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“Design” is a word I’ve found myself using more and more these days. My previous title as an instructional designer; thinking about intentional lesson design; positing the writing process for multimodal composition as a design process. It’s almost as if the word just snuck into my vocabulary, encompassing teachers and writers as designers of any given trade. Perhaps, this is how design thinking came to me then—not as a revolutionary approach meant to unlock creative potential but as a self-aware process of ideation. I guess I would have defined it as a more intentional and responsive engagement with the acts of the writing process or lesson planning. Digging a little deeper, I found this inclination to not be entirely false. But the process of design thinking has been developed into a much more cohesive framework than the general disposition I originally had in mind.
As I reached out to learn more, in particular through Stanford’s dschool website, I was struck by how similar this process seemed to the lesson workshop model I was developing and attempting to articulate with my Teachology students. The convergence of ideas originally led me to think of what would become our Peer Mentorship model as design thinking in action. For my recent presentation during the 4T Digital Writing Conference (Design Thinking: Digital Writing in the Classroom), I was able to better clarify how peer mentorship serves as a collaborative process focused on integrating technology into instruction by means of a design thinking approach to planning. That’s a mouthful. Here’s an excerpt of how I explained this in a recent blog post I shared on the National Writing Project’s Digital Is website: Design thinking encompasses the following steps (as outlined in the Stanford dschool resource), and here is how I connect the steps to the stages of our mentorship model:
For more information on Teachology’s peer mentorship model, you can visit our website to access videos and resources. I recently had the opportunity to engage in extended professional learning around the design of more interactive webinars and wow— did I walk away with a whole new perspective. The training was part of the presenter preparation for the 4T Digital Writing Virtual Conference co-hosted by the University of Michigan and the National Writing Project. While I often serve the “techie” function of moderating webinars for the online courses I teach and facilitate, I’ve never actually designed and presented my own webinar, which may also be one of the reasons why I wasn’t as able to support engaging webinar design. So this was definitely a chance to feel the pressure and perspective from the other side!
Throughout the training, I was struck by the simple yet powerful suggestions that the team presented. Unfortunately, some of these were based on platform features that didn’t necessarily translate to my working context, as our training took place in Blackboard Collaborate while our courses currently use Go To Meeting. The ease of engaging participants on the whiteboard with text, raising their hands, and using polling features were all simple ways to keep them participating throughout. Though I was unable to incorporate these feature-based additions into my future work, there were some more transferable practices I am already putting to use!
I’m so grateful for the opportunity to engage in this training and am excited for the impact it will have on our future webinar planning. I can also say that it already had a powerful impact on my own webinar experience, which went better than I ever could have expected! I’ve also decided to pilot a platform switch to Blackboard Collaborate during the upcoming semester. Just to capture all of my current thinking, I created the following resource as part of the new preparation materials I will share with presenters to help them design more interactive webinars. |
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