Week 6 Discussion

Improving Our Professional Working Environment with ID

Comparing the three areas covered in business, grade school and higher education, there are a lot of similarities.  Each shares the same goal of improving the speed, impact and retention of instructional materials and teachings.  Where they defer is in some of the driving motivations for changing and improving these areas. 

In business, the ultimate goal is to generate profits for the business unit.  It wasn’t always the case but companies have realized that well trained employees are the most productive employees. One of our first week articles by Reigeluth and Joseph touched on this by contrasting employees during the industrial age and information age.  What ID offers is the most bang for your buck to a company looking to train its employees in the shortest amount of time with the most amount of retention.

In P-12 levels of schooling, to me the driving factors are budgetary and communal growth. The perfect situation would be one teacher for each student, but we don’t live in a perfect world.  Schools have a finite amount of dollars to spend on teachers and materials and must allocate these to have the most impact to the students.  Every purchase of educational materials and training must be carefully weighed against using that funding somewhere else. Instructional design helps this allocation process of the budget.  Also, beyond just facts in books and how to form letters, students learn how to fit in to their community and get along with others.  Properly designed materials and technologies allow students to work together on projects, interact with the world beyond pictures in a book and even converse and share with other schools.  Instructional Design allows educators to reach further down Dale’s cone to make learning an enriched and immersive experience.

Higher education to me is really where Instructional Design can flex its wings and bring improvement to education.  It’s where learning takes place not to prepare you for society or a specific job but for the sake of learning.  Each field can take a different approach to educating its students, and even multiple approaches with in that field. The interesting part is despite different approaches they can all be correct.  Also they can all be improved.  Taking our course as an example, the tools we have to learn online are vastly improved over my first online course I took years back.  In that course we were emailed a syllabus, purchased a book, and then emailed in an assignment each week.  No discussion and no interactivity at all, it was basically just self study with someone grading your work.   Pretty soon with every laptop and smart phone having a camera we will be sitting together in a virtual classroom having real time discussions!  

There are a lot of things each of these three fields can offer to my own education experience.  Most of these changes would be piecemeal at best with out approval of our school staff and as they grow in scope the district as a whole.  That’s a shame as there are some systemic changes needed for sure!  One thing I would absolutely love to see was from one of the vignettes in chapter 22.  Brenda Litchfield mentioned asking the teachers what workshops they would like to see offered in a school year. I couldn’t believe that when I read it!  I’ve sat through so many professional developments that didn’t match my grade level needs or even had any relation to what areas I need improvement.  This would save the district money as well as improve both the skill levels of the staff and let them feel involved in their own development.  There are other things like this that would not cost money and maybe even save money but have a big impact on our staff.   

Achieving My Professional Goals

This chapter for me finally drives home what I’ve had trouble with understanding in this course. Our homework assignments focus on technology tools to use for learning but I believe the book is using a different definition of technology.  From Dictionary.com:

Technology
1. The application of practical sciences to industry or commerce (or education; my edit).
2. The methods, theory, and practices governing such application: a highly developed technology.
3. The total knowledge and skills available to any human society for industry, art, science, etc.

The tools we are learning about fall under definition one, while the book is using the third definition of technology. We are discussing technology tools and how we can use them in our classroom, and the book has been talking all along about how to clearly define Instructional Design and classify the rules and best practices that can be used to improve the instructional experience.  This seems to be a disconnect for me as I’m finding the tool lessons to be incredibly helpful and the book to be arduous at best.

In this chapter there was a lot more discussion on the defining the steps of ID and the refinement process and history behind the revisions of the process.   There are two really good sections in there that can be applied to teachers like me.  In the ibstpi section there is a table (27.3) that has eighteen competencies for an instructor.  The ID and training manager sections are a bit too high level to really apply but these eighteen are a great guidebook for a teacher no matter what level of expertise they possess.  I tend to focus on the grade level content expectations (GLCE’s) when designing my lesson plans and often don’t think about ways to improve the way I deliver my lessons.  Areas like promoting transfer of knowledge and evaluating instructional material effectiveness don’t really cross my mind. Instead I tend to focus on how much my students would enjoy the lesson and how I will test them on the materials.  I could see brainstorming one area of improvement in each of these eighteen categories and making a year long goal to complete.  It would certainly make me a stronger teacher! 

The second area I thought was really good was again in a table (27.6) that listed the ISPI/ASTD performance technology competencies.   This book is heavy on the precise word use in its definitions and diagrams almost to the point of being difficult to understand.  This list of ten competencies is clearly written and easy to understand and apply to my teaching methods.  It provides a great checklist to writing your own instructional materials like lesson plans or curriculum thematic units.  I’m pretty quiet and don’t have a lot to offer in staff meetings where we are developing our thematic units. This list provides some discussion points to strengthen our work.  For example asking “How can we work with in our resource constraints to develop better materials?” would certainly open up some discussion among our staff and encourage thinking outside of our normal ways.  I already am looking forward to using some of the tools we have learned about in the classroom and with my coworkers.  These competencies could be a great way to provide personal review on my contributions.