Theresa

Dawson
Reflection paper

Completing the UW Stout class Trends and Issues in Instructional Design was
immediately useful to me in that it scheduled tasks each week that led to the creation of
a final instructional design project. This enabled me to have a trial experience of what it
would be like to have to create a final project that fully explores each aspect of the
design process. It was also valuable in the longer term in the sense of explaining
concepts in instructional design and helping me to make decisions about the most
appropriate model or theory to use in real life projects. I am already making connections
to a brand new project that has come on since I started this course. I can why it is so
important to have this class as a pre-requisite to the other courses -on assessment and
on designing computer instruction for example because it seems that to decide on the
most appropriate assessment or learning materials you first need to ask more searching
questions about the nature of the learner and what problem you are trying to solve
through instruction. This course provided a useful starting point for understanding these
questions.

I found that the front-end analysis was one of the most useful activities that we
undertook as part of the final project. In my current job as a curriculum designer I find I
am usually presented with a task to design X program of learning with X outcomes and
almost immediately begin designing activities, material and assessment rubrics tied to
what I am presented with. It was refreshing to take a step back and first of all consider
whether there was a need for instruction. I used a mixture of methods to do this:
existing large scale external research identifying the need, employee growth and
strategic development of the organizations existing training. I feel that this is a vital
step in the process of designing instruction, yet so often forgotten. If this were a day to
day practice at every educational provider I feel there would be far more ordered set of
instructional programs, rather than the situation that most educational providers find
themselves in: offering a grab bag of programs, some of great value and much aligned to
the mission of which seem out of step with the orgs mission some where it unclear
what had led to their development.

I also found that completing the learner characteristics and considering the needs of
culturally diverse learners a new experience. I found that reading about Bradford (1999)
and Tharps (1998) standards for teaching culturally diverse learners including engaging
in joint projects related to the real world and supporting students to perform
increasingly difficult tasks were things I did naturally, but I hadnt considered modifying
my language prompts so as to be simpler/clearer or indeed having students take a lead
in talking each other through their projects as a way to engage culturally diverse
learners. I have subsequently given much more time for students to talk through their
processes with other learners in order to support this standard.

The activity that I enjoyed the most was comparing instructional design models. The
model I had most wanted to get to grips with was the ADDIE model. It was the one most
referred to in job postings yet I had never studied it formally. In my current job I employ
a systematic approach to developing curriculum which I can best describe as backwards
design see McTighe and Wiggins Understanding By Design(1998) -a planning process
and structure to guide curriculum, assessment, and instruction. This learning theory
focuses teaching and assessing for understanding and learning transfer, and designing
the curriculum backward from those ends. What immediately struck me when
researching ADDIE was the argument presented by Morrison, Ross, Kalman and Kemp
that the term the ADDIE model is merely a colloquial label for a systematic approach to
instructional development. This made me feel that ADDIE wasnt some new approach
that I had to learn, but in fact an approach not too dissimilar to the one I had been
employing. This made me feel so much more confident in my abilities and helped me to
see that switching over from being a curriculum designer to an instructional designer
might not be such a leap.

The activity I had chosen for my final project involved learners being able to select and
use a microphone so as to capture audio within a certain range and with few technical
problems. Here there was most definitely a right answer that I would want learners to
arrive at! I found that considering the learner characteristics actually enabled me to
arrive at a best fit learning theory actually the one I used in my project that of
androgy. The learning theory I chose for my final project built on the assessment of my
learner characteristics. Knowles theory of angrogy builds on the characteristics of adult
learners e.g. that they often favor task-oriented instruction that is slanted toward
being immediately useful to their job. This learning theory also allows room for
differentiated learning so that a student who has less experience with the subject
matter, and a student who has more experience can be accommodated in the same
program.

Going through the process of designing a program of instruction in this systematic way
was eye opening for me, particularly as I have been designing curriculum for 15 years
and I guess I tend to have my fall back theories or go-to methods. However, I realized
that I can improve my design process by stopping to ask questions. The biggest change
for me is asking who is my learner and am I designing my instruction to meet their needs
rather than starting with the objectives, which is where I have traditionally started.

Although completing the final project was a large part of this course, additionally the
course also called on me as a learner to reflect on this new field that I was considering
entering and to deepen the work I was already doing or planned to be doing in the
future. As timing would have it I had the opportunity to apply what I was reading about
almost immediately to a real life project that was presented to me a few weeks into the
course.

The project that presented itself was to be the curriculum lead for a project involving
the National Endowment for the Humanities , Brooklyn Historical Society, and a group of
teachers at turnaround schools in 3 geographical location in Tri-State area to inspire
middle school students to learn the history of the civil rights movement, understand the
power of people and the media to advance social change, and share their own story
about racial justice through the creation of multimedia arts projects. Where I would
normally start with a project like this is to say what are the learning standards (my
organizations learning outcomes, common core outcomes and social studies outcomes
and lets design backward, thinking about how the students might be able to
demonstrate the learning outcomes

This time armed with the work Id done for this class I was able to ask whats the
problem and is instruction the appropriate solution? From these discussions with
project partners it became apparent that the problem was that teachers dont feel
equipped to teach the civil rights era and connect it to racial justice battles going on in
the present day in a way that might engage middle school students. The learner
characteristic hasnt quite been clarified as I write, but I am intending to use this as the
basis for determining the learning theory I eventually use.

The research I enjoyed most was comparing learning theories. Before I started this class
I assumed that I would use a problem based learning approach as this is often a go-to
when you are teaching practical hands-on collaborative classes. However, on completing
the research I found that problem based learning was best suited to open ended no
right answer type scenarios. What I realized is that while this is suitable for creative
projects where there is no right answer, some instructional programs require a right
answer or at least a task performed to certain standards. In my project for this class
selecting the correct microphone and recording audio to an agreed standard, project
based learning might not have been the most apt learning theory. In a broader sense
this has taught me that there is no right theory that is right in all circumstances, just
different theories that suit different types of outcomes.

Surprisingly, given that I have been dealing with learning outcomes for many years, one
part of the process that I fund particularly challenging was writing terminal and enabling
objectives. I have been used to writing only terminal objectives and found it difficult
classifying terminal objectives as cognitive, psychomotor etc and then further using
Blooms taxonomy are you asking learners to demonstrate grasp of a fact, application
etc for the enabling objectives. A question I had as I was going through this process is
how do you hold all of this in balance at once? I guess increased practice at writing
terminal and enabling objectives will help me with this.

As I go forward into the other classes in the certificate program I do so with the
experience of having gone through a mock version of writing a final project. This was
taxing but absolutely pegged to learning the subjects we were engaging with
theoretically each week. Moreover, I have gained much greater understanding of the

purpose of a front end analysis as a means to guide the learning theory, objectives and
learning materials and assessment tools that I had previously jumped into and I am
already seeing the impact of taking this prior step backward in the systematic approach.
I am also looking forward to building on what we have covered in this class when we
focus more on assessment and designing learning objects in the next modules. In short
Trends and Issues in Instructional Design has been a solid foundational course that will
hopefully underpin my learning across the rest of the UW Stout Instructional Design
Certificate program.