Implement and Iterate

Before planning your professional learning experience, pause to reflect on essential aspects of designing an inclusive experience for and with your participants. Accessibility in learning environments is a critical component of cultivating an atmosphere where participants can participate fully. Building authentic relationships goes a long way in supporting and ensuring participants have what they need and feel like they belong. Reflect on the power, privilege, and biases you have, consider what barriers they may inadvertently build for participants joining you in the space, and design solutions to address them. Some questions to consider might be:

• Power: How might my role position me as having authority in the space, and how might that impact how participants engage or disengage in the professional learning experience?
• Privilege: What experiences have I had that might cause me to make assumptions about the knowledge participants are bringing into the space, and how can I design a space to elevate their voices and experiences?
• Bias: How might my identity as [insert identity] impact my ability to empathize with someone who identifies as [insert identity]?

Additionally, begin thinking about the framework you will use to deliver your professional learning opportunity, and analyze and reflect on areas where you can hone in:

1. Ensuring you are designing an opportunity that is accessible for all participants; Designing at the margins is one place to start
2. Fostering a sense of belonging and building empathy
3. Encouraging educators to show up authentically
4. Cultivating a space where participants can participate fully
5. Utilizing multimodal instruction
6. Identifying opportunities for participant co-creation

The Instructor Accessibility strategy developed by Digital Promise’s Learner Variability Program is a resource to help you dive deeper into research-backed strategies for successful instruction with adult learners.

Check out the following to further explore these themes:

• Equity and Accessibility Considerations for Digital Learning
• Lost by Design: Designing From the Margins Toolkit
• d.school Liberatory Design Cards

Empathize with participants and seek to understand their needs to the extent they are willing to share. Ask clarifying questions, be transparent, and find solutions to minimize barriers. Cultivating a space where participants feel like they belong is important, as it allows them to feel included, respected, and willing to participate authentically, which then increases their ability to learn. Co-create the environment the participants wish to experience. Establish norms for participation and center and validate participants’ voices and experiences. Ensuring participants’ needs are met is an ongoing, reflective process and should be revisited throughout the professional learning experience. Check out Stanford d.school’s Redesigning a Meeting worksheet to explore essential aspects for designing a professional learning experience that is purposeful and targeted.

Center the educator’s voice and provide relevant choices to engage in throughout the professional learning experience. When possible, co-design sessions and activities with participants. Encourage them to share their content and context expertise. Honor the educators’ knowledge and expertise by validating and highlighting their experiences. If challenges or harmful ideologies and language are used in the space, use the Mirror, Affirm, Bridge protocol to recenter and hone in on essential aspects of the conversation. Participants are entering the space with their own identities, and their ability to share their unique and diverse perspectives will enhance the learning environment.

Support participation by:

1. Learning alongside participants.
2. Providing multiple ways for participants to engage and support multimodal learning.
3. Navigating centering the human experience while working toward goals and outcomes.
4. Being observant and flexible.
5. Deconstructing social and cultural norms that privilege certain voices and ideas in the space over others.

Additionally, design opportunities for educators to construct knowledge together, make connections across their work, engage in thought partnership, and discover opportunities for collaboration. Encourage peer learning and design a learning experience that allows participants to exercise agency and decision-making and to provide space for group problem-solving.

A few ways you can support with centering participants throughout the learning experience include:

• Allowing educators to guide conversations.
• Making space for educators to respond to questions posed in the group to level out power dynamics between educators and facilitators.
• Making space for educators to present/share their knowledge and expertise throughout the learning experience.

Dive deeper into the Powerful Learning principles, what motivates adult learners, and strategies to engage participant’s identities for deeper learning.

Case Study: As we built rapport and relationships with the Maker Learning @ Home cohort participants, we aimed to design learning experiences with their needs at the center of the design. We aimed to meet the cohort participants where they were, ensure we created a space that supported their full participation, and model and support their efforts in doing the same with their learners. Because each cohort participant was in a different phase of designing their maker learning at-home project with their learners, we designed the synchronous working sessions to allow participants to choose activities that would support them in their journey. For example, during a synchronous session, participants were able to choose from activities that would help them define their project or ideate on what was possible. Participants joined breakout rooms to support one another with thought partnership and problem-solving. The design of the session was centered around the participant’s needs so that the content would be relevant and actionable. Creating activities that could be self-guided, while also having the support of the facilitators and their peers supported successful implementation.

Pause and reflect on your work to notice whether your actions align with your intent, goals, and outcomes. Often the need to meet deliverables and outcomes supersedes the importance of how we interact with others. You may experience tensions between completing outcomes and pausing to reflect and iterate in this process. In these instances, be clear on what is and isn’t negotiable, and be transparent with participants when there is and isn’t flexibility as needed. Be willing to challenge the usual way of doing things, especially when an action inadvertently creates inequity or marginalization for participants. A way to pause and reflect on your work is to implement pulse checks.

Pulse checks are protocols to quickly gather information from participants to determine where they are, and then use the information to level set and ensure alignment. Pulse checks can be completed at the end of a session, such as an exit ticket, but can also be implemented during sessions with quick feedback cycles to inform how to move forward. Whatever tool you use, adapt it to ensure it meets your needs.

Designing any learning experience should be iterative and requires consistent reflection and pivoting to work toward your outcome. When you need to redesign, try using the SCAMPER method to re-envision what is possible.

Here are areas where you may want to pause and reflect on iterating:

• Before beginning outreach and recruitment
• Before selecting and onboarding participants
• Before a kickoff session
• After synchronous sessions
• Before implementing an evaluation
• Before implementing another professional learning experience

Case Study: While planning the Ciena Solutions Challenge model school cohort experience, we began with synchronous cohort meetings, and during our pulse checks we asked questions to check in how the content was landing with participants. Despite our intentions and original goals, the COVID-19 pandemic’s continued impact was causing additional strain and stress for the educators we were serving. Although we focused on designing an engaging and meaningful professional learning experience, we paused to take stock of our scheduled work and created space and time for participants to process their emotions and workloads.

The pulse check feedback from participants let us know we needed to change our engagement strategy to meet their needs. We made the decision to pause our synchronous cohort meetings, instead checking in with educators individually, as their schedules allowed, so they could meet their own needs and those of their learners. This allowed us to continue identifying how the Ciena Solutions Challenge would be implemented in these school communities while being respectful of and responsive to our cohort members.