Teachers as Designers

Who are you designing for?
In a perfect world, just my students. In reality, the government, society, the media, administrators, other teachers, parents, and finally my students.

What are you designing?
Curriculum, daily lessons, ways to reach out to students and their parents, connections with other teachers and administration, pieces of entertainment, moments of revelation, feelings of discovery, ways to implement external motivations, ways to exhume internal motivations, field trips, disciplinary plans, behavior models, methods of keeping data, exams, assignments, projects, evaluations.

What's the final product of your design?
Well-rounded, happy, academically fulfilled students who enjoy learning and discovery, and don't hesitate to help and teach those around them.

In terms of today's class, I'm happy to have a renewed vision about technology in the classroom as something that could potentially be of great use to me rather than a burden. Naming all of the roles of a teacher helped to clear my head in terms of all of the things that I'm responsible for as a teacher, and I really enjoyed seeing how these roles will help me to educate the "whole" child. When it comes down to just lesson-writing, though, the Instructional Designer role is great because it helps teachers clear their minds of all the other things going on during the day so that they can focus simply on creating a great lesson.