Novice Teachers' Learning and Knowledge Building during the Induction Programme

This paper explores the Estonian novice teachers' learning and knowledge building (LKB) practices in the extended professional community during the induction programme using well-known knowledge conversion model. The assumption in this study is that a teachers' participation in the extended professional community facilitates their professional development. The survey was conducted with 101 novices after their induction programme. The patterns of novices' LKB practices in the professional learning community during the induction programme were explored. The analysis showed to what extent extended professional community may be formed during the induction year. LKB practice patterns among the novices were identified. We discovered that many novices felt that there was insufficient support from other teachers and from university experts. It appears that it is challenging to develop a coherent induction programme as the extended professional community of educators, where different partners collaborate and share professional knowledge is challenging.

Keywords: Novice teacher; learning and knowledge building; extended professional community; induction programme

In many countries, induction programmes that provide peer facilitation and mentoring at schools are implemented in order to support the smooth entrance of novice teachers into their profession (Britton et al. 2003; Wang, Odell, and Clift 2010). Research has shown that the first year of work is a period of learning for a teacher - during this period the school organization as well as the support and attitude of their colleagues have a strong influence on a teacher's professional development (Darling-Hammond 2017; De Neve and Devos 2017; Levine and Marcus 2010). Throughout the induction, novice teachers experience a lack of emotional support and positive feedback (Day et al. 2007; Oplatka and Eizenberg 2007). A supportive school climate is important during the beginning of their professional career in order for the novices to become professional teachers (Flores 2010; Lam and Yan 2011).

Mentoring, the main feature of novice teachers' induction programmes (Bickmore and Bickmore 2010; Hobson et al. 2009), is a collaboration between novice teachers and more experienced teachers. Mentoring as a concept has been widely researched and several concepts have been created (cf. Norman and Feiman-Nemser 2005; Orland-Barak and Klein 2005). Among emotional and social support, a reflective or educative approach is also mentioned where the mentor facilitates a dialogue between novices and mentor in order to support the novice's learning (Norman and Feiman-Nemser 2005).

The usefulness of induction programme activities has been studied with respect to mentoring by senior teachers and university learning experts, teachers' collaborative work, novices' motivation, self-efficacy and self-reflection (Eom and Hilderbrandt 2011; Meristo and Eisenschmidt 2012). We do have empirical evidence regarding novice teachers' socialization and personal characteristics that are necessary for professional development; however, we have less evidence on how the actual learning process of a novice takes place. This paper explores the Estonian novice teachers' learning and knowledge building (hereafter LKB) practices in the extended professional community using the knowledge conversion model (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995) elaborated for the teacher development context (Tammets, Pata, and Laanpere 2013) to understand the novices' professional development from both an individual and a community aspect.

The fundamental assumption made in this study is that teachers' participation in the professional community facilitates their professional development and learning. According to Hargreaves (2000), teachers' professionalism was standing at a crossroads at the beginning of the 21st century and one possible pathway was the development of professionalism through teachers' participation in the professional community. The definitions of a professional community determine the attributes or characteristics that transform a group of professionals into a learning community that supports their professional development (Hord 1997). An extended professional community (Tammets, Pata, and Laanpere 2013) promotes interaction between different sub-communities of the same profession - in-service teachers, educators and novices who can learn together and support each other's professional growth. Extended communities should enable a bidirectional transfer of knowledge and infiltration of new pedagogical ideas across the borders of sub-communities, for example in order to facilitate novices' professional development (Villegas-Reimers 2003) or support teachers' development throughout their professional career (Tammets and Pata 2014).

Teachers' professional development is usually focused on self-directedness - shaping the habit to control their own learning (Villegas-Reimers 2003), which can be promoted by systematically organizing learning and knowledge building (LKB) in the extended professional communities. Scardamalia, Bereiter, and Lamon (1994) suggest that learning is an internal and often non-observable change in teachers' beliefs through reflection and competence enhancement that does not necessarily have to be visible to others. Knowledge building (KB) on the other hand, is an external, individual and socially shared knowledge construction process, which results in the formation of various new cognitive artefacts that contain individual, group, and organizational knowledge (Bereiter and Scardmalia 2003). Two concepts, learning and knowledge building are used together in the professional learning context because they reinforce each other and may be intertwined in professional development practices.

In the light of this study we see that novice teachers learn new methods and concepts during the induction program at the university, but this new knowledge becomes meaningful only if it is documented, discussed, and shared within the community and further new knowledge is created. In addition, we have used the concepts of novice teachers' low-level and high-level LKB practice types in this study for referring to frequency and habit of learning, creating and sharing knowledge in the extended professional community. We define novice teacher's low-level LKB practice as tendency not to plan and reflect on their professional development, reflect on their professional development, learning and collaboration with other teachers in the extended professional community. Novice teachers with high-level LKB practices, however, tend to reflect more on their professional development. They are also active members of the extended professional community by transferring knowledge from one organisation to another. Finally, they tend to jointly discuss and work on new teaching methods and sharing best practices.

For identifying LKB practices in the induction programme, we adopted the organisational knowledge-conversion model (hereafter SECI model) proposed by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995). The SECI model is a suitable model for this study because it focuses on the transfer of knowledge from the individual level to the group and community level. By implementing four phases (socialization, externalization, combination, internalization) in teachers' professional development activities, teachers are encouraged to systematically learn individually, but also follow knowledge-building practices with their colleagues in and across communities, thus contributing to the emergence of shared community knowledge. This model promotes organizational learning and describes how individual KB practices may renew organisational knowledge. The SECI model was extended to integrate self-directed learning (Tammets, Pata, and Laanpere 2013) in order to better inter-relate individual and community LKB in extended professional communities. According to the extended model the LKB practices of novices include:

• Networking (socialisation) - novices are expected to discuss and share information about innovative learning methods, resources or organisational guidelines (e.g. the National Curriculum of comprehensive schools, the qualification standard of teachers, accreditation requirements, school documentation, internal regulations, subject programs and school development plans) with colleagues from different schools and from the university across the sub-community borders;
• Self-directed learning activities (externalisation and internalisation) - novices are expected to plan their competence development and set goals for learning, learn from the professional community knowledge (internalisation), reflect upon and share their professional practices (externalisation) and consider the guidelines and community expectations in their reflections.
• Collaborative KB (combination) - these are LKB practices in which novices look for collaborators to form groups that share professional practices, develop teaching knowledge and new resources that could be used at schools for guiding other teachers and in teacher-training institutions for preparing novices.

Estonian universities use two pre-service education models in teacher education: the mono-phase (or integrated) five-year model in which subject and educational studies take place concurrently (for class teachers at the primary school level) and the two-phase (or consecutive) model in which students complete their subject studies during a three-year bachelor level course which is followed by a two-year master level course of teacher education (for subject-teachers and pre-school teachers).

Every teacher entering the profession participates in the induction programme. The extended community support for the professional development of the novice is crucial in the Estonian induction programme. The programme addresses professional development and mutual learning by involving the novices, mentors from the workplace and experts from the universities in one professional community. The induction programme combines two action environments (a) learning and development in the school context with mentor support, and (b) the two-day peer-meetings for the novices at the universities, four times per year (Eisenschmidt, Oder, and Reiska 2013). This approach is quite unique because of the integration of the two types of mentoring, one-to-one mentoring at school and peer-group mentoring at the university (Heikkinen, Jokinen, and Tynjälä 2012).

School mentors are more experienced teachers who have undergone a special preparatory programme at the universities where they learn to observe and analyse students' lessons. It is expected that a mentor from school takes on a crucial role in guiding the novice's professional learning and introducing the newcomer to the school. The induction programme leaders, as group mentors, are university lecturers with the expertise in educational sciences. As the experts in learning, their purpose is to support novices enabling them to discuss their learning experiences with each other and develop new knowledge about teaching and learning.

Studies on providing feedback on novice teachers' reflection (Poom-Valickis 2014), promoting collaborative construction of materials and having KB discussions in the induction programme context (Meristo and Eisenschmidt 2012), all identify the challenges of LKB in the extended professional community of educators. The LKB activities among novices, teachers and university learning experts and learning as an extended professional community have not been sufficiently considered as the enablers of novice teacher induction. Meristo and Eisenschmidt (2012) reported that the teachers in Estonian induction programme consider relatedness with colleagues very important and this importance tends to grow during the induction period. However, there are some findings indicating that novices feel that the school mentor is one of the few or perhaps their only contact with colleagues at school who facilitates the competence development of the novice teacher (Löfström and Eisenschmidt 2009). Poom-Valickis (2014) found that mentors in Estonian schools were not active in promoting continuous collegial co-operation. The research also shows that the effectiveness of mentoring depends on the school culture and the perceived support by mentors' correlates with colleagues' support (Eisenschmidt, Poom-Valickis, and Oder 2008). Of particular concern was the fact that in some other Estonian novice teacher education studies, some novices did not experience professional growth during the induction period (Poom-Valickis 2014). In addition, mentors appeared not to notice the changes in the development of novices in the field of professional growth and cooperation. There was clearly a need for a systemic approach to investigate the role of LKB activities that novices, teachers, mentors and learning experts perform in the extended professional community, and for understanding how these activities may support each other in promoting novices' professional growth.

We had following research questions in this study:

• What are the patterns of novices' LKB activities in the professional learning community during the induction year programme?

We considered novices' participation level in different types of LKB practices as an indicator of their involvement in the extended professional community.

• (2) To what extent the extended professional community is formed during the induction year, and what role the different types of members play in LKB activities in that community?

It was expected that by getting an overview of these LKB practices that connect novices with other novices, experienced teachers and learning experts at the universities could diagnose the challenges of the induction programme. Mapping the induction programme problems systematically on the SECI phases and sub-communities within the extended professional community could pinpoint where the interaction with novices should be improved.

To investigate the formation of the extended professional community during the the Estonian induction programme, a five-point Likert-scale (strongly agree = 5, not agree at all = 1) questionnaire was developed that measured novices' perceived LKB activities during the induction year. We developed the survey instrument on the basis of previous empirical work (Yeh, Huang, and Yeh 2011; Tammets and Pata 2014; Tammets, Pata, and Laanpere 2013) that related LKB activities with the SECI phases in the context of teacher education in order to ensure ecological validity. The questionnaire contained twenty-three statements and mapped the statements regarding LKB activities on an elaborated knowledge conversion SECI model (S - socialisation, E - externalisation, C - combination, I - internalisation) (Tammets, Pata, and Laanpere 2013). The overview of the statements can be found in Appendix A1. The table indicates to which SECI phase each statement belongs. Some statements could belong to several SECI phases because the number of statements had to be reduced in order to make the questionnaire more appropriate to the novices' experiences during the induction year. To calculate the initial theoretical reliability of the instrument we used the marker concept in the statements. For all the survey statements, the Cronbach alpha = 0.87, indicating a scientifically acceptable level of internal consistency. The Cronbach alpha levels for statements belonging to SECI phases were:

• Socialization = 0.78 [Q1-2, 4-7, 10-13, 17,23 (discuss, socialize, share, ask advice, get feedback, suggest)]
• Externalization/internalization = 0.78 [Q4-5, 8-9, 14-15, 18-23 (plan, write down, written reflection, competences, professional development, implementing, introducing, trying to use, have learnt)]
• Combination = 0.75 [Q3, 11, 13-14, 16-17, 21 (created, learning materials, learning resources, lesson plans)]

The instrument was distributed among all novices (N = 141), who worked their first year as a full time teacher and participated in the induction programme. The respondents had started their teaching career in autumn and had 9 months of work experience before the data was collected at the induction programme seminar in spring. The questionnaire was anonymous and participation was voluntary. The final sample consisted of 101 novices and the response rate was 71.3%. The average age of novices was 26.7 years. A total of 47% of novices worked in preschool institutions, 41% in general educational institutions, 9% in vocational schools and 3% in other educational institutions.

Data analysis stages were following:

• Stage 1 - for discovering communalities and clusters in novices' LKB practices, the K-means cluster analysis was used. The smallest number of clusters that appeared to be significantly differentiated according to ANOVA analysis was two (2).
• Stage 2 - to reduce the questionnaire items, the exploratory principal component analysis was conducted. The solution was rotated using Oblimin with Kaiser Normalization and yielded six components describing the LKB practices with certain community members, which explained 63 % of the total variance of the system. The tests for suitability of data using the KMO Measure of Sampling Adequacy was 0.775 and the Bartlett's test of sphericity significance was p < 0.001, indicating that the data were deemed suitable for principal component analysis.
• Stage 3 - for distinguishing how novices with low-level and high-level LKB practices behaved in respect to these principal components, we performed Canonical Discriminant analysis. Fisher linear discriminant function coefficients for novice types were calculated. One discriminant function, Function 1: C = 0.601(C3)+ 0.465(C6) - 0.454(C5) + 0.421(C1) + 0.371(C2) + 0.268(C4) was found (eigenvalue 1.57). According to the Wilks Lambda test, the function contributes 100 % variance of the system, the components being significantly dependent of high-level and low-level LKB type of novices (λ1 = 0.389, χ12 = 90.685, df1 = 6, p1 < 0.001). This function had the following absolute correlations with the components: C3 (r = 0.665), C5 (r = -0.523), C6 (r = 0.529), C1 (r = 0.472), C2 (r = 0.393), C4 (r = 0.280).
• Stage 4 - for getting the systematic overview of how community members conducted LKB activities with novices, we mapped the components on the matrix with the rows describing the SECI model phases, and the columns describing the different actors of the extended professional community.

Our aim was to discover patterns in novices' LKB practices in the extended professional community during the induction programme. We distinguished two types of novices: Cluster 1 - with low-level LKB practice (N = 48) and Cluster 2 - with high-level LKB practice (N = 53) types (see Appendix A1). ANOVA showed that the two clusters differed significantly (p < 0.001) on most of the statement scores.

The results of our study indicated that large differences between low- and high-level LKB practice types occur in all of the SECI phases, but especially in the externalisation and combination phase (see Appendix A1). Novices belonging to the low-level LKB practice type tended not (M = 2.35) to introduce teaching methods and learning materials suggested by university lecturers to colleagues at school compared with the novices belonging to the high-level LKB practice type (M = 3.81). In the internalisation-externalization phase we identified that novices of low-level LKB type are documenting less their professional activities (M = 2.54) than novices of the high-level LKB type (M = 3.45). In addition, the novices of the low-level LKB type perceive the feedback to their professional skills and competence gained in the programme to be insufficient (M = 3.25), compared to the novices of high-level LKB type (M = 4.08). In the socialization phase, the novices of low-level LKB type only sometimes discussed teaching methods with other novices (M = 2.98), compared to more frequent discussions of novices of high-level LKB type (M = 3.96).

In general, all the novices tend not to ask advice about their professional activities from their former lecturers. This may indicate that the lack of habit to transfer knowledge from one community to another undermines the development of extended professional communities. The results also indicated that novices with low-level LKB practices did not receive sufficient feedback on the resources they created and had fewer discussions about creating and implementing new teaching methods in the teachers' meetings in their schools. They also did not learn very much from other teachers' materials. That may show that in those schools, the culture of knowledge building and sharing was weaker. Most frequently, the novices discussed their personal competence development and successes and failures among themselves, whereas the teaching practices, methods and materials were more often discussed with teachers. Novices shared their teaching materials with teachers but did not always receive sufficient feedback. The school mentor and the induction programme mentor participated in the discussions with novices, but the former university lecturers had a weak role in advising novices during the induction programme.

The data analysis yielded six components that can be used to characterise LKB practices in the extended professional community. The names of the components were given based on the statements' content (see Appendix A1 for statements) - SECI activities were performed with certain member types of the professional community (teachers, novices, university experts). Table 1 lists the components of LKB with correlations between variables and factors.

Components of LKB, correlations between variables and factors.

The first component, Learning from networking with colleagues (Socialisation) correlated with novices' communication with their colleagues from school. Novices socialised with other teachers for getting feedback about the learning materials they created, or the learning materials suggested by colleagues, sharing knowledge, discussing the teaching issues, and their successes and failures. Some of this socialization took place online. This factor correlated with the support from the school mentor.

The second component, Learning from networking with novices (Socialisation) correlated with the questions about the communication between novices. Novices share with other novices their professional success and failures, discuss teaching issues and the need for developing new learning materials and methods and also communicate with other novices online. This component correlated with the support the novices receive from the university mentor.

The third component, Learning from KB across all the extended professional community (Combination) correlated with creative professional activities among different members of the community - teachers, novices and former university lecturers. Novices have asked professional advice from former lecturers and tried to introduce the methods and resources they received from former university lecturers to other teachers. This component correlated with discussing new teaching methods and materials at teachers' meetings at school.

The fourth component, Applying the shared knowledge (Internalization) correlated with the statements about applying teaching methods: whether novices have implemented innovative teaching methods at school and whether other teachers have tried to implement teaching methods suggested by the novices. This component correlated with the support the novices receive from the university mentor.

The fifth component, Learning from self-reflection and competence development (Internalisation-Externalisation) contained statements about novices using the teachers' competence standard for planning for competence development, and discussing their professional advancement with other teachers and the university mentor, who had suggested to test out some teaching methods. Novices had also reflected in writing about the important moments of their competence development. It appeared that the professional teachers, school mentor and the induction programme mentor from the university, but not the former university lecturers, supported these professional competence development activities.

The sixth component, Learning from KB with colleagues (Combination) correlated with statements about receiving and developing teaching knowledge with other teachers. The strongest correlations appeared with teachers offering the learning materials to novices, and novices trying out these materials and learning from these materials received from colleagues. It also correlated with several socialization activities: discussions at teachers' meetings regarding what learning methods and materials to develop and discussions about teaching methods with other teachers, getting feedback from teachers about the learning materials the novices develop and discussing with school mentor teaching methods and resources. This component relates to the transfer of teaching methods and resources from teachers to novices.

Above we identified two types of novices based on their participation in the LKB activities in the extended professional community. Results show that novices' success or failure in LKB practices in the extended professional community during the induction programme can be best detected with LKB components like Learning from KB across the whole extended professional community (C3), Learning from self-reflection and competence development (C5) and Learning from KB with colleagues (C6).These components indicate that in order to create an extended professional community of teachers that supports the induction of novices, the following aspects are the most important: the two-way knowledge transfer between novices, university lecturers, induction programme mentors, teachers and the mentor at the school - especially KB around professional knowledge (C3, C6) - and planning and reflecting on professional competence development and obtaining feedback on reflections (C5).

The Fisher linear discriminant functions (see Table 2) revealed that all LKB components (except Learning from self-reflection and competence development) characterised novices from high-level LKB cluster. It appears that novices with high-level of LKB were eager to transfer new methods from the university to school and have discussions with former lecturers. They may also have had the supportive KB culture present in their schools. The novices with low-level of LKB, however, were mainly characterised by the self-reflection component and in the earlier phase we revealed that these novices received insufficient encouragement for reflecting on their development and seldom did so.

Fisher linear discriminant function coefficients for novice teachers' types of LKB practices.

We have illustrated novices' LKB practices within the extended professional community with the following scheme (Figure 1). On the rows, we have mapped the LKB activities that are related to the different SECI phases. On the columns, we have mapped the ways of involvement for the members of the professional community.

PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 1. LKB activities of novice teachers in an extended professional community during the induction programme.

Our study indicated that a mentor from the school played an important role in novices' self-reflective LKB activities, whereas other teachers as colleagues were very important for KB practices (combination). Currently, the mentor from school mainly monitors the novice's professional development but does not have to involve the novice in the LKB activities with other teachers (Meristo and Eisenschmidt 2012). We found that in particular these LKB activities, where cross-community learning happened and knowledge was mediated using written artefacts, happened less in some of the schools where novices from low-level LKB cluster had started their teaching career. We may relate this fact to the missing or non-voluntary collaborative cultures in some schools (Ngang 2013), poor mentor effort to embed the novice in the collaborative culture (Poom-Valickis 2014) or to students' lower motivation (Meristo and Eisenschmidt 2012) and self-efficacy during the novice period (Poom-Valickis 2014).

It appeared that novices communicated the least with their former lecturers for getting advice or transferring their innovative methods to schools. The Estonian induction programme traditionally lacks the cross-community knowledge? transfer and division of feedback-loop tasks between the community of learning experts at the university and the novices and teachers in the schools. We also found that a sub-community of novices' is formed within the larger extended professional community, where they discuss competences, failures, and success stories. Previous studies in Estonia have indicated that some mentors discourage novices from discussions with each other in order to allow them enough room for developing their own practice and approach to teaching and learning (Löfström and Eisenschmidt 2009).

We explored LKB practices in the extended professional community as one of the drivers of teachers' professional development. Our study, among other recent studies about novice teachers in Estonia (e.g. Meristo and Eisenschmidt 2012; Poom-Valickis 2014) and elsewhere (e.g. De Neve and Devos 2017; Heggen, Raaen, and Thorsen 2018) contributes to an understanding that a professional community across schools and universities should be created to provide a better induction experience for novice teachers in schools. Our approach of applying the systemic SECI model to the LKB practices in the extended professional community provided an insight into the community members' involvement in novices' LKB practices during the Estonian induction programme. The most characteristic forms of active participation in the professional community appeared to be KB with the colleagues at schools and the learning experts at the university and self-reflection of professional competences. We discovered that many novices perceived insufficient support from other teachers and university experts. It appears that building up the coherent induction system as the extended professional community of educators, where different partners collaborate and share professional knowledge is challenging. Applying the SECI model in analysing the induction programme activities may be useful also in other educational contexts.

We see two main future implications for supporting novice teachers' LKB in the extended professional community. First, development of the extended professional community to increase the LKB cultures among educators could be started developing during pre-service studies and the induction period and the in-service self-development could continue these LKB cultures. The innovative technologies supporting learning in the community could be considered in increasing the exchange and evaluation of new teaching materials and practices. Second, we see the importance to embed the novices in the LKB culture in educational institutions. It appears that novices face difficulties in being part of the collaborative LKB practices of the teachers' community. For more effective embedding we may need to assign the mentor to actively introduce the novices to the LKB practices that teachers have in schools. Interactions through collaborative development and transformation of created and shared objects between the novices and mentors, teachers and university lecturers could be promoted.

One of the limitations of this study is that we don't have information how mentors see their role in extended professional community. It is important to get insight how mentors themselves act in extended professional community and how they understand the role of the university experts. Further research is also needed to obtain more knowledge about mentor knowledge and practices supporting learning and knowledge creation of novice teachers.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.