Thursday, October 15, 2015

Post #6: Teachers as Designers and the 5th Design Principle: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"
As I read articles such as "Professionalism and Teachers as Designers" by Calgren, I (1999) and "The Creative Spirit of Design" by McDonald, J.K. (2011) I find myself at odds with the authors as far as how their articles correspond to the old riddle.  To get good lessons you have to try them and go through an iterative improvement process. So which comes first, a good lesson or the design of a good lesson?  The crucial points of the articles are a bit cloudy in my head, but my take on the articles is the following.  First, that teachers need to change the way they prepare their lessons by "disembedding" their tacit knowledge acquired by acquaintance and let students, instead, go through that process.  Second, that the design process of the lesson must occur in some virtual practice, prior to use in the classroom (before action). Third, that a "creative spirit of design" approach provides more opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, multiple outcomes and an examination of assumptions in unconventional ways.  The 5th Design Principle discussed in class summarized this as "Good learning designs are anchored in the creative spirit of design by teachers who recognize their before action role as designers."

As stated above, I research what has been done already in developing lessons, I am a firm believer in not "reinventing the wheel", if the "Ends" are met.  I synthesize the research into my lesson and perform "affordance analysis" to match tools and symbols as appropriate.  I do play it through my mind before putting it into action, and I use my own creativity in boiling down a lot of words from many sources into the essential ideas of the lesson.  In my opinion and practice, you have to go through a process of trial and error, reflection and improvement each time you do the lesson.  I have been doing this for 13 years and it is still the same.  The other reality-based constraint I brought into our last class discussion on this topic is that time is a factor.  When I say that, I mean time is a multi-faceted factor.  You have a certain amount of time to get the "improved" lesson ready (virtually), and it must be delivered within a calendar time frame that is coordinated with curriculum guidelines.

It's great that Sweden 16 years ago started telling their teachers what they need to do in their time out of school, but I stated that (good) teachers already spend as much time on school work out of class as they do in class and I don't see this idea, as presented, too realistic where I sit.  I think it would take too much time out of what doesn't already exist, spare time for teachers to decompress.

5 comments:

  1. In class the other night, my group had a discussion that focused on how we truly wished their had been some form of an honest final course given to all teachers prior to going into the classroom. Things are so sugar coated when you are learning to be a teacher. There is never an honest discussion of how much time it truly takes from your life. I am talking about inside and outside of the classroom. In a given day, I work about ten hours in the building and then 2-3 more hours at night grading papers and thinking about my next few lessons. It is an all encompassing job. I find that I spend more time with my students than with my own child, which can be very frustrating at certain points.

    When I sit and map out my next unit, I too also look at time as a factor. I have to make sure I am hitting the essential knowledge points that the county provides us with. I also try to keep them on track with the pacing guide, which to me is a complete joke. How do they expect students to learn and synthesize things so quickly? I wish we could get the point where we look at the quality of the knowledge not the quantity of the knowledge. I am always further behind the other teachers in my grade level. My reason, because I do not want to rush through the information. I really want my students to connect to what they are learning. That does garner me crap sometimes, but in the end, I feel as if my students leave my classroom with a better understanding of what they have learned and how it relates to the world around them.

    I like how you broke apart what we learned on Wednesday. I liked reading the "Creative Spirit of Design" more than I liked "Professionalism and Teachers as Designers." I felt I could understand the first one better. I do not do well with all the technical jargon. To me, sports metaphors and movie quotes are always the best way to learn something new.

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  2. Well that's the trick isn't? Making it all happen in a year's time. I used to think the same way, that we should stress the quality over rushing things, but then I realized that it doesn't matter as much as how you teach it because students are going to forget it anyway. That's thing that we lose sight of along the way of all our PD days, it's not how we teach it, there are many ways to do the lesson that work, but how do you get students to remember it days, months, years later? That's my soap box and I'm not getting off of it. Don't forget music references either, right?

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  4. Sorry hit publish before I could finish thought. Let us try this again...
    You're right! You should never forget the musical references. I understand your soap box dilemma. I too think about the same thing every school year. How can I teach them in a way that they are going to remember it? These days, I try not to focus on an unrealistic one of reaching all of my students. Now, my goal is always to get a handful of them to leave my classroom with the love of history that I have. If I can do that, I can at least say I impacted some of them to go out and learn more history on their own.

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  5. When it comes to time management as a teacher I often feel that if your job was to just teach, I think you'd be pretty well off. But these school systems go out of their way to take up that time with their:
    -school improvement plans
    -groups of teachers to have meetings for everything
    -In-Service days
    -Teacher quantitative goals
    -etc, etc, etc

    Either way it's not worth taking up that much of your day. Hope your weekends are better.

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