The tale of two virtual teacher professional development modules

Abstract

Virtual communities of practice (VCoP) have been advocated for some time as a promising means of taking professional development to teachers in widely distributed locations. However, geography, and indeed education literature as a whole, contains very few examples where this has been achieved. This paper reports on two VCoP professional development modules for New Zealand geography and social studies teachers. The first module focused on perspectives in geography and the second on values in social studies. The paper describes the design of the modules and tells the story of each module in practice as two “tales” or narratives. The second tale tells a much happier story than the first, and the reasons for this are explored. The paper concludes by discussing what can be learned about implementing successful professional development for geography teachers through VCoPs as indicated by the results reported through the two tales.