Apr 5, 2021
Designing for Educators
Every educator is a designer. They are involved in creating, facilitating, and transforming the classroom structure. Yet, our institutions and companies building ed-tech products have given the educators only the role of delivering the hard facts. In contrast, they have the capability of being a mentor, guide, and coach to the kids. The educators are always in constant touch with parents and kids. But most of the classroom spaces are designed to fit the lecture format. With a prescribed curriculum, the educators are given less or no opportunity to innovate or design their classrooms.
To transform education, we need to transform the role of educators.
While looking for their buy-in during curriculum development, we need to consider the educators as users rather than stakeholders. We need to step in their shoes to understand what tools and resources they need to inspire kids to learn.
New information technologies are ready to break apart the old, fragmented, school-bound versions of knowledge. We need to empower educators to cope with these changes.
Here, I am jotting down some of the approaches to create educator-powered classrooms that I think are practical to adopt today.
- We need to develop a process for educators to make efficient decisions about teaching and learning issues.
- We need to define how much autonomy they can have in different situations (classroom, advisory groups, decision-making teams, etc.).
- We need to clearly define the team’s shared purpose and goals to align personal and team goals.
- We need to design their collaboration with their peers, learning technologists, user experience experts, and instructional designers for whatever skills and expertise that they require. This will help them shift from traditional instructors’ roles to “learning facilitators”.
- We need to build trust and develop opportunities for resolving conflicts.
In an educator-powered classroom, the educator is an “unfinished learner” rather than an expert because there is always something new to experience and learn.
“Storytellers and educators at Pudle work with joy to find such inspiring stories to make sure kids and our future generations keep dreaming high and aiming even higher. Explore here the amazing story packs these educators have diligently designed. See you soon in one of the sessions!”
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