Tools used: Storyline 360, Mindmeister, Google Suite, and Freekpik
Navigating Parent Teacher Conferences
Can you have a successful conference?
The Problem
As a new educator who graduated college and then started in her classroom the following school year, parent teacher conferences were one of many topics on my mind during new hire orientation. I quickly found that I was not alone. Other new educators voiced as well that they too felt underprepared for the different conversations that might need to happen during the school year. Throughout the year, this led to conversations being avoided, unhappy parents, and/or a lack of confidence from a majority of educators.
The Solution
The solution I designed and developed focuses on a scenario based E-Learning experience. This type of solution allows learners to experience a parent teacher conference first hand while receiving feedback after each response whether it was the correct response or not. Learners are free to make mistakes in a safe and risk-free approach while engaging in a real-life scenario and practicing conference etiquette. As parent teacher contact is highly encouraged even outside of conferences, this will allow educators to use what they learned right away.
The Process
For this learning experience, I used the ADDIE instructional design model. Each phase of the model, analyze, design, develop, implement, and evaluate is taken into consideration when creating this learning experience. Analysis of the current problem, designing storyboards, developing a prototype, and programming in storyline. Throughout each step the learners and stakeholders needs are taken into consideration to help mold the learning experience so that it can be as effective as possible.
Action Mapping
Understanding that the goal for learners is to have a successful conference, I used action mapping and meetings with educators to not only uncover the actions that educators need to take for this to happen but what shifts in their mentality need to occur as well. By doing this educators will be able to build upon what they learn from the experience and be able to reflect about their practice with parent teacher conferences.
In this action map, I focus on both analyzing what makes a successful conference as well as why a successful conference might not occur. On the map it can be seen that being prepared and maintaining a positive attitude are two of the biggest aspects of having a successful conference. Using that understanding, the actionable steps that learners can accomplish are identified as well as the consequences if they are not.
Storyboarding
Serving as a blueprint for the learning experience, the storyboard is created using the information from the action map to create the scenario, choices, and consequences that are seen in the real world. Through each choice a learner makes, a real consequence, favorable or not is explained and allows learners to see which solutions are most ideal during their conferences. With this in mind, a guidance button was also included to allow learners to receive help if needed to figure out which reply would be best. It can be seen below in the example storyboard that a comment is made from the parent, answers and consequences are given, guidance for this particular question is provided if needed, and flow of the slide itself is iterated to help development of the program.
Prototype
During the development of the learning experience, a prototype was made. For this prototype, the beginning scenes and through the second question were developed testing a number of functions.
Making sure that the user could not start the program without first entering their name to personalize their learning and could then properly use the help button. When choosing an answer, that the correct consequence was displayed. Testing conditional triggers for if a user answered a question correctly on the first try. or if they answered incorrectly. This allows learners to get immediate feedback on their choices and see how a parent would react to the given response.
Full Development
After feedback was given on the intial prototype, full development of the program was created. Some unique programming aspects of the experience are the stars that appear. Stars are collected if a learner answers a question correctly on the first time and are then displayed throughout the program. This means that strict variables and conditions needed to be set so that any combination of stars will appear correctly throughout the program. In the end of the program a unique variable and condition have been set to not only add up the number of stars that the learner was able to collect but take them to a specific slide based on that number.
Results and Takeaways
After implementation of the learning experience any initial feedback of the program itself or content fulfillment would be taken into consideration when keeping the learning experience up to date and relevant. After the allotted time for the learning experience, assessments would take place to determine if the goal was met.
By creating this learning experience, it shows the new age of education that our society is heading into. Making education more accessible for all learners and putting them right into the scenarios to give them the hands on experience they need to be successful without the fear of making mistakes.