Sustained blogging about teaching: Instructional methods that support online participation as professional development

Abstract

Successfully preparing prospective and practicing teachers to blog as a means of professional development requires more than simply introducing popular blogging platforms, teaching technical moves and assigning an arbitrary number of blog posts. To assist teacher educators who aim to engage teachers in sustained blogging to advance their professional growth, the author presents instructional methods drawn from scholarship on effective writing instruction, including the following: examining mentor texts in the form of teacher-generated blog posts; exploring writing territories (i.e., the topics, genres and audiences for whom a teacher could write); and pursuing specific purposes for writing to generate a number of focused blog posts from a single general topic of professional interest