For this quarter’s Community Engagement Project I have been tasked with creating a professional learning presentation or workshop on a topic of my choice which would be used to engage and provide professional growth for a selected audience. This project is meant to demonstrate my understanding of the performance indicators for ISTE Coaching Standard 3. The following is a framework for the construction of my professional development workshop for resilient pedagogy (RP).

ISTE Coaching Standard 3

• 3a Establish trusting and respectful coaching relationships that encourage educators to explore new instructional strategies.
• 3b Partner with educators to identify digital learning content that is culturally relevant, developmentally appropriate and aligned to content standards.
• 3c Partner with educators to evaluate the efficacy of digital learning content and tools to inform procurement decisions and adoption.
• 3d Personalize support for educators by planning and modeling the effective use of technology to improve student learning.

Intended Audience:  

The intended audience is higher education instructors from all over the world.  This will include attendees to a virtual Global Symposium and a group of instructors from a higher education institution in Indonesia participating in virtual PD workshops. 

Chosen Topic:  

The topic for this PD presentation will be Resilient Pedagogy (RP), both theory and practice. RP is an emerging instructional philosophy/framework with extremely timely implications for this current moment in education and the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the many unknowns that may introduce themselves in the form of future crisis or disruption.  Though facets of RP have long been practiced by educators in the form of classroom differentiation, and though other frameworks like Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) inform resilient pedagogy, Rebecca Quintana and her colleagues at the University of Michigan have attempted to define a more expansive type of differentiation by building upon these approaches to instructional design and extending beyond them, bringing to the forefront the need for instructors to be agile and intentional in all educational contexts, but especially in moments of crisis and change.  More than just a fancy synonym for differentiation, resilient pedagogy can be defined as “…the ability to facilitate learning experiences that are designed to be adaptable to fluctuating conditions and disruptions.”  Resilient teaching is an approach that “take[s] into account how a dynamic learning context may require new forms of interactions between teachers, students, content, and tools,” and those who practice resilient pedagogy have the capacity to rethink the design of learning experiences based on a nuanced understanding of context (Quintana & DeVaney, 2020, para. 8).  The key to resilient teaching is a focus on the interactions that facilitate learning, including all the ways that teachers and students need to communicate with one another and actively engage with the learning material.  

My intent is to create a workshop that introduces the basic tenets of RP to participating instructors, offers practical examples or RP, provides inspiration and opportunity for implementing RP, and, ultimately, helps build resilience in educators in the long term.

Event Description:

This PD material will be used in two settings: 1) a virtual, Global Research Symposium in which academics and higher education instructors from all over the world will be in attendance, sharing with and learning from one another’s research enterprises 2) a PD workshop for a university in Indonesia.  The Global Symposium will consist solely of a pre-recorded presentation, 12 minutes in length, with some opportunity for follow-up discussions in breakout rooms. The PD workshop will have opportunities for follow-up activities which extend beyond the pre-recorded presentation.

Concerns for this project include the fact that I must make considerations for an international audience.  Providing transcripts, for example, will be important given the fact that, for many attendees, English is not their first language (though they are fluent).  Additionally, since I am not currently employed as a higher education instructor or learning designer, establishing trust/rapport with the intended audience may take some extra consideration.

Length:  

The pre-recorded presentation of RP content and case study examples is 12 minutes; 12 minutes reflects the presentation timing restraint given for the Global Symposium. However, there will be extended activities and reflection questions for use in a PD workshop space.  Time allotted may vary depending on the workshop schedule, but my thought is that the presentation (12 minutes) and follow-up activities (30-45 minutes) might be a total of 60 minutes in an active workshop session, not including any additional applications instructors may want to add on their own time.  In the workshop, time will be prioritized for instructor reflection and active participation with colleagues vs. lecture/presentation time.  I am creating follow-up activities under the assumption that attendees will participate synchronously in an online format, and I may or may not be the one leading the actual follow-up activities.

Active and engaged learning/collaborative participation

This slide deck is a framework for follow-up activities, engaging attendees with reflection questions, group discussions, and suggestions for practical application.  A summary of the framework is as follows:

• Opportunity for brief social-emotional connection via a simple “What dog do you feel like today” slide; participants can respond in the chat with a number corresponding to the dog they associate with.  It’s silly and lighthearted.
• Brief recap of the most important points from the RP presentation
• 3 slides with reflection questions, each tailored to a different design principle of resilient pedagogy.  Ideally these questions would be discussed among peer instructors who work in the same department (i.e. group discussion).
• An activity/exercise which asks instructors to workshop one of their own courses for extensibility.  A sample product is shown in the slide deck to model and help with direction.  The hope is that instructors will each work on their own course while actively collaborating and sharing ideas with members of their discussion group.

Address content knowledge needs

This presentation/workshop on the theory and practice of RP gives educators a chance to explore new instructional strategies (ISTE standard 3a), consider use of new digital tools and resources for varied mediums of instruction (ISTE standards 3c and 3d), and build their own resilience (ISTE standard 3b) so that they are better prepared to meet the fluctuating needs of their students–especially in moments of crisis–in the future.  Instructors will be invited to reflect upon barriers that may exist in their own contexts preventing them from practicing RP more robustly.  Additionally, instructors will be given the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues on possible applications of RP in their course designs.

Address teachers’ needs/presentation artifacts:

• The original slide decks will be shared with attendees/instructors ahead of time so that they may keep it for their own reference, view it ahead of time, and have access to references and resources with live links. 
  • A link to the slide deck for the pre-recorded presentation is here.  It is only visible to those within my university organization for the time being
  • A link to the workshop framework slide deck is, once again, here.
• A recording of the presentation without captions will be provided separately as one of the deliverables for this project.  Captions have been edited and a version of the recording with cc is available. I will not be sharing a link to the presentation in this blog post until after a pending publication on this RP material is released.
• Additionally, a written transcript for the recording is available here.  If a video platform does not easily allow for uploading the closed captions for presentation, the transcript document is both a back-up plan (redundancy!) and a possible supplement to the existing captions.

Standards reflection

This presentation/workshop on the theory and practice of RP gives educators a chance to explore new instructional strategies (ISTE standard 3a), consider use of new digital tools and resources for varied mediums of instruction (ISTE standards 3c and 3d), and build their own resilience (ISTE standard 3b) so that they are better prepared to meet the fluctuating needs of their students–especially in moments of crisis–in the future.  Examples of each are provided below.

• 3a Establish trusting and respectful coaching relationships that encourage educators to explore new instructional strategies.
  • The workshop invites educators to think about resilient pedagogy as an approach to instructional design which helps make courses resistant to disruption. 
  • This presentation and follow-up workshop gives practical guidance for what it looks like to design a course for extensibility, flexibility, and redundancy.
• 3b Partner with educators to identify digital learning content that is culturally relevant, developmentally appropriate and aligned to content standards.
  • Takeaways can be immediately applicable, and the topic is especially relevant given the many ongoing challenges faced by schools and universities during the COVID-19 pandemic.  It’s meeting higher education instructors where they’re at and speak into the experiences and challenges they’ve already faced over the last year and a half.
  • Instructors are encouraged to make the learning relevant to their specific discipline and teaching role.  They are also encouraged to think critically about their own course design and reflect on their approach to teaching/learning, which is always valuable.
• 3c Partner with educators to evaluate the efficacy of digital learning content and tools to inform procurement decisions and adoption.
  • Opportunities for reflection are provided, including questions which ask instructors to reflect on their relationships to the digital tools they use (or would like to learn to use) in their teaching. For example:
    • What new educational technology tools or platforms could you experiment with as you think about adapting a course for different modalities?
    • Do you know how you would approach teaching a course if students had unreliable internet access?
• 3d Personalize support for educators by planning and modeling the effective use of technology to improve student learning.
  • The workshop slidedeck models a possible way to plan a course with extensibility in mind.  It helps educators take concrete next steps towards resilience.

I look forward to delivering this project to real instructors in higher education with hopes that the theory and practical application of RP will be a source of inspiration, confidence, and clarity in the ever-changing landscape of teaching and learning, especially with the continued unknowns of the COVID-19 pandemic.

_______

May 23, 2022:

Building on the foundation set forth above, I have created a screencast on the theory and practice of RP to be used as a resource for higher education instructional faculty. This screencast is 13 minutes long and may be used as an asynchronous option when a live presentation/workshop isn’t an option.