Friday, December 5, 2014

Tangents - Rationalization of Instructional Pieces

While working on a research paper about a design-based professional development (PD) initiative a few tangential thoughts have crossed my mind.  Here's the fist.

Alignement/Rationalization of Instructional Pieces

The first was reasonably germane to PD: is effective teaching usually due to alignment/rationalization of various nested instructional pieces? In other words, does having an aligned/rationalized

  1. educational philosophy, 
  2. delivery method, 
  3. instructional process (i.e. assessment, classroom management, mastery expectation, expected student effort, etc.) and,
  4. instructional strategy
correlate with effective practice (as either measured by students or teachers)?

My suspicion is that it certainly does.  The small sample qualitative research I've been doing suggests that instructional process is extremely tacit and opaque.  It also suggests that not many teachers conceive of adjusting, let-a-lone actually adjust, delivery methods.  The Carnegie unit and "bums-in-seats" mentality are robust.  Educational philosophy is generally pretty easy to probe and easy for teachers to describe practically.  Instructional strategies are highly contextualized by experienced teachers.  Changes in instructional strategy really only happen when they align with educational philosophies.  After all, education is loosely coupled, and even the most firmly managed instructional strategy changes quickly become hybridized.

No comments:

Post a Comment