Principle 1: Teachers as Designers

In addition to their doing practice, teachers participate in design practice - “before action” practice - situated in thoughtful consideration of principles, processes, patterns, and paraphernalia.

Principle 1 of designing learning says that teachers must participate in designing practice while carefully considering principles, processes, patterns, and paraphernalia. Those four considerations should lead the teacher to an optimally designed learning experience for students. It was clear that in the articles about two teachers using technology, the podcast summative assessment was thoughtfully designed by a teacher who was looking for students to meaningfully utilize skills they’d spent all semester developing, while the day-long iPad use for reading and math activities was planned by a teacher taking advantage of the technology and app access she knew the students had. While I will give the teacher the benefit of the doubt that the apps the students were using can incite meaningful learning, I don’t think the student’s use of them was meaningful in itself due to the apparent lack of framing. Something else that stood out to me about our first class was this simple statement: the word technology is closer to technique than it is to tool. The reason I chose this program instead of one of the many educational technology programs out there is because I’m not simply interested in using technology in my classroom--everyone is interested in using technology in the classroom. I want my practice to be purposeful and innovative. Technology can do things that humans can’t, so we should use it to do something that we couldn’t do otherwise! By the end of the program, I want my technique to be reflective of my technological knowledge.

This first principle suggests that practicing design helps you learn your own teaching, both content and pedagogy, better. The more you consider each little piece of instruction, the more invested you become in the students’ learning processes. It seems that after practicing designing for a while, teaching will become more efficient, as I’ll have a better understanding of the best combinations of process, patterns, and tools for specific content or categories of learning.

I look forward to diving more into the processes and patterns of designing learning. While we viewed the kitchen patterns, I kept thinking about how my school implements gradual release model for our teaching, which I suppose would be considered our teaching pattern. Often, the gradual release model is a great option for framing students’ learning, but in the past year, I sometimes got frustrated with the structure. At times, it just didn’t make sense with what I wanted to do, and I realize now it’s because I was being boxed into constant repetition of the same pattern. Learning patterns need to be diversified as part of design practice, just as we saw through the iPad teacher article that constant repetition of iPad and app use is not going to get the students what they need.

Design should be at the forefront of most “planning” conversation we have as teachers. As a new teacher last year, part of what I found took me so long to do my lesson plans was that I was thinking so long and hard about how I should structure all parts of the unit. Generally, I do think a lot about sequence and what the correct order to present information is, even within just a mini lesson. This principle will definitely encourage me to continue to evaluate sequencing and thoughtful presentation of material. However, when it got close to SOL time last year, I was so focused on what the students needed to learn that I lost sight of how they were going to learn it. I did think about which tools or resources would help them learn, but according to this principle, the tools are not enough.

On my drive home from class, I kept thinking how important design is, but how much more work it seems to be. Having a curriculum map or a fully constructed unit with great resources from a fantastic grade-level teammate makes our own workloads more bearable. I was left thinking that there must be a way to compromise what we should do (design, everything, always) and what we sometimes want to do (take the pre-made bundle). So far, I’m thinking that if I truly take a critical eye to what’s been given to me (a curriculum guide, a unit plan, and project resource, etc) and I determine that the design of it is intentional, thoughtful, and what my students need, then I’ve applied my design skills without practicing them, and that’s okay sometimes. I’m curious to see where the rest of the group stands on that, and even to see if my own opinions of that change as we continue to learn!