We got to know each other’s thresholds. Holding tension in the shoulders. Holding tension in the voice. Pressing down on the desk with both hands and holding your breath.

And that’s when we’d say, “Take ten.”

I am not a SCRUM leader and this team does not have a SCRUM ecosystem. It is does not have a build phase, a test phase, and a team of QA specialists. It is a team of dedicated professional development trainers who want to collaboratively make exceptional content. So what do you do?

When I was a research fellow at Austin Community College, the leader of our program loved to repeat this quote: “If we treated active learning like any other thing we’v researched, by now we would have stopped doing research since it’s so obvious it’s an improvement over exclusive lecture.”

I’ve picked three tips that apply as broadly as possible. Explainer video? Meeting presentation? Check. Demonstration of a new tool? Check check check. Here they are:

Then suddenly you see a sign that says “Santa Monica 50 miles.” You calm down. You feel better. You know where you’re going, and you know there’s at least a chance of more signs telling you that you are headed in the right direction.

Here’s the secret: the learning objectives are the signposts.

The core of my instructional design philosophy could boil down to this: you have to create trust with the demographic you are serving. If you don’t, they will never tell you what they need.

Some trainings on accessibility are great; they provide a solid definition for what accessibility means, and give actionable guidance on how to increase access. Some accessibility trainings are…not so great.

I recently found a good one.

If you have the opportunity to create your own surveys, you have the opportunity to capture that thing we all crave when recommending instructional design interventions: high-quality data.

Figma is a tool that allows me to make graphics that clarify what I am trying to say. For example, a reverse designed is a complicated concept. When I try to explain it in writing, it goes something like…

Scrum is something that I never heard about when I worked in university professional development, but it’s something I’ve heard about (and utilized!) in every private sector position I’ve held. It’s a methodology for accomplishing tasks that is similar to chunking.

Everyone has that one book that brought them into the world of teaching. The book that explained the how and the why in a way that made sense. For me that book is Small Teaching by James Lang.

I’ve been doing this long enough to know that sometimes I will learn about a great and useful thing (a book! a strategy! a video!) but then, after using the thing, forget all about it. This blog helps me remember.