Using Most Significant Change Stories to Document the Impact of the Teaching Teachers for the Future Project: An Australian Teacher Education Story.

The Teaching Teachers for the Future (TTF) project engaged teacher educators from all Australian institutions in a professional learning network that provided targeted professional development and fostered collaboration within and between teacher education institutions and relevant teacher education partners to build capacity within each institution. This paper explores the Most Significant Change (MSC) method used to demonstrate the impact of the National Support Network on Information Communication Technology Education (ICTE) in teacher education that formed part of this project. The MSC approach was developed as a tool for sharing practice and monitoring project impact in a participatory way. The process involved collecting stories from the field to establish the impact of the project. These stories were shared by participants to identify the Most Significant Change across the three domains of change: Course development, ICT capacity of teacher educators and ICT capacity of pre-service teachers. The stories and comments by participants in the project represent the initial secondary data analysis presented in this paper. These data were analysed to identify the patterns of change using content analysis and Leximancer analysis. The results indicate that the development of confidence, knowledge and understanding are important when developing TPACK in teacher education. One of the challenges in developing and delivering teacher education programs is addressing the ever increasing impact of the inclusion of technology in education contexts both within the university and school context (Abbitt, 2011; Lim, Chai, & Churchill, 2010). The complexities of the process of developing information and communication technology in education are well documented in the literature based on the work of Mishra & Koehler (2006). Their model of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) underpinned the implementation of change related to the Teaching Teachers for the Future project. There has been much debate in the literature on the most appropriate ways to measure the development of TPACK (Polly, Mims, Shepherd, & Inan, 2010). A recent review of this literature in the context of pre-service teachers indicates that it is important to use multiple mechanisms to measure TPACK in the context of teacher preparation (Abbitt, 2011). This study contributes a qualitative approach to the analysis of self-reported data in the form of stories focused on the Most Significant Change within the context of the implementation of the Teaching Teachers for the Future project. The Most Significant Change (MSC) method is a research approach that charts the learning as it relates to an intervention (Dart & Davies, 2005; Dart, Dysale, Cole, & Saddington, 2000). In this case, the intervention was the Teaching Teachers for the Future project. The MSC approach provided an additional data source to the large scale survey for evaluating TPACK (Finger et al., 2012). The focus of the MSC approach was qualitatively exploring the impact of the work and charting the learning within the Teaching Teachers for the Future (TTF) project.