The instructional process comprises three basic steps. The first is planning instruction, which includes identifying specific expectations or learning outcomes, selecting materials to foster these expectations or outcomes, and organizing learning experiences into a coherent, reinforcing sequence. The second step involves delivering the planned instruction to students, that is, teaching them. The third step involves assessing how well students learn or achieve the expectations or outcomes. Notice that to carry out the instructional process the three steps should be aligned with one another. That is, the planned instruction should be logically related to the actual instruction and the assessments should relate to the plans and instruction.
The three steps and the relationships among them are interrelated in a more complicated way than a simple one-two-three sequence. For example, in planning instruction (step 1), the teacher considers the characteristics of students and the resources and materials available to help attain desired changes (step 2). Similarly, the information gained at the time of student assessment (step 3) is useful in assessing the appropriateness of the learning experiences provided students (step 2) and the suitability of intended expectations or learning outcomes (step 1). Thus, the three steps are interdependent pieces in the instructional process that can be aligned in different orders.
All three steps in the instructional process involve teacher decision making and assessment. Obviously step 3, assessing expectations or learning outcomes, involves the collection and synthesis of formal information about how well students are learning or have learned. But the other two steps in the instructional process are also dependent upon a teacher’s assessment activities. For example, a teacher’s planning decisions incorporate information about student readiness, appropriate methods, available instructional resources, materials, student culture, language, and other important characteristics obtained from diagnostic assessments.
Similarly, during instruction the teacher employs formative assessment to obtain information to help make decisions about lesson pace, reinforcement, interest, and comprehension. Remember that formative assessment includes observations and feedback intended to alter and improve students’ learning while instruction is taking place. Thus, the entire instructional process, not just the formal assessment step, depends upon decisions that rely on assessment evidence of various kinds.
The processes of planning and providing instruction are important activities for classroom teachers. Not only do they occupy a substantial amount of their time, but teachers define their teaching rewards in terms of their
students’ instructional successes. Teachers like to work with students, make a difference in their lives, and experience the joy of a student “getting it.” Teachers feel rewarded when they know that their instruction has
reached their students. Since the classroom is where pride in teaching is forged, it is not surprising to find that teachers guard their classroom instructional time jealously. They want few interruptions to distract them from teaching their students.
The true rewards of teaching are identified in terms of the impact that the teachers’ instruction and mentoring has upon students. Pride in teaching does not come from collecting lunch money, planning field trips, meeting
the morning bus, and the thousand other semi-administrative tasks teachers perform. It comes from teachers’ knowledge that they have taught students to do, think, or perform some things they otherwise would have been unable to do, think, or perform.
Teachers plan in order to modify the curriculum to fit the unique characteristics of their students and resources. To plan, teachers reflect on and integrate information about their students, the subject matter to be taught, the curriculum they are following, their own teaching experience, the resources available for instruction, the classroom environment, and other factors. Their reflection and integration of these factors leads to an instructional lesson plan. The plan helps teachers allocate instructional time, select appropriate activities, link individual lessons to the overall unit or curriculum, sequence activities to be presented to students, set the pace of instruction, select the homework to be assigned, and identify techniques to assess student learning.
Planning helps teachers in five basic ways:
1. By helping them feel comfortable about instruction and giving them a sense of understanding and ownership over the teaching they plan.
2. By establishing a sense of purpose and subject matter focus.
3. By affording the chance to review and become familiar with the subject matter before actually beginning to teach it.
4. By ensuring that there are ways in place to get instruction started, activities to pursue, and a framework to follow during the actual delivery of instruction.
5. By linking daily lessons to broader integrative goals, units, or curriculum topics.
Classrooms are complex environments that are informal rather than formal, ad hoc rather than linear, ambiguous rather than certain, process oriented rather than product-oriented, and people-dominated rather than concept-dominated. The realities and strains of the classroom call for order and direction, especially when teachers are carrying out formal instruction. In such a world, some form of planning and organization is needed. Planning instruction is a context-dependent activity that includes consideration of students, teacher, and instructional materials. A lesson that fails to take into account the needs and prior knowledge of the students or that poorly matches lesson aims to lesson instruction is doomed to failure.
Similarly, a lesson that does not take into account the context in which it will be taught can also lead to difficulty. Teachers have a great deal of control over many classroom features associated with instructional planning. For example, most teachers have control over the physical arrangement of the classroom, the rules and routines students must follow, the interactions with students, the kind of instruction planned and the nature of its delivery, and the methods used to assess and grade students. However, there are important features that teachers do not control. For example, most teachers have little control over the number and characteristics of the students in their classes, the size of their classroom, the quality of their instructional resources, and the Ministry/Department curriculum guidelines. In planning, teachers must arrange the factors they do control to compensate for the factors they do not.
Imagine that these classrooms are at the same grade level. Suppose the teachers are each planning a lesson on the same topic. Teachers normally would have little control over these characteristics of their classrooms. How might these different classroom characteristics influence the ways these two teachers plan instruction? What features are especially influential in determining teaching plans? Which characteristics would be advantageous to a teacher and which ones might be disadvantageous? Do you think the teachers would construct identical instructional plans? In what ways might they differ? Initial and extremely important considerations when planning instruction are the present status and needs of the students. What are they developmentally ready to learn? What topics have they mastered thus far in the subject area? How complex are the instructional materials they can handle? How well do they work in groups? What exceptionalities do they have and how are they accommodated? What is the range of students’ culture and language in a given classroom? What are their learning styles? The answers to these questions provide needed and valuable information about what and how to teach. Note that teachers obtain much of the information to answer these questions from their diagnostic assessments.
