Exploring Collaborative Professionalism as a Means of Virtually Supporting Rural Teachers

Thirty percent of US teachers work in rural schools where geographic isolation and lack of peers can make it difficult for them to engage in collaborative professional relationships with colleagues. Facilitated professional development can be used as a way to build these networks. 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. The team was interested in how collaborative professionalism (Hargreaves & O’Connor, 2018a) could be built and used to bring these rural teachers together to support each other as they explored their own identified problems of practice. The analysis of the collected qualitative and quantitative data (including videos, reflections, and documents used and created in the sessions) revealed initial trends that supported the development of solidarity and solidity in this group of teachers and facilitators. The authors posit that this perspective could be productive in connecting rural teachers in collaborative professional relationships despite their isolation