Designing a Professional Development Program for Teachers Using Digital Technologies in Their Classrooms: An Application of D.School's "Design Thinking Bootleg" at Stanford University

This paper describes the process of designing, developing, testing, and implementing a professional development (PD) program for teachers using a digital mathematics learning platform in their classroom practice. The program was designed with the dual goals of familiarizing the teachers with the digital learning platform and developing professional learning communities within schools around this work. The PD design was carried out by a team of one researcher and three teachers, with a continuous close contact and openness to the teachers’ needs and reactions to the PD. To describe the process this team went through, we use the “design thinking bootleg” from the d.school at Stanford University. The “design thinking bootleg” has five components, namely Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. For the Empathize component, the team used insights from visiting teachers and their classrooms, observing how they work with the platform and what their needs are, and working with groups of teachers during training sessions. The Define component led to the problem definition, which was the need to provide sustained support for teachers to become familiar with the use and usefulness of the math platform. The Ideate component built on previous findings from direct contact with the users, the rich teaching experience of the three teachers, and the researcher’s empirical evidence of the long-term support that professional (learning) communities (PC/PLC) can provide to teachers in schools undergoing innovation and change. The Prototype took the form of an online Moodle-based PD consisting of six sessions spread over six months of a school year. The format consisted of videotaped professional discussions and instructional videos that teachers could access as a team at their school at any time. The innovative prototype was Tested with 50 volunteer teachers from 10 schools during one school year in Luxembourg, who provided rich feedback on all aspects of the PD. The prototype was called “Professional Learning Communities for MathemaTIC” (or PLC fir [for] MathemaTIC) and its reiteration was followed by more than 100 teachers in the following years. In this paper, we describe the process and reflect on the resulting PD and its outcomes, as well as the lessons learned from such an enriching experience close to teachers’ classroom practice.