Humanizing online professional development has become more important as schools, universities, and companies continue to shift to learning online. The purpose of the chapter is to chronicle the collaboration of four teacher educators' successes and failures in moving a two-hour face-to-face professional development to online (Real Science PD). The Real Science PD provided pedagogical methods to engage students in K-12 science standards by integrating online tools to examine local and global science issues for approximately 25 K-16 educators. The facilitators aligned the seven common features of effective PD with the principles of adult learning theory and humanizing pedagogy as they attempted to translate what they did face-to-face into an online setting. Findings indicated that humanizing online PD can be best understood with clear objectives, demonstration of relevance, opportunities for engagement, relevant classroom contexts, and by providing opportunities for participants to envision applying what they learned in their own classrooms.
While the focus of the study was a comparison of two formats for delivery of PD, the design of the PD itself was somewhat under-specified. For example, there is not enough information in their article about specific design assumptions guiding PD learning goals, nor is there much detail about the specific nature of their evaluation measures. This is not intended to be critical, but to suggest that to take their findings as applicable to all online PD would be an overreach. (para 2)
In their meta-analysis of online teacher professional development over the last decade, Lay et al. (2020) used Grahm et al.’s (2014) framework of physical (technology) and pedagogical layers to ascertain best practices for online teacher professional development. Regarding the physical layer, aspects of navigability, technology support, duration, and additional research were paramount. Content, relevance, community building, and modeling instructional practices were highlighted for the pedagogical layer. “The field of oTPD [online teacher professional development) has taken what is known from the research into best practices in TPD [face-to-face teacher professional development] and oTPD and intentionally addressed improvements in both the physical and pedagogical layers” (Lay et al., 2020, p. 7). As online professional development becomes more accessible and convenient, additional work will need to take place to determine the best practices for effective online professional development.
The purpose of this book chapter is to chronicle our foray into translating an ongoing face-to-face PD that two of us have run the past 3 years (multiple summer sessions and follow-up academic year sessions) to a one-time two-hour online professional development so that others might learn from the successes and failures we experienced. We four authors are teacher educators who collaborate cross-institutionally in writing, research, and instruction. Most recently, the four of us came together to offer a two-hour online summer PD for K-16 educators, primarily from Arkansas, but including others from across the United States, on how to “Engage students in real science using simple virtual tools” (Freed et al., 2023). Coming together, we each brought different perspectives and experiences, yet we were all committed to providing an engaging and relevant PD that connected online learning to the human element that is often a part of on-going face-to-face learning.
By the human element of on-going face-to-face PD, we mean the natural sharing of self, recognition, and celebration of others’ expertise, participation in hands-on learning, modeling best practices, and webs of collaboration that occur. Though we know from previous experience and research that these aspects can occur in online learning and are the tenets of robust online learning communities (Dias & Boulder, 2023; Farris, 2015; Ross, 2011; Scott & Scott, 2010), we wanted to explore what the possibilities are for developing these elements in short, one-time online PD offerings. Since professional learning workshops tend to be shorter in duration than university courses or the on-going face-to-face PD we do, we attempted to challenge ourselves to keep these tenets in mind when developing online PD, as we readily acknowledge it would be easy to fall into an information delivery model of instruction when time is constrained (Prestidge et al., 2023). This book chapter explores the successes and failures we experienced in our first attempt at translating the work we engage in with our K-12 colleagues in face-to-face settings into a short, one-time online workshop.
TopWho We Are
In order to humanize ourselves, we provide a brief introduction that situates our past and present experiences with online PDs.
Lacey’s entrance into online learning began as a doctoral student in an online semester-long class. Since then, she has attended many online PDs as a participant, where the structure of the PD was presented as a webinar/lecture, with a question and answer period at the end of the session. She never gave much thought to how to design online PDs as I designed, implemented, and researched face-to-face PD for science teachers.