Week 7 - The Same Boat
Goodyear, Casey, and Kirk's article in the readings this week sparked my interest in getting more e-support for child care professionals and how I can accomplish that in my work. Anyone who follows my blog or my discussion posts knows that I work in child care professional development as an instructional designer/writer of training courses for Florida and Georgia early childhood education professionals. That job has its challenges and rewards, but maybe the greatest reward is knowing that I help educators do their job by providing best practices and assurance that they are doing the right thing by engaging in professional development. Knowing that our kids are in good, capable hands is thanks in part to the work I do is a great feeling.
Tens of thousands of educators take our courses every year but there's no real way for them to get in touch with each other. Oftentimes educators take the online classes together in small groups, where they can provide support to each other. However, if a teacher takes a course alone, they can only call tech support to talk about any technical issues in the course itself, not about the themes or ideas that are produced by taking the courses. In a slightly different direction, educators who take a course and have a question about content can email "Ask the Experts." This is an email address that we have set up with DCF so that anyone who has a question about, let's say multi-tiered system of support, they can email that account and a real subject matter expert will respond with an explanation. But that doesn't go far enough.
I'm imagining a community of practice that is described by Goodyear et al. in their 2014 article. Professional development seems to me to be a personal thing these days, with educators taking our online in-service courses at home or on break, usually alone (if they don't do the small groups). We ask them to do workplace connection activities in which they engage with their workplace to perform an activity, or ask their supervisor something, or in some way bridge the learning in the online course to the actual work of child care. It's difficult to ask that because we cannot assess the activity, and so we trust them to do it. It would be great to extend that Ask the Expert account to be more robust. Usually the workplace connection activities come at the end of the course, when we have assessed all that we can assess. It's an activity that is really more of a suggestion. If there was a person to message on social media that would not only help with performing the activity but also give advice for further engagement, that would mirror the type of e-support that Goodyear et al. describe.
The idea is challenging to implement because of course, all of these courses are asynchronous and educators from every corner of Florida and Georgia take these courses. It would be an enormous undertaking to ensure that people doing online professional development have a person to message at the end of the day for feedback and suggestions. The future of cooperative learning is bright, however, and there may come a day soon that we'll be tasked with exploring how we can tap into the community of practice and instead of teaching at professionals, use e-support as a method of professional development.
Hi Alejandro! I really enjoyed your post and commentary! I think that in these days, there are many opportunities for greater professional development - the transition to online learning, the implementation of technology in the classroom, instructional design.... The trends in the education sector are many, however, as you have pointed out, it is challenging to implement a community of practice to further this at this point of time. I am curious to know, do you think a virtual community of practice will be able to resolve this?
ReplyDeleteHey there Kelvyn, I think that as the number of educators that participate in online professional development grows, the bigger the need will be for a virtual community of practice. It seems like we are in a transition period from educators taking PD in-person in classrooms to them doing it in their homes or at break time alone. The opportunity for sharing and collaborating on ideas is diminishing. Having official, DCF-sanctioned Facebook or LinkedIn groups for these teachers may help them find each other and share what they've learned in the courses. It would also be a home base for experts to share their experiences and narratives. Thanks for the question!
DeleteHi Alejandro, Thank you so much for this post. It would be nice of your early childhood education professionals had a blog they could easily access to feel supported amongst their peers.
ReplyDeleteI have that same challenge with the Guardian ad litem program since the pandemic in establishing a community. They take 16 online classes in three different "chunks" to become new volunteers, meet one-on-one with me in between "chunks," but do not interact with each other as they did in the F2F learning environment. Some of the new trainees are students, others are older and insecure with the technology, and frankly, everyone is zoomed out. I am retiring from the position, but have suggested that they keep the online training, and begin to introduce weekly F2F sessions that are mandatory and scenario or problem solving based.
Hey there That Will Show Them, I think that's a great idea to keep the online training but re-introduce the F2F sessions. As we've learned in other courses, scenario and problem-based learning can be beneficial for learning the practices of a community and especially for becoming a volunteer. Online training, while a great tool, doesn't really capture the same feeling. Plus, the feeling of "zoomed out" is achingly real, many people are tired of sitting in front of a camera to replicate a shared learning environment. It's easier to share perspectives and knowledge in a F2F session at this point! Thanks for your comment!
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