The Lesson Design Toolkit: Lesson Planning As Experience Design

Abstract

This thesis work asks how design can be helpful in the context of education, better facilitating the lesson design process for early-career educators. Because most college educators aren’t formally taught how to teach, they often lack the processes and methods to effectively design classroom experiences. Designers face similar problems, but have well developed processes and methods for moving forward while building intuition. Lesson planning is a form of experience design, but it’s not approached as such. This situation calls for a toolkit to help early-career college educators effectively design lessons without the benefit of extensive experience. The Lesson Design Toolkit is a series of workbooks that help early-career college educators navigate the process of creating a lesson. As each workbook guides the way, it introduces teaching theory and design methods that are helpful in an aspect of lesson design. This approach shows how design methods can be applied to the design of designed experiences.