Round 2: Customized Gear

Creating Cohorts

After the Usability Report from my testers, a question about creating and grouping learners in cohorts arose. Here are the following questions that needed to be considered:

1. How many people should be in each cohort?

2. Will the cohorts be by school proximity?

3. Should the cohorts be by grade level?

4. Can the cohorts be designed to include different level of tech savviness? Or the same level?

5. Is the consideration based on teacher or student progress the determining factor?

6. How many cohorts will be run?

7. How will the cohort meetings and trainings be affected in each grouping?

If permitted, I would love to have the opportunity from an organization to try the different conditioned demographics to determine if there is an advantageous grouping or would any combination work. Until the research opportunity arises, I will have to use my reasoning to determine the best form of grouping. Let's digest each question!

How many people should be in each cohort?

I believe 10 is a good rounded number for the first cohort. It is manageable. It is a not overwhelming and can cultivate a strong collaborative environment. I think for my current organization, which is small, it will create efficient and well rounded mentors. After the initial cohort, increasing the size to 20 participants while running 3-4 cohorts at once. This will not wear the organization thin and permit purposeful leadership.

Cohorts by Location

After my mom's usability testing, she mentioned that she feels more confident having a colleague while working on projects. This is an important factor, because confidence and collaboration is essential for all growth. Making sure participants are willing and comfortable when learning is important to me, especially people who are not sure of their tech abilities. Another benefit, our instructional specialist will be at the campus for immediate support. Having mentees and cohorts locally is convenient, however, having everyone in the same place limits creativity, causes dependence on specialist instead of cohort, and the sharing is confined.

Cohorts by Level

One of the effective professional development principles is relativity. Learners need to see how the tool can be molded to fit their needs. This will be build commodity amongst grade levels and create extensive designed lesson plans with ePortfolios. This can hone the teachers that are needing reinforcement in learning the material to then manipulate it for their students. For specialist, they can focus on 2-3 grade levels and become experts in those levels. However, what happens when one grade level is struggling, we can bring in a mentor but that is an after the problem happens. If we have different levels working together, we can create vertical alignment. For ePortfolios, teachers can see how to build on from the previous teachers lessons.

Cohorts by Tech or Readiness

The two ways cohorts can be clustered are (a) same level tech proficiency or (b) varied proficiency levels. I do not like same levels together. It can be an archaic form of thinking, but collaboration and growth by peers seems stagnant; meanwhile, different levels with an all encompassing range theoretical promotes collaboration. I think this is the least optimal grouping. I could use it for small groups within the innovation plan or for targeted T-TESS development.

At the end of the day, I would prefer a well rounded group of people to give the opportunity of different backgrounds to flourish and help develop the plan. In an ideal situation, I would research my organization to find the best possible groupings for their needs. This is a partnership so at the end of the day my organizations will have an impact on cohorts grouping.