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.

Concept Map Lesson Plan: Living Things

This is a concept map of a Science lesson I actually perform with my students on living things.   I bring up traits and types of living things then ask  them to give me some examples of each trait and type.  The students are encouraged to raise their hand and provide answers for each category.  I place these on the board and have students match them into groups.  For example,  a crab walks, needs to eat food, drink water, etc.  Grass needs sunlight and water but not shelter.   Once we complete the board exercise I have each student draw a picture of one of the animals or plants and something that it needs to live.  The next lesson we branch out into further classifications like parts of a plant,  grouping animals into types, and so on.   I could use a concept map displayed onto an overhead to "save" the discussion for the following week.  This would allow students to pick up where we left off and expand further into each feature bubble.

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.

A Social Studies Lesson Plan using Google Maps

View Social Studies Lesson- Walking for Ice Cream in a larger map

As soon as the weather gets nice in the spring, we have a social studies lesson where we walk to a local ice cream parlor.  Along the way I have students point out safety features like traffic lights,  stop signs and crosswalks.  Every time we stop we discuss why we need each of these features to keep us safe.  Also I have them determine the weather conditions as a tie in for our science learning on weather.   Each student is given a map where they draw in the stop signs and traffic lights and circle what the weather condition was.  After the trip each student illustrates a picture and writes a sentence using proper punctuation describing their trip to get ice cream.   

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=213837021522119836791.0004a53a1c19be5538860&ll=42.086949,-86.443455&spn=0.01094,0.01929&z=16

Check out my Social Bookmark site!

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http://www.delicious.com/mshugg

Week 4 Reflection

1. Web and internet increased use in learning
The author does point to a greater increasing integration of technology with the classroom in the last few years and draws from it a conclusion that in three to five years computers and digital media will become of more importance in education. Looking at it now (compared to the book publish date of 2007) it hasn’t really taken off like he though it would it would. Budgeting crisis has laid off a lot of positions in technology, mothballed computer labs and put money that would have been spent on education programs in technology into keeping the doors open. If funding for education would have been made a proper priority we might have reached the levels he was envisioning.

Unfortunately since we are taking a different route the authors goals may end up being met after all. It’s cheaper to have one instructor broadcast to multiple classrooms rather than having a dozen on staff. A recorded lesson can be played every year with out having to pay for health insurance for the DVD player. These are probably the only realistically approachable ways for it to take shape in the K-12 levels.

Higher education and adult education has a much better chance of incorporating the web and internet for education. Colleges aren’t at the mercy of tax dollars like the lower grades and can pass of the expenses of new and innovative technologies on the students. My younger sister is at the same university I attended just over a decade ago and is paying almost twice the tuition!
Instructional technology is really taking off in the workplace. My husband is always taking part in webinars and was given an ipod full of training videos for his job. The competitiveness of the marketplace makes companies more willing to spend big money on more efficient ways to train staff and allow them to retain information. One of the articles from the first week of class touched on the importance of this.
2. Applying principals to my work
I was a bit dismayed to reach a chapter this late in the book and discover that it was another heavy dose of defining and redefining terms. I can understand importance behind the use of the technology tools we are learning about and the process and methodology of creating these tools. I can also get behind the formalizing and methodizing the concepts of the field of instructional technology and how it ties to into things like human performance involvement. I just wanted to see methods for applying these cool concepts and definitions into my own teaching methods. I flipped through a few more chapters and saw more of the same. It would be nice for more applied knowledge and less historical importance of word changes. The chart on page 141 seems to be the closest to this but would be more informative if they ran through a real life example through the steps for analysis and design. The book example of a rocking chair factory is a step in the right direction. It shows how a training department (or group) can lose its focus when its stated purpose gets subverted by reality boundaries of the company that pays for its employees and budget. In our district these small battles are fought regularly. Schools are like small kingdoms on their own rather than a united district when it comes to budgeting dollars.

I didn’t get a clear picture of the concepts of this chapter so I’m not really sure how to apply it to my classroom. We have systems for human performance improvement in our weekly team meetings, curriculum planning sessions and professional development sessions. HR doesn’t have a role in this like other companies leaving a sort of disconnect between its roll as discussed in the text and how it supports us. Our school improvement programs are closer matching to the way the book is defining HPI. As I mentioned above this chapter seems to be content light despite being word rich. I don’t see a way it can improve the programs we already have in place.

Note a typo in the book: the chapter pages are titled at the top “Chapter 14 The Development and Evolution of Human Performance Involvement” which caused me to do a double take. Involvement is much different than improvement. Of course I would like to see human involvement increased in my classroom when it comes to my students parents!

3. Podcasting
I’m not a fan of the name podcasting as it doesn’t clearly define what it is. It seems like its just a recording on the internet. Why the fancy name? This type of recording would be difficult to use with kindergarten students. They have enough trouble sitting still as it is with out having to be silent to listen to an audio recording. They are much more excited with a “silly songs” CD where we can get up and dance. A podcast for teachers would be helpful allowing theme oriented training on various subject matters that relate to our field. I found one podcast related to early childhood education but haven’t had time to listen:
http://www.helendoron.com/podcast.php
It seems like it would be a lot of work to organize and record a weekly podcast. I could see if there was monetary compensation a person might be more motivated to record one. If it was of sufficient quality I would pay to subscribe to one related to early childhood, organizing learning stations, or differentiated instructional groups.

4. Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking to me had immediate value. I’ve lost websites over the years and have spent time struggling to remember that one link I have on my work computer but not at home. I don’t have a lot of tech savvy friends to take part in the social part but perhaps sharing links with other students in this class will give me enough of that. I recommend adding each semesters students you have to one continuous list that you share out at the end of the semester. That would provide a wealth of links for educators! I’ve already talked about it to some of my coworkers and will bring it up at the next staff meeting we have. The value it provides is clear!

technology podcast

The only early childhood education Podcast I could find:
http://www.helendoron.com/podcast.php


A technology podcast similar to what we are learning.  Maybe we will learn about twitter in a later lesson!