Whew! Just the thought of juggling all of those proverbial "balls" is giving me a headache! As a 34 year veteran of the Long Island, NY middle school classroom, I know just what teachers are feeling right about now all over the country and I don't envy them!
I "retired" in 2005 and in my "unretirement", co-founded an e-learning business called Moodlerooms. We offer training, hosting, support and customization on the open source Moodle platform (Learning Management System). If you want to instruct others in an online course in k-12, higher ed, corporate training, government,faith based or small business, Moodlerooms is the vehicle.
Instruction..., that's been my raison d'etre for so many years, I can't abandon it it now in my un-retirement. Veteran teachers, never die , they multiply! I just read a recent article in the eSchool News, "Let retiring Boomers transform schools", which made the case for not letting a significant knowledge base walk into the sunset with their considerable skills unavailable to new teachers and their former students.
So how do we tap into this gigantic pool? How can they help our newly hired teachers?How can we use this pool of talent to retain and sustain new teachers as they hone their skills in America's classrooms? This article, though focused on the STEM areas, does emphasize 21st century skills of collaboration in the classroom; students and teachers learning from each other.
This collaboration could begin with the most basic of tenets in the classroom; that of instructional design. ID or instructional design is normally not a familiar term in schools of education or in school settings. Teachers are more familiar with terms like:
- lesson plans
- objectives
- aims
- curriculum mapping
- observations
- NCLB
- AYP
- Analyze
- Design
- Development
- Implementation
- Evaluation
In a f2f classroom or an online learning environment, the greatest objective or outcome of instructional design is to serve the learning needs and success of students through the effective presentation of content and the fostering of interaction among the course or classroom participants.
In an online environment instructional design is transparent. You can monitor and track competencies. You can "see" the interaction of participants. In a regular brick and mortar classroom, instructional design is not transparent or may not be there at all. The class participation or collaboration is not seen, outside of the view of the instructor.
Objectives, aims, curriculum mapping, standards,ayp, NCLB or other educational jargon rule the day in regular f2f classrooms. There may not be one design platform used to achieve specific learning outcomes in the f2f classroom in a specific school. Teachers are given guidelines, state standards and information to use to achieve their learning goals for the year. There may not be a trackable system in place in a brick and mortar school to monitor the achievement of these targeted goals for each teacher in that school.
Why am I writing about this now, at this juncture of my life? Good question and one that I'll continue ruminating about in this blog, the UnRetired Teacher.
