Mindy Lower: Our Classroom Management Expert

Mindy Lower

With 25 years of special education experience, Mindy Lower has spent many hours managing classrooms that others (myself included) might find challenging. That expertise, combined with her experience teaching multiple PLS online courses, made her a terrific Subject Matter Expert for the revision of our Classroom Management course. Mindy made revising this course very easy for me; she stayed right on schedule through the entire five-month development process and had tons of great ideas about how to revise the activities to make them more effective. Working with Mindy was truly an enjoyable experience for me.

To give you all a chance to get to know Mindy a little better and see the development from her perspective, I asked her to answer a few questions about working on this course. Here are her answers.

What did you learn while developing the course?

This was the first time for me to work with an instructional designer on writing and revising a course.  One of the main learning experiences for me was discovering how a class is built.   It was rewarding to watch the progression of the different steps that led to the final product of the course. I have taught for PLS the past two years, but this experience gave me more insight to how the courses are designed and developed which I think will help me as a facilitator. I also learned what the role of the instructional designer is and how important they are to the overall product.  They are very talented people and I saw many different skills from design to analysis used in this process.

What was the most challenging aspect of being a SME and developing the course?

One of our main goals in revising CM was to update the course and take advantage of the newer online delivery tools that are now available to us.  Each activity had to be evaluated as to whether it still fit our objectives, whether it needed to be revised, and what available technology tool would fit its intended purpose.  With Sakai we now have more options such as wikis and blogs, but we had to make sure that we were fitting the tool to the learning objective rather than forcing an objective to fit the tool.

What was the best part of the course development process?

Working with my instructional designer was definitely the best part.  This was my first time working on a project such as this and I was a little hesitant to try it.  Christy, my ID, clearly laid out the process and walked me through it.  It is amazing how the technology tools such as Google Docs and the availability of the internet allows us to complete projects collaboratively without ever meeting.  It was rewarding to see the final project and to think that I had a part in it.

Do you feel that serving as a SME will influence your approach to facilitating in any way?

This experience will be influencing my facilitating.  Since I have taken many online courses as a student in the past, I always try to look at a course I am facilitating through the eyes of the student.  Now with the SME experience, I have more knowledge on how to evaluate a course and analyze whether the objectives and goals are being met. Being an SME has definitely given me more insight to the structure of the course which will help me be a more effective facilitator.