Designing Instruction

Background

Whether you are creating your own curriculum, adapting a pre-existing curriculum, or directly following an existing curriculum, you still have to do some design. For example, you will need to decide which learning activities/assignments students should do and decide how to assess student learning and assign grades. This unit addresses key ideas of instructional design.

As most of you know, I was an education major as an undergraduate [Math and science education. I spent four years as a middle school teacher.] I suspect that I had coursework in the College of Education and in my discipline specific Methods classes that talked about how to design instruction. But if I am very honest with you, I don't remember any of that. I mean, I clearly made it through four years of teaching middle school and 20+ years of teaching college computer science so I must have learned SOMETHING. But I don't remember what I was formally taught. As a young teacher much of my instructional design was designing lessons and several weeks later scrambling to write a test about what I had been teaching for the last few weeks. If I am honest, it wasn't always as organized or as effective as it could/should have been.

And from a lot of my experiences talking with in-service teachers I think that they often feel this same way.

It wasn't until about 2017 when we started designing the CSEd program at UNI that I really started to THINK about what it means to DESIGN Instruction. In the process I did some reading that absolutely revolutionized how I think about teaching and learning and the importance of designing from the big picture down to the small details rather than the other way around. In developing this unit, this course, heck, even this whole five course curriculum program, we have used two texts:

I STRONGLY encourage you to track those books down at some point and read them at your leisure.  But you need not read them for this course. I will provide you with links to the key ideas to get you started.

 

Readings

In this set of readings I want you to read about the educational design framework known as "Understanding by Design" as described by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe.

 

 

Write