Topic 5: Designing Thinking and Learning Design

Comment posted on 22nd of September on Kayla Chester’s Blog

Hi Kayla,

Thank you for your post! I really enjoy reading about your early childhood lessons and seeing what is similar and different to what I experience.

I agree with you that it was really nice to see your lesson neatly ordered, but I also agree that there would not be much of a need or a motivation to do this considering that you would do this automatically. Furthermore, I am sure that your time is already occupied with enough planning and admin without this additional task.

Apart from the fact that this does not radically change your teaching, it does not, from what I could understand, automatically make the layout for you and the formatting to me would be quite tedious.

As you have already read on my blog post, I would much prefer using a tool like Learning Designer (Dimakopoulos, 2019), as it enables you to put in what you would do in terms of kind of activity and you can add in your resources for each activity to each section of the lesson. What it lacks is that there is not a clear distinction between resources and supports which I think is interesting part of the tool that you investigated.

I am wondering whether the Learning Design Visual Sequence tool could be used after a lesson, perhaps one of a pre-service teacher, as a diagnostic to work out why certain aspects of the lesson went well or not so well. Using this tool, they might be able to spot gaps in the lessons to explain why students got stuck at a certain point. For example, if a teacher used the Kagan Rally Robin animation (resource) without understanding the support behind that, they might work out after the lesson that this was missing which is why the brainstorm did not seem to work. Moving forward they would learn how to ensure the support is there for the resource.

I am not sure if this would be of benefit in your context but would be interested to know your thoughts.

Thanks again!

Julia

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