Post-COVID-19 Rooms of Our Own: Lessons Learned from Virtual Professional Development Projects Designed for Early Childhood Educators in Ontario

Abstract

This paper reflects and explores lessons learned during two professional learning series related to the pedagogical practices of early childhood educators (ECEs) in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on a comparative analysis of our observations, collaborative inquiries, and discussions, we underline post-COVID-19 conditions that change how we think, engage, and envision possibilities in professional learning. We discuss the way the use of technology at the intersection of time and space and carefully chosen pedagogical approaches pushed us to reconsider current practices used in the design of professional learning activities, the implementation, and the responses to educators’ learning. We focus on the way technology helped us envision and plan for virtual rooms as environments as third teachers. Trading the traditional professional workshop-like activities with fixed time boundaries for virtual café-style learning, introducing design thinking, distributed leadership, Indigenous world views, and rhizomatic wonderings, we discuss our decisions to change the directions of professional learning from focusing on skill development and transmission of knowledge to enhancing dispositions needed to become lifelong learners, innovators, and advocates. We conclude the paper with invitations and provocations for educators, academics, researchers, and regulatory bodies to further discuss professional learning activities for the early childhood education (ECE) community in Ontario. In brief, we focus on removing the dividing practices between professional learning activities and pedagogical approaches as a starting point to envision possibilities in Ontario’s ECE field.