Unraveling Good Instructional Design: Planning my First Professional Development

Despite being a teacher for 12 years, instructional design is still something I haven’t given much thought. I’ve never volunteered to teach professional developments or implement training, but it has always been a goal of mine to present at art education conferences. Taking time now to start diving into the guiding steps and strategies for creating effective instructional design will benefit how I teach students and adults and help me reach that goal. 

I was unfamiliar with the instructional design process before I began this journey. The ADDIE approach for example is something I had never heard of. ADDIE stands for: Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate. According to the ADDIE process, you first need to determine who your target audience is, what needs to be covered in your training, and the best way to deliver that information. As with any educational experience “reflecting” is key to growth, so evaluation is the final step. There are a number of instructional design models out there and the majority of them are based on these ADDIE steps. (Brown & Green, 2020). 

To thoroughly practice the instructional design process for the first time, I designed a professional development for other art teachers in my school district. In their book The Essentials of Instructional Design, Brown and Green say that “before the instructional goal(s) can be developed, the need or problem that is to be addressed must be identified through a needs assessment and analysis process” (2020, p. 57). I was fortunate that the analysis portion of my planning was relatively simple. Prior to creating my presentation, I thought about who my audience would be and what I could teach that they wouldn’t already know. After some reflection, I decided to focus my training on the use of augmented reality in the art classroom. My next step was to conduct a task analysis which helped me create the best possible learning experience for the instruction I was planning. According to Brown and Green, “the result of a learning task analysis is a listing of the goals that describe what learners should know or be able to accomplish at the end of instruction” (2020, p. 72). In their book, Brown and Green describe a variety of approaches to task analysis and they say that all of the approaches “share the common goal of gathering information about the content and/or task that will make up the instruction” (2020, p.73).

Next, I moved into the designing and developing phases. According to Nada Alsaleh, in the design phase, you focus on “the educational aims, the sequence of learning, the educational strategies, the instructional technology and the assessment tools” (2020, p. 753). At this point, I started creating resources for my training. I have always loved designing aesthetically pleasing learning materials such as presentations, flyers, handouts, visual displays, and more. I have embedded the visual resources I created for my training below. If you are interested in how professional artists are using AR in the art world, check out some of the videos in my professional development presentation. If you are interested in creating your own animations, gifs, or AR experiences, explore the videos in my Wakelet collection, my AR lesson, and the handouts below.

I had a lot of fun designing the presentations, handouts and Wakelet collection above; however, my favorite part of planning this instruction was creating a ThingLink. ThingLink is an excellent online resource I recently learned about from a colleague. Thinglink allows you to design interactive and shareable infographics and there are a variety of ways to use this resource with students and adults. Instructional designers can create ThingLinks for training participants, teachers can create them for students, students can create them to organize digital content, and the list goes on. The ThingLink I designed for this AR training can be found below.

Since I’ve never taught adults before, I have been feeling anxious about delivering this training; but now that I’ve had so much fun creating it, I’m actually starting to look forward to the experience. As a teacher, I find that oftentimes I do things quickly because there is never enough time to fit everything in. While designing this training, I appreciated the ability to take things slow and think about every aspect of the instructional design process. Nada Alsaleh published an article where she discusses the effectiveness of the ADDIE model on teachers' ability to solve problems in education (2020). In her conclusion, she states that “coaching teachers on ADDIE skills could enhance their skills and especially their skills in solving educational problems. Practicing ADDIE skills provides teachers with systemic thinking that helps them deal with educational issues in systematic ways” (2020, p. 762). After completing the planning and creation of my training, I would agree that taking my time and going through the appropriate steps helped me design a more comprehensive training with content applicable to participants’ individual needs. I was able to think about what I will say to participants, what questions they might have, what resources or materials they will need, and how I can best engage them. Having the opportunity to spend multiple days on the design of this training helped me plan, what I believe, will be a much more thorough instructional presentation. I am still a little concerned about whether all the participants will be able to fully engage and grasp the content. However, when the training is over, I plan to complete a full evaluation of my instruction and determine what changes need to be made in the future. Below you can see an example of what I will be teaching during my training.

References

Alsaleh, N. (2020). The effectiveness of an instructional design training program to enhance teachers’ perceived skills in solving educational problems. Educational Research and Reviews, 15(12), 751–763. https://ezproxy.montevallo.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ1280098&site=ehost-live

Brown, A., & Green, T. (2020). The essentials of instructional design: connecting fundamental principles with process and practice. Routledge.