Instructional Design

A teacher has a lot of roles namely being a listener, a helper, a coach, a psychologist and an evaluator. These roles varies at varying times and in differing degrees. 

The role of lesson designer or lesson planner is a more important role that is often done at home or the teachers' room. Planning a lesson needs clear  thinking about learners, objectives, and how to bridge the gap between the material I want to present and how to most clearly convey that material so that learners will acquire it. Asking other teachers can be a source of inspiration.

Robert Gagne created a rather systematic approach to instruction. Gagne declared nine learning steps within his system. In a real learning environment, a teacher might skip one of these nine events entirely, put them in a different order, or even repeat an event multiple times in a single lesson. Gagne's design considers the fact that learners are active, and do not receive information passively. The design also consider ways to stimualate students. 

Presenting the Information:

The first three steps are often associated with the lesson's introduction. When presenting material, gain the attention and interest of the audience. Inform students of the objectives and stimulate recall of prior learning. Students who are given clear objectives and who understand those objectives are better language learners. Stimulating background knowledge can assist teachers. Gagne's first three events of instruction are gaining students' attention, expressing clear objectives and stimulating the recall of prior learning. While these three events can happen at anytime of the lesson they are often presented at the beginning of a lesson plan.

Present the Content, Provide Learner Guidance, and Elicit Performance, or Practice
The next three events from Gagne's nine instructional events are presenting the content, providing learner guidance, and eliciting performance, or practice. Presenting the content refers to the idea of demonstrating, sharing, speaking, and presenting, carefully constructing a lesson by explicitly giving information that will help learners understand material. Here is where a teacher would do a lot of teacher talk, explaining, breaking down, scaffolding Put in mind that the teacher should not present for the entire class period and remember the 80 / 20 rule in which the teacher presents 20 percent of the time while the students practice 80 percent. As for providing learner guidance the teacher provides assistance as learners attempt to recall, use, or apply the information, think and examine critically. Students should be given time to play with language, make mistakes, figure out how certain rules work and and interact with each other in order to acquire and practice using the language.  Interaction patterns plays a definite role in helping them acquire the language  and working  in pairs or in groups make them better at acquiring and using the language. Performance stage can be a test, a presentation, a group activity, a question and answer session. To make the idea clearer: First, the teacher is  in charge of the information. Then, the  students and the teacher play with the information. Finally, the students use the language  alone. 


Provide Feedback, Assess Performance, Enhance Retention and Transfer
The last stages are related to feedback which should be constructive, enhancing retention and transfer through extra practice. 


Gagne's nine events of instruction are:

• Gaining attention
• Informing students of objectives
• Stimulating prior recall of instruction
• Presenting the content
•  providing learner guidance
•  and eliciting performance
• Provide feedback
• Assess performance
• Enhance retention and transfer  

 
 
Donclark: Learning Nine Steps