Teachers:

• experienced designers but only rarely expert educators
• teachers are not trained as teachers and rarely receive thorough, relevant feedback regarding their teaching performance/ design teachers, like other educators in academic institutions, are appointed on the basis of their professional knowledge and skills and receive all but no training as teachers
• they bring knowledge, professional skills, theory in use, personalities, values and their understanding of their role
• Quayle classification: instructor as source of authority/ as facilitator/ as “buddy”
• Webster classification
• Uluoglu reports that 47% of the design teachers in several schools consider their educational (pedagogic) capacity to be the single most important factor in their work
• Schon: the studio master tries to figure out what the student understands/ constructs a dialogue in the media of words and performance/ tries to make interventions matched to the student’s understanding

Using linkography*, Goldschmidt examines three cases of teacher-student interaction during a crit. Her conclusions are that the teachers:

• must navigate among categorical action priorities that suit the student’s needs and his or her own tendencies
• must raise issues and sustain ideas at both a general and a specific level preferably while demonstrating and modeling for the student what can be done and how
• must do everything without making the students feel that the teachers are designing their project for them
• issues raised must be made relevant to students by tying them to students’ concepts
• must give examples
• must not put pressure on students to come up with “correct” notions
• must not let the student feel that they know sth the students don’t have access to
• coaching seems to be the most fruitful strategy in this sample of investigation

References

Goldschmidt, G., Hochman, H., Dafmi, I., 2010. The design studio “crit”: Teacher-student communication. In Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Deisgn, Analysis and Manufacturing, 24, pp. 285-302, doi:10.1017/S089006041000020X

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Linkography: is a notation and analysis system that treats links among protocol units. It is based on the premise that the proportion and distribution of links among units, and in particular, units that are highly interlinked with other units, are indicative of the quality of important characteristics of the situation under scrutiny