An Analysis of Questions from Teachers' Online Groups: Turning the Lens Back to Teacher Education

Abstract

During the first months of the COVID pandemic, teachers were forced to move to online instruction without the appropriate resources. They resorted to social media to gather expertise and ideas. This study is grounded in an analysis of the questions posed by K–12 teachers on popular Facebook groups. The authors argue that a close analysis of what K–12 educators are asking and wondering about in online teacher groups at a moment in which much of what they know and trust has been disrupted can be generative as a novel feedback loop to engage in conversations about some common practices in teacher education. Specifically, they ask: How can an analysis of questions posed by educators on public Facebook groups in the early pandemic enter into a productive conversation with teacher education programs beyond the specificities of that context? The study performs a thematic analysis based on categories that were inductively coded from 752 questions posed between March and June 2020 by educators in the three most popular public Facebook groups dedicated exclusively to K–12 teaching during the pandemic. The goal is to consider the underlying assumptions and ideas embedded in the questions being asked in these groups, and to place them within the context of the authors’ political understandings of the role of teacher education. Four themes emerged from the analysis: an expanding notion of community, tensions in the understandings of “context,” new positionings of expertise, and a questioning of what counts as legitimate schooling. The themes led to a need for teacher education programs to always consider their students’ professional identities as collectively constructed and to find ways to disrupt universal models of the mind. The authors also invite programs to rethink the location of expertise by taking into account the practices that young teachers are already engaged in when seeking professional knowledge. This opening could potentially lead to perhaps the hardest thing to do within teacher education programs: to provide the conditions to reimagine schooling.