The Top Ten Learning List from My Practicum

Many have imitated, but few have succeeded at mimicking David Letterman’s top ten lists, that certainly won’t stop me from trying!

This final blog post for my practicum, a reflection via:

“The top ten lessons I learned from my practicum.”

#10 - Tagging blog posts gets you readers and responders. No tags, no one comes to the party who isn’t required to.

So why does this matter? If you want to perpetuate an image as a professional in the education field, blogs seem to be a strong way to do so. Even though we as educators teach the importance of research and validation, there is a definite trend in education to lean toward experience, relationships, and a voice we can relate to. I only tagged one of my posts for this practicum, but for every other post I have ever made on my blog, I have tagged them all. All of my tagged posts have a double-digit readership.

#9 - You don’t have to recreate the wheel, just tailor it to specific users instances.

My research and my critics made it clear that soft-skill curriculum resources are a dime a dozen (HA, if only they were that affordable!). What finally landed me a serious conversation with our fund development team and what finally put a signature on an invoice for the curriculum that I have recommended for the students in the GPS program, was my ability to demonstrate the strengths and opportunities of the package I was pushing.

#8 - Make breadcrumb trails in stone.

One hand isn’t enough to count the number of times I was asked for my research to back up my assertions, conclusions, and ideas. Annotating pages, summarizing resources, and creating easy visuals to help inquisitive minds cut to the chase made my work all that much stronger.

#7 - Whether you call them benchmarks or weekly goals call them out loud and make them public.

Goals and/or benchmarks will not prevent detours, interruptions, re-starts or do-overs. They will, however, help you stay focused on where you need to go.

#6 - Everyone is a sucker for a pretty picture.

Learning how to create infographics was one of the best skills I ever developed in my time with LRU. Like spandex and mascara, images evoke emotion and adults want to be appealed to through their emotions first and mind second. My infographics and “pretty” website made it easier to tell my story and share my mission on the personal development project. I still had research, “one-pagers” for funders, and slideshows for presentations, but the compliments poured in on the simple presentation tools.

#5 - Passion is contagious.

I cruised full speed ahead on this project until the very end when one strong voice challenged the relevance and value of the course. Had I been apathetic, I would have never been able to defend my work. I am not living in a Disney world where all projects will be passion projects, but I share this tidbit for those who may be headed to positions creating instructional pieces for content they aren’t interested in personally. If you want others around you to like your work, you have to like it first.

#4 - Anchor yourself to reality before you begin

Reading the weekly blog posts of the other students in my practicum helped me avoid personal pity parties when challenges hit, helped me stay enthusiastic about my audience when mired in research, and overall, just helped me remember that I am not an island. Finding a person or group of people who can help you keep your experiences in perspective makes it easy to see the forest for the trees.

#3 - Know thy audience

Having a clear understanding of my audience helped me face my assumptions and helped me carefully plan to meet the needs of my audience. When faced with scope creep, knowing my audience helped me explain to “the powers that be” why the current iteration of my work was inappropriate for their desired audience. Instructional Design basics = TPACK...Let’s all take a moment to remember that P stands for pedagogy. Understanding your student is a fundamental pedagogical rule.

#2 - Accept Challenge

Peer feedback, beta tests, external review - all of these are terrific methods to test your ideas and work. It is easy to turn instructional design into a job on a throne. You can look down on your subjects knowing that you are designer of their world, their learning, their experiences. Nothing knocks those thrones over faster than failure of our work. Students and teachers won’t care if the LMS is unfriendly to users or hard to program. They also won’t sympathize with designers if subject matter experts are long-winded and/or resources are limited due to copyright. Allowing your work to go up against a fire fight helps you identify weaknesses and reinforce where necessary. It also helps you build a quality reputation.

And the # 1 lesson that I learned from my Practicum:

LAUGH

You will misspell words, publish work with broken links, create explanations that are only meaningful to you (and sometimes not even you). I’m not recommending you be flip about your work. I am recommending that you take a firm stance in the understanding and reality that you are a human juggling life, work, and personal issues. Laughter will help you manage stress, keep expectations realistic, and help others see you as a person who has high standards balanced by a strong understanding of reality.

So there you have it. One quarter of my year gone and three months of learning stuffed into an overdone Top Ten list.

Personal Development Program - Book II

As we ended the last book, our heroine had discovered that not all was lost. A new beginning was visible just beyond the horizon…

A little dramatic? Maybe. But, that is how I felt when the fund development team expressed their concern over moving forward based on a comment from a leadership member who felt the market was too saturated with soft skill curricula. The grant coordinator tried to make me feel better by indicating that every grant she has looked at in the last two years has required information on how soft skills will be addressed. Her grace gave me a moment to pull myself together as I remembered why my work was so important. The other curricula on the market all exist to help people UNDERSTAND soft skills. My work took this a step further to give learners a chance to develop the ability to DEMONSTRATE the skills. The good news is that my conviction won over the team and the saga over funding will continue - probably long after this practicum!

On the other side of this story, the subplot if you will, the internal staff of my organization really liked the curriculum. The director brought out great questions relative to overlap in the curriculum with other coursework and making sure the additional activities would fit into our tight classroom schedule. (GPS teaches the core four subjects plus electives in personal finance and manufacturing all in only two to three hours of class per day). She was also concerned about the cost of the curriculum, but the budget was already a piece I had managed and could address.

The rest of her questions resulted in my final piece of evidence for this practicum. The document at this link is the result of my curriculum review and time assessment. What isn’t plainly obvious from this document is that I had to ensure that students who enter our program as juniors in the fall, as juniors in the spring, as seniors in the fall could all manage the extra coursework. Magically, it all came together.

Next week I will clean up the contract language and curriculum plan. From there, I have to begin to author placeholders in our LMS for the PAIRIN content and rubrics. The weeks following will include updating course guides, planning teacher training, and beta testing the process with a small group of “test students” before the course changes go live in September.

The only folks involved in education who actually get a summer break: the students!

Scope Creep

"Scope creep: Adding additional features or functions of a new product, requirements, or work that is not authorized (i.e., beyond the agreed-upon scope)." - Larson, R. & Larson, E. (2009).

If you view my January 20th blog post, with my timeline of goals, you would see that I expected to be finishing the curriculum for the third tier of my personal development program right about now. That goal was abruptly derailed when my supervisor indicated that I was to focus on getting funding for the final development of this project before I complete the authoring of the support materials.

This week I had to regroup and figure out where to go next. That answer led to tiptoeing around a pending scope creep.

As the Curriculum and Instructional Design Manager, the coursework, competency frameworks, and curriculum resources accessed by our students are all my responsibility. In conversations with my supervisor around budgets and curriculum for the upcoming school year, we toyed with the idea of getting at least the PAIRIN curriculum in front of current students as a beta test of the third party tools and lessons. However, because my project was never designed to be used in a GPS ed center, it was decided that I should tread carefully around this scope creep by “offering” the only the curriculum from PAIRIN (not all of the supporting lessons, activities and additional assessments) as a potential new resource for teachers.

My tiptoeing caused confusion with our program staff. Normally, I introduce new curriculum and coursework as a directive - “Here are the changes in curriculum delivery for the upcoming school year.” I had to spend some time explaining that my project was a set of activities and assessments that make use of a third party curriculum - it was not just researching which pre-packaged curriculum we should adopt. In addition, I had to provide a 30-second synopsis of my learner analysis so they could understand that my external product is inappropriate for internal use. (Check out my January 27th blog post for a refresher on that analysis.)

After reviewing the lessons and tools we would purchase from PAIRIN, the enthusiasm that I have received from all parties thus far was shared by our program administrators. In other words, my suggestion of a new resource led to a definitive scope creep. My project has just taken on a new audience with entirely different delivery and time management issues.

Stay tuned, next week I’ll lead out with a new project plan. As an instructional designer, my job isn’t just providing educational materials for students, it is also to educate my internal customers on setting clear goals and boundaries for a specific audience.

Resources:
Larson, R. & Larson, E. (2009). Top five causes of scope creep ... and what to do about them. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2009—North America, Orlando, FL. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.