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@joe_edtech
I am just starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel of my doctoral program, so I can say with some confidence that I've spent too much time over the last couple of years studying instructional design models. The biggest criticism I have of most of the models is that they appear to be based in behavioral psychology, not cognitive psychology. I still think it is worth the effort to study them, though. It is always good to discuss and review the basics of instructional design, no matter where we are in our careers.
The most important aspect of the ID models so far is that each one of them is fundamentally an iterative process based on lots of formative assessment. Each time I read that a light goes on because I think we often forget what formative assessment is really all about. On the one hand, it is a measure to gauge student progress towards mastery of a skill or content area. However, another equally important function of formative assessment is to gauge the effectiveness of our classroom instruction. The idea is that if the students aren't successful, it might be our instructional methods or processes that need to be changed. In other words, maybe there are things we can and should do to reach the students who aren't succeeding.
The key is that we may always have to be changing our methods, messages, and means in the classroom. As teachers, I think we are sometimes reluctant to do that. There was a myth propagated in my earliest days of teaching that if we just work really hard to develop our materials and lesson plans in the first couple of years, we can simply reuse those materials every year. Hopefully you clearly read that as a MYTH.
Working in technology has taught me that the world is in a constant state of change, and it should be. The tools we have access to this year are better and more effective than the tools we had access to 19 years ago when I began. And we should be excited to embrace them and re-imagine our classrooms every single year. Furthermore, the group of kids I have in class this year might be a lot different than the students we had last year - and that means that our instruction, processes, methods, and messages should change, too.
Teachers aren't lazy. They hold onto materials because they believe in "tried and true." We are taught to seek best practices and hang on to them once we've found them. The one lesson I wish all schools of education would teach at the very beginning of any education program is that the "best practices" are actually processes, and they have to be constantly updated, changed, re-invented, and re-created. In other words, teaching, like technology, is always changing - and that means we should always be presented with new learning opportunities, for ourselves and our students.
The most important aspect of the ID models so far is that each one of them is fundamentally an iterative process based on lots of formative assessment. Each time I read that a light goes on because I think we often forget what formative assessment is really all about. On the one hand, it is a measure to gauge student progress towards mastery of a skill or content area. However, another equally important function of formative assessment is to gauge the effectiveness of our classroom instruction. The idea is that if the students aren't successful, it might be our instructional methods or processes that need to be changed. In other words, maybe there are things we can and should do to reach the students who aren't succeeding.
The key is that we may always have to be changing our methods, messages, and means in the classroom. As teachers, I think we are sometimes reluctant to do that. There was a myth propagated in my earliest days of teaching that if we just work really hard to develop our materials and lesson plans in the first couple of years, we can simply reuse those materials every year. Hopefully you clearly read that as a MYTH.
Working in technology has taught me that the world is in a constant state of change, and it should be. The tools we have access to this year are better and more effective than the tools we had access to 19 years ago when I began. And we should be excited to embrace them and re-imagine our classrooms every single year. Furthermore, the group of kids I have in class this year might be a lot different than the students we had last year - and that means that our instruction, processes, methods, and messages should change, too.
Teachers aren't lazy. They hold onto materials because they believe in "tried and true." We are taught to seek best practices and hang on to them once we've found them. The one lesson I wish all schools of education would teach at the very beginning of any education program is that the "best practices" are actually processes, and they have to be constantly updated, changed, re-invented, and re-created. In other words, teaching, like technology, is always changing - and that means we should always be presented with new learning opportunities, for ourselves and our students.
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