A Team of Teams: Iterative Instructional Design in a Learner-Centered Online Urban Teacher Residency
Concurrent Session 8
Brief Abstract
Session engages participants in an interactive workshop in which they will discover the instructional design process entailed in an urban teacher residency, in which a multifaceted team produces an online learner-centered teacher preparation sequence that is designed for teacher residents at placements in urban school districts throughout the country.
Presenters
Additional Authors
Extended Abstract
In March 2020, the world of higher education and teacher education programs that we once knew drastically changed. Although higher education appears to be resuming some sense of normalcy as students return to in-person teaching and learning, it is safe to say that moving forward, teacher education programs may continue to include some elements of remote learning. Since its inception in 2016, this university-based teacher residency (TR) has maintained a focus on iterative design to keep it at the forefront of instructional excellence. In this program, teacher residents carry out their residency year in-person at urban school sites across the country, while completing academic coursework remotely, through an online platform, assisted by a team of support specialists and designers whose aim is to design and implement a fully learner-centered approach to teacher education. As we continue to teach and learn through these unprecedented times, there is valuable information to be gained from the design of the TR and its organization of remote, student-centered learning.
In this interactive and exploratory workshop, the presenters will organize their session around the following questions: How did we get here? What are we doing? Where are we headed? And how and what can we improve? This workshop will model an academic online module in the TR through which participants will work through a session with the facilitators in the same way that our teacher residents work through a synchronous module meeting with their faculty instructors. Through this workshop, participants will be immersed in a behind-the-scenes opportunity to explore the instructional design process of the TR. Participants will leave this workshop with concrete takeaways to enable them to create their own successful remote instructional modules.
This workshop on instructional design will be beneficial and insightful for participants of myriad roles, including but not limited to administrators, designers, faculty, instructional support specialists, students, and technologists. The program currently educates 160 resident teachers annually, up from the 12 who were enrolled in its pilot cohort, and the program has proven to be both scalable and sustainable. The central lynchpin of the TR is that students are connected to a web of academic experiences and support as they learn and practice. Managing these connections requires a sort of hive mind, with everyone driven by the same mission. While such a collaborative, cohesive approach may be easy to implement with a dozen students, scaling to serving over a hundred requires complex processes and systems. Our “team of teams,” consisting of residency directors, content mentors, module instructors, and support specialists, works together during the virtual admissions process, the onboarding phase, the orientation period, and then throughout the program’s duration of a year to support 160 teacher residents connected to partner schools and districts throughout the United States.
Participants of this session will take away an understanding of the vision of the TR as well as insight into how thoughtful, intentional, and rigorous an online teacher education program can be. Participants will learn how the accelerated one-year Master of Arts in Teaching program is organized into an immersive in-school learning experience for resident teachers, while at the same time they complete a sequence of ten instructional modules spread out over the course of the year, all built upon learning from the previous modules. Participants will explore how a module is created by the design team, how residents access the modules for their coursework, how the faculty collaborate to make the module impactful and meaningful, and how the entire “team of teams” uses data to iterate and adjust the modules’ content and pedagogy to ensure their excellence and efficacy.
This “team of teams” approach provides wrap-around support to the resident teachers enrolled in our program, combining those who work in-person with the residents in their school settings; the university faculty who teach and mentor them; and the support services staff who provide assistance and guidance to ensure the success of the residents in the TR. In the school settings, Teaching Mentors work alongside residents and model and coach them toward increasing effectiveness as classroom teachers. Meanwhile, university faculty serving as Residency Directors connect with school leadership in practice settings and help facilitate key connections for the residents between their course content and classroom experiences. Module instructors are university faculty who teach the residency program curriculum through an online learning management system, and Content Mentors are university faculty who connect module curriculum to relevant content-specific learning, meeting with their content mentees weekly throughout the year of the residency program. In all cases, faculty intentionally engage in multiple roles in order to maintain a comprehensive understanding of the residents' experiences across contexts. The faculty in these roles provide ongoing guidance for residents as well as raise awareness when a resident requires academic, professional, or personal support, stepping in swiftly to craft a “proactive improvement plan” to ensure, as much as possible, residents’ success. In addition to school-based staff and program faculty, Student Support Coaches check in frequently with the residents, hosting monthly “community” cohort meetings with all 160+ teacher residents and even working 1:1 with residents to enable success. Entering its seventh year, the TR now operates like a well-oiled machine, with all moving parts working together smoothly to create an integrated and synthesized program for teacher residents beginning with the application process and continuing to induction post-graduation.
Through an interactive agenda, this workshop will guide participants to learn how the TR makes all of these connecting and moving parts work as cohesively and smoothly as they do and will show participants the aspects of the program that require particular care to manage as well as the design features that require the most attention and effort to establish and maintain. Participants will also learn about the ongoing evaluation work we do that allows us to continually examine, iterate, and reimagine the TR program in response to data and stakeholder feedback. Continuous improvement is a central goal of each of the teams that together construct our “team of teams,” and our central and collective dedication to excellence is part of the glue that holds our different groups together.
Participants of this workshop will navigate through an interactive, online agenda that they will access through their laptops or using a QR code on their phones. They will be able to check-in, ask questions or drop comments, review norms, begin with a “thought-starter” or mindfulness activity, and then dive into content through activities and breakout groups, modeling the residents’ experiences in the modules they take in the TR program. Agenda topics will cover opportunities and challenges such as: non-credit bearing content workspaces, handoff memos that enable collaboration and increase retention, available online platforms (Hypothes.is, Perusall, etc.), use and timing of module introduction videos, and other strategies in place throughout the TR that enable us to recruit, support, deeply educate, evaluate, and ultimately retain excellent and effective teacher residents. Lastly, the workshop will present evidence that what the TR is doing is working. Surveys show high Net Performance Score (NPS) for faculty, high retention rates for students, low faculty attrition rates, and high Quality Matters scores.
Upon completion of this workshop, participants, no matter their role, will leave with solid understanding that successful instructional design is ongoing and iterative, and must be flexible and responsive to the learners and to stakeholders. The TR design team views its job as a dynamic and iterative process constantly driven by ongoing evaluation versus a static blueprint. Participants will be challenged to consider how to build such a design at their own institutions, understanding that in order to reach effectiveness, design must be ongoing and iterative. The instructional designer remains a continued member of the TR team, realizing that the instructional design product is never truly finished and must continually adapt to changing needs and circumstances.
When COVID-19 changed the way all preservice teachers carried out their teacher training, the TR remained successful and in fact increased its success because its design team was ready to adapt to these unexpected and unprecedented changes. Through its focus on relationships, adaptation, sustainability, and scalability, the TR has much to share with all attendees interested in instructional design in remote teaching and learning.