Teachers as designers is moving away from the classic Norman Rockwell view of teaching and shifting to a style that brings innovation and creation into the hands of students.
No longer are teachers only planners, organizers and schedulers but now they need to be facilitators guiding students to voice and choose how they want to learn.
Teachers as designers is creating opportunities for students to learn, by taking the learning into their own hands. When a teacher becomes the designer she is no longer organizing and scheduling her lessons, but instead creating and innovating ideas to help her students think critically, problem solve, and communicate.
In the two articles we read we saw how two teachers incorporated technology in their lessons, but the results were very different. Where in one class students used it as an added tool and struggled to find a balance between technology and regular pencil and paper. In the other class it becomes an instrument of learning and an alternative way to assess students.
This the direction education needs to go in. The drawback is convincing everyone involved. When my school decided to make our middle school 1:1 we had over half of the parents against the idea completely. Partly because that is not the way they were taught. The reality is that if we want our students to be global citizens in the world we need to prepare them and given the tools to be successful. Designing instead of planning is a mental shift for all involved. Becoming a Designer in a Foreign Language classroom is going to be a challenge for me. In order for my students to become global citizens and aware of other cultures it is essential that I challenge them with real world problems that they will encounter. It’s going to take time, but the results from the students are what will make it successful.
Mel! So happy to have another language sister in the cohort! I teach German at the middle school level. I also find it challenging to incorporate some principles of design into my teaching, because the nature of what we do is slightly different than a more traditional school subject. Bill VanPatten of Michigan State University is an expert on encorporating authentic problem solving and communication into a language-learning environment. Check out his website and podcast: http://www.teawithbvp.com/. I was so inspired I even bought two of his books.
ReplyDeleteHa...good thing I don't teach English...incorporate? encorporate? Too bad you can't edit comments once they're published! :/
DeleteHa! That's always my excuse!
DeleteHurray for language teachers! I do feel like being a language teacher often and easily gets overlooked or forgotten. It's nice to find people like Bill VanPatten who have being working on incorporating problem solving in the language classroom. I can't wait to check out his site and podcast. Especially because I sit and think how am I going to do this with grammar?
Hi Mel! I LOVED your summary of the first design principle! I think you hit the nail on the head with your comment, "No longer are teachers only planners, organizers and schedulers but now they need to be facilitators guiding students to voice and choose how they want to learn." I, too, teach middle school (math 6), and our school is a pilot school for Personalized Learning. From what I have learned in this course so far, the lessons I am teaching are still expecting students to arrive at only one expected outcome. I look forward to learning how to design lessons that put the learning into the hands of the students. I think by doing so, my 6th graders may actually learn to like math!
ReplyDeleteThanks Kelly! I think it's easy for us to get lost in the planning and organizing and let the design slip past us. I'm excited to see what your lessons will look like. How does Personalized Learning work for your school? What are the ways they want you to implement it?
DeleteRight now PL is being implemented by only certain teachers. In math 6, videos are posted on Vision or YouTube for the students to watch at home the night prior to the lesson. Once they come to class, they are split into three groups: ones that completely understood what was presented in the videos and can work independently on the assignment; another group of students are in a group that has teacher assistance. These students may understand the concepts, but just have a few questions for clarification; the final group are students whom are completely lost and need teacher directed instruction. I am the math 6 special education teacher, so being able to divide a class into three groups is easy because two teachers can each lead a group rather than one teacher circulating.
Delete1:1 is a topic I'm very interested in. It's also interesting to hear that a large part of the school community was resistant to it. I do think you've hit on something with parents being afraid of education being different (Like in Saber-Tooth Curriculum) but it's definitely on us as educators to not fall into the trap (also from Saber-Tooth Curriculum) of using the computers to try and teach the same way the parents learned instead of thinking them as a resource to design lessons for the skills this generation needs.
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