The Pedagogy We Practice

On May 20, 2025, I was invited to keynote the Spring Pedagogy Institute at Plymouth State University. The text of that keynote is below, followed by the slide presentation.

It’s been awhile since I’ve presented a keynote. And even longer since I presented in person. And the truth is, I started this keynote many times, always trying to figure out the best way to get it going, make it interesting, make it relevant. I remember this challenge from teaching, actually. How to deliver something that will engage students, that students will care about or find valuable, how to teach them what I think they need to know. I always overcame that challenge by being transparent, letting students know that I had struggled with a lesson plan, or that I was nervous in front of them, or that I really just wanted to go back to bed.

I almost always start off a keynote with an anecdote, but I think in this case I’ll start with transparency… and let the experience of that be the anecdote we all participate in together.

Transparency is honesty; not just a revealing of process, the pulling back of a curtain; it’s the humbling of that process. In that spirit, I’ll tell you that I struggled with this keynote, and I am nervous in front of you all. I’m too souped up on adrenaline and caffeine, though, to go back to bed. And, honestly, now that I’m here and I see all y’all in the audience, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

So, here’s the deal. I’ve been an instructional designer off and on, officially and unofficially, and under varying definitions of that role, since the late 1990s. I’ve studied Bloom’s Taxonomy, backward design, ADDIE, and the rest that was expected of me. I know how to align assessments with learning objectives, how to take people from knowledge to comprehension and on. Been there, done that. A lot.

I’ve also been a teacher, and I like to call myself a pedagogist. I’ve studied critical pedagogy, pedagogies of care, trauma-informed pedagogy, student-centered learning, ungrading and alternative assessment, and a bunch more. I organized and led a conference on teaching called Digital Pedagogy Lab, and I’ve had the unexpected privilege of speaking to audiences on five continents. 

And what I’ve come to, after decades of learning design and teaching, is that all design is about expectation. About giving people who want to learn, who were born to learn, guardrails for that learning. Here’s how you learn, design says to the student, this is how you get to know things.

I used to buck up hard against the idea of learning objectives, because I feel that this foundational instructional design assumption centralises the teacher as the knower, and the student as that person who needs to know. 

Learning objectives have always bothered me because they assume the teacher knows entirely what a student needs to know, that the student doesn’t know that, and that what the student does know or wants to know isn't part of the plan. And I still get growly about learning objectives. 

But this very recent recognition that design is about expectation, and the silent ways that expectation is expressed, has made me rethink a bit what I want to push against more. 

And here comes the inevitable anecdote.

A long time ago, my mom was studying for her BA at the University of Colorado, Boulder. That university has on its campus a large, austere library called Norlin Library. Inside, it smells of dust and paper—a smell my young nose associated with scholarship, and a smell my young nose also found exhilarating and exciting. The library is situated across four or five floors, and is fronted on the outside with huge pillars, big around as a sequoia, that extend from the deck just outside the revolving doors up to the lintel just under the roof. Now, I wasn’t a small child—I was five-foot-ten by the time I was in the fifth grade, which is also the time when my mom started college—but those pillars made me feel small.

It was a smallness that felt honest, humbling, and exciting. Looking up at those pillars was like looking up at the stars in the night sky and saying “ooh, there’s so much.”

One day, my mom took me and my younger brother to campus, and to Norlin Library, to retrieve some books. And what I need to say about this, if it isn’t already clear, is that college excited me. Literally. Adrenaline coursed through my body as soon as we crossed the quad. I’ve always felt this way about campuses. And on that morning, crossing the quad and moving toward Norlin, I couldn’t contain myself. When we hit the revolving door into the library, I flew through it like a banshee—a banshee going to a library.

What I didn’t know was that a very elderly professor was directly behind me. Five-foot-ten ten-year-old running through a revolving door. Elderly professor squeezed into the triangle of glass behind, suddenly pushed to keep up. Not a pretty scene. And as soon as the professor was free from the whirling door, he let me have it.

Revolving doors have a certain air about them. They’re fancy. Or at least I’ve always thought so. I looked up the history of revolving doors, in fact, and it turns out they have a pretty fancy function. Apparently, they were innovated specifically for skyscrapers, which because of their design, are subject to something called the stack effect. I don’t really understand the physics, but according to Wikipedia, revolving doors “were designed to relieve the immense pressure caused by air rushing through high-rise buildings.” High rise buildings also have an air about them. The taller, the more prestigious; but also, apparently, the more susceptible to the stack effect. 

And Norlin Library is a tall building, with the aforementioned pillars outside to double down on its prestigiousness. Thus, the revolving doors.

Revolving doors set an expectation, or several. On the one hand, they are designed for airflow, but also for traffic flow. They set the expectation that many people will be using them, and probably in quick succession. But they also set a social expectation: revolving doors are designed for cooperative use. I learned this the hard way. 

Where swinging doors have the feel of autonomy, a one-person-at-a-time design, revolving doors require us to think about who might be behind us, and to accommodate or anticipate them. When we walk into a revolving door with other people before and behind, we surrender a certain amount of power and autonomy. We are part of the whole of a mechanism of people coming and going.

We surrender even more to automatically revolving doors. Those are practically a surveillance technology, and the expectation of our gait is profoundly standardized such that every human passing through them must be like every other human passing through them. My child-powered acceleration through the doors at Norlin would have been cut short had those doors revolved on an automatic timetable.

The design of revolving doors conveys, implicitly and through use, an expectation of the behaviour of the human being passing through them. 

Learning design, or instructional design, does the same thing. It sets an expectation, implicitly and through use, of the behaviour of the human being passing through its taxonomies, its zones of proximal development, its linear commitment to objectives.

Martha Burtis once described the predilection of instructional design to “build standard interfaces, provide standardized features and tools, and promote, among our students, the expectation that their experiences from one course to the next will be… standard.”

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Friere parsed the relationship between teachers, students, and learning this way:

• The teacher teaches, and the students are taught;
• The teacher knows everything, and the students know nothing;
• The teacher thinks and the students are thought about …
• The teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the students are mere objects.

When I think about these dichotomies in terms of instructional or learning design, it feels like design not only tends toward reinforcing these power dynamics, but that it introduces another facet of authority altogether: the authority of the design itself.  

For decades, instructional design, and in many cases teaching—fueled by constructions like learning objectives, alignments, and the rest—has been an automatic revolving door, asking every student to meet the same expectations, telling us when we can walk, and keeping us apace of everyone around us. This isn’t just true about students, but it’s also true about teachers, and even instructional designers.

We operate education within a framework of proven methods, methods that create so indelible a blueprint across our work that it becomes difficult to discern, much less change, much less resist when we want to resist it.

And the problem instructional design has is the same problem revolving doors have: neither accounts for zeal. Neither accounts for the unexpected, the sudden, the revelatory, the emergent. The adrenaline-soaked excitement of someone crashing into learning, a bit too big for their britches.

The solution, in fact, to the unexpected, the exuberant, has been the installation of machine controlled revolving doors in the form of metrics, rubrics, surveillance. Not to encourage children with too much vim, but to contain them.

Now, when I’m talking about instructional design, I’m talking about teaching, too. About the pedagogy we practice—online, in class, behind the curtain and in front of the room. Instructional design tends to be seen as something that takes place behind the scenes, and mostly online; but really, very little teaching happens without design. 

A lesson plan is design, a syllabus is design, a mid-term exam is design. Anyone who designs instruction is an instructional designer.

Saying that might ruffle some feathers, so let me clarify. Instructional designers are unique, and they occupy a strange space in the university. They occupy offices, make appointments with teachers, and they rarely have much encounter with the students who encounter their designs. 

On Monday, instructional designers are teachers of teachers, assisting with the framing of an instructor’s ideas for their class into the shape of the LMS or other digital platform. They know, or should know, what is possible, what isn’t possible, what stretches the boundaries of tradition, and what bends toward new and imaginative applications. 

By Wednesday, they’ve moved from teaching teachers to teaching students. It would be a mistake to think that an instructional designer ever disappears from a course. Their fingerprints are upon the pages, the discussions, the quizzes, the assignments. An instructional designer may have touched every piece of a course before it’s offered, may have helped with the logical arrangement of ideas, of digital components, with the flow of the course, the scaffolding, the movement from beginning to end of the narrative the course tells.

Exactly the way that the architect who places a revolving door is there every time someone passes through it.

Now if instructional designers are teachers, then teachers are instructional designers, too. Where the instructional designer understands the evidence-based ways that learning can be produced and reproduced, teachers see the intimate, stirring ways that content intertwines with students’ lives, that a learning objective must be relevant to a student who is struggling, or a student who is marginalized, or a student who will soar way beyond that learning objective before the end of the term. 

I like to think that teachers have unexpectedness literacy; they know that lesson plans are only as good as the paper they’re written on, that tests shouldn’t be taken on an empty stomach, and that personalization isn’t a conundrum that AI will solve, but a time-consuming, difficult, and sometimes Sisyphean effort.

I’ve been both an instructional designer and a teacher, and I know the tension that can arise from the clashing of expertise. And as I said before, instructional design is often seen associated primarily or specifically with online learning. So I want to bring a couple of things out into the open here, in what is probably a clumsy transition:

First, instructional design isn’t limited to the digital, just as teaching isn’t limited to classrooms. Instructional design is concerned with pathways toward mastery of subject matter, wherever that happens. Traditionally, this has meant building structures that not only allow learning to happen, but demand that it does, and that provide evidence when it has. 

But learning isn’t restricted to a classroom, so why should instructional design be? I sometimes wonder what would happen if instructional design met architectural design in the creation of a new cafeteria, or student commons area. What would it look like if we designed learning into our campus buildings, the locations of our grassy spaces, the structure of a dorm room?

That’s exactly the kind of imagining I think we can do about education, if we give ourselves the freedom to.

And speaking of freedom, the second thing I want to bring out is this: there should be no experts in teaching and learning. Of course there are people who are seasoned, people who’ve been doing it a long time, and people who study it. But I really think the idea of being an expert needs to be questioned. 

I say this because I see expertise as terminal. Just as design says to the student, “here is how you get to know things,” expertise says to the seasoned practitioner, “you know the things.” The idea of learning design, of teaching—at least as it’s been traditionally conceived—is that the expert dispenses knowledge to the learner. It says, here, hold my knowledge; and when I want it back, I’ll give you a test.

I personally don’t understand the appeal of being an expert. It sounds boring and monotonous. It’s like being the revolving door, and no longer passing through it.

I made the mistake once upon a time of coining the term “critical instructional design,” and writing the very first couple of essays about it. What that got me was the mantle of “expert” in critical instructional design. 

But I’m no expert; the idea of critical instructional design is as confusing to me now as it was when I first considered that something like it might exist. 

Similarly, I’ve been studying critical pedagogy—and primarily the work of Paulo Freire—since 2002. And I go back and back and back to that theory, mystified by its implications, inspired by its optimism, and confounded by its application. Can I say I’ve read more Freire than the average? Probably. Can I say I’m an expert? Absolutely not. Unless I’m expert at asking questions, being intrigued, at continually going through doors too quickly.

I once overheard someone say that “faculty aren’t students.” I find that idea sad. Who does not want to remain always a learner, undrowned by their expertise, free to imagine new limits for their field and practice? I think we should welcome and celebrate the faculty who remain students, instructional designers who remain students, administrators who remain students… really anyone who remains a student.

Because remaining a student means remaining curious. Education is propelled by inquiry, by the not-knowing and wanting-to-know, and I hold that the literacy of asking questions is much more important than concrete knowledge, which too often is more calcified than it is certain. We should ask questions of everything, even the answers we get back when we ask. We should wonder why there are revolving doors in buildings, wonder why a room like this was designed this way, wonder why a keynote starts things off at an event.

In my experience, wondering like that creates a sense of wonder. A sense of “ooh, there’s so much.”

When we don’t know what we’re doing, we’re poised to learn, to try new things, to fail, and to triumph. If we are certain of what we’re doing, we’re less likely to leave the path we’ve always tread.

So, just as I consider the critical literacy of revolving doors important to our understanding of entering a tall building, I believe in the wonder that can be inspired by looking carefully at how what what we design—and what we didn’t even think we design—creates expectations, functions, and behaviours in those who encounter it.

Audre Lorde says that “It is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding.” Those truths are probably different for different people. You have truths you know and believe beyond understanding. So do I. Sometimes, we find those truths reflected in another’s writing—I did, with Friere—and sometimes, we have to be the person whom others find their truths reflected in.

As teachers and designers of learning, Lorde would have us find out how to express what we believe and know through our designs. Which may sound very foreign to a lot of folks, even to the instructional designers in the room. Most of us have never had to come up with our own designs, to start utterly from scratch. We’ve had the tools of instructional design at our fingertips for so long, it’s difficult to say what we’d do without them.

We often design learning without ever thinking of it as design. And that’s understandable. Most of us inherited a knowledge of how learning works from the teachers who taught us, or from the PD we’ve attended and which gives us tips and tricks for keeping students in line, for writing more effective learning objectives… or, more recently, for navigating a kind of creepy world where AI plays Cyrano for all of us.

I try to imagine a design, a pedagogy, and a practice which begins with that deep knowing Lorde describes, and which refuses the constraints of a design that doesn’t make room for what we know beyond understanding; and which, when we’re faced with a blank page on which to begin designing, encourages us to approach our work as a toddler approaches walking: bravely, wobbly, experimentally, and entirely.

You have permission to be wobbly, to experiment, and to be brave. 

Now, I want to acknowledge that what I’m encouraging here comes at a time when education itself is on shaky ground. America looks to be facing a cultural revolution, one in which academia has a great deal to lose. I didn’t open with this, but I don’t think we can shut the doors to this room and expect that everything that’s happening out there—to research funding, to access to education, to the investment in diversity and belonging—isn’t still present in here.

I once wrote that, if education is going to prevail in its mission, it will require those who teach to lead the way. I still believe that. And I believe it can start with small things, like the choices you make when designing your next class, or the sentences you write on your syllabus, or the recognition that applying your imagination—your innate knowing that things can be otherwise—is as important as applying what you know.

Which is what I want to invite you to do today. To put down the terrible weight of expertise and to instead think from a place of wonder, of curiosity, and not of expectation. I’m not going to ask you to rush through any revolving doors, but I won’t discourage you from trying, either.

Now, with all that as context, let’s get back to design. I’m going to let you do some of the talking now. This isn’t the Q&A part, but rather a chance for you to do some of that design-y thinking I’ve been going on and on about.

Let’s think about all the aspects of instructional design. In fact, it might be useful to consider a new term: academic design. How do we design academia? How are we subject to the academic design that was created before us? How were we subject to it as students, and how are we subject to it now?

Another quick anecdote: I spent about four years doing something entirely not academic in my career. I was, for lack of a better word, a personal coach. I was pretty happy doing that work, even if I wasn’t making much money. But at some point, the siren song of academia came back into my life, promising a small office on a green campus, a little window and a bookshelf, and students in classrooms in a building with stone arches and chalkboards and wooden furniture everywhere. 

The promise of that, held out to me like a shiny object, drew me back into teaching and pedagogy. It would take several years before the office of my aspirations came to be, but the dream of it was enough to keep me in the work.

That office I describe is part of what I mean when I say “academic design.” Because it’s symbolic of how one might conceive academia; and the image of an ivy-clad university life still shows up in movies, on TV, in books, and in the restlessness of being an academic. So, rather than think about learning objectives right now, or about assessments, or about learning management systems, interactivity, accessibility, or—god forbid—AI, let’s start with the look and feel of academic life, and how that design sets expectations.

Let’s start with how we present ourselves. Two days ago, I packed this outfit I’m wearing today. It was a design choice. Same as the choice you made today when you got dressed. What each of you wore today is design. What you wear when you teach or come to work is design. We choose how to present ourselves both in order to set expectations and meet expectations.

1. So tell me, how do I appear or not appear as you would expect me to? What expectations does my appearance set?
2. Now let’s consider this room. Clearly, this room is design. It’s both been designed by an architect, and it’s designed again and again each time someone steps in here to teach. Or to give a keynote. 
   
   If revolving doors set certain expectations, what are the expectations this room sets? Take a second and close-read this room. What do you see? What does it expect of you? Of me? Of a student in here?
3. And now let’s get a little more esoteric, and dig into learning objectives. We could do this, actually, with any academic standby: from the syllabus to the idea of a semester or term, the notion of tenure or what happens when someone is labeled as faculty, staff, or adjunct. But for the sake of familiarity and ease, let’s do learning objectives.
   
   Imagine learning objectives as something in this room, something changeable, something you could move out of the way if it didn’t suit your purposes. Turn to someone next to you, or behind you or in front of you, and take a couple of minutes to think this through. And I’ll put some questions on the screen for you to consider.

Exercises like this are designed to get us thinking differently about what we assume are just a natural part of education and reality. I remember conducting exercises like this with a group of teachers in Nova Scotia and one of them remarked that looking at education this way gave him the sense of “playing bridge underwater.” That the game is the same, the rules don’t necessarily change, but the environment, the way you look at the game, and the way you engage with it, changes.

Design is the water in which we swim, and under which we play bridge; and as I said, it sets expectations. I’m not saying that design shouldn’t set expectations. I’m saying it just does, it’s impossible that it wouldn’t. And maybe it exactly should.

But the point I’m trying to make is that the expectations that design sets, and the expectations we set when we go about designing anything—from a course to the arrangement of a room, to an assignment or assessment, to our outfit for the day—are things we should think about, and set intentionally.

John Holt writes that:

Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to control our own minds and thoughts. That means the right to decide for ourselves how we will explore the world around us, think about our own and other persons’ experiences, and find and make the meaning of our own lives. (4)

Design can either interfere with this right, or it can support it, facilitate it. 

How.

I’ve recently begun working with an organization in Canada that delivers workforce learning to under-resourced populations. They do work with refugees, displaced workers, and indigenous peoples. In doing this work, we’ve been trying to tackle the actual how of implementing a critical instructional design that is—and I hate this word, but understand why it's important—scalable. In working with them, I’ve started to formulate some hows that I never really considered when I was mostly dabbling in theory.

So, I’m going to close with a few best practices. Because best practices are one of those morsels of academic design that just feel like a warm bath after a cold plunge into theory.

So here we go. The best practices of a critical instructional design. There are seven. Because we expect lists should be five or ten.

1. Don’t use rubrics, use reflection.

Design should support the fundamental right of all human beings to control their own minds and thoughts. So, critical instructional design must make the student the subject of the learning process. To do this, we need to give them the opportunity to mark their own understanding. Asking the right questions of a student can get them looking again at what they’ve learned through a new lens, while putting the power to change their relationship to knowing in their own hands.

2. Don’t ditch learning objectives, but emphasize essential questions.

Learning objectives are incredibly useful as guideposts. I can’t believe I just said that, but it’s true. We use them too often as the line to cross at the end of the race. We can use them instead as mile markers, to help students know they’re still headed toward discovery. 

Essential questions are those points of inquiry that will drive the production of new knowledge. Ask questions of your course material in order to model asking questions, and in order to open up the opportunity for new, emergent outcomes.

3. Make content into open water by providing resources for students to digest according to their interests and inclinations.

Don’t do your field or your course the disservice of editing out swaths of what’s been talked about or discovered. Providing a library of resources for students to use in completing their work creates the opportunity for investigation as much as investment and engagement and gives students agency in their learning process.

4. Don’t grade.

Seriously, don’t grade. There are so many better ways. Today, ungrading methods are becoming commonplace, and many teachers are finding that creating alternatives to traditional assessment benefits both students and themselves. I encourage you to consider strategies like grade-free zones, self-assessment and self-reflection, and process letters in order to reconsider grades in your classes. 

5. Let students lead.

When I was in corporate, I used to say that I managed a team of leaders. Expect great things of students. Let them be geniuses. They are amazing, rampant learning machines. They are going to crash through every revolving door if you give them the chance. Expect to be amazed. The teacher’s job, or the designer’s job, is to hold the vision, understand the full narrative of the course, so that students can take risks without getting hurt.

6. Make failure safe, and even encouraged. 

I thought about this one a lot. “Failure” is such a heavy word. And “productive failure” or “failing forward” is just so much jaw wagging. Failure needs to be understood as falling down as we learn to walk, or hitting that car in front of us when we’re trying to parallel park. It’s the stuff that makes us feel bad on the way to getting good at things. This should not just be allowed in the design of a course, but integrated into it. 

And failure is easier to swallow when there aren’t any grades.

Seriously, don’t grade.

7. And last, and this one is not mine but Jesse Stommel’s: Start by trusting students.

They’re a million times more likely to trust you, to not cheat, to not use AI inappropriately, to show up to class, to stay engaged, if they believe you believe in them.

Oh, and one last one, just to disrupt expectations:

8. Don’t be an expert. 

Look at a class as a place where knowledge isn’t just consumed, but produced. This means opening your arms to different ways of knowing, honoring students’ personal lives as valid sources of information. 

In fact, a critical instructional design does more than simply open its arms to diverse voices and populations, it relies upon it. We proceed with the knowledge that there are stories we haven’t heard, and we understand the deficit this has imposed on our own education, our own knowing, our own experience of life. Because education—the institution, the community, the process itself—is incomplete without these voices.

Maxine Greene writes again and again of the need to imagine things 'as they might be otherwise.' Not to stop at the point where we see things aren’t as we hope they will be, but to plunge forward with daring and to imagine them differently.

What do we want education to be? What can it be? What do we hope for? The answers to these questions too often fall upon cynicism, fear, or just plain exhaustion.

But here, I invite you to become playful, hopeful, creative. Imagine things as they may be otherwise. And take students, and the rest of us, with you.

Photo by benjamin lehman on Unsplash