Abstract Book of the 2nd World Conference on Teaching, Learning, and Education
Year: 2025
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Using Interconnected Model of Teacher Professional Growth to Evaluate The Effectiveness of College EMI Communities of Practice
To-ken Lee
ABSTRACT:
Communities of Practice (CoP) have been a prevalent medium for supporting faculty’s professional learning in higher education settings. For the professional development of the teachers who teach English as a Foreign Language, communities of practice have been noted for their supportive environment encourages members to reflect on their own strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to more readily request and accept assistance from experienced members in the community. Most studies on CoPs have focused on learning outcomes for teachers instead of their learning processes although these investigations ascertain the benefits that CoPs provide to teachers. The research gap in the literature of CoPs needs to be addressed through the attempts to capture what elements of diverse CoPs cause teacher change. Teacher change has been associated with teachers’ learning since teachers are acknowledged as active and reflective learners, socially situated within a learning for professional development. To capture teacher change with CoPs, this study adopted the Interconnected Model of Teacher Professional Growth (IMTPG) (Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002) to understand. Data sources include the EMI CoP participants’ reflective journals, minutes of online meetings, and interviews. Results suggest that most teachers’ changes occurred in personal domain and few of them could reach domains of practice and consequence. Also, the study provides a revised version of IMTPG based on the previous finding that all of external stimulus needs to be accepted by teachers’ personal domain of past knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes before teachers experiment with them.
Keywords: Interconnected Model of Teacher Professional Growth; English as a Medium of Instruction; Community of Practice; Teacher education; Teacher change