Co-designing learning can be a challenge. How do you partner with students to create personally relevant next steps for everyone in the room? How do you ensure the curriculum is learned while also honouring student interests, passions, and curiosities? How do you engage students in becoming learning designers themselves?

There are many ways we can explore this landscape of shared learning. One manner that I utilize is a 4 quadrant activity that helps make student thinking visible and guide our next steps.

It begins with a large quadrant on the board as we engage in the top half of the thinking first. In Q1 I share the “Must Knows” of our course and the curriculum. What are the big ideas and key understandings we must explore in our time together? I boil these down in student friendly language onto a few sticky notes and briefly walk the class through what these big ideas are. I then ask students to engage in conversation around their “Want to Knows”, any topics of interest, wonders, passions, curiosities, goals, or hobbies they may have that we can explore more deeply in class together. Similarly, students document their thinking on sticky notes and post their ideas to Q2.

We then move to the bottom half of our quadrant where, in Q3, I share the “Must Dos” of our course, the important ways in which they will show their learning, communicate, and be assessed. I then prompt students to discuss ways in which they would like to show what they know in the Q4 area titled “Want to Dos”. I ask them “if you could show me your learning in any way, how would you like to show me what you know?”. Again, students discuss and evidence their thinking on sticky notes before bringing these up to the quadrant.

We then step back and look at what the evidence tells us. I prompt the group to become observers, to notice what they see, and to look for trends, themes, or categories that the various quadrants tell us. We then return to the board and begin to move the sticky notes around into clusters to represent what we have noticed as trends and themes. This sorting phase is so powerful, especially if students are given the chance to reflect on what they see and discuss the trends on their own. There’s no correct answer and together, we begin to create the direction for our learning for the coming months.

Our next step is to take the information from this matrix and begin to rewrite it into more of a course syllabus. This will require some creative thinking, collaboration, and fun. I’ll share some of what this looks like in a future post and on Instagram.

In the meantime, have a look at this short time lapse of the activity at work.