Layering Book: Educator as Designer
Instructional design — a role for educators
Those who are trained and employed as instructional designers may cringe at my efforts to encourage classroom educators to think of themselves as the designers of instruction. These practitioners imagine a situation in which an agency approaches them to solve a problem. To identify the problem and the most effective approach to take more concretely, they conduct a formal needs analysis, determine how best to satisfy the need (instruction is not necessarily the only possible solution), and create a model of the characteristics of the learners, the learning environment, and the budget.
Instructional designers may work with educational goals they know very little about and rely on subject matter experts to provide the information that is included in instruction. The designers develop expertise in interviewing and cross-checking with experts to assure that the intervention created reflects the content or skills to be acquired. They carefully identify goals (objectives) that will both guide the development of instruction and eventually guide assessment to determine if instruction has been successful. With these objectives identified, they then craft the content and experiences that will be used to influence learners. Typically, they include elements in this instruction to generate interest, activate existing knowledge, and accomplish other important cognitive and motivational conditions for learning, understanding, and retention. Then, they field test their instructional approach with a sample of learners and have the approach reviewed by content experts. Using the feedback from these formative assessments, they modify the content and methods before official deployment. Deployment may include the development of implementation guidelines for those most directly involved in implementing the final design. [Roughly based on Dick, Carey, & Carey, 2014).
As a classroom educator, you may be able to identify several of these elements in which you have participated. You may develop formal lesson plans and under some conditions write implementation guidelines (e.g., notes for a substitute teacher). You may participate in curriculum planning committees that translate national or state standards into something closer to what individual teachers are to emphasize. You might be involved in a review of standardized test results as a type of needs analysis. You may see other connections with the broad responsibilities of being a classroom educator.
My reference to “the teacher as instructional designer” focuses more precisely on the development of content and experiences intended to influence learning. The full-time instructional designer is also trained using models that identify important components of the learning experience. A very commonly applied example of such models would be Gagné’s 9 events of instruction (Gagné, Briggs, & Wager, 1992).
Gagné’s 9 events of instruction identifies a sequence of events important in establishing ideal cognitive and motivational conditions for learning. This model is used to guide those designing a unit of instruction to assure that important experiences are provided to learners. There is a high probability that educators preparing to work as instructional designers learn this model and practice applying it to learning and training units as part of their professional preparation. If you are a practicing K12 teacher you likely learned a model for developing a lesson plan. There are likely some similarities in the components of a lesson plan and the events of instruction. To me, the events of instruction are different in being more directly related to the cognitive experiences important in learning, retention, and application. By related, I mean the events offer general guidance regarding external events that encourage essential mental activity. Thinking about student thinking and how essential types of thinking can be encouraged may be a different way to guide planning. Models such as that provided by Gagné and colleagues offer a concrete way to check a planned learning experience against a list of components known to be effective. What follows is a quick summary of the 9 elements.
- Gain the attention of students — create an introductory experience to get students ready to learn. Example — ask thought-provoking questions, show a content-related interesting video.
- Inform students of the objectives — describe expected skills or knowledge that will be present after instruction. Example — list things students should know after reading a chapter, identify the skill level that is the goal of instruction and practice (e.g. run a mile in under 9 minutes).
- Stimulate the recall of prior learning. Examples — ask students what they already know about a new topic, identify previous topics that relate to what is to be learned.
- Present content
- Provide learning guidance — Examples — provide examples and nonexamples of key concepts, provide an outline or concept map to identify key ideas and how they are related.
- Provide an opportunity for practice — Examples — have students explain key concepts to each other, assign practice problems or simple quizzes.
- Provide feedback — Examples — have students review content to find answers to quiz questions they could not answer, provide remedial instruction to individuals or small groups who appear to understand key ideas.
- Assess performance — Examples — administer post-test of a pre-test / post-test sequence, use a rubric to determine levels of skill proficiency.
- Enhance retention and transfer — Examples — engage students in a problem-based activity that draws on key concepts, ask followup questions evaluating understanding of key concepts at a later point in the course.
I am guessing a review of Gagné’s 9 events of instruction would generate some sense of familiarity with most educators. For the instructional designer these elements function like a checklist against which one could match what exists in an existing effort to generate instructional materials and processes. Is there something here that activates existing knowledge? What has been provided that encourages practice? What has been included to identify and respond to failures of understanding?
The connection with the notion of layering elements on information is this. The events of instruction mostly involve external experiences intended to stimulate important internal (cognitive) behaviors. These external experiences do not necessarily have to be built on top of existing online content to produce a composite experience for learners, but many of the capabilities of layered components could be used in this way. One important focus of design in general and the elements of instruction more specifically is to consider what needs to happen for successful learning. For some learners, what needs to happen can require little in the way of external tasks. For other learners, this is not the case. A purposeful awareness of important internal processes and related external tasks is what the elements of instruction and my arguments for the value of specific layered elements is intended to develop.