Instruction

For decades, arguments between the behaviorist and constructivist camps have dominated the conversation over the design of the best ways to teach and to learn. With the advent of high stakes testing and the emergence of learning management systems, many teachers gravitate toward behaviorist approaches to prepare students for the tests. Some current efforts are relaxing the amount of testing that must be used as a way to introduce more flexibility into the national role in education.

If a behaviorist/direct teaching approach is the common instructional design being used in the school, then the library learning commons initiatives are severely curtailed. This happens because the learning management system often controls the exact content to be learned, the learning assignments to be given, the rubrics to be used, and the assessments to be administered. In this case, a LLC initiative is often viewed as interrupting instructional time or as an add-on that has no bearing on how students score on the test.

There are many recommended models for designing learning experiences in the literature and around which books, articles, webinars, professional development workshops, and even national conferences are constructed. Here are a few of them that should be a part of the repertoire of the professional staff of the LLC. The reader should recognize similarities in a number of the ideas.

One major caution about any of the major instructional design models is that there is the underlying theoretical construct of the idea, but when applied in the field, a number of various flavors of that model emerge. For example, Lary Cuban (1) looked at the translation of “Personalized Learning” in theory or so schools and found a wide variety of interpretations. Each flavor and its emphasis will affect how much impact the professional staff of the LLC can have on that type of instructional design. Being “at the table” as a particular model that, when applied in a school or district, will provide an opportunity to exert leadership on the LLC role and how evidence of impact will be determined.

The Power of Coteaching

With almost all models mentioned above, if students are going to be free to go out into the world of information, use a variety of technologies, and have some opportunity of choice, the most powerful role any of the professional staff of the LLC can expect is to coteach a learning experience alongside a classroom teacher. It is the power of "two heads are better than one." True coteaching ask both asks the adult partners to plan, assess, and teach a learning experience together.

While coteaching is a tough challenge for both the faculty member and the LLC professional-staff member, the result is so powerful that the added effort on both partners far outweighs the extra bit of time involved. The proof of this claim comes when you as the reader builds a series of cotaught teacher experiences across the school year with will members of the faculty. And, just ask the students whether they remember such experiences and what they learned as a result. The increase in content knowledge and the requisite increased learning skills will speak for themselves. And, if documented over time will speak for the indispensability of the professional LLC staff and for the hiring of teachers who are flexible enough to embrace coteaching as a regular diet across the school year.

No matter what type of instructional design is done or proposed in a school, the professional staff of the LLC are advised to construct a Knowledge Building Center (KBC) where both adult mentors and the students can work together on a learning experience whether in the LLC, the classroom, or at home. A template guide for building such a learning environment is at: https://sites.google.com/s/1lepBYO0p2bMVzKq5XzMsutLihXIQIL18/p/1O84EsjtL9dE9SCOAIQNo2ZuYzmlWblVG/edit

Two tutorials of appropriate instructional designs for coteach are:

• The Umbrella Question Model at: https://sites.google.com/view/kbcumbrellaquestion/tutorial
• The Umbrella Creation Model at: https://sites.google.com/view/umbrellacreation/home

When robust collaborative online learning environments are not available, such as in the Google Classroom or Schoology, or Canvas, a simple url to such a KBC can be inserted for students to link to from any device.

Finally, while the idea of instructional design presumes that adults are in charge of what and how learning will happen, the students themselves need to be able to teach each other and become mentors to others around them. Oral presentations are just one aspect of each student learning how to teach, share, mentor, and help a fellow student or group of students along the path of learning. During a learning experience, the adults might constantly encourage students to collaborate and help each other. Particularly, the stages of creating, building, and designing will benefit from more than one mind. A steady diet of competition is antithetical to problem solving and design thinking.