Designing Creative Learning Experiences for Teachers
Thesis Project 2020
Abstract
Most curricula include in one form or another creativity as one of many students’ expected learning outcomes. In order to achieve creative learning, we must first achieve creative teaching. However, the tools that educators use to design learning experiences remain incredibly linear and constrain experimentation, collaboration, and building on what others have created.
For my thesis I dived deeper into an educators’ thinking and design process, and explores how alternative tools, such as Trello and Milanote, might support teachers in developing creative learning experiences.
This work was composed of interviews and workshops run with educators from different backgrounds, contexts, and expertise. The outcome was a set of insights, artifacts, and design principles that shaped the design of a new digital tool: ‘RemixEd’.
Research Process
We explored how educators use digital tools and other physical materials (post-its, paper) to:
Find creative and engaging lessons online.
Design lessons and project-based learning experiences.
Collaborate with co-teachers (ideate, co-plan, manage tasks) and students (e.g. invite students to share work, document their projects, reflections, etc).
Reflect on design decisions, how things went, and how they might continue to refine their craft.
Document: Share concretely the what, why and how behind a lesson (objectives, photos, videos, GIFs, student work).
Insights
The Iceberg Of Lesson Planning
The most magical parts of a lesson are not being written down. What lies unseen are the long iterations, finding what excites your students, the intellectual challenges, and being creative with a limited stock of materials. All the magic that teachers bring to class, the ethereal things that an educator brings to teaching are not recognized in a lesson plan.
Draft Like Environment To Promote Creativity
While other digital media feels too final, Milanote seemed to feel like a tool that supported drafting, flexibility, and experimentation. Users seemed to attribute this to the flexibility of the tool, for example being able to just insert a link or image or text in the board, to put it on the site for later. Being able to have more structured or complete work on one side, and ideas on another side of one's workspace seemed to support creative, iterative design.
Sharing Your Work Is Sharing A Part Of Yourself
Why? Because teaching is very personal. Sharing your work as a teacher is entering a very difficult space where your identity will be criticized and where your will expose your individuality. How might we we bring vulnerability into a digital tool?
Every teacher has something to share. But we found that sharing comes from motivation and context. By context we mean whether the school or department creates a culture of feedback loops, a culture of sharing.
A Tool To Think With Versus A Tool To Make Thinking Visible
It seems that Milanote is a great tool to organize our thinking, but when students had to present their work, they migrated to a different tool. One that would afford linearity and narrative content. Milanote is not meant for showing thought process, there is a trade-off between thinking versus presenting.
“Why has there not been an ‘Instagram’ or a ‘Youtube’ in the Edtech world? Why is it that technology has not yet transformed education?”
User stories
Visualize what students make
When I design a learning experience, I would like to visualize what students create so that I have an idea of what the activity is working toward and how I might need to design and facilitate the experience.
Solve through images
Solve through drawing / doodling
Visualize how learning happens
When I design a learning experience, I would like to visualize how learning happens (engagement with people, objects, and ideas) so that I can design and facilitate for those engagements.
Organize my thinking
“Chunk”: When I design a learning experience, I would like to organize my ideas into related chunks so that I can see the different parts of the experience and what I need to do in order to support students through the experience.
I would like to see everything at once so I can see how things are connected, flow, etc.
“Reconstruct" content
When I design a learning experience, I would like to be able to move around different ideas or visuals so that I can explore different possibilities.
Share
For others to design: I would like to be able to share my design with others so that they can adapt it or use it as they see fit.
Export: I would like to export my design as a PDF or word file so that I can share it with people who need to see it in that form.
Remix
I would like to be able to copy specific parts or entire designs others have made so that I can repurpose them in my own work.
Prototyping
Product: remixED
