Blog #3

Instructional Design is more defined and rigorous than I remember. It might be because of the way that I got my teaching certificate that I did not get into anything near what this course has me think about. I earned my bachelors degree expecting to go to Law School. I graduated in December and only one school admitted for spring at that time. I was too late to apply for admission and ended up taking another path after college. That path had me the end of working in retail management with students between 17 and 21 in a retail clothing store. I enjoyed working with these students so much, I soon started helping a friend with little league baseball for middle school students. That got me really into working with students and back to school to get my teacher’s certification.
I was only a part-time student as I completed my required courses so maybe I missed the design courses offered. I do know that I really like looking at the design process as I dig deep into what it really means to design things for instructions. Before, I would think about my lessons but not as critically as I am for this course. It would have been nice to have done this before as I was writing curriculum for the two courses that I was teaching a few years ago at a middle school in East Texas. This level of critical thinking about why you do what you do and beginning with the end in mind really helps to design lessons that are effective and meaningful.
I prefer to have students make choices about how they want to show their learning during a class and this has really made me think about how they can make those choices in specific ways to show their learning. It allows me to design lessons where they do the heavy lifting and I just guide them to their discoveries. Next school year, I have been challenged by my administration staff at the high school where I work to attend more planning meetings and help push the teachers to use technology more. Right now, we are using technology more at a substitution level, tech is a direct substitute for analog learning. We want to do more activities in lessons that allow students to do things they could not without the technology in their classrooms. They want the teachers to allow the students to share in their learning instead of just sitting there and taking notes in a Google Doc. Instructional design will allow me to help those teachers design good lessons that are challenging and push the technology used to allow students to rethink problems that exist and find new answers they could not before. This is not for every stage in a lesson but can be done to help make the challenges of the lesson more rigorous than before.
Instructional design has challenged my thinking. I have had to approach problems from a different angle. It is an angle that I have not really approached from before. This allows me to shift my perspective to something new adding a new tool to my teacher toolkit. It is a skill that I can now use to help frame the work I do for my school. It gives me a specific structure to help make lessons that are impactful to student learning. This is especially important for me because I am a technology support for teachers in their classes. With the amount of technology we have, 3200+ Chromebooks, we have an important tool that needs to be used to maximize student development. This skill will help teachers see me as more than a technology teacher but now a teacher that uses good instructional design to create good challenging lessons. This key is something that I have been looking for the previous 2 years I have been in this position.
I can also use the key components in this course to help my student group. They design professional development for teachers. I can have them really think about the professional development they want to deliver and how it needs to be set up to make sure it hits the target. They created some pretty good activities and lessons last year but with some of the key aspects of instructional design, they could make even more impactful presentations. This will help them challenge themselves to become more critical thinkers and be more deliberate in the actions they take in developing training. This critical thinking is a great skill for them to leave high school with having developed in this different way.