Hey teacher, find your inner designer

Our world has changed a great deal since we first (or last) designed education. The current educational setting – a bunch of students in a classroom, at a set time and place, with one teacher sharing their knowledge as an omniscient authority – is still very much the same as it was a century ago. In the Netherlands, the educational landscape provides, at least in theory, a great deal of freedom for schools to transform the contemporary learning environment as well as our vision of learning. However, many teachers struggle to experience or professionally make good use of this freedom. There seems to be a mismatch between the possibilities for change, and how these possibilities are actually being used.

Manon Mostert believes that education will benefit from a design approach toward educational processes, developed by teachers and encouraged by school administrators. Once teachers start to (iteratively) design the process of learning, the education system will change accordingly. Such a design approach makes it possible to transform education on a small scale but with a big impact. Let’s do away with the big-bang, top-down implementations. We, teachers, have the power to change education at its core.

Therefore:

Hey teacher, find your inner designer!

This handbook combines a study of the value for educational processes of the various mistakes which teachers make, with small challenges for encouraging teachers to discover their inner designer. The book also includes a number of case stories of teachers who dare to fail.