Helping teachers design effective instruction

How to help teachers design effective instruction?

First, what counts as effective instruction? Instruction that more often than not helps students attain intended goals. So there should be both before and after measures pertaining to those goals if one intends to claim that instruction has been effective.

Second, there are general strategies that seem to work for many students at the lesson level. For example, there are Bob Gagné’s (1985) nine events of instruction:

1.     Gain and maintain attention

2.     Inform learners of goals and objectives

3.     Stimulate recall of prior learning

4.     Present the content

5.     Provide learning guidance and ongoing support

6.     Elicit performance and provide opportunities for practice

7.     Provide timely and informative feedback

8.     Assess performance along the way

9.     Enhance retention and transfer to other problems and situations

There are also Dave Merrill’s (2002; 2013) first principles of instruction:

• Learning is promoted when learners are engaged in solving real-world problems.
• Learning is promoted when existing knowledge is activated as a foundation for new knowledge.
• Learning is promoted when new knowledge is demonstrated to the learner.
• Learning is promoted when new knowledge is applied by the learner.
• Learning is promoted when new knowledge is integrated into the learner’s world.

Merrill’s principles easily map onto Gagné’s events and might be stated in terms of telling, asking, showing and doing. Merrill argues that too little emphasis occurs on showing and doing in many cases, which amounts to under-emphasizing events 5 through 9.

Gagné also characterized instruction as having three main phases – a set-up phase (events 1-3), a primary presentation phase (event 4), and a resolution phase (events 5-9). All too often instructional designers focus on event 4 and conduct a breakdown of the content into discrete things to be learned. Gagné and Merrill (1990) collaborated on exactly one paper in which they argue that what people do is to engage in enterprises which involve many different kinds of things (e.g., concepts, principles, problems, objects, etc.) – that is to say that what needs to be learned is an enterprise (as in the effective application of knowledge to solve problems and perform tasks). Given that perspective, the set-up phase is important, especially with regard to motivation and establishing a meaningful context, and the resolution phase is especially important so as to ensure that what is learned can be effectively applied later.

Tools to help? The mind is an important tool – especially the learner’s mind. Activate a mind, help a mind visualize a problem, get the mind engaged, and good things are likely to happen. That is my simple-minded instructional design advice.

The teacher’s job is not to tell students what to think. The teacher’s job is to help students learn HOW to think. Getting students to have questions, to visualize problems, to devote time and energy to refine visualizations and find possible answers, to question assumptions, to consider alternatives, and to reflect on the process is the teacher’s job. Is it not?