BUILDING A VIRTUAL COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE - A CASE STUDY ON PARENTS` COUNSELLORS IN ROMANIAN DISADVANTAGED AREAS
BUILDING A VIRTUAL COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE - A CASE STUDY ON PARENTS` COUNSELLORS IN ROMANIAN DISADVANTAGED AREAS

Summary/Abstract: The article analyses the development and performance of a virtual community of practitioners in the field of parents` counselling as part of a blended professional development program. Parents’ counselling is an important piece of an integrated intervention program which aims to support schools, families and pupils in preventing school drop-out. By the mean of an online training platform (training.ise.ro) a virtual learning community was built in order to facilitate the communication between the practitioners, the peer learning and to support them through online tutoring and coaching for parents` counselling activities. We start by presenting the aim, structure, type of learning and coaching activities, then we analyse the developed community of practice against a set of social, psycho-pedagogical, technical and managerial criteria according to an integrated model adapted after Conole (2007), Lesser & Storck (2003), McDermott (1999), Palloff & Pratt (1999). Conclusions are drawn in respect with improvement measures of the virtual community in order to better support the recurrent parent counselling interventions.

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