Design Based Learning

On Saturday I went to a Professional development training located at the Colorado Academy. The focus of the training was on design based learning. This is a relatively new idea to me, and one that I didnt know was a growing strategy. The idea of design based learning is to integrate problem solving into the classroom, by having students think about real world problems in the light of solving it. It focuses on a set of steps used to solve the problem.

Step 1- Interview/Identify the problem- In this case the learner is trying to identify the problem that needs to be solved. In the case of our PD we were interviewing students from Colorado Academy and interviewing them on their school experience. What did they like about school? What didn't they like about school? How would they go about changing the current system? After interviewing 4 different students we compiled a list of problems, and sorted them into categories. WE then decided what category was the most prevalent. It turned out that students were most disenchanted by the process of learning. They all said that they often only learn to get a grade, and therefore take shortcuts to work the system for grades. This was the problem that we ended up addressing.

Step 2- Brainstorm-

In this step we brainstormed solutions to potentially solve our problem. We came up with a list of over 60 ideas to solve our problems. In this step there are some important stipulations such as shooting for quantity of ideas, and not being afraid to take chances on an idea.

Step 3- Prototyping

In this step we we came up with a visual representation of our final solution. Which was to have students take base in an expeditionary learning environment. We then had the students come back into the class to critique our idea.

Step 4- Analyze

In this step we took a look at our idea, took the feedback from students and modified our solution where it needed to be changed.

The whole idea of Design based learning is intriguing to me. I thought this was an interesting way to learn. Does anybody have any experience with this form of learning, I would be interested to hear about your opinion on this method.