Negotiating my Design

Being in the program for a year already, Dawn has reviewed what “designing” means. It’s taken me a bit of time to shift my thinking of “planning” to “designing”, but reading Teachers are Designers really helped my understanding. 

Looking back at last semester where we focused on community, I thought it was the perfect segue into a semester where we study design. Community is an abstract idea - it’s not tangible or concrete like the placement of a desk or an application used to enhance reading comprehension. Connecting the abstract idea of community and how to incorporate it into a design plan helped me understand the abstract concept of design. 

During our first week in 780, Dawn asked us to create a list that defines the purpose of 21st-century education. As I was creating that list, I realized that’s where the foundation of design comes from. We have to take a step back from our tests, quizzes, worksheets, Google Classrooms, and/or structured lesson plans and ask ourselves what life skills are we teaching our learners? What skills do they already have that we can build upon? As teachers, we’re constrained, and I feel as if that’s the biggest hindrance to creativity in our design. But, it just means we have to be all the more creative! Design is so much more than putting together a lesson plan - it’s thinking outside the box, thinking “bigger picture”. I must admit that I am much better at thinking of smaller details, so planning is always easier for me. However, the idea of designing gives me freedom in my creativity and forces me to look at teaching skills rather than knowledge. 

Switching from being a teacher to working with adults in professional development, I see design is so much more crucial. The figuring out the problem of practice and designing definitely takes up a lot of time (a lot more than planning and implementing). When the design is implemented, everyone is critical of the delivery in any professional development, and adults are much pickier than students (they [believe they] know what does and doesn’t work for them when it comes to learning). This is where the “negotiating” piece comes in. Sometimes, as a new employee, I would bend to what the seasoned learners would want. However, that might not be the best design for them to learn or gain the skills they need. So how can I better negotiate in my practice? Stay tuned to find out my growth moments in negotiating…



Comments

  1. Caitlin CordovaSeptember 5, 2019 at 6:42 PM

    I connect with your thought on structures for instruction and assessment: "We have to take a step back from our tests, quizzes, worksheets, Google Classrooms, and/or structured lesson plans and ask ourselves what life skills are we teaching our learners?" What are our students (young or adult) going to take away from the learning experience? I can lesson plan for a 90 minute block in 15 minutes, but will my students even like learning if I *plan* education in the traditional knowledge-assessment model? This makes us educators consider the end goal: the life of students beyond our building. What are educators doing to help students reach the best possible outcome for that point?

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    1. Michaela IbrahimSeptember 12, 2019 at 4:10 AM

      You questions are perfect, Caitlin! I love them because they're applicable to any age group. When I was a teacher, I loved my AP Lang class because the content easily allowed me to teach students practical skills (I also had a great mentor help me in that as well). In my current job, it's even more applicable as adults don't buy-in to professional development that much - so I always have to make it relevant for them in all aspects of their life.

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  2. PHD-HairmanSeptember 8, 2019 at 3:23 PM

    When the learners come into my class they are juniors or seniors and are very uncomfortable with my teaching and grading. I sometimes have non-graded assessments to see where they are at, so that we can move forward or revisit the topic. It takes them until the middle of the first quarter to understand not everything needs to be graded to learn. Once they know that I want to see growth and it's not always about grades, they become more creative and are not afraid to fail and re-try.

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    1. Michaela IbrahimSeptember 12, 2019 at 4:06 AM

      When I taught AP Lang, I also had ungraded assignments, and it was a strange concept to students. As you said, it took them time to understand why the course was structured that way. When working with adults, they see it similarly (as a "waste of time"). I haven't really figured out yet how to encourage participation with adults, yet. It's much harder to show them the worth of what they're doing, and sometimes they know but don't want to do it.

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