Educational Designer

Link to materials

This approach has the advantage of promoting student agency, ownership and responsibility because the teacher can mostly observe, only intervening where necessary. But ensuring the guidance is enough to keep the work on course, without being over directive, presents considerable design challenges.

The Numeracy through Problem Solving modelling project (Shell Centre 1987-89) approached these challenges in various ways over the five modules – by using, for example:

• initial examples of products with lots of faults for student to analyze to analyze in Phase 1, clarifying the challenge - e.g. Design a Board Game included some example games that ranged from subtly flawed to unplayable, much to the delight of students.
• delayed reminders of necessary elements to avoid lethal omissions – e.g. the parental permission letter in Plan a Trip, without which the trip out of school can't happen in Phase 3.
• collective formative evaluation of the products in Phase 4 – by the other groups in the class, who also provided the audience for other groups' quizzes in Produce a Quiz Show.

The student guide for Plan a Trip, available online, illustrates this in more detail.