About Me
I began my work in the education field teaching pre-K and kindergarten in Houston, Texas. I joined Teach For America’s national design team specializing in early childhood in 2007 and spent over a decade creating and delivering innovative content-focused programming and support for early childhood teachers and their coaches across the country. I left Teach For America in 2018 to begin my consulting practice, POP Ed Consulting.
I bring years of experience observing, evaluating, and working to improve classrooms across the country; coaching designers to create powerful learning experiences; and applying the theory and practice of adult learning and motivation principles. I am well-versed in the science of learning and development and eager to work towards the day when all teaching implements this knowledge base.
My Instructional Design Philosophy
Valuing the Adult Learner
In the field of education, it is a universal truth that we can’t teach what we don’t know. Adults must receive development that builds a relevant understanding of both content knowledge and pedagogy, across disciplines and domains, including academic and social-emotional learning. Teaching is a complex art, and by honoring the adult learners in our profession we will have the best chance of leading our students to the ambitious outcomes they deserve.
Creating a Welcoming Environment
If learners feel scared, threatened, cold, or hungry, they are not in a physical or mental state to learn. Creating an environment that is comfortable and meets learners’ physical and psychological needs for safety and connection increases the probability that they are in a receptive state.
The Purpose of Instruction
Adult learners are highly focused on the potential relevance of learning to their personal or professional life. Learning that is clearly relevant to the people in the room will increase learners’ attention and persistence. Sometimes learners will need help understanding why something should be important to them, and developing their beliefs about value for the task can be incorporated into the learning experience to promote learners’ motivation. If something is worth spending time to learn, then instruction must be designed to maximize learners’ time and attention so that learning results in lasting changes.
How People Learn
Supportive relationships, even temporary relationships with a facilitator in a training, mediate experiences in a positive way. Powerful experiences, those which introduce new information in an especially memorable way, can propel learning forward exponentially. Combining the two results in especially effective outcomes for learners.
Valuing Learners’ Experiences
Adult learners have a wealth of experience to connect to new learning and to share with others. Strong learning designs incorporate prior experience so that learners feel valued and knowledgeable. Bringing diverse perspectives into the room increases the likelihood that all learners can connect to the information and feel successful.
Creating a Sense of Urgency
Time is the one thing we can never get back. Being respectful of the fact that learners are spending their time with you means that you must use it wisely. Strong learning design and facilitation creates a stimulating sense of goal-directed focus for achieving the learning outcomes in the time available, without creating a feeling of pressure.
Responding to Learners’ Needs
Even the best-created plan cannot account for the range of possible responses from a group of learners. A skilled facilitator pays attention to learners’ questions, body language, and engagement during a training in order to respond in purposeful ways.
Immediate Practice & Application
If learners don’t apply what they have heard, read, or seen to their own contexts in a meaningful way, the likelihood they will retain that information is greatly reduced. Incorporating authentic skill-based practice, application, feedback, action planning, peer discussions, and other strategies into training sessions helps learning stick.
A Little Information Goes A Long Way
It’s easy to overwhelm learners with too much information at once. By providing information in bite-size pieces and following that with discussion or application activities, learners are able to process and integrate new learning into their existing knowledge base before moving on.
Stories, Analogies, & Metaphors
Humans are attuned to stories—every culture had an oral storytelling tradition before the advent of writing. Even today, in our modern society, we remember rich stories more easily than we remember statistics. By structuring key information around memorable elements like a story, analogy, or metaphor, learners will remember it more easily.