The Reflection. Would This Thing Even Work?

Decisions Made

The first decision I made about this project, and calling it an active decision feels disingenuous, was the notion of accepting an ambiguous outcome. In my day job I like to create assignments that can generate unexpected results, so after finding some research articles on tolerating ambiguity it was cemented in my mind that setting learners off on a journey with a loosely defined map is the way I want to approach the experiences I design. The way I approach the solution to my problem statement later will reflect this.

The next decision I made, and the first concrete one, was to limit the survey to a specific population. I wanted high school in order to keep the subjects a little closer to what I'm comfortable with, but then I let the data tell me who the biggest group of high school teachers was in our bubble. English stood out as one of the bigger discernable groups, so at that point I locked myself to a specific content area. Later I'd quit worrying about English teachers specifically, but the idea of focusing on the content areas was something that would stick.

During the ideation party my okay idea was to connect teachers with professionals who specialized in careers that deal heavily with their content areas and see what technology the professionals regularly utilized. It got good feedback so I doubled down on it in my prototypes.

What did and did not work?

During my very first attempt at connecting teachers to content-specific tools I was still looking at English specifically. I quickly realized a few things.

I can look at the English standards and try to find tools that address them, but I may not be getting the nuance of those standards or even interpreting them correctly.
English teachers may already know many of the tools I'd find within the first fifteen minutes of using Google.
Specific technologies and websites can very quickly become outdated.

I'm not an English content master, why would I plan specifically for them without even consulting one? The timeless and cost-effective solution could just be enabling content-masters to vet the technologies they come across, and maybe forcing them to come across a few.

The biggest thing that I'm not sure works is my final prototype. It could work and result in a transformative technology being applied in education. I think it's more likely though that we find many of the professional technologies to be too jargoned and high-level for application in a high school setting. Some advanced tools may be suited for trade-programs or courses with an emphasis on coding, but not necessarily the core content areas. That said, I think that having voices in education talking to the representatives of these technologies could spur education-centric solutions down the line, and maybe that is worth something.

Was That so Hard? Yes and No.

I think the hardest part for me is that I regularly equated evaluation and solution. I want to apply a very simple yes/no check to whether the problem has been solved, and creating grey space where I can gauge the success of a solution can be difficult. Similarly, a learning objective looks a lot like a solution to me. We should arrive at both in the same instant.

(But really I think this particular paragraph has been the hardest part.)

ADDIE Model, that now makes no sense here after all the revisions to my "hardest part" paragraph.

The 5-Whys analysis during the problem statement reframing on the other hand was soothing. Using maps like that helps keep me from branching into too many directions too quickly.

How I'll approach Instructional Design in the Future.

I like that my solution doesn't end concretely with teachers having a specific technology that I handed them and trained them on. That said, it is tempting to try and create a design solution that evaluates a bit more cleanly, something that involves a path that ends with near-certain success provided the learners genuine participation.

Key Takeaways

First and foremost I enjoy the ADDIE model visualization and will be taking it with me.

It's been interesting to compare the instructional design process with what I had learned about design previously. At this point I think that design is just a universal life-tool. My art classes this year are framed that way. It's a pretty widely adopted pedagogy known as TAB (Teaching Artistic Behaviors,) but what it really boils down to is asking students to think about how artists go about creating the things they do and getting them to emulate those design processes.

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