Blog #5

Section 5:


I am working in a P-12 environment currently.  I have been a part of this setting for the last 11 years. 

One thing that I learned about in the Corporate setting was that they have 3 types of roles when it comes to instructional design.  Sole designer, designer as a consultant and team member/leader.  The latter one is the one that interests me the most.  In a previous post I discussed that one of the problems on my current campus is that sometimes it would be better for those teachers who are "experts" at a particular subject, topic or idea should be able to lead a team to discuss that particular subject matter.  If it always comes the principal I believe that much of the time the teachers will not have the "buy in" that the principals wanted.  If it comes from a colleague that the staff respects then they might be more willing to listen.  I like the idea of creating teams for projects.  The book states, " the number of instructional designers can vary from one to several."  I think with that said our school could have many different projects going on and many different team leaders/team members determined by their special skills.

When reading the Military section there was a particular statement that stood out to me, that I believe needs to be ingrained into the staff of all schools.  The books states, "  The global corporate world thrives on international partnerships.  Designers must recognize the cultural diversity of the clients and select training or learning solutions that can accommodate dissimilar audiences."  In another section of this chapter they discuss alternative training solutions.  It discusses the importance of looking at your audience and deciding what is the best way to design instruction for those audience members.  This same concept could definitely be put into place at my campus.  We have several different cultures that need to be thought of when planning a lesson.  Teachers many times have an idea of how they are going to teach a lesson and much of the time it is difficult to do because of the different backgrounds of the students.  It is not only important for our campus to keep this in mind, but all schools.  There are many families that have come from another country where they might not have the resources that we have or we were brought up with, so teachers need to keep this in mind when planning lessons.

Health care is the next chapter discussed in this section.  One of the ideas that they discuss is that of Problem-Based Learning.  This occurs when students are able to learn by actually working with different cases.  One statement that I thought was interesting is, "PBL students tent to integrate, retain, and transfer information better and that they have superior self-directed learning skill."  This is something that would be very useful to the students that I work with.  This is a continuous problem with the students on my campus that they can not retain information and use information learned in a variety of settings.  If our campus were to adhere to this type of problem solving then there might be a better chance for student success.  Teachers could allow children to work out problems that have meaning to them.  For example in Science when discussing habitats, taking them to different areas in/around the school to review these habitats that they see on an everyday basis and work out problems using real world environments in their community. 

Because I work in a P-12 setting most of this chapter I could identify as strategies that my district try to put in place.  On the other hand there was a section of the chapter - Chugach School District - that discussed a way that they put an improvement plan into place.  They work on 4 different phases, design, delivery, refinement and continuous improvement.  This improvement plan had several different parts to put in place from standards to an instructional model for students to assessment tools.  The refinement phase is the section that caught my attention most.  The reason that this area stood out so much to me is because I can see that my district does try some of these ideas, except the refinement phase.  Every year the district comes up with a new idea that they want to implement in schools, policies, procedures, standards, instructional models and so on.  The only problem with that is when you get to the refinement phase this is where you look at what you have implemented and tweak it to make sure that it works.  Unfortunately when my district finds out an idea is not working they take it away and implement a whole new plan.  Which takes more training, and time.  It also provides instability for students and frustration on teachers.  If my district were to look at what the Chugach has done and their phases the students and teachers might have more success.

In one section of the Higher Education Chapter they discuss a model called the Generator Model.  First the ID will work with subject matter experts to discuss the learning and how it is to be taught.  Next, they will continue to work together and come up with a sample of the course and the ID provides feedback about the sample that has been provided.  They will as a group agree upon what changes need to be made and then they will go into their final phase of implementation.  This again is an idea that I think we would benefit from especially the part of having a leader with "experts" in a subject matter.  Unfortunately in my case this is usually the principal and I do not believe that one person is an expert on every subject matter.  For example my principal is an expert on the subject matter of reading.  So in this case she would be our Instructional designer along with other teachers who are "experts" in reading.  I do not believe that they same person (my principal) would be the ID for a math project or Science lessons.  Teachers need to work together and have people lead them where they excel most. 

In the last section I reviewed, World at Large, the section about appropriate technologies related to what I see day in and day out on my campus.  There are so many different technological resources that the teachers are privileged to that they do not use.  Nevertheless they will come to me and others complaining that they need the new and improved models, or a different resource that yet does the same things that they have access to.  I think it is important that we provide technology resources to our teachers and students that they will be able to use not only in the classroom, but at home.  I believe that they need to master what they have before they begin asking for new things that they don't necessarily need.