My campus
has our Learning Community meetings every two weeks where all of the teachers
and administrators come together to share best practices. Our administration does a great job of
scripting these and having training information ready to present, but the best
learning opportunities come during the last part of the meeting where they open
the floor to questions. For instance, our
district is focused on implementing multiple response strategies. One teacher asked the group for ideas. By the time we left, we all had a list of
responses that fit her situation as well as mine. We could share those learning moments if we
took the time to record and catalog the responses. I feel like codifying and managing these
moments would remove the authenticity of the learning. As close as we could get to replicating is
possibly creating a list of discussion stems, talks that the faculty might
encounter during new units, etc. Additionally, after my experience with this class, I'm thinking about creating a blog for our teachers to facilitate online conversations like those we have during our meetings.
Monday, November 26, 2012
Informal Learning
Chapter 17 describes types of
informal learning. What informal learning experiences have you participated in
at your organization? Could those informal learning experiences be shared with
others? Could the knowledge gained in those settings be codified and managed?
And should it be managed or should the informal experiences be replicated or
broadened to include others?
Data to Support the Need for Intervention
Chapter 16 explains knowledge management:
the way we manage information, share that information, and use it to solve
organization problems. Organizations, such as schools, accumulate a great deal
information/data, which must be organized in a way that we can make sense of it
in order to use for making decisions. What knowledge would help solve the
problem you identified above and how would that knowledge need to be collected
and managed to help facilitate problem solving?
The on-site
stress management experts could gather tacit information through brief behavioral
assessments designed to find identify cues pointing towards stress. Assessments can be given at specific
increments throughout the school year with designated scores receiving
designated intervention plans. Due to
the sensitive nature of the information, the data would have to be collected
covertly and shared only as needed and with the teacher’s permission.
On-Site Stress Support Groups
Chapter 15 presents performance
support systems. Define performance support systems and explain how a
performance support system might (or might not) help solve the problem you
identified above.
Performance
support systems are practical, individualized, ever-available helps for a
person to do their job effectively and add the most value to their system. A performance support system could possibly
help improve teacher motivation, especially if it helps with stress
management. Also, teachers will need
stress-management support at the campus level so that they are able to feel as
if someone can identify with their struggles and offer practical,
tried-and-true solutions. According to our text, providing help “at the point
of need” is a crucial component of effective performance support. On-site stress management experts would be
able to intervene before stress levels became excessive.
Teachers Need Incentives, Too!
Chapter 14 discusses the concept and
evolution of human performance improvement. Several sections of chapter 14
present a variety of non-instructional solutions to performance problems.
Identify a performance problem in your area of work and identify
non-instructional solutions that may help solve the problem.
As the
school year progresses, teacher motivation is waning (mine included). This prompt motivated me to revisit incentive
pay for teachers and how it could positively impact teacher performance. On page 137 of our text, it states that “a
system that rewards people for their behavior without accounting for accomplishment
encourages incompetence” (Gilbert 2007).
At my campus, we are occasionally verbally rewarded for completing
tasks, like getting grades turned in on time, perfect attendance, etc., but our
administration is limited in the fiscal incentives they can offer us and still
comply with district and state policies.
Although “new incentive systems” are listed on page 140 as one of the
interventions at the disposal of human resource development professionals, for
some reason, it almost seems that society expects teachers to be “above” requiring
incentives to encourage performance and that our reward should come from
shaping lives. However, both Gilbert’s
Behavior Engineering Model and the HPT model of the International Society for
Performance Improvement list “adequate financial incentives contingent upon
performance” and “compensation” respectively as intervention and incentives. In his article “Most Likely to Succeed” (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=1)
, published in The New Yorker in December 2008, Malcolm Gladwell argues that
incentive pay for highly effective teachers would benefit the education system
just as it does the world of investment bankers.
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Team Dynamics: Situational Leadership
Chapter's 12 & 13 focus on
project management and how to manage projects when resources are scarce.
You have been assigned to develop a series of professional development
sessions focusing on technology use in the classroom for teachers during a
time of economic decline. How will you use Situational Leadership to
facilitate this project and manage scarce resources?
I would approach the task by breaking it
into small, doable segments by planning the first training in the series as a
group, then letting my team plan the other trainings with my supervision. I would follow the four phases of situational
leadership as outlined by Hersey in 2001.
During phase 1, I would convene the team to establish my authority and
experience developing teacher training and assess their
strengths/weaknesses. I would present my
ideas for how to divide the workload. I
would give specific deadlines for their drafts of their trainings, etc. Then, we would reconvene for a follow up on
tasks assigned during our initial training.
As we enter phase 2, I would meet individually with each team member to
applaud their hardwork and help them to narrow down the best of their ideas. Then, each team member would present their
best training topic ideas for critique to the large group. Next, we would actually deliver the training
as we designed and enter into phase 3.
During our debriefing meeting after the training, we would go over the
aggregate results of the participant evaluations and celebrate our successes as
well as plan to combat our weaknesses. Phase
4 would consist of my team developing their ideas and going straight to the
large/group critique meeting. Each team
member would then develop their own timeline for implementation. Phases 3 and 4 would remain the same until
all trainings have been developed.
Evaluating Evaluation Models
Reflect on what other questions
that instructional design evaluation should address besides whether the
instructional design leads to comparable amounts of learning and learner
satisfaction as traditional methods. What else would be useful to know?
I would like to see an evaluation model
that also addresses retention of learning and long-term achievements of
participants. I also prefer the models
that are broken into logical chunks because those models can help answer the
questions regarding which parts of the instruction were effective and which
were ineffective so that the designer does not always have to evaluate the
intervention or program as a whole but can figure out which parts work and which
do not.
Instructional Design Evaluation Models
All
too often instruction is developed with little thought as to how evaluation of
learning or the effectiveness of the instruction will take place. When
evaluation is considered on the front end of the instructional design process,
it is often limited to evaluating whether the instructional design is more effective
than traditional methods.
For
this week's reflection activities, I would like for you to concentrate on the
following:
Chapter 10 discusses evaluation in
instructional design and provides you with two evaluation models, the CIPP
and Kirkpatrick models for evaluation.
Evaluation of innovative instructional practices began
using methodology familiar to scientists—experimental groups versus control
groups. In the midst of a revolution in
education that spanned the 1960’s, Michael Scriven coined and defined formative
evaluation (designed to improve a product or work) and summative evaluation
(designed to derive any other information about a product or work, including
its overall value). He believed it
necessary to take the intent of evaluation into consideration before analyzing
its effectiveness.
Chapter 10 highlights the CIPP model of evaluation by
Stufflebeam which is comprised of four individual evaluations—context
evaluation (assessment of the environment in which the intervention would take
place), input evaluation (assesses the resources used), process evaluation
(assesses how the program is implemented) and product evaluation (assesses the
results and outcomes). In this model,
the evaluator is an essential part of the evaluation process and is involved
from the beginning.
Additionally, this chapter discusses the Kirkpatrick
model for evaluating training, first proposed in 1959. As I read the paragraph introducing the model
on page 99 (in the 3rd addition of our text), I realized that the
Kirkpatrick model is a perfect example of a “schema” or “mental structure” as
Wikipedia defines it. There are four
levels of evaluation that can be utilized alone or together, but that build on
each other.
·
Level 1: Reaction
·
Level 2: Learning
·
Level 3: Behavior
·
Level 4: Results
The Kemp model is comprised of nine
different steps represented visually by nested ovals. According to this site from the University of
Alberta,http://www.quasar.ualberta.ca/edit573/modules/module4.htm,
the nine steps can be defined as follows:
1.
Identify instructional
problems, and specify goals for designing an instructional program.
2.
Examine learner
characteristics that should receive attention during planning.
3.
Identify subject
content, and analyze task components related to stated goals and
purposes.
4.
State instructional
objectives for the learner.
5.
Sequence
content within each instructional unit for logical learning.
6.
Design
instructional strategies so that each
learner can master the objectives.
7.
Plan the
instructional message and delivery.
8.
Develop evaluation
instruments to assess objectives.
9.
Select resources
to support instruction and learning activities.
The outer two circles are there to remind the
implementer that planning, revision, formative assessment, summative assessment,
project management and supporting the program occur at each of the nine steps
and repeat throughout.
Like the Kirkpatrick model, the TVS or Training Validation
System model (Fitz-Enz, 1994) was designed to evaluate training utilizing these
four evaluation steps:
1.
Evaluate the situation through pre-assessments
2.
Determine the
needed intervention according to the
data from step one
3.
Assess the impact by comparing pre- and post-test
data.
4.
Derive the value of the training using concrete
methods like Return on Investment calculations
Describe
how you would use them to evaluate your instruction.
Honestly, I most likely would not use
the Kemp model to evaluate my instruction because of its specificity and
because it has about twice as many aspect to consider. However, for some, the detail of the model
would be its strength, especially when beginning to understand the basic
concepts of instructional design. Other
strengths are that it addresses sequencing the content in a logical manner
rather than a blanket prescription for implementation in step five and that it
addresses differentiating learning for the individual student in step six. If I were using this model, I would focus on
steps five and six to help strengthen my instruction. In my opinion, the other steps are already
inherent in the traditional teaching cycle.
Conversely, the TVS model seems a little
too succinct and may or may not be the best model for me to use to evaluate my
instruction. I appreciate its emphasis
on pre-and post-testing. I rarely
formally pre-asses my students, but I believe that they could benefit greatly
from it. However, the TVS model does not
seem to clearly explain what should happen in the classroom during the time
between those two assessments.
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