“What do I want my students to be able to know and do as a result of this lesson?”
“How can I design an activity in which students can search for the answers for themselves?”
Beth Pandolpho cites these two questions that she asks herself when beginning to design lessons in an article for Edutopia.
Pandolpho wants her students to have agency in their learning by creating lessons that afford them autonomy. Research is on Pandolpho’s side because it shows that when students have control over their learning, or design their own learning, they are more likely to experience “deep learning and mastery of both transdisciplinary and subject matter” along with acquisition of other 21st Century Skills (Levinsen and Sørensen).
And thus we know that “students as designers” works, so the question becomes “How do teachers design lessons that give students the desire and tools to design their own learning?”
Levinsen and Sørensen suggest designing lessons that provide stages to scaffold how to do this and use a modified version of the Dale’s model of competence levels:
1. | Practice | teacher student |
2. | Organization and Planning | teacher student |
3. | Situated and practice based reflection | teacher student |
4. | Theory based reflection | teacher |
Reflecting on Nussbaum’s concepts of five creative intelligence, let's explore how he might view a teacher’s role in creating lessons that enable students to design their own learning.
It seems to me the Project Based Learning (PBL) provides opportunities for students to design their own learning. How can I apply Nussbaum’s ideas of knowledge mining, framing, playing, making, and pivoting into lessons for students?
Combining Nussbaum’s concept of knowledge mining with Levinsen and Sørensen idea that students will need to practice designing, I might begin by introducing students to exemplar PBL project products. Students could explore the rubric for each exemplar PBL and then reflect on a series of questions about the choices the PBL student designer made and if they were effective. Some of the questions that might help the students assess a project are:
- When you first viewed the project, did you recognize it’s meaning?
- What details were helpful in recognizing the meaning of the project?
- How did the project make you feel?
- Do you want to learn more about the meaning of the project?
- What might you have done differently?
I think these questions would help students make memorable connections to the project while they collect information and ideas about what details make an effective PBL product. I believe that immersing the students in the exemplar PBL is a bit of knowledge mining and that it also fits with the Levinsen and Sørensen recommendation that the first step in designing a lesson in which students become lesson designers is practice.
Levinsen, Karin Tweddell, and Birgitte Holm Sørensen. “Teachers’ Designs for Learning Practices When Designing for Students as Learning Designers.” Designs for Learning, vol. 11, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 30–39. EBSCOhost, doi:10.16993/dfl.111.
Pandolpho, Beth. “Putting Students in Charge of Their Learning.” Edutopia, George Lucas Educational Foundation, 4 May 2018, www.edutopia.org/article/putting-students-charge-their-learning.
