What Decisions Drive Instructional Development?

Video Transcription

Hello, and thank you for joining me for What Decisions Drive Instructional Development. By the end of today's tutorial, we will have answered the following essential question. How can I engage in reflection on my instructional design?

We're going to try to answer this question by looking at Marzano. In 2007, he published The Art and Science of Teaching where he indicated 10 instructional design decisions. Teachers should use these decisions as a guide for their reflection when they're designing units of instruction. We're going to look closely at each question. And we're going to start with questions 1 through 3.

The first question is what will I do to establish and communicate learning goals, track student progress, and celebrate successes? So how am I logging what students are learning and who is advanced and who needs a little bit of extra help? Will I use programs that automatically calculate this data for me? Will I do it myself using Excel?

How am I tracking their progress? Am I tracking it? And how will I celebrate success? Will I do things like give them badges, recognize their hard work by putting their end result on an example wall? What am I doing to recognize the students?

Question 2 is what will I do to help students effectively interact with new knowledge? How am I making sure students get the new knowledge? One way a lot of teachers do is make connections for students with knowledge that they've previously learned. And what will I do to help students practice and deepen their understanding of new knowledge? This could be as simple as assigning meaningful homework.

Question 4 says, what will I do to help students generate and test hypotheses about new knowledge? Well, obviously, this is going to start with teaching them the scientific process in the first place and encouraging constant questioning and inquiry.

What will I do to engage students? How will I keep them engaged? One way to do this would be differentiate. Find out what the student's interests are maybe by doing an interest survey or multiple intelligences surveys and base lessons off of that.

Number 6 is what will I do to establish or maintain classroom rules and procedures? The answer to this could be as simple as reviewing them at the beginning of each semester and having them posted on the walls and constantly going over them when students are accidentally not following them. So that's establishing, but how do you maintain?

You maintain with constant reminders and with positive recognition and reinforcement for students who do follow the rules, which leads us to question 7-- what will I do to recognize and acknowledge adherence and lack of adherence in the classroom?

Well, adherence is you give them positive reinforcement. And lack of adherence could be a consequence, or perhaps you just remind them of the rule. I know a lot of elementary school teachers have positive reinforcement token systems. And when a student gets a certain number of tokens, they get to choose a prize. If they're caught not adhering to the classroom rules, they simply don't get a token. So it's not a punishment. It's positive reinforcement.

Question 8 is what will I do to establish and maintain effective relationships with students? This is all about having rapport and getting to know your students and knowing what their home lives are like. It's knowing their interests, what they do outside of school, and playing to that.

And what will I do to communicate high expectations for all students? I think you communicate high expectations for all students by setting your expectations in advance, being crystal clear about what they are, and giving the students copies of rubrics, checklists, or whatever you might be using to assess them.

And what will I do to develop effective lessons organized into a cohesive unit? I think the obvious answer for this is use understanding by design. Figure out what you want them to know by the end of the unit and how you're going to assess that. Then come up with the smaller units that will lead to the larger cohesive unit.

Let's reflect. If you were to use Marzano's 10 questions to evaluate the last unit you designed, what would you find?

Today, we answered how can I engage in reflection on my instructional design? To dive a little deeper and learn how to apply this information, be sure to check out the additional resources section associated with this video. This is where you'll find links targeted towards helping you discover more ways to apply this course material. Thank you for joining me and happy teaching.