Instagram as a platform for teacher collaboration and digital social support

Abstract

Social media platforms can be sites for professional collaboration and the provision of digital social support among teachers. Instagram is one such platform that is widely used but that has received only limited attention from education researchers. To date, little is known about which teachers use Instagram for collaboration, the ways in which they collaborate, and how this collaboration contributes to their perceptions of digital social support. Using questionnaire data from 249 teachers from Germany, we identified three collaboration activities among teachers on Instagram: information seeking, information sharing, and co-creating. While teachers with higher levels of enthusiasm for teaching in particular are more likely to use Instagram to seek information, teachers with higher self-efficacy levels are more likely to share content. In addition, seeking and sharing information as well as co-creating are each positively associated with various forms of perceived digital social support. These findings point to the potential of social media use contributing to teacher professional development and indicate that it deserves more attention in both teacher education and research.