 Center EDC in Newton, Massachusetts, great director of the Center for Online Professional Education and was co-director of the Northeast and Islands Regional Education Lab. He was also a faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and education chair of the Harvard EDC leadership and the new technology institutes. And on a personal level, I've had the pleasure of working with Glenn, both with him and under his supervision on a couple of projects. And I'm definitely one of the best people I know. Thank you so much. Somebody mentioned I also have the pleasure of being on her dissertation committee. She's that person. She's done a really good job. So it's a pleasure to be here. I've long known about the school. I've visited several times. I've worked closely with Melissa and Ross. And it's just a delightful to be here. And as the room calls for and my nature calls for, this will be quite an informal setting. I've brought some slides and examples. I'll try to show, but feel free to interrupt, ask questions, direct me what's useful. I don't really have a whole lot of background and kind of where you are and what you're looking for. So I kind of took my best guess and we'll move forward. So I'll start off with some background stuff, kind of feeling a little more of the history and some idea of what we're doing. I was asked to talk about the Friday Institute's model of professional learning. We don't have a model. We have some guiding principles we work by and then we design according to the intended audience, intended content, context, the blend of face to face online, lots of parameters. So I'm not here to say, here's a way of doing it, but I can talk a little bit about what we do, some of what we've learned. I threw in a little bit about what I did even before I came here and what we learned because actually that has some connections we'll list it from her learn and see days and I just, I don't know, I was thinking about what do we know that I could share with you? And then we'll break, we'll have you guys do some table discussion and then with what times left I'll talk a little bit more specifically about the MOOCs for educators work because that's an example of how we take our design principles and try to apply them with a really new context of lot scale online learning and happens to be the basis for Tamar's dissertation too so she can fill in some more of what we're doing. That work? Okay, people know the Friday Institute. We're over at NC State University. We have a very cool building. We run lots of conferences and various things, come visit and very quickly we have official mission statements and all that but really our goal, our reason for living and working or at least working is to help create the next generation education system with a focus on pre-college education. That's the gist of it and we've got lots of good people doing cool things around that. Tamar mentioned, I have to update that cause we finished the digital learning plan so I was directing it but we had a large contract and about two years of work to develop what should have been called the digital age learning plan because it's not really about the technology it's about teaching and learning but we've put together with a lot of work with school districts and working groups and advisory boards and everything else a plan which really hopefully will guide some of the state's work around updating the system to digital age teaching and learning looking at everything from the infrastructure to the professional learning to the state policies. So that's taken up a lot of time recently and I knew we were gonna miss the edge. Should I dare touch it and try to adjust this? Just a tiny bit. We spent a long time trying to get the projector lined up, there we go. And I won't go into details, this table well there's actually, there's a two-sided table that talks about traditional learning versus digital age learning. This is just the digital age side. But so when we talk about this, oh it's got the wavy lines again. People okay, are you getting seasick from that? It's okay. Things like anytime, anywhere learning, personalized learning, competency-based learning, things I'm sure most of you are familiar with and we emphasize that the plan is about how we do those kinds of things in the school enabled and enhanced by technology. It's not just about giving out devices and setting up network infrastructure. Just very quickly and I'll make a few comments. I wish, it's bothering me even if it's not bothering you or maybe I'm looking at it from the side. We'll stop there. Just a few examples and a couple of notes of things we've learned. Before coming here, this is actually on the next slide, well at EDC, back in 1997, I get older each time I do this, we started a program called e-learning for educators which was to help districts and states develop capacity to online professional learning. Back in 97, we started this. We ran an institute at Harvard, a group of us and we actually created a website for it. And people came in and we took a digital picture of them and by the end of the first day, everybody's picture in bio was up on this website and it was an amazing thing in 1997 and now your typical second grade class can do that. So it's come a long way. But the idea here was to help groups around the country develop that capacity to first run online courses for educators and then develop them. That morphed into something called e-learning for educators which was a very large federal grant to spread that to states around the country. North Carolina was one of the late states to join in and it was centered at Learn and See. And I guess Russ did a great job as the point person on that. And part of the learning experience there, these were small cohort, asynchronous, run over period of weeks with strong facilitation. And we had a lot of research around this but one of the lessons there was you really can do a lot online. Educators can learn about, can share ideas, can communicate well online. Some people didn't like to work that way, some people preferred that to face to face, some liked it, they blend. But the work over there convinced me that there really was a lot of potential in online learning for educators. And we had a strong belief that I maintained to this day that it's very important we give educators an opportunity to learn in the ways we're asking them to teach. And having folks experience online learning as students first seemed to be a great entry point into having them use online technologies and teaching. The other thing is as we, people would go through a course we developed similar to Learn and See one on designing online courses. And we often got feedback, well, this really made us rethink how we did things in face to face professional development. It sort of, it was a new lens. It's kind of like when you learn a foreign language you really learn more about English. It felt like that kind of thing. So I think applying new technologies, King King has potential and can loop back to influence on more traditional approaches. And then of course it's the blend of the two where the most power is. When I came here we quickly got involved in the state's early one to one pilots. This was 2007. And we began to work with the Golden Leaf Foundation that funds a lot of the tier one and tier two districts, the economically distressed districts. It's the tobacco settlement money trying to help the districts that have been economically damaged. And a lot of the, it's actually county proposals. A lot of the counties send in education proposals around bringing digital learning to that classrooms. So we've done professional development for teachers and administrators really throughout the state and really have gotten I think a much deeper understanding of the variety of school contexts. And so much of the thinking at the federal level, sometimes at the state level, is really urban district oriented. And Halifax in Northampton and Weldon City and Wake County and Charlotte Meck are totally different worlds. And we're going to think about how do you address the different needs? What are the roles of different approaches? What are the expectations, the backgrounds of the teacher, really the school culture? And what are the levers of change in different places as you do professional growth? So that's one of the lessons that's come out of that. We also developed a program with NC Papa. You all know that acronym? It's a great acronym. North Carolina Principal and Assistant Principles Association. Specifically for principals on preparing them to be leaders of digital learning transitions in their schools. And one lesson there is the role of school leaders has really changed. We're talking about new kinds of ways of communicating with your community, new kinds of organizing, new demands, principles understanding how to work with the technology people, understanding the nature of distributed leadership because no one person can do all the things they're expected to do. The use of new data systems, responding to evaluations, teacher evaluations. So we've learned a lot about the incredible demands on school leaders, but that we also know from lots of research around the country, things won't change unless there's a school leader reading and supporting the change. And we teach teachers about doing project-based learning and all kinds of cool things, and I'm sure many of you do. And the principal comes in to observe the classroom and wants to know why is it so noisy? You've lost, right? Or is it insisting on very traditional evaluations as the one and only thing? So lots of important work there. That program, as in many of our programs for school and district leaders, is a blended program. It expands over a school year. During the school year, there are six face-to-face meetings that are typically the original program, those were about a day and a half weeks. So there's a lot of intensive time together reflecting the lesson that educators love to have time together with people in similar roles and there's tremendous learning from within the community. Between those six sessions, which is spaced out for a month or six weeks or two months, there are online activities that are facilitated. So the principals are asked to go back and do things like conduct focus groups with their teachers and students and parents, analyze their school data, review that digital learning plan and how it intersects with the other plans they have. So things that are very much problems of practice, which is a theme you'll hear in a lot of our work, how do we engage people in that professional learning programs in what are genuine problems of practice that really serve their own needs? How do we blend intensive days with big groups face-to-face together, working together, learning from each other with continuing that work online and connecting it with that day-to-day life in the school? Another one of the themes of our work, these are probably on the latest slide, but is that successful professional growth has to be job embedded. It's not something you do for a couple of days at the beginning of the year. It's gotta be ongoing and in the context of teaching and learning. Is someone calling me? I don't know. We similarly have a superintendents program with the North Carolina Association of School Administrators. Superintendents are an interesting group to work with, but we won't go into those stories, but those I think really help us think about where different people are, what they're comfortable with. It is so much easier and more fun to engage teachers like you folks on let's do a hands-on activity. Let's try something. Let's just play with this and see what it is. Boy, those superintendents resist that kind of work. Adapting the activities to the audience becomes a very big thing and they are less engaged online. We do some online exchanges, but some of them are big on Twitter and QuickThings, but they have so little time and they don't live online. But what we actually prefer is what we're doing in the next one is a district leadership program. We've started this with this CCRESA, the Central Carolina Regional Education Service Agency, which brought together the 14 districts in this region. And these were, this is over three sessions, the first one's two days and one day sessions. We bring together leadership teams. So in most cases, we have a superintendent, associate superintendent for curriculum instruction, HR people, technology people, and we really have them work on analyzing where they are, where they want to go and what that plan will look like. So again, it reflects some of the same principles, real problems of practice, folks working in collaboration, working on their own context rather than some mystical context we made up. But we really, if we had to pick one of these three, we would really focus here. We see tremendous power of bringing cross-role teams together to work together and share the different perspectives on this work. This is all around digital learning planning kinds of things. There's lots of value in the role-like work, but the teamwork really is important. Then we have a whole other different group where the principals play it very differently. These are the instructional tech coordinators, library media specialists, instructional coaches. They come together several times a year and then even if we didn't do anything online, they'd all be online all the time anyway is that those kinds of people and they love sharing the newest tools and trying out everything and they are the most energetic, engaged group we work with. And this to us is a big theme. We keep, in the digital learning plan, we keep trying to convince everybody and if you know any legislators please help that it's great. We got the networking infrastructure set up, districts are buying devices, but it really is about preparing the education workforce which in this state is 100,000 people for new ways of teaching and learning. And our best success there will be if we've got principals ready to support it and we have instructional tech facilitators or coaches in the school who can do the modeling, co-teaching, providing resources, support the teachers on an in-school, day-to-day, ongoing basis. So it's building more of that capacity is what we're doing here. And then the MOOCs for educators I'll come back to. So I can talk about all of that endlessly. I'll try not to today but that gives you a quick run through. I'll just say a couple of things here because I put this on and I was thinking last night but I go back my first work in professional learning with a colleague. We used to pack up our car with a couple of devices and take them out and we had built some boxes that enabled us to hook them up to a big TV screen and the devices were things like Apple II and TRS-80 and Atari 400 and even Commodore PET computers. I see some of you smiling because you use those when you were kids and some of you know what the hell I'm talking about but it was great fun. This was out in California and one of the things that were in there is at the beginning, we were being brought in by San Mateo and Santa Clara County Department of Education and it was an invitational thing. It was like the teachers who were interested they come and we'll show you some stuff and do some cool things and that then a year or two later it became a requirement for all teachers. And you've probably seen the thing about early innovators and then the sedwars who will follow the innovators but are interested and then the resistors. Boy that's a true thing in many schools and many districts and how you work with a group that's very engaged in well let's try this new stuff let's take some risks, let's see what our students do. You know I'm perfectly comfortable being up there in front of my students and trying something to tell them and this is new I don't know how this works. You guys figure it out and tell me versus those who say I need to control the classroom and I know exactly what's going to happen. So adapting the professional learning opportunities to where people are and there's all kinds of change models and things many of you are familiar with but that really hit home. Work with it when I was at EDC we were anybody I don't have the math people here I don't even remember the Geometric Supposer it came before Geometer Sketch Pay it was one of the first very interactive visual math things and then we did other work with IBM and a lot of work and trying to help teachers think about what are these new tools that we really need in the classroom and discovered quickly it's not about new tools we were creating things that were bringing in these cases, dynamic interactive exploratory things into math class, right? Things that had kids posing their own problems, right? Exploring things in different ways kids discussing the mathematics things solving math problems in different ways some very algorithmically, some visually some more manipulatively and we realized or I realized I was young and naive that this wasn't about the technology this was really about fundamentals of teaching and learning and we'd work with some teachers who always wanted to make mathematics interactive and engaging and dynamic and they were like waiting their entire teaching life for these tools to come along so they could do it and there are others who were totally baffled by what we were talking about because they saw mathematics as something you learn and you grow algorithms and you apply them to problems in a book so again this constant lesson of how professional growth works really understanding the conceptual structures of the audience and how you can help bridge from where they are to what you're trying to advocate for. I put seeing and thinking mathematically I led the development of an NSF funded middle school math curriculum that was used in Durham and maybe some of your math folks would know if anybody remember Everly Broadway did everybody know Everly was the math coordinator it goes way back I just put it up. We developed a cool math curriculum it was followed the kinds of principles I talked about it added a lot of more complex language to curriculum had kids discussing things describing how they did things working in groups and then we discovered when we got out to schools with it well it's kind of cool and there are kids some kids who really are grabbed by this and are excited to be doing mathematics in different ways but there are other kids and particularly the special needs kids well if a kid was an English language learner or had reading difficulties having all this additional language and math could be a negative and some of those kids math was where they'd been successful previously and here we were making it more complex for them if kids had attention problems having projects where they had to work through multi-step things and the need for a lot of scaffolding and we could go on through the list but then began to realize well the special ed teachers were working with these kids but they had a very traditional view of mathematics instruction so we had NSF funding for a project that brought together math and special ed teachers and began to learn a lot about professional learning communities and the importance of teachers working together and things like action research and lesson study of really engaging teachers in the problems of teaching and learning from different perspectives so we try to build that into some of our work I'll just move on I don't wanna take too much time here let me break for a moment I don't like to lecture too much but you know when you have an hour plus and a lot to say you end up doing it and you know I'm a professor it's what I've been trained to do but let's take a little time and do some discussion at your tables so I get a little sense of where you are I know you're thinking about I guess your own professional growth and how the school will support professional growth is that what this is really about or another oh okay is that is it about something else I should know about or why are you guys here what are you to lose it what was that for both you for yourselves for professional growth you'll deliver to others for both who knows alright we'll just talk so what I'd like you to do at each of you to think for a couple of minutes and think about some professional growth experience that you've had that worked for you that you view as this was a good example and then not just describe what they did but think about what are the attributes what made this good and it could be anything was they give us really good food or they took us somewhere or it was about this content or it worked in this way or it did this whatever it is and discuss those for a bit and then we'll just do a quick go round have each table kind of throw out one attribute that you'd like to see in good professional development and see what we get from that is that clear enough go we'll take 10 minutes or so to do this and then we'll come back that's a professional product thing I'd like to really cool okay can I get people back hello hello I know we had different sized groups and if we had a bigger session we'd do the whole process of recording these and organizing them but I'm just going to do a quick round table just each table shout out one and then we'll go around like second time until we kind of feel like we're getting pretty redundant okay so just kind of what what makes professional development good for you you guys got one okay so the timing issues are very important when is the right time how much time is it if it's a priority this time allocated to it if it's not it's squeezed in at the end of the day next table you guys got one very nice learning for its own say we're all educators we're here because we enjoyed learning we had a group in the back yes I'm sorry discipline specific content yes yes we've often that often has come out around technology the vendors will come in they'll sell you devices and they'll say they're doing professional development but they're really teaching you how to do devices they're not teaching you what does technology mean when you're teaching history versus biology versus mathematics versus English literature not even that content content how do I implement it using technology okay learning learning something new yes in our discipline okay so great so your own learning which is part of the joy of learning folks we often use the t-pack model technological pedagogical content knowledge and how you need all three of those to teach effectively with technology and serve the content knowledge is something we all need to keep learning one more in the back same thing the most effective professional develop teachers levels of knowledge okay recreating our okay our so just some things we've actually done here is go out to the U.S. we're a resident of all others we stay all day we have lunch and resident fellows at the time I was helping we're chosen four of us based on things that were specialized there were presentations that were interactive it was very exciting I see what they were saying and the teaching American history grants that we hosted for eight years two different grants pulled together this is the U.S. Department of Education but they pulled together from the state of North Carolina to concentrate on enrollment to work with university faculty on enhancing teacher's content which I think is one of the best things that the U.S. government might ever did and the external if you were on that panel yes this was enormously helpful it was fun but no this is a great theme experience as learners and those who are great learners tend to be the best teachers and those who are ongoing learners and have the joy of learning convey that to their students which is probably more important than anything else so those are great examples good, going around to you guys a lot of our discussion was about content in CD as well but I think one thing we had in common was the opposite in the workshop they gave me courage to use what you were learning in the professional development and get feedback from the other so actually generating something of use that you can try out that I think fits one of the themes I either mentioned or will when we talk about problems of practice and job embedded learning you come out of with something you can try out with your students you can bring back, you can share we'll go around the outside and then come into the inner loop you guys got something? getting to watch our peers work actually seeing from watching someone actively implement trying to get feedback and add hot interactions between what happens when you get a small group of people together other things like high interest things that we're keeping things of your interest for everybody to necessarily help the first one is more sort of modeling, coaching, co-teaching kinds of experience with high interest great we just talked about a similar topic about peers and given that we do something that's a little bit different it can be difficult to find people who do something quite similar to you in a similar context so Asian studies or whatever it is or athletic director for a school that has a lot more diverse offerings than a typical high school for those with opportunities opportunities we're with colleagues another great point and that's where from early on I thought the online connections had some possibilities and one of the interesting projects we did at EDC we worked with the department of defense education agency on the schools there on the military bases around the world and as they said these are American kids American teachers with an American curriculum but there's not another school down the road so if you have a calculus teacher there they don't have another calculus teacher teaching that curriculum anywhere and they were real eager to have teachers interacting online so they were able to do that it's probably preferable to do that face-to-face but the online technologies gave us an alternative where that wasn't possible having commented that the participants were really invested that they had chosen to be there and they were really excited about being there and also that also the participants could help steer the direction of the PD based on their own interest we also talked about having a diversity of activities and a good camaraderie of them versus a field of community yes great all important points the first one reminds me of what I said about my early days when we started out with the innovators and then everybody's told they had to be there and the whole thing changed but and the idea of learning community and camaraderie is so important I think in any professional development but I think as educators we really we're here because we like to work together and share ideas you guys so you points right into an active conversation yeah definitely but so many of these are I think the themes are strongly coming out here one of the things we're talking about with the individual nature or the individual lies to nature of content and really have direct application to our very three unique classrooms and then just one other thing that sort of jumped out to me as we were talking about was exemplary experiences for a couple of us were built on things that really had nothing to do with our specific course content but bringing skills that we had from other even areas of our lives from counseling and Karen's case or for me a sales job that I had into the classroom which is really a professional development experience at some level and probably being open to that too yeah great I'll tell a personal example at the end that relate to that but I'll hold it for the moment you guys got it what did you do a lot of what we said was the same we're trying to go along with at the end of the day if we try to go to a conference or something during the school year there's no substitutes so we're dumping on our colleagues which makes it harder to do that so we sort of found summer things were much more useful okay so again time and flexibility but also I'm hearing organizational structures that say this is important and if there are good conferences during the school year we'll make sure that you can go without just burdening your colleagues yeah those kinds of things we work with with the administrators let's see we haven't been here yet we did think content was important but we really enjoyed a bunch of PD experiences that we had over pedagogical things and echoed the thoughts that we needed time and those experiences for example to create a rubric or to generate some new lessons planned and then be able to go try it out so those experiences required us to be reflective about our teaching and know sort of what was going to fit in the PD experience that filled that need allowed us time to work on something get some feedback and then we were able to go right back in and implement it okay so some of the same consistencies of real problems of practice that you can implement and use but you're bringing the pedagogical side to balance the content side what they think is great so if you're moving towards portfolio assessment or use of rubrics or competency based assessment there are things that are really pedagogical strategies as well as deep content good that's a great set of thoughts now there are others that people would like to make sure they get to say we can do another quick go around I believe we got everything we had a good set this is the you know speak now or speak later you can yes we've got one one other thing that came up in our group was that it's um it occurs either for in one setting over a long period of time or multiple times kind of a long term focus not just our here and then that's the last one okay not the fly by professional development doesn't work for you is that okay yes sir this morning I raised this in a different way but it makes me wonder as we celebrate things that we really like and we are all here because we really like the things that we're doing to push the technology further away not because it's inferior because we really don't want to know about it but because it doesn't reinforce our values given the pace at which technology is impacting the children are we continuing to push them further and further away from us and so even though this might not be something we want to learn the consequence of not wanting to learn this puts us in danger of becoming irrelevant not because what we have is important but because they don't care and I wonder I don't know what to do I think that's a great point and it's really helping all of us and some of us have been around for a long time some of you grew up more with technology to adjust to the changing times and I do have another lecture I won't give but talks about the concept of the background and how different our kids' perspectives are they think that all information is immediately available they can communicate with anybody at any time they have powerful tools I mean they have music tools that the greatest composers would have died for they have animation tools that Walt Disney never could have imagined that they have so much power in what they can do there's a whole set of these that everything has intelligence I mean just I guess I put my phone over there and once in a while you think about this magical device that got me here that I carry in my pocket that I tell it where I want to go and now I can say it and it tells me how to get there I mean that's bizarre but our kids that the device has that kind of intelligence in quotes and knowledge and that you can search anything so they really do have a different view of knowledge of communication of creativity and we all need to deal with that and that's part of why I think educators need to experience some of that but I think it's a very challenging transition for all of us I'm glad you raised that point for many of us in the office industry we have access to very technology so we're waiting for facilities to access with our own understanding for me what you're saying I understand all of that because my technological context is that we somehow are greater than that so it's not a barrier to my understanding of technology at all it's having access to equipment to implement that well and I know my colleague Phil Ema who's a parent of one of your students has been working with your strategic plan he's driving the technology infrastructure for all the schools in the state and he's reported to me a little surprise that you guys weren't more advanced yet but hopefully that's being resolved to do that so I think this blend of we've got deep content we've got pedagogy we've got catching up with the new ways in which things are done and what it really means for students to be a digital age earner and how we can be digital age educators bringing all of that together are part of the challenges for all of us other things people would like to get in don't be shy we don't seem like a shy group it's activity with other groups and the one difference I mean obviously you're a unique school and you're a unique bunch of teachers there's more emphasis here on deep disciplinary content than I usually hear otherwise you pretty much overlap with other teachers and I think that has something to do with who you are and where you're teaching and the students that you need to keep up with and I've met some of your students I actually had the pleasure of going to Beijing with four students who won the Science Award one of whom was from here and I mean these students blew my mind I could never keep up with what they know about science so I can understand how you have to keep refreshing and advancing your disciplinary knowledge when you have students like that many schools of course don't have students at quite that level yes yes of course yeah yes a better phrase I know I mean you guys are in many ways more like a college faculty than typical high school faculty yes good okay let me switch gears and I'm cognizant of the time I will try to go quickly so as I said usually we try to organize that but I'll leave that when they open the bar you guys can hang out and organize your thinking and all that there's just a standard list we use it gets dropped into proposal and all but you'll see a number of things you said were already on this list and if you have a need this kind of list is research from Linda Dahling-Hammond at Stanford and others so that when we talk about any professional development we do we come back to these kinds of things does it deepen subject matter increase understanding of learning and appreciation of students' needs so I think that kind of says it's what the three tables in that corner said all needs to be put together that worked out pretty well centers around critical professional activities many of you said that in a number of ways builds on problems of practice that lead to reflection and professional discourse and some of you talked about it's not just a quick drop in we've got to do something we've got to create something we've got to try it out but this reflection you then have to think about it and your modeling those are all stimuli and their value is when you really reflect on and learn from it not just do those things so those are very important and allowing time for that is important provide opportunities for educators to learn in the ways they will be expected to teach that theme of some of you I'm sure are quite sophisticated with the technologies with new pedagogies with collaborative learning I almost said constructivist learning I'm so old I know we're not allowed to use terms like that anymore so I think that's part of it and is personalized to meet individual needs it's funny I always chuckle when I see someone lecturing on the importance of differentiating instruction for students while not thinking well we need to do that for educators also cultivates a culture of collegiality we all learn it's a social action learning and I think it's particularly true for educators and is ongoing, intensive and woven into professional work and the points you were raising so I think you've captured some you have a research based set of ideas that you came up at your table that if you needed them we could give you a whole bunch of references if you're writing a grand proposal and you can turn them into official proposalese but I think seeing some of the kinds of things you've captured very well I can make the slides available I see some people trying to take notes but if you want these so what I'd like to do in the remaining we have about a half hour we'll save a little time at the end for further discussions so we've got about 20 minutes so I'll have to move quickly given all that and those principles one of the things we started on about three years ago this whole talk started about MOOCs massive online open courses and as I said I've had a lot of experience in professional development particularly online learning I thought well there might be some potential here we had always done small cohort based facilitated kinds of things well this is very familiar with those what well maybe there's something here about doing these at massive scale so we always have the scale problems there are 100,000 educators in the state but I never thought it was going to solve the problems of dropouts and kids who weren't learning but that maybe with educators who are self-motivated who are highly literate who like to work in community maybe there's something here so we formed something called MOOCs for educators really is an experiment we just started building one because that's what we do we then got some funding from the Euler Foundation the Oak Foundation so we're getting support for this and it really was about the theme of we're expecting so much from our educators with so many changes student demographics and technologies that we have this enormous national education workforce and state workforce lots of turnover, lots of new folks we know there's tremendous dissatisfaction with the traditional models of professional learning there's lots of data about that the kind of things that drive by the hour at the end of the day the one day in service is not something that educators say those are great, that's all we need and there's also of course in the broad world lots of issues now about cost efficiency we have so we have almost no resources going into professional learning in the state in the education system call your representatives and complain about that they're helpful, we're working on it so lots of reasons we thought this is worth exploring and the real question was can MOOC-like approaches be adapted to address educators' needs as principles of effective professional development and provide something that's scalable and accessible and effective and again we also had the very rural communities teachers of special areas where they don't have colleagues in mind so we set out and explained I won't take you through the history I always wonder which would come first let me show you what one looks like and then I'll go back and talk about the specific design principles of what we did there but this is the basis of her dissertation so excuse me let me sit down and see actually I'll go back one slide we've developed a set of these around digital learning around mathematics, around learning differences around disciplinary literacy and I thought it'd be fun to show the one that Tamar's dissertation is based on as long as everything works well and I had this already open nope do do do what did I just do okay so these are online sets of resources designed to be interactive and this was a and probably most of you aren't old enough to remember the old Mickey Rooney and Judy Gaughan movies where they'd say come on gang let's put on a play let's just kind of come on gang let's make a mook we don't really know what it is but it sounds kind of interesting let's start with one on digital learning we then moved on so each of them has an overview a set of goals for the cost deeper understanding of the content investigating common students misconceptions analyze student thinking address students learning differences the fractions one is built around a guide practice guide for teaching fractions from the Institute for Education Sciences the U.S. Department of Education research ground and typically they range but this one is eight weeks of content is an opening introductory week they were then three main weeks on three main approaches to teaching fractions at different levels each of those is two weeks so there's time for people to try something in the classroom and reflect back and then a final wrap up week if we stop doing that please why that is happening to me let me jump into one what is going on here I just close that let's see if that will work I don't understand why it is not going to the lesson hang on a second sorry about this but you know when you give presentations nothing ever works works quite right it's very strange this was working earlier are you coming well this is I had the tap the same thing hang on we'll get it well let's see if I click on something else very strange it was working earlier yep what we're going to do is we're going to take the risk and close it out and start again and see where we end up where we end up no I was just trying to go to the actual actual MOOC that should be it that's not the right one I have never seen I've done these thousands of times and I've never seen this before let's try this it is really let's go down to that one back up set of links alright alright close enough I will do this quickly and give you a sense of it if it will work if not I will talk some more and show you two alright there it goes so just very quickly I'd like to do this in more depth so this is a traditional sort of unit structure there is an introduction there will be a little video one of the things we've learned we have lots of data lots of analytics people don't watch long videos videos are limited to 5 minutes max when we look at how long people spend that's about it when we survey people they say oh yeah I love to watch a video alright put one on while waiting for the water to boil and we've learned that these kinds of things people can do a lot but they do it in little segments of time that's how they use the web and it's a very different design than we think of I'm a professor I'm going to give an hour lecture that doesn't work so how to make things into nice little chunks where each one is worthwhile is part of it we have a text short we have an opening discussion which here asks people well how do you teach about computing with fractions which is a tricky thing to teach this is for upper elementary school teachers generally it's an area that's really a target of difficulty for them and their kids and what are the big challenges so we try to get people into it by sharing their own experiences and their own frustrations what would you do next which turned out to be very very robust and interesting and this will all work and I'd like to take a few minutes even though we're short of time I think this is worth showing so these are short video clips that start on their own you might recognize that voice that's tomorrow these were based on clinical interviews we did with kids about math problems and our folks in the room were not allowed to give them answers they were only allowed to ask questions trying to uncover the kid's thinking we then stop it at a certain point and the discussion is what would you do next what do you think this kid understands doesn't understand what would be the right next teaching step and we found this is incredibly good format for getting really engaged discussion our approach to MOOCs is it's about engagement somebody mentioned engagement and about educated sharing their ideas is where the best learning is so we look for what are the right types of stimuli for that to happen even though it's online even though it's a large number of people even though they've got no reason to be there other than they're interested they can get some CEUs if they complete certain requirements there's no college credit there's no tuition so he begins by using one strategy and shifts to another sharing the different approaches he takes as he works to solve the problem sharing 50 among 9 people let me had more volume before he's asked what he would change he's a little puzzled at this point he doesn't know what to do with that extra 5 at the bottom which is not an atypical confusion for kids he was asked what would you do with that extra 5 just a question no instructions so one of the reasons for this is we want to help teachers really look closely at students thinking not just about right and wrong answers so we're trying to demonstrate and closely at students he'll do it a different way don't worry I won't make you go through so you get to skip ahead 50 lines 9 circles starts dividing them up crossing them out trying to solve it visually and then he finds he's got 5 left and 9 circles 5 over 50 not quite right divide the 5 left over into halves and then what happens to him you think so he's then trying to figure out those 5 so given our lack of time it goes on a little bit more but the real question here is okay what are you seeing here in terms of student what do you see in terms of student understanding or not understanding and I know you're not upper elementary math teachers but what might you think about what would you do next that's great so some of the folks in the discussion say wow he's really persisting and obviously this kid is going to be a math student but do you just let him keep going then that's where the discussion goes or would you do something what would others do right right you might simplify right so you might go to more physical things you might simplify the problem this is the kind of discussion we get into and the discussion varies I was just looking at one of these discussions and I won't take time to show what I thought you should have intervened earlier well that was great but I never would have sat back and watched it I would just told them how to do it and one of the teachers might have said well the difference here is whether we're teaching him to get the correct answer or to understand the mathematics and that just triggered this aha's for a bunch of people because it's so hard even the people we have doing these interviews I would say no it's just five nights you're almost there but that just tells them the answer it doesn't help them develop their thinking what do you do with five nights with people so I actually think the way that you approached it was much more realistic than this arbitrary oh five and five months absolutely the whole discussion around obviously a lot of elementary teachers they just kind of teach the algorithm in fact one of the things that when I was working on the math curriculum it was just such one of those moments where I went through a fifth grade classroom and I remember the problem the kids were doing multiplying whole members by fractions and there was a problem that said John took 24 pictures two-thirds of the pictures were of his cat how many were of his cat and I sat down with one little guy who did 24 divided by 3 and came up with 8 and he forgot the second step they had taught which is you divide by the new denominator multiplied by the numerator so I said okay suppose it said one-third of the pictures were of his cat so he said okay so I put in the 24 put in the 3 in and said it's 8 and I said well could one-third of something and two-thirds of the same thing be the same and he looked down and said yeah they're both 8 and it turned out he had no idea what a third was he didn't know if it was bigger or smaller than a half but if he knew how to manipulate whole members if he remembered the second step he would have gotten every problem in the book right and no one would ever notice that he had no idea what this was about and to me that was just this fundamental moment we really have to think about understanding not just algorithms yes sir I think there's two underlying things we want one is that there's a concept that we're talking about we want them to explore different ways to get to that but on the other hand we have to teach them the conventions by which the concept is expressed so we have to teach them what is you know 5 remainder 5 or what is 5 9 or 5 D with a line over the line right so it's also the conventional ways we express them but there are different theoretical ways that they can get to yes and the question of where do you start and what leads us a tremendous number of pedagogical questions and the point here for me is you know thinking in terms of professional learning what are the activities that really engage educators in thinking together exploring their own this becomes an opportunity to reflect on how you teach and how you deal with the situation to share with your colleagues to understand different perspectives and it's you know I'm making a lot of one example but it turned out to be a wonderful example of generating the kind of professional reflection and engagement in exchange that we find to be very beneficial there's a couple of comments let's okay go ahead I think this also gets to the heart of what what are our objectives as teachers what are we prioritizing so to watch someone share their thinking ask the questions that reveal their thinking when we have content to get through and too many kids yes we don't have the time to do the good teaching or the good pedagogical things so I think that's great but you gotta do that because they're doing it not only part of it but getting teachers more attuned to kids thinking we understand not everybody can do these but we do ask them they all have a project and we ask them in the project to pick some activities sit down with the kid or two do this kind of process to help the teachers own development it's not to say you can do this every day with 25 kids or whatever you have but it's a lens that a lot of the elementary teachers don't have about teaching mathematics I'm gonna run out of time now let's go behind you though what's that video I missed the key word what's that maybe experiential I think the if I can watch somebody explore and fail and then get it on their own yes be committed to that so I'm not gonna get to show much of the MOOCs I'm gonna jump to design principles but this is a kind of example when we talk about those principles looking for ways to bring them into actual activities so we had lots of questions about could we build effective professional learning how are they different from other MOOCs other forms of online learning etc and through this work we gradually articulated a set of design principles that we now have been doing research on Tomas one of three dissertations we'll have it's kind of cool being in the university you get a lot of free research but I want to talk about these in the few minutes we have left and then I know we wanted some time to get input from folks so one of the design principles in MOOCs specifically is multiple voices have any of you taken MOOCs signed up for MOOCs and not finished them like most of us do yes these are not talking head MOOCs as I said our talking heads are not allowed to talk for one five minutes we have teacher voices we have expert panels which are typically university or other folks we have student voices we have classroom videos that to make sure we have multiple perspectives in all of these MOOCs is a very important design principle a second principle is this is designed for self-directed personalized learning I didn't get to show it but we have core resources that are typically some articles some videos very carefully selected some research background for those who wanted some classroom descriptions that in each of those we annotate with a brief description to help people decide is this what I want will this be useful to me we ask people to then rate them so we can share back the ratings the next time we do the course we get rid of any that were not well rated we hope to eventually have enough data to have like a recommendation engine an Amazon kind of thing if you're a sixth grade teacher of special needs kids these are the things that other special needs teachers found useful if you're a teacher at a very sophisticated group of students et cetera but this idea of many different paths and I'll show some quick data there these are not a everybody step through and we ask people that goals when they sign up and our concern is that people meet their goals we don't care if they quote finish the course they did everything did they meet their own goals so that's an important principle peer supported learning I mentioned we design things to foster good engaged discussion and the example shows one of them we do crowd sourcing share the resources that you found most useful so we gather things from the folks we have people do projects we do peer feedback one of the things in MOOCs we can't review everything we do that very differently than other MOOCs other MOOCs they do like random assignments of who gives feedback to who and it's all confidential we put that right in the discussion so if three of you give feedback to a fourth you know who it was you can talk back and forth and try to build constructive learning and critical friends kind of thing Twitter chats I hate but we've tried them in some MOOCs and some people love them my policy is if consenting adults want to do Twitter that's fine we'll let people do that so peer supported learning is very important job connected learning action planning, case studies projects, things to try with students and then one of the nice things they're both advantages and disadvantages of any modality of professional development one of the nice things this kind of online learning is we can spread things over time so we can have people try something in the classroom reflect on it and report back if we had a one day thing and we didn't come back together for six months it's hard to do that so the flow of time is different in how things have been small chunks but it allows you to kind of connect things up in different ways and we try to really think through the design advantages and disadvantages of each type of modality we use links to blended learning this is really important to us we now have taken some of these MOOCs and we've wrapped a graduate course around them so our own students a couple out of 15 or 20 in NC State do some introductory stuff participate in the MOOC and then finish up their own projects for credit when we first proposed this idea I got universities that's like slow to change and wonder about new ideas what's this MOOC thing and I finally rewrote it and said the MOOC is a set of resources so it replaces the reading package or the books because it is it's very rich resources and it's field experience because it's opportunities for us students to engage with experience educators from around the world and they said oh resources and field experience great and it became something we can do at NC State we also been working with places these MOOCs are much more powerful when a local team decides to do them together to share ideas and bring them back to schools we now do PLC guides with them and try to foster that kind of thing we don't see these as an answer but we see them as another tool in the professional learning toolbox that can really help us I'm just going to skip along we found that is interest in this, this is all data from the first couple digital learning transition MOOCs we've now had 24,000 educators register in these things typically as in other MOOCs half the people who register never show up again so down to 12,000 half of those pop in once or twice but it means we've had 6,000 people have real learning experiences that were of some benefit more than 80 countries we did nothing to advertise it internationally people just find out and show up some of our most active participants were around the world the one person sitting in some village in Africa who somehow not connected it's quite fascinating all in English in fact we say that this was designed US educators in US schools others are welcome to join in and of course in the feedback then we always get from the international this was too US based but that's what it is we've talked with some folks UNESCO about internationalizing some of it but we don't have the capacity to do something that's really designed that way I won't spend time on that, a variety of people different levels of experience survey results during the course are pretty strong those who didn't like it drop out so we have a bias sample we know lots of people saying they get something from benefit of this some don't sometimes when we try to follow up it's hard to follow up with the drop outs but it's often just time or it wasn't the right fit this is a graph I want to show this is brand new, I just showed it to tomorrow we find in all our MOOCs you signed up and never showed up forget about those who popped in once or twice and never came back those who have some engagements fall in all the MOOCs into five categories these are confidence interviews of the range one category of those who really are committed and are stable the y-axis here is basically whether they looked at videos, read something participated in the discussion had sort of four engagements during a week and these are the people who say from the beginning that they plan to spend a good amount of time and often want the CEUs so there's a good number of those this is from learning differences MOOC and 64% of those actually request a certificate for CEUs and finish the requirements then there's a group we call mid-rise sometimes it goes up and down again who start out slowly and get more and more involved and sometimes it drops off again so it may be that it's the middle of the course's most interest or somehow they got engaged we never really thought about that group but it's an interesting group then there's another group that start out pretty engaged drop off and often they come back and do something at the end there's the slow decline who are involved at the beginning and then fade away and there's those who are involved for the first week or two and fade away and it's just we're thinking about trying to get more information is that a problem or is that fine is it that these people weren't really interested in beginning introductory overview stuff but there's something in the middle that they're really interested in is there something we could do to better keep these people are we not meeting the needs that can be met or are they just curious and they want to come in and see what this is about and they really never intended to complete it I've signed up for lots of MOOCs like that so I know I need to stop but we have lots and lots of data the analytics are unbelievable we can track every click everybody makes in these things so we're getting into the whole big data thing but it's really interesting to be able to have a really different lens on these kinds of things and think about how does that feedback into design and how do we use that I've got lots more to say but I'm out of time we wanted to raise one final question do you want to do that I think I have it on the last slide thank you