Teacher As Designer

This book offers insights into how design-based processes, principles, and mindsets can be productively employed in diverse P-16 educational spaces by a myriad of educational actors including teachers, instructional leaders, and students. It addresses concerns about the theoretical and practical implications of the still emergent emphasis of design in education. The book begins by examining a number of prominent design processes being used by educators including human-centred design, designing for authentic inquiries, and Universal Design for Learning. It then delves into how teachers, system leaders, and students can engage in educational design within the complex spaces of K-12 contexts. Finally, the book takes up design in education within a maker and making context. Each chapter includes a vignette, a series of guiding questions, along with specific design principles that can help address common challenges and issues educators encounter in their practice. This book provides both theoretical and practical elements involved in educational design and is beneficial to scholars, graduate students, educators, and pre-service teachers.

This book offers insights into how design-based processes, principles, and mindsets can be productively employed in diverse P-16 educational spaces by a myriad of educational actors including teachers, instructional leaders, and students. It addresses concerns about the theoretical and practical implications of the still emergent emphasis of design in education. The book begins by examining a number of prominent design processes being used by educators including human-centred design, designing for authentic inquiries, and Universal Design for Learning. It then delves into how teachers, system leaders, and students can engage in educational design within the complex spaces of K-12 contexts. Finally, the book takes up design in education within a maker and making context. Each chapter includes a vignette, a series of guiding questions, along with specific design principles that can help address common challenges and issues educators encounter in their practice. This book provides both theoretical and practical elements involved in educational design and is beneficial to scholars, graduate students, educators, and pre-service teachers.

Created by an international team of architects and designers concerned about our failing education system, The Third Teacher explores the critical link between the school environment and how children learn, and offers 79 practical design ideas, both great and small, to guide reader’s efforts to improve our schools. Written for anyone who has school-age children in their life, from educators and education decision-makers to parents and community activists, this book is intended to ignite a blaze of discussion and initiative about environment as an essential element of learning. Including a wealth of interviews, facts, statistics, and stories from experts in a wide range of fields, this book is a how-to guide to be used to connect with the many organizations, individuals, and ideas dedicated to innovating and improving teaching and learning. Contributors include children’s singer and advocate Raffi, author and creativity consultant Sir Ken Robinson, scientist and environmentalist David Suzuki, inventor James Dyson, and other experts who are working to create fresh solutions to problems and create a new blueprint for the future of education.

What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment? Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.

Teaching is changing. It is no longer simply about passing on knowledge to the next generation. Teachers in the twenty-first century, in all educational sectors, have to cope with an ever-changing cultural and technological environment. Teaching is now a design science. Like other design professionals – architects, engineers, programmers – teachers have to work out creative and evidence-based ways of improving what they do. Yet teaching is not treated as a design profession. Every day, teachers design and test new ways of teaching, using learning technology to help their students. Sadly, their discoveries often remain local. By representing and communicating their best ideas as structured pedagogical patterns, teachers could develop this vital professional knowledge collectively. Teacher professional development has not embedded in the teacher’s everyday role the idea that they could discover something worth communicating to other teachers, or build on each others’ ideas. Could the culture change? From this unique perspective on the nature of teaching, Diana Laurillard argues that a twenty-first century education system needs teachers who work collaboratively to design effective and innovative teaching.

This book explores, through eight chapters, how design thinking vocabulary can be interpreted and employed in educational contexts. The theoretical foundations of design thinking and design in education are first examined by means of a literature review. This is then followed by chapters that characterize design thinking among children, pre-service teachers and in-service teachers using research data collected from the authors’ design-driven coursework and projects. The book also examines issues associated with methods for fostering and assessing design thinking. In the final chapter, it discusses future directions for the incorporation of design thinking into educational settings. Intended for teachers, teacher educators and university instructors, this book aims to provide them with the theoretical foundations needed to grasp design thinking, and to provide examples of how design thinking can be interpreted and evaluated. The materials covered will help these groups of professionals to consider how design thinking can be integrated into their own teaching and learning contexts. The book will also promote a discourse between educational researchers on the theoretical development of design thinking in educational settings.

Pedagogy is at the heart of teaching and learning. Preparing young people to become lifelong learners with a deep knowledge of subject matter and a broad set of social skills requires a better understanding of how pedagogy influences learning. Focusing on pedagogies shifts the perception of ...

This book provides a framework, concrete examples, and tools for designing a high quality, academically-robust preservice teacher preparation program that empowers teachers with the depth of professional knowledge and the skills required to become adaptable, responsive K-12 teachers ready to engage with diverse groups of students, and to achieve consistent learning outcomes. Renowned teacher educators Etta R. Hollins and Connor K. Warner present a systematic approach for developing a teacher preparation program characterized by coherence, continuity, consistency, integrity, and trustworthiness, as well as one that is firmly grounded in collaboration between faculty, community members, and other school practitioners. This book offers an evidence-based roadmap relevant for teacher educators, administrators, scholars, agencies at the state and national levels, and any organization that serves teacher educators.