Am I an educational designer?

I do not have to write a whole blog before I can answer this question. My answer is: no.

But during this course I have gained some experience in designing a professional development program and I am very happy with that! This blog goes about that design. I will not share with you our final result, because I do not think that you will read the whole report. But I will describe some parts of the process and my own thoughts about our design.

For our final assignment we had to design something. There were two options: to design a lesson based on TPACK or to design a professional development program for teachers based on TPACK. My first thought was: ‘I want to design a lesson’, because with that I am familiar. Unfortunately, my teammembers prefer the other option J. But after we have finished this assignment, I am glad that I choose (together with my group) to design a professional development program based on TPACK. At the teacher training college I have gained enough experience in designing lessons (except the TPACK-part). To design a professional development program was totally new for me. And a bonus was, that by designing a professional development program, I could develop myself more professionally...

To clearify the assignment: we had to design a professional development program/course for teachers of a primary school in which they will learn TPACK and how to work with that.

First we brainstormed. In my group there were two teachers and one student who has followed the bachelor on the University of Twente. This means that sometimes the opinions were divided, but at the end it seems very useful to have different prior knowledge. The bacholor-student came up with a theoretical framework (which was very nice and useful) and has a lot of ideas. But sometimes we (the teachers) thought that it was not attainable. We know that teachers are not happy with all those innovations including the meetings. And they do not have much time. So we combined our ideas and knowledge.

After the brainstormsession we divided the work and individually we did our part. But we planned also some groupsessions to consult with each other and to prevent that there was inconsistency in our design.

The overall goal of our professional development program was: let teachers learn how to integrate technology into the classroom practice by developing and using TPACK.

This overall goal overlaps more specific goals:

1. For teachers to gain knowledge and skills about how to develop and use TPACK

2. To improve teachers’ technology-use in classroom teaching practice

3. To increase the student outcomes because of changed classroom practice

The most difficult part for me was the motivational aspect. How to motivate and support teachers to use TPACK? On one hand, you do not want to use much valuable time from the teacher, but on the other hand, you want to give them support. Also some researchers (see my blog about how to integrate technology in education) state that it is important that professional development is stretched across longer periods of time. And because it is better that it takes more time with good results instead of less time but no results, we choose for a design in which the teachers join a meeting each month. In the begin maybe a meeting lasts longer than at the end of the year.

To create a teacher design team, we hope that the teachers motivate each other. Maybe a teacher shows a good practice and then his colleague will use that ideas.