A Community of Practice Approach to Teacher Professional Development—Innovation and Good Practices

Abstract

This paper presents and discusses a community of practice approach (CoP) to teacher professional development (TPD) as a mean to support pedagogical innovation and the development of good practices. The research case is a designbased research experiment based on a community of practice approach to teacher professional development with focus on ICT and problem and project-based learning. The research provides detailed insights into the dynamics of a community of practice model in a distributed community of university teacher professionals. The research identifies tensions in the CoP-model, which future designs for TPD might try to balance. The research case confirms that teacher professionals are eager to learn and to share, and to engage in pedagogical innovation, and that a designed CoP approach all in all works well for them. Based on the results, the paper suggests a set of recommendations for people who are engaged in designing TPD.