffner, 2008). Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 16(1) 3 Connecting to Other Teachers Another important part of teacher education is the notion that learning is socially situated. In the seminal text, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Lave and Wenger (1991) advanced a notion of situated learning as learning that takes place by being engaged in a “community of practice. ” Referring to one’s engagement in a social practice that results in learning as “legitimate peripheral participation” (p. 29), Lave and Wenger posited that learners participate in communities of practice and gradually transition from being a newcomer in that community to a full participant. Participants in a community of practice have a common goal in regard to what the community of practice is about, how it functions, and what it is capable of producing (Wenger, 1998). This theory of learning “claims that learning, thinking, and knowing are relations among people in activity in, with, and arising from the socially and culturally structured world” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 51). Twitter affords its user an opportunity to participate in a community of practice—one that varies by scope (e.g., within group, across groups, and outside of groups)—and to become an integral member of a learning community. Numerous research studies analyzing the use of Twitter in teacher education programs and by in-service teachers have concluded that Twitter use can result in preservice and in-service teachers feeling like they belong to a teaching community—a community in which teaching resources are shared, issues in education are debated, and encouragement is provided (Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2009; Forte, Humphreys, & Park, 2012; Visser, Evering, & Barrett, 2014; Wright, 2010). By creating a Twitter handle, tweeting, and following key people and organizations in education, teachers begin to form a professional online social network that has the potential to enhance their daily teaching by staying up to date on innovations and engaging in conversations about teaching, learning, and educational reform (Forte et al., 2012). Reflecting and Connecting Through Writing A long-held belief in English education—especially with organizations such as the National Writing Project—holds that teachers of writing need to be writers themselves (Gillespie, 1991). Gillespie offered three reasons why teachers of writing should write: (a) to establish their own authority of their writing, (b) to experience the difficulties of writing which may, in turn, allow them to support their own students through those difficulties, and (c) to show professionalism through the opportunity for teachers to share their work with students and demonstrate that “we can do what we ask our students to do” (p. 40). Swensen, Young, McGrail, Rozema, and Whitin (2006) argued that the concept of writers and writing have evolved, and that the act of writing can mean “the composition of an attempt at meaning, whether that composition is a print text, a digital slide show, a film, or a multi-media flash poem” (p. 358). Commenting on blogs, writing blogs, or participating in Twitter conversations such as #engchat are important ways for teachers to engage as writers with other professionals, gaining insight into what professionals are discussing (Hicks & Turner, 2013). Writing should not be only about what teachers write, however, but also for whom teachers write. Writing instruction experts argue that writing for an authentic audience is important; Twitter and other forms of new media composition provide authentic audiences for teachers and students alike (Swensen et al., 2006). Such Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 16(1) 4 audiences also provide opportunities for teachers to become advocates in education (Hicks & Turner, 2013). For example, Peter Smagorinsky, a distinguished research professor of English Education at the University of Georgia, contributes to The Atlanta Journal Constitution, where he writes regularly about teaching, testing, and other educational issues in Georgia. Teachers, Profs, Parents: Writers Who Care is a blog that helps writers connect with schools locally and around the country to communicate “a shared desire that students everywhere learn to value writing, to understand its power, and to do it well” (Zuidema, Hochstetler, Letcher, & Turner, 2014, p. 83). In both examples, teacher educators use blogs as a means to reach a wider audience. Other forms of social media, such as Twitter, can provide similar opportunities for preand in-service teachers to engage as writers with audiences beyond the walls of their classrooms.