"Education has missed the boat, with respect to instructional design. Teachers come up with lesson plans on the fly, with little thought to why they are presenting information or even who their audience is. Teacher training, at the university level and during Professional development, needs to focus on helping teachers become comfortable with instructional design principles."This is a complex statement, of which I agree with some parts and disagree with others. Education is a big field made up of a lot of teachers. To say that all teachers put little thought into their planning, presentation, or their audience is an overgeneralization. Sure, there are some who just teach with lecture, textbook, test, but I disagree with putting all teachers into that pot.
Even some professional development and preteacher training falls into this pitfall of a lecture with no goals for the learners or assessments to gauge success. I would agree with part that says teachers need to be taught (and modeled) how to use instructional design principles. Instruction needs to carefully plan the message of why the objective is important and take into account in the needs of the audience.
Instructional Design, like good teaching, comes from careful planning for the message and the audience. Once teachers are comfortable using Instructional Design principles, then public opinion will begin to turn from the belief that education has missed the boat of effective teaching.
James,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your response to the quote. We had very similar viewpoints in the sense that we partially agreed with the statement and partially disagreed. I particularly liked your blurb about student ownership of learning. The more control students have over their own learning, the more it will benefit them in the future. To me, teachers are merely there to facilitate learning. Ultimately, it's up to our students to take learning into their own hands and be responsible for the outcome.
James,
ReplyDeleteI would agree, the quote is generalizing all teachers whereas I believe it shouldn't. I like your suggestion of telling the class the learning objectives for the lesson, even during professional developments. There have been many classes and professional developments where the objectives are not stated and I don't know what I am supposed to be learning or paying attention to during the lesson.
James,
ReplyDeleteI was with you on how some teachers can be put in this category where others shouldn't. The same thing goes with any of the support staff. Expectations have to be set for everyone or the school is not going to progress.