Classroom-Based Research for Professional Development EVO session coalesced around the Community of Inquiry Framework (COI). Speakers aim to share their journey in this session which was run with 232 geographically dispersed international teacher-researchers who met online for five weeks to have hands-on learning experience in different stages of classroom-based research. Different facets of this online teacher research training experience are discussed with special emphasis on instructional design of online teacher research training (objectives, participants, moderators, and guest speakers, content, key characteristics of input sessions, and Web 2.0 tools used in these sessions) and reflection on the impact of this online training upon participants.
In addition, the participants were invited to comment on the potential of an online research training for professional development. The audience were invited to discuss affordances of creating an online-community for research in their own institutions, challenges and ways of overcoming them, sustainability of online teacher research training, contribution of an online community of practice to professional development of its participants and implications for future training opportunities. This practice oriented presentation aims at encouraging participants to reconsider integration of technology into professional development and boost confidence to engage in such initiative to learn and improve in the 2.0 world.
About the speakers:
Asli Lidice Gokturk Saglam has been an English teacher in EAP settings for 18 years. She holds a PhD in ELT. Her research interests include; testing and assessment, teacher education and educational technology. She shares her reflections about teaching in her blog at http://aslisaglam.edublogs.org/ and on Twitter (@aslilidice).
Kenan Dikilitaş is an ELT teacher educator and researcher, particularly interested in teacher research for professional development. He has organized international conferences and published a series of edited books for and in association with the IATEFL ReSIG and has conducted several teacher research projects in Turkey. He established international collaboration with universities in England and Cyprus; he has also published papers in ELTJ and EAR.