No More Bad Coffee--Successful Instructional Design

                                               

Creating a conducive and engaging professional development for adults is very similar to creating a great lesson for students. Designing good instruction takes planning and backwards design. You always plan with the end in mind. Many of my colleagues have expressed that they have been in professional developments that have either been boring or not relatable. According to Ritzhaupt et al.,  (2020),  ¨An instructional designer is a professional that focuses on the analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation of instruction in a wide-variety of settings ranging from military to healthcare to higher education to K-12 environments.”  Creating my very own training using the ADDIE Model was a real eye opener about what design really is. According to Simonson et. al., (2019) adequate teacher training is imperative to know if you are ready to start a distance learning program. Imagine starting a distance learning program with unequipped teachers. If the teachers are confused and organized it will cause students to be unengaged and unmotivated!

So, what exactly is good instructional design? Good instructional design starts with the ADDIE model. I had heard of it before, but just recently, I've actually had the opportunity to dive in! I am going to analyze and reflect upon each part of the ADDIE model below.

Analyze- During this part of the design process I gathered information about my audience. I found out how I needed to differentiate my instructional design based on the needs of my learners. Pretest, surveys and personality tests are done in this part of the model.

Design/Development- This is where I actually started finding tools and resources based on what I found out during the analyzing process. I also spoke with my administrators after creating the objective and agenda just to be sure that what I was training the math teachers on matched their vision. My primary presentation tool was through Nearpod.  Nearpod has the seven widely shared features of effective professional development as mentioned by Darling-Hammond, Hyler, & Gardner (2017). The seven features are: content focused, supports collaboration, use models of effective practice, provides expert support, offers feedback and reflection, and is of sustained duration. The Infographic was used in my design phase for learners to have a reference tool.

Implementation- I will implement my design next Fall, but I look forward to the interactive presentation. I will evaluate throughout the process using formative assessments embedded in the Nearpod presentation.

Evaluation- Evaluation helps us to determine whether our instructional implementation was effective in meeting our goals (Ritzhaupt et al.,  2020). Formative assessments are done throughout my training, but the Summative Assessment is done during the learners Flipgrid activity. Learners will share three new ways they will implement the tools introduced in their classroom. I will also create Hyperdocs for the teachers to put evidence of their implementation as they use them.

If I would go back and change anything about my design it would be how I give the pre-surveys. These surveys should be complete BEFORE the training not just at the beginning. My reasoning of this is that I should know my audience before I actually start designing, not while implementing the design. The video below explains how to use the ADDIE model for good design.

Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M., & Gardner, M. (2017). Effective Teacher Professional Development. Learning Policy Institute.

Ritzhaupt et al.,  (2020). ADDIE Explained. Wordpress. Retrieved from http://www.aritzhaupt.com/addie_explained/

Simonson, M. R., Smaldino, S. E., & Zvacek, S. (2019). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.