Re-Imagining the Classroom Experience
Why Now is the Right Time to do it!
The Covid19 pandemic has changed so much of our day-to-day. In March 2020 we were pushed into remote teaching. That semester I wasn’t teaching high school (so had plenty of time to plan a redesign of the Fall 2020 Entrepreneurship class). But I was teaching my Teachers College Columbia class on design thinking. We had 2 physical classes and boom we went straight into remote mode.
So it was time for a reframe of this course which we had been teaching for about 7 years in a physical classroom.
The first thing that my co-professor Reshan Richards and I learned was that it was impossible to keep the momentum of a 2-hour online synchronous teaching and learning experience. We changed that down to an hour immediately. The class assignment could be done in the second hour or at any other time the student chooses (giving them agency). That was our first pivot and redesign — in dschool language we ‘Experimented Rapidly’. Experiment rapidly is one of the 8 core design abilities.
The second redesign we did was to implement an asynchronous class every other week. So now we have every other week synchronous/asynchronous, this provided a little variety for the students. The asynchronous class also gave the students more autonomy on how their learning should happen. We were hitting a few more design abilities with this tweak- Learning from Others (people and context) and ‘Design your design work
Taking our students on voyages is a big part of the learning experience we design for our students. With voyages, we are taking our students out of their normal learning environment and moving them into another zone. When they move to that zone they are much more prone to absorb new “stuff”, and their observation skills are also improved. The redesign of the voyages was not that exciting. We just had speakers show up in our synchronous environment. Along with getting a different point of view from ours, the invited speakers brought new expertise to the class which challenged the students. I am happy that our voyages are returning this semester.
So we redesigned and redesigned until we got a model that worked to keep our students engaged.
I hear a lot of educators talking about the difficulty of teaching these days and that they don’t have the bandwidth to reframe. However, I think more than ever it’s time to reframe. By reframing you will be pulled from your fixed mindset and come up with ideas to engage your students and feel better about the pandemic situation we are in. Reframing will help you to open up and not close up as is what is happening with most of us in this pandemic.
