What One National Writing Project Site’s 2020 (Online) Summer Institute Can Teach Us about Effective Online Professional Learning

Though research on effective professional development (PD) demonstrates that features including active learning, collaboration, modeling, coaching, reflection, and support over a sustained duration lead to positive outcomes (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017), and that technology-based professional learning needs to focus intently on pedagogical goals and not just use of individual tools (Mouza, 2009; Petko, 2012), many school districts and other PD providers continue to struggle to make these shifts. These challenges have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, as a shift to “emergency remote teaching” in the spring of 2020, followed by a renewed need for teacher PD in the summer of 2020 demonstrated that many providers were not prepared to embrace these realities. In this project, Author 1 served as a participant observer during a two-week, fully online PD experience, structured in the form of a summer institute (SI) through a local site of the National Writing Project, under the direction of Author 2. With 30 hours of synchronous learning that was delivered primarily through video conferencing sessions over two weeks in late June, the SI brought together 24 participants and six facilitators, and sought to model best practices in literacy instruction. Author 1 has, subsequently, interviewed six participants three times since the SI. Early findings suggest relational elements have a significant impact on participants’ perceptions of PD.