3.7 Some tips Chapter 3

  1. As you work out a design, think now and again of exciting a learner response in an unusual way: listening to silence; reading a ‘difficult to read’ text by starting with the last chapter; mentally practising a manual operation with the eyes closed.
  2. Be very suspicious of the quality of an explanation (written or verbal) when you find yourself using the word ‘thus’. Your ‘thus’ is not necessarily the learner’s ‘thus’!
  3. If someone wonders (as they frequently do) why it took so long to think up and work out a design, have the following thought (Gordon, 1976) ready for yourself and that other person: ‘Ultimate solutions to problems are rational; the process of finding them is not.’ It is a legitimate answer and, provided that the end product is effective, valued, liked and efficient, it will be accepted and understood.
  4. A thought-up design is ready for working out when you can draw it, explain it clearly to someone else, visualize it with cut-out bits of paper or a bit of string… How you do it is up to you. It’s your design.
  5. Listen very carefully to what your thought-up design is telling you about introducing the special bit of content that will be the students’ REO and focal point of learning. It may want you to introduce it bit by bit or as a whole. It may want you to introduce it straight away in the course or lesson, half-way through, or bit by bit and only at the end in its entirety. In thinking up a design, the REO was of special help to you, the designer. When you have worked out the design (with the REO running through it), the REO must have been woven into the design so that it now works for your learners and no longer just for you.
  6. Find a desk or a table and a window, or imagine you have these. Put your feet up and reflect on this thought of Albert Einstein: ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science’.
    Let the pictures that this thought evokes come swimming into the video of your mind.

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