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Acronyms for Instructional Design
by Elizabeth Helfant

While the work required is significant, the complete overhaul of our curriculum provides a wonderful opportunity to intentionally design the curriculum using the acronyms that support contemporary instructional design. Those acronyms are TPACK, UbD, and DI.

Each year we are required to write a spring reflection on the progress we made towards our personal goals. One of my goals was to help make us more intentional in designing curriculum and to better understand the models that the institution was using. That reflection had me dealing in a wealth of acronyms but also demonstrated to me that we have made progress synthesizing educational material and have begun to use it intentionally as we design curriculum for use in a 1:1 environment.

The TPACK model is the overarching model for thinking about curriculum design in a 1:1 environment.

This model emphasizes and equates using content, pedagogy, and technology knowledge to support learning. In an oversimplification, the goal is to teach in the overlapping sweet spot that is the intersection of all types of knowledge. Living in that cross section requires a great understanding of all three areas.

In the content area, most of us excel based on the degrees we received in that area. However, if I am not engaged in the current developments and the ongoing knowedge that is being created in my content area, if I have created a file cabinet of activitites that I simply return to each year because TTWWADI (That's The Way We've Always Done It) 

What we know about virtually everything is increasing rapidly and engaging with developing content is the only way to keep the content realm viable. New developments frequently provide us with hooks to connect our students’ world to the content that we are passionate about. The current erupting of the Icelandic volcano and the disruption to world travel could offer a current knowledge hook for many disciplines. It could serve as a writing prompt in a history class asking students to identify other natural events that disrupted civilization in a specified region or time period. It could be the point of entry to a calculus lesson on rates of change or minimums and maximums that asked students to examine wind and temperature fluctuations that would minimize or maximize the days that air traffic would be impacted. It could certainly be used to launch scientific inquiry into environmental impact. Ideally, it promotes a trans-diciplinary discussion across all areas and leads to the development of greater systems thinking skills in students. Regardless, content is an important area but it is not static and learners readily realize this to be true. Unfortunately, there exists a subset of teachers who would argue the converse.

Pedagogy, the area concerned with best practice and teaching strategies, is an area that should be deeply impacted by emerging  mind, brain and education research.  My recent reading of Tracy Hokuhama-Espinosa’s The New Science of Teaching and Learning and Washburn’s Architecture of Learning have convinced me more than ever that metacognitive activities that develop  a common vocabulary and allow for student reflection of learning are extremely important. Equally important is the need for intentional well scaffolded differentiation. Differentiation mandates formative assessment practices that are rich in feedback. It requires a variety of strategies and ongoing assessments to really identify what a student understands. Without question, traditional summative assessment fails to accurately reflect what students understand. That means a pedagogically sound approach would include a variety of assessments. Designing around what we know is certainly helped by the UbD with DI approach in which the articulation of essential questions is of utmost importance to the development of instruction. Only after those are articulated can the best method of assessment be determined and only then can the learning plan be determined, a plan that will be flexible enough to change as formative assessment dictates.  The stoplight template for design is often helpful as it reminds us not to differentiate the essentials, to cautiously differentiate the assessments, and to go crazy with the learning plan.

All of the pedagogical structures can be enhanced with the thoughtful addition of technology.

Using technology in way that enhances both content and pedagogical knowledge requires an excellent understanding of technology.  It’s important to know the tools that are available but to recognize their constantly evolving, coming into being, and fading from use. Our document of available tools and their hierarchy changes weekly to reflect what is in use and what teachers should be aware of and its quite a robust listing. This week saw the emerging uncertainty of Ning. Knowing the available tool requires being a learner and investing some time in learning about technology either in an online community or in a face to face group. Using technology wisely requires not only knowing the tools available but understanding them, the learning process and the content objectives well enough to be able to properly implement the tools such that they are not an obstacle to learning; so that the learning isn’t about learning technology and the content/skills objectives but about deeping the learning of the content/skills by empowering the learner with the proper tools and environment. Its hard to live in the sweet spot.

As we move ever closer to next year and the demise of semesters in favor of trimesters in an effort to allow more student choice and more differentiation of student learning plans to better match student interest and learning profiles, the need to use everything we have learned about learning to develop instruction has become evident. The need to develop alternative assessments and move away form exams has us experimenting in several core areas this year. Ninth grade biology will have a final research/experiment project in lieu of an exam. US History will have a final museum exhibit project. World History will have a research and writing portfolio. Global Issues will develop community awareness digital documents that will be assessed by a panel that will include a librarian, an instructional technologist, a history teacher, a peer, an administrator, and themselves. All of these are using a wide range of tools and activities. They are using technology to help differentiate the instruction and the products and to communicate feedback during the continuum of the learning process.  While the units aren’t finished, it might be worth looking at them as they occur. Any feedback you have, could help us revise our strategy. You’d be formatively assessing us for the benefit of our kids.

Biology – An Example of Portfolio Assessment

As the ninth grade year comes to an end, the biology team needed something to determine if students had mastered the essential questions and enduring understandings, if they had obtained the skillset that the course was designed to impart. It was determined that a traditional multiple choice/short answer test was not the ideal assessment tool. It was decided that students would individuall research a topic, design an experiment, collect and analyze data, and communicate their ideas and solutions in a creative way to a wider audience than just their class. This would give teachers an opportunity to assess 5 key learning areas for the 9^th grade year- research, presentation, writing, data manipulation and critical analysis, and creative communication of ideas. Its not a radical shift at face value, but when you really look at it, there is very little that is tied to assessment of direct contact. The final assessment is linked to the ability to use skills that have developed to learn something new. The concluding writing prompt will tie to content skills and key vocabulary and concepts should certainly be an essential part of the final submission. However, its vastly different from a multiple choice exam session. Another stark difference will be the use of continuous feedback during the course of the project. Each component of the project will be submitted via an assessment portfolio and students will receive feedback and have opportunities to revise their work. Students will also be required to critique their own project and discuss their learning as the project develops.

History – An Example of Technology Enhanced Differentiation

Ninth grade world history decided to apply the concepts of TPACK, UbD, and DI, and Brain Research in the  design of their final unit. The unit is a 14 day look at imperialism in the World from 1800-1918, far too much material in far to little time. The starting point was the first step of UbD design, determine the essential questions and enduring understandings. Our questions centered on understanding the motivating forces behind imperialism as well as the perspectives of both sides and evaluating the ethical implications associated with the practice. Staying true to what was essential allowed us to provide options for students and to differentiate for student interest and ability. As we developed the learning plan, we followed the WHERETO (what, hook, equip, rethink, evaluate, tailor, organize) model from UbD. The WHERETO model made us more intentional about properly scaffolding the various components of the student work. Student-centric doesn’t mean it occurs without teacher guidance. We selected 3 sets of primary source documents and political cartoons that varied in difficulty and organized a jigsaw group assignment with graphic organizers to facilitate the discussion and ensure that students covered what was essential. We will use Diigo to help annotate documents where we thought we were pushing student’s out of their zone of proximal development. We added a google earth tour that would provide some baseline knowledge for all the students. We will use DyKnow during the group discussions to have student throw key ideas into a backchannel chat and to record group comments on dyknow panels that we will collect. We will divide students into research groups based on ability and interest to research different activities using wikiguides and  livebinders. Students will use shared OneNote research notebooks to document their research and to allow teachers to provide feedback throughout the process. Students will be required to create a 20 minute presentation using presentation skills they have been working on all year. They can use prezi, powerpoint, or a wiki backdrop with multimedia to share. They must use images to author a one page comic life overview of the content they are responsible for sharing as well. When students are presenting, their classmates will all be assigned the role of a country and will need to fill out a “Risk” game card on strength, style, and strategy points. After all presentation, students will play a game of risk using what they have learned on a map on the smartboard. Their final assessment activity will be to review some current event multimedia clips and to argue whether they are examples ofcontemporary  imperialistic behavior or not.

Planning was a group event and division of labor made the project fairly easy to assemble. We are looking forward to starting it next week.

Global Issues – An Example of Importance of and Assessment by Audience

Global Issues is a semester elective for juniors and seniors who have been creating a wikitext on various issues across the planet. They have essential questions centered on understanding complex relationships and dependencies on one person’s/country’s actions on global well being.  As they have worked this semester, they have also uncovered a number of interesting issues that they want to delve more deeply into. For the final project, they will be allowed to do that. They will research an issue of interest to them and will be required to decide a format for communicating the issue to the entire MICDS community in order to raise the community’s awareness of the issue. They can do brochures, posters, or video service announcements. Their research will be documented using zotero and the final projects will be displayed throughout school during the exam period. Their final grade will be determined by a panel of assessors. The students are keenly aware of the extended audience for their projects. The ability to choose a topic of interest and the product format should allow students with much needed flexibility so they can be creative in the manner is which they communicate their message.  To develop this assessment properly, we used the GRASP component of UbD.

By focusing on GRASP, we developed the audience concept more completely and decided the products could all be different.

The goal is to archive the projects in a 3D gallery in our local installation of opensim.

There is nothing really new here. The TPACK model is the newest idea. This is really just an evolution of learning. The ease with which these units were designed and the way they naturally included technology was merely a sign of growth. Perhaps 10 years into the 21^st century, we are finally getting on board with contemporary learning, which, I believe, includes some things that span across many centuries so I’d prefer not to date us at all. I think we’re striving to make learning relevant, purposeful, and intrinsically motivated. I think we’re trying to make learning timeless and perpetual. To that end, if we need another acronym, how about one for LEARN-

Linked(to mind, brain, education research and theories)

Engaging

Anytime/anywhere

Relevant/Rigorous/Realtionship-oriented

Neverending

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Helfant is the Upper School Coordinator of Instructional Technology at Mary Institute Country Day School, a JK-12 institution embarking on a 1:1 adventure. using Tablet PCs and DyKnow.