Propel Professional Learning

Five Things to Do Now So September Doesn't Catch You Off Guard    Small steps to take now for a calmer, more confident fall By Kathy De La Torre and  Carrie M. Cannella It's June. Your inbox is a bit more manageable, your calendar has some breathing room, and you know this peaceful pacing won't last. Before you know it, September will arrive, the fall schedule picks up, and a new wave of learners reaches out. Suddenly, you're juggling meetings, intakes, training, teaching, and community events, among other things, all at once. Here's the good news: A little planning now buys you some breathing room later. Although most literacy programs run year-round, the summer months are still typically a bit quieter and are a great time to get ahead of the curve. By taking advantage of June and July to lay the groundwork with bite-sized tasks, you can scale your outreach without the autumn burnout.  Every September brings three big opportunities to highlight our adult literacy w...

Strategizing with TBR: Level up your lesson planning By Rebecca Sherry & Nadia Kader Training From the Back of the Room (TBR) is an instructional methods workshop designed using cognitive learning theory to support professionals in tying instructional content to engaging activities. TBR has been incredibly popular in New Mexico adult education and is offered multiple times per year in two different formats; TBR In-Person and TBR Virtual Edition, for professionals who deliver content online. With this article, we intend to outline the cognitive psychology theories behind TBR design, what TBR strategies are, and how to choose the activities that accomplish what you want to in your practice. TBR, originally designed for corporate workplace learning, utilizes cognitive learning techniques such as cognitive load theory and active learning to enhance short-term learning goals. Cognitive load theory refers to the different categories of working memory load that affect retention and memo...

Organizing Interactions in the Online Environment By Nadia Kader Are you worried about engagement in your online class? Are you getting ready to start online instruction but are unsure how? Online instruction can be challenging even for the most seasoned practitioners. At the forefront, there is so much to consider: audience, engagement, resources, tech tools, and support. At Propel, one of our priorities is to support you in designing, developing, and delivering the best online learning possible. This article intends to discuss what transactional distance is and what the four interaction points to consider are in order to bridge the transactional distance between students and their instructors. Instructors may use this information to better design their online courses. Administrators may use this information to support online course design and instructors in improving their practice with pointed feedback and potential solutions.  Transactional distance is a theory that hypothesiz...

                     Getting Started Tutoring Online                                                                      by Carrie M. Cannella                                                                       Tutoring adults online requires all of the same skills a nd approaches as tutoring in person PLUS the extra digital literacy skills for both the tutor and the learner. While it is often more challenging than tutoring in person because of this extra layer, the benefits include safety, critical at this time, and flexibility for the student. It...

  Microlearning in the Library  By Linda Martin and Carrie M. Cannella   Linda is tutoring a student who recently got a new job and now simultaneously has less time for studying and is more anxious to progress quickly in his studies. They have been talking about how to shift gears and how to learn more in less time: the constant struggle with adult learners balancing all of life’s responsibilities.  Around the same time, Propel colleagues started a discussion group about a book called Microlearning: Short and Sweet , by Karl Kapp and Robyn Defelice (learn more about the book from this podcast ). Linda jumped on board, thinking this might be the magic bullet—a way to compress her student’s lessons. She realized that there is no magic bullet; microlearning can’t replace the deeper study her student was working on. Yet she has found microlearning to be an effective addition for the learning, teaching, and tutoring repertoire.  This post will focus on how Prope...

What’s the Buzz About Microlearning?  By Rebecca Sherry  Microlearning. Maybe you heard this word at a recent conference. Perhaps you’ve tried out some of Propel’s microlearning offerings like Mental Health Mondays or TSTM-E’s Nine Skills Microlearning Minute . But what is microlearning, and how and why do we use it as an instructional tool? In this blog post, we’re going to investigate those questions and introduce you to some resources for implementing microlearning in your teaching. You will also see some microlearning examples embedded throughout this article as a way to demonstrate how this tool works in practice.   Microlearning Explained   Let’s start by defining microlearning. In their book Microlearning: Short and Sweet, authors Karl Kapp and Robyn Defelice (2019) synthesize several definitions found in the research in this way: Microlearning is an instructional unit that provides a short engagement in an activity intentionally designed to elicit ...