Teacher Development In The Networked Learning Community CLEN: A Case Study

Teacher development theory has become a burgeoning research field since the1960s.Teacher professional development, as a flourishing research area, is particularly eye-catchingin view of networked learning community. The networked learning community is a newlearning and developing environment for language teacher learners, which can not onlyprovide teachers with a platform to strengthen their own learning, but also make teachersinteract online to jointly explore and research, and to generate their own teaching idea.This paper shows a case study on teacher development integrated with an online networkcalled CLEN (China Language Educators Network). CLEN is used as a research platform,from which the author makes an analysis of how a teacher develops from a novice teacher toan experienced teacher, trying to give responses to three research questions. Firstly, what arethe teacher development stages in CLEN? Secondly, from which aspects does the teacherlearn and grow in CLEN? Lastly, what are the factors influencing the teacher’s developmentin CLEN?The author spends one and a half year in observing and recording the research subject’sblogs in CLEN. From the aspect of teacher external environment, their own needs, and otherbasic situation, the researcher has drawn a conclusion through the retroactive context analysismethod and interviews. It comes as follows:Firstly, there are two development stages of the teacher in CLEN: pre-service stage andin-service stage. Both of them have distinguishing features.Secondly, the teacher made progress in social development, personal development andprofessional development in CLEN.Lastly, the factors, such as the number of clicks, the number of comments and thedrawback of the site itself, have a great influence on the teacher development.The limitation of this research mainly shows as follows: firstly, data collection is oftensubjective with too many choices relevant to the researcher’s theory of preference, whicheasily bias its judgment. Secondly, the researcher cannot ensure that all the results from thesample teacher will apply to other teachers as well. Therefore, it can be validated by othermethods.