An Instrumental Co-Genesis Approach to Developing an Online Practice-based Environment for Teacher Education

Abstract

LessonSketch is an online, multimedia-based learning environment that supports practice-based teacher education. A work in progress since the development of its initial components in 2008 and its launch in 2011, LessonSketch has served more than 3,000 users, consisting mainly of teacher educators, in-service teachers, and pre-service teachers. In this paper, we show how we have applied an instrumental co-genesis approach to the design of LessonSketch in order to address its users’ changing needs and their difficulties using LessonSketch. The instrumental co-genesis approach consists of multiple design-utilization cycles, each of which helps us understand how users’ needs develop and how they deal with difficulties using LessonSketch, thus informing how we improve the environment in the following cycle. Through this work, we have developed a number of design principles that can be useful for the development of online learning environments that support practice-based teacher education.