Using TPACK as an educational designer (Lesson design with TPACK - part 2)

As educational designers, one of the first decisions that we took was to set the teacher knowledge part of the TPACK model aside - at least in the beginning. As I have already mentioned in the previous post, we focused on the integration of the technology, content and pedagogy itself. As educational designers, we have a different perspective compared to teachers and of course no “teacher knowledge”. The teacher knowledge part will come back in the considerations about the implementation and the support.

Hypothetical is possible to approach the lesson design in a different manner. One could also make assumptions about the knowledge of the teacher and design a lesson that is based on his existing knowledge. Yet the problem would be that teachers generally don’t have the right knowledge. We don’t want an approach where technology is only an add-on. The TPACK-way of thinking means for most teachers breaking new ground. A lot of them did not learn about (new) technologies in their initial training, let alone about the integration. So it is inevitable that teachers have to acquire new knowledge. That’s why it is important to promote the implementation and give the right support.

All in all, working as an educational designer with the TPACK model went well. It was however kind of a problem to do the design in a group. The problem was of course not that the group composition was not good. It was just a matter of sequencing. The model was very helpful in the first discussion when we where brainstorming about possibilities. It helped us to make good decisions and caused that we all had the same point of departure. But during the elaboration of our ideas in text form, it was difficult to split the work because every part is depending on the preceding one. It was hardly possible to work on the assignment simultaneously and for doing it in a more linear fashion, there was simply not enough time.