Developing Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) Through Teaching Online Lisa Peruski, Punya Mishra, Matthew J. Koehler Michigan State University United States
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Abstract: This paper presents cross case analysis of three university faculty members who worked within design teams to develop and subsequently teach an online course for the first time. We analyzed the data from a previous study (Peruski, 2003) using the theory of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) outlined by Mishra and Koehler (2006). TPCK builds upon and extends what Shulman (1986) called Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK). TPCK represents teachers’ knowledge of the connections, interactions, affordances, and constraints between technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge. The theory also specifies the importance of how and in what context teachers learn to integrate technological with pedagogical and content knowledge. The integration of these forms of knowledge is best accomplished when teachers engage in developing technological solutions to authentic problems of practice.
The Context and Research Questions In 1999 Michigan State University (MSU) created a new online mater’s degree program. The second and third authors of this paper designed a faculty development class to teach faculty how to develop their own online classes. The class was based on the idea that the design of educational technology represented an authentic context for faculty to learn about educational technology. By designing an actual class that they had to subsequently teach, faculty were immersed in a learning environment that provided opportunities for sustained inquiry and revision where they could develop a deep understanding of the connections, interactions, affordances, and constraints between and among technology, pedagogy, and content. Faculty members and graduate students (with an interest in educational technology) worked in groups of three or four (one faculty member and two or three graduate students) to design an online course that the faculty member would subsequently teach. The faculty development course involved little direct instruction about particular technologies and software. Instead, the design teams learned the technologies they needed to as they made decisions about what content to include, what activities and assignments they wanted their students to engage in, how their students would be assessed, and how the course would appear aesthetically. Our primary question was, “How do faculty members integrate new technological understandings with existing understandings of pedagogical and content knowledge within a new online course design and teaching context?” Our second question was “Does analyzing preexisting data using TPCK provide evidence of its usefulness as an analytic framework?” Below we explain the theoretical framework and research methods. Next we provide the results of the data analysis, a discussion, and the educational importance of our findings.
Theoretical Framework Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) outlined by Mishra and Koehler (2006) and Koehler & Mishra (in press), builds upon and extends Shulman’s (1986) work on pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). TPCK emphasizes teachers’ knowledge of the connections, interactions, affordances, and constraints between and among technology, pedagogy, and content. The theory also specifies the importance of how and in what context teachers learn to integrate technological with pedagogical and content knowledge. A key component of TPCK is the “Learning Technology by Design” approach where teachers participate in “design teams” comprised of individuals with varying expertise in content, pedagogy, and technology, to develop technological solutions to authentic problems of practice.
Methods & Analysis The TPCK framework was used to analyze a corpus of existing data, collected for another research study (see Peruski, 2003 for details). The data were drawn from a cross-case study that followed three faculty members as they participated in design teams to develop and subsequently teach their first online courses. The design teams consisted of one faculty member and three to four graduate students with varying expertise in technology and other content areas. Using three faculty members took the analysis beyond a single case study, evaluation study, or comparison study and provided more basis for understanding similarities and difference among diverse cases. The data consisted of interviews, observations, and artifacts. The data used for this analysis primarily were from faculty who were interviewed three times: during design, midterm during teaching, and on completion of teaching. The interviews were a mix of semi-structured and open-ended questions. Data were reviewed and analyzed together, with interviews as the primary focus of analysis and other data (observational notes, CD-ROMs of the courses, etc.) serving a supportive role (i.e., corroboration or refutation of interview data). We reviewed, multiple times, transcribed interviews from the three different interview times (during design, during teaching, after teaching), notes from observations of the design teams’ work across the semester, observations of the faculty members as they taught their course, and copies of the various iterations of the design teams’ mock ups of their online course. This provided us with a holistic conception of the content and helped us find instances that related to our study question (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Subsequently we created a cross-case chart organized according to the TPCK framework (PC, PT, TC, TPCK). We plugged data into the chart and found evidence that supported and refuted instances of learning, understanding, and integration of technology with pedagogical and content knowledge. Participants The focus of this analysis was on the three faculty members, Jim, Juliet, and Mikala, as opposed to their design team members or online students. Jim and Mikala had been teaching face-to-face classes in higher education for about 15 years each, and Juliet for about nine years. Jim and Juliet took the faculty development course but Mikala did not due to scheduling conflicts. Jim’s design team was comprised of students with whom he had work on other projects. Although Jim’s team was working with familiar content, they were using a new curricular framework, Problem-Based Learning. This meant that the team was simultaneously learning about the new framework and integrating technology into a new online course. Jim considered himself a novice technology user considering the technologies he believed he would be learning about during the design process. Juliet’s design team was formed after she entered the course and was comprised of graduate students she did not know and who were not familiar with her content. Juliet’s challenges with the content were that she had to design a six-week online summer course as opposed to the usual 15-week faceto-face course that she would have taught in fall and spring terms. Juliet considered herself a novice technology user, not afraid of it, and not particularly interested in tackling it. She hoped to leave most of the technology to others. Mikala used a college stipend to form her own design team to develop her course. Like Jim, Mikala recruited graduate students she knew for her design team. They were both content experts and competent technology users. Mikala saw herself as a technological novice, and like Juliet, had little interest in engaging much with the technology. Mikala’s primary focus in her design team was content and pedagogy.
Cross-case Analysis Regardless of their differences, the design teams wrestled with integrating technology, pedagogy and content. However, initially they also dealt with group process issues such as role definition and division of labor even when they had a history of working together. More pertinent to our discussion in this paper is the recursive manner of the design process. That meant that the phases (PC, TC, PT & TPCK) were not mutually exclusive, though there was a discernable pattern among the groups, which provided evidence of their emerging TPCK. Below we present the data according to these “stages.” (1) PC: deciding upon content and pedagogical goals; (2) TC: aesthetic and practical decisions about how to lay out and “chunk” the content across the number of weeks the course would run, and looking into and experimenting with technological solutions for representing the content; (3) PT: experimentation and decisions about what
technologies would support their pedagogical goals; and, (4) TPCK: emerging and crystallizing understandings about the interplay among TPCK. Pedagogy and Content Although the content was familiar to each of the faculty members, the task of putting it online was complicated by more than just the technology. Jim was using a new curricular framework while Mikala was developing a new course, albeit with familiar content. Juliet, on the other hand, was condensing a fifteen-week course into a six-week summer course. Initial conversations within all of the teams also were centered on pedagogy. Faculty held similar philosophies on what methods facilitated student learning. They wanted interactive classes where students grappled with “real world” problems, collaborated, participated in discussions, and completed written assignments. Mikala’s team decided to use case studies and Jim’s team planned to use Problem-Based Learning. Pedagogy and Technology Realizing their pedagogical goals online initially proved challenging and troublesome. All three faculty had preconceived notions about what the online context would be like. In face-to-face, you have much more feedback. The students are there and generally speaking because they’re compliant. They’ll do what you ask but those are the very things, which are going to happen online. They can choose not to do that or enter it only partially. They can do that in class too but it’s much more difficult to hold back in class because you can do things as a teacher which invites people if they’re reticent to participate (Jim, May 7, 2001). I tried to think about things that would be interesting and how to engage them and how to coerce them to do that. In a classroom, you coerce them by your social persuasion skills. In an online format, your grades are tied to this because they won’t do it unless you provide some sort of incentive to do it because there is more anonymity so I’ve tried to think that through (Juliet, May 2, 2001). Alternatively, Mikala believed that transporting her pedagogical practices to the online context was fairly simple because she relied more heavily on others to deal with the technology. I have this zone of comfort around technology that I need to know only what I need to know…. I don’t want to be accountable and responsible for it. So, integrating the use of different programs as well as the important questions that (students) had to deal with was explicitly woven into every activity. I often said, ‘I’d like this or this to happen. Can you make it happen’ (Mikala, August 21, 2001)? Navigation through the course web site also became an important issue for all three faculty as they considered ways to engage students with the course content. Their conversations indicated that the teams were engaging more deeply with the issue of how teaching in an online environment requires finding technological solutions to pedagogical concerns. We wanted people to be able to move easily and with minimal number of clicks so that if they’re deep into the problem and they wanted to go back and read the original problem again, they’re one click away from that. We wanted the navigation to be sensible and intuitive (Jim, May 7, 2001). Jim and Juliet engaged directly with the technology to solve these issues, while Mikala relied mainly on her team and an external a technology expert employed by the university to assist faculty in putting their courses online. The technology expert determined how to divide the work on the pages of the web site based on Mikala’s syllabus. However, Mikala still gained understanding about technological solutions to pedagogical problems by virtue of her interaction with the technology expert. The navigation part was only concrete after we saw what the (technology expert) constructed so we had no idea but the needs were stressed by (me). It was a continuous construction. We had
pages available and ideas would pop up and so we went back to (the technology expert) and he constructed something else and we were adding and sharing ideas and discussing those ideas. It was a real iterative process (Mikala, August 21, 2001). Technology and Content Juliet’s team also grappled with questions about how to represent some of the content. For example, in her face-to-face classes, she had students physically rearrange furniture to facilitate discussions about how physical space and furniture configurations influence people’s activity and interactions with one another. In order to accomplish that online, a technology expert created a module that allowed Juliet’s students to view and rearrange a virtual classroom floor plan. Subsequently, Juliet planned to use it in her face-to-face classes instead of having students physically move furniture around the room. Jim noted that his challenge with the content was that the online context required extensive preplanning and frontloading of content into the web site. This was counter to his face-to-face classes where he usually had a general structure in mind for the course but he liked the freedom to make small changes from week to week based on students’ needs and interests, and on his own continuing investigations into relevant literature. Mikala’s challenge was figuring out how to weave software applications into the content because all of the activities required students to use a variety of computer programs to do things like literature reviews, search for web-based resources, participate in synchronous and asynchronous conversations, and create power point presentations and spreadsheets. TPCK – Integration Early interviews indicated that faculty was beginning to appreciate the dynamic and complex relationship between content, pedagogy and technology (Koehler, Mishra, Hershey & Peruski, 2004). “It’s not just like finding a way to get this stuff delivered. You’re actually creating a new way, your instructional deliveries, you’re actually creating fundamentally different ways of understanding” (Jim, May 7, 2001). Interviews during the middle and later stages of the design process indicated deeper understanding. We were thinking of the curriculum. What does it require in terms of key buttons or key navigation points or key structures? In terms of the pedagogy, what does that require? I wanted to add the lecture piece. That’s a reflection of the thinking of the pedagogy. I think it’s like how does the pedagogy influence the design? What if a group of people wants clarification so we want to create some avenue or opportunity to do that online (Jim, May 7, 2001)? When Juliet began the design process, she explained that she did not know much about technology and did not have much interest in learning about. However, in later interviews her explanation of her course structure, indicated new understandings about how technology helped her to achieve her pedagogical goals (individual and group learning, finding content online and in texts, providing feedback to students, etc). Each week of the class, they’ll have three units, or days. First, content… they’ll have to buy some texts, and online sites to visit. The second day will be small groups with applications. They’ll work in chat rooms and develop a group product and post them to the whole class. Day three involves individuals looking at what they did in groups and across groups and reflecting individually to me. I’ll then provide group feedback via voiceover to the whole group. In terms of how I make contact with them, every week they get an audio slide show of me previewing the week. I’m going to try to have fun with the pictures. We’re going to superimpose me in different parts of the world (Juliet, September, 26, 2001). Faculty interviews during teaching show the continued progression in understanding. For example, they came to understand the importance of dedicating a “space” or a thread for each of student groups in order to more efficiently mo nitor students’ small group discussions.
In person, you can watch the team working and intervene. (Online) even though I was trying my best to watch the different threads, I couldn’t see the progress on a daily basis. I couldn’t intervene fast enough. I think that’s really important in team projects, setting up these communication systems so that the instructor can see the progress on a daily or on an every other day basis and intervene immediately (Mikala, December 7, 2001). Mikala provided an example of how all three faculty members were becoming clearer about affordances and constraints of the technology. It’s almost an iterative process. When I get on line it gives me some limitations like how quickly I can write. But I found that I could do more with it as well. I had different channels of communication so… it also was somewhat liberating. How can I use all these different threads of communication to do different things? I like that a lot (Mikala, December 7, 2001).
Transferring New Understandings to Old Contexts As faculty members reflected on their experience after teaching, they all came to understand how and when technology could play a role in their face-to-face teaching and they planned to rethink their face-to-face course designs to reflect this understanding. I learned a lot about the web. I bumped into some really cool resources that I’m continuing to use in my (face-to-face) teaching. I’ll bring it up in class… integrate it right into the classroom…. I can do that and I don’t think I would have been so fluid in doing that before. The course really helped me to feel much more comfortable with technology more broadly speaking. I’m not afraid of it but I think to be more comfortable with it as a teaching tool is one thing and also to be more comfortable with the stuff you need to do to get it to work, like I was recording and uploading my own audio files. I screwed it up a couple times and then I got it to work and then it was fine so I feel like my competency has really grown (Juliet, September, 26, 2001). Jim and Mikala had similar comments in post-teaching interviews about how teaching online and their new technological understandings would carry over into their face-to-face teaching. For example, finding new web sites for their students to visit, using the web during class, and, more profoundly for Jim, thinking about ways to structure in-class discussions to gain a better understanding of students’ thinking. All three of the faculty members also gained an understanding of how technology mediated teaching and student learning. Although, compared to face-to-face teaching, they spent more time developing and teaching their online classes, because students produced more writing, this also meant that they had more frequent and sustained interaction with their students. They got to “see” individuals and groups processing information, doing inquiry and grappling with the content issues. In addition it also helped the faculty members to assess each student’s contributions to their group and thus served as an accountability tool. I’ve come to believe in more frequent assignments as a result of this course. I think the quality of our instruction can be directly improved by increasing the number of assignments for two reasons one is that it forces students to deal seriously with the material sooner and then deal with it in an integrative and ongoing way and then it gives us feedback as faculty sooner about what they’re struggling with, what they’re getting and what they’re not getting and we can provide that feedback before it gets to be the eighth or ninth week in a semester (Jim, December 18, 2001). I get a better sense of they’re thinking (online); the way they’re working with the material. I don’t make them write [in my face to face classes]. I haven’t used journals. That might give me more of that weekly look at their thinking. I might do that [in my face to face classes] (Juliet, September, 26, 2001).
Discussion
The analysis indicates that each faculty member came into the project with well-developed PCK. Having to use technological tools to design and teach a course forced them to rethink all three components, and most importantly the relationships between them. There were important changes in their technological literacy and thinking about their professional relationship with technology. Also, each faculty member created a distinctive product that reflected their individual interests in technology, and their content and pedagogical goals. This variability in course design reflects each individual’s unique development and knowledge regarding all three components. What was common was that all participants moved from thinking discretely about technology, pedagogy, and content, to thinking and speaking about them as hardly separable constructs. What is more, they easily transferred this knowledge back to their thinking about face-to-face teaching and course design. Educational Importance This paper supported the contention (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) that TPCK is a useful analytic lens for studying teachers’ integration of technology, content, and pedagogical knowledge as it develops over time in “learning technology by design” settings. However, the framework proved equally useful where a less structured design team approach to course development was used as in Mikala’s case. Thus, faculty members, faculty developers, and technology experts, can gain insights into faculty thinking and learning about technology by applying the TPCK framework within various types of design teams in different settings. This also suggests areas for continued research. In addition, although the data were drawn from only three detailed case studies, when taken with other cases using the design team approach and TPCK as a framework, commonalities between cases continue to emerge increasing the robustness the theory and its usefulness for practitioners. This type of case study design, more than two cases and extending data collection across the entire process, facilitated a fine-grained analysis useful in uncovering patterns and differences in development in both groups and individuals. We were able to see what processes facilitated understanding and how, where insights occurred, and how problems and difficulties were resolved. An understanding of these issues may help others working with faculty who are incorporating technology into their practice.
References Koehler, M.J., Mishra, P., Hershey, K., & Peruski, L. (2004). With a little help from your students: A new model for faculty development and online course design. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education 12(1), 25-55. Koehler, M. J., & Mishra, P. (in press). Introducing Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge. In AACTE (Eds.), The handbook of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Teaching and Teacher Educators. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Miles, M. B. & Huberman, A. M. (1994). An expanded sourcebook: Qualitative data analysis (2nd ed.). Sage. Mishra, P. & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A new framework for teacher knowledge. Teacher’s College Record. 8(6). Peruski, L. (2003). An activity theoretical analysis of three faculty members developing and teaching online classes for the first time. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI. Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15 (2), 414.
