Social Reinforcement

Think about your most meaningful professional development experience over the past year. What was it? Were you sitting in your office watching a recording of a past webinar? Were you at a workshop passively listening to an expert lecture to a room full of people? Or, were you engaging in dialogue with a group of your peers? Odds are, your most meaning professional development experience didn’t occur in isolation.

Professionals attend workshops, participate in book clubs, contribute to blogs, comment on blogs, reply to Tweets, and go to conferences because these events offer social reinforcement – we derive knowledge, meaning, and professional insights from our social interactions with peers. Connecting with others—in person or online—is key to professional growth.

Peer Mentoring

Pictured: Heather Garcia and Flower Darby, ID2ID buddies, at the ELI Conference in January, 2018.

One way to connect with others and develop professionally is to participate in a peer mentoring program or a professional community. My most meaningful professional development experience over the past year occurred in the ID2ID program. The ID2ID program is a peer mentoring program for instructional designers (IDs), sponsored by Penn State and EDUCAUSE. The program matches instructional designers and places them into mentor-mentee or buddy-buddy pairs, based on information provided by each ID during the application process. Throughout the program, the pairs meet regularly and work toward achieving their identified goals and program milestones. An outcome of participation in the program for me was presenting with my ID2ID buddy, Flower Darby, from Northern Arizona University, at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) Annual Meeting in New Orleans in January 2018.

While this program may not be for everyone, if you’re in an instructional design or faculty support role, I highly recommend applying for the next cohort. It’s free! You have nothing to lose!

Making Connections Beyond Your Campus

With so many opportunities to engage with peers, why is it that so many of us continue to feel isolated? One reason might be that, as we continue to specialize in our fields more and more, we need to reach farther and wider to access people with professional experiences that we can relate to and learn from.

Schwier, Campbell, and Kenny (2004) indicate that most instructional design communities are “born of convenience” (82). These communities of convenience typically include people working in physical proximity to one another. Communities of convenience exist everywhere. You probably engage in more than one without even realizing it. While colleagues are a tremendous resource, it’s important to reach beyond our local communities to access the wealth of resources and knowledge beyond our institution’s walls.

We are lucky that we live in world, where we can use digital technologies to connect with our peers and build our communities. Not even two weeks ago, @ONE offered their first fully online, untethered conference. CCC Digital Learning Day was a remarkable success. Just take a look at some of the tweets sent by educators across our state and beyond about #CCCDLDay:

These folks got something from their digital community that they wouldn’t have experienced otherwise.

Building Your Network

So where do you go to build your network? @ONE is a great start. Their professional development offerings are designed to foster community among educators. As a current participant in their Reflective Writing Club, #CCCWrite, I am grateful for the opportunity to hear from my fellow educators, have a dialogue with them, and reflect on my practice in a supportive environment.

Another great place to get involved is the Canvas Community. The CCC Group is a place where you can connect with other California Community College educators using Canvas, ask them questions, and make feature requests. You can also find an extensive line-up of CanvasLive events in the Canvas Community.

Below you will find some other professional communities that may be of interest, especially if you are in an instructional design role. Please add to this list by sharing your own resources in the comments for this post.

• Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT)
• Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD)
• Association for Talent Development (ATD)
• Educause Community Exchange
• LinkedIn
• Linkedin Higher Education Teaching and Learning
• LinkedIn Instructional Designers Group
• Loop calls through EdSurge
• Online Learning Consortium (OLC)
• Open SUNY Center for Online Teaching Excellence
• QM Instructional Designers Association (IDA)
• TopKit
• University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA)

So, get out there. Connect with a professional community. Find a professional learning network. Apply to be a part of the next ID2ID cohort. Sign up for an @ONE class. Get connected on Twitter. See you online!

Using Principles to Guide Professional Practice

This post is the first of a series about principles in teaching and learning with contributions by Lené Whitley-Putz and Michelle Pacansky-Brock.

In early December, Inside Higher Ed published an article on the need for a theory of learning in which the authors, Chew and Cerbin, decried a “buzzword wasteland” and pursuit of “simplistic solutions” in higher education teaching and learning. Comments on the article were fascinating, and I was drawn into a subsequent Twitter discussion. (The Twitter conversation included Michelle Pacansky-Brock, who encouraged me to expand upon my thoughts here.)

The primary concern of Chew and Cerbin is that too few faculty are guided by a “valid theory of learning” informed by cognitive research on how students learn. They acknowledge that a theory meeting this perceived need would be complex, and has yet to be developed. Yet they believe that development of such a theory is a prerequisite for college teaching to become a “coherent set of effective practices.”

Theory vs. Best Practices vs. Principles

As a former K-12 teacher and teacher educator who has been working at the intersection of technology and faculty development in 2- and 4- year institutions for the past 15 years, I understand the desire to see educational practice consistently grounded in some sort of coherent theory. But in my experience, while some college faculty find discussion of the distinctions between connectivism and various flavors of constructivism mildly stimulating, most would prefer to cut to the chase - just tell me what works.

At the other end of the educational development spectrum, this leads to the proclamation of “best practices,” a concept that has origins in regulatory compliance in the business world. Because teaching and learning is affected by many contextual factors, evidence-based conclusions about the effectiveness of pedagogies and technologies can be difficult to reach. Sharing practices that have some evidence of effectiveness is great, but perhaps we could strive for a bit more nuance and contextualization.

For me, the sweet spot in teaching and learning between theory and “best practices” is principles. A good set of principles typically has a coherent theoretical underpinning, as well as at least some evidence of effectiveness. Good principles provide direction without overspecifying implementation. Principles are most effective in faculty development when they are accompanied by a variety of examples in order to illustrate multiple applications in varied contexts.

An oft-heard phrase in educational institutions these days is initiative fatigue. A common language to describe our collective work may help to counter this sense of fragmentation of efforts focused on the latest iteration of identified problems and solutions. At the institutional level, this language often consists of mission and vision statements, shared values, and institutional outcomes. Most institutions have these, but their authenticity and utility varies greatly.

I would suggest that at the classroom level, instructors often experience a phenomenon similar to initiative fatigue. Chew and Cerbin point out the many pedagogical trends and technological “advances” which can overwhelm any instructor wanting to remain current in their practice. It’s my belief that individuals and institutions which adopt and use a common, consistently applied set of teaching and learning principles will have an easier time staying grounded.

Finding Principles that Resonate

So, which principles to follow?

For me, Chickering and Gamson’s (1987) 7 Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education have aged well. Research and experience continue to affirm the simple message that

“Good practice in undergraduate education:

1. Encourages contact between students and faculty
2. Develops reciprocity and cooperation among students.
3. Encourages active learning.
4. Gives prompt feedback.
5. Emphasizes time on task.
6. Communicates high expectations.
7. Respects diverse talents and ways of learning.”

For the most part, these principles speak to faculty as teachers, informing our teaching behaviors. But faculty, especially in the community college system, are also designers of learning experiences and environments. Some have taken Chickering and Gamson’s principles as starting points to provide teaching and design guidance aimed at online instructors (see examples from VCU and from my own MiraCosta College).

Other useful principles focus on more specific aspects of learning, teaching, and the design of learning experiences and environments.

• Principles derived from cognitive science research provide guidance about factors affecting learning such as developmental stages, metacognition, motivation and emotion, social interaction, and memory (e.g. Angelo’s Teacher’s Dozen; Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction; How People Learn; Thiagi’s 14 Laws of Learning)
• Other principles from cognitive science research focus specifically on the design of learning experiences and use of media (e.g. Mayer’s Principles of Multimedia Learning; 25 Principles of Learning)
• Humanistic principles focus on the learner as a whole person and learning as a natural act (e.g. Carl Rogers’ principles of learning)
• Still other principles are derived from research on effective teaching for learners who historically have not been well served by educational institutions (e.g. Universal Design for Learning, Equity by Design, Culturally Responsive Teaching)

If you review every link above - good on you. Hopefully you’ll feel inspired and informed, and will start to see common threads that speak to you. Please don’t be overwhelmed. There is no expectation that you must be the master and fulfiller of every principle. As Thomas Angelo says, “It's up to individual faculty members to determine which principles apply to whom, when, where, and how.”

But I would love to hear if something above has inspired you. Which of these principles could be helpful to you personally? To your department? Your college? And if you have another set of teaching and learning principles you think is worth adding, please share here!