The process of designing a professional development as an educational designer.

The assignment
When we get the assignment to develop a course for children or a professional development for teachers, first I was positive about the course.
I’m a teacher, so developing a course is something I did before. I thought it was easier.
But when we were discussing the two assignments with our group we decided to design a professional development. We thought it was a challenge!

The start
I’m glad we made that decision that time, because challenging it was! The first step of the developing was brainstorming. I think brainstorming is a very good way to start a design process. But even before the brainstorming, I had some ideas about the design and the way we want teachers to integrate ICT.
Because 3 out of 4 in our group are teachers, we had a different perspective than some other groups with no teachers. I immediately thought about the motivation of teachers to go to a course with the content ‘integrating ICT’.
As a teacher you do not want a course where an instructor tells you something about ICT and you are just listening. But even before the course will begin, the teachers may feel unmotivated about the whole idea of integrating technology.

We decided to develop a course for one school. We want all the teachers to participate, because we want the development to be school wide. So the course was kind of an obligation in the school. We thought we can make them enthusiastic during the course.
First I was a little bit against obligated courses, but I think when you want a school development, the whole school must participate. That’s why we also made the choice to let the school leader, the ICT coordinator and the pupil monitor coordinator participate. We called them ‘the experts’.
After seeing all the presentations of the other groups, I think we made a good decision to let the experts join the course.

The design
After the brainstorming and the nice ideas about, for example the experts, we need to find out what we want to teach them. What is the problem with the integration of ICT?
I think we did a good job to find some relevant information in the literature. Of course we knew what the main problem was, but the literature helped us to clarify that.
The problem is that teachers can’t combine the technology and the curriculum with each other. There is a gap between them.

Now that we know the problem we need to think about the design. I thought it was difficult to make choices, because we had so many ideas. We wrote down all the ideas and made a blueprint. After the blueprint we elaborate all the ideas. We divide the material so everyone could work individually.


For next time I think we need to deliberate more about the design. It was difficult to write your part because you don’t know what the others will write. Of course we have read each other work, but that was not enough to make the design comprehensive. So next time when we work in groups, we need to meet each other more and deliberate more.

Conclusion about the process
The nicest thing about this process is the perspective of a designer. I’m always the teacher who design lesson plans. Now I was the designer developing a course for teachers. I found it very interesting. We were a group with 3 teachers and one bachelor student. We had different ideas, but we could combine them very good. The collaboration was good, but it was a pity that we could not meet on school as often as we want because of work.