Humanizing Online Professional Development

Humanizing online professional development has become more important as schools, universities, and companies continue to shift to learning online. The purpose of the chapter is to chronicle the collaboration of four teacher educators' successes and failures in moving a two-hour face-to-face professional development to online (Real Science PD). The Real Science PD provided pedagogical methods to engage students in K-12 science standards by integrating online tools to examine local and global science issues for approximately 25 K-16 educators. The facilitators aligned the seven common features of effective PD with the principles of adult learning theory and humanizing pedagogy as they attempted to translate what they did face-to-face into an online setting. Findings indicated that humanizing online PD can be best understood with clear objectives, demonstration of relevance, opportunities for engagement, relevant classroom contexts, and by providing opportunities for participants to envision applying what they learned in their own classrooms.