Here are our design principles. What do you think?

At Getting Smart, we partner with organizations that help collectively reach our mission of actively building the future of learning by designing, accelerating and amplifying equitable innovations that empower all people to thrive and lead in a complex world. 

Within our learning design work, we spend a lot of time writing about, supporting and implementing three critical elements: values, goals and design principles. Without these, learners in organizations do not benefit from a coherent, aligned and focused model. Values are how we act and the filter through which we make decisions. At Getting Smart, we have our own values and help others build values as a first step to learning design. We have written extensively around building a clear North Star for learners within an educational organization. The end result of this work is the Portrait Model – roadmap for not only building a Portrait of a Graduate, but also Portraits of Leaders, Systems, Educators and learners themselves (via a self-portrait).

In addition to strategic advisory and learning design, our work also focuses on sharing stories about education innovations. Over the last six months, we drafted a set of design principles that integrate what we have learned from the landscape. 

While each of these is a tried and true description of powerful learning, collectively, they describe our point of view at Getting Smart. If learning experiences, whether formal or informal, adhere to these as principles, we believe that learners will have had transformative and powerful learning experiences. 

These design principles are nimble and adjust to environments and emerging challenges and opportunities. Artificial Intelligence, for example, will be a new design partner in our work and the education sector and the use of these tools has the ability to enhance or diminish each of the above principles. It is critical to be measured and thoughtful when implementing and co-designing. To see recent examples of learning approaches and initiatives that satisfy the above guidelines, check out our blog and our podcast.

Over the next six months, we will write about each of these in more detail, adjusting and editing as we go based on what we learn.

So, what do you think? Do these design principles correctly capture high quality learning? What are we missing?