Teacher Designer 2
Teacher Designer
Teachers as Designers
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What did I learn?
Designing is not planning. Design requires reflecting on and coming up with an idea for teaching before actually creating a “plan of action”.What is the best way to go about this? How can I best help my students to learn? Design is about innovation. Design allows for ideas that are outside the traditional methods, but don’t necessarily exclude them. Thinking about choosing the right methods for learning. Designing the idea. What do I see happening?Teachers need to reflect while the teaching process is occurring.Teachers must reflect after the lesson: What did I like? What needs to change?· What does it mean and what supports that position?It means that teaching from a prepared pacing guide isn’t the best way for students to learn. It means we, as teachers, need to stop and think, prior to beginning a lesson. We need to determine what we want to see as the outcome and how we can best get there. What sequence of events will help students to learn? We want more than just an understanding of skills. We need our students to be communicators, working together. We want to provide them with opportunities to think and solve problems, not just follow a prescribed set of steps. We want to allow for creativity in our students.The readings from this week all support these ideas. The NEA, the Common Core Standards, Partnership for the 21st Century; all support the idea that teaching needs to be more that is has traditionally been. The design in teaching to allow for student collaboration, communication, and creative thinking.· What are the ways in which it might impact my practice?It is exciting to step back and design a unit with these ideas in mind. How can I embrace these ideas; not just continue on the same path I have used? We are about to begin our first big unit of study. I want to reflect on whether or not it meets these objectives and, if not, see how I can make changes to do so.
"Teachers need to reflect while the teaching process is occurring." Exactly! I feel like that's an area we don't always get around to. We get so wrapped up in being prepared for the week, having all of our copies complete (while keeping our fingers crossed the copiers are working properly), and prepping for the long-term that we don't always make time for that reflection. My planning team, CLT, at work tries to make time for reflecting at least once a week, but as teachers know, part of our job is being flexible and that reflection time doesn't always happen because something else came up.
ReplyDeleteNot sure what district you're teaching in, but it seems that LCPS and FCPS (One to the World, and Portrait of a Graduate, respectively) are both making attempts at being innovative with what the NEA, Common Core, and Partnership for 21st Century are striving for with the 4C's.
What content do you teach? Were you able to pull in some ideas from class into your unit? I teach 7th grade math and I'm going to do a burma shave activity to review integer rules!
I'm teaching an Algebra 1 class to 9 - 11th grades (many ESOL students) and a Prob/Stat class. Right now, I've been focusing on the idea of making the math I teach relevant to the students. I'm trying to take the time to reflect on how I can make what I need to teach more relevant to the lives of my students. As you suggest, we are always so strapped for time. Our CT was just introduced to the Ten Marks program which is supposed to be really great for reaching the low/high group of students. (We already tend to focus on the middle.) I don't know that any of it does more than teach to the learning skills part of math. As with the Sabertooth curriculum, we are very definitely mired in all that is the SOLs.
DeleteWhen I read your blog, what I found really inspiring was the idea of design as an ongoing process. I guess that one of the positive aspects of our profession is that it is iterative and that we have the opportunity to have a fresh start every school year. I think being able to embrace and refine what worked well in previous years while discarding ideas that did not fare well are trademarks of good teaching practice. I suspect that the same can be said about designing learning. It may very well be that there’s no perfect design as a ‘product’, but as a ‘process,’ subject to constant revision.
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of the hope is in that "fresh start"! Each year we try new ideas and hope to see the students more engaged, learning with more understanding. Sometimes it works, sometimes... maybe not! That's why I think the whole thing is ongoing. I can't change everything I'm doing right now. There isn't the time in one day to do that. I can change something here and there, though. I like the idea of the reflection before, during and after learning. There's a lot of opportunity to tweak what we do.
Delete"Teaching from a prepared pacing guide isn't the best way for students to learn." So true!! This is something I think most teachers would admit to recognizing as true, but then when it comes time to plan those lessons, it's not just the "easy way out" to follow the pacing guide, it's not knowing where to begin your plans otherwise. It's a novel idea (to me, anyway) that we have to DESIGN our instruction long before the planning takes place. The design of a pacing guide is archaic. So, what design DO we need? I certainly know I need a lot of time to figure it out, but I'm going to start with baby steps at least!
ReplyDeleteI'm on board with the baby steps! We are tasked with doing so many things. I hear a lot of teachers leaning on the pacing guide, not because they thinks it's the best path, but because it provides a ready-made structure. They can add to it as they have time. Certainly (having working on these committees myself), a team of experienced teachers has met to determine a good sequence for learning. It may not be the best, but it's worked relatively well for a long time. I feel that the "design" concept puts some of the freshness back in my teaching. I feel excited to look at math through different lenses. How can I make all of this formulaic so students see how the math fits with their lives. Living to learn and learning to live. It has made me stop and think about the whole picture.
DeleteYour statement, “We, as teachers, need to stop and think, prior to beginning a lesson… to determine what we want to see as he outcome and how we can get there” was very well stated. Creating good instruction is a reflective practice. Entering my eighth year of teaching middle school language arts, I always look at the resources I implemented in the previous year when covering the same objective and reflect about how the lesson could have been improved. I ask myself about its effectiveness and whether the lesson contributed to my desired outcome. There are many factors to consider, however, such as student and community need. Regardless of how lessons are adapted year to year, it is important for teachers to reflect and continuously improve their instruction to adapt to a changing society.
ReplyDeleteI know that I have not taught the same thing the same way any two years in a row. There always seems to be materials, activities, sequencing, or whatever that needs to be changed to fit the population I have that year. It would definitely be easier if I could just come up with a program that was one-size-fits-all! I know I am a much better teacher now, after many, many years of teaching, than I was even in the first 10 years. It feels like there have been so many different suggestions for better teaching thrown my way, depending on the setting where I've been teaching. I take pieces from here and there. I'm trying to be much more aware of the need to stop and reflect, before, during, and after teaching. I want to reshape the material I teach to make it more relevant to the world as my students experience it.
DeleteI definitely agree with your thoughts about a pacing guide, that seems more of a outline or plan, but not really a design. But here is what I wonder about. Am I even prepared or qualified to be a designer? How do I know what the students need or what the community needs? What experiences do I bring (outside the classroom) that will relate to the content or put the content into context? It's almost as if we need a separate education on designing, maybe that is why we landed here :)
ReplyDeleteI always wonder if the people most qualified to do this job are those who come to it from another space. I have always been a teacher. I've taught other subjects, but I don't have the experience to talk about really using math, because my occupation doesn't go beyond teaching it. That being said, I can invite those who do use math in their career to visit and talk with my class... I know, and I've tried reaching out. I haven't gotten a single bite, in terms of someone being willing to come to school to talk!
DeleteI do think we're qualified to come up with a design. I have lots of great ideas (or at least I think they're great). Making them happen... Working on it.