Maximizing Value Creation: Online Communities of Practice for Teacher Professional Development to achieve the goals of the Student Success Act 2015

How is the critical role of teacher in education? Who could argue about the importance of the value of having competent teachers under this environment with fast advancing technology? Has there been systematic support and actions added to improve the organic improvement process for our valuable teachers’ development? Our student team presentation explores the potential educational reform based on local innovations “for” and “with” teachers supported by the Every Student Success Act (ESSA) signed December 2015 by President Barack Obama. The critical provision that our presentation focuses on is stated as “Helps to support and grow local innovations—including evidence-based and place-based interventions developed by local leaders and educators—consistent with our Investing in Innovation and Promise Neighborhoods” (ESSA, 2015). Based on this provision, we will explicate and discuss the concepts of Online Community of Practice (OCoP) and how to maximize value creation from OCoP for Teachers’ Professional Development (TPD) as one of the key actions to take to promote local educational innovation. We will also introduce some good practices of OCoP for TPD and share meaningful findings from previous researches on this topic by evaluating those OCoP with the indicators for “maximizing value creation” presented by Wenger (2011). As a conclusion, we propose three actionable items to start this local educational innovation with OCoP for TPD to make ESSA successfully implemented.