Why professional development enhances educator wellbeing: What we can learn from professional development on Zoom teaching during the pandemic.
Lauren Woodlands and Sarah Dart, Queensland University of Technology
There’s nothing quite like the apprehension and anxiety of being a relative novice thrust suddenly into completing unfamiliar tasks completely out of context. That’s exactly what it felt like for thousands of higher education professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic, when they were asked to turn their face-to-face teaching into an online learning experience.
While the student-facing educators were scrambling to flip their teaching, our central academic support teams were doing the same and creating professional development (PD) on the fly to help and support the rapid change required. My colleague and I then decided that this was also an excellent opportunity to understand better the capacity building enablers presented by one of these supportive PD offerings called Introduction to educating on Zoom.
In our study we wanted to know:
How did we impact educator confidence?
How did educators define successful teaching online?
What’s important when teaching online for the first time?
We looked back at the way our team designed, taught and supported teaching staff, which included academic, sessional and professional staff. We wanted to know how our responsive PD might have contributed to staff wellbeing during a time of incredible change and uncertainty.
So what did we learn about running responsive PD?
We had over 600 staff engage with these workshops on Zoom (more on their design can be found here). Then we asked those staff about their confidence levels, what suggestions they had for online teaching, and what advice they’d give to others just starting out. We’re now going to share with you two particularly important findings from our study that will help you better support educators to enhance their teaching practice and wellbeing, resulting in more confident educators and an improved student experience.
Firstly, short professional development even just 45 minutes, makes a massive difference to educator confidence. We called the PD series used to support teachers in using different digital tools “Technology Tasters” because they were designed to do just that – give them a taste test – and increase familiarity. Providing educators with straightforward tips and clear strategies for using the technology to engage students resulted in more confident educators with enhanced wellbeing and greater motivation to develop teaching innovations. This increase in teacher confidence and wellbeing also had a bonus flow-on effect for student wellbeing.
Secondly, educators can’t focus on student wellbeing through delivering quality pedagogy and engaging learning environments if they don’t feel comfortable with the technology. What we found was that, after practising and teaching with Zoom, educators reported they felt another boost of confidence. This came through in the advice they gave their peers about teaching online for the first time: many educators focused on technology-related advice and reassurance, with only some educators discussed learner engagement and active learning strategies. A key finding here is that, following initial familiarisation, it takes time to build the foundational technology know-how necessary to enable educators to then focus on student engagement.
We suggest that tertiary institutions take the time to run short bursts of timely, responsive PD as this does make a difference overall to the learning experience for students. Further, investing in PD that enhances confidence and reduces educator apprehension is a practical wellbeing strategy for staff.
Lastly, if you’re looking for some of those wonderful teaching tips for Zoom, our educator participants suggest increasing engagement through:
Using breakout rooms early in the lesson to make learners comfortable with engaging;
Trying non-verbal feedback (e.g., reactions and polls) to increase engagement for all; and
Being patient, using a variety of engagement strategies (e.g., chat, whiteboard, breakout rooms).
Dr Lauren Woodlands, Lecturer Learning and Teaching Development, Impact and Recognition Queensland University of Technology, and artist.
Dr Sarah Dart, Strategic Lead – Learner Experience and Evaluation, Queensland University of Technology.