791 Blog #4 - Instructional Design Models, SITE and Designing Action Research
This week was full of studying the instructional design models of David Merrill. Merrill is a down to earth, 80ish year old college professor and he explains the principles of instructional design simply and precisely. There are youtube channels full of interviews of him and it is obvious that people love this guy. His principles make a lot of sense to me and completely connect to what I have experienced in my own classroom with kids and learning. When I think back to my favorite days of teaching and examine the types of activities the lessons included I realized that they were problem based like Merrill prescribes. The more real-world I could make the problem, the more motivated students seemed to become. Merrill’s model starts with a problem. The students need to see examples of how to solve the problem and may need a certain skill set to be taught to them in order to solve the problem. Eventually they will collaborate with other students and share problem solving research, data, and presentations to the rest of the class or another real world audience. While Merrill’s ideas helped me with the bigger plan for learning in my classroom, Clarke’s ideas get down to the nuts and bolts of how to use e-learning to effectively teach vocabulary, facts, processes, procedures, and principles. I would use Clarke’s ideas to teach some of the skills, vocabulary, and processes that problem solving in science would require. My research question revolves around using a homeroom model to increase connections between students and teachers to create a mentoring relationship, with peer mentoring and self evaluation and reflection being a part of the model. My school has used a teaming structure to accomplish a lot of this over the years, but I am interested in trying something new to see if we can get better results. Our teams were so large, 150ish kids and 4 teachers, that we never were able to create a true connection between a smaller group of students and teachers, which I think is really a necessity for the years when kids are “caught in the middle”. A lot of the SITE model information will guide my research. I am trying to create and influence sociocultural subcontext that will support students and allow them to experience success in middle school. The technical subcontext will allow them to access the information they need to be successful academically and also will be how we collect data. I am hoping that a few new technical tools will help to lighten the load of mentoring for teachers. If we can use technology, especially video based technology, to connect and conference with kids and to connect them to other people that are in the community that can support them in their life goals, then the mentoring model would be sustainable.
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AuthorHello! Welcome to my blog! This will be a fun place to share thoughts about teaching and learning. I am a middle school science teacher at Redwood. When I'm not teaching, I'm hanging out at home with my family or enjoying nature somewhere in the valley. Archives
March 2021
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