Engagement Them and They Learn: Mediation Effect of Community Engagement in Professional Learning Networks

Conference: The European Conference on Education (ECE2022)
Title: Engagement Them and They Learn: Mediation Effect of Community Engagement in Professional Learning Networks
Stream: Professional Training, Development & Concerns in Education
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
Authors:
Sunny S. J. Lin, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
Jo-Chi Hsiao, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan

Abstract:

At the critical moments of global educational remedy after the rampaging of COVID-19, teachers’ professional development becomes more urgent than ever. In this Web 2.0 era, traditional professional development (PD) occurring within schools and supervised by the authorities are being replaced by an emerging form of teacher-initiated communities, professional learning networks (PLNs), which is also getting growing research attention. The growth of competence is the shared vision of most PD programs and organizations, and three important indicators of teachers’ well-functioning in teacher communities (i.e., innovative educational knowledge, well-being, and altruism) have only been implied in previous studies. However, the underlying mechanism of these effects remains unclear. This study proposes the third variable, Community engagement, and adds it as the mediator to the described relations (from Competence satisfaction to Innovative educational knowledge, Well-being, and Altruism) to extend our current understanding of teachers’ PD in PLNs. The participants were 302 voluntary K-12 teachers enrolled in 11 active PLNs in Taiwan. Their responses to the questionnaires were analyzed with Mplus 7.0 and several single mediation models in Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) were conducted to test the hypotheses. The results showed that Community engagement, surprisingly, completely mediated the path from Competence satisfaction to Innovative educational knowledge, and it partially mediated the paths from Competence satisfaction to Well-being and to Altruism. We argued that Community engagement is critical for the quality effects (Innovative educational knowledge, Well-being, and Altruism) to occur across PLNs.



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