Multiple forms of support for teachers new to the profession are important and necessary. The use of an online community by 11 novice instrumental music teachers at the middle school and high school levels was investigated in this case study. The teachers exchanged messages and information within the online community during the 2010-2011 school year; data sources included all transcripts from the online community and multiple interviews with each participant. The participants' experiences in the utilization of the wikispace as an online community of practice was analyzed using Wenger's three components of domain, community, and practice. The findings suggest that the online community appeared to have met novice teachers' emotional needs as they learned to become music teachers but that their positions were often also quite different in terms of specific responsibilities and music curricula they taught. Thus, online conversations focused more on the affective issues that surround being a new music teacher rather than on curriculum and classroomspecific content.
Support for music teachers new to the profession is important and necessary. Some school districts use traditional mentor-mentee pairings as their primary support for novice music teachers; however, many factors in the professional lives of music teachers, such as traveling among multiple schools or a lack of subject-specific colleagues often makes this type of mentoring problematic. This review of literature synthesizes the research on music teacher mentoring and suggests that avenues such as face-to-face professional learning communities of music teachers and virtual communities of practice be further researched and explored as an augmentation of the mentoring framework in the support of novice music teachers.
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