What is the User Experience of Your Classroom?

Why thinking about UX in your teaching practice is worth your time.

Like many teachers I know, I spend a lot of time thinking about my work as a teacher. Where I might be a bit more intentional in my thinking than a lot of teachers I know is in my attempts to use more of the formalized toolsets from design-thinking when engaged in my own consideration. I don’t think this makes me special, and it certainly doesn’t make me some sort of expert. It is just a natural outcome of my own professional journey, one that has included a bit more formal design instruction than what usually comes a teacher’s way.

I can not give a strong enough recommendation for the use of design-thinking when considering one’s work as a teacher. More than any other source of inspiration, or any other driver of my classroom success, design-thinking has been the thing that has done it for me. But design-thinking can also seem esoteric to the naif. It can be inscrutable, employing a language that suggests that the uninitiate has no place in the realm. With that in mind, I personally privilege design-thinking resources that are maximally accessible in my own work.

It is from this stance, that I want to talk about User Experience (aka UX). Unlike other design fields, UX is centered upon the interactions that people have with designed things. It focuses on studying those interactions, using principles from psychology and experimentation to improve them. It is also a field of design that is likely totally unknown to most non-designers.

UX is crucial to teaching.

Whether you realize it or not, as a teacher you are a designer. Everything you choose to do in your practice is a design choice that you are making. This is pretty obvious in things like instructional materials, curriculum, and lesson plans. It might be less obvious when considering every one of the interactions that you have with your learners, and that learners have with both you and the rest of the things that comprise the totality of your teaching. But just because you didn’t realize it doesn’t make the reality of your work as a designer any less real. It just means that you’ve been doing it without realizing it (though I expect that on some level, you were aware even if you lacked the lexicon necessary to describe your work as such). Because of this, fields like UX can be really useful for teachers to spend some time…