Week 5 Reflection

Interesting Uses of Instructional Design at Work

A few months before taking this class I mentioned to my dad that I felt overwhelmed by the amount of hours I spend at my school attending professional development training.  In just a decade of teaching that amount has gone up certainly.  I find it interesting that this is stated in the book as affecting the business world as well.  It hits even more close to home when the book mentions technology based training as I do my homework for our asynchronous Internet based training course we are all participating in.

Finding a fit for some of these areas are easy to see for a business field where rapid prototyping can save many hours of trial and error when building a product.  When developing the minds of five and six year olds it’s more of a stretch.  What I see as the best fit is the use of instructional designers to coordinate the creation of learning products we use.  Particularly interesting is not only including those with the skills to create the training materials like editors, writers, graphic layout artists, but including subject matter experts to influence the process.  While working on materials for our science standards and grade level content expectations we never would think to bring in an actual scientist to provide their expertise.  We pull from books, previous course materials and unit lessons we have used in the past.   A subject matter expert could provide neat examples or fun experiments to integrate more layers of Dale’s cone to the learning experience.

I could also see using advanced evaluation techniques defined by instructional design. I sometimes feel that the ways we measure student performance is teaching them to do well on standardized tests and not on their ability to learn and retain information.  It doesn’t do a student to work on memorizing the state capitals over a month of class only to forget most of them only a month later. The book doesn’t really lay out these methods in this chapter besides mentioning various stage processes but there is a strong need to make sure that learning is actually taking place. Adapting somewhat from a sentence in the book, productive evaluation must measure not just simply learning, but also transfer of knowledge gains to the student and the impact on his or her future ability to learn.

Trends and Issues in P-12 Educational Change

In just the years I’ve been teaching there have been calls for systemic change in education.  You read about districts in Michigan like Detroit and Flint that are facing government take over forcing systemic changes.  Even my district has had many schools not meeting AYP landing them on the failing school watch list.  Despite this the changes we seem to plan are more of the piecemeal nature.   The state of Michigan is facing needs for systemic changes caused by budget shortfalls but the districts overall seem paralyzed by this.   Comparing the two methods described in the book here (GSTE and SUTE) there seems to be one better suited for a school or small districts (GSTE) and one for larger organizations or the state as a whole (SUTE). I’m sure either could work for most districts but the SUTE you have seem to have a lot more work before the development of the changes that require a lot more teams and committees.   I don’t recall hearing about the terms being used in our schools so I’m curious if there’s been of our planning have involved them. 

Reading on the Decatur District changes using the GSTE process, I was really surprised to read about there involving community members in the planning process and holding community forum meetings to shape the process.  It can be difficult to get a consensus of views among a group of like minded coworkers.  I can’t imagine what it would be like to bring in large number of people with diverse backgrounds with different views.  I like how after they had compiled information on the educational needs in the community and then broke down into building level groups to work on the actual processes.  It sounds like at the end of the section that the work was still on going.  I checked out their website on Google (http://www.msddecatur.k12.in.us/) and amusingly they actually have a section under their missions and values about initiating systemic changes.   Recently they have done things like engage in a district-wide effort to engage in conversations about systemic transformation through Professional Learning Communities in the 07-08 school years.  Their site is impressive and there’s evidence that they are engaging the community to improve the district.

What was surprising to me about the Chugach School District was how few students they had over such a large area.  I had to do the math and it works out to be about one student per hundred square miles!  That has to make putting together a sports team difficult.  If any district is in need for technology to bring students together it’s this one for sure.  I looked into this school as well but there website was down.  There’s a lot of links about them though on Google.   I found it interesting that  Decatur called their process “Journey to Excellence” and Chugach called it “Voyage to Excellence”.   It’s almost like they attended the same seminars or class on how to make systemic changes.   The most impressive was a statistic saying that in 1994, only 1 student in 26 years had attended college and the school had a massive turn over level.   To fix this they took a lot of steps.  Sorry for the complete plagiarizing below but I thought this was an amazing example of radical systemic change that I would like to see in our Michigan schools

From COSN.org  Case Study on Chugach School District:

Through a series of town hall meetings, the district determined that the traditional industrial model of education to prepare students for college was not relevant to their community. Students needed to prepare for five possible outcomes, equally weighted in importance: college enrollment, business entrepreneurship, full-time employment, military or service learning, or vocational training.

The school board and district leaders proposed radical changes to suit the remote community's needs. The district eliminated grade levels as measures of progress and adopted a standards-based system with levels of mastery that emphasize real-life learning situations. The standards continuum extends from pre-kindergarten to the equivalent of grade 16 and students complete their education at their own pace, graduating at age 14 to 21.

That is an impressive change!  If you read further on their site there is strong evidence that the changes have been successful.