Erin Reilly & Ioana Literat – Designing With Teachers: Participatory Professional Development

As digital media plays a growing role in youth’s lives, how do we ensure that their adult support enables healthy and meaningful experiences, both online and offline?

The Four Values of Participatory Professional Development:

1. Participation, not indoctrination
2. Exploration, not prescription
3. Contextualization, not abstraction
4. Iteration, not repetition

Key Questions and Comments:

• (05:02) It’s also really important to learn from each other, where all are encouraged to share in the knowledge exchange, whether it’s a teacher, a student, an administrator, a parent, a community partner. All of them are part of the learning process.
• (10:34) How many of you have heard a student saying, ‘Why am I learning this?’ or ‘Who cares?’ […] Sometimes, curriculum may be disconnected to where the students are and what their realities are.
• (12:56) Although we usually talk about the participation gap in relation to students, it’s crucial to acknowledge that it applies to teachers as well. If teachers are not afforded these opportunities to grow and to learn, then the participation gap is consequently passed on to the students.
• (16:50) What is the current role of teachers in the Professional Development (PD) design process, and how can we make this process more participatory and more engaging?
• (21:07) When educators have an opportunity to explore, they connect differently to the content and are able to display their own individuality in the process.
• (28:22) In order for students to participate productively in this learning environment, we need to actually get teachers comfortable with what the learning environment is. […] If they’re not comfortable with it, they can’t help their students to be comfortable and participate easily.
• (35:50) We oftentimes overlook […] the fact that teachers, too, are learners. And that teachers, too, are adapting to this shifting landscape that we find ourselves in. […] What would you identify as some of the more immediate challenges that schools and educators might face in terms of really trying to build an environment where this type of PD can take place?
• (43:22) Schools that are oftentimes strapped for resources, strapped for time […] what would you say to those schools and those educators who may not have sufficient room in their budgets, who may be lacking in other kinds of resources?
• (49:02) There’s this concern and angst about how technology–and the integration of technology into the various learning ecologies that students inhabit–diminishes the quality of the ecology. I’m wondering how your work might respond to some of those kinds of conclusions?
• (52:59) I think that we really need to shift the conversation on PD from being what we did for over 10 years with education technology (where all these outside sources came in and taught a tool) to really being more about how we’re communicating, how we’re learning, how we’re engaging *through* the technology.

View the Conversation
During the broadcast, the conversation also took place on Twitter using the hashtag #connectedlearning.

Guests for this webinar included:

• Erin Reilly: Erin Reilly is Creative Director for Annenberg Innovation Lab and Research Director for Project New Media Literacies at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. Her research focus is children, youth and media and the interdisciplinary, creative learning experiences that occur through social and cultural participation with emergent technologies. You can Follow her on Twitter at @ebreilly.
• Ioana Literat: Ioana Literat is a Ph.D. student in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California (USC), and a researcher for Project New Media Literacies and the Audience Engagement group at the Annenberg Innovation Lab. Currently, Ioana is exploring the educational, cultural and transnational aspects of digital participation. You can Follow her on Twitter at @ioanaliterat.
• Craig Watkins
• Laurel Felt
• Sarah Kirn
• Sarah Morrisseau

Resources for this webinar:

• Report – Designing with Teachers: Participatory Approaches to Professional Development in Education
• Digital Is resource: The Participatory Learning & Assessment Network
• Technology Is Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say – NYTimes.com