Portfolio and Featured Project
Welcome to my portfolio!
Included here you will find my featured project, as well as 4 other artifacts which each showcase an additional set of skills in my toolkit as a designer and learning developer.
Featured Project:
Practical Equity
This project was created in Articulate Storyline to explain practical methods in the addressing issues of equity, for the staff of a community school in Philadelphia of over 200 diverse and multilingual stakeholders, including upper leadership. You may explore the version that is embed in this window, or open it in Fullscreen using the button below.
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Project Details:
The Problem:
This course was created for a diverse and multilingual staff of over 200 stakeholders at a community school in Philadelphia. School leadership had noticed that communication between staff and students was not supporting the work of equity at the school and was building barriers to student success. Administration requested an asynchronous course which could engage staff in foundational considerations for how to better promote positive outcomes and effective communication with students.
A significant barrier to engaging with this conversation was the lack of opportunities for full-staff development sessions within the constraints of the schedule. However, leadership expressed that e-learning content created by other authors often struggled to engage staff, as it often lacked interactivity and ways for the intended audience to apply concepts in any active way. As such, the mission was to create something that could be easily shared and completed at flexible times but was engaging and interactive so as to enhance learning.
The Solution:
Using the ADDIE model, my work began with attempting to understand my audience and the desired content to the best of my ability. I knew, from having worked with many of the stakeholders involved before, that the priorities for whatever was created were going to need to be:
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accessibility and ease of use
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engagement and interactivity
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direct relevance to day-to-day work
With this in mind, I proceeded to gather expertise from SMEs to form a strong basis for the course material. This brought me to Mica Pollock, an educational anthropologist and expert on the concept of "SchoolTalk", or how educators interact with and speak about students. Additionally, I worked with equity experts within the district this school is a part of in order to make direct connections between the staff and relevant considerations for any content which would be delivered to them based on the recommendations of these experts.
With these two considerations in mind, I moved to the design and development phases of my ADDIE process, wherein I attempted to create an e-learning course which would address the concerns of school leadership, engage the audience with the desired content using a foundation of expert insights, and help stakeholders to see the long-term relevance of the work and their power to carry out the desired practices. I was able to accomplish this in three ways:
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The course I created is direct in addressing the concerns of school leadership regarding staff engagement with the information. The course includes many interactive elements and ways for learners to engage with the content, including through learner choice of what content to see and when. In addition, this course was designed to be accessible anywhere, any time, and on any device, ensuring accessibility and circumventing the scheduling constraints of the staff. Finally, I designed the course to be as concise as possible in order to avoid staff feeling that the experience was too time consuming for their schedules, with the overall time for completion averaging 10-15 minutes.
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The content of the course is aimed at addressing the exact desired subject material and application that school leadership requested. There are multiple methods for understanding, checks for understanding throughout the learning experience, and the content is centered on the insights and influence of the SMEs who were consulted.
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Throughout the course, staff members are given relevant analogies to their work and given ways in which to consider how the content relates to their daily tasks and interactions. Staff relates different aspects of the content to different real-world scenarios and even considers simulations and thought experiments about the content so that they may make direct connections to their own work.
From the process employed to meticulously plan the course to be created, to the flexibility and adaptability of the content to allow for accessibility for a diverse audience, the end result of this project was an e-learning course which engaged staff in meaningful learning opportunities that could bring about meaningful behavior change.
Tools Used: Articulate Storyline, Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Copilot, MindMeister
Audience Feedback:
Kirkpatrick's Evaluation Model was used as the basis for gaining insights into the effectiveness of the training. While evaluation of Levels 3 and 4 of the model, Behavior and Results, is still ongoing, the Reaction and Learning Levels of the model were employed in gathering staff engagement and reflection through the use of survey and direct conversational evaluation.
As desired, feedback from staff was overwhelmingly positive and reflected a significant positive impact not only from the content itself, but from the growth in understanding that it brought about. As evidence of this positive result, 3 pieces of evaluation data have been included below:
1. Evidence of Growth in Understanding of the content and its implications: Over 90% of staff members noted that this training helped them to understand the content and its implications for their work better, showing a high level of growth in staff knowledge and practice as a result of the learning
2. Recognition of relevance of information to professional practice: The vast majority of staff members, 93%, acknowledged that the information presented in the course was relevant and helpful to their work. Of that 93%, 82% stated that the content was "Highly Relevant" to their work, emphasizing success in the goal of providing learning that was relevant and applicable to the daily work of the audience.
3. Testimonial statements from staff: There were a wide collection of responses from staff recognizing the value they saw in this course and the learning gained from it. The following are direct quotations from respondents and highlight the sense of positivity felt by many...
"Nicely put together, insightful info and in a format I can go back and refer to."
"It was an engaging way of gaining more insight into the effects teacher actions can have on students' lives."
"I liked how it was interactive and showed examples of how many little things could affect a student's ability to become successfully and how to remove those layers to help the student achieve."
"Just made me refocus on my perspective and how my own experiences shape my interacts with students."
"The self-direction and pairing visual and textual instruction was useful, especially since I was under-caffeinated."
Additional Portfolio Highlights
Below are a collection of additional artifacts which showcase the diverse work experience and skill sets that I bring to the table.
Click on an artifact's image to see that artifact in full
