Throughout the design process, we kept in mind the findings from our needs and learner analyses that showed teachers are very busy and feel overworked. Teachers also shared a preference for having trainings during working hours, which led us to designing a training that takes place only during weekly Professional Development meetings, which better accommodates teachers' limited free time.
As we were brainstorming this design, we reflected on how we don't want to create a whole training to turn Gen Ed teachers into ENL teachers, which would require too much time. Rather, we want to provide a training on strategies based on the results of our needs analysis that pint-pointed specific knowledge gaps teachers highlighted that the training can focus our 5-week training on. Additionally, this helped us prioritize including a collaborative element with the goal of creating a supportive community aimed toward continuing share ideas to support ELL students.
Throughout the design process of our project, I have been particularly moved by the deep understanding and accommodation my team showed towards the heavy workloads that teachers face. This insight influenced our decision to schedule our training sessions during the weekly Professional Development meetings, which effectively respected and accommodated the teachers' limited time availability.
When designing the training curriculum, we intentionally avoided creating an overly complex program that would convert general education teachers into English as a New Language (ENL) teachers. Instead, we focused on pinpointing specific knowledge gaps through a needs analysis, crafting a five-week strategic training program tailored to these identified needs. This approach ensured that the training was both focused and efficient, targeting the real challenges that teachers encounter in their classrooms.
On a personal note, throughout this entire process, my team has been incredibly supportive and accommodating of my circumstances. Despite several delays on my part due to personal reasons, my teammates were always there to assist me, ensuring that our project could move forward without compromising its quality. This experience has not only deepened my appreciation for our project’s goals but has also profoundly affected my view on the importance of teamwork and mutual support in achieving collective objectives.
Wins:
One of the aspects of this portion of the project that I found really gratifying was being able to brainstorm creative design solutions with my team -- it was really helpful to see how many different solutions we were able to come up with to solve one primary problem. I think my greatest takeaway from this is that learning design does not follow a "one size fits all" model, in that any given instructional challenge may have a multitude of potential solutions that can be implemented and applied. Additionally, thinking through the various types of technologies and media that can be utilized to meet learning goals was a highly engaging process -- in particular, looking at the tools that already exist to support teachers and learners, and defining how we can implement them in the design of our learning solution.
Challenges:
A challenge that I faced during this design portion of the project was ensuring that the tools and activities we wanted to utilize actually worked to meet the learning goals and objectives outlined earlier in the project. The team and I consistently went back to the original framework we had created, and had to ensure that our design solution was hitting upon the original aims we had previously outlined. Subsequently, discussions surrounding how we will conduct assessments also posed an initial challenge, as the team attempted to define what methods would be best to measure learning. Thankfully, we were able to overcome these challenges as we conducted additional research, and deepened our learning.