Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

One of my tasks at the moment is working with the History of Advertising Trust (HAT) on their AD:Mission project. Following a successful grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, HAT appointed a part-time Learning and Access Development Co-ordinator whose role is to develop the educational remit for the charity and promote access to their resources. Jane is an experienced English and Media Studies teacher.

The major access issue for HAT is their location being based on the Raveningham estate on the Suffolk / Norfolk border so there is little real prospect of large groups of teachers flocking for courses or to access their collection on a regular basis. This of course is where the technology comes in. HAT have the biggest collection of UK advertising material in the world with over 6000 sq ft of dedicated space to material ranging from posters and newspaper to television advertisements.

The aim of AD:Mission is to create an online professional development space for teachers and educators. Their starting point is supporting the new 14-19 Creative and Media Diploma, but the courses will also provide appropriate CPD for teachers wishing to use advertising material in a range of subjects. The courses are being developed by classroom teachers around themes they wish to explore with their students. My role as consultant to the provide expertise in teacher professional development and the technology, in order that they produce a useful and worthwhile resource. Apart from three face-to-face meetings, most of their ‘learning’ will take place online modelling the way in which their eventual participants will interact with the course material.

A key to the success of any CPD experience can only properly be measured by the impact it has on learners in classrooms. Indeed, the whole notion of CPD is to change teachers’ practice so that it has greater impact on learning. So it was I turned to the work of Thomas Guskey whose framework for evaluating teacher professional development is seminal. He propounds five levels by which professional development can be judged to be effective:

1. Participants’ reactions
2. Participants’ learning
3. Organisational support and change
4. Participants’ use of new knowledge and skills
5. Students’ learning outcomes

Importantly, Guskey advised that each level builds on the prior one, so that the early levels are critical to the achievement of the ultimate aim of CPD – an effect on students’ learning. This framework is extremely helpful in clarifying why it is so important to focus on the personal, intuitive and qualitative areas of teachers’ engagements with CPD, understanding how they experience and react to it.

For this project I began to wonder if Guskey’s framework could also provide a structure for developing a CPD experience for teachers. With this in mind I proposed that the online courses provided by HAT use these five levels to ensure that activities within Moodle take the teacher-learners through the hierarchy.

It’s early days yet, but the course developers first task is apply Guskey’s five level model to their course design.

Image credit: Jonny Hughes