The Learning Design Guild

The challenge is real. Capable teams feel the pull between the learning they want to create and the competing, often incoherent demands for performance placed on them. Plans are implemented thinly. Meetings feel busy yet unfocused. Well intentioned people carry out directions they have had little chance to create and own. Initiatives arrive faster than they can land, and morale and trust wear down even while everyone is scurrying to do their best. These are symptoms. What they point to is the absence of learning design as a shared responsibility and embedded capability.

While organisations increasingly appoint Directors of Learning, Chief Learning Officers, Curriculum Leaders and Professional Learning Leads, there are remarkably few opportunities for these professionals to develop their identity, craft and efficacy as Learning Designers.

The Guild exists to develop the identity, self-awareness, craft and efficacy needed to lead the co-design of learning in your context. It operates from the premise that adopting or implementing programs and models that have worked elsewhere leaves many learning teams floundering and wondering why it is not working for them. What is needed instead is powerful, well-informed co-design of learning led by a competent, confident and credentialed Learning Designer.

The shortfall between what learning organisations need and what transpires can be stark. The need for the Guild emerged through conversations with practitioners across international schools, government systems, corporate entities, philanthropic foundations, early years educators, teacher training bodies and senior leadership teams. The same things came up repeatedly. Time pressure flattens depth, so planning becomes coverage. Teams leap to action before they have had time to ascertain what the learning should be and how to create it. The learner is rarely at the table when learning is planned. And what passes for collaboration is often coordination in disguise, busy yet shallow.

The Learning Design Guild exists to address these gaps and put you in a position where you can be influential and competent in any context in which you lead learning.