Creating a Design Solution

Abstract

Classroom practitioners are often asked to adopt continually changing standards, to be collaborators and reflective practitioners, and to make new and evolving technologies an integral part of their practice. Understanding Problems of Practice: A Case Study in Design Research describes a process for thinking about and reflecting on innovative practice – the design research process. Each of the five phases of the design research process is exemplified by a discussion of how the authors used this process to create a technology education course for perspective secondary educators. In this chapter, the authors focus on the second phase of the design research process and the goal of transitioning a problem of practice to a design solution. The authors begin with a description of strategies and techniques used by design researchers to gather information that grounds a design solution in evidence leading to an explicit and visible map for instructional planning. The authors offer a comprehensive description of the design pattern approach as a strategy to promote classroom practitioners’ ability to transition from an understanding of their problem of practice to a design solution. They conclude the chapter by presenting the second design research phase of a case study to create an online version of a technology education course for perspective secondary educators, presenting how as classroom practitioners they completed a second review of literature to create a design pattern and the ways in which the design pattern framed an instructional plan.