ISDDE Newsletter May 2015

Contents

  • Announcements
  • Project outline
  • Working groups
  • Other news (Major international award to ISDDE Fellows)
  • About ISDDE

Welcome

Welcome to the first edition of the ISDDE Newsletter! Written for members and fellows of the society, this newsletter supports ISDDE in meeting her goals. Specifically, it contributes to:

  • Improving design and development processes by providing information about high quality design and development work and, where possible, linking news items to relevant articles published in the society’s journal, Educational Designer;
  • Building a design community by sharing information about working group initiatives, new initiatives and job postings; and
  • Increasing our impact on educational practice by reporting on discussions (those needed, intended or already held) with practitioners, decision makers and academics on the nature of high-quality design and systematic development as well as its value in achieving educational improvement.

Ideally, the ISDDE Newsletter will also help raise awareness among designers about their own designer identity, how that can be nurtured, and what role ISDDE can play in the process.
On behalf of the society, I’d like to express sincere gratitude to Will Morony, Angela Hall and Alan Schoenfeld for establishing this newsletter. In a typical designer struggle, they have carefully considered the tension between providing sufficient information and maintaining an easily digestible format for the busy reader. I believe that they have struck a delightful balance. I am also certain that, like the readership, the editorial team members welcome constructive comments on their design.
Many thanks to Will, Angela & Alan, and happy reading to all!

Susan McKenney
ISDDE Chair

Announcements

Educative Design: 2015 ISDDE Conference - Boulder, Colorado

The ISDDE 15 conference will take place from September 22-25, 2015 in Boulder, Colorado, USA. Situated in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, the University of Colorado Boulder will provide a uplifting natural landscape for presentations, showcase events, and working groups focused on design and development in education. The Boulder community is known for innovation in engineering, technology, science and the arts, and several of these local features will be reflected in program options.

This year’s conference theme, Educative Design, was selected to convey the educational opportunities in both the process and results of our designs. This year we gather in Boulder, Colorado, to continue to share our ideas on educational design principles and practices as well as our collective experiences, expertise, and examples of educational design work.

Registration is now open, with early-bird discount until 15 June.

Visit: Educative Design conference website for more details.

2014 ISDDE Prize to Christine Cunningham for Engineering is Elementary

The 2014 ISDDE Prize (also called the “Eddy”) was awarded to Dr. Christine Cunningham from the Museum of Science, Boston and the team of curriculum developers who worked with her to create the Engineering is Elementary® (EiE®) curriculum. The prize “for excellence in design for education in science or mathematics” was presented to Dr. Cunningham on October 1st at the 2014 ISDDE conference in Cambridge, England.

Engineering is Elementary® (EiE®) has provided proof of concept that even young children in ordinary classrooms can learn to love engineering. The curriculum, developed at the Museum of Science's National Center for Technological Literacy® (NCTL®), has already reached more than 6 million children and 71,000 teachers across the United States and serves as a model for curriculum projects around the world.

The design elements that Dr. Cunningham and the EiE team developed and incorporated into EiE include short, flexible curriculum modules that integrate engineering with the science topics schools routinely teach--helping teachers integrate engineering into an already crowded school day. After elementary teachers said they found the idea of teaching engineering “terrifying,” the EiE team made the curriculum easy to implement with carefully structured lessons, and created a library of short videos so teachers could see what these lessons look like in real classrooms. Finally, to engage students from populations underrepresented in engineering careers, the team placed each design challenge in an authentic setting that would draw on students’ real-world experiences (for example, designing a bridge to reach an island play fort or a wall to keep hungry bunnies out of a garden)--using storybooks that support school goals for literacy.

2015 ISDDE Prize - Call for Nominations

Lifetime contribution to design in education

The 2015 Prize of $10,000(US) is offered for a substantial body of work, by an individual or a team, over a period of years that shows excellence in design for education in science or mathematics.

Nominations are solicited from Fellows, Members, and friends of ISDDE - the deadline for nominations is June 15 2015.

Click here for full details of how to nominate…

ISDDE Journal – Educational Designer

Have you considered sharing your work through Educational Designer?
Educational Designer is ISDDE’s peer-reviewed, open access journal. The main audiences for the journal are: educational designers with a substantial commitment to design and development; leaders of design and development groups; strategists in education; funders and clients of systematic design and development; and educational design researchers. Educational Designer articles typically address: design and development processes; the relative merits and drawbacks of pathways to design; and/or design premises, principles or considerations. Authors are encouraged to include rich exemplification as well as empirical support for the views expressed.

The Editorial Board Educational Designer is pleased that the journal will benefit from the following editorial appointments starting this year:
- Editor-in-chief: Kaye Stacey, University of Melbourne
- Assistant editor: Sheila Evans, University of Nottingham
- Design editor: Daniel Pead, University of Nottingham
- Associate editors: Frans van Galen, Utrecht University; Dor Abrahamson, University of California at Berkeley; Max Stephens, University of Melbourne

The editorial team welcomes preliminary inquiries as well as completed manuscripts. Detailed author guidelines can be found by clicking here.
Please feel free to contact Editor-in-chief Kaye Stacey.

Project outline

One of the Poster Abstracts of work shared at the 2014 Annual Meeting.

If you have a project you would like to share with the ISDDE community, please contact the Editor.

Design Dimensions: In-Depth Retrospective Studies of K-12 Science Curriculum Design

Collaborators

  • TERC, USA (Debra Bernstein, Anushree Bopardikar, Brian Drayton)
  • Open University of the Netherlands and University of Twente, The Netherlands (Susan McKenney)
  • Lawrence Hall of Science, USA (Jacqueline Barber, Sara Walkup)
  • University of Pittsburgh, USA (Natalie Pareja Roblin, Christian Schunn)

Design and development are critically important to the educational enterprise. Unfortunately, there is little research on which design and development processes produce optimal outcomes for curricular materials intended for large-scale implementation. The Design Dimensions project asks: Across phases of design (analysis, development, and evaluation), what processes and strategies are critical to successfully obtain large scale implementation with significant impacts on learners? Our work examines design processes with respect to three themes in science education: Deep Understanding and Rich Performance; Social and Cultural Experiences; and Implementation in Diverse and Resource-Limited Settings. A series of ‘deep dive’ studies examines designer processes in two successful contexts: the Lawrence Hall of Science and TERC. The first phase of investigation includes four retrospective case studies. This poster presents the theoretical framework and methodological approach used to investigate the work of successful design teams. We seek feedback from designers at ISDDE about the approach taken thus far.

For more information about Design Domensions, please click here

Design Dimensions: In-Depth Retrospective Studies of K-12 Science Curriculum Design

Collaborators

  • TERC, USA (Debra Bernstein, Anushree Bopardikar, Brian Drayton)
  • Open University of the Netherlands and University of Twente, The Netherlands (Susan McKenney)
  • Lawrence Hall of Science, USA (Jacqueline Barber, Sara Walkup)
  • University of Pittsburgh, USA (Natalie Pareja Roblin, Christian Schunn)

Design and development are critically important to the educational enterprise. Unfortunately, there is little research on which design and development processes produce optimal outcomes for curricular materials intended for large-scale implementation. The Design Dimensions project asks: Across phases of design (analysis, development, and evaluation), what processes and strategies are critical to successfully obtain large scale implementation with significant impacts on learners? Our work examines design processes with respect to three themes in science education: Deep Understanding and Rich Performance; Social and Cultural Experiences; and Implementation in Diverse and Resource-Limited Settings. A series of ‘deep dive’ studies examines designer processes in two successful contexts: the Lawrence Hall of Science and TERC. The first phase of investigation includes four retrospective case studies. This poster presents the theoretical framework and methodological approach used to investigate the work of successful design teams. We seek feedback from designers at ISDDE about the approach taken thus far.

For more information about Design Domensions, please click here

Working Groups from 2014 Annual Meeting

The four Working Groups at the 2014 Annual Meeting in Cambridge, UK were:

  1. Designing Resources
  2. Designing Curricula
  3. Designing Assessment
  4. Designing Professional Learning

Their Design Brief was

“to design a product or artefact (e.g. a resource such as a textbook page or animation; a curriculum plan such as a learning trajectory for a specific topic; an assessment item; or a PD instance)."

Outlines of their work and outputs are included below. 

Designing resources

The group focussed on the 110 years on lesson as a means of unpacking issues. They produced several documents

Designing curricula

You can download the group's paper on "coherence and curriculum design" and on "research priorities".

Designing Assessment

Formative assessment across different countries

Building on the work done at the Cambridge ISDDE Conference we are exploring how local situations shape the meaning of formative assessment, the opportunities provided for formative assessment, and the issues around implementation. Throughout we take a design perspective, whether the design of a task, the design of a teacher guide, or the design of a series of tasks.

Designing professional learning

The group's presentation at the final session of the conference is available here.

Three sub-groups worked on these areas:

  • Online PD
  • Challenge
  • Cascading PD for scale 

Contact Will Morony for an update

Other news

ISDDE Fellows receive major international award

The inaugural Emma Castelnuovo Award for Excellence in the Practice of Mathematics Education has been awarded to Hugh Burkhardt and Malcolm Swan. The award has been established by the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI) to recognise outstanding contribution to teaching practice in mathematics. Two other ICMI awards recognise excellence in research.


The following is an extract from the citation from the Award Committee:
“…in recognition of their more than 35 years of development and implementation of innovative, influential work in the practice of mathematics education, including the development of curriculum and assessment materials, instructional design concepts, teacher preparation programs, and educational system changes.

Burkhardt and Swan have served as strategic and creative leaders of the Nottingham-based Shell Centre team of developers. That team has included many talented individuals over nearly 4 decades, in parallel with the contributions of more recent teams of international collaborators. Burkhardt and Swan are selected because of their continuous leadership of this work. Together, they have produced groundbreaking contributions that have had a remarkable influence on the practice of mathematics education as exemplified by Emma Castelnuovo.

Burkhardt and Swan’s approach is distinguished by their efforts to address the problem of improving learning strategically and across all levels of education by:

  • Designing activities for learners based on an understanding of their thinking;
  • Designing lessons that promote deep learner engagement in those activities;
  • Designing professional development to help teachers use the activities and lessons;
  • Designing system change (e.g., in assessment, curriculum, and teacher support) to promote the above; and
  • Encouraging educational researchers to value more highly the impact of change on the educational system.”

The full citation can be found here.

The whole ISDDE community congratulates Hugh and Malcolm on this well-deserved recognition.

About ISDDE

ISSDE was formed to help those dedicated to raising the quality of design of educational processes and materials towork effectively as a coherent professional design and development community. The society's Background Paper provides information an\bout the mission and activities of ISDDE.

Educational designers around the world are invited to consider becoming a member of ISDDE.

The ISDDE Newsletter

I would really like to hear from readers with their feedback on this first edition of the ISDDE newsletter. This edition is the first and we expect that the ISDDE Newsletter will evolve through a design process – and that relies on feedback. And of course, if you have any items of news for the international educational design community, please send them to me.

In future we plan to have newsletters archived on the ISDDE website; and will be exploring means for direct (free) subscription. In the meantime if you have received the newsletter through a colleague and would like to receive it directly, I will be happy to add you to the list.

Next edition – August

ISDDE

Editor Will Morony

ISDDE Website

MailerLite