Book: Course Design
Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World
Derek’s
Recommendation
I love how Paul Hanstedt encourages readers to dig deeper with their stated learning objectives and how he talks about the role of audience in student writing and production. This is a great exploration of the design of more authentic and meaningful assignments.
How we teach our students is also crucial in the development of authority. If what we are talking about is a kind of authorship of the world, it follows that the learning process that prepares students for this kind of active, thoughtful response to the problems we face must allow them to practice these skills. In other words, the only way to truly develop authority is to practice it, consistently, from the start, in ways at first small, then increasingly large. We need to develop authority in ways that are perhaps less complex (although never simple), then increasingly more complex, that allow students to fail, fall down, and pick themselves back up again. Authority should allow student to learn how problems are solved with the deliberation, creativity, resilience, and collaboration that allow them to understand that they are capable of solving problems and that solving these problems leads to a rewarding relationship with the world and with themselves.