Designing professional learning

Participants

Kristen, Australia, Michelle, Galway; John, US, Susan, Netherlands, Jacquey, US, Tabitha, Cambridge, Solana, US, Jessica, US, Sheila, Nottingham, Maarten Pieters, Netherlands chair.

Focus of the discussions

One discussion was on the question how to scale up contacts with your "clients", like teachers or general practitioners, from the small number you are in real contact with, to the thousands which you only reach through virtual windows. Another discussion focused on identifying stakeholders and the roles of each of those stakeholders. For example, there were some concerns about involving administrators without them having the background knowledge of instructional practices that focus on student-to-student interaction. As stakeholders we distinguished students, teachers, administrators and instructional coaches. All categories can be further refined. For each of the categories we tried to elaborate professional learning into some stages: present an opportunity, agree on activities and formulate the expected observable impact on students. Who is involved in each stage and how do we build agreements?

Achievements and/or conclusions

The group discussed a structure for recording agreements, needs, and professional opportunities provided to teachers. There was extensive discussion around the issue of articulating and identifying teacher needs. Who determines them? How are they established? We received feedback on a graphic organizer/framework. In keywords: What are administrator needs? User-based design (focus on empathy), consider Stanford’s Empathy interview protocol; see Michael Patton: Utilization Focused Evaluation and David Fetterman: Powerman Evaluation (Stanford); consider Asset Mapping; articulate your theory of teacher learning (how is it that teachers come to learn what it is we want them to?).

Future work

Jessica intends to use the framework with teachers and school administrators as she designs professional learning opportunities for schools in United States. She intends to share drafts, feedback, and progress with the rest of the team and others during the 2019 ISDDE conference, if not before.

Kristen intends to write a contribution for Educational Designer about the use of the concept of Collective Intelligence in professional development approaches.