I spent
most of last week feeling sorry for myself, railing against this flu epidemic
which seems to be gripping Auckland. I’ll spare you the detail!
So I knew
something was up when I woke last Saturday morning. I was due in to facilitate
a student leadership programme at the university the whole day. But boy, was I
feeling rough. I dosed myself up and in I went.
My lesson
for the day? Strong design conquers most things … even the flu. The beauty of a
strong design rooted in properly thought through learning outcomes is that you
can have faith that there are unlikely to be too many surprises in store.
When I
discovered the work of David Baume in the UK, via the wonderful PGCert in
Academic Practice at the University of Auckland, it was a revelation. In
summary, David advocates for flipping conventional learning design on
its head. Think learning outcomes first, then design your learning to support
students in reaching these goals. In practice this strategy forces the designer
to build support and gradual attainment of outcomes into the learning
activities.
If the
material does not support the attainment of a learning outcome, out it goes. Of
course David’s work is primarily focused on assessed, classroom design. Nevertheless,
I believe it also holds great promise for the design of leadership development.
I have
found myself increasingly slimming down the amount of new ideas I factor into a
day’s schedule. So on Saturday I was working with a group which had some
exposure, but not a huge amount, to the idea of collaborative leadership. I
realised that the core objectives for the day had to be developing a capacity
for students to articulate a definition of leadership and to engage in some
reflection about how this definition might be of value to their lives. It was
an uncluttered, unhurried day.
Tempting as
it may be to suppose that others will very quickly grasp a notion of leadership
as highly collaborative, this is simply unrealistic. We may be excited by this
material but others need to be drawn in and need to take the time re-evaluating
their old concepts of what it means to lead and follow. You can’t rush a good
learning outcome!
If you want
to find out more about David Baume’s design theory, I have attached one of his
slide presentations here:
https://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/publications/files/040110.36637.LoRes.pdf
Stay well
everybody!
After 13 years as an academic I found this refreshingly succinct! I personally loved 'searching for serendipity & newness', also 'the economy of a course', I thought 'factors in and myths about courses and learning' was to the point, and the idea of 'steps not cliffs' for student learning resonated well.
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