Thinking up a design takes time: before the optimum design is found a lot of mental effort will be demanded.
It can be nice to have something to accelerate the process. This is what referent 3: an appropriate model is for. By using an ‘appropriate model’ the designer is making use of an existing solution (an existing design) to a problem. Having such a referent can be very time-saving. The other three referents ensure that the existing design is indeed an appropriate one.
Their presence gives some guarantee that only those features in the model which have relevance for the designer’s own instruction are transplanted into the design she or he chooses. They also discourage direct transplantation of a design. Direct transplantations seldom work. More important, the practice also kills originality; and originality in a design is a quality that students invariably welcome.
Every time you meet a design that you like, write notes about it, ‘diagram it’ and put it in your archive. One day you will find it useful as your referent 3. Below is a description of a model that many teachers in the Think Tank workshop have liked It may well be found in their archives under the name fishbone’: this is the name I gave it in the workshop. The basic plan, structure and strategy of instruction which it contains has been used in many different settings — encounters with the scientific method of enquiry for first-year Botany students at the University of Utrecht, encounters with the ‘joys and sorrows in life’ in projects in eschatology and reflection for young priests in training in a seminary in Yogyakarta in Indonesia, and most recently in designing a course for waiters in the dining room of The Fox Hotel in a rural part of England. The model could also serve as a model to help design the course on teaching six-year-olds to tell the time.
The fishbone model (Fig. 6) is essentially very simple. Each vertebra represents a distinct teaching-learning event. The ‘S’ under each event is the input (stimulus) in the form of information, materials, criteria for decision-making, etc., which is needed for that event. The ‘R’ above each event is the response that the materials, information, etc, must evoke. This ‘R’ could be a solution to a problem, a write-up of an observation made in practice, a diagnosis, a correctly laid table or a correctly cooked egg. The small stars along the backbone in the model indicate interventions by a teacher or guide. During these interventions the learner has the opportunity to get feedback on her or his performance in the S-R event just completed, to ask questions, to get more information, or to learn what the following event involves. The designer may choose to start with the event nearest the tail or with the event at the head and work backwards. (This latter model of a sequence is known as ‘backward chaining’; you’ll meet an example of it later in this book.)
Figure 7 illustrates the fishbone model as it was used in training waiters at The Fox Hotel. Five discrete events were identified which were concerned with receiving, serving and taking leave of the hotel guests. These events are named along the vertebrae of the fish in chronological order. For each event a teaching-learning situation was made. The information and other stimuli (S) needed for training in each situation were chosen. The things (R) which the trainee would have to demonstrate that she or he could do during and at the end of training in a given event, were decided. This was all done with the needs of the particular style of The Fox Hotel, and the needs of its particular guests, in mind. The interventions (indicated by the small stars) are opportunities for reviewing and criticizing what has just been done in an event. They are also for looking ahead at what will have to be done in the event which follows.
Use your intuition, creativity and logical thinking to fill in some of the stimuli (S) — materials, content of films or content of role-playing — which you would use in one of the didactical events along the fishbone. What are some of the responses (R) for learning you would want the trainee waiters to make in the event you have chosen? Ask yourself why those particular responses are so important.
If you can’t get going, start the vibrations going in your think tank by thinking of some `incidents’ which it would be important to handle in this course: a guest spills wine over the table; a waiter spills wine over a guest(!); a guest cannot pay her bill …. Let the fishbone model work for you as your referent 3.
When you have more time, choose a subject that you know and would like to teach — playing chess, stopping nosebleeds, mending a bicycle tyre — it doesn’t matter what it is.
Think about the ‘needs’ in terms of the end goal, and so on. Let an initial idea form in your mind about how you are going to teach it. Think about some existing design which could help you find a design. Let this existing design interact with your initial idea for a design. Do you notice their influence on each other? If you do, you are experiencing referent 3: an appropriate model, at work.