The final principle, Student as Designers, happens when we design lessons with the first 5 principles in mind.
- Teachers as Designers take into consideration the principles, processes, patterns, and paraphernalia and create lessons using AeCTS.
- Prepare our students to meet community needs by linking living and learning to the PICKLE.
- Analyze the content for structures, processes, and discourse
- Include authentic activities, background building activities, constructing activities, and sharing activities
- Conduct an Affordance Analysis
Designing a lesson with these first 5 principles will allow for the 6th principle, Students as Designers with the clear outcome exit experience.
In this last class session, we were students as designers to show our understanding of the 6 design principles. My group created a Cooking Show Video. Priscilla went through all the principles to design the course for us. As I look back and understand the process, it is not always sequential. She used the design process for each principle we learned in each session, as well. I can see how we were designers at the end of each session when we created the Burma Shaves and poems. In retrospect, the learning was relevant to me and I am now, able to apply what I learned in my own practice.
I will never forget when my group and I were creating the cooking video and there were other GMU students in the area. One of them commented, “I wish our class was that much fun.” And it was that much fun while we are learning.
Dr. Norton told our group about your conversation with the other student. What a great example of a good lesson design. Well-designed lessons should be fun because using creativity to solve problems and create your own student design is much more fun and meaningful than an exam or report.
ReplyDeleteThese opportunities are more memorable as well and I think it's important that we consider the principles of lesson design so that we are providing a rich learning experience for our students. It takes a little thought, but knowing that you're putting your students in a great position to succeed is a nice feeling to have.
ReplyDeleteIt was engaging to showcase our learning in such a fun way. I love that they were envious. This was our chance to reflect back and prove that all the work we have done so far made sense and show that we are now the experts in the principals.
ReplyDeleteWe should definitely strive to make learning fun! If we could generate that same sentiment that was expressed by that student (who wished that his course of study was as enjoyable as ours) to Priscilla, the classroom would be a vastly different place. To me, it would seem that one thing that helped us enjoy ourselves was the fact that we were able to exercise our creativity. We should seek to do the same for students, and get them used to the idea of using that flexibility responsibly.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that the Students as Designers principle is a natural result of a lesson designed with the first five principles in mind. Our video project was a great example. I think that the comment from that student is telling us that this needs to happen more often, it shouldn't be an "out of the box" class but the norm.
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