Mentoring in Learning by Design

Writing curriculum outside my subject area, whhhhhhhhhooooooooooaaaaaaaaaa!!! I have found that you need a rudimentary understanding of the subject matter to be able to suggest conceptual learning and to analyse critically. I have mentored teachers for Chemistry, Sports Leadership, Art history and appreciation, Building design and in 6 different curriculum areas for the year 9 Exhibitions rotations. Mostly by the time I get them the teachers are on board with the idea of using the Learning by Design framework. It still amazes me that there are those who resist the process of deliberate, planned, documented curriculum and that some teachers feel like they have all the answers and couldn’t possibly benefit from going through a collaborative process.
Our cluster of schools has recently undertaken action research, as in every teacher in each school identifying pre data, applying an intervention (a learning element) and then collecting post data to see if the intervention was successful. Of course this happened with varying degrees of success and enthusiasm but on the whole teachers were excited by the changes that they saw in their students’ understanding of the material taught. Our school network leader and the curriculum head in the department were amazed at the high level of understanding of teachers of their work and the deliberate way they had designed their units.
The challenges for me in mentoring teachers has been in communicating the need for a progression in the learning activities, to have some kind of logical flow in order to allow students to have deep understanding of the topic. Previous units of work have been like a scatter gun or a brainstorm or activity vomit, all the possible activities you could do on a topic recorded in no particular order with a test at the end to see if the students remembered what they were taught. I looked over an element writted by a staff member last year who had a foot in each camp, she liked the way she did business in the classroom but liked the opportunity to participate in the Learning by Design structure. The resulting unit was a scattergun unit with activities recorded in the correct knowledge processes but with no logical flow between them and no pedagogy to support higher order thinking or summarisation, few opportunities to collect data along the journey. It is still possible to write a bad unit of work using the Learning by Design framework. I have personally written the best elements in collaboration with staff who have diverse teaching experience and whilst being mentored by a leader who has strong conceptual knowledge of how to use the framework effectively. There is no substitute for a collaborative approach to curriculum design and when it is facilitated by someone who knows the framework inside out show stopping curriculum is the result.

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