PROFESSIONAL LEARNING, ANY TIME, ANY PLACE WITH VIRTUAL MENTORING

Mobility, defined as freedom of movement through ‘knowledge’, cultures and contexts, is an imperative that underpins the re-determination of education. Learning provision, including professional learning, therefore needs to embrace these notions of mobility to enable education practitioners to interact locally and globally, engage with digital literacies, and to question, co-construct and collaborate.

This paper describes a professional learning provision that has been offered in New Zealand from 2010 to date - the Virtual Professional Learning and Development (VPLD) programme. This programme does not have formal ‘content’, but instead encourages participants to identify their own project and professional learning foci, which they work on while meeting regularly with a virtual mentor, and sharing reflections, conversations, and resources within the VPLD online community of practice.

The paper outlines and discusses findings from the associated research study. A combination of access to regular mentoring over three years, a community of peers with whom to tease out ideas, and access to relevant resources appears to have created a powerful, flexible system of professional development. There is evidence that participants’ beliefs about learning and teaching change, along with corresponding shifts in professional practice, although the virtual mentor is critical, especially when participants are under stress.