ADDIE is for Me.

When I look at the ISD model, it just seems to make sense.  When I look at all of my undergrad in education and the readings we have been doing in class I can't help but be overwhelmed with evidence of ISD model.

With five main parts to the ADDIE model, implementation makes up only one part.  I find is key that only one-fifth of the ISD model is actual content delivery.  The majority of time is spent on analyzing, creating, designing, assessing, and evaluating what will be or has been taught, and this makes sense especially in my own classroom.  As a teacher, I have seen the units, where I implemented each piece of the ADDIE model, meet objectives without problem.  I have also seen lessons fail that were mostly implementation and weak in the rest of the rest of the areas of the model.  When I follow ADDIE, I see better results from my teaching.

For the last three years I have been working on and evolving a poetry unit I do with my students.  I have spent months on my own and with with colleagues planning, developing and tweaking this unit.  And each year I continue to improve on it.  Last year I analyzed their final test results and saw that there were some weaknesses in the unit and students did not have enough opportunity to practice identifying some of the elements of poetry.  I went back to those sections and taught them in a different way, created a new assessment and saw huge improvement.  Not only did my students meet the objective I planned, but I still have parents from last year that approach me and thank me for getting their students to love poetry (a desired byproduct).  I strongly rely on academic research to shape my instruction, but it is my own personal success with using the ADDIE model that confirms its validity in my mind. I cannot deny what I have seen with my own students.  

I'll Learn You!

As I think about how people learn, I can't settle on just one or two theories. As I have gone through the readings and thought back to the theories of learning I learned about in college,  I realize that as individuals, we all learn differently.

When it comes to teaching, I am a firm believer that you cannot just settle on one approach to instruction.  With the multiple learning theories out there, there have been thousand of hours of research that have gone into testing these theories.  The fact that many are all still around shows that their are people that respond favorably to each of them.  However, it is my personal experience as an educator that confirms this.  As I went through each theory, I could think back to a numerous students that I saw learn best from each specific theory (or several).  I know that as a teacher, in order to reach as many of my students as I can, I need to design my instruction around the practices from a variety of theories.

When I would teach students with lower ability levels, I saw them find success when I taught with strategies based in Behaviorism.  They needed the constant affirmation and the whole process broken into small attainable tasks.  I think of the used of Study Island in my classroom where students were rewarded with a short game after each correct answer and how many found success in that.  In reference to Cognitivism, I have seen almost all of my students benefit from Dual Coding and Information Processing Theory.  I have also see students have difficulty retaining information when the amount is too great or it is always presented in just one type of media.  I am a huge supporter of Constructivism.  I would teach inquiry-based science, allowing students to come up with questions and create their own experiments to solve them.  I also am really big on letting my students know why they need to learn something.  When instruction is presented in a a real-world context, they can see why.  My knowledge of the Zone of Proximal Development was also utilized as I clustered students together for group work, and I always did my best to allow my lessons to be presented in a variety of ways. 

While I see the benefits of all of the learning theories and I do try my best to take advantage of as many as I can, I find myself leaning mostly towards Constructivism, Social Cognition, and Multiple Intelligences Theory.  I would always allow my students to collaborate in groups, create lessons with real world application, and present information using a variety of media to meet a large number of the intelligences.