1a: Demonstrating Knowledge of Content and Pedagogy

2017-2018 School Year: Professional Development Modules Created for Staff (click to view)

The target audience for this professional development design is educators from the South Side Area School District located in rural Beaver County, Pennsylvania. These staff members are pre-k through grade 12 classroom teachers, support staff and administration. South Side Area School District participates in the Educator Effectiveness System through the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Besides periodic formal observations that are required through this process, staff members are additionally asked to engage in self-selected professional development activities to support their unique needs and interests. This design is focused on giving staff members another avenue to meet this differentiated supervision requirement.

This opportunity addresses a need in our school district for relevant professional development opportunities for staff. Our teachers have often requested regular, on-going professional development that is flexible. This design provides this evolving, continuous support that meets educators where they are and helps them to continuously move forward. As discussed by Traxler (2013, p.139) “teacher development is a crucial place to break into the educational cycle and promote education for all.” Our staff members have also requested learning solutions that are immediately usable in their unique learning environments. Schoology, the district’s newly implemented LMS, along with recent research about the most effective ways to increase a teacher’s skill-set have presented an opportunity to shift our PD toward something more personalized and flexible. Pachler (2010, p. 74), discusses the importance for teachers to view it as an obligation to learn effective uses of new technologies not only to grow themselves professionally, but also to be able to model reflective technology use for their students. The advanced technology available in our district can be leveraged to bring our school community (students and staff alike) and new information together in new ways that would not be possible without mobile technology.

This design is anchored in collaborative,constructivist and situative learning perspectives. Learners will interact both individually and as a group with authentic and relevant tasks in context. It is my intention that as participants engage in the learning activities both individually and as a group, they will construct knowledge together and share their collective understandings, thus being able to reach a much richer understanding of the chosen topic. Bransford et al. (2006, p. 227) cites research that demonstrates that collaboration often leads to better problem solving and learning than learning individually. Sharples et al. (2009), writes about the tremendous power in mobile technology to form a distributed system of meaning-making that promotes collaborative knowledge. These same authors also examine the tools used for collaborative meaning-making. They suggest that these tools become an active part of the learning process.

The mobile learning tools and resources that were chosen for this design are portable, appropriate for field work, and often customizable by the learner. As recognized by Kukulska-Hulme et al. (2011), mobile devices can provide learner support when students are given choices surrounding learning tools and methods to demonstrate their understanding. The use of the Schoology LMS which works on multiple platforms, allows participants to choose which device and platform they will use to support their own learning. This design feature is also supported by research from the European M-Learning project which utilized a learning management system in order to provide materials and services to a variety of devices (Kukulska-Hulme et al., 2009). The LMS will be an effective way to deliver multiple learning paths rather than a single solution. James Gee (2000/2001) discusses effective learning with mobile devices as using such tools to facilitate personal learning paths and differentiation based on need or preference.

The activities in this design were created to encourage choice, self-direction, and personalization. This opportunity to choose the direction of the learning is supported by Martin et al.(2012). These authors suggest that learner engagement increases when projects are self-directed to reflect a learner’s own areas of interest and those things that they find personally beneficial. This student-led learning may additionally support the learner’s affinity identity as defined by James Gee (2000/2001) as the way a person perceives themselves based upon their interests.

This design is a blended one that includes both online activities as well as face-to-face interactions. Results from an infant study of Mandarin Chinese acquisition suggest the importance of live-interactions to the learning process "Learning theories and education" Bransford et al. (page 214). This study reinforces the need to make sure that even as we deliver more and more of our content and learning digitally and take advantage of the many affordances that mobile technologies provide for education, we must be careful to create properly blended learning activities that balance this media use with strong pedagogy that also includes ample live face-to-face instruction and feedback.

Finally, Kearney et al. (2012) highlights authenticity, or the act of providing learning activities that are closely related to real-world tasks, problems and processes as one of three distinct features of seamless learning. Learners in this design are invited to create artifacts and engage in fieldwork that is directly related to the work being done in the classroom on a daily basis.