Assessment

RQ#3: How can meaningful interactions be evaluated in a professional development workshop?

This part of the DL-PD remains cold and dark to me. My plumbings so far:

• From an instrumentalist perspective on digital literacy, training UFT-CWE members to draw on their smart phones, and posting their drawings to a Padlet for photo elicitation could serve “weak ties” objectives similar to the ones served by the word and free lists described supra. An opportunity to design a very clear rubric and assessment heuristics for an activity that will further a fundamental human competence.
• How to gather data during instructional delivery is important context when assessing group work. Group conversations can easily be recorded, transcribed and AI summarized by otter.ai, after all privacy matters are resolved. Developing a coding protocol that targets group communication about delineated objectives for the DL-PD, e.g., digital standards that apply to a lesson plan.
• The Post Training Satisfaction Survey needs a complete overhaul. Too much “cheerleading” in the responses.

Implementing these revisions will first require a meeting between me, my Chapter Leader, and perhaps one or two other UFT-CWE members savvy with LMS management. At the meeting we should reach agreement on “global” design parameters that all subsequent DL-PDs will align to, e.g. “weak ties” activities. Each DL-PD will be rolled out at least twice, the first time with every group getting the results of a “weak ties” activity, subsequent iterations with a treatment. Producing clear instructions for groups to create collaborative content is the next step.