Investigating the Impact of Learning Architecture on Teachers’ Learning Outcomes

Abstract

Teachers’ learning has long been identified as crucial to successful implementation of pedagogical innovations. Prior studies on facilitating teacher learning in pedagogical innovations have placed much emphasis on the design of learning architecture in terms of the structure and interaction mechanisms that scaffold teacher learning. This study explores how different features of architecture for learning may contribute to diverse trajectories of teachers’ progress in classroom practice in three school cases in Hong Kong. The findings indicate the importance of pedagogically-centered cross-school teacher interactions in expanding teachers’ pedagogical repertoire, which is conducive to their engagement in and contribution to educational innovations. As one element of learning architecture, technology’s role to expand or constrain teachers’ pedagogical practices is also explored.