Standard 4.1 - Collaborative Practice
"Candidates collaborate with their peers and subject matter experts to analyze learners, develop and design instruction, and evaluate its impact on learners." (AECT, 2012)
Description of Artifact
In the spring of 2018, I took Dr. Misook Heo’s GDIT 716 course: Design of the Learner Experience. The summative assignment of this course was to create an application (app) that students could use to facilitate the change of a specific behavior to achieve a learning goal. Therefore, I worked with a partner to design an app, using the cycle of UX design, to create Collaborain. It is an app that is designed to help students who approach math with a “can’t do” attitude, to review the material learned in class and ask their peers for help in a learning environment they feel safe in.
Reflection and Rationale
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Both my partner and I have experience teaching students in either math or math-based science classrooms. So, we decided to analyze the characteristics of learners in a math-based learning environment. We found that many of the disruptive behaviors seen in these classes were because of students who may have been struggling with the material or did not want to be in the spotlight for being behind compared to their peers. Therefore, we decided to create an app that could be used to help students review the material taught in class and ask their peers for help by using the app to directly message their peers.The objective of the app was to change the "cant do" mindset of these students to a more positive attitude towards math-based classes. Once a prototype of the app had been designed, we first asked our peers to evaluate the learning environment, then we tested the prototype with actual students using an evaluation plan. After both rounds of evaluation, we used the results and recommendations to revise the prototype.
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I chose this artifact to represent proficiency in AECT’s Standard 4.1 as it demonstrates my ability to “collaborate with peers and subject matter experts to analyze learners, develop and design instruction, and evaluate its impact on learners.” Furthermore, this course with Dr. Heo made me realize the importance of having peer evaluated learning materials. Everyone can experience a learning environment differently. So, it is important, as a teacher, to be aware that the environment you created my not be perceived the way you intended. Due to this realization I now ask both my colleagues and students to provide feedback on the learning materials and environments I create. For example, my students expressed how they hated going over the syllabus on the first day of class, so I decided to create a colorful infoposter of the syllabus with eye-catching colors and diagrams. There was a positive response to this improved syllabus and the students were more engages during the lesson. Many students chose to use the syllabus as the covers of their class binder. One student even mentioned that this way they can easily reference the syllabus as well. Please see the image below of an example infoposter syllabus.
Artifact 12C - Rationale paper outlining the revisions of Collaborain
Example of an infoposter syllabus created using student feedback.