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Dave Smulders

Senior Manager, Faculty Development, CTLI

Integrating Reflection in Facilitator Development Training with PebblePad

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Self-reflection sits at the heart of our Facilitator Development Workshop (FDW), where participants complete daily reflections, set personal learning goals, and process peer feedback throughout the program. We’ve integrated PebblePad, an e-portfolio platform, to give that reflective work a structured, lasting home. Participants capture daily reflections, feedback, and goal progress in one connected space they can revisit and build on across the full workshop — turning scattered notes into a coherent record of growth.

 

Using PebblePad to scaffold reflection is an innovative pairing of proven facilitation practice with purposeful ed-tech, strengthening how instructors document, revisit, and act on their own development.

WHAT WERE THE MAIN GOALS OF THIS PROJECT?

To give reflection a dedicated space to capture ideas, observations, and reflections as they happen and, in doing so, build a stronger, more permanent, and accessible record of each participant’s workshop journey.

HOW DOES THIS DEMONSTRATE INNOVATION?

It takes a well-established, decades-old practice — reflection within the ISW/FDW model — and rethinks how that reflection is captured and used, rather than changing the pedagogy itself. That’s a meaningful form of innovation: not inventing a new teaching method, but modernizing the infrastructure around a proven one. This is also the introduction of a new technology (PebblePad) to help support existing effective practices.

PROBLEMS OR CHALLENGES FACED?

Integration of the reflective writing was difficult to manage in a busy schedule of daily activities. Some of this writing was left as homework during a busy workshop when it would have helped to bring this activity into the workshop itself.

LESSONS LEARNED

It would help to add dedicated time in the daily schedules to do this work, with greater guidance for participants so as to ensure that the reflective writing is comprehensive throughout the time of the workshop.

AUTHORING TOOL(S) USED

PebblePad, Blackboard Ultra

PROJECT LINK

It would help to add dedicated time in the daily schedules to do this work, with greater guidance for participants so as to ensure that the reflective writing is comprehensive throughout the time of the workshop.

About Dave Smulders
Dave Smulders works in faculty development at the Justice Institute of British Columbia. He supports instructors and staff who are experts in public safety, justice, and first responder fields. His work comes back to a couple basic questions: how do people learn, and how can educators design for that? In Liberating Structures sessions, World Cafés and the Instructional Skills and Facilitator Development Workshops, he tries to flip the script on traditional instruction by getting his learners to do all the work! Off the clock, he rides his bike and chases eudaimonia, roughly "a life lived well."
About Dave Smulders
Dave Smulders works in faculty development at the Justice Institute of British Columbia. He supports instructors and staff who are experts in public safety, justice, and first responder fields. His work comes back to a couple basic questions: how do people learn, and how can educators design for that? In Liberating Structures sessions, World Cafés and the Instructional Skills and Facilitator Development Workshops, he tries to flip the script on traditional instruction by getting his learners to do all the work! Off the clock, he rides his bike and chases eudaimonia, roughly "a life lived well."