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What Is This Teaching Me? A Learning Designer’s Lens for Conferences and Beyond
- Kathryn Laster
- 10 hours ago
- 5 min read
As we look ahead to the Learning Forward Texas Summer Conference, I’m sharing a short series that explores not just the sessions and speakers, but the design of the experience. These posts offer a mix of perspectives, including conversations with presenters and a closer look at how specific elements of the conference are intentionally designed to support connection, learning, and professional community.
This post focuses on how we, as learning designers, can study those design choices as we experience them.
One of my all-time favorite concepts from Michael Bungay Stanier is “What is this teaching me?” He posed this question as he was creating a new podcast. As he listened to episodes of other terrific podcasts, he reflected on the structure, interview style, music, and other design choices to help him shape his own platform.
Austin Kleon encourages us to Steal Like an Artist, writing, “Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.” He suggests creating a “swipe file” of great ideas so that when you need inspiration, you have something to return to.
(In my CoffeeEDU community, Marvia suggests we do not steal ideas, but we #AdmireAndAcquire them.)
This idea of noticing and collecting strong moves isn’t just about creativity. It’s part of how we grow as learning leaders.
The Learning Forward Professional Expertise standard reminds us that effective professional learning depends on educators continually developing their expertise and applying research and best practices to their work. For many of us, summer creates space to do just that, through conferences, workshops, and other learning experiences. Noticing, collecting, and refining ideas is one way we actively develop that expertise.
And while we often attend these events to gather ideas, there’s an additional opportunity available to us as designers of professional learning. We can study not just what is being shared, but how the learning experience is designed, whether we’re reflecting on a particular session or the conference as a whole.
This lens is especially powerful at the Learning Forward Texas summer conference. As a #PL4PL (professional learning for professional learning leaders) experience, strong design moves abound. It becomes an ideal setting to continually ask, “What else is this teaching me?”
What we experience at LFTX (and beyond) can help us design, guide, and build learning for others.
Conference Learning Lenses
Capturing the Content
As continuous learners, most of us already have favorite ways to take notes and capture content at workshops, webinars, and conferences. We may use digital tools like Google Docs or Notion, sketchnote on our iPads, or prefer an analog approach with a favorite journal and Flair pens. If we attend with a team, we might set up collaborative Slides to share ideas throughout the event.
As we attend sessions, we often capture ideas with questions like:
What are the major concepts and/or takeaways?
How will I specifically use this information?
Who do I need to collaborate with?
Studying the Design
Here’s where the learning becomes meta (and often more meaningful.) Jared Cooney Horvath writes, “If we want our teaching to be effective, we must move beyond simple recipes and dig deeper into the mechanisms behind why each recipe works.”
Studying design moves allows us to reflect on the mechanics of learning and better understand why a structure, format, or activity works for us as learners.
For multi-day conferences like LFTX, I typically take notes in Google Docs. I now use the tab feature to create a separate space just for the design moves I want to #AdmireAndAcquire. This summer, I may try a simple two-column approach:
What I’m Learning (content)
What I’m Noticing (design moves)
My recent design move entries include everything from “Add Blame It on the Boogie by The Jacksons to my PD playlist 🎶” to “Try zipcations like Katie Fielding,” which eventually became part of this LFTX blog post.
Noticing Design Moves
As you prepare for upcoming conferences and other learning experiences, consider how you might look beyond the content and into the design.
“What else is this teaching me?”
One way I approach this is by paying attention to moments that make me pause and think, “Ooh, that’s interesting.” Sometimes I capture those moments quickly. Other times, I return to them later and reflect on why they stayed with me.
As you attend sessions, you might notice and capture design moves like:
How the session begins and sets the tone
Facilitation moves, such as pauses, instructions, or storytelling
Introductions and “icebreakers” (or community-building moments) that feel purposeful
Invitations for participants to think, talk, or create
New-to-you tools or creative uses of familiar ones
Visual design choices in slides, resources, or the environment
Ways facilitators offer choice or curate resources
Opportunities to extend learning beyond the session
And then, either during or after the session, you might reflect:
I left that session feeling energized, calm, or eager. What contributed to that feeling?
What part of this experience is sticking with me—and why?
What would I want to try, adapt, or refine in my own work?
These reflections help move us from simply noticing a strong design move to understanding why it worked and how we might #AdmireAndAcquire it for our own contexts.
As relevant, I also make sure to note where an idea came from so I can give proper credit. I typically include a name or link, along with a sparkle emoji and often “h/t” for hat tip.
At the LFTX Summer Conference
Even if you are not attending the Learning Forward Texas summer conference, this same lens can be applied to district learning events, leadership retreats, webinars, or even well-designed team meetings.
If you are attending the LFTX conference in June, you will have plenty of opportunities to notice design choices not only within sessions, but across the experience as a whole.
You might use the familiar See, Think, Wonder thinking routine from Project Zero to guide your observations:
See
What do you observe about the design of the experience?
How the conference communicates before, during, and after the event
The way you are greeted as you enter the building
The setup and flow of common spaces
The interactive game designed to elevate belonging
The social experiences woven into Monday and Tuesday afternoons
The design of the closing keynote and overall wrap-up
Think
What do you think these choices are intended to do?
How do these elements shape the experience for participants?
What seems purposeful or intentional?
Wonder
What questions or possibilities does this raise for your own work?
How might I adapt something like this in my own context?
What would this look like with my audience?
Even this series of conference posts is part of that design. These posts are intentional priming opportunities to extend the learning before the event begins.
As you notice these elements, consider:
Which of these ideas might I #AdmireAndAcquire for my own conferences, meetings, or back-to-school learning?
We often attend conferences looking for ideas we can use.
But when we also study the design of the experience, we gain something deeper.
We begin to see how learning is shaped, through structure, pacing, environment, and intentional choices both big and small.
So as you move through this summer’s learning, keep asking:
What is this teaching me?
Not just about the content, but about how meaningful learning experiences are designed.
And then, perhaps most importantly: What might I try next?
Explore More in This Series
This post is part of a short series leading up to the Learning Forward Texas Summer Conference. If you’d like to continue exploring the people and design behind the experience, you might also enjoy:
What We Design Before We Build (a behind-the-scenes look at this year’s interactive conference experience)
Why Educators Return to the Learning Forward Texas Conference Every Summer
Kathryn Laster brings over 30 years of education expertise as a math teacher, instructional coach, and digital learning consultant. As an independent consultant, she creates and facilitates transformative learning experiences through intentional, human-centered, tech-infused design, with a goal of normalizing excellence in professional learning.
Connect with Kathryn at kathrynlaster.info and at Refined Learning Design.