Supporting Teachers in the Classroom

Hello and welcome to my scenario-based eLearning concept project. This is an eLearning experience for leadership teams in Australian schools. The project is based on my own experience as a High School Teacher and also published research. 

The project addresses Teacher Retention issues by raising awareness of Teacher Mental Health and Well-being. It aims to shed light on the workforce’s need for trust and support from Administration teams.
‍

The Problem—and How It Can Be Addressed

The project aims to address an issue that’s well-documented in Australian research and media. Australian schools are contending with a major teacher shortage crisis (Longmuir, 2023).

Teacher shortages affect student performance, engagement and mental health (Kelchtermans, 2017; Ronfeldt et al., 2013). It is in a school’s best interest to minimise its staffing turnover rate. 

I bring to this project my own experience of two Australian schools. One school was well managed—teachers had the support and trust to do their jobs right. The other school—admittedly—was not. 

I used two papers to ground my project—a study from Monash University, published 2022; and a report commissioned by the Associated Independent Colleges NSW, also published 2022. My experience with poor management was by no means unique—rather these papers show a common issue in the Australian school system (Heffernan et al., 2022; Wyatt-Smith at al., 2022).

In schools and State Education Departments alike, teachers feel management places too much emphasis on policy and accountability. This focus conflicts with the alternative approach, one of trust and support. It leads to teachers feeling disempowered, devalued, and unnecessarily overworked. Teachers understand that with their qualifications, they can enter other industries which pay more, offer better career development and—most importantly for this project—treat them with respect. 

The eLearning experience has been created to attend to Knowledge and Skills deficiencies in Education leadership. In so doing, it will address its own performance metric, Teacher Turnover Rate. 

Action Mapping

I created an Action Map to address the stated Business Goal: Reduce Year-on-Year Teacher Turnover Rate by 20% in 3 Years Time. In practice this goal could be applied at either a school, district or state level—with the target and timeline adjusted, based on site specific data.

In place of a Subject Matter Expert, I drew on my own professional experience to identify actions needed to improve Teacher Mental Health and Well-being. I referred to published research to confirm the importance of each. The research helped me categorise actions under four banners.

Under the category of Reduce Workload, many tasks were pinpointed as non-essential and unimportant to the business of actual teaching—tasks often referred to as Administrivia (Heffernan et al., 2022).

Under Replace Accountability with Support, the importance of a school-wide discipline system was highlighted as a means to return accountability to students and support to teachers (Wyatt-Smith at al., 2022).

Another area of importance was the need to Reduce Emotional Stress, achieved by allowing support staff to take on greater counselling, behaviour management and differentiation responsibilities (Heffernan et al., 2022).

The last element was to Provide Recognition and Trust. Teachers have been screaming to be heard (Heffernan et al., 2022; Wyatt-Smith at al., 2022).

Actions of consequence were added to the below map.

From this map, the ten most important actions were chosen. Using these, I formulated ten scenario-based questions.

Text-Based Storyboard

I decided to put the user in the shoes of a Deputy Principal newly promoted at a school. The school is at a breaking point and the user becomes a catalyst for change. On their first day, the user must confront those policies which are driving teachers to quit. In conversation with teaching staff, the user must steer the situation and choose the best course of action.

The story involves confrontation with the Executive Principal, the figure ultimately responsible for policy. The user must walk a fine line as Deputy Principal. As a leader it’s a Deputy’s job to do what’s best for the teachers and the school. With a boss that has her own idea about what’s best, the position creates enormous potential for conflict.

The story is designed to be engaging and high-stakes. Wrong answers send the user on rollercoaster-ride pathways. Students get hurt, teachers quit, the user gets fired, there are blow ups and arguments and lots of drama. These kinds of consequences are not only engaging, they actually emulate real school environments.

The story follows a three-act structure and builds to a climactic end. The story arc is based on an archetypal structure and the characters serve archetypes too. Most notable, the user acts as Protagonist and the Executive Principal as Antagonist. Gavin the Deputy serves as Mentor and also Quest Giver.

Visual Mock-Ups

With a draft of the story complete, I considered visual design and how it might enhance the program. To reflect and enhance the drama, I opted for an expressive animation style. It would be important to show characters and the emotions they’re feeling.

I chose to incorporate a warm colour scheme. The scheme was designed to agitate and rouse emotion in the user. The idea was to bolster the drama in the narrative.

I improved the slide layouts over a series of drafts. My wife is a professional Graphic Designer and she offered help in this phase. She hit home the importance of design hierarchy in giving text pride of place. I made compromises on props and character setups in order to achieve this end. I also altered my choice of colour to square attention on the text, not the character.

In each of the ten questions, the user cycles through three template designs. The Ask Gavin template is a fourth—and is there for additional support.

The story features dialogue with seven different characters. Each character has representation in the Path to Question template. See below, Brian.

The Question template is next. The example case is for Question Eight.

A response will lead to a consequence pathway. The pathways are represented on a blackboard.

On top of the question series are template designs for the Introduction and Conclusion. They all feature a mockup of the school.

Upon reflection, the visual design phase was a big learning curve. My wife helped a lot and will continue to provide assistance and insight.

Interactive Prototype

Development began with a Storyline mockup of the Introduction and Question One. This first prototype included basic animations. All animations were contained within text-based slides.

My wife considered the prototype to be too similar to a PowerPoint presentation. She suggested that more animation would help. I followed her advice and worked on the opening sequence particularly. Here I used Adobe After Effects to create a transition animation and also an extended visual sequence.

The sequence goes for 22 seconds and shows the character Brian up against the student Jake. It’s a good way to hook viewers’ attention from the get go.

Full Development in Storyline 360 / JavaScript Certificate

Full development followed. I used Storyline 360 to create a fully realised project. Features used include inserted elements; timeline adjustments; animations, motion paths and object positioning; states; layers; triggers; variables; embedded JavaScript; and references.

On the closing slide, I created a window for the user to insert their name. The name, among other variables, then generated onto a PDF certificate. See the following example:

To build this functionality, I used an Execute JavaScript trigger. For the name and date variables, I developed code with the help of an online tutorial—but for Help Prompts Viewed, Pathways Explored, and Time Spent in Course, I built the code myself (using JSHint, ChatGPT, and Google Chrome Developer Tools to troubleshoot errors).

Evaluation, xAPI and the Learning Record Store (LRS)

This program is scenario-based eLearning. It has no quiz—rather choose-your-own-adventure consequence pathways. To evaluate users and what they were able to take away, I developed engagement based metrics.

As already mentioned, I created variables to track the number of Help Prompts Viewed, the number of Pathways Explored, and Time Spent in Course. For these metrics, higher values reflect greater engagement with the content. This may mean the user got the wrong answer more often—but in doing so they were able to explore the alternative consequence pathways. In a program like this, a user may purposely choose the wrong answer just to see what happens.

At the end of the course, the downloaded certificate allows the user to see these variables for themselves. For myself or a program administrator, the values have also been made available in a Learning Record Store (LRS).

Together with these metrics, an xAPI script retrieves statements on user progress through the course. With these statements I can track users and how far they got. There may be a question at which users are disengaging and quitting en masse. If so, I will be able to identify it and work toward a fix.

With trial and error and several tutorials, I built the xAPI code piece by piece. See below in full.

The code sends user progress information from the program to the LRS—with either the initialized, progressed or completed verbs. The verbs are accompanied by a score out of ten—to show the number of questions completed. This score takes the JSON path expression result.score.

A timer records time spent on every question, and altogether total time spent in the course. For the LRS, it is displayed in ISO 8601 format on the JSON path expression result.duration.

The two variables Help Prompts Viewed and Pathways Explored are separately sent to the LRS, under the object.definition.description JSON path expression.

To send statements from the course, I used the following JavaScript trigger.

Below is a screenshot of the LRS with collected statements.

The raw data can be used in one of two ways. For quantitative analysis, it can be exported to a spreadsheet and processed there. To influence variables or create leaderboards within the eLearning program, it can be extracted using xAPI querying.

References and Attributions

Longmuir, F. (2023) 'Australia's teacher shortage is a generational crisis in the making. How can we turn things around?', ABC News, 30 January. Available at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-30/pandemic-exposed-australia-teacher-shortage-students-schools/101886452

Heffernan, A., Bright, D., Kim, M., Longmuir, F., & Magyar, B. (2022). ‘I cannot sustain the workload and the emotional toll’: Reasons behind Australian teachers’ intentions to leave the profession. Australian Journal of Education, 66(2), 196–209. https://doi.org/10.1177/00049441221086654

Wyatt-Smith, C., Holloway, J., Alexander, C., Harris, L., Day, C., & Marcy, A. (2022). ‘Reviewing the Evidence Base’: Attraction, Pathways and Retention – A Focus on Teacher Retention. Sydney, Australia. Association of Independent Schools New South Wales and Australian Catholic University.

Kelchtermans, G. (2017). ‘Should I stay or should I go?’: Unpacking teacher attrition/retention as an educational issue. Teachers and Teaching, 23(8), 961–977. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2017.1379793

Ronfeldt, M., Loeb, S., & Wyckoff, J. (2013). How teacher turnover harms student achievement. American Educational Research Journal, 50(1), 4–36. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831212463813

<Vector Image Attribution> "Annoyed People at Work" by upklyak on Freepik (image#34477980)
<Vector Image Attribution> "Heart" on template.net (image#74627)
<Vector Image Attribution> "Windows" by pch.vector on Freepik (image#16369067)
<Vector Image Attribution> "Globe" by brgfx on Freepik (image#9957020)
<Vector Image Attribution> "World Map" by macrovector on Freepik (image#13031912)
<Vector Image Attribution> "Razor" by macrovector on Freepik (image#6479491)
<Vector Image Attribution> "School Building" by macrovector on Freepik (image#9377400)