My experience of designing and delivering learning opportunities.

How do you go about the design process? 

Learning design for my lessons is in part influenced by my school strategic development plan which has creates a learning journey for all students that is skills and process orientated rather than product oriented.  As a  humanities department put great emphasis on helping students to critically evaluate current and emerging events and question their own world view and "common sense" interpretation of events.  Research skills and critical analysis of information is given high priority.  The design process is based around the 7e Instructional Design Model recommended by the NSTA.

 Where do you get ideas from? 

The ideas developed in lesson are informed by our school development plan which is working towards International Baccalaureate MYP accreditation.  The lessons also draw on ideas presented by the Geographical Association .  Perhaps most importantly we listen to our students and their preferred topics and ways of learning.  Within this we also look carefully at the assumptions and bias our students make and create lessons that actively challenge these, important examples include attitudes towards migration, human rights and development issues.  In particular we challenge students to reflect on their own action and how closely these link with the school's mission statement.  Lesson are planned with an emphasis on  skills drawing on connectivist learning principle     

 How do you share and discuss learning and teaching ideas and designs with others?  

Ideas and designs are shared at weekly planning meetings and half termly meetings with the other schools in the consortium.

How do you evaluate the effectiveness of your design?

We place great emphasis on student feedback when evaluating the effectiveness of our learning design in addition to levels of achievement in assessments.   Students at the end of each lesson complete and electronic exit survey which is used to plan the next lesson and review the entire scheme of work.  We also monitor student's participation levels in blogs and the peer review process.  Each year group also has 4 student learning advisors that help use to evaluate lesson against the school's mission statement and development plan.  Weekly planning meetings are also used to evaluate lessons and adjust them as necessary.  Staff are also free to adapt their lessons as they go using observations during the class itself.  This is a bit like building a plane as it flies.