 Hi, my name is Tracy Takahama-Spinoza and this is a video on 3D learning. Basically, how do you combine backward design, instructional design, and universal design for learning as the best combination for delivery? I am the director of education at Connections and I teach a course at Harvard called the Neuroscience of Learning. It's an introduction to mind, brain, health, and education. And I also work as an associate editor for Nature Partner Journal of Science of Learning. I'd like to invite you to take notes as we go through this very brief video. And also to write down our website. There's a lot of free and open material for you there. I want you to think about why I'd ask you to write as well. Writing is one of the highest forms of thinking and it also extends your memory so it helps you pay attention when you take notes along the way. I'd also like you to think about doing a reflection as we finish. Three things that are new, two things that are interesting, and one thing that you might change based on the information that's shared today about design. So we're just going to go through this idea about justifying why we need to have new 3D learning and exactly what this means in terms of designing new learning experiences. I'm going to do this within the context of the learning sciences. I'm basically focused mainly on how we can leverage elements from technology and our design, but also understanding that we educate based on all of the learning sciences, including cognitive sciences, psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics culture. All of these elements play into great instructional design. So the punchline is that great course design involves a logical plan, a trajectory, or a hierarchy, or a construction of learning objectives, that it is a design that is pleasing and easy and intuitive for the learner, and that it has resources that can help differentiate amongst the different kinds of needs that your students would have. This means we have to think about understanding by design. Initially, we have to look at this in the context of mastery learning, then put this into an instructional design, and ultimately with universal design for learning. Now, a design framework can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, but the main way that we're using the term is that rather than it's equated with teaching, but rather than just thinking of the teaching learning dynamic, it's thinking about how we have control over designing that teaching and learning experience. So we do this in connections through the learning sciences context, looking at teachers' new pedagogical knowledge, taking into consideration technology, as well as information from learning sciences. And so any question you might have, the worry about Zoom fatigue, or trying to reach ultimately better online engagement, or trying to get away from cookie cutter instruction and be more personalized with your students, having to meet curriculum standards, but still wanting to help students reach mastery in your subject area, or from going from just being an entertaining kind of a structure to actually having significant learning experiences, all of these are questions of design. So we're going to take you through these three different types of designs with hopes that you can put this into context within your own course structure. So understanding by design was developed by Jay McTie and Grant Wiggins, and it basically has three core steps. The first is to decide your objectives. At the end of the day, what is it that you hope to achieve? Then, number two, you decide on evaluation structures. What evidence would you accept that you're moving towards your objectives? And then third, you decide what activities or resources you'll need. The key to doing all of this is having a clear objective. If you have clear objectives, you can easily decide what type of evaluation criteria you want to use and what types of activities or resources are necessary. So in this sense, Jay McTie thinks that design is pretty much shaped by the objectives that you choose. So are you after factual knowledge or conceptual knowledge? Are you looking for procedural knowledge or higher order thinking and metacognition? Depending on your objective, you have different tools that you can use then to evaluate and different tools that you can use to teach. It also changes the physical design of your classroom. If all you want to do is deliver facts and content, you can definitely do this in a webinar or just recording information, right? But if you're trying to get into deeper conceptual knowledge on the part of the learner, you really have to have more interactive activities and to have face-to-face meeting to be able to do that. Or if you're looking for procedural knowledge, how do you actually execute a certain type of a skill? You need to have the time to do that. And reflective activities pretty much have to be practiced independently because different learners will start off at different points and need different amounts of time to achieve that. And if you have met a cognitive knowledge as your goal, you really should think about deeper learning, flipping the classroom and then having those deeper discussions when you are face-to-face. Within Wigan's and McTai's model, all learning is the combination of knowledge, skills, and our attitudes. So knowledge is dates, facts, formulas, conceptual understanding, skills or your ability to apply the knowledge. And attitudinal things have a lot to do with values, valuing the teamwork or hard work or resiliency. So everything we do and teach can be categorized as knowledge, skills, and our attitudes. Understanding by design, the structure of objectives, evaluation activities can be used at all levels. It can be used at the level of, you know, macro understanding, macro planning as far as what do I want to achieve as a country, as a nation, or as a state, or for this particular course, or even for this particular class that I'm teaching today. So the same structure, setting objectives, deciding how well we evaluate it, and then what kinds of activities or resources you need can be done at all of these macro, meso, and micro levels of planning. If you use this to set up an entire semester's worth of planning, you can backwards engineer yourself to your starting point. And so ultimately, where is it that you want to go, decide the topics you want to cover, and then how you will actually get there. So if you have weekly objectives, then how do you backwards engineer that to the activities of the day? This is what we do in our course, which we feel has a great instructional design that really leverages all of 3D learning. The second point has to do with instructional design, and there's been 75 years of trying to piece this together. How do you design learning experiences in a way that would actually stick? And starting way back when there was a pyramid, which got misinterpreted. But it was actually trying to look at what types of sensory perceptive benefits there were to varying different types of input and learning. Back in fifties, Bloom was absolutely brilliant in establishing this taxonomy of cognitive objectives and helping people think about a rather typical, hierarchical trajectory mentally in the mind that kids would be at a handicap. They couldn't actually analyze things if they didn't understand what was going on, right? And so this hierarchy was beneficial in structuring concept of mastery learning. Several other researchers back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s were also extremely influential in creating basic instructional design structures for their teachers, their audiences, and these still play a role in good instructional design. The work by Merrill's, Briggs, Gagne, and also Keller, and especially that of Sweller, has been extremely influential in what we deem a successful instructional design that exists today. Some of the most recent additions to this have to do with incorporating information from social emotional learning, from diversity and equity teaching, and also looking at how this all plays out if you are to incorporate more technology or to do some things online. The most recent work that we have been focused on has to do with radical neuroconstructivism. How is it that the people build off of personal relationships with one another and change their own understanding of the information once they have those exchanges? We like to give the example that if you read Romeo and Juliet when you were 12 and then you read it again when you were 20 and you read it again when you were 35, the book is the same, but because the person has had different life experiences, they will interpret that book differently, right? So similarly, you have a lot of ideas in your own head, but the minute you explain or talk about your ideas with other people, one plus one is three, you'll have different type of understanding of the information once you have that social exchange. This means a great instructional design. If we go back to Wiggins and McTye's idea, if you have a clear objective, then you can make decisions about modalities. Should things, what things should be done asynchronously? For example, individual rehearsal and practice should be done really on individual time, but there's other things that are much better off when we do things together as a group, synchronously, right? And now we have to think about whether or not these things occur online or face-to-face, whether or not we have direct instruction explicitly teaching elements or whether it's implicit and whether or not we're supported by digital tools as we do that. The third design element has to do with universal design for learning, which is a pretty fantastic concept, which comes up with this idea that we can diversify, we can individualize, we can personalize students' homework. So that this means that we take into consideration the range of learners and all of the resources we have, and then we design a learning experience where everybody gets what they need. That's the key idea of universal design for learning. It's a concept that really looks at this idea of the average as being unrealistic kind of a goal to have for education. We should all try to learn and thrive, but just teaching to the average is not the way to go, mainly because different people will need different things at different moments. Universal design for learning was inspired by architecture, which said that nobody's going to have the same experience with an educational concept. How many times does it take for you to learn something new? Depending on your prior experience, it could be anywhere between 1, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 different times. This is Marsano's work, where he shows that it's possible that due to your own prior knowledge of information, you may need to rehearse a lot more than the next guy in the class. Universal design for learning is also based on this architectural concept that some people can do stairs, but everybody can do ramps. So why don't we design education with ramps? We use this basically lowest common denominator as an entry point for the information so that we're sure that everybody, high flyers as well as those lower achievers, can all have the access to the information that they need. So if you look at universal design for learning, it really fits in well with Bloom's idea of mastery learning. In 1968, Bloom really pointed out for us something that's still true today, that the main variation in an individual's ability to learn in your class, basically he said that everybody, you know, pretty much over 90% of the kids in your class can learn anything that you throw at them, if and when they have enough time. The key variable here is having time to reach mastery. Do you have enough time to fill in your gaps of prior knowledge if you come into a class missing core elements or core notions? So time is the key variable here. You cannot add more time to the school year typically, so the idea here is design. Can we design a structure in which homework is more personalized so everybody gets exactly what they need? So universal design for learning means that you have clear objectives, you use a neuroconstructivist pathway and trajectory for learning or curriculum to get to those things. You are able to supply opportunities for differentiation in order for everybody to reach mastery goals. You use all of your tools, tech tools as well, in order to scaffold that learning and that you have transparent instructional design so everybody knows where to find all of these different resources and everybody can get and use what they need. Treating people fairly does not mean treating them equally. Different people are going to need different things at different times in order to be successful. So the main two questions that need to be asked to successfully create universal design for learning is what is the range of my learners and what are the tools and resources that are available to me? And once you've figured out those two things, what does my highest level look like, what does my lowest student look like and you know what kinds of tools are available in your setting, you're able to now create or design the best learning experience possible for the widest range of learners. That is universal design for learning. Some of the main lessons that we've learned by using the lens of the learning sciences is that information about cognitive load. A good design means that there is distribution and timing and frequency of information. The design is intuitive, that there's hyperlinks and repetition and colors that actually lend to an individual's navigation of the information. We've also learned from memory systems and attention systems with our both the vital for all learning that if we do things like interleaving where we teach something, leave it alone, come back to it, repeat that we reinforce memory tracks and therefore learning. We also know that things like frequent low stakes tests are a fabulous way of rehearsing memory in the brain and also bringing that information to the fore when it's needed. And so learning sciences have contributed a great deal to design in this sense. And the biggest area most recent impact has to do with emotions and cognition. There is no cognition without emotion. Physiologically speaking in the brain, everything that you experience in life is passing through this filter of emotional interpretation before you get to this cognition level. And so taking that into consideration to create learning environments that are safe where kids dare to air, where they can have the opportunity for do-overs if necessary is also something that's very important. And to reach this ultimate goal of school education of great and metacognitive development, mentalities such as shifting from an idea of feedback where you lament what you did, right, to an idea of feed forward, what will you do better the next time is something that's very key within the learning sciences. We also encourage doing getting to deeper thinking using flipping as a classroom instrument. And finally this idea of differentiation and personalization by creating a structure and universal design for learning where you can personalize everybody's homework. In our course we do this through bundles where students get to choose what level, what entry point of the information they want from the different resources that we have there. And so this allows for students to fill in their own gaps of prior knowledge that may be existing so that they can all reach the same objectives we have in the classroom. So the final big idea is that design is necessary for good teaching. We have to know our students well in the range of tools that we have in order to be able to do that design that technology can lend itself towards that as well as information from the learning sciences. And that we can learn to leverage that same technology to save us time so that humans can do what humans do best, motivate kids for example, as opposed to what machines might do best. They can quickly score an exam for a kid, but they might not be able to give him that encouragement to keep working hard to improve the next time. The idea here is to leverage technology in the best way possible. If you look at the collective models for instructional design and universal design and for backwards design or understanding by design, you can meet standards and you can meet school objectives at the same time reach for master instruction. And if you're interested there's a couple of great books that are out there that I'd recommend. The final big idea is that great design means that you have a balance of asynchronous and asynchronous activities, as well as things that are done individually as well as collectively over a longer period of time. So it's not just that it's one and done. You teach it, you have an exam and you move on, but that this becomes lifelong knowledge that you're able to continually reincorporate that information into your own personal life experiences. So to include great instructional design has clear objectives. You can document learning advances so that your evaluation criteria become much more transparent, and it uses a balance of synchronous and asynchronous activities that we remember from the learning sciences we have to stimulate that prior knowledge, create authentic understanding, and fill in gaps of requisite knowledge that might be missing for students, and then leverage the most appropriate pedagogy within the classroom structure that we can for the age group, subject area, and range of learners that we have, and that we use our tools. This means designing the right balance of individual activities to group activities from synchronous activities to asynchronous activities, but always keeping in mind that individual learner and being able to tend to that person's needs in order to make the entire class advance together. So in this brief video we looked at design thinking, understanding by design, the history of instructional design, and universal design for learning, and hope that you can now take the time to do a 3-2-1 reflection to document what learning you have taken away from this video. Thanks and let us know if you have any questions.