ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the real-world design practices of teaching staff and other professionals working alongside them. It also addresses teachers’ conceptualization of, and their approach to, the activity of design. The chapter discusses four factors that may bear on their design practice: students’ needs and preferences, the nature of the discipline, educational theories and frameworks, and the tension between teaching and research. It explains the influence of the institutional context in which design practice takes place. Studying teachers’ design practice yields two benefits. First, it allows the principles of educational design to be held up against real-world processes and heuristics, and second, it can inform the development of tools and processes to support those practices. The chapter concludes by identifying some problematic implications for developers of digital tools to support teachers’ practice as they seek to marry the constraints of a structured design with the unpredictable, and often unruly, nature of design practice at the chalkface.
