00:00:11
Corey: Organizationally, you know, you guys see a bunch of solutions every year, and there’s probably people knocking on your door nonstop about things, but there’s specific challenges that you have and that you encounter. And I’d love to hear a little bit about the challenge that you were having that attracted you to LaunchPad. What was it about? And seeing this and then thinking about some of the challenges you were having that made you even want to give it a serious look?
00:00:39
Kelly: I think one of the biggest challenges that we’re having is an inundation of initiative overload and people feeling like they’re spread really thin, right? So there’s so much on there to do lists, but at the same time, you’ve got people who are very intrinsically motivated, highly motivated people who. flock to the field of education want to make a difference, and they enjoy learning themselves. So to be able to find something that is helpful to engage in bringing, bring people together to learn, expand their knowledge on really critical and important topics that we need to be on top of in education, but also be mindful of that initiative overload and the burden of day to day job functions that we have on people. Turning to something like a rocket PD, a launch pad where there’s bite size chunks of content, there are follow up workbook pages to engage with. There’s opportunities to have conversation with a group of people so you don’t feel so isolated when you’re when you’re engaging in your learning, but you also have that opportunity to kind of do some of that self-paced or picking and choosing like I can’t get a rocket PD learning module done during the day because I’m hopping from meeting to meeting to meeting, but I can certainly watch a video when I’m at home. You know, getting ready to do a load of laundry or I have some time set aside on Thursday, but everybody else on my team is busy with things on Thursday.
00:02:19
Corey: Speaking of that flexibility, any of the users or the people in your district downloaded and used the mobile app? At this point.
00:02:25
Kelly: One of our gifted specialists, Amanda, was just we just had our meeting earlier today and she is a mother of four. Her husband is a lawyer. They are a very busy family. Be careful what I say. She engages with the videos while she’s driving, so I don’t think she watches them because she’s not watching them. But what she does is she has those videos playing. She’s listening to the content while she’s in the car and then is able, of course, to follow up with those beautifully designed content pages that gets her to engage with the next steps of what I just heard. How can I apply that to my work?
00:03:03
Corey: So you’re able to go into it when it suits you in terms of your schedule, whether that be at home, in the car, at school, some combination of those things. Think about it on your own, then have some time to self-reflect with those workbooks and then hopefully, you know, apply those concepts to what you’re doing in your classroom or with your organization.
00:03:32
Corey: Talk to me a little bit about that application of the concepts. Once you’ve had a chance to listen to some of the content and engage with it, the ways in which you are applying it in education.
00:03:43
Kelly: We all know there’s a teacher shortage, right? Well, there’s a substitute shortage. So this allows our staff to do this. You know, we watch the videos, do it on their own, do it in short spurts, and then we can meet. You know, we usually do it in a staff meeting, so we’ll do it before school, after school. Um, and then start reviewing the workbook. But then we break up into small groups. Um, there’s enough of us to break up into small groups and really focus in on different parts of the workbook. Um, I’ve even moved it out to our parents. Um, we really focused on family engagement. Um, module. There it was. It was wonderful. And so we’ve branched out and done some things with our families. And our parents have really loved being engaged with it as well.
00:04:36
Corey: We think that it’s fairly intuitive and easy to use, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that people find it intuitive or easy to use or that they are using it. So I’d love to hear from you about how the implementation has been, um, how it’s going. If there’s things that we could even do better to help, it’s, uh, be smoother for you. So I’m just curious.
00:04:56
Kelly: Yes. So the way we started as we were stepping into something new, and I think anytime you’re stepping into something new, if you’re doing it together with shared expectations, that helps a little bit. So we decided to all together take the same course. We picked the AI course. I think that’s a topic that’s very top of mind for educational leaders right now. And we slowly worked through that course together. Again, the beautiful thing is that these courses are not at the same length and depth and breadth of like a graduate course, right? But we gave ourselves deadlines to say, okay, we’re going to watch this first video by this Friday or next week. And then in our team meetings we had a discussion about it. I know I’m kind of like a broken record about the workbook pages, but I loved using them because as a facilitator or someone who leads a team, it takes mental cognitive energy to come up with an agenda, or come up with discussion questions or come up with talking points. It takes energy to push that conversation or lead that conversation. Well, the workbook pages do that for you, so I loved that aspect of it. Moving ahead though, I very much just like I was in the classroom with my students, understand and know that different individuals have different interests and different passions, and I didn’t want to dictate for the remainder of the year. Okay, now we’re all going to do the literacy course together, or now we’re all going to do the culture class together. I opened it up to them to pick a course that was of interest to them, but I also asked them to do it with a buddy. So also I’m kind of following somewhat of that like gradual release model in education. We didn’t do one together and let me step back and say, okay, you’re completely on your own from here on out. I stepped it back just a little bit like benchmarked it. Now do it with a partner and a buddy. And when we come back together at our next month’s meeting and sit down, we’ll go through and share our experiences in that course. I think we’ll get to a point this year where I will step back, you know, almost completely and say, okay, now go pick a course of your own choosing that you’re super interested in. But I like, um, just when we learn something new, that information sticks. When we engage in dialog and conversation about it. Talking is learning. So I think although I love the availability of this tool to be digital and self-paced and asynchronous, I think that the information is going to stick and it’s going to be best applied when we’re able to have social conversation about it.
00:07:47
Corey: What I’m hearing is like, we’re going to go off and do this stuff. We’re going to think about it on our own. We’re going to come back together, pair up and share ideas. And then we’re going to take those ideas to the broader group to really start to make some improvements in what we’re doing. And man, that is just super cool. Thank you for sharing that. Um, how is it going so far?
00:08:08
Kelly: The feedback has been really good. I think that people like feeling validated and that they have a voice and some selection of choice, right? I think when you look at some of the the research and data out there on job satisfaction, no longer are people saying that it’s solely money or benefits that give them job satisfaction. It’s things like culture. It’s things like being heard. It’s things like being valued. And so although we may have an initiative or a central focus in our organization, which is important, right? We’re all in the same team. We should be working towards these same goal areas. I think when you give some individuals an opportunity to explore an area of interest on their own. Number one, it makes them feel valued and seen as an individual, and it also breathes fresh new life into that individual. To grow in an area in which they want to learn more about and then it enhances their overall productivity, efficiency, creativity. Brainstorming that individual now brings more value to the overall organization.
00:09:19
Corey: Maureen, how’s it going on the ground? How are you feeling? What’s your experience been like?
00:09:23
Maureen: We are an alternative school. We’re a therapeutic alternative school. We work with kids with high social emotional needs, anxiety, ADHD, high functioning autism, things like that. So, um, my staff is small, but they’re also, um, they’re really my staff consist of a tenured group of educators, um, who, you know, just really needed to kind of level up and refresh their pedagogy and align more with current educational best practices. So for me, I like the fact that I could have access, give them access quickly to this rocketPD and just let them jump on and see what you know inspires them. And as I here heard Kelly and Wendy even talk about kind of work on their own, you know, so helping them in an area they feel fits their needs best. We have staff meetings once a week, and I’ve used this at a staff meeting. So as an example, we use the AI one because we also had an AI conference that I attended just before this. So to follow up we did the AI, um PD together and it was easy. You know, it was relatable. Uh, the staff enjoyed it. And then like Kelly said, that there were the questions that kind of guided us afterwards. We just did those together, which was nice, so we could brainstorm, you know, different ways that we could use AI here. Um, at Gateway.
00:10:49
Corey: It was great to hear that because, Kelly, I think you mentioned that, like these courses are not super long. You can go to a lot of different places probably, and get deeper, longer graduate style courses. But when we travel around schools, one thing we noticed was that’s a tremendous time and resource commitment. And if you’re trying to understand and apply a topic quickly to things that are moving quickly on the ground in your school system, oftentimes you don’t have the luxury or the time to step through that. You may go back over the summer and choose to dive deeper into something like that. But for right now, when you’re trying to get things moving, you need a foundational understanding of things and the confidence to be able to have productive conversations. And that’s one of the things that got us so excited. So it’s super cool to hear you say that.
00:11:44
Wendy: You know, I just think as a new administrator, I love the format of it because, you know, we’re not experts. We can’t be experts in everything. So like the AI course or the family engagement course, um, you know, it gives us the information and then we’re able to dive a little bit deeper in it and use the workbook to really focus in on some questions that are topics, you know, within that, that we really are interested in and get a little deeper. And so it gives, I think, new leaders an opportunity to kind of practice their leadership skills. And then like Kelly said, kind of do that, um, release of control and let the staff kind of dabble in it on their own and then come back, you know, reflect and then dig a little bit deeper. So the format is a wonderful opportunity for that.
00:12:36
Corey: I always had this desire, this sort of vision in my head, which was that oftentimes we call it the gymnasium, right? When school districts are people within a school district or within a community get called to a professional development, right? They’re herded into the gymnasium, and oftentimes they don’t even know who’s speaking or why they’re supposed to be there. They just know that they have to go there in order to do their PD for the quarter or the year or whatever it might be. And you set someone up in that situation and you look around the room, people are on their phones, they’re talking to each other, you know, they’re not super engaged with it. And there’s a reason for that, right? It’s because they kind of don’t know why they’re there. But if you give them foundationally these things to explore and to do on their own so that they can have that ownership and they can choose their adventure, so to speak, relative to the things that they’re professionally interested in. By the time they get to those larger events, they’re excited to be there because they understand their purpose in being in that room. They know and respect the person, hopefully, who is speaking, and then they understand how they can apply what they’re doing to the larger sort of organizational context and the missions of the district or the community or whatever it might be, so that that’s like the the foundational idea here is like, we need to respect people. They’re professionals. They have their own interests. Let’s help them, explore them. And in doing so, create a force multiplier.
00:14:05
Wendy: I just want to add on to that, um, some responses from my staff. It’s not just like a sit and get kind of thing, you know, because we all get these long lists of, you know, the public works, we call it that. We have to complete those, those little trainings. Right. Um, but this is not like that. And so my staff was very hesitant in the beginning like, oh, another thing we need to do. Right. But they came back out of it. It’s not a sit and get one day like these work, work, books that go with it. And just the discussion, you know, that we’re bouncing off of everybody. Um, as we were getting going, they enjoyed it. And you could see, really, they were eager to like, okay, what are we going to do next? And what can we do on our own, um, and be really engaged with it. So the format is fabulous with the engagement piece, and it is not just a sit and get. And you’re going to you can read, um, what’s the word like everything that you’re learning, uh, through the classes that we’ve taken so far, we’re able to put and use and be effective with them and have it carry on to something else. We’re not just getting it in and then just letting it sit there so we’re able to, you know, really use some of the things that we’ve learned. And I see the teachers doing it. I like I said, the families are engaging with us. It goes right along, you know, with our program.
