Exploring Collaborative Professionalism as a Means of Virtually Supporting Rural Teachers

Using a situative perspective in which teachers are viewed as experts and agents in their own professional learning and by capitalizing on the rapid increase in understanding and use of video conferencing in 2021, the research team developed an open-enrollment, co-designed series of workshops for rural teachers in the intermountain West. In the United States, rural public schools account for approximately 20% of students (more than 9.3 million) across the K-12 educational system (Showalter et al., 2019), which represents 30% of all public schools (Education Commission of the States, 2017) and half of all school districts (Lavalley, 2018). Today, rural teachers, who often teach many-or even all-small classes across multiple subjects (Avery, 2013), are asked to provide this high-quality learning while themselves learning about and aligning to complex teaching reforms such as that accompanying the Next Generation Science Standards (National Research Council, 2012). [...]the currently discussed PD-created a coherent online learning community through synchronous, discussion-based sessions that, as defined by Lock (2006), fostered a sustained, flexible, and purposeful environment to support teacher knowledge.