Curriculum Planning with Design Language: Building Elegant Courses and Units

232 Pages·2018·37.142 MB·

by  Ken Badley

CURRICULUM PLANNING WITH
DESIGN LANGUAGE
Curriculum Planning with Design Language provides a streamlined, adaptable
framework for using visual design terminology to conceptualize instructional
design objectives, processes, and strategies. Drawing from instructional design
theory, pattern language theory, and aesthetics, these ten course and unit design
principles help educators break down and clarify their broader planning tasks
and concerns. Written in clear, direct prose and rich with intuitive examples, this
book showcases insights leading to effective curriculum design that will speak
equally to pre-service and experienced educators.
Ken Badley teaches in the Department of Education at Mount Royal University,
Canada, and serves as Professor of Education by Special Appointment at Tyndale
University College, Canada. He recently completed nine years of service in the
doctoral program in education at George Fox University, USA.

CURRICULUM
PLANNING WITH
DESIGN
LANGUAGE
Building Elegant Courses
and Units
Ken Badley
Illustrations by Kristen Badley
First published 2019
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Ken Badley to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification
and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Badley, Kenneth Rea, 1951– author. | Badley, Kristen, illustrator.

Title: Curriculum planning with design language : building elegant

courses and units / Ken Badley ; illustrations by Kristen Badley.

Description: New York : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical

references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018020445 (print) | LCCN 2018036369 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781315146140 (eBook) | ISBN 9781138504714 (hbk) |

ISBN 9781138504721 (pbk) | ISBN 9781315146140 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Curriculum planning. | Instructional systems—Design.

Classification: LCC LB2806.15 (ebook) | LCC LB2806.15 .B34 2019

(print) | DDC 375/.001—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020445

ISBN: 978-1-138-50471-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-50472-1 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-14614-0 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo and Stone Sans

by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK
To the generations of students who have taught me
what is written here

CONTENTS

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xiii

1 Designing Instruction 1

2 Introducing the Patterns 17

3 Strong Centres 33

4 Boundaries 49

5 Entrances and Exits 65

6 Coherence and Connections 79

7 Green Spaces 93

8 Public and Private 109

9 Repetition and Variety 125

10 Gradients, Harmony, and Levels of Scale 137

11 Master Plans and Organic Development 151
viii Contents
12 Agile, Light Structures 165
13 Agile Unit Design 185
14 Conclusion 205
Author Biography 211
Index 213
PREFACE

Teaching is like working on five jigsaw puzzles simultaneously, with all the
pieces in a single pile and no certainty that the photographs on the boxes
accurately represent the pictures you are supposed to assemble. Teachers need to
manage curriculum, instruction, and assessment while building a positive
classroom climate and staying caught up with their administrative tasks. It would
be simpler if teachers could work at these big five separately, and teacher-training
programs do try to break them apart for the purposes of study, but real-world
teaching requires that teachers go at all five at the same time. Somewhere in
the middle of that pile of pieces are the needed components of good instruc­
tion. What works best with which students? What are the elements of a great
class? What immutable laws, if there are any, govern how classes work and how
students respond to instruction? Is direct instruction really as bad as its critics say?
How does a teacher plan a unit?
For many teachers, that last question presents a sticky problem and is one of
the reasons I wrote this book. Pre-service teachers I have worked with tell me
that they know how to plan lessons but are not so sure about planning units.
Some in-service teachers report that they just work through the textbook or they
teach what they taught last year, rarely checking and possibly having forgotten
the learning outcomes specified for the course or unit in question. In higher
education, some simply show the PowerPoint slides provided to them by
the textbook’s publisher, pushing the PgDn key repeatedly until the semester
ends. On the other hand, many teachers participate regularly, even weekly, in
professional learning communities where they pool ideas and help each other
plan instruction. Such is the range of approaches educators take to longer-range
instructional planning. Various factors underwrite this range of practices and in
this book I am more concerned to aid the teacher who wants to plan great units
than to convert the person who should be replaced by a computer.
x Preface
In Awakening the Inner Eye, Nel Noddings and Paul Shore call for educators
to approach curriculum and instruction that starts with less defined objectives.
They want educators to take intuition into account. I do not mention their work
here because they suggest designing according to aesthetic principles (which they
do not do) but because they ask educators to consider an approach other than
what has become orthodoxy in our time. The approach I take here is not
orthodox. Orthodoxy at this time implies starting with identifying the learning
objectives, big questions, or big ideas, then deciding what kind of assessments
would allow students to demonstrate that they have achieved the desired targets,
then identifying what instruction would move students to those achievements.
In this book, I say repeatedly that this approach makes complete sense, especially
in comparison to simply pushing PgDn day after day so students can see
PowerPoint slides provided by a textbook’s publisher. But I also say that this
approach does not go far enough. Like Noddings and Shore, I want us to rethink
planning. Specifically, I believe we need to add a stage called design somewhere
into the steps of what we now call planning.
This book has several roots. It grew initially out of the design philosophy of
Christopher Alexander and then out of my reading of hundreds of other artists,
designers, architects, and builders of bridges. It also started in a high-school social
studies classroom where a student once blurted out that he had no idea how the
unit we were studying fit into the course. I initially wondered what his problem
was, and then realized it was my problem . . . for not making that connection clear.
It also has roots in a third, deeply frustrating, place. At several points, my teaching
responsibilities in education programs have included courses in program planning
and instructional design for K-12 classrooms. Some of the textbooks available for
these courses include complicated graphics about how planning works when the
teacher has all the time in the world and all the students are in the top decile. In
these books, my students and I saw flow charts with as many as 20 boxes, connected
by arrows running in all directions. We saw so many acronyms that we wondered
if we had accidentally begun reading a military manual. In short, to the extent I
could understand these books, they presented a complicated and overly mechanistic
view of planning that was, at the same time, very optimistic about educators’
abilities to predict and control the outcomes of their work.
To the concerns I address in this book, those planning textbooks did not
begin by having teachers pay attention to design. They began (appropriately) by
having teachers identify the learning outcomes, then the assessments, then the
instruction. However, many who recite that quick trio of steps as the key to
good planning fail to explain how a teacher should decide what to do on the
ninth day of the unit, which happens to be on the Thursday before a long
weekend, or on the fifteenth day of the unit, a Wednesday in the middle of five
straight weeks of instruction, each of which has five days in it. Classes on those
two days may differ very markedly from each other. For one thing, student
energy for learning will almost certainly be at a low ebb on the Thursday before