Going Beyond Lesson Planning To Designing A Learning Experience
Learning experience design differs from lesson planning in its focus, objectives and instructional approach. In addition to what learners ought to know and how they should be taught what they ought to know, learning experience design also focuses on how to make what they ought to know stay with them many years after to be applied in emerging situations. The objective of a learning experience other than a lesson plan is learner performance and transformation not teacher performance. While you can observe passive, aggressive and assertive behaviors in any learning environment, teachers who seek to go beyond and offer a learning experience to their students should seek out ways to make students active participants and not passive receivers of instruction. Additionally, planning to engage multiple senses in the learning process is necessary to ensure the subject and the interaction stays with the learner.
The steps below will serve as a roadmap to designing a learning experience.
1. Know Your Learners
This does not demand knowing each person in-depth and designing a learning experience for each unique personality — that is over ambitious in a typical school setting but not impossible in a home school setting with a lone learner. The scope of knowing learners to aid learning experience design is on two levels: one as individuals and then as a group. It involves appreciably knowing each one for his/her dominant character traits, level of motivation to learn, learning styles and then exploring group characteristics, group motivation, gender distribution of learners and the dynamics of interaction between them. Knowing your learners also involves exploring their knowledge base in depth and scope to enable building upon previous knowledge, making use of previous knowledge and managing your own expectations to set smart learning objectives.
2. Set the right Goals & Objectives
As a teacher planning to design a learning experience, you should set clear learning goals and objectives. These may include thinking reformation, behavior transformation, innovation, the creation of an artefact, etc. These are not just big but also broad. It puts a demand on the basic school science teacher to plan how to teach photosynthesis for example in a way that makes learners appreciate the environment and plants more to want to be part of it’s preservation. This could mean learners watering the flower in the flower pot every day because they have learnt the concept in a way that will stay with them for a long time. Hence, the goal of a learning experience should go beyond what learners ought to know and how to teach what they ought to know to how to make them learn what they ought to know in a way that it stays with them to be applied consciously or unconsciously.
3. Know Your Content.
The content you deliver should be informed by the goals and learning objectives and not the goals and learning objectives being informed by your subject knowledge. Implying that, the teachers knowledge base should be stretched to be able to lead learners to achieve the learning objectives and not reduce the learning objectives to match
the teacher knowledge base. Additionally, knowing content in this sense goes beyond knowing the subject matter but also the instructional materials to be utilized. It as much means having a good knowledge of the medium of instruction and education technology to be utilized if any in other not to compromise the user experience. Core to subject matter knowledge is also the ability to lend knowledge from other topics, subjects or fields of learning to establish relevance and applicability of what is to be learnt.
4. Design Activities and Experiences
At this stage, the questions a teacher should be asking him or herself is what kinds of activities are compatible with the goals and objectives, learner characteristics and course content? How can learners be engaged in active learning? What ways can the learning and what ought to be learnt stay with them? Once you have selected activities, designed sequence, selected materials to be used and technological aid if any, map each activity or experience fragment to a learning objective to ensure each is relevant to the learning process and experience. It is important to note, designing activities for problem-solving other than mere knowledge recall is a winning approach.
5. Deliver, Assess and Modify
Here is the execution face and it is as simply following through your design as designed. This is where you put your design to test and then evaluate at the end of the learning experience or through the various phases of the learning experience as differentiated by activities to ascertain whether or not the objectives were met. Some of the objectives however, may have to be measured over a period. It is important to always be on the lookout for the things you can improve upon and modify accordingly.
Note: The product of engaging learners in a learning experience will always be no less than behavior change, renewed thinking and better, the creation of something for authentic use. While at it, the goals, objectives, learner characteristics, activities, delivery, and assessment should all complement each other.
Author: EDUCATION 360. www.education360gh.com
