Tag Archives: design

Stop Confusing Learners: The Connection between Consistent Design and Cognitive Load⤴

For a long time I've been frustrated at the way the IET, particularly in its On-Site Guide, sets out information. I'll give just one example. In the catchphrase of the Irish comedian Jimmy Cricket, there's more, but one will hopefully suffice. This example is taken from 'Section 10, Guidance on initial testing of installations, Insulation Resistance'. In particular, the OSG's guidance given on the Pre-test checks necessary before carrying out an IR test. This is what it looks like:

(i) Looking not at the information, but at the typographic manner that the information is presented, we can see that the text:

(a) Has a bold heading.
(b) Is formed into a list.
(c) Is numbered with a lower case Roman numeral.
(d) Is indented from the left-side margin.
(e) And is further indented and numbered with a lower case letter (a & b) for each check.

The information is easy to identify because it stands out on the page and easy to follow because it’s split up into easily digestible chunks of instructional information. So when an apprentice, who's trying to carry out this test with neither instruction, guidance, nor feedback, needs some assistance; this is both a useful and helpful place to look. The problem with it is that it's incomplete. There are a number of further pre-test checks that need to be done, but these are not included in this list. These are:-

Located on the following page.
Tucked away in the section headed "Test".
Not written in bold.
Not set out in a list like the previous checks.
Not numbered.
And not indented.

This is what it looks like.

And as well as not standing out typographically, this information is located in a section that gives guidance on how to carry out a test on a single phase circuit. If you were testing a three-phase circuit, you probably wouldn't consider looking here. The information presented in the OSG, which an apprentice, or indeed an electrician, might need to prepare a circuit for an IR test, is fragmented and typographically inconsistent. It tacitly acknowledges the need for guidance, then seems to almost go deliberately out of its way to deliver that guidance badly. I've written elsewhere about the way technical/manual work is regarded. This lack of attention to design details hints that at some deeply hidden level of consciousness, the OSG writer thinks that the information isn't worthy of the respect it deserves.

consistency enables people to efficiently transfer knowledge to new contexts, learn new things, and focus attention on the relevant parts of a task (Lidwell)

The Principle of Consistency

The fundamental principle of interactional design that is broken here is that of consistency. Consistency allows us to identify patterns and give them meaning, which in turn enables us to make sense of our experiences, to predict what might come next and to decide what choices to make in order to pursue our goals. William Lidwell, in his book Universal Principles of Design, explains that consistency ‘enables people to efficiently transfer knowledge to new contexts, learn new things, and focus attention on the relevant parts of a task’. More specifically, the design fault in the On-Site Guide is a lack of internal consistency, which, as Lidwell points out, undermines rather than cultivates trust. This lack of internal consistency communicates to the user that the system has not been carefully designed and is more likely to have been “cobbled together”. As a consequence, they lack faith in the book and because they're not sure they've got all the information they need, themselves.

The value of internal consistency for the educator is that it doesn’t just group the aesthetic and the functional together in one consistent whole but makes the aesthetic a feature of the functional and helps teach through design. And that's exactly what you need when you’re looking to the OSG for guidance and support. You want to find your spot and gather your information from that spot. Instead what happens is that at worst the user misses vital information, and doesn’t carry out the test correctly, or at best, if you are fortunate enough to find both bits of information, your attention is split between the two parts. And that leads to unforced errors, circuits not tested properly, and assessments failed.

Designing to focus the learner's attention

In vocational training, learners often need to integrate information from various sources like diagrams, text, and instructions to master practical skills. I encountered this precise problem with the specification for an electrical installation that was inherited from previous educators. Information for each of the circuit was scattered in various places throughout the document making it almost impossible for the apprentice to find all the information required because they couldn't for the life of them tell where that information might be hiding. Finding a single piece of information required the learner to read, re-read, and read again the whole spec every single time that they needed one piece of information. The learner's working memory became overloaded, trying to mentally connect the disparate information instead of focusing on understanding the skill itself. Consequently, and not unsurprisingly, information was missed, and tasks were left undone. Again, the problem lay not with the reader whose attention was split across too many points but with the design of the specification. It was like the learner had been tasked with collecting water in a sieve.

The solution, of course, was simply to redesign the specification so that all the information for each individual circuit was consistently presented typographically and collated in one specific place. In other words, the specification was designed to focus the reader's attention rather than split their attention.

The Split-Attention Effect

The split attention effect, identified by John Sweller within his Cognitive Load Theory, describes a situation where a learner must divide their attention between multiple sources of information that are presented separately in space or time. This separation requires learners to mentally integrate the disparate pieces of information, and this consumes valuable working memory resources. Essentially, when information is not physically or temporally integrated, learners experience an increased extraneous cognitive load. This load is unproductive for learning as it's directed towards mentally connecting the fragmented information rather than understanding the content itself. As a result, less working memory capacity is available for processing and encoding the actual material, leading to less effective learning.

Physically integrating disparate sources of information so that they no longer have to be mentally integrated reduces extraneous cognitive load and facilitates learning. (Sweller)

The problem with the spec. for the electrical installation mentioned earlier was that information was spread across multiple pages: some of it was here, some of it was there, and other bits were somewhere else entirely. The learner had to constantly switch their attention between the multiple places and hold information in their working memory to make the required connections. This split attention hindered the learning process compared to the new scenario where the text is integrated into one place. By physically and temporally integrating this information, we reduced extraneous cognitive load to optimize learning and performance. In effect, the educator bore the complexity of the design, allowing the user to experience the simplicity of it. (I’ve written elsewhere about Tesler’s Law in education).

The split attention effect highlights the importance of instructional design that minimizes the need for learners to mentally integrate separate but related sources of information. By being mindful of the split attention effect, instructional designers in vocational education can create more effective learning materials that reduce extraneous cognitive load and allow learners to focus on acquiring the necessary skills and knowledge.

------------------------

Sources

* Doughton, M. (Ed) (2022) On-Site Guide BS 7671:2018+A2:2022, The Institution of Engineering and Technology, London

* Lidwell, W. (2003) Universal Principles of Design: 100 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions and Teach through Design, Rockport Publishers, Massachusetts

* Sweller, J. (2016, February 10). Story of a Research Program. In S. Tobias, J. D. Fletcher, & D. C.

Berliner (Series eds.), Acquired Wisdom Series. Education Review, 23. http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/er.v23.2025

The Unseen Hand of Complexity: How Tesler’s Law Shapes Effective Assessment Design⤴

from Blue Collar

It all started with a question. Maybe it was meant to be an insult:

"Are you sure you aren’t making this more complex for yourself than you need to?"

I wasn't sure how to answer. Today, I would reply emphatically,

“Yes! That’s exactly what I’m doing!”

Tesler's Law

Last week, I discovered Tesler’s Law. From that moment, all the problems that I’d been facing on an assessment design project simply melted into thin air. In this post, I want to elaborate how Tesler’s Law of Conserved Complexity might apply to assessment design in education. Although I work in vocational education, the information will, I hope, be useful to anyone involved in assessment design.

The pursuit of effective assessment is a constant evolution. It’s no wonder the word assessment begins with the small letter ‘a’! Bad Lacanian jokes aside, every educator, every where, strives to create assessment methods that accurately gauges student understanding, provides meaningful feedback, and ultimately drives learning forward. But all too often, we find ourselves wrestling with overly convoluted marking schemes, overly simplistic scoring systems, and labyrinthine processes that lead nowhere. Could there really be a guiding principle lurking beneath these design challenges? I didn’t think so. And then, out of the blue, there it was, right in front of me;

Tesler’s Law states:

"Every application has an inherent amount of complexity that cannot be eliminated or hidden."

Whilst originally conceived in the field of computer-human interaction, Tesler’s Law, also known as the Law of Conservation of Complexity, offers a surprisingly insightful and practical lens through which to analyse assessment design.

Come and see the complexity inherent in the system

The complexity is always there. You can’t wish it or design it away. Instead, it must be dealt with in one of two ways: either by the application itself or by the user. As educators, our "application" is the assessment itself whether it be the test paper, or the practical task to be completed competently. The fact is that Tesler’s Law applies to any method we use to evaluate what students have learned or are supposed to have learned. The "user" is both the student completing the assessment, and the assessor tasked with evaluating it. That latter point, I think, was the most striking revelation of last week’s “discovery”. I had designed a process that looked incredibly simple. But all I’d done was effectively shift the complexity onto the poor bloody infantry of assessors. It really seemed like a binary choice: simplicity or complexity. Once I started to think about the problem in terms of Tesler’s Law, I was able to shift the complexity elsewhere.

The Trap of Overly Simplistic Assessments: Student Burden v. Limited Obvious Insight for Educators

One might initially think that the ideal assessment is the simplest one possible. A quick multiple-choice quiz, for instance, seems straightforward. However, Tesler’s Law suggests that by pushing all the complexity onto the student, we might well be missing crucial insights. A multiple-choice question requires the student to:-

navigate potentially nuanced options;
discern subtle differences;
guess strategically, or
all of the above.

The complexity of understanding the underlying concept and applying it correctly is entirely on their shoulders. And whilst multiple-choice assessments are quick and easy to mark and score, such assessments can often provide a superficial understanding of student learning. We know what they got right or wrong, but not necessarily why. They might have guessed right, or they might have guessed wrong. They might even have guessed their way to a pass. Under the circumstances of these known unknowns, the complexity of diagnosing misconceptions and providing targeted feedback is significantly increased for the educator.

The Power of Well-Designed Complexity:

Conversely, consider an assessment with a detailed rubric. Here, the educator takes on more of the complexity in the design phase.

Educator Investment: Crafting a clear rubric with specific criteria, levels of achievement, and guiding questions requires significant upfront effort. This is the educator absorbing the inherent complexity.

Reduced Student Ambiguity: A well-defined rubric clarifies expectations, reduces ambiguity, and guides students in demonstrating their understanding in a structured way. The cognitive load for the student shifts from deciphering the assessment's hidden requirements to focusing on what's required of them.

Richer Data for Educators: The detailed rubric allows for a more nuanced evaluation of student work, providing richer data on their strengths and areas for growth. The complexity of analysis is managed by the structured framework.

Finding the Balance:

The key takeaway from applying Tesler’s Law to assessment design isn’t about making everything complex or overly simplistic. It’s about consciously deciding where to put the inherent complexity. Effective assessment design strategically distributes this complexity to maximize learning and provide meaningful insights. We should always know where the complexity lies.

Here are some practical lessons that I’ve learned from my current design project:

Clarity is Key: I’ve invested a lot of time on this over the last few weeks. Crafting clear and concise instructions, rubrics, and expectations shifts the complexity away from the student. Instead of the student trying to decipher the task, the educator should provide clear, upfront, and standardized guidance. Think inductions and briefings.

Structure for Success: Provide scaffolding and frameworks for complex tasks. Breaking down large tasks into smaller, manageable steps reduces the cognitive load on students. But this doesn’t just apply to the student, it also applies to the assessment process, such as in the way that the assessment items are written in the first place.

Targeted Feedback Mechanisms: Design assessments that allow for specific and actionable feedback. This helps educators address the underlying complexities of student understanding. It’s worth considering ways that can automate a certain amount of the feedback to allow educators to provide more detailed and/or nuanced context.

Consider the Learning Objectives: The complexity of the assessment should align with the complexity of the learning objectives. High-order thinking skills often require more complex assessment methods. Ensuring that the syllabus aligns with the assessment is a jolly good place to start.

Iterative Design: Don’t expect perfection. Assessment design is rarely perfect on the first try. Be willing to iterate and refine your methods based on student performance and your own reflections. It might mean a period of double-marking. But taking that weight of responsibility removes complex problems later. This also acknowledges and addresses the inherent complexity of measuring learning. Students are endlessly inventive in the ways they get things wrong. The assessment structure and processes have no option but to be dynamic.

Beyond Ease of Grading:

Ultimately, Tesler’s Law reminds us that striving for the easiest assessment to grade might inadvertently place a greater burden on our students and limit the depth of our understanding of their learning. By consciously embracing and strategically managing the inherent complexity of assessment design, we can ensure fairer, more informative, and ultimately more effective methods for evaluating and fostering student growth. Let’s move beyond the illusion of simplicity and embrace the inherent complexity.

Power Up your PowerPoint Presentation with inbuilt Designer for Design Ideas⤴

from Malcolm Wilson

Do you want to present with panache, style or flair? If you or your learners spend a lot of time trying to make your PowerPoint slides look good, then welcome to PowerPoint’s inbuilt Designer or Design Ideas to power up your PowerPoint presentation in the click of a button! With just a few clicks in …

To look forward, don’t beat a retreat⤴

from Ewan McIntosh @ Ewan McIntosh | Design Thinking, Education & Learning

Defining strategy is the most important work a leadership team can do. The last place they should go to do it is a retreat.

It’s January, and wherever I look online I see so many friends’ new year’s resolutions, strategies to make 2019 a little better than 2018, perhaps. And I see many wittily launch jibes about how they don’t make resolutions (“I never keep to them anyway, so why bother?”

They’ve got a point: we create resolutions at a time of forced relaxation when most of the world has shut down. The inbox is empty (or, at least, not filling up), our families surround us physically or digitally, our thoughts of work are kept at bay, still, through a fog of champagne bubbles and hangovers and bracing twilight walks. The time in which we come up with our resolutions barely resembles any other time of year. It’s no wonder that the daily cycle rides, walks or gym visits subside when the onslaught of reality begins on January 3rd.

In March a few years ago, I had been invited by a group of different schools’ Heads to a joint retreat. It was a retreat in name, at least. In reality, it was an overcharged three-day programme of administrative meetings, mutual therapy, forced fun, eating and drinking a bit too much. I was asked to walk them through an innovation process so that they could make Great Things Happen. I was given six hours during their three precious days. One of the widely-respected Heads proclaimed:

“I don’t know why we’re looking at innovation now, at this point in the year. It’s a terrible time to be thinking about doing anything in a school.”

March is indeed a hectic time in schools. Examinations for older students are looming, the last chance for some serious cramming on the horizon (by this point, many secondary schools admit that the learning is more or less suspended). Even little ones are finalising portfolios and presentations, exhibitions and performances.

But I was perturbed. As the CEOs of their organisations, strategy should be an everyday activity. Strategy is not something for which we can afford to cherrypick a slot in our calendars, something we choose to do at certain more relaxed times of the year. Strategy is definitely not something we can demote to six hours in a forced period of ‘retreat’.

Innovation is change. Change is what strategy both predicts and provokes. Strategy is where we plan.

The strategic plan itself is rendered useless fairly quickly. “Strategy’s great until you get punched in the mouth,” says Mike Tyson. “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything,” is how Dwight Eisenhower put it. Eisenhower was actually paraphrasing what a soldier had told him, and the soldier was much more precise in what kind of plans are worthless:

“Peace-time plans are of no particular value, but peace-time planning is indispensable.”

And there it is. Peaceful time plans — new year’s resolutions, strategic planning done in the quiet months of an organisation, holiday romances — are often worthless the moment the break or retreat is over. But the process of thinking things through — the planning — is vital. Why?

Peaceful time planning is vital because it lets us go through a process slowly. Think of it like training in a technique, a technique that we should be employing every day, at faster and faster speeds, so that when we’re in the thick of it in our busier ‘real’ lives we can cope with the punches coming our way.

After a deep immersive process throughout their organisation, a Design Team of students, teachers, staff and parents work through a mass of data, perceptions and stories to design simple strategy that anyone can use.

Over the past four years, my team has been involved in more strategy work with organisations than ever before. The word of mouth that drives some of the most successful organisations in the world to us for this help is invaluable, and reveals why people are seeking something different to their usual “strategic planning retreat”:

1. One, two or three days are not enough to come up with a strategic plan. Strategic planning is about the future, but to do this well you need to build on what happens today. People need some time to dive deeply into what makes their organisation tick today, and what people’s hopes and fears for the future might be. If you’re doing it properly, this deep dive immersive experience can take up to six weeks, and should involve everyone in your community contributing their perspectives. It’s a significant communications exercise to ensure everyone knows that they have the opportunity to present, share or post their perceptions of what works well, and less well, in the organisation today.

We use a strategic planning version of our NoTosh Design Thinking process to set up effective teams who can procure, encourage and manage this massive set of contributions, and then make sense of the trends that emerge from it. This kind of inclusive, immersive process is superb for providing that ‘peacetime planning’ moment for every member of the community. Even if it’s just for five minutes in the ‘war room’ or ‘project nest’, every teacher, student, parent, employee or visitor to the school can take the time to reflect, and get their memory muscle developed for planning every day. And the tools we use to synthesis all that data turn even the most ardent moan into a positive force to drive an organisation’s ambitious ideas.

2. The strategic plan itself is worthless within weeks or months. Organisations’ needs change quicker today than they did ten years ago. A five-year strategic plan might help a leadership team feel accountable, that they’ve done their job. But continuing with it headlong, without ever changing the expectations along the way, would be foolish. I don’t know any leadership team which has actually seen through every item in a five year plan, at the exclusion of all others. Most organisations with these kinds of long-term plans have massive fatigue in their teams: initiative after initiative gets introduced as sticky plaster planning for when the original plan isn’t quite working. But no-one ever dares to ditch significant projects in a five-year plan, even when, further down the road from the point of writing the plan, they’re clearly off-target.

Instead, we invest expertise in framing a leadership team’s vision as an exciting image of the future. Individually, a leader will struggle to express a vision that doesn’t make their ass clench with slight embarrassment from being a little too much or, more likely, a bit underwhelming. But with help, it’s possible to translate a team’s individual ideas for the future of their organisation into something that is compelling and which feels like a ‘goldilocks’ vision — not too hard, not too easy, just right.

3. Most strategic plans are actually just long-term plans. They’re not strategy. Strategy should look mercifully short when laid out on a postcard. Three, four or five ‘orders’ that tell the team how to play, but which don’t lay out each and every step you expect people to take. The ideas to realise the leadership’s expression of the vision need to come from and be delivered by the people who will feel the positive impact in the end.

That level of simplicity takes a lot of effort, expertise and time. We use some of the world’s best copywriters to knock strategy into shape so that the youngest member of a team or the person with English as their third or fourth language, can all understand how they’re meant to act.

4. Good strategy is only good when we know it works. So we don’t make anything final until the leadership team have tested the strategy out with their own current big projects. Ideally, there should be some that are clearly in their last breaths, ready to be ditched because they don’t help realise the vision, and they can’t be done in a way that works with the rest of the team’s strategy. Other projects will need changed to be successful — the strategy tells the leader how they need changed. And there will be some existing projects which will move front and centre — they may take on importance they didn’t have before.

Confident organisations test strategy further. In the American School of Warsaw, they’ve been testing for eight months, and are ready now to commit to most of what they set out, with some minor changes. Other organisations just know that they’ve nailed their direction, in days, often because there was little direction before, so any direction helps people have the focus they need here and now. These teams, far from being slapdash in their approach, understand deeply how strategy is something to be revisited daily.

5. Good strategy should be revisited every day. How do you know you’re doing a good job? How do you know that what you did yesterday worked, and what you’ll continue today will realise the vision you’ve got? Success metrics should not be reduced to annual or quarterly traffic lights, percentages and Board-speak management jargon. Success of projects can be measured in so many different ways, every day. Meeting about project success every week for 30 minutes allows the average organisation 48 points of change, instead of what might be achieved with eight Board meetings. For a leadership team to meet every day for 10 minutes to talk about success, accelerates the potential to tweak and amplify success to 240 points every year.

1000 points of change over five years, or a five year plan with one process at the start to get it right? Which do you prefer? That’s a lot more opportunity to plan together, to cope with the punches to your collective jaw, to kill off ideas that aren’t working (and assure yourselves that everyone knows why). You can only do this if you’re confident that your strategy is of the people in your organisation.

6. Strategy has to be true, not a trueism. Genchi Genbutsu is the Japanese term for the kind of active observation of the organisation that we undertake in that first deep dive. A leadership cannot take itself away to a five star hotel to presuppose what might be true, and develop a strategy from that point of view. A team can’t just talk about what it sees. It’s got to look. This is Genchi Genbutsu. It literally means: get out and see for yourself. Toyota are arguably the Japanese grandmasters of this technique, led by the founder of their world-famous manufacturing system, Taiichi Ohno, and it forms part of their formal five-part strategy for working:

The best practice is to go and see the location or process where the problem exists in order to solve that problem more quickly and efficiently. To grasp problems, confirm the facts and analyse root causes.

The Toyota Production System requires a high level of management presence on the factory floor, so that if a problem exists in this area it should be first of all correctly understood before being solved.

In Jeffrey Liker’s The Toyota Way we see the notion taken beyond the factory floor. Yuji Yokoya was the chief engineer for the 2004 Toyota Sienna redesign. Yokoya had never worked on a car made for the North American market, and he felt the need to practise some Genchi Genbutsu and get out to North America to gain some sense of empathy for a North American driver, and the potential purchaser of this new car. In the end, Yokoya drove a previous model Sienna throughout all 50 American states as well as all 13 provinces and territories of Canada. He got as far as the streets of Mexico.

Why was such a costly and timely roadtrip necessary? Was this the midlife crisis of a successful engineer, or a genius move to make major changes to an otherwise successful (in the Japanese market) car?

What he learned could not have been learned from any analytical data, survey or web search. Why? Because the things he observed needed observing by a Japanese Toyota engineer to make sense — they needed that empathetic, but foreign eye, to be seen afresh. For example, he discovered that roads in Canada are very different from those in the US — they have a very high central reservation designed to deal with the never-ending snowfall of winter. He learned that the winds in Mississippi are so strong at times that, if the family-sized Sienna were not designed with this in mind, it might have flipped over with the force. The most valuable lesson was perhaps to do with a tiny, non-engineering type problem: cup holders. In his native Japan people rarely eat or drink in their vehicles, while their North American counterparts were relatively settled in the habit of eating several of their daily meals within the car, on the move.

From the many design and engineering problems he spotted, Yokoya’s team developed a new Sienna for 2004, equipped with 14 cup holders and a flip tray specifically designed for your Big Mac and fries. It was their best-selling model yet.

The notion of ‘getting out there and seeing it’ might well seem like a drawback for leadership teams looking after large institutions, or entire districts, states or countries. They might feel that they can’t afford the equivalent of a 50-state road trip to get a firsthand insight. To undertake an extensive immersion, in person, ‘out there’, might not be possible for every individual leader. But it is possible when you harness your community, communicate well, form dedicated design teams to do the work with you. Toyota explain further with a reassurance for leaders:

The nature of the phrase is less about the physical act of visiting a site but more to do with a personal understanding of the full implications of any action within an environment as a whole.

The impact of changing one’s mindset, often by applying a strong sense of empathy to how others might view a situation, is powerful. Even in a workshop type situation, normally within the air-conditioned magnolia of a plush hotel or a school meeting room with no wifi (and no connection to the outside world), the mindset change put in place by considering every actor’s feelings and potential observations of the current situation is profound.

From one workshop in a business centre in Spain looking at problems in schools 500 miles away:

‘This workshop focused on people and used real examples; the process was involving.’

From a Headteacher in England:

‘The fact that everyone can take part and feels a necessity to join in means that all views, good and bad are taken into account.’

From a team in Australia looking at a perennial challenge they hadn’t (yet) overcome:

‘We loved having the time to explore ideas, good and bad, without negativity, to see things from so many perspectives.’

Just making an effort to connect with people from other perspectives transforms our thinking about what the underlying challenges we need to address might be.

This article has elements adapted from my book, How To Come Up With Great Ideas and Actually Make Them Happen, available in paperback, Kindle and iBooks, and in Spanish.

Educational reforms.⤴

from Robert Drummond

As soon as the PISA results came out, the questions, accusations and incriminations began. Blame it on the CfE, blame it on the SNP, blame it on the boogie. I’m not going to blame anyone, there’s plenty of stuff written by plenty of people on the internet already, indeed I’m not sure the PISA results are something to aim for or worry about – Finland seems not to be too concerned – but I am going to write about working through major education reforms in my career to date.

The two major reforms which took place whilst I’ve been a teacher occurred in England and Scotland. In England, I taught through the time of the National Literacy Strategy, the National Numeracy Strategy, the QCA units, the QCA unit plans, SATS tests and OfSTED inspections every four years in a range of schools in England. In Scotland I’ve taught throughout the implementation of the Curriculum for Excellence, and seen at first hand via The Girl, the national assessment procedures.

The reforms in England were massive and to a large degree micro-managed. The Government wanted improvements in literacy and numeracy and wrote strategies to make sure this happened. If there was debate around what ‘good’ literacy and numeracy should look like, I wasn’t part of (I was in my 20s though, so I knew everything anyway). The strategies were written by a group of literacy experts and then rolled out to schools in the autumn and winter to be put into place for the start of the next school year.

I recall the literacy strategy being rolled out in 2 hour staff meetings after school – I hate after school meetings, I’ve done a day of teaching, there is assessment to do and I’m tired: You’re not going to get the best out of me. These meetings were scripted by the government, the trainers read out what we needed to know and we worked through units of work which explained how the strategy worked, how we should plan, how we should teach reading,writing and spelling. We soon spotted that the answers to the trainers’ questions were usually on the next page of the document! For this training we were given a complete strategy, various unit breakdowns of our own, resources (which we needed to make up in school) and some examples of expected work. It was a slog but by September we had stuff in place and away we went with it. The lessons I taught from the strategy weren’t perfect, but there was a structure in place to help me.

Of course, your school didn’t HAVE to follow the literacy strategy, but if you didn’t and the OfSTED or local authority came a calling, your school literacy strategy had better be an improvement on the national strategy. If your SATS results weren’t up to standard then OfSTED might make an extra visit and again, you’d better be getting the national strategy in place or else (or else usually meant your HT retiring or resigning).

Once we had successfully implemented that – well actually by October of that same year – the National Numeracy Strategy was launched. If you’ve had the misfortune to chat to me about this, you’ll know I love the NNS! The Government spotted some of the problems with the literacy strategy and made some key improvements.

The NNS contained examples of questions and ideas you could use, straight out of the folder. The document, like the NLS had learning objectives for each term of each year group (meaning for differentiation there was a progression mapped out). However, the NNS was supplemented with two things I thought were brilliant.

Firstly, there was a 5 day maths course for every teacher in the UK. 5 days out of class (in a hotel at times) to discover the document, talk about it with colleagues from other schools, plan how you would implement it with your class, look at all the resources. Like the NLS it too was scripted, so the Government really were leading this change in EXACTLY the way they wanted it to go. The 5 days were back to back. A full week thinking about nothing more than numeracy. It changed my teaching approach to maths from ‘here’s the book kids’ to something I love to this day. And really it bloody well should have done, bearing in mind the cost of this to the UK taxpayer.

The other wonderful thing was the resources the NNS team made and shared. They created some wonderful teaching programs which I use to this day and they wrote the unit plans. These were highly detailed documents for each unit of work. Unit one was place value it contained 5 plans, one for each day of the week. Each plan was A4 and was pretty much a script for the lesson. There in the same folder (and latterly on CD-ROMS) were the resources (including worksheets) you needed for the lesson. Differentiated. The idea was that these plans were a start point, you changed them to suit the needs of your class. Lots of teachers did and that was great, but even if you didn’t (because you were, like so many teachers lazy what you delivered was good quality, written by numeracy experts, lessons. If you were new to the job it allowed you to know where to pitch an average lesson and how to piece your maths teaching together over a term. I loved them and still did out the ideas for a concept which my class find tricky to see if I’ve missed anything.

After a year or two, the Government did it again. They released the QCA topic documents. These detailed the teaching for all of the non-core subjects on a lesson by lesson basis. Again, all the information you needed to teach the lesson was contained in the folder. You adapted it, changed the order, added bits in, took bits out but the basic lessons for all your Art, DT, History, Geography, Music, Science, RME and PSE were there. Concurrent to that, the Government noticed that problem solving and investigations was not progressing as well as they wanted, so they created more problem-solving resource and ran another 5 day maths course for two teachers in each school to upskill them in teaching this. Again, resources and knowledge I still use to this day.

Looking back, it seems a great time, with resources aplenty, cash aplenty, but it was hard, hard work at times, with the pressure of OfSTED ready to pounce and the pressure of SATS scores needing to meet targets for school and local authority. For me, giving me start points close to a finished article of a lesson plan or termly plan allowed me to focus on the delivery of the lesson, moving children to their next target (of which they had many) and how I might make these at time dry lessons interesting and meaningful for the children. For teachers, new to the profession it certainly offered a proven scaffold to begin their careers. I loved the support the strategies and unit plans gave me and the time it freed up to think about the needs of the children in my care.

I will discuss the education reforms since I’ve moved to Scotland in my next post. I think it’s possible I moved out of England before things took a turn for the worse, but I’m happy to hear comments from people who disagree with that thought or with things as I recall them from the late 90s and early 2000s

Scottish Engineering Special Leaders Award – Maaz Nayyer⤴

from Glow Scotland @ Education Scotland's Learning Blog

Join us for an opportunity to chat to an engineer who can help you as part of this year’s Scottish Engineering Special Leaders Award.

This week’s engineer is Maaz Nayyer. Maaz grew up in Hull with a keen interest in Maths and Sciences at school and college. He attended the University of Leeds to study Mechanical Engineering following which he completed his Master’s level degree at the University of Sheffield. As a result of his academic achievements as well as previous experiences he also received the IMechE postgraduate scholarship at their Vision Awards Ceremony in 2013. He is now working as a graduate engineer at Doosan Babcock which provides engineering expertise to the energy industry. His work involves lots of design and calculations and also project planning and controls. He has worked on various projects involving coal and nuclear power and gas processing plants.

If you unable to join us for the live event you can always catch up with the recording at another time – Glow TV’s Watch Again.

Scottish Engineering Special Leaders Award – vlog 4⤴

from Glow Scotland @ Education Scotland's Learning Blog

Scottish Engineering Special Leaders Award – join the thousands of children already registered for this exciting free competition!”

If you could be an engineer in Scotland – what would you do?

Be inspired by the Strathclyde University Prototype Team in our fourth vlog as they discuss why they chose the winning entry, how they are planning on making it and where! Hear advice from the engineers about how to start thinking about your own design and how to develop it.

Engineering creativity starts here: info@leadersaward.com
Twitter: @Leadersaward

It’s high time for designers to get out of the way of design thinking⤴

from Ewan McIntosh @ Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

A prospective client sent me a link to this in-depth article on IBM's design thinking revolution, where Phil Gilbert, IBM's General Manager of Design, has hired over 1000 designers into the firm, and pushed for over 8000 of its managers and staff to get 'trained' in design thinking. They have even created specific design centres across the firm, with design offices in most of its key locations, such as the one above. The goal is nothing short of beginning IBM's next phase of transformation, one of many in its 100+ year history.

However, all is not rosy. Despite achieving a monumental success relative to the status quo, 8000 'recognised' design thinkers in a corporation of over 370,000 souls is barely a dent in terms of changing practice. If NoTosh were to effect change in only 2% of the teachers with whom we work, we'd have packed up our bags long ago.

I'm not sure hiring 1000 designers in and of itself is the answer to any organisation trying to instil a different way of viewing the world. Here's why.

Since design thinking really began to be a thing, back in the early 60s, the designer him or herself has consistently been at the centre of the design process. Even though we talk of 'user-centred design', the actual ideation and production of a solution, and in many cases the synthesis and definition of the problem to be solve, too, are all tasks undertaken by skilled 'designers', rather than the people in the organisation who have the scope, brand, or 'permission' to play in that space. Once the designers leave the project, so does the design thinking.

There is a reason d.school sees its executive courses filled with repeat customers and firms like IDEO continue to thrive - they are resolving challenges in specific examples of services or products, but not necessarily transforming the firms and organisations who had the budget and desire to solve a problem in that specific area. Solving a problem costs money. Solving a problem and teaching the client how to do it again and again costs more than just money. That might be the greatest challenge of all.

It's not just a gut feel or my word for it either. There is ample research showing this phenomenon of 'designer at centre' of the process, and the negative effects it has on finished products and services (Brown & Katz, 2011; Leifer, Plattner & Meinel, 2013).

Where the IBM story gets interesting is the number of times the word 'study' is used: four times. Those who want to think differently have to work hard at it, and look out of their existing ecosystem to see how. But the words 'teach' or 'show' or 'share'...? 0 appearances in this article, and many like it.

As long as organisations 'buy in' design expertise, it is in the designers' interest not to teach or to show. After all, where will the next gig come from? And are all designers clear on how they can work and teach their craft to the client? In our firm, we're not only well-practiced at thinking differently, both creatively and critically, but we're also beautifully amateur in so many of the industrial domains in which we choose to play. We are not experts in automotives, fashion, television or web startups. But we are expert teachers. And, with that, we are inherently sharers and showers.

It is that nuance that will help design move from the ranks of bearded, checked-shirt, boating shoe cool kids, and into any organisation that wants to effect perpetual and significant change in the way it views the world around it. If you want to outthink the limits of what's possible, the first step might be to put learning at the heart of everything you do.

References:
Brown, T., & Katz, B. (2011). Change by design. Journal Of Product Innovation Management, 28(3), 381-383.
Leifer, L., Plattner, H., & Meinel, C. (2013). Design thinking research: Building innovation eco-systems.

It’s high time for designers to get out of the way of design thinking⤴

from Ewan McIntosh @ Ewan McIntosh | Design Thinking, Education & Learning

I'm not sure hiring 1000 designers in and of itself is the answer to any organisation trying to instil a different way of viewing the world. Here's why.

The unknown unknowns – test out your ideas⤴

from Ewan McIntosh @ Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

Not knowing what you don't know is one of the most troublesome concepts of living in an information rich time poor world. And for educators, who have been used to knowing a lot about some stuff for the past century, it proves an elusive concept in my Masters programme and in workshops that I lead around the world.

I've just kicked off teaching my second year of Charles Sturt University's subject on Designing Spaces for Learning (you can follow the course hashtag to see what we're up to 16 weeks). Without any exceptions, this concept of unknown unknowns is one of the toughest for people to get, especially when they get their heads into the research behind it, such as C-K Theory:

Designing the unknown | C-K Theory Presentation from CGS Mines ParisTech on Vimeo.

While it's vital that my Masters students read the research, to really "do their homework" I set the first week's assignment in the real world. Every student must make an actual change to their learning environment within 10 days of starting the subject, and note the impact that the change has had. Sometimes, folk lack some inspiration. Here are two great things any educator could try in their learning spaces when they get back to school, or to their office, or their library. From Inc. Magazine, these two ideas encapsulate what it means to get out those unknown unknowns:

Play Anthropologist

How do you choose the environment that's best for your team? Forget asking them and try watching them instead, suggests Kuske:

"The problem with asking is, if people don't know it's an option, they're not going to give it to you as an answer. But when you watch their behaviors, you see no one ever uses those four spots over there but the couches are always busy. Or hey, why do you leave every other day? That would give [a small business owner] a lot of clues to what's right for their particular company."

Forget One Person Equals One Desk

Think you need one desk per team member? Think again. Kuske says mobile technology has rendered this idea obsolete, which is good news for cash-strapped small-business owners--it frees up money for more creative space design.

"Part of the cost structure everyone has is they make this assumption of a desk per person, but with mobile work, when you walk into most places, how many of those desks are actually used at any given moment? Not many," he says.

In Turnstone's experience often up to 60% of desks can go.

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An aggregation of Scottish educational blogs