Modeling Sociocultural Pedagogy in Distance Education

Increasing numbers of English as a second language (ESL) learners throughout the United States have created an urgent need for professional development for millions of teachers. Distance education offers an opportunity for high-quality professional development to be delivered to collaborative teams of teachers at local school sites. However, research has shown that effectively meeting the needs of second language learners requires sociocultural pedagogy. The challenge has been to develop an approach to distance education that attends to sociocultural perspectives of learning and models sociocultural pedagogy. In developing a bilingual/ESL endorsement program, teacher educators at Brigham Young University have met this challenge with the ProfessorsPlus model for sociocultural pedagogy in distance education. This article describes this innovative approach to distance education.