Conducting and Evaluating Professional Development Workshops using Experiential Learning

NACTA Journal, Jun 2004 by Myers, Brian E, Roberts, T Grady

Abstract

Faculty members are often called upon to design and deliver professional development workshops to a variety of clientele. This clientele could include county extension agents, agriscience teachers, producers, business owners, or local government officials. This article presents an experiential learning format in which faculty can accomplish the task of information dissemination in a manner that is both effective as well as enjoyable to workshop participants. Background information is presented for experiential learning and andragogy, which indicates that experiential learning is a teaching method that addresses the educational needs of adults. In addition, an example is provided for readers to use as a guide in developing their own professional development workshops. A brief discussion on evaluating professional development workshops is also included.

Introduction

Professional development workshops are routinely offered for agricultural education teachers and extension personnel. These educators attend these workshops to maintain their pedagogical and technical expertise. As such, the content presented varies greatly at these workshops. Professional development workshops can range from short workshops that may take only one hour to multi-day intensive workshops. Under the pretense of maximizing the information presented, these workshops often consist of a single or multiple presenter(s) that use a teacher-centered approach, such as a lecture, to deliver the content of the workshop. A teacher-centered approach is one that uses the teacher as the single focal point during the lesson. As such, the teacher is the single source of information and attempts to transfer that information to the participants (Bransford et al., 2000). Although appropriate for some topics, teacher-centered approaches are overused and often not the most effective means in presenting professional development workshops.

Practicing educators have discovered that using student-centered approaches that allow students to become actively involved in their education are more successful in teaching the content and maintaining student interest. Student-centered approaches seek to allow students to actively interact with the phenomenon being studied. The instructor takes more of a facilitator role and guides students as they learn the content. These methods include problem solving, cooperative learning, laboratory activities, and experiential learning. These same methods can be used to effectively deliver professional development workshops to teachers, extension personnel, and other adult audiences. Experiential learning has great potential for delivering professional development workshops and is the focus of this report.

The purpose of this article is to provide a guide to using experiential learning as the methodology to deliver professional development workshops to teachers, extension personnel, or other adult audiences. The material presented in this paper may benefit faculty members, administrators, teachers, extension specialists, and extension agents that are called upon to conduct these professional development workshops.

To facilitate a better understanding of experiential learning, this article contains information on professional development workshops and experiential learning. Also included in this article is an example of how to use experiential learning when conducting a professional workshop and how to evaluate a professional development workshop conducted in this manner. Finally, several resources are listed for further study on this topic.

Professional Development Workshops

Professional development programs have taken many shapes in the past. One of the major questions facing a designer of professional development is selecting a proper format for the workshop. When addressing these design questions, one should begin by defining the term "workshop." This is a term that is commonly used to describe professional development opportunities, yet can take on several meanings. For the purposes of this discussion, "A workshop is a short-term learning experience that encourages active, experiential learning that uses a variety of learning activities to meet the needs of diverse learners" (Brooks-Harris & Stock-Ward., 1999, p. 6). In order to better understand this definition, around which to design a professional development program, it should be broken down into its three major parts.

A Short-term Learning Experience

The first part that should be examined more closely is "a short-term learning experience" (Brooks-Harris & Stock-Ward, p. 6). Professional development is often delivered in one-shot sessions ranging from one hour to several days in length. These short sessions are chosen due to time and financial considerations. Recent research on learning and cognition has provided new insights into how people learn in various settings. These studies have shown overwhelmingly that short-term and isolated learning experiences fail to produce powerful and long-lasting learning (Stiles & Mundry, 2002).