I colleague asked for my take on the difference between the two. I figured it mught be an interest post for my blog too.
Design Versus Planning
When I was an undergraduate student studying to become an educator, my peers and I took great pride in our lesson planning. When I was a graduate student (I completed my master’s degree at the end of my 12th year as a teacher), my peers who had yet to teach wrote lesson plans with great care. My recollections are that those who have yet to teach are too confident with their lesson planning.
We start with intended outcomes, which we can clearly define, but the appropriateness of those outcomes is dubious to me. To me, the purpose of education is to prepare students for unpredictable futures, and few of our learning outcomes reliably transfer to useful skills in those futures.
Our plans include teaching methods we are confident will result in students achieving intended outcomes. Unfortunately, there is far less direct connection between instruction and intended outcomes than educators believe.
We complete our plans by defining test questions or some other method of determining the degree to which students accomplished the intended outcomes. Rarely do we check the reliability or validity of these measures.
Because responsible educators will seek to minimize the about of guessing they do, they will design lessons rather than plan them. Design is a process whereby faculty seek to improve their lessons by:
- Questioning the outcomes. Is this really what they should have been? Are there different outcomes that were achieved?
- Questioning the instruction. How did students engage in the lesson? How aligned are they with the outcomes? You can include your own observations, but those students are equally important (if not more important). What did they notice in the lesson you did not? What suggestions do they have on how to improve it? Capture the observations of others as well if you were lucky enough to have someone else in the teaching space.
- Questioning the technology. How did the technology work? Was it easy to use? Was it effective for the purpose? What factors would make it more effective? Were the materials accessible?
- Question the assessment. What did the students demonstrate? Did their learning appear to meet my expectations? What did they learn that I didn’t expect? What was missing? What do they know that was not captured, and how might you capture that?
The purpose of lesson design is two-fold. First, improve the lesson. What can you do next time to make it more effective and more efficient, and even more enjoyable. A general rule of thumb is that a course or lesson doesn’t become good (from the perspective of the teacher) until the third iteration. Second, improve the teaching. Record discoveries about the tools both the practices and the technologies you used. Consider how you can improve the lesson when you next teach the lesson to similar students. Consider, also, how you can improve your teaching in other courses or how other teachers could benefit from what you learned.