Teacher-Designers: How Teachers Use Instructional Design in Real Classrooms

Abstract

If you are a practicing teacher at any level—primary, secondary, or higher education—you already know quite a lot about designing instruction. Your work, prior to teaching a course, includes finding out what your students already know when they walk into the first day of class and determining what knowledge you hope they will gain by the end of the course. You design activities that enhance their new knowledge and allow them to practice with it. You plan tests that help the students demonstrate their newfound understanding. Every time you teach the course, and even at some points during the course, you make changes based on “how things are going” and later on you think about “what happened” throughout the course. The next time you teach the course, it is (hopefully!) much improved. That is, in essence, exactly what instructional design is all about. But instructional design practices proceed from a more formal and systematic way of thinking about the teaching and learning process. Such systematic thinking helps designers focus on each component of the design process that ensures a successful design for learning.