1. On-Demand Learning
2. Nationwide Coaching
3. Video Library and Classroom Video Collection
Innovation
High-functioning, motivated teams who are fulfilled in their work are always thinking about how to meet the needs of the customers they serve. That often requires innovation, and my team at Great Minds was filled with innovators. We were eager to better meet the needs of students, teachers, and leaders in an evolving education and professional learning landscape, and to ensure equity of opportunity for teachers in addition to students.
I evolved our team from a small team writing workshop-style PD to a multi-faceted professional learning team of 15 learning experience designers and one instructional designer creating a suite of learning experiences offering greater flexibility of knowledge-building and implementation support for a wide-range of district contexts and needs nationwide. Whether attending to cost-effectiveness, time, the need for support of their professional learning communities, or the desire to attend to principles of adult learning, the Learning Experience Design team ensured that districts have options to construct the optimal learning sequence for their teachers and leaders.
1. On-Demand Learning
I formed the On-Demand sub-team of the LED team to ensure the availability of asynchronous learning opportunities for our customers nationwide. The On-Demand designers ran with on-demand module studies in Canvas - attending to the unique needs of e-learning, gathering internal feedback, and conducting beta testing to continually improve sessions and codify systems and guidance for future course development. The team became adept with tools like Wistia, Captivate, Synthesia, and Camtasia, and learned how to ensure WCAG compliance with design, closed captioning, audio descriptions, and alt text. Then, they just kept innovating - creating on-demand versions of our national, workshop-style professional learning sessions and knowledge-building content sessions on mathematical strands that are perfectly suited for professional learning communities in schools.
"Under Emilee's leadership, our team successfully crafted a diverse array of consumer-grade professional development experiences for our Eureka Math Squared product. She excels at empowering each sub-team, allowing them the autonomy to delve deep into their work while ensuring a consistent standard of quality and a shared point of view across all our products." -Chris Kjorness, Learning Experience Designer at Great Minds
On Demand Teach for PFolio.mov
2. Nationwide Coaching
Motivated by a desire for teachers nationwide to have coaching support, the coaching side of the LED team developed resources, tools, and responsive facilitator guides, created a collaborative plan for training coaches with the training team, and engaged with and supported pilots, all working toward maintaining the responsiveness that is essential to coaching, while scaling and standardizing it nationwide.
"I love working with Emilee at Great Minds! She is clear and supportive while working with various partners...across the company, equally focused on cohesion, clarity, and efficiency in creating an effective product for our coaching teams." -Meri Robi-Craven, Associate Director, Writing Editorial at Great Minds
Notes about Structure of Implementation Support Tool
Excerpt from Coaching Indicator Guides
Overview of Leadership Support Tool
Abbreviated Coaching Guide.pdfCoaching Guide
Strategically designed to optimally support coaches in planning and facilitation
3. Video Library and Classroom Video Collection
The video work of our team took two pathways, both to meet the needs of teachers and leaders. 1) They need resources for evolving their knowledge and supporting implementation that are adaptable to the many demands on their time and attention. 2) They need (and love!) to see teaching in action! The innovation that was borne from the urgency to fill these needs were the video library and the classroom video collection. The Great Minds video library consists of short videos about design aspects of the curriculum and "What to Expect" videos for coaching, professional learning, and components of the curriculum. The Classroom Video Collection not only provides fantastic footage of real classrooms used in the video library and professional learning sessions, but it's a collection of footage that is being expanded regularly and can be leveraged by sales, marketing, and other teams who want to showcase actual instruction with the curriculum. The third, "workshop" arm of our team, created the systems, partnerships, and filming/editing processes that were essential to the success of this initiative.
"[Emilee] has navigated a great deal of change while leading her team at Great Minds. Since the inception of the Learning Experience Design team, of which she was the founder, she worked tirelessly to ensure open dialogue within her team and initiate effective communication across teams. She continuously and consistently improved the systems and structures to do so in order to avoid having to solve for similar problems in the future. It is this proactive approach that resulted in better outcomes, with more engaged stakeholders over time." -Rebecca Sela, Director of Service Design for Great Minds
Examples of publicly available videos