6 Characteristics of Instructional Design

It has been a long time since I developed a lesson for the K-12 environment and almost as long since I received a lesson in any kind of formal manner, so in order to relate a personal learning experience to the 6 characeristics of instructional design, I am going to use an example of a recent Bible study lesson that I presented to my 5th and 6th graders at church.

The last lesson that I presented was on the topic of The Value of People of Other Beliefs.  The lesson was developed along the lines presented in a provided leader guide, but was redesigned to include more in depth scripture basis and to attempt to "meet the students where they are".

After having worked with this particular group of students for a couple of years, we have developed a general sense of where they are with their spiritual walk, what types of issues they tend to be confronted with, and how they tend to respond to different types of lessons.  The goal of the lesson was to demonstrate through scripture the value that Christ placed on all people and to foster the practice of the same values in the students.  The instructional design was, as is typical for us, a conversational interactive group discussion including specific scripture reading, sharing of personal experiences, drawing comparisons between the students' values and behaviors and those of Christ, and open discussion of issues which appear as distractions or road blocks to adopting and exhibiting the same values and behaviors as Christ when dealing with other people.

So, we have a student centered design: the design takes into account the student's historical desire to interact rather than be lectured to and the students will through this design be expected to participate actively to experience a successful lesson.

We also have a goal oriented design: there are expectations of the students' behavior and attitudes upon completion of the lesson.

We have an instructional design which focuses on a meaningful performance:  the discussions concerning adopting and exhibiting the desired new values and behaviours relate to real world scenarios and the "test" of the success of the lesson is the authentic performance of each of the student in their real and individually unique environments.

The lesson also presents outcomes which can be measured; the question here is whether or not the outcomes can be measured with reliability and validity. The behaviors and attitudes which are we desire to see as a result of the lesson can be observed and measured if we were to go about doing so, and they would be observed in the real world around the students so the data would be valid.  Data reliability in this case would probably not be very high as the performance of the new "skills" are going to be inconsistent by nature (the explanation for this would take us into the nature of sin and that is a topic which most academic ID scenarios do not have to take into account).

What this lesson does not have is: empirical, iterative, and self-correcting qualities and team effort.  To include team effort would have certainly made sense as 3 other leaders were present in the room during the lesson, performed supporting roles during the lesson, and brought unique and poignant views and information to the lesson which added significant value to the meaning of the lesson for the students.  In retrospect, I would have attempted to sit down with these other leaders to develop this lesson in a cooperative manner to allow the supporting activities (praise and worship music, prayer and praise time activities) to be designed not as stand alone processes but to be designed to redirect focus to the topic of the lesson.  This type of team work is possibly a little more difficult to achieve, however, when you are talking about leaders who do not see each other except for twice a week versus an every day interaction which would be expected in a typically school\educational setting.

As far as the empirical, iterative, and self-correcting attributes of the design, it would obviously be a great idea to develop a data collection tool to administer the week prior to such a lesson to gather data about students' understandings concerning Christ driven attitudes and the reasoning behind such attitudes as well as an inventory to identify how students currently respond to and think about people of different faiths prior to the lesson.  Not only would this step be reasonable, but would actually be very easy to incorporate into the design process.  Additionally, formative assessments could be conducted to inform the leaders that re-teach or additional instruction conecering the topic is needed.