Woodrow Wilson Academy: Co-Designing Challenge-Based Curriculum to Prepare Playful STEM Teachers

• In Event: Playful Practice Spaces: Innovative Approaches for Next Generation Teacher Education

Abstract

Overview
Expert-novice research indicates that experts, after spending many hours practicing their craft, can respond more quickly to challenges they face because they have encountered similar challenges during their practice. What if teacher candidates in teacher education programs had more and varied opportunities to practice applying their teaching knowledge and skills in order to better prepare them for their first years in the classroom?

The Woodrow Wilson Academy of Teaching and Learning is a competency-based teacher education program being designed to enable teacher candidates to practice, apply, and hone teaching knowledge and skills through a variety of purposeful learning experiences and assessments. The Academy will open with 10 Design Fellows in the fall of 2017. Collaborating closely with the faculty and staff of the WW Academy, Design Fellows will help co-design, test, and refine the Academy’s program.


Pedagogical Approaches
To guide the design of the WW Academy, we are integrating game-based learning into both the curriculum and learning experience assessment design. The curriculum is being designed as challenge-based. A challenge-based curriculum integrates sets of competencies and situates them within real-world challenges often faced by novice teachers. To complete a challenge, a teacher candidate must first learn and practice specific teaching knowledge and skills and then integrate those knowledge and skills in order to ultimately solve the challenge. The challenge-based curriculum simulates actual situations that teacher candidates may face in their beginning years of teaching, thereby giving them opportunities to practice solving them.

In addition to game-based learning influencing curriculum design, the WW Academy is also designing games and simulations that create practice spaces for teacher candidates. Oftentimes, teacher candidates submit many planning artifacts (such as lesson plans) and observational data from actual teaching as evidence for assessment in teacher education programs. In designing learning experiences and assessment, WW Academy is creating practice spaces “in-between” planning and actual teaching. These “in-between” spaces mirror the in-the-moment thinking and actions that happen during teaching. This in-the-moment thinking must not only take into account what is happening in the moment itself, but also the knowledge and skills associated with the moment, such as student, contextual, content, and pedagogical knowledge.

Connections to Framing Questions
One major challenge of our model is how to connect and utilize the clinical experience of teacher candidates in purposeful ways. We want to use the clinical experience to provide more high-stakes practice opportunities for teacher candidates in ways that leverage the affordances that the clinical experience provides. Additionally, we know we have more control over the design of games and simulations than we do over what teacher candidates will experience in their clinical placements.

Significance
From our opportunities to test our challenges, games, and simulations with undergraduates, teachers, and other educators, we learned that people describe their learning as purposeful when contextualized within a challenge narrative. The challenge narrative, games, and simulations also model how complex and creative teaching is as a profession.

Author

• Rupal Jain, Woodrow Wilson Academy