Journal
Event
Learning about the teachers
Presenting at the ISDDE Education Conference
The International Society for Design and Development in Education (ISDDE) is a professional global community of people dedicated to raising the quality of educational processes and materials. Their 2021 conference in March was staged virtually across three timezones over a 24 hour period.
I was thrilled to kick off the presentations for the Australia-Asia region, explaining the value of understanding users–in this case teachers–to design better services both with and for them.
The education sector is at an exciting tipping point. Many things seem to be broken: teachers are overloaded, struggling to keep up with the volume of topics covered in the curriculum and the skills needed in a rapidly-changing workforce. There’s additional pressure coming from the downward trend in Australian student performance in mathematics, reading and science (PISA).
But the opportunity to rethink industrial education models and leverage technology to create a system fit for the future is fast becoming a reality. Some leading education organisations are already recognising its potential. The home schooling dynamic forced on us by COVID-19 accelerated that change at enormous scale and gave us a glimpse of what might be possible.
Reaching this new future in education can only be achieved with a deep understanding of those in the education eco-system – students, teachers, parents, principals, office staff. Learning about their needs and behaviours will allow us to design services that enable them to work more autonomously, creatively and with differentiated support.
My talk dug into the research that Folk have conducted with the Australian Academy of Science to understand how we might embed professional learning for teachers around science into their day-to-day, instead of seeking hard-to-come-by days out of the classroom.
If you're interested in reading more about ISDDE, please find more information here.