Current Approaches in Teacher Learning on Digital Social Platforms
Within digital ecologies, teachers routinely find an abundance of information related to their teaching. While many teachers pursue brute force searches for online ideas and resources, during the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers had to address pressing new challenges in online teaching in the most efficient ways possible. This chapter reports on an ongoing study of 16 teachers and how they relied upon digital social platforms to make the move to online teaching. Analysis revolves around socially-distanced video-recorded interviews with these teachers. Given their limited time, teachers had to be selective about what they deemed useful and relevant to their immediate needs. Strategic uses of digital social platforms served to address some of those needs. Specific strategies observed in the data regarding the development of pedagogy included joining teacher collectives, accessing expert-like spaces, and finding pedagogical inspiration within posts by teacher-influencers.