Topic 5 – Design Thinking and Learning Design

Using “Learning Designer” to map out an existing lesson and assessing the helpfulness of this process.

Overview:

Something that comes quite naturally to teachers who have a wealth of experience, is the art of lesson planning or learning design. While all teachers should have access to a program for a unit of work, these programs are usually quite a general overview of the unit and lack the “nitty gritty” of real lessons. However, for experienced teachers learning design can become so automatic that rarely any notes are made about how successful learning activities are sequenced meaning it is difficult to display and communicate these lesson designs. The way a good lesson is planned can, and should, be shared, but teachers need to have a way to effectively communicate their design to other teachers so that they may implement their original design. (Bower, 2017, p. 141) Using Educational Design Models, such as Learning Designer (Dimakopoulos, 2019), new teachers or teachers inexperienced in this area of the syllabus could be able to visualise this practise.

To try out this tool, I used a lesson that have recently designed for a high ability Year 8 NSW Science Class learning about chemical changes. Using Learning Designer I was able to document:

• The type of activity (e.g. analysis)
• The time taken for the activity
• The grouping of the activity
• The availability of the teacher
• Resources
• Whether there was an online component

After this, by clicking “Analysis” in the top left corner a graphical representation of the lesson was accessible. The three graphs displayed a temporal break up of the balance of activity types, whether it was online/face to face, the presence of the teacher and the type of groupings (individual, group or whole class).

A word document can also be exported, showing the break up of the different parts of the lesson, directly reflecting was was put into the TLA’s.

Assessment of helpfulness:

I found this to be an excellent tool for enabling professional reflection on the effectiveness of my learning design. For example, as someone who is passionate about inquiry learning, I was pleased in the analysis that a large proportion of my lesson was inquiry which suggested my practise for this lesson matches my philosophical perspective. The collegiality of this tool is another huge benefit. This tool would be very useful for communicating to other teachers a learning design, particularly if a teacher is known for being effective in planning and running activities in a unit. This could be particularly useful for pre-service or new graduate teachers in providing the with examples of solid lessons and enabling them to reflect on their practice, ensuring that they are diversifying not only the kind of activity but the time given to each style of learning. The usefulness of this tool was confirmed in a recent study by Laurillard, Kennedy, Charlton, Wild & Dimakopoulos (2018) p. 1050, who found that 70% of teachers using the Learning Designer saw the valued of sharing designs with this tool and 60% can see the benefits to planning teaching using the tool.

While very useful, this would unlikely be a tool used for planning every lesson as this would be unrealistic and unnecessary for experienced teachers. Further to this, the true nature of teaching and learning is that there are some activities that do fall outside of the scope of the prescribed areas. Discussions with students one on one and organic moments in the class cannot be captured with this tool. Rather this tool is useful for obtaining an overview of the flow/design of a lesson so as to help other teachers replicate and best enable effective learning.

References:

Bower, M. (2017). Design of Technology-Enhanced Learning: Integrating Research and Practice. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing.

Dimakopoulos, D. (2019). Learning Designer. Retrieved 22 September 2019, from https://www.ucl.ac.uk/learning-designer/index.php

Laurillard, D., Kennedy, E., Charlton, P., Wild, J., & Dimakopoulos, D. (2018). Using technology to develop teachers as designers of TEL: Evaluating the learning designer. British Journal Of Educational Technology, 49(6), 1044-1058. doi: 10.1111/bjet.12697