Tag Archives: online professional development

Equitable Grading Conversations with the Oregon DOE

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I’m excited to announce that September 29 will mark the launch of a new cohort of 15+ school teams from across Oregon that will be exploring policies and practices related to grading and how they are or might be more equitable. It’s a big topic and one with many parameters, and I’ve learned so much with this fantastic ODE team.

I was asked to join the work with my ALP colleague, Bob Dillon through an offer by Dell and Advanced Learning Partnerships. (By the way, Bob is is the co-author of the great Space books on learning spaces and others–check ’em out! And sign up for his blog.) I need to share up front that I am not an expert on equitable grading, but I do have some pretty significant experiences with developing online learning communities going back, well, let’s say…before Facebook. Bob is such a great thinker and is so good at comprehending and evaluating a situation and sharing it back for reflection. I’m glad to have this opportunity to work with him on this initiative.

About the Work

The gist of the matter is that inequitable grading practices that have existed, well, possibly as long as there have been grades. These inequities were exacerbated this past year during the pressures and stress of “remote” learning. However, that experience, as difficult as it was (and still is in many places) helped to exacerbate what has like been years (decades!) of inequitable grading policies and practice. The ODE team is dedicated to helping the educators in their state grapple with the issue rather than accepting the status quo. There has been significant interest in the topic from districts across the state.

A critical component of ODE’s approach is to avoid being directive. They take a position that they don’t tell school and district educators what to do. Instead, they take a stance of empowering educators in their state to evaluate and reflect on their own needs and then giving them resources at their level of need or experience. That has been a guiding principle in this work, and I’m excited to see it roll out over the next few months.

My homework for the Oregon learning community on equitable grading.

What to Expect

Honestly, I’m not sure, but I am super excited! I have such a good feeling for this project. Luckily there is a wealth of information to support those interested in exploring equitable grading practices, as evidenced by my homework picture. I especially enjoyed What We Know about Grading by Thomas Guskey and Susan Brookhart, two education leaders whose work I have long admired on this and other topics. With these resources and others, the ODE team has been so conscientious about designing the experience for the needs of their constituents and realizing that teams may be at a different place in their exploration of equitable grading.

On September 29 we get to meet the pilot teams that have volunteered to participate. One requirement is that a building-level administrator be a part of the team, because both you and I know that if the principal isn’t on board, nothing happens. From there, the teams will be provided an opportunity to explore five “modules” on both a self-paced-PLC basis as well as interacting with the larger statewide community. The goal is to have teams develop their own for a plan for tackling the aspects of equitable grading that are relevant to their own school culture. I’m excited to see what the teams come up with. I’m looking forward to sharing this experience and learning with them.

Stay tuned for updates!

A Double Standard

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I read with some dismay and more than a little surprise this article from EdWeek, Providing Credit for Teacher Online PD Efforts, because I didn’t know this was an issue. There are many more types of professional development available to teachers these days, especially online, and yes, it can be difficult to quantify a tweet. But are we really suggesting that online learning isn’t worth the credit for teachers? According to the article, “experts caution that this type of professional development is not designed to replace conventional workshops and courses that teachers might need to enhance or learn some skills.” Uhm, yes it is! And it should! Especially if you attended any of the workshops I was forced to sit through when I was teaching. This attitude harkens back to some of the worst reasons for implementing something, “it’s always been done that way.” Well, just because it has, it doesn’t mean it works, so why keep doing something that doesn’t work?

I can add a little teeth to this, and I can rely on the research of some very credible authors, not just my own experience. In 2007, the U.S. Department of Education published a study from one of its federally funded Regional Education Laboratories (Yoon, Duncan, Lee, Scarloss, & Shapley). These researchers evaluated more than 1300 students about professional development. Of these, they found only nine—yes 9(!)—studies that met their criteria for being a rigorous research study. They were able to make some generally limited inferences from these nine studies, but that means that those folks in those other 1300 studies don’t really know if their PD worked! I’m glad they could make some suggestions about high-quality PD, but what trust do you have in a sample size of nine?

So, if we really don’t know if what we’re doing now works, why the bias against online PD? I didn’t know it was such an issue. Heck, I’ve been offering teachers PD credit for online PD since 2004. And my specific goal was to replace conventional workshops and courses. More to the point, I think what I helped to develop then (and am continuing now with a range of organizations in multiple states) probably exceeds what could happen in conventional workshops and courses. Most of those are so far removed from actual practice, that even the most well-intentioned practitioners find it hard to incorporate what they’ve learned. I just did one of those workshops last week. Three days with some great teachers who won’t be able to put in place half the things we learned about until they get their students. However, I backed it all up by putting all of the content and activities online in their learning management system, so this fall I can contact them via e-mail and remind them of what we practiced. All from a distance.

I know this idea that “if it’s online it can’t be good” was a prevalent one at one time, but is it really still out there? This many years later? The Open University in the UK started in 1969. I’ve been delivering online PD in one form or another for almost a decade. I’ve been teaching graduate classes solely online for about three years now, and there isn’t one of those students who would say that experience wasn’t as rigorous as a face-to-face class. It’s probably more so, based on the feedback I get from those students—some dismayed it isn’t the walk in the park they expected.

But the thing that really gets me is the double standard. The fastest growing area for online learning is in the K-12 sector at the district level. School divisions across the nation are purchasing or developing online high schools and others to support their students. My home state of Virginia is just one state that has recently mandated that all high school students enroll in at least one online course before they graduate (let’s not talk about availability or quality at this point, that’s for another post). With such tremendous growth in online learning at the K-12 level (and yes, K-5, too, not just high school), what does that mean if we don’t think that online PD is worth credit for our teachers? They’re going to have to teach online but can’t get credit for learning online?

 

Ah me, I know I shouldn’t be in such high dudgeon, but it was a remarkable find. It was more like an article one would read 10 or 15 years ago, not now. I guess because I spend so much time participating and delivering in online learning I’ve become a little blind to the idea it can’t work. All learning can work, regardless of the platform. And look, I learned something too, and it got me back to my blog. Oh, but I did it online. Guess I won’t get credit for it.

 

Getting the Most from Online Learning

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The opportunity to participate in online learning continues to grow as the tools we have available to develop and deliver online learning become easier to use and more readily available. More educators at all levels—K-12, colleges and universities, or continuing education—are using these tools to help meet the needs of their students, whether through stand-alone courses or by creating resources to supplement classroom instruction.

I’ve been involved in developing online professional development for teachers and school leaders for more than ten years now. I’m currently interviewing people who have led the development and delivery of online professional development programs across the country and beyond for a book on the subject. What is interesting are some of the similar challenges we have all faced in our work, often without knowing others just like us were going through the same thing. Better yet are some of the strategies these innovative leaders have used to create successful programs.

Online learning holds great potential to connect and support teachers of world languages and their students. Online learning in its many forms can be supported by technologies that are available in most classrooms and many homes. However, it’s been my experience that when many educators move to creating online learning, whether formal classes or less-structured learning opportunities, these now common technologies that allow us to quickly create audio, video, and web pages can overwhelm the most critical aspect…the learning.

In order to help you if you plan to develop your own online learning or even if you are evaluating online learning developed by others for your own use, I’ve put together a short list of tips. These are drawn from my experiences and my initial thoughts from the interviews I’ve been conducting. These five tips are a starting point, and I look forward to hearing from you about strategies you’ve used to make online learning more successful.

Tips for Developing or Evaluating Online Learning

Guide the learner. Much online learning is accomplished asynchronously. In other words, many online learners go through content on their own time and pace. While there are many opportunities for synchronous interaction, this asynchronous mode predominates in online learning. Therefore, online learning should provide explicit directions and cues to guide the learners with whatever technologies being used. Navigation systems for web sites and other media should be obvious. Follow common protocols for links and use standard buttons and interfaces to start and stop videos.

Online learning should guide the learners through good pedagogy, as well. It should have clear learning objectives or learning targets for the learners that tells them what they are going to learn in language that is easily understood. A good rule to follow is tell the learners what they are going to learn and be able to do, provide the content, then tell them what they should have just learned (and what to do if they didn’t). This is especially true with video, because videos provide so much information at the same time that learners have to be guided to look for the information you want them to observe. Very often, learners can’t raise their hands online and get guidance from a live teacher, so sometimes you may feel you are being overly descriptive. But chances are some learners will appreciate detailed guidance while others can just ignore it if they don’t need it.

Don’t restrict the learner. Learner control is a big concern in online learning and receives significant scrutiny in instructional design research. Often in my initial meetings with clients they want me to ensure that every users reads every screen and views every video and sits in front of that computer screen exactly as long as they would in a classroom. In reality, we all learn differently and come to learning situations with different levels of interest, motivation, and knowledge and skills related to the content. I may like to print out pages and highlight them while you just skim through them. You may watch videos over and over while I just go to the transcript.

Too many novice designers try to restrict users as if they can impose their own brand of learning on them. Learners are forced to watch a video before they can go on to the next screen. Information is presented in only one way, such as a narrator reading information on the screen rather than having a transcript the learner can read on their own. Learners can’t navigate to different areas of the content but are locked into a prescriptive sequence. Ultimately, your learners do have ultimate control regardless of how we may try to restrict them, because if they don’t like the instruction, they’ll just turn it off.

Give feedback. For me, I learn through interaction. I like to try new things out to see how well they worked and I need to know how well I did. In a classroom, teachers can give feedback about student performance almost constantly. In an asynchronous online course, it can be more difficult. But remember, giving feedback about a student’s performance is good teaching, and good teaching trumps the technology.

Feedback can be provided in asynchronous online learning by including examples and non-examples, encouraging self-reflection that relates to past learning, and through quizzes and other self-assessments. Your examples and non-examples should include guidance as to why they do or don’t represent a concept. Too often, I see questions for reflection that have no supporting guidance and make it easy for students to generate misconceptions that they then believe are true. Many online quizzing and survey applications also allow you to link back to the content for questions the learner may have gotten wrong.

People often give the best feedback, and it’s easy to connect people through technology rather than trying to replicate people with technology. We all don’t have access to intelligent tutoring systems or artificial intelligence engines, but we do have access to technologies that connect learners with other learners, with teachers or content experts, and with others that can serve as guides, mentors, or who can practice with learners. While a lot of online learning happens asynchronously, consider the benefits of using synchronous communications tools, such as chat, video- or webconferencing, or even a telephone to connect students with other students or with teachers to provide feedback and check for understanding.

Content is still king. This is derived from a phrase often mentioned in the early days of web design, but it is still appropriate today. When working with people who want online learning I often hear the words “interactive” and “engaging.” My job is to make sure it promotes learning. Very often interactive and engaging translate into action, animation, video, bright colors—what we experience in movies and video games. Learning requires explicit instruction, high-quality content that is relevant and engaging on its own, and opportunities for practice and feedback.

You can strike a balance between engaging media and engaging content, but as I’ve heard time and time again and experienced in my own work, if the content is not good, it doesn’t matter how engaging the media is. And poorly designed media can ruin even the best content. Start with good content and strong pedagogy and find media that supports it.

Learn from the pros. This is a codicil to the previous tip. Because online technologies do support a range of multimedia, it does provide us an opportunity to create more engaging learning environments that go beyond simple presentation of text. With that said, just be careful of technology used for technology’s sake. A saying I often use is, “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should,”

It’s very easy to create videos using iMovie or MovieMaker, but there’s a reason why television shows and movies are engaging. They have people trained in filming who use the right equipment to record, edit, and produce their videos. That still doesn’t prevent us from turning them off or going to another channel when the content is bad or the acting is poor (see, content is important in entertainment, too). You can improve the media in your online learning, though.

Watch news clips or channels like the History Channel to see how the pros use still images, voiceovers, and text to augment videos. They still get factual information across, but they often do it by making it engaging and interesting to watch. You’ll see very few “talking heads” on entertaining shows.

And this goes for other media as well. Find web sites with engaging graphics and color choices and try to determine what you like about them and how you can use similar strategies in your own online learning. Perhaps the most important suggestion I’ve picked up recently came from Matt Huston at the EdLab Group in Washington State. He said to be able to develop better online learning, be an online learner first. Go take an online class. Become an ePal. Participate in a webcast or a webconference. Find out what works for other people and see how it can support your own needs.

As you review these tips, don’t forget that you should always work from your understanding of what you know to be good instruction. Just because you’re using a digital video, or a wiki, or you’ve created an avatar in a virtual world, the technology should promote that good instruction and not overwhelm it. Ground your technology use in what you do best…teaching. Consider how these tools best support good teaching and learning, and justify your technology choices from this perspective. I look forward to your feedback on these ideas and learning more tips from you.

Please note: This blog entry is cross-posted by permission to the February 2010 newsletter of the National Capital Language Association.