Remix Your Learning Experience Design Process

“Remix Your Learning Experience Design Process” was the second workshop in the three-part Ready GO! summit at SXSWedu this year. This workshop was designed to support participants in thinking through a process that innovative teachers might go through to re-design lessons or units–“learning experiences”–to support deeper student learning.

Martin Moran, at the Francis W Parker School in Chicago, and I worked together to hammer out this workshop, and in the process really thought through how we go through learning experience redesign ourselves.

We first pulled out several of our own learning experience examples that we feel best highlight deep learning that develops critical skills. From those examples, as well as examples from resources like Buck Institute for Education, we identified our 10 “core elements” of innovative learning:

1. My students have choice in the learning process and deliverable.
2. My students know the purpose and context of learning experiences from the beginning.
3. My students confront and design for other perspectives and needs.
4. My students directly interact with the content and directly practice the skills at the heart of the learning experience.
5. My students problem-solve and design towards their learning goals (adaptive expertise).
6. Learning experiences have no single “right” answer, and solutions require significant sustained effort by my students.
7. Learning experiences include appropriate scaffolding for my students to be successful with appropriate challenge and perseverance.
8. My students contribute to the plan for assessment.
9. My students collaborate to solve problems as a team.
10. My students reflect, revise, iterate, and can identify and describe their own learning pathways (metacognition).

Having identified these 10 “core elements,” we then pieced apart a few of our own examples to see whether there was a pattern in how our redesign process took place… How did we take existing learning experiences and redesign them to increase each of those 10 core elements? I used an example of a redesign I conducted with my kindergarten colleagues for a weather unit, as well as an example with my 7th grade social studies colleagues on a unit about the antebellum era of American history.

Kindergarten Weather Redesign Process:

7th Grade Social Studies – Antebellum Era Unit Redesign Process:

*This “different ways of tackling the problem” can look like magic to teachers with less practice in PBL, design thinking or other “innovative” learning experience designs. More on that below.

Ultimately, these two examples show very important similarities and a distinct design thinking bent to the learning experience redesign process I’ve been using.

1. Develop an understanding the history of the unit and the teachers’ likes and dislikes (empathize)
2. Follow with establishing the basic learning goal, somewhat in the form of a problem statement (define)
   • A great technique for this can be the “5 Whys”
3. Brainstorm different ways of grappling with the content (ideate)
4. Think through and plan for maximizing the 10 “core elements” (or making purposeful decisions to not emphasize a core element or two) (prototype)
5. Finally, adjust on the fly and take notes for future years (iterate)

As mentioned above, step #3 seems to be the step that feels the most like “magic” to many teachers who have less experience with redesigning their learning experiences through a student-driving-the-learning lens. I had come to begin thinking of my own brainstorming as sort of sifting through a hidden subconscious library, and I really wanted to make that library more visible.

I tried to start defining categories for my hidden library, thinking through as many examples as possible from the projects I’ve redesigned with my colleagues over the past two years. In addition to our own examples, I sifted through this giant amazing list of PBL prompts, to try to ensure I covered a wide variety of ways of tackling content.

The library classification system eventually settled itself out to:

• Visualization / model
  • Static or interactive
  • Literal or Metaphorical
• Comparison to other example
  • Identify similarities and differences, or create mashup/hybrid
• Create a hypothetical example based on criteria
• Debate / take a position
  • Self or other perspective
• “What If?” / one change
• Problem / solution, invention
• Place-based analysis
• Community service / public awareness / teaching others

This feels quite aligned to a Bloom’s Taxonomy style of categorization, and if Bloom’s is a categorization of depth of knowledge or thinking, perhaps this library could be a categorization of depth of grappling with content. Perhaps it’s just a more specific action-based organization of Bloom’s? In any case, so far it has felt quite useful.

To test these categories, I took three more examples of projects redesigned with my colleagues and tried to brainstorm valid, exciting, students-driving-the-learning project prompts in the other categories.

The bold items below are project prompts we’ve used with students:

Planetary habitats, hypothetical civilizations, possible seed dispersal mechanisms

So, having sort of gone backwards through a few examples of our own design processes, our learning redesign process as outlined feels “right.”

1. Develop an understanding the history of the unit and the teacher’s likes and dislikes (empathize)
2. follow with establishing the basic learning goal, somewhat in the form of a problem statement (define)
   • A great technique for this can be the “5 Whys”
3. Brainstorm different ways of grappling with the content (ideate)
4. Think through and plan for maximizing the 10 “core elements” (or making purposeful decisions to not emphasize a core element or two) (prototype)
5. Finally, adjust on the fly and take notes for future years (iterate).

If you’d like to give the process a try yourself and see whether it impacts ease, depth and/or divergence of your own redesign process, here are a few documents you can use:

• A simple redesign template
• The slidedeck from our presentation at SXSWedu
• The handout from our presentation

Give yourself time to build up and deepen your library, and recognize projects across all ages and subject areas as potential sources of inspiration for your own classroom.

And finally, as we emphasized in the workshop itself: allow your expertise to vary across the different core elements of innovative learning experiences, and seek out support from teachers whose expertise is in different areas. When we presented the core elements in the session, we asked participants to self-assess themselves in the elements where they feel most confident and the elements where they feel least confident. So few participants felt confident in supporting students in contributing to the plans for assessment, and in developing learning experiences with no single “right” answer–those are hard!

For more blogs by Lindsey, check out:

• Radical Student Choice: Student Designed and Demonstrated Projects
• Incorporating STEM and Tinkering Across the Primary Grades
• A Challenge to Bring Making Into Hour of Code

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