Heidi starts by introducing a familiar concept: Bloom’s, particularly the cognitive domain that most educators will have familiarity with. However, she also illustrates something people may not know: Blooms has other domains (Affective, Psychomotor) that should be considered. I have seen these considered in some K12 settings, particularly at the Elementary level and in CTE (Career Technical Education) courses, such as an ROTC program design, but I have also seen a lot of schools fall back onto purely Blooms or modern day 4-pt learning scales that align with things like Marzano and Danielsen, which really aren’t effective at writing skills-based objectives (I say as a former teacher, who taught skills-based classes as well as content-based ones). Heidi finally dives into Mager’s, the big mindset shift that she focuses on: contextualizing the learning you want to happen and the outcomes in performance.

Summary: This one you a little bit just have to experience because of the Miro of it all! Dr. Kuva Jacobs does a great job making this session interactive by letting audience participation drive the discussion of learning myths. Myths come up such as “it’s easier to learn when you’re younger” and “it takes 10,000 hours to master something” and she addresses them. She also discusses her Learning Mythbusters group on LinkedIn (which is a great group to join — I enjoy it personally) and how we need to remember that when we see people perpetuate myths on social media, we still need to address them like a person because there’s a person behind that triangle post! It doesn’t necessarily help change minds or spread the truth to “bust” myths if we just fuss at someone they’re wrong/bad/stupid because they think learning styles are real.

Sara introduces teachers to a variety of business technology solutions for learning in this conference, including some modern features of the LMS and where learning technology is beginning to overlap with business data analytics and human resources tools. She does a great job also covering the “why” of technological changes in business and the purpose of various tools: most of which comes down to better employee experience, creating and storing learning content, tracking and analyzing data to drive performance, and making systems work together efficiently within an organization.

I’ll point out she doesn’t focus on authoring tools and only really mentions them in response to questions. I think one big shift teachers struggle with is this: authoring tools are not all of the tools instructional designers use, and designing and developing content uses different tools than the analysis, implementation, and evaluation phase of instructional design may. What Sara highlights are all the technologies that help us implement, evaluate, and analyze learning solutions, not just design and develop them.

Heidi covered so many things! She covered what teachers do and some ways that might relate to various parts of Learning and Development (L&D) in order to help folks develop clarity towards the kind of niche they wanted to focus on in L&D. She gave basic career clarity tips, thinking about how to find a niche that works for you. Later, she focused in on instructional design and other duties within L&D roles in order to connect what you like to do and already do to the corporate field, with such great specific, concrete examples of instructional design terms. If you didn’t watch the video yet, her examples are extremely helpful so I deeply suggest it!

This is a series of posts recapping and reacting to sessions from the recent January 2023 Training, Learning, and Development Community (TLDC) event to support teachers transitioning to L&D.

One thing I find interesting: schools are supposed to have robust learning cultures for staff too, but they often never get to this goal. That’s not really so different than challenges faced outside of education in some ways. But you have to “zoom out” of your classroom, and you also have to understand — as Sara said — the different goals and stakeholders involved. I feel like a comparison activity is a good mental shift here.

The point of this homework — and any of the homework I give — is to start getting you thinking critically about teaching vs. learning and development, how they intersect and where they differ, and to develop some understanding of business acumen. So this was a perfect place to start, with the very first session, because Sara refers back to business acumen over and over.