Building a virtual community of practice: Teacher learning for computational thinking infusion
Citation
Jocius, Robin; O'Byrne, W Ian; Albert, Jennifer; Joshi, Deepti; Blanton, Melanie; Robinson, Richard; Andrews, Ashley; Barnes, Tiffany; Catete, Veronica. (2022) Building a virtual community of practice: Teacher learning for computational thinking infusion. TechTrends, 66(3), 547–559. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-022-00729-6
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic led to an urgent need for professional development (PD) experiences to support teacher learning across hybrid and digital contexts. This study investigates teachers' experiences in a Virtual Pivot, a PD workshop designed to support computational thinking integration into disciplinary teaching. Participants were 151 middle and high school content area teachers, including 49 teachers who participated in previous face-to-face workshops. Virtual Pivot employed research-based design principles for virtual teacher PD, including asynchronous and synchronous engagement, explicit instruction in technological tools and scaffolds for teacher collaboration. Data sources included pre-PD surveys (n=151), post-PD surveys (n=119), interviews (n=57) and six-month follow-up surveys (n=105). Findings describe elements of Virtual Pivot which supported teacher learning and engagement (virtual community of practice, PD structure, during-PD support, pre-PD support and badges). We conclude by discussing this study's theoretical, methodological and practical contributions for designing and investigating virtual computational thinking PD experiences.
Notes
This paper came out of the chaos of early COVID, specifically the question of what happens to face-to-face professional development when you can no longer put teachers in a room together. The Virtual Pivot was our attempt to answer that in real time, not just by moving existing PD online but by rethinking what teacher learning could look like in a distributed, asynchronous-first environment.
What I'm most proud of here is the community of practice framing. It would have been easy to treat virtual PD as a delivery problem. How do we get content to teachers remotely? Instead we treated it as a relationship problem. How do teachers build trust, shared language, and genuine collaboration without physical proximity? The badges component was part of that: giving teachers visible markers of progress and identity within the community, not just course completion credits.
The scale surprised us. 151 teachers across content areas, with follow-up data six months out. That longitudinal piece mattered — it pushed back against the common critique that PD effects evaporate once the workshop ends.
If I were doing it again I'd push harder on what "infusion" actually looks like in practice for non-CS teachers. That tension between content expertise and computational thinking stayed underresolved.