I have long advocated, in consonance with sound learning   principles, that in a good design process works backwards:

• start with the desired outcomes as capabilities,
• align assessment to the outcomes,
• and then design the learning experience to achieve those outcomes.

This shouldn’t be new.   Recently, I was pointed towards Wiggins & McTighe’s Understanding by Design, which turns out to be a curricular approach predicated on just such lines.   I am of mixed feelings.

First, I am thrilled to see someone in formal education talking about looking at more meaningful outcomes, particularly aimed at “clarify learning goals, devise revealing assessments of student understanding, and craft effective and engaging learning activities”.   This is something I’ve been trying to argue for in my work with formal education, e.g. with publishers, schools, and more.   It’s a more enlightened approach to design.

On the other hand, it’s sort of like my reaction when we investigated what should be covered in continuing medical education and were told that we should proselytize evidence-based medicine: “what have they been doing ’til now?!?!”   I continue to be amazed at how folks go about things in ways that do not reflect what we understand about doing things well.   And what I’ve seen of their 6 Facets of Understanding seem a bit vague (and mea culpa, I have not read their thorough exposition, but it seems like YAT, Yet Another Taxonomy), though I’m perfectly willing to be wrong about that.

Interestingly, they apparently do not recommend applying this approach to individual lesson plans, and instead constrain it to curriculum level goals. I can see how the focus should be on the goal, not the time-frame, and I personally believe in spreading out learning over a longer period of time.

It’s nice to have another label to attach to good design, so I laud the initiative, and hope we can get more good design, and more understanding, in our schools and everywhere else.

In the ‘getting it off my chest’ department:

I gave a talk to a national society last week on the future of learning.   An off-hand comment on ‘homework’ got more interest than I expected.   My point was that there are limits to reactivation.   However, given the battles I know so many are having with schools on homework, and we too, some thoughts.

The underlying mechanism, roughly, for learning is associations between related neurons (and, at a bigger scale into patterns). However, our brains saturate in their ability to associate new information.   Some activation a day is about all a brain can take.   Re-activating is key, over time.   That is, the next day, and the next.   And, of course, the feedback should come quickly after the effort (not the next day).   And, let’s be real: some kids need more practice than others.   Why aren’t we adapting it?   And are we really rewarding achievement?   In elementary school, my first-born noticed that by being smart, he got more work than the other kids with the ‘stretch’ assignments, and wondered why being smart was punished!

So, in theory, a light bit of homework on a topic that was first visited in prior days might make sense. So you see it on Monday in class, say, and then visit it again in homework.   Note that reactivating it in class the next day in a slightly more complex problem is better.   And, as, John Taylor Gatto has hypothesized, everything we need to learn in K6 really ought to take only 100 hours to learn, if the kids are motivated.   With the feedback coming the next day, it will also be harder for the learner to be able to make the connection. This post I found while verifying the 100 hour claim is fascinating on the amount of time really necessary.

However, that’s not what we see.     I’ve seen my kids complaining about trying to solve more of the same problems they saw in school that day.   That’s not going to help. And it’s too much.   If every teacher wants to get an hour out of them, they’d be overloaded with homework.   This is middleschool, but the same problem manifests in K6, and I’m only dreading what comes next.

And then we get the ‘coloring’ assignments.   I’m sure the argument is something along the lines of ‘by seeing the information represented as they color, they’ll remember it’.   Sorry, no.   If they’re not applying the information, or extrapolating from it, or personalizing it, processing it, it’s not going to lead to anything but prettier classrooms for open house. I’m sorry, but don’t spoil my child’s youth to pretty up your room.   And it’s very clear that, at least in our school, largely the mothers are doing it.

And then there is the weekend homework.   I’m sorry, but I do believe kids are entitled to a life, or at least most of one. Why have work hanging over them on the weekend?   Now, if you give them long term projects and it replaces some homework, and they decide to put it off ’til the weekend, well, I suppose that’s ok, because I think interesting overarching projects are valuable (and bring in important meta-skills).   So then there’s the homework assigned on Friday that’s due on Tuesday, so supposedly you can get it done on Monday so it’s not really homework, but who do you think you’re fooling?

So, my first-born got hammered with homework the first year of middle school.   Worse, it was idiosyncratic; so it was luck of the draw whether your kid got a teacher who assigned lots of homework.   My school admitted that while the math teachers were pretty much in synch, the science department had great variability, and didn’t explicitly admit that they can’t do anything about it (*cough* tenure *cough*).   This had been going on, but now my better half had me behind her as she rallied the other mom’s into a persistent force against what was happening.   There’s now a homework policy, which still gets violated (oh, this is a honors class at highschool level, so we have to assign weekend homework).   Nope, sorry, don’t buy it.

My second has not been hammered by the first year of homework (luck of the draw, the science teacher who doesn’t believe in homework), and hasn’t had her love of schooling squelched.   The first, however, has had to have serious support by us to not turn off completely.   I really believe that the middle school (a good one) has a belief that the only way to deal with all these coddled elementary school students is to hammer them the first year. Frankly, I’m not convinced that most kids are ready for middle school in 6th grade.   But I’m getting away from my point and getting personal…

Some reactivation, within limits of the overall load can’t keep kids tied to desks hours after school’s out, can be understandable, but I’m inclined to believe that it’s not really that necessary. If we tap into motivation, we can accelerate learning and get more utility out of school.   Doing the same problems at night, overloading from too many classes, and weekend homework don’t really provide enough advantage to justify such assignments.

I’m not sure whether they’re teaching the principles of homework to teaching students, and whether there’s any education of existing teachers from whatever path, but we’ve got to get it right. If Finland can get by minimal homework, I reckon we can too.

If you get the design right, there are lots of ways to implement it; if you don’t get the design right, it doesn’t matter how you implement it.

Too often, people under design and overproduce, resulting in great looking products that are worthless.   This is certainly the case in elearning, but you see it in other fields, too.

Similarly, I’ve found that if you get the design right, you don’t need lots of production.   In an example cited in my Engaging Learning book, we designed a game for kids that need to learn how to live on their own. The first version looked like it was done by lame 3rd graders, but the play was right; as a consequence, we got some funding to tart up the graphics.   On the other hand, if the play hadn’t been right, it wouldn’t have gotten used.

One of the reasons to tout this is so many people are concerned about what tool to use.   I don’t really systematically study tools, because once you’ve got the design, you can probably implement it in a variety of tool solutions. And the tools will change, but the need for quality design won’t.

The focus has to be on the learning experience design first, and then you can worry about how you might build the delivery environment.   So, please, get design, and get the design right.   Then we can talk about how to develop it.

There are no right answers, only tradeoffs.

This is something I frequently say in my design workshops (games, mobile, whatever). When you are doing a design, there are many factors to be considered, and many alternatives.   The question is not “what is the right answer”, the question is “what is the right answer for now, in this context”.   The reason being that there are many possible answers, and you will have to consider several alternatives.

When we do an analysis, we have to decide whether it’s a skill, knowledge, attitude, or something else.   Then we can decide whether to address it with training, job aids, interface redesign, or something else.   And usually it could be one or the other but we eventually converge on a solution.

In the interface design space, there arose an approach called a ‘design rationale‘ just to keep new folks on the team from revisiting prior decisions.   There were even tools created to document these.   There are a lot of factors that affect a solution, including audience, current environment (tech, sociocultural, resources, etc), and goals.   There will be tensions between them, and the solution will end up being a compromise that is the best guess at a solution space.

Or, as I depicted it a while ago, the potential solution space is large, and various factors end up constraining that space down to a solution (if we end up with the empty set, we have to relax one or more of the constraints).   It helps to have constraints.   Some of the solutions are better than others, but seldom is any one so dominantly optimal.   Just think of the problem of what car to buy?   Economy, style, reliability, current sales incentives, there are lots of factors, and   you probably ended up choosing among several possibilities.

On a side note, this is an important way the real world differs from ‘schooling’.   I like what David Jonassen says about how the problems we give our kids in class don’t bear any relation to the problems they face in the world (and his focus on changing the problems seen in schools).

And, as m’lady likes to say, there should be no ‘coulda shoulda woulda’s.   You made the best decision at the time (right?), and then if it later turns out to have been wrong you had no way to know or you would’ve factored it into your decision at the time.   Unless you missed something you could and should have seen then, you still made the right decision.

This is why consultants typically answer with ‘it depends’ when asked for specifics beforehand (much to potential customers dismay).   When the expert realizes the myriad factors that could affect the choices and outcomes, it’s naive to give a pat answer to the client who needs help.   There are likely parameters that affect the decision and may help to constrain it to a range,   and the experience may allow a qualified guess, but don’t expect a binding agreement until a scoping exercise has been performed.

It is important to be explicit about this, rather than assume you can make a perfect decision.   Recognizing the process allows you to be open in your evaluations and honest in your assessment of the solution.   Make the best tradeoffs you can, recognize that you can be wrong, and move ahead.