Teacher as Designer

“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:

• Empathize: Step 1 emphasizes knowing your students (and contexts) in order to identify interests and needs.
• Define: In Step 2, you use knowledge gleaned through empathizing in order to identify a problem (concern, limitation, etc.) that might be addressed through strategic design choices. Here, we choose a “shift” that will help us to focus our process of design.
• Ideate: Next, in Step 3 participants engage in open brainstorming to generate potential solutions and opportunities. It is important to think about active student engagement and the corresponding verbs that describe student experience. This will help to develop a picture of what the writing project might look like in a broad sense, as opposed to constraining possibilities to a particular tool too quickly (which limits the outcomes).
• Prototype: Finally, in Step 4 participants explore particular solutions through design. This often involves engaging with a few technologies before selecting the best fit for designing the actual project. In addition, we encourage the creation of mentor texts to serve both as exemplar and important learning experience for the teacher him/herself. This insider perspective is really crucial for successfully scaffolding digital writing projects.
• Test: The writing project is then brought to the classroom, and the teacher continues to reflect and adjust in response to student needs.

I’m not sure how novel any of this really is— design thinking or peer mentorship. But how we can use it to structure professional learning around very real and pressing goals for teacher education might provide new perspectives that are worth a closer look.
For more information on Teachology’s peer mentorship model, you can visit our website to access videos and resources.