Chapter 3: The facts of design

I am beginning to recognize how important it is for teachers, especially new teachers, to have a strong understanding of educational design to not only be more successful as a teacher, but to do a great service to their students. I am beginning to think we, as teachers, are not really well prepared for this facade of education within our own education to become teachers, or professionally/institutionally by the school districts we work for. Hopefully, some others have experienced education-design based teacher development workshops?

Out of all the tools one can use to support and enhance learning, I've come to appreciate databases and data work. It's really a love hate relationship--I hate access but I love solving the problems. This type of thinking/problem-solving/understanding and ability to manipulate data is a skill that is quickly becoming foundational in the work place but is still found in rather limited qualities--so is rather extra-ordinary. Most people do not have this interpretive skill and are not able to do this type of thinking. Arguably, this is a very hard skill to teach because it is such a subjective process. It seems that older people who do not have the same exposure to information technology as I have had, and people younger than me will have, struggle the most with this type of thinking/motivation/ability. These skills are the foundation of being able to understand statistics, as well as do meaningful research qualitative or quantitative alike.