Learning Design Studio
The Learning Design Studio was designed as a 2-day professional development training in learner-centred design for K-12 school leaders and educators from New Hampshire, USA.
Role: Researcher, Learning Designer, Facilitator
Client: CAST, MA, USA
Learners: School leaders and K-12 educators from Public Schools across New Hampshire, USA
Sector: K-12 Learning
The Brief
CAST is a Massachusetts based nonprofit education research and development organisation that works to make learning accessible through their wide-reaching Universal Design for Learning (UDL) pedagogy. In 2018, the CAST Professional Learning team wanted to design a summer studio that introduced 100 K-12 teachers from New Hampshire, to UDL and equip them with skills to design their own UDL enriched classrooms.
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While they had been designing teacher trainings for many years, the team wanted to change the dynamic and make these trainings more learner-oriented, experiential, and sustainable.
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I was hired as a Learning Design Consultant to prototype this 2-day training in August 2018, in a way that the CAST Professional Learning team could facilitate and adapt the training beyond my engagement.
My Design Process
To understand CAST’s current training model, and to gather participant expectations, I first conducted ethnographic interviews with educators and team members on previous workshops and pedagogies. I then held a Design Sprint with the CAST team to design a journey map of the workshop on MURAL.
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Recognising the overlaps between HCD methods and the UDL framework, I introduced the team to tools like Journey Mapping and the Innovator’s Compass. I also organised workshops on Journey Mapping with the CAST team to help familiarise them with the process. I co-designed the overall experience and individual activities and reflection tools with the aim of helping educators and school leaders collaborate, innovate, reflect on, and refine creative ideas together to kick off the new school year.
As an iterative designer, I quickly took on-board our participants’ feedback on the structure of the sessions after day 1, and included more opportunities for them to use the tools in their individual contexts (lesson plans, students personas).
The learning journey I co-created with the team on MURAL
Outcome
The resultant Learning Design Studio was a 2-day professional development training for 100 educators and school leaders from New Hampshire. Educators experienced the joy of playing with new ideas, designing collaboratively, and made use of the expertise of their peers and CAST staff in learning “playgrounds.”
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Among all the activities and experiences I designed for the two-days, of note was the role-playing game for players to understand ‘learner variability’ (based on Persona development methods), and sessions that helped educators and school leaders learn and use design tools like the Innovator’s Compass and journey mapping to plan their lessons.
Impact
While this was the first time our participants attended a design workshop like this, we got a tremendous response. More than 90% of the attendants found the tools and the way we had designed the training very useful to their practice.
School leaders who attended the training took the tools back to their schools and used our ‘Playground’ structure to design their own Professional Development trainings.
My tools, games, and training format have now been embedded into CAST’s Professional Learning programmes, and have also been facilitated at SXSW EDU 2019.
Participants play the Origami Instructional Variability game.
An educator documents her experience during the training on Twitter.
Educators use the journey map to design a lesson.
The 'Idea Gallery' where each educator anonymously posted a challenge/question about their lessons or UDL, and others walked around answering the questions with their ideas.