| To be a productive member of the 21st century, teachers and students need to be digitally literate (CCSS, 2014). The current models of professional development, PD, have not been effective at preparing teachers to keep up with the ever-changing technological landscape (Lawless & Pellegrino, 2007). Strategic and thoughtfully-designed professional development is needed to train and empower teachers to be confident at integrating technology into their classroom practice (Hutchison, 2012). In light of these challenges, collaborative action research (CAR) provides opportunities for teachers to learn new educational practices, reflect on their teaching, and gain mastery experiences (Henson, 2001; Ross & Bruce, 2012). Because teachers' sense of self-efficacy and collective teacher efficacy are strong predictors of both teachers' level of technology integration (Moore-Hayes, 2011) and teachers' innovative teaching practices (Bandura, 1997, 2001), one way to measure the effectiveness of professional development is to measure changes in teachers' sense of self-efficacy (Ross & Bruce, 2012). Toward this end, the primary purpose of the study was to examine the impact of participating in an ICT-CAR, as a professional development model, on teachers' integration of information and communication technology into their teaching practice as measured by their sense of teacher efficacy and collective teacher efficacy. The study's findings validate the ICT-CAR as a professional development model for the integration of technology. The collegial support and democratic equality, embedded within the recursive cycles of collaborative action research, served as essential components to bolster teachers' sense of efficacy around the integration of technology. |
