Analysis Phase
The instructional coaches indicated in their survey that they would like a training for how to create engaging presentations for their base audience (teachers) during staff development trainings in both small group Professional Learning Community settings and faculty meetings.
For this purpose, I conducted a needs analysis to fully understand how to create the learning material for the coaches.
Referring to the flowchart above, the instructional coaches had provided the DESIRED OUTCOME for the learning material, namely to learn how to create engaging presentations to engage their teachers.
The next step was for me to DETERMINE THE CURRENT REALITY of the situation by rating the perceived vs. actual engagement of teachers and identify the root causes of why the presentations were not engaging teachers.
I met with 15 different campus instructional coaches to conduct in-person surveys of how they were conducting their presentations with staff. The presentation topics were typically heavy with either testing and assessment information, student data review strategies, or introducing new campus initiatives.
Afterward, I sat in on several staff presentations at different campuses to see the basic process in action. Two covered testing and assessment, three covered student data review, one introduced a new math teaching strategy, and the last one was about student behavior.
Finally, I interviewed several teachers, asking questions about the presentations. Most were honest in their answers and indicated that were either somewhat or not engaged.
Based on the data from my observations and interviews, I determined that Instructional Coaches were correct in their assessment regarding the engagement of teachers. I disaggregated the data into 6 primary contributing factors to this problem. When presenting, Instructional Coaches:
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did not scale the information for the audience, often presenting at a very high learning level;
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were sometimes going off on tangential information, adding more to the already heavily loaded topic;
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were not sharing the objective up front, or not repeating their objective for audience retention;
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were creating presentations that were filled with paragraph upon paragraph of textual information, and oftentimes reading from the slide;
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were not including relevant interactivity, with the audience in the "sit and get" mode of learning;
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were not including any type of anecdotal or relatable information to put the audience at ease.
I was now ready to begin designing my learning experience.
