Reflection #3

Chapter 1.

What was most surprising to me in this chapter was that there was this huge of a debate about defining the field.  Maybe I’ve worked with younger students for too long to require a precise wording on anything. I’m just happy to have them put their names on each assignment!  I can understand refining the title as technology of the media advances and new insights in methodology are developed.  Refinement of something should clarify it. Creating new mission statement for the field every few years blurs the definition in my eyes. 

The most concrete definition to me in the book is from 1994:

“Instructional Technology is the theory and practice of design, development, utilization, management, and evaluation of processes and resources for learning.”  

It’s not restrictive, it doesn’t use fluff words, and it doesn’t need to be reread, yet is still broad enough to be applied to the field as a whole.  Our school is working on interdisciplinary curriculum units for our district that merge subjects into a focused learning experience.  For example if we are teaching insects in science they would be writing a paper on bugs in language and drawing.  Technology allows for bridging a lot of these disciplines into a cohesive learning experience.  I’ve already thought of ideas that I will be bringing to this summer’s meetings. 

The biggest thing missing to me what were the driving changes in each of these time periods. What changes in technology or methodology brought about these revisions in defining the field?  Most specifically what drove someone in 1977 to break it down into a quick 120 page read!

Chapter 2.

We are using a new program called Curriculum Crafter this year.  It allows you to look up cores and standards as well as published assessments and incorporate it into our lesson plans. It’s almost a wiki for curriculum materials.  Traditionally I would look up the state standards and use that as a framework to develop my lesson plans.  I’m sure I internalized methodology like ADDIE and learned similar methods in school and professional development meetings.  I’ve just never formalized it into a process.  Reading this chapter is sort of a refresher on why you need a structured approach as I can see it with the program we are using now in our district.   The part that breaks down for me is that not every lesson plan layout should follow a methodology like this and that different age groups will have widely different structure for design.  As an example is gauging meaningful performance (one area listed as a characteristic of instructional design) when there often is difficulty in measuring this.  I’ve only been teaching and student teaching for just over a decade and I’ve seen four or five different approaches to measuring performance.  Our current system is extremely confusing to parents and to doesn’t really accurately measure students.  It was designed by some large education group who clearly put a lot of time, research and effort into it.  This is an area where a structured design failed to produce a good result.