What do Campfires and Social Media have in Common? Improvement
Chapter 19, by Kaitlin Torphy Knake, Jordan Tait, and Kenneth Frank, moves the focus from more brick-and-mortar educational contexts into virtual spaces facilitated by social media and, by doing so, pushes the boundaries on our conceptualization of where improvement work takes place. This innovative chapter is about the informal learning that takes place in self-organized spaces between and among teachers as they share and exchange resources related to improvement efforts. Educators are increasingly sharing ideas and practices across a variety of platforms, including Pinterest, Twitter, Teachers Pay Teachers, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. These platforms afford educators the opportunity to interact at times of their choosing. Educators are now no longer constrained to school hours or formal meetings for collaboration and can share at all hours of the day and throughout the school year. The interaction among improvement, virtual spaces, and teacher learning has received limited attention in the improvement research space, and this chapter provides important necessary foundations as well as methods related to capturing and analyzing data.
The Foundational Handbook on Improvement Research in Education
Public Instructional Network of School Resources (PINSR)
Section IV: Designs, Tools, and Methods of Improvement Research in Education [Foundational Handbook]
Torphy Knake, K. T., Tait, J., & Frank, K. A. (2022). What do Campfires and Social Media have in Common? Improvement. In D. J. Peurach, J. L. Russell, L. Cohen-Vogel, & W. R. Penuel (Eds.), The Foundational Handbook on Improvement Research in Education (pp. 443-464). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538152348/The-Foundational-Handbook-on-Improvement-Research-in-Education