Module 4 – Reflection

In this module I was tasked with understanding instructional design concepts such as constructive alignment and backwards design for lesson planning. I was also tasked with learning about active and passive learning, and reflecting on how lesson planning combined with active and passive learning and Miller’s concepts creates a landscape indicative to learning for students.

Instructional Design and Active Learning

Constructive Alignment and Backwards design struck a chord with me, they seemed like obvious concepts that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t had the forethought to use while creating the learning objective based lesson plans I had in the past. Not once have I thought to work backwards to ensure my learning activities worked towards my curriculum goals, but knowing what I know now I’ll be utilizing backwards design and constructive alignment far more often during future lesson planning.  For now however, I can only reflect on my past teaching experiences and evaluate where I did and didn’t go wrong without the use of backwards design. 

During my stint as a junior museum camp educator I found myself attempting to work towards many learning outcomes for the children I looked after, like learning about mining techniques, minerals and our general town history. I have felt the frustration of having taught information to kids and performed gamified quizzing based on my assigned learning objectives only to have them not understand what I had taught them, or forget the information entirely. I have fallen into having the kids create decorations and crafts after failed attempts at motivating them to learn, which I realized at the time isn’t indicative of learning or moving myself or them towards my objectives. Where I had some success was during the hands-on exercises we had at the museum, such as taking the children into the mine shafts and telling them stories about how minors would send in canaries, teaching them to gold pan and showing them the rare minerals which exist in the mountainside. All these activities seemed to create more buzz amongst the kids as well as lasting impacts on their knowledge, as opposed to the silence I would receive asking a question after a lecture about mining. Had I maybe worked backward from my desired learning outcomes, maybe I would have had the ability to balance the fun of active learning with passive learning to generate the most value for the kids while also hitting my learning targets. 

Given what I know now about backwards design and constructive alignment, I have attempted to create a lesson plan about the topic of growth mindsets: 

My experience with Active and Passive Learning 

For the whole of my highschool experience and nearly all of my university schooling I have been presented with the same passive content the writer of “To learn students need to do something”’s children were presented with, presentation slides, and the occasional offhand comments to write down key points made by educators. I have rarely experienced professors who allow for discussions and the utilization of students for demonstrative purposes. Although, I will note that in my experience, university professors are better at incorporating novelty in their movements during lectures than my highschool teachers (though this may have been due to space limitations). 

In the few university classes where I have had professors who have utilized a balanced amount of active learning and passive learning I have found that my engagement with the material increased, I made better connections to the topics, and my recollection of information increased. I recall a professor who would break up their flow after key points had been addressed during lecture, and would allow for students to talk amongst themselves for 5 minutes before posing a question and waiting another 5 minutes for us to deliberate on the topic. The class this  professor taught also happened to have the highest level of engagement I have seen from students during my time in university. Conversely, another professor I have had worked solely off of passive learning, they would read a slide deck for an hour and a half and then pose questions to the class at the end. This professor had very little class engagement, which it appeared she took to heart as the semester passed. Her questions began to come across as hostile as people would be disengaged and wouldn’t answer. Ultimately many people stopped attending that class, myself included. 

There is definitely a balance between active and passive learning, finding the right amount of core information to passively give students as well as allowing them time to disseminate the information and create connections is a skill teachers need for their students to flourish. After this unit, I’ve noticed that without fail, all of my favorite professors the past 4 years have managed to balance passive and active learning, and those I didn’t enjoy learning from relied solely on passive learning strategies. The concept of passive and active learning has been affecting me positively and negatively for years without my knowledge. Now I know these concepts, hopefully I can use them to my advantage during my time both as a student and as an educator. 

Active Learning and Multimedia

I decided for my active learning multimedia project that I would take my previous powerpoint and add review questions throughout, to test the viewers understanding of concepts as the video played. I tried to avoid simple yes or no questions, and attempted to get the viewer to engage with the material in order to know the answers to the questions, hopefully I was able to successfully do just that. 

I’m hoping that the inclusion of these review questions will allow viewers the time to create connections about the topic in their heads and apply the ideas to real life situations. I’m also hoping the questions allowed learners to draw comparisons to other forms of etiquette, like that which is performed in person. 

Principles of instruction

As someone not in the field of education, I had never heard of Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction. Though, while I was reading through the content in this module  I realized that once again the professors whom I have enjoyed learning from the most during my time in university consistently built their lesson plans off of the principles. One such professor I had for a class about algorithms started by teaching us the basic terminology for algorithmic structures, then she assigned us work creating and labeling an algorithm used for an automatic door, she then used class time to demonstrate common algorithms like the one we had made. We were forced to use our knowledge of the real world (how does an automatic door work algorithmically?)  and make connections to the terminology through our assigned work. She reiterated what we had learnt the following week in class by giving us more real life examples, time for discussions between topics, and demonstrations using student participants. Even though I took this class over a year ago I can still remember core concepts. 

Knowing what I know now about instructional design and active learning I will be altering how I design and think about my teaching processes in order to create better learning opportunities for my students and meet my goals as an educator.