From design to practice:teachers’ experiences and perspectives of blended professional development in Hong Kong

Abstract

This research explores teachers’ perceptions of a blended professional development course at a Hong Kong university. This course supports teachers’ knowledge and application of blended learning and teaching approaches, and follows teachers’ inquiry and reflection of their blended learning experience to support student learning. Few studies have investigated teachers’ perceptions of blended professional development courses to support their understanding and implementation of blended learning. Addressing this gap, this qualitative research uses the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework as its theoretical lens. Teachers’ perceptions are explored through data combining aspects of blended course designs and related experiences. This data includes participants’ interview transcripts, learning journals, commentaries and reflections via Pecha Kucha presentation slides. Applying thematic and image-theme analysis on the data collected provides a multimodal representation of teachers’ experiences of blended learning including their reflective practice through inquiry based learning. Findings suggest evidence connecting to the CoI three presences: social presence; teaching presence and cognitive presence. These findings are complemented and presented metaphorically through a Confucian proverb to acknowledge the study’s Asian context. This study contributes to the knowledge of blended learning approaches ii for professional development courses and how these act as an effective means to build teachers’ knowledge and competence in blended learning. The data also reveal the importance of providing meaningful tasks for teachers to experience the benefits and challenges as online learners. The effectiveness of these tasks is further evidenced when teachers implement their blended learning designs through inquiry and peer-based collaborations. The study also identifies the use of image-based reflection as an useful approach to understand and support reflection in teachers’ continuing professional development. The study recommends further research targeting blended professional development for teachers. These findings can inform teacher training and staff development in relation to blended learning design and implementation.