Podcasts are one of the fastest-growing media platforms for sharing content to meet both personal and professional interests. According to a 2019 survey in the U.S., an estimated 62 million Americans had listened to podcasts in the prior week and more than half of survey respondents had ever listened to a podcast. The most frequent reason for listening, the survey found, was to learn new things (Edison Research & Triton Digital, 2019).

myPD Unplugged is a podcast about professional learning that is leveraging this popular platform to create “anywhere, anytime” professional learning for educators. The Office of Curriculum, Instruction, and Professional Development in the Long Beach (California) Unified School District launched the podcast in 2018. As leaders from that office explain in the article on (see article), they were driven by the dual goals of expanding the scope and depth of professional learning for their own district staff and sharing their learning more widely.

The podcast team partnered with Learning Forward at our 2019 Annual Conference to interview expert conference speakers for an eight-part Thought Leader Series. The eight episodes are available for free download.

But the Long Beach team didn’t want the learning to stop with listeners hearing the experts’ voices and stories. To extend and deepen the learning, they created a facilitation guide for each episode, containing questions for reflection and discussion, learning activities, and additional resources.

The tool we feature here is an adaptation of the guide the team designed to accompany an interview with expert Andy Hargreaves about collaborative professionalism (Episode 3.5). All the guides are available for free download.
To learn more about the podcast series and the role it plays in the Long Beach professional learning strategy, see the article https://learningforward.org/journal/beyond-the-basics/the-long-beach-approach/.