Instructional Design

"Education has missed the boat, with respect to instructional design. Teachers come up with lesson plans on the fly, with little thought to why they are presenting information or even who their audience is. Teacher training, at the university level and during Professional development, needs to focus on helping teachers become comfortable with instructional design principles."

As I was reading and watching the videos for this course, I realized that instructional design is the way I think about lesson planning, but I rarely have the time to complete all these steps.  When I was in undergrad, I learned the basics of instructional design.  Before designing our units, we would come up with what the problem was.  We would then make a blueprint for what we needed to teach.  We spent a lot of time learning how to write objectives and investigating different learning strategies. Then, we would spend time developing what and how we are going to teach.  At my school we were lucky enough to implement our lessons and actually deliver instruction to real students.  During class the next week, we would relfect and evaluate.  We would ask ourselves, did it work?

There is no doubt that this is the process we should all go through when we are developing units and lessons.  It is the best for learners when we know where we are going, why we are going there, and how we are going to get there.  However, I agree with the WikiBooks article when it said that this method is rarely used in real life.  The lessons we developed in undergrad took hours upon hours to design one 45 minute lesson.  When you are an elementary teacher, teaching five to six different subjects every day, there is simply not enough time to do this with every single lesson we teach.

That being said, I do think I work in a district that has done a lot of that leg work for the classroom teacher.  At the district office, they generally identify the problem and write our objectives.  Because this is the age of standard assessments, the objectives are directly tied to our state standards.  As Gustafson and Branch said, sometimes we are told what the delivery method needs to be and what instructional strategies we are to use. Teachers are the ones that develop the lesson plans, but we have long range plans that help us pace our teaching and really good materials to pull lessons from.  I don't always use what the district gives me, but sometimes it is a mandate to use the provided lessons.  It is always my responsibility to deliver instruction and I do get some room to do what is best for my students.  I always give pretests so I know what instruction is needed and what we can skip.  I find it really hard to find time for the evaluate step, but I want to get better at making time for this.  

After learning more about instructional design, I do think it will help me slow down and intentionally plan lessons.  However, I don't think it is just because teachers come up with lessons "on the fly".  Teachers would love to have the time to go through this process with each lesson, but that is not real life.  I also think there are a lot of outside influences that make it difficult to let teachers teach specifically to their particular students and teach to their needs.