Saturday, November 20, 2010

Designing a TPACK professional development program

As most of my readers know, I started this weblog for one of my master’s courses, taught by Petra Fisser. Now that this course is coming to an end, it’s nice to think about what we’ve actually done, especially during the last weeks. The last weeks were filled with our ‘final assignment’, which included designing either (a) a lesson in which the TPACK model is used or (b) a professional development program for teachers, based on the TPACK model. My group (consisting of Frank, Lotte, Elly and me) chose option b.

I really liked working on this assignment, because it made us think about the practical use of the TPACK model. I think one of the strong parts of this model is that it’s very well applicable in many situations, and that it’s not too hard to use it. So it was nice to think of an example for this. The collaboration within our group went really well, we all had a clear idea about how we should do this, and after we’ve sat together once, everything went smoothly. We were inspired by the lectures of the course, in which the flexibility of the model became clear – you can start from anywhere, be it the technology, pedagogy or content. We had also seen some examples from guest speakers who came from Kuwait, Ghana and Tanzania, where they had all set up a TPACK project for teachers. So we did have an idea about how to design such a professional development program.

I think that one very important issue in our design process is that we all were sure that we should use the teachers’ creativity and experience. Teachers know a lot about teaching, they know how to design lessons (or lesson plans) and they know what works and what doesn’t work. We really wanted to use their experience to make them think creatively and out of the box about the integration of technology in their lessons. We also thought that it’s really important that teachers feel like they have some ownership of the situation. When the professional development trainers just tell them what to do, and the teachers have to do that, they won’t be very motivated for it. They need to be triggered to think, instead of being told what to do, in order to become more motivated to change.

The process for me as an educational designer went pretty well. As I mentioned before, all of us had some clear according ideas about the program. As we all had designed a training or lesson before, we knew very soon what we wanted the design (and the process) to look like. We started defining the goal of the program, because that’s always the basis: that’s where you want to end up with your design. Then we divided some tasks and finally we all reviewed each other’s parts, because this was the most efficient way to design this program.
            Personally, I think that designing with the TPACK model added a new insight on the design process, because it’s such a flexible model. Although the general design process is about the same as those that I’ve been through in earlier design projects at university, the multiple perspectives that the TPACK model implies made me think differently about the components of our design. If you want to teach others a lesson design strategy, you also need to use the same strategy in your own lesson design. This was new for me, to integrate technology in my training design, because I’ve never done this in my bachelor studies in Utrecht before. I had never learned how to use technologies in a training, for example as a support for the ‘students’ (in our case these were the teachers). So that really was something new for me, but I think that it turned out okay. The other group members knew more about this, and when I heard some examples, I could also think of some more.
            Another part of our design that was difficult, was the detailed description of one of the training parts. We chose to write some more about our first training day, because this is the day where a lot of things happen, for example an explanation of the TPACK model. It’s hard to say when the description is detailed enough: do you need to write everything you want to do down, for every five minutes? We didn’t do this, because we thought it would also be clear enough if we would just describe the different lectures and assignments generally, with our ideas about what would happen.

Working with TPACK
Since we were designing a program in which the target group would learn how to integrate the TPACK model in their teaching, we thought it would also be a good idea to use the TPACK model in the design of our own program. If you “practice what you preach”, the teachers would see how this model works and how well it works. So we thought that teachers could communicate in online communities of practice and use Skype, which is a way of integrating technology in education.
            I really liked to work with the TPACK model, because I think that this model is very useful in many situations. It’s such a flexible model, that it’s applicable in almost any situation. There is no set point to start from, you can choose to begin with the technology, pedagogy or content (or combinations of them) and then start thinking about how this can be integrated with the other parts. The flexibility of this model also triggers creativity, because many perspectives are possible. I think creativity is the key to good education (and to solving educational problems; to quote Albert Einstein: “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” [source]). Thinking creatively (or out of the box) is, in my opinion, the only way to gain new perspectives on the situation, which shows new solutions to the problem.
In our professional development program, we started designing for the teachers from the T in the model, i.e. the technology, because in our case, the school had some technological resources (computers and a digiboard) that were not used very often or properly. Our goal was for the teachers to learn how to integrate these already available technologies in their daily teaching practice. The design of the professional development program started from the C (content), because we wanted to teach the teachers on a certain topic: how to use TPACK to integrate technology in your teaching. So we had two starting points, be it on two different levels. In our design, we also used the different perspectives that the TPACK model enables a designer to use. As I mentioned before, I had never designed a training that included technological support for the participants during the training period. But by using the TPACK model it became easier to think of ideas about how to use technologies here, because it encourages your own creativity. I really think that this is a very strong point of the TPACK model.

All in all, I really liked to design a training that is based on the TPACK model, because this model encourages creativity, which to me is the key to solving (educational) problems. It also encouraged mine, which helped me solve some difficulties that I had during the design process. Also, I think that training others to use the TPACK model by using it in your own design is a very strong motivator, because this shows that the thing you’re trying to teach actually works and encourages the creativity of the teachers, so that they will discover that integrating technologies is not that hard, and that it’s fun as well!

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