Contexts in IDT

Supporting Instructional Design from the Bottom Up

As I read through the chapters for this week, I began to see how we use instructional design in K-12 education as a tool to prepare students to be lifelong learners in each of the future career fields described in the text. The three contexts I chose to evaluate were ones I had personal connections to or experience in, which included business and industry, healthcare education and post-secondary education.

Business and Industry

Education in business and industry immediately caught my attention as a recent initiative in our district involves improving our district’s customer service practices. Our former superintendent who was only with us for a short few years, started this movement by relating our district to a business who delivers a service to customers; students and parents. While this model didn’t seem to be well received in the beginning, I can see some correlations between customer service expectations in business and industry and in elementary and secondary education. In any business, including the business of education, customers often have similar expectations for service including a personalized experience, options, frequent communication, and to be heard as well as responded to appropriately and promptly. Parents, easily expect each of these things as “customers” we serve in elementary education, my current industry. In addition, while students may not expect these behaviors from their experience, there certainly is current research to support the benefits of providing them in instructional design. In order to design individualized experiences that offer an authentic context “to support learning by doing” as mentioned in the text, we must in some ways view students as our customers or clients (Reiser and Dempsey, 2012). Instructional designers in business and industry serve in various roles including that of a sole designer, team member, or external designer/consultant (Reiser and Dempsey, 2012). K-12 education utilizes each of these practices as well in employing teachers as instructional designers, developing design teams including curriculum specialist teams at the administrative level as in my district, and even seeking outside instructional design through consulting services. I would say K-12 education differs in that those assigned to design instruction are almost always content specialists regardless of the instructional designer role they are in, whereas in business and industry, the subject matter expert usually is an internal designer or team member. Overall, while I don’t particularly like calling my work a “business,” I do feel there are many similarities between how we design instructional training opportunities for both teachers who deliver the service and our student/parent customers receiving instruction as a service.

Healthcare Education

As I read through this chapter, I could see how Healthcare Education has set the standard for instructional design and learning methodologies. Just as those employed in the healthcare industry need hands-on experience and interpersonal skills, our students need these skills as twenty-first-century learners who will be tasked with critical thinking and problem solving in future careers as identified by “The Partnership for 21st Century Skills” (Reiser and Dempsey, 2012). In addition, Healthcare education has high stakes that influence the necessity of quality instructional design. While the health care field is very broad and includes many entities other than medicine practice, it is highly important to invest in resources that will provide a high level of training and education as well as the continuous need for the evaluation of these practices in relation to scientific discoveries. Healthcare expertise is a matter of practice that improves with experience in problem solving scenarios much like the problem based learning methods we find to be so engaging and successful in the elementary classroom. I was surprised that K-12 instructional design considerations mirror those of health care education so closely.

 

Post-Secondary Education

In my current experiences as a post-secondary student, I have found the curriculum design in this context to be challenging, engaging and motivating. While post-secondary education may not be as broad a context as healthcare, I still find that it covers a wide range of experiences, sub contexts and subject matter, which influence the design of instruction. However, the demands on instructional designers in this field seem to have some common features including the ability to “revise, create, and innovate,” adapt to changes with each new semester and group of students, set aside time for research, and “develop a good rapport with faculty” (Reiser and Dempsey, 2012). I face similar challenges in the elementary education world such as the stamina to keep up to date on changing curricula, state expectations, available resources, innovative teaching methods and new technology. The traditional expectations of creating learning experiences and material, while also maintaining the knowledge to serve as a subject matter expert have continue to exist while teachers are also expected to reflect, evaluate, revise and innovate in today’s classrooms all to prepare students for jobs that may not even exist yet. Just as the expectations for post-secondary instructional designers are changing, the pressure on elementary and secondary educators to prepare students for both post-secondary education and a future career is steadily increasing.

Equipping Students with Instructional Design

Overall, I found the skills necessary for IDT in all sectors to include a vast amount of considerations and constraints that seem to continuously evolve as our economy and educational philosophies change. As an elementary educator, I find this to be somewhat stressful as the challenges in each field trickle down to my level of instructional design.

I picture my role as taking on a bottom up approach in trying to equip my students with the thinking processes and problem-solving skills they will need versus filling them with content they may or may not use. A few twenty-first-century skills mentioned in the text that I find crucial for our students are developing a global awareness of the effects their actions have on society; critical, creative, and innovative thinking skills; the ability to seek information from accurate sources and use it for the benefit of solving problems in an ethical manner, collaborative and cooperative teamwork practices, and other life skills including understanding the attributes of an effective leader, adaptability and flexible thinking. In addition to these skills, I have recently found lessons in failure to be invaluable to students who will face problems associated with living in a world that cannot be sustained by current resources. Introducing students to failure at a young age will encourage them to develop a sense of grit as they work to solve problems that seem impossible. While this may seem like a long list of “perfect world” desires, these attributes will encourage students to become productive, contributing members of our future society. Therefore, instructional design at the elementary level should include a variety of opportunities that focus on building these skills in students while still incorporating the content expected by the state. This will be a daunting task, and while our countries methods for educating children have often been criticized, I do think we are headed in the right direction; slowly but surely developing well rounded citizens who are capable of much more than simply scoring well on tests.

Reiser, R. A., & Dempsey, J. V. (2012). Trends and issues in instructional design and technology. Boston: Pearson Education.