This week, I explored empathy by conducting interviews relating to my current problem of practice: designing technology professional development sessions for faculty and staff that are meaningful and empowering to them as tech users/instructors (and that they will actually attend).
Check out my reflection below!
As a technology support specialist, one of my office’s current initiatives is to offer technology-centered professional development to faculty and staff. Topics we have already started to offer include G Suite skills and Mac basics. We have only begun to develop this program, and my problem of practice focuses on how to design these PD sessions so that attendees (“users”) find them to be worthwhile and effective.
To approach this problem from a place of empathy, I wanted to hear directly from users about their expectations and experiences involving PD. We (the instructors) must understand the needs of participants in order for our workshops to be successful, so I chose to discuss this problem with members of both groups (instructors and participants).
I first interviewed our Technology Director, with whom I have been developing this PD program. I wanted to hear how he feels about our work on this so far— his goals for the program, what he thinks we are doing well, what needs to be reworked, etc. Based on our conversation, I’ve synthesized his perspective into the following visualization.
His goal for tech PD, at least at this point, is to get people comfortable enough with the various topics to explore them further themselves. He is not concerned with our low turnout, and considers our initiative to be a grassroots program in which those who do attend will hopefully share what they’ve learned with their peers. He acknowledged that we are still developing this and seeing what does and does not work, and pointed out an example of our success so far: GoGuardian, a device monitoring program that was used by only one of our teachers last year, has been widely adopted among the faculty since we offered (and advertised) sessions on how to use it at the beginning of the school year.
I then interviewed our assistant librarian, who has attended one of our PD sessions before. I asked her what she wants out of technology PD and what we could do to make it a worthwhile experience. Her responses are summarized below.
She pointed out reasons she wants PD as well as barriers to attending (namely, time constraints), and gave me suggestions for ways to better assist our staff. I had not previously considered the fact that there are three operating systems in use at our school-- faculty and staff use MacBooks, while students are 1:1 with either iPads or Chromebooks-- and moving fluidly between these different devices can be difficult for staff who are not trained on all of them. Especially in a librarian role, where students of all ages may come to you for help, it is difficult to provide assistance on a machine you aren’t familiar with. She also shared with me something that really resonated with my own goals for this program: even if she doesn’t remember everything we teach in a PD session, it is helpful just to know what tools are out there are to know what her options are as a tech user and instructor.
Based on these interviews, I understand that part of effective professional development is just exposure. On the instructor side of things, we want users to get hands-on experience with new tools and become familiar enough with them to explore and learn on their own. On the user side, they may simply want to know what the possibilities are for their personal and classroom tech use. Additionally, I believe users want to feel seen and supported-- to know that we in the tech department will meet them where they are and help them develop their skills without judgement and with open communication.
Images created with Lucidchart
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