Traditionally, PD has been centered around district initiatives and enabled through single-point workshops. Modernized professional learning, however, requires an ongoing, personalized and hybrid approach. Here’s how to create teacher-centered PD systems that work.
As we shared in Part 1 of this blog series, research suggests that teachers are seeking more timely, flexible and relevant professional learning. This personalization is important not just to teachers’ professional development (PD) satisfaction, but also to their overall job satisfaction, to the reduction of burnout and to improved retention.
In Part 1, we shared teacher survey data about the importance of their personalized learning. We also outlined the first steps of aligning school values and communications around learner-centered PD to meet teacher goals and expectations.
An educator work group assembled by D2L identified those first steps among eight recommended school practices to personalize teacher learning. Here we will discuss some of those additional practices around modernizing PD systems to support personalized pathways.
Traditionally, PD has been centered around district initiatives and enabled through single-point workshops. Modernized professional learning is ongoing, personalized and hybrid; merges content and community; is embedded in practice; and leverages resources from across the district and beyond. Delivering those elements requires a thoughtfully designed PD infrastructure that affords choice, customization, community and credentials.
Creating a single PD resource hub, curating a course and content catalog, and enabling scaffolded pathways are all critical systems to advance teacher-centered professional learning.
Updating district systems begins with creating a single hub for teachers to identify and access all professional learning information and resources. The hub should include announcements, content and course catalogs, tools, and community information through a web portal or learning management system (LMS). To build such a robust catalog, districts must diversify sources and curate resources so teachers can easily assemble their individualized pathways.
Resources can include archived conferences and courses and videos from other educational agencies, associations, colleges of education or other experts. Internally, you can empower various teams and teachers to create their own content through an LMS and other authoring tools. Building partnerships with districts and service agencies helps create the economies of scale needed to meet the full scope and diversity of teacher requirements.
| How the Greater Essex County District School Board Created a Hub for PD Discovery and Access |
| The Greater Essex County District School Board has 4,700 staff members in southern Ontario dedicated to serving approximately 36,000 students. School board leaders realized the importance of making all teaching and learning resources more easily discoverable, including for their teachers to identify the most relevant professional learning resources. They started by helping teachers implement their new Brightspace LMS for students by creating a teacher course within the LMS that featured 90+ short, targeted one-topic tutorials on how to do basic tasks. Each tutorial followed a three-tab template of a five-minute video, written instructions and a PDF download. The tutorials provided a single online, searchable hub within the district’s central teaching and learning environment for ease of access and discovery. This approach has now been used for other courses by various board-level consultants and special assignment teachers. “We had to find a way to provide PD and support to all our teachers in a way that would be accessible, convenient and personalized to their individual needs,” said Peter Phinney, technology-enabled learning and teaching contact at the Greater Essex County District School Board. |
Curating resources includes tagging content by format, by expected prior knowledge and teacher learning outcomes, as well as by creating suggested scaffolds and progressions. Teachers, coaches and other stakeholders can then sort, filter and stack resources through the inclusion of multiple entry points and pathways.
A number of practices can support this goal; for example, this can be done by creating or deconstructing courses and content as shorter, stackable modules with clear articulation of expected prior knowledge and skills and learning outcomes. To that end, integrate pre-assessments, formative assessments as well as post-learning growth measures, and incorporate a variety of self- and peer-evaluation methods for flexible and authentic demonstration of learning.
To help support the need for modernized K-12 professional development, D2L convened a working group of educators to identify practices that will help reimagine teacher professional learning. This guide delivers their top eight recommendations for improving the timeliness, flexibility and relevance of professional learning.
It’s also helpful to design with a balance of structure (e.g., preconfigured pathways) and flexibility (e.g., the ability to “choose your own adventure”). This approach can support learner agency thoughout the overall learning pace and path, while also reflecting principles of universal design and inclusion through choice boards or playlists within a given learning task.
Relevance is also supported through informal on-ramps such as through a social media post, a blog or even a question that triggers teacher interest and aligns to a content pathway where they can then go deeper.
| How the Durham District School Board Simplified Professional Learning Personalization Through Automated Customization |
| The Durham District School Board’s Professional Learning Hub was created as a personalized, on-demand PD portal for its 12,000 teachers and staff in this Ontario district. The hub intelligently speaks to the school board’s HR systems so that all employees are greeted with a personalized landing page that highlights professional learning based on user attributes. Online learning modules, links to face-to-face learning opportunities, and other resources are all centralized, organized and customized to simplify access for all staff. When courses are ready to launch, they are added to a learning group, automatically enrolling all learners in that group to efficiently scale personalization. Courses include quizzes and tools that automate content release, pacing, notifications and badging to track completion. The scaling of introductory-level, self-paced and on-demand courses also allows for instructors to repurpose their time to delve more deeply into topics and spend more time one-on-one to advance learning with teachers and staff. Durham saw a staggering increase in course offerings, user logins, courses accessed and awards earned in the 2020–2021 school year versus the first year of the use of the Professional Learning Hub. |
Creating a single PD resource hub, curating a course and content catalog, and enabling scaffolded pathways are all critical systems to advance teacher-centered professional learning. These steps and modular designs support a more flexible, mastery-based approach to help teachers best target their content needs and learning pace.
To create truly personalized teacher learning, our expert panel identified a few more steps ed in our K–12 School Guide. In Part 3 of our blog, we review two more of these: employing multiple formats and modalities to create blended and hybrid courses. We also look at enhancing authenticity through hybrid professional learning communities, portfolios and other practice-embedded methods.
Written by
Mark Schneiderman is Senior Director for the Future of Teaching and Learning at D2L. Mark curates research and strategic partnerships to support the K-12 education sector in identifying and implementing best practices. He previously held senior roles in the technology and nonprofit sectors where he built public-private partnerships to help imagine and advocate for public and school policies that enhance student success through the use of technology and digital learning.
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