Lecturing is easy. Successful teaching is hard. Teacher-centered classrooms support the teacher’s impression that “information is being distributed to students”. Student-centered classrooms support the ways student’s successfully receive the information, the way student’s feel about the information, and the way student’s go on to apply that information in meaningful ways. It’s definitely much more difficult.

Not only must the teacher master the content being delivered, but also understand and accept the many ways that students receive it. Despite the administrative efficiency of well-funded schools, learning itself is not an ordered process. Even with desks neatly lined in rows, learning is messy, full of mistakes, wrong concepts that must be corrected, errors of procedure, as well as frustration, anger, and hopelessness. Think back to your own education experiences, subjects that you struggled with. When were you afraid to raise your hand to ask a question? Or wonder why the rest of the class seemed to know what was happening when you did not? Were you ever angry at yourself for not getting it or jealous of others easy success? Alternatively, did you ever dismiss another student’s question as foolish? Wonder why they could not understand something so simple? Did drawing help you understand science better than taking notes? Which was easier: geometry or algebra? To be as successful as possible, the teacher at the front of the room is expected to deal with all of these setbacks. See my post on flipping the classroom to understand why training and supporting teachers ability to work one-on-one and in small groups is so important to ensuring success for all learners.

There are long answers to this. I would like to give a simple answer by focusing on the word design. Design is the practice of creating products that are both easy to use and functional. Principles of design have long been applied to consumer products. With consumer products, a good design makes the product’s use intuitive and powerful. A bad design forces the user to waste time, effort, or is unpleasant to use.

Designing the Human/Machine Interface

A human/machine interface is where person and tool meet. The meeting point can be anything from the buttons on a microwave oven to the shape of a shovel’s handle. Consider the amount of effort Apple has put into designing good human/machine interfaces.  Users of Apple products experience the products as pleasant to use, easy to learn to use, and performing valuable functions. It’s no secret that good design has made Apple successful.

Human/Learning Environment Interface

Thinking of the learners as product users is valuable to the designer. Users are active. Users have rights. Users needs must be considered. Traditionally, learners have been thought of as either passive or needing to increase effort when experiencing failure. Increasingly, principles of design are being applied to learning environments: kids/adults in classrooms, an apprentice and a journeyman in a workshop, summer interns at a law firm, basic military training, or Microsoft Flight Simulator. However, considering the needs of the user does not mean compromising the objectives of the course. The needs of the user are considered so that the assessments, the measurements of learning, are valid.  For example, a welder needs to pass a certification test after successfully working as an apprentice. The test evaluates the ability of the welder to follow standard safety procedures. He is a proficient and safe welder, but functionally illiterate. Is a written test a valid way to assess his ability to weld safely? I would say it is not valid. An observational or verbal test would be a better choice. Certainly, gaining literacy would also be good, but the certification was intended to measure ability to weld safely, not literacy. Our welder’s characteristics must be considered, since he is a user of the certification, a type of assessment.

Verifying that assessments are valid is critical to having a pass/fail mark that meets the needs of the user. The users need to pass, but you do not want to pass users who have not learned whatever knowledge, skills, or attitudes (KSAs) the environment is meant to teach. Conversely, you do not want to fail users who have learned what was required. By knowing your users, you know the KSAs each user begins and ends with. Distilled to its essence, the process goes thusly:

1. pre-assessment of specific KSAs
2. intervention (i.e. the learning environment imposed on the user)
3. post-assessment of specific KSAs
4. repeat as necessary, with appropriate modifications