Instructional Design for Teachers

Improving Classroom Practice

Alison A. Carr-Chellman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317680208
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Instructional Design for Teachers, Second Edition focuses on the instructional design (ID) process specifically for K-12 teachers. The first edition introduced a new, common-sense model of instructional design to take K-12 teachers through the ID process step by step, with a special emphasis on preparing, motivating, and encouraging new and ongoing use of ID principles. This second edition includes new material on design in gaming, cybercharters, online classrooms, and flipped classrooms, as well as special considerations for the Common Core.

Each chapter contains framing questions, common errors, easy-to-use rules of thumb, clearly stated outcomes, and examples showing ID in action. The basic model and its application within constructivism and user-design will help teachers adapt from a behavioral approach to a more open, student-centered design approach. Combining basics with strategies to implement this model in the most advanced instructional approaches, this book empowers teachers and learners to use good instructional design with the most recent research-based approaches to learning.

Instructional Design for Teachers shows how ID principles can impact instructional moments in positive and practical ways. The book can be used for basic ID courses and introductory curriculum courses, and is accessible to in-service as well as pre-service teachers.

1

WHAT IS INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN?

Chapter Questions

1. What is instructional design for teachers?

2. Why do we call this a systems approach?

3. What are some of the benefits of using ID in the classroom?

4. What are some of the drawbacks of using ID in the classroom?

5. What are two things you can do to use this book optimally?

What Is Instructional Design for the Classroom?

It’s Common Sense!

First, let me assure you, instructional design (or ID as we fondly call it) is not rocket science. Sometimes it may feel as if it is much harder than rocket science, but ID is really fairly straightforward and I’ll bet you will find it feels pretty intuitive—it’s very much applied common sense. As you work through the content of this book, you may feel that you already know these basic ideas, or that you learned it a slightly different way earlier in your teaching career or in an earlier course. You may even find that this all makes sense and it’s how you’ve been creating learning and instruction in your classroom for years. Even if you’ve never set foot in a classroom, this book will help you to see how ID can improve learning moments in any classroom. This is a promise I can make with 20 years of experience designing learning in classrooms for K-12, higher education, and even corporate settings. I’ve created learning in tutoring centers for 4-year-olds, and in Navy pilot training centers for advanced air combat maneuvering. I’ve created classroom instruction at the elementary and secondary levels, as well as many years of courses for both online and face-to-face college courses. I’ve had a lot of chances to get this right, and plenty of screw-ups too and I’ve seen that there are a few things that if we can simply understand and apply them well, will make my classroom, and I’m confident, your classroom, work better at the job of true learning.

So although ID is a pretty simple set of skills that you can exercise daily, it can be frustrating as well. ID is a very disciplined approach to designing learning situations in your classroom. It may seem silly at some level as you go through the steps. Avoid the tendency to say, “Oh I know how to do that already, I’ll skip to the really difficult stuff.” Please take one step at a time and stay in that step, stay in that moment of instructional design for as long as it takes you to really understand what is needed to create a good goal statement, well-written objectives, or properly integrated technology decisions. Don’t rush through the process. In this way, this skinny little book may be a bit deceiving because in order to really effectively use these ideas in your classroom, you have to internalize them, to bring them into your thinking in a fresh way. That will require time spent really thinking about these steps and ideas, and digesting them. You will need to make the translation into your own unique classroom experience so that you will see ways that you can easily, seamlessly implement these ideas. I’m going to help you with that a great deal, but sitting and thinking about these ideas will be critical for your ability to transform what may seem at first to be a clunky or difficult or overly long process into a set of heuristics, or brief rules of thumb, that you will fall back on every day. Heuristics are guides that can be easily and quickly called upon to help you find the best solution. They are a way to help you use the model in a more intuitive and comfortable way.

As you can tell, I believe that there are some really important gifts that ID can offer to a classroom. While separately the steps may seem familiar, even simplistic, as a system, working together and carefully interwoven, it is probably going to be a new experience for you to see the ways that we make sure tests, for example, align with the content, goals, and classroom activities. ID can help you focus your instruction so that you are really reaching the learning goals you have for your students. It helps you to concentrate your efforts toward specific learning goals that are then supported by appropriate objectives, tests, integrated technology, and classroom activities.

Simple Definition

The definition of instructional design for teachers is simply the process by which instruction is created for classroom use through a systematic process of setting goals, creating learning objectives, analyzing student characteristics, writing tests, selecting materials, developing activities, selecting media, implementing and revising the lesson. Each of these steps will be discussed in complete detail in this book, starting in Chapter 2 with examples of how teachers can and have used these steps to create effective lessons in their classrooms every day.

Steps in the ID Process

The field of ID has been around for a long time. Coming from the use of audio visuals in military applications to ensure that large numbers of soldiers are up and running as quickly as possible, the field has worked through the past decades to clarify and research the best way to create good learning experiences and environments. The basic steps in this model for the general ID professional are:

1. Analyze needs.

2. Design instruction.

3. Develop materials.

4. Implement the instruction.

5. Evaluate and revise the instruction.

Most in the field know this as the ADDIE model, based on the first letters in each step. For the purposes of learning about ID in the classroom, we’re going to dispense with the use of step 1 for the most part. We will analyze our learners, and our context, but we aren’t really going to look at needs. This is, in general, because within the classroom, there are requirements and those needs are often determined at a much higher, even a community or political, level. We all realize that there are some standards, for example, that we don’t necessarily think make sense for a given developmental level, but they’re there, and pretty immutable. So we dispense with the long and arduous task of doing a full-needs assessment in which we would determine whether the need was really instructional, and so forth. Instead we will focus our efforts on a recasting of the remaining four steps into a nine-step model as outlined in Chapter 2.

Principles of ID

These are some good points to remember when you’re doing instructional design on your own.

1. Know where you’re going There’s a saying—perhaps from Native American originally, but applied from Mager’s work (1975) on instructional objectives—which says something like, “Knowing where you are is a function of knowing where you’ve come from and where you’re going.” My own children have a framed calligraphy of a saying from my husband’s family, “Remember who you are and where you come from.” While they may sound trite, these are important foundations for good instruction. You need to have clear goals and objectives for your learners. They should be defined in such a way that you know (and so does your learner) when they’ve reached that goal. So it is important that you clearly understand and clearly state your goal.

2. Know your learners It is essential that you understand who your learners are, what motivates them, why they are reluctant to learn, which ones will embrace an idea, and which ones need more relevance, for example. The process of analyzing your student characteristics will be the main place where you can focus on knowing your learners with relation to the specific content for the instruction.

3. Be creative with your activities and media It is important to remember that novelty is a good motivator even though we don’t want to select expensive media just to motivate. Doing creative things with your classroom instruction will produce better results overall. Avoid ruts and comfort and keep reaching for the stars, doing new things, creating exciting and fun approaches to your classroom-learning experiences.

4. Do drafts and iterate! You’ll find that ID is a process of iteration. Like good writing, it is imperative that you revisit earlier decisions and plan to make changes as new things emerge in the process of instructional design. Don’t create documents and set them into stone with the expectation that they will never change. That is antithetical to the whole point of ID, which is a flexible and open process.

5. Test out your instruction and materials with a similar population and revise Make sure that you are able to try out your instruction with a population that is as similar to your target population as possible. Take the results and feedback they’re able to give you and change the materials and instructional approach if necessary to better meet the needs of your learners.

6. Align, align, align As they say in real estate, it’s all about location, right? Here in instructional design it’s all about alignment. The goals should be aligned with the objectives, which should be aligned with the test items, and the media and activities, and so forth. What does this alignment mean? It means that you’re not testing on something that you think is important but that isn’t represented in your objectives—a surprise then to the learner. It means that you select activities and media that support reaching your goals and objectives rather than selecting activities that are fun or comfortable, but don’t support the learning. Alignment is perhaps the most important piece of advice I can give you in terms of good instructional design.

7. Do ID all the time Instructional design should fit nicely into your life as a classroom teacher. It does not have to be something that you only do when you have great amounts of time to devote to it. Yes, you may find it appropriate to pay particular attention to the practice of ID when you’re planning your classes in the summer before the first day of school. But you may also find it seeping into your every moment throughout every day. It’s best not to sequester ID into only large planning time blocks, particularly as those may come all too rarely! Consider ID as a process you can use all the time.

The Systems Puzzle

The idea that this is a systemic process is an important one, and there are some distinctions I’d like to make here in regard to systems approaches. To begin, an easy way to understand a system is as any combination of elements that work together. In its simplest conception, a system could be a motorcycle, a clock, or a human body. These are mechanical systems that work in very predictable ways. Generally speaking, if a part of a mechanical system is broken, we can take that part out, repair it, reinsert it into the system, and voilà! The system will work again. But we also understand there are many more complex systems that aren’t mechanical, such as organizations, classrooms, and families. These are much more difficult to repair when they’re not working properly. Thus, if a family member is ill, if you remove the family member, and send them to rehabilitation (for drug use, for example) and reinsert them into the family, they’ll rarely “fix” the problem in the family and far too often revert to their old ways precisely because they are embedded in a familial context that was already ill with addiction. Social systems like these, as with instructional moments in classrooms, are truly complex systems. This means that we can understand systems as pieces that are contextualized and working together. In the case of instruction in classrooms, what follows then is that when we understand our learning goal, that goal drives the potential solutions that we might consider for the activities and technology to be integrated into that lesson.

This is a very precise procedure, in part because we are working systemically, where all the pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, but a puzzle with slightly flexible pieces. Because precision is not demanded up front in order to create the solution, this allows for some level of errors that you may not see or understand until you realize that the instruction isn’t working, but you may not be sure why. When fixing a clock, if a piece isn’t milled properly, it simply will not fit, and you have to go back and retool it until it does fit. But instruction doesn’t work like that, so a part can be put into place (improperly formed objectives, for example, or test items that are not reflective of the learning goals) and you may not realize it until months later when something seems to be wrong and not working with the learning environment.

Figuring out what went wrong can be a devilishly difficult task at that point.

A system is truly a set of pieces working together for the good of the learning goal. And this means that it is important that each step along the way is properly and precisely performed and that the outcomes of one step will properly feed the next step in the process. When we talk about systems in ID for classrooms, we are saying that the outcomes from each step feed the next steps, that they all fit together in a way that helps the entire endeavor to work properly in the classroom.

Figure 1.1 Well-fitting jigsaw puzzle

Figure 1.2 Ill-fitting jigsaw puzzle

In order for classroom ID to work, it all has to fit together like a well-fitted jigsaw puzzle, not like a sloppily assembled jigsaw.

Systemic Versus Systematic

I would like to make a distinction here between systemic and systematic. This is a distinction I have made in the past (Carr, 1996) and one that I think is very useful here. Systematic is the easier to define, as it is a process that is usually linear, step by step and disciplined. Because of the nature of systematic processes, it may seem to be ill-matched to the fast-paced, dynamic, flexible nature of classroom life. A systemic approach is one that looks at the whole picture from a very high level to consider possible solutions. ID in the classroom needs to have a careful balance of both systematic and systemic approaches. The process needs to be clear and linear, particularly as you are first learning about the process. However, without the larger picture, the very narrow systematic approach will not be effective in the longe...