Quality criteria

The didactic bricks concept has its roots in a Danish project, called Aktion Klima. They have worked with so called development dogma’s to ensure the quality.  Those criteria are consistent with the Education for Sustainable Development didactic design criteria, drawn from UNESCO and other sources.

We use the following checklist to ensure that all activities and the concept as a whole have the quality we want. The dogmas are under continuous development.
 
Quality criteria for activities:

• Activating: Students must be active and participating by, for example, investigating, creating and acting.

• Self- and co-determination: Students must have the opportunity to choose, make decisions, take a position and/or otherwise influence the learning process in order to thereby achieve greater ownership of it.

• Creativity: Students must work creatively in varying ways to investigate, develop, create and produce something concrete or otherwise bring their own creativity into play.

• Cooperative: Students must cooperate and experience community, to be included and experience neutral spaces where there is room for everyone and for what each individual can contribute.

• Safety: Students must feel safe and participate in the activity without fear of making mistakes, saying the wrong thing, feeling guilty and ashamed or otherwise feeling wrong and/or inadequate.

• Mastery: Students must experience that they succeed and/or achieve something (experience of success), which gives them courage, pride and desire for more. This can be big or small in the form of concrete productions, achievements or realizations.

• Curiosity: Students’ wonder, interest and curiosity must be stimulated, so that they feel like working further and new questions, thoughts or ideas arise.

In addition, there are a number of variation-creating elements (i.e. something that applies to the entire material and not a criterion for the individual activity) such as activating the students’ different senses and using their whole body in the learning processes – and including movement, outdoor learning (learning outside the classroom), game-based learning, the inclusion of technology and space for immersion in various ways.

The activities as a whole should find a mix between taking as a starting point the students’ own frame of experience/world (e.g. their own clothes) and opening up their world. The activities should – when used to build courses – provide insight into the world, educate the students and give them hope for the future through creative actions (the experience of being able to contribute and make a difference).

Didactic tips will generally include suggestions for variations (possibly different levels of difficulty), differentiation and possible progression. In addition, the individual activities should be linked to other activities where it makes sense to create better conditions for teachers to put together meaningful courses.