Paper abstract:

Teachers’ professional learning has been increasingly identified as one of the key factors to the effective implementation of education reform and support for teachers to improve education outcomes for all students, particularly those from marginalised backgrounds. Although the existing research demonstrates the growing understanding of teachers’ professional learning as a complex process, with teachers being both the subjects and objects of learning and development, informal professional learning is still an under-researched area, particularly in the context of increasing use of social media platforms. Capturing the experiences of 41 schoolteachers in Kazakhstan using thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews, the paper provides evidence of teachers’ use of social media within professional communities to obtain knowledge manifested in an overlapping mixture of news, information, opinion, experience and teaching resources. The paper analyses teachers’ engagement in virtual professional communities within the framework of informal learning. Particularly, it suggests that virtual professional communities help to reduce the professional isolation of teachers in rural schools.