Sibme continues to be the best way to facilitate professional development, coaching, and collaborative learning. In this new virtual environment, instruction is going to completely change. Teachers and staff will need training and pedagogical support in virtual environments. Don’t just provide your team with expectations and no support. This is going to be a stressful experience for everyone. Many of the employees at Sibme joined us from non-virtual work environments and we had to onboard them and provide ongoing support entirely from a distance. We’ve found ways to structure workplace learning such that our management team can provide quick examples, templates, and feedback to staff to get everyone up to speed. Here’s what we’ve found that works:

 

Start with a model

Providing people with something concrete to build off of is incredibly valuable. Sometimes we create models from scratch, sometimes we just link to an external source. We place the models in a Huddle for our team to review and ask questions about, either through time-stamped comments (on video and audio files) or in Huddle Discussions.

 

Ask for an artifact

Once our team has an idea of what we need them to produce, we ask them to create an artifact to share with the team for feedback. The artifact can be a sample email, a written document, a video or an audio file. The artifact gets uploaded to a huddle, and each person reflects on (either as comments in the video/audio file or as a huddle discussion) why they shared this particular artifact and an area related to it where they’d like to improve. We pair team members up every week and ask them to respond to their partner’s learning objectives, as well as identify one thing they learned from their partner’s artifact.

 

Share 

Periodically (we do it every two weeks), meet as a team in a web-conference to check in on each person’s learning goals. During the live session, people share the one thing they learned from one another with the group. We use this to identify any trends and learning-gaps that might need additional support. If we find a topic that deserves a deeper conversation, we’ll use Huddle Discussions and videos to continue the conversation as a group after the web conference is over. 

 

Of course, there are some simpler ways to provide on-demand and live training for your team. You might just need to provide simple how-to videos on new technologies, expectations, or procedures. If that’s the case, they can be simply housed in a Video Library, or, if you want the experience to be interactive, put them into a Huddle so people can ask questions and support one another.