Reviewing Your Instructional Patterns

To transform a lesson into an electronic media form, it is clear that the lesson should be working as smoothly as possible. Having collected one or two of your instructional patterns, some obvious questions might arise: How do you know how effective they are? What distinguishes a productive routine from a sequence of activities that is not likely to produce any real learning? Or, more importantly, what distinguishes either of these from an ordinary kind of pattern that, by and large, works for most people most of the time?

As you first begin to look at the patterns that make up your teaching, it is necessary to determine whether or not these are the right ones for the goals you hope to accomplish -- a question raised last week. It is also necessary to develop a frame of reference for evaluating how well these patterns work.

You can look at your teaching patterns from any of 4 distinct levels. Each uses a different frame, a progressively more complex understanding of teaching and learning. Using any of these levels can lead to pedagogical enhancements that will make your transformed lesson more effective. Your time, pedagogical background, professional needs, and a variety of other factors will influence which level is the right one for you. Below you will find a brief description of each. Consider what is the right approach for you.

Level 1: Something Is Not Working

The most common problem with the sequences teachers follow in their lessons is that they are incomplete fragments of patterns. To be effective, lesson requires additional steps. For example, criticisms aimed at the lecture method might be better understood as critiques of lectures that do not follow all the steps needed to make the lecture a successful learning experience. Forty-five minutes of non-stop talk is hardly a pattern for success. It defies most people's attention span, fails to allow listeners to internalize information, and gives no opportunity to question or explore ideas. In short, it fails because it doesn't follow the right steps for learners not because the lecture is inherently flawed. A teacher who follows all the steps of an effective lecture pattern, however, builds into it moments when listeners can engage in some or all of these cognitive activities.

Lectures are not the only teaching method to suffer this same problem. Often, the reason icebreakers, small group interactions, lab experiences, or other techniques fail is because they have not been designed to follow a plan that assures that all the necessary steps are followed. Important steps for capturing attention, consolidating insights, or reflecting on gains are inadvertently omitted -- or are inserted randomly. As I recently watched a teacher (not on this campus!), he posed a series of questions to his students, hoping to spark a conversation. Faced by lackluster response to his first question, he jumped to the next. In each case, the students used virtually the same series of grunts and mumbled responses they had used to avoid the first question. Without a follow-up strategy that would draw out students' opinions, the pattern of questions and mumbles was repeated as he ran through his list of ten questions. No conversation was ever started. This teacher had successfully planned the first step of ten different conversations, hoping that students would complete the steps to a fully engaged discussion. Had he been able to lead students through these steps, he would have found the engagement he was looking for. Repeating the incomplete pattern, he was left dejected.

For patterns to be complete, they must relate to an overarching purpose. Furthermore, they must include the steps that assure that all the necessary actions take place. A story needs a beginning, middle, and end to keep listeners from becoming confused. A lecture needs a good learning structure; so too does a small group discussion. A successful teacher makes sure that the patterns they use are complete.

If you are not getting the student involvement and success that you want you should try to evaluate your teaching patterns to see if they are adequately addressing all the steps students need to follow in order to master the lesson's goals. Look for the moment where their engagement seems to falter and consider what action might be taken that would help them take the next step.

When deciding what steps might complete a lesson that is not proceeding successfully, you will find it helpful to consider the actual intellectual or social processes you are hoping to accomplish. Leaving your goal as general as "learn this material" does not help you know how to design your teaching patterns. Instead, focus on more discrete actions like: gaining attention, organizing information, analyzing elements of a case, demonstrating, recalling, problem-solving. Each of these can be more appropriately connected to student behaviors. For example, it is obvious that students will need to analyze something if you want them to learn "how." A lecture pattern must therefore incorporate a moment in which students are presented a case and asked to conduct an analysis. Simply listening to the teacher present the conclusions of his or her analysis does not mean that students will do anything to analyze the case.

In the next section, there is a description of more formal models of coherent patterns that may be used as templates against which to gauge your own teaching patterns.

Level 2: Why is This Working?

Why do some patterns work while others don't? The answer usually has to do with what the pattern is designed to do. Just as some narratives are designed to entertain while others confront us with tragedy, so too the purpose behind instructional patterns may vary. We need to understand the functions that patterns perform, if we are to understand how likely they are to accomplish our goal.

There is, for example, a standard social routine that guides most interpersonal encounters, including those in the classroom. It is a five step pattern in which each step performs a special function. Satisfying all five of these functions usually assures that the interaction itself will be satisfying. Step 1 of this pattern is called the "welcome phase." People need to quickly gauge the attitudes of the people they are encountering. Avoiding this social warm up time leaves people wary and tentative. The second step is a "transition phase" whose function is to redirect the other person's attention away from alternative interests or other possible discussions towards the one at hand. Skipped over, the listener may not understand what the main purpose of the encounter is or why it is important to focus on this aspect of the encounter. The third step is called the "work phase," and it is where the central tasks of the encounter are undertaken. Its function is determined by the goal of the meeting. The fourth step is known as the "clearing up phase" because it allows participants to disconnect from the task clearly, noting what has worked and anticipating next steps in accomplishing the goal. Often, when a meeting does not provide this summary, people are uncertain what has been accomplished or what the next steps are. The function of the final step is to make sure each person knows the expectations for the next encounter (see table).

Table : A Common Classroom Pattern

Phases Social Relations Function Problems
Entrance casual talk among small groups around personal topics

 

 

 

 this phase helps individuals build connections excessive time

raise distracting issues

boisterous
Settling Down personal comments quiet with move to common attention. ready materials

 

 

 shift from personal to group; from individual interests to task excessive time

distracting issues

confusion
Work follow assigned activities to accomplish learning goals

 

 use of group to assist individual in gaining & retaining knowledge, attitudes, skills disorganized, confusion

un-engaging

wrong pace

not responsive to group needs
Clearing Up students disengage from group and return to personal relations

 

 

 

 allows individuals to take care of personal responses/needs created by activities; closure can confuse work assignments;

can be reactionary;

inadequate time
Exit return to other personal activities

 

 

 leave relations in a state to be able to return unexpected

cuts off work

This general pattern gives a teacher a template from which to plan a lesson. Where your pattern may inadvertently skip over one of these steps, you might specifically add an activity to assure that each step adequately performs its needed function (a variety of techniques for each of these steps can be provided).

In a similar way, the steps needed during the work phase of an educational encounter need to perform unique learning functions. The effort to internalize knowledge cannot succeed by passive listening. Instead, learners must actively process the words, images, and experiences of a lesson. They must not only hear or see a concept, they must decipher key elements, connect it to prior beliefs, and be able to apply and evaluate their understanding. Good instructional patterns assure that students do some or all of these by organizing the lesson so that deliberate activities require that they actively uses appropriate thinking processes.

The attached files outline a number of instructional patterns that meet a basic standard for active intellectual engagement. Without the need to fully analyze the educative functions in their steps, a teacher can compare their current pattern(s) to these templates to gauge whether or not they have been fully incorporating essential stages in the learning encounter. Using these patterns as guides, teachers can organize their lessons to make sure that students are led through the steps of engaging educational material in a way that is likely to make them process it so that they will learn it.

Level 3: In A Groove

To know about instructional patterns is not, in itself, the final step for using instructional patterns well. Just as musical scores must be interpreted, instructional patterns must be chosen for the audience and adapted with a clear purpose in mind. Selecting and following a pattern's steps, even in a formalistic way, should enhance a lesson. But, without a thoughtful interpretation of how to bring together your carefully scripted steps with the fitful pace of student involvement, the pattern itself can become too rigid to turn the encounter into a rewarding educative relationship.

Accordingly, teachers need a repertoire of strategies for reading and adjusting the rhythm of the pattern. Should you dwell longer at one step or move rapidly on to the next? Have they handled this step well enough or do you need to take the exercise further? Is it time to abandon the original pattern and re-map the activities another way? These are all choices that call on the teacher to go beyond the pattern and view the lesson from a vantage in which the pattern itself is just a piece of the puzzle.

The organizing principle for this meta-view of the lesson must focus on the goals of the lesson. The teacher needs a clear view of what endpoint is intended (and what progress along the way looks like). He or she needs some skill in continually monitoring the improving competencies of the learner. Then, he or she needs a repertoire of strategies for modifying the pattern so that students make progress along the anticipated lines. The Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) described by Angelo and Cross offer a formal method for actively monitoring and responding to the progress of the class. At times, this overarching view may be more intuitive and informal. A teacher must rely on his or her innate sense that things are or are not working and that a certain tone, or emphasis, or some kind of adjustment is in everyone's best interest.

There emerges, then, at this level a capacity to be a manager of patterns, rather than a follower. Patterns become tools to employ in accomplishing a given end. The broader view of the final goals, and the progressive stages of growth and development along the way, become the framework from which patterns take on their utility.

Level 4: A New Composition

There is yet one more stage to reach for the teacher who has become conscious of the patterns that shape his or her teaching. Reaching Level 3, the teacher has the necessary control of the teaching process to be an excellent teacher. He or she can plan and adjust so that instructional patterns are ratcheting people towards valued learning goals. Level 4 involves the teacher's willingness to accept an even greater challenge: to compose patterns themselves.

As mentioned above, the formal instructional patterns that make up the templates for good teachers work because they address the functional learning needs of students. Modifications in response to the situation are also part of good teachers' skill. However, to construct a pattern from scratch or to formalize patterns found unarticulated in current use, requires an additional awareness of the functional needs of learners. It assumes a clear pedagogy, an understanding of learning theory, a sense of cognitive and affective development, and social learning theory (some of the main sources of insight on the needs of learners). Where reliance on existing patterns relieves a teacher of concern for the multiple design elements of an effective educational pattern, a teacher who invents or composes his or her own unique patterns needs to prepare himself or herself to consciously address this range of issues.

Yet, for all this extra demand on a teacher to learn an interdisciplinary mix of educational theories, the master teacher is one who is not only excellent but can craft in new, innovative ways the learning rhythms of the era. This, not entertaining presentation, is the art (the aesthetic) of teaching.

It is in historic junctures, such as we currently face, that the re-invention of learning patterns is most obvious. The patterns common to public schools today, including universities, derive from the bureaucratic consolidation of schools around age-based cohorts relying on standardized (state approved) curriculum. These patterns were, by and large, invented by the early 1900s. By 1946, James Mursell had not only described the new patterns but also illustrated how they failed to address fundamental learning needs, with subsequent high failure rates. His critiques stand, in many instances, as solidly today as half a century ago. Even discounting the effects of incompetent use of conventional patterns, the patterns themselves are flawed enough to inhibit effective learning.

For this reason, the master teacher must be able to take responsibility for the fundamental revision of dysfunctional teaching patterns. He or she must develop the conceptual background to analyze how well existing patterns can accomplish stated goal; he or she must be prepared to critique these patterns, ideally offering more functional ones.

Conclusion

As we examine the instructional patterns that we use in our classes, we must review their effectiveness before translating them into a technological medium. We are challenged to consider just how deeply we want to analyze our teaching habits. At the first level, we can look for ways to polish up our current routines. Level 2 encourages us to draw on formal patterns that meet the functional needs of learners. Level 3 pushes us to reflect on how we implement these patterns effectively. And level 4 demands that we understand the fundamental dynamics that give us the conceptual framework to reinvent our pedagogy. At any level, the insights we bring to our lessons will enhance the design of the final media product. Which level is appropriate for you depends, ultimately, on your professional goals.

As we talk about various aspects of media-transformed courses during the CTA, we will keep the focus on Level 2 so that we can share some useful formal patterns and so that we can illustrate how these can be used to address issues as diverse as assessment, assignments, texts, and social relations.