Crowdsourcing learning designs
Teaching can often (and not entirely wrongly) be perceived as an essentially individual endeavour. The image of a teacher carefully preparing his or her course materials and lesson plans, delivering the lecture and spending long nights grading essays and exams is as common nowadays as it has been for the past centuries. Not much has changed in that respect. Of course, teachers discuss their practices and exchange ideas, but this is mostly done in an informal manner, so that it does not lead to the creation of a body of practical knowledge accessible to a broader teacher audience. One of the consequences of this is the fact that educators will inevitably reinvent pedagogical templates that already exist but were never shared, instead of going a step further by reviewing existing practices, adapting them to their discipline and learning goals and offering them back to the community. By often operating in a vacuum, teachers are, on (too) many occasions, missing on the benefits of being part of a community within which they can easily share their knowledge and practice, look for new ideas and offer each other support in innovating their pedagogical thinking.
In the research world, such communities are extremely active, developing a knowledge base that everyone can contribute to and build on in their own work. In the field of education it is the educational researchers and not the teaching community that fulfill this task. But if the knowledge base is to become more connected to the day-to-day pedagogical practice, the teachers themselves need to be involved in its development. This doesn’t imply that teachers need to start researching educational theories and write academic articles. After all, this is the job of educational researchers. But this rather theoretic body of knowledge needs to be complemented by the outputs of an active community of practice. What this means is teachers reflecting on their teaching methods, on their link to the learning outcomes, on the efficiency of the tools they use and the overall learning experience. What is also means is teachers sharing their reflections with their peers, offering and seeking constant feedback and getting inspiration to develop their practice.
Many repositories of best practice have been built, mainly discipline-specific, and they represent quite comprehensive collections of what is being done in and beyond the classroom. They are useful to go through and perhaps get some good ideas. But most of the time there is still a huge barrier between liking a lesson plan or a curriculum and being able to implement it, be it in the same discipline but in a different context, or, even more difficult, across disciplines. In order to offer a real potential for transfer and reuse, the “pedagogical patterns” have to capture the essential pedagogical underpinnings of a learning design: the aims, the description of the teaching and learning activities with a focus on the type of learning they link to and especially how the methods and activities are aligned with the overall learning goals.
This process of distilling the teaching and learning experience to its basic pedagogical features can be indeed quite challenging. It requires teachers to analyse with a critical eye each aspect of their teaching process, exposing the “bare bones” that could eventually be reused in other contexts and even in other disciplines. It requires thinking about “how” to teach at least as much as about “what” to teach. But it also represents a great opportunity for teachers often isolated in the bubble of their own discipline to meet in a common space that is all about pedagogical design. Perhaps this is a new dimension worth experiencing. Perhaps teaching needn’t be (only) individual, after all.