New Meeting Routines to Support Maker Educators

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Designing Online Professional Development Toward Creative Production

Abstract

During the pandemic, established educator learning communities had to shift their meetings and work online by adapting their routines to be responsive to new remote arrangements, as well as the new instructional reality for educators. This paper provides a case of how the learning community iteratively refined their new, remote learning routines and considers what elements of this work will continue in a post pandemic world. Specifically, this case highlights the role of documentation to support educator discussion and reflection and how remote learning shifted what was documented and by whom.

Agency by Design Pittsburgh (AbD PGH) is an educator learning community based in Western Pennsylvania where educators come together around a common problem of practice: assessment in maker-based learning experiences. AbD PGH is an off-shoot of a research project developed by Project Zero (Clapp et al, 2016). Since its initial formation six years ago, AbD PGH has evolved to a research practice partnership between a lead school district and the BLINDED FOR REVIEW. Each year, a cohort of 30 educators from schools and out-of-school organizations meets once a month during the school year to engage in professional learning routines, such as sharing documentation of what they value for learning and engagement (Author, 2018), observing learning in a host educational site and engaging in a design challenge. Fundamentally, AbD PGH uses documentation of learning and engagement to serve as a concrete reference points for educators to discuss and reflect on what learning looks like in their setting and how they can support.

This case presents data of how the learning community evolved their routines over the 2020-2021 school year. The case builds upon two perspectives. First, we build upon documentation as a pedagogical practice that supports reflection and instruction (Buldu, 2010). We take as a starting point documentation as “producing traces/documents that testify to and make visible the ways of learning of the individual and group” (Rinaldi, p. 23, 2005). In addition, we organize the case around elements of professional community: shared norms and values; reflective dialogue, deprivatization of practice, focus on student learning and collaboration (Kruse, Louis, & Bryk, 1995). Through interviews with community members, field notes, and artifacts from eight meetings, we construct how remote technology influenced small group discussion practices and how additional sources of documentation were shared. For example, one routine of the community is to share documentation of learning using a discussion protocol. While in previous years the teachers were the primary documentors of learning in their settings, their new remote learning settings created opportunities for learners to be documentors of their own learning.

This case presents several implications for the field. Fundamentally, this work provides a rich description of how documentation plays a role in a learning community of creative educators. Moreover, the remote learning environment created new ways for learners to be involved in the documentation process. As we return to face to face learning, we plan to investigate if and how learner documentation continues.

Authors

• Peter Samuelson Wardrip, University of Wisconsin

• Jeffrey Evancho, Quaker Valley School District