Under Pressure

Monday, I was in meetings all day, but Tuesday I ran head first at organizing my research and preparing a demo. For four hours I tried spreadsheets, tables, images, words, outlines...

It didn’t matter. None of it was clean, simple or meaningful.

Wednesday, a project that I anticipated eating two hours of my day, took my ENTIRE day. As if that weren’t stressful enough my boss called with a large list of projects that needed to be completed. My boss was going to be out of the office for the next three days, and as a reflexive, nervous twitch, he eased his qualms about a growing to-do list by delegating to me.

The reality of a demo and research AND a method for displaying learner growth and progress loomed large in my fears.

On Thursday, I was in full procrastination mode. I tackled every project that my boss gave me.

Before I knew it, I was kissing my family and sending them off for their last work/school days and heading to my computer with 9 hours to create a multi-lesson demo, organize a summary of research and rationale for my work, and offer mock-ups of data displays for a student dashboard.

Tangent: 

In college, my husband had this annoying habit of waiting until the night before a paper was due to write it. I would have had the paper written, edited and revised with a week to spare - JUST IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. He would swear that he was just more creative under pressure. He would also assert that his writing was best edited as he wrote.  The word “draft” was not in his vocabulary.  Who creates quality work like that?

And We’re Back:
I won’t even begin to wax romantic over my amazing husband who never once uttered “I told you so” as he sat next to me wordsmithing my demo at 4:30 PM Friday night. And, while I haven’t had any feedback on the demo yet, I feel great about my work. I “kept it simple”. I used charts and images instead of a lot of words. I also opted to storyboard in Google Slides instead of authoring in our LMS.

The demo goes to the executive leadership team on Tuesday, I will know more about presenting to the Kern Family Foundation. For now, I’ll enjoy my weekend and try to slow my pulse at my near miss this week.

Run, Don't Walk

Available by CC0 Creative Commons

I remember so clearly reflecting on how thankful I was that this was to be an easy week. “Just feedback,” I thought. “I only need to collect feedback.”

Silly, silly woman…

On Tuesday, I met with the supervisor of the project. He was very pleased with my work. I have worked for this man for three years and this is truly the most praise I have ever received. I was still walking on sunshine at this point.

“I want you to present this to the executive leadership team.” He said. Still riding high… “Then I want you to get this in front of business partners to make sure they would hire students validated in these skills.” He said. Still riding high…

Let’s fast forward to Friday when I presented to the executive leadership team. This crew represents the head of finance, marketing, program operations and the company as a whole. I wasn’t worried. These are fantastic people whom I know very well. (Yep, still riding high.)

Enter the President of our organization, “How soon could you put together a small module to take to the Kern Family Foundation with all of your research? They WILL fund this initiative.” The Kern Family Foundation is the second largest philanthropic organization in the state of Wisconsin. Their charitable giving assets exceed half of a billion dollars. As a non-profit organization, GPS (where I work), we rely on continuously thinning school budgets to fund a large part of our work.

So, hearing that my project now needed a demo worthy of funding... now I am starting to freak out!

I am going to have to alter my schedule to include the build out of a demo.

"People Freaking Out" by Fred Seibert
Available by CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Originally, I planned on spending this upcoming week creating a curriculum outline out of all the necessary lessons, activities and assessments. Instead, I will pick one trait to create the curriculum outline, identify content sources and/or create content, develop application activities, and create assessments. I also have to create mock data reports to demonstrate how a student’s work might be reported AND make my research pretty enough to share and organized enough to clearly validate my work. AHH!  Clearly, I feel a little stressed about this.

Luckily, I am a resilient beast. My plan for success includes creating a clean task list with estimated deadlines and then communicating a reasonable timeline adjustment with the customer. I can do this!  I just need to pick up the pace from a nice steady hike to a full out run!

By Neoclassical_Velocity.JPG: Unitfreak derivative work:
Nevit Dilmen (Neoclassical_Velocity.JPG) [
Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Following the Leader

By Wiros from Barcelona, Spain
 [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Design is a tightrope walk between originality and research. You want your work to be founded in solid research and practices, but you also want your work to stand out as original and creative. I spent my week playing follow the leader on a tightrope.

Despite having to define the scope of “soft skills” for outside audiences at the start of this project, hiring managers, career and guidance counselors, and non-profit/government agencies across the United States have been mired in research on the topic. They are all trying to answer, “What are the skills and behaviors necessary for success in the workplace”. Thankfully for me, their hard work and research left me only needing to synthesize. 

Curriculum writers spend a lot of time aligning their work to standards, that is essentially the same task I started with. Seven different bodies of research offered 44 desired traits. My first thought after this synthesis: I have three semesters to develop student character, not three lifetimes. With a little more research on my part to identify where there was overlap, I whittled this list in half.

To meet the specification of a tiered, progressive curriculum, I organized twenty-four traits into 8 categories. Each category has three levels of skill development. For example, a student working to develop “Work Ethic” will start by learning, practicing and being evaluated on “Punctuality”. When the student has demonstrated mastery of that competency, he will move onto “Dependability” and finally onto “Accountability.” Using an adapted version of the “Whole-Student Competency Plot”

developed as part of the NextGen Learning initiative of Educause, student progress can be tracked and growth can be monitored.

With all this said, I feel like Dr. Frankenstein gazing over his monster come-to-life. I am so excited about the work that I have done! Unlike the famous doctor, my success is tampered by the knowledge that my newest creation will be inspected and critiqued by the customer. Then it will likely be sent back to be repaired and restitched.

Alas, a big hurdle has been overcome. I’ll let you know next week how the product fared against customer expectation.

Coaching the Customer

Instructional design is a double-edged sword. One side of the blade is learners who will engage with the material. As the instructional designer, I had to delve into the personalities, learning styles, demographics and prior knowledge of the learners in order to craft meaningful lessons. However, the second side, that will cut you if ignored, is the customer - the actual business, school district, teacher, etc. - who has requested the development of a learning product. This week, I turned my attention to this second edge.

My customer, high school principals and apprenticeship coordinators, are not subject matter experts. This made my job easier, as I spent my time conversing with customers to hear what their needs were in terms of time frame, educational setting, and deliverables as opposed to conversations that included all of those topics AND content.

One interesting point in the conversation came when I questioned the time frame of the course. I suggested that the first two tiers be designed for completion within one semester and the last tier be opened up to a full school year. The last tier is dedicated to leadership - a fairly chewy topic with more intense evidence needed. The customers weren’t sold. The course is competency-based. This means students work to provide proof of competency in a behavior or personal character trait. The customers thought that the time should be open-ended to allow a student to continue to work on a tier until every competency at that tier is mastered.

Mastery-based, competency education does mean that a student is allowed to work toward a skill until it is mastered - instead of being pushed on to keep pace with peers. However, the customers were clear that they needed to be able to give a grade at the end of a semester. These felt like opposing forces - opened ended time to allow for mastery vs. a hard stop at the end of the semester.

Luckily, I have been researching soft skills programs for a while. I was able to cite a program in Chicago that has a repeatable “professionalism” curriculum that school staff encourages students to return to each semester in order to continue their personal development. The content offerings are deep enough to allow continued pursuit of mastery at varying levels of difficulty.

Ed Surge's Whole Student Competency Plot;
Retrieved from Edsurge.com

My extended research on the topic also allowed me to share a tool created by the educational think tank Educause that maps growth toward a cloud of goals in a visual that looks a little like a spider web. Each trait area has an arm that extends from a shared center point to the outer rim (likes spokes on a wheel). Students are scored for each trait on a continuum that extends from the center point (beginning learner) to the outer rim (mastery), then the scores are connected in a loop. Each loop represents a snapshot of learning and the gap between loops is a visual representation of student growth.

Educators are easily won over with pretty graphics, so the scoring tool and repeatable competencies made sense to my customer. This graphing tool would have a loop of scores that represent minimum proficiency. When a student has achieved minimum proficiency in every skill/trait, they can earn a grade for the course. A student could repeat the course until the student has achieved mastery in all skills/traits.

As I transition out of the analysis phase and into the design phase, I’ll take with me the lesson I learned this week. It was very beneficial to be smart on my topic when meeting with the customer. Continuing to stay on top of best practices and research as a subject matter expert will likely make design a lot easier as well.