Preparing teachers for the classrooms of the future through research and design.

Designing For Impact

Designing For Impact

6 Design Elements For Encouraging Change In Practice

Image Credit: Megan Haddadi, Head Of Technology, Park School

Overview

From January to March, MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab ran the Launching Innovation in Schools MOOC. The central design challenge of the course is that MOOCs are primarily an individual, asynchronous, online medium, while school leadership is collaborative, real-time, and situated in specific contexts.

The core design strategy of Launching Innovation in Schools was to develop new learning techniques that transferred learning in the online setting to action in real contexts. These techniques included anchoring leadership principles in specific practices, encouraging the formation of collaborative learning circles, providing a facilitator’s guide for learning circles to use, creating takeout packages that walk leaders through new practices, modeling the process of change in compelling case studies of schools, and offering calls to action that get participants putting their new learning to work right away in their schools. Throughout our design process, we reminded ourselves that the learning that truly mattered was that which transformed participant behavior and changed conditions in their schools.

Presentations & Reports

SIG Presentation about our design strategy

Launching Innovations in Schools Review

Teaching Systems Lab

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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