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Valuing Teachers' Diverse Attitudes to and use of Social Media

Alison Fox (af173@le.ac.uk), School of EducationWith thanks to Terese Bird and Nathaniel Owen,Institute of Learning Innovation/School of Education

The aims of this presentation

• Overview of our interest in teachers’ use of social media

• Our survey identifying patterns of social media use (and not use) by teachers

• A focus on the reported attitudes to and use of social media with students (including interview responses)

• Further areas of research and development

Background to our interest• Teachers’ personal network maps from previous research (Fox

et al, 2011; 2009; 2007) began to refer to electronic modes of connecting, but not social media

• By 2011/2012 approximately 1/3 Initial Teacher Education programme cohort referred to social media use on their network maps; head teachers starting to use Twitter in school-University partnership work; schools starting to ask for research which evidenced ways forward with social media use

• So, to what extent is social media being used and valued by teachers and what are they using it for...– for their professional learning?– in their professional practice (with students)?

A small-scale project: Our research questions

How do teachers report their use (and not use) of social media (SM)?

• Which teachers are using SM professionally (and which not)?

• How do they use SM professionally? (and how does this relate to their use of it personally)?

• What are teachers’ attitudes to SM as a professional tool? (for their students’ and their own learning)?

Sequential mixed methods research designFocus groups (n=7)

Online survey by questionnaire (n=216)

Interviews (n=17)Interviews cover socio-cultural perspectives:Social – SM role in connectivity Historical - initiation and change of SM useCultural - factors affecting SM use and attitude to use

The InstrumentUsed Bristol Online Survey (http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/)

• Composed of 42 questions

• Mixture of closed-response, multiple-choice questions/tables

• Q1-4 (Guidance & classroom use)

• Q5-21 (Hardware & platforms; personal/professional use)

• Q22-29 (Attitudes towards social media and its potential for enhancing learning developed from focus groups)

• Q30-42 (demographic/personal information)Owen et al, (pending)

Sampling• Self-selecting

For the focus group (n=7)

• Those on a Masters programme

For the questionnaire (n=216)

• Initially stratified (Leicestershire schools)

• Subsequently widened (England, Scotland, Wales) via email, Facebook, Twitter and Forums (TES)

For the interviews (n=15)

• Response to an invitation as part of the questionnaire

The Sample (Q30-41)32. Gender

Male:

28.9% 57 Female:

71.1% 140 33. Age (years)

20-25:

4.2% 9 26-30:

13.0% 28 31-35:

16.2% 35 36-40:

11.1% 24 41-45:

16.7% 36 46-50:

19.0% 41 51-55:

13.0% 28 56-60:

5.6% 12 61-65:

1.4% 3 >65:

0.0% 0

34. Experience as a teacher (years) 0-5:

17.1% 37 6-10:

21.3% 46 11-15:

20.4% 44 16-20:

13.0% 28 21-25:

14.8% 32 26-30:

6.0% 13 >30:

7.4% 16

How can we think about identifying the enthusiastic ‘users’ and ‘non-users’ of SM?

– Non-users are those who are:• Not registered with Facebook• Not registered with Twitter.• These criteria identified n = 46 participants.

– ‘Enthusiastic’ users• Registered with Facebook• Visit at least once per day• Post on their wall (or that of their friends) several times per week• Upload photographs• Have manually adjusted their security settings• Have a twitter account and tweet.• These criteria identified n = 40 participants.

Enthusiastic users vs. non-users (age) Q33 AGES Total

1 (20-25) 2 (26-30) 3 (31-35) 4 (36-40) 5 (41-45) 6 (46-50) 7 (51-55) 8 (56-60) 9 (61-65)Enthusiasts (1)

2 9 11 3 7 4 2 1 1 40

Non-users (2)

0 0 4 3 9 11 12 6 1 46

Total 2 9 15 6 16 15 14 7 2 86

Enthusiastic users vs. non-users (experience) Q34 (years of teaching experience) Total

1 (0-5) 2 (6-10) 3 (11-15) 4 (16-20) 5 (21-25) 6 (26-30) 7 (>30)Enthusiasts (1) 9 15 7 3 3 0 3 40

Non-users (2) 3 5 7 8 13 4 6 46

Total 12 20 14 11 16 4 9 86

Which SM tools do teachers use and how do they use them?

Tool/platform Use Personal Professional

Facebook 155 (71.8%) 129 (83.2%) 26 (16.8%)

Twitter 113 (52.3%) 39 (34.5%) 74 (65.5%)

Other tools that could be considered social media tools/platforms, referred to by respondents, were:

• LinkedIn;• RSS feeds;

• Youtube;• Wikipedia;

• Virtual learning environments;• Blogs;

• Forums.

The two major SM tools used by teacher respondents were: Facebook and Twitter

Four significant clusters of users

Considering both levels of engagement with and attitudes towards social media‘

• Enthusiasts' (3% of the sample);

• More 'cautious users/engagers' (35%);

• A diverse group who could be considered 'sceptics' (32%) – include a group we termed ‘impartials’;

• A group classified, as a result of early focus groups, as 'conscious luddites' (30%)

Teachers’ attitudes to and use of SM with students

SM enth

usiasts

SM enga

gers

SM im

partials

SM sc

eptics

Conscious lu

ddites

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5

4

4.5

5

Teachers IT Literacy

Students, SM and online safety (inverse scale)

SM use for students’ skills

Potential advantages of SM for students (SKILLS DE-VELOPMENT)

Potential advantage of SM for students (TO FACILITATE LEARNING)

Beneficial use of SM with students

“I use it in my teaching, not loads but quite a bit, the thing I love about Twitter is because it gives me sound-bites…what I love about Twitter is it will say something that’s just happened….and then you can click onto the link and then read the whole article and quite often it will be relevant to what I’m teaching”

(SM engager ‘cautious user’ W, female secondary school teacher talking about teaching with 16-18 year

olds).

Cautious advocation of SM use with students

“My viewpoint is that this is the kind of thing our children are going to be accessing. They access it now, they want to access it…So you can either fight it or you can go with it. And I think if you go with it, you’ve got to then think…what's the best way for us to deliver that for our children to get the best out of it?”

(enthusiast R, female primary school teacher working with 7-11 year olds)

Concerns about SM use with students

“The amount of bullying and whatever that goes on through social media: Having a row face-to-face in the playground and then it all goes onto Facebook and whatever, and parents expecting us to unravel that”

(conscious luddite B, male secondary school teacher).

Open to being convinced about the potential use of SM with students

“I might be missing a trick there, I have been thinking I could have sent this or that to my students. So I am sceptic I guess, I remain to be convinced…If someone actually showed me what I could do with it, I might have a try I think”

(sceptic J, female secondary school teacher, working with 11-18 year old children)

Our further plans• Learning from the qualitative data analysis and looking in

particular at teacher identity and SM• Projects with schools wishing to use SM to reflect on how they

will deal with diversity of teacher experience and attitudes to SM• Current project with a school wanting to spread the use of Twitter in

teaching 16-18 year olds: teachers working in triads to co-plan lessons, observing one another and getting student feedback (using Lesson Study methodology)

• Projects which focus on discussing the potential and pitfalls with SM for education

• Intergenerational event planned for November 2014 to develop a charter for SM use in schools #smile2014

• Projects exploring the role of social media in professional learning across professions

References• Fox, A., Wilson, E. and Deaney, R. (2011) Beginning teachers’

workplace experiences: their perceptions and use of support, Vocations and Learning, 4 (1),1-24.

• Fox, A. and Wilson, E. (2009) “Support our networking and help us belong!”: listening to beginning secondary school science teachers, Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 15 (6), 701-718.

• Fox, A., McCormick, R., Procter, R. and Carmichael, R. (2007) The design and use of a mapping tool as a baseline means of identifying an organisation’s active networks, International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 30 (2), 127-147.

• Owen, N., Fox, A. and Bird, T. (pending) The development of a small-scale survey instrument of UK teachers to study professional use (and not use), International Journal of Research & Method in Education

Thank you for listening. If anything interests you please feel free to contact me on: af173@le.ac.uk