On Friday June 17, I conducted a 2-hour master class on the intro to Instruction Design at (the) Alexander Pushkin public library in Minsk, Belarus. More than thirty secondary school teachers of foreign languages came to the event. My personal aim was to introduce the concept to the Belarusian audience. In the first part of the master class, I explained the term “instructional design” and its correlation to the Russian equivalent “pedagogicheskiy dizayn” (literally “pedagogical design”), what specifically we mean when we sat “instruction” and “design.” I proposed explicitly a definition of instructional design and an instructional designer, since it is a total terra incognita for educators in Belarus. Also, I briefly outlined the history of I.D. starting from the 1940s and till the early 2000s, summarizing mostly a well-known Reiser’s article (Reiser, R. A. (2001). A history of instructional design and technology: Part II: A history of instructional design. Educational Technology Research and Development, 49(2), 57-67). To describe the process of instructional design, I demonstrated two visuals of the ADDIE model—one example of more than 100 models that we know and/or use in I.D. currently. Finally, I prompted them to think about what learning is and what we know about learning, which, of course, most people identified as a process of acquiring knowledge and skills. So I alluded briefly at the three major theories of learning that inform the field of I.D.
In the second part of the master class, I highlighted that instructional designers are not teachers, since the former design instructional materials using the I.D. process while the latter arrange the environment which facilitates learning. However, a lot of teachers often do some instructional design work without calling it instructional design. To illustrate it and to improve their intuitive work, we practiced writing student learning outcomes as defined by R. Mager (+ using Bloom’s taxonomy) and saw how to improve a typical lesson plan by implementing Gagne’s Nine Events theory. The frame for the master class was a scenario in which in a fictional school the average students’ grade dropped by 15% in the third quarter of the school year. During the master class, I referred to the scenario to exemplify how each piece of the information that they heard can be put into practice from the I.D. perspective.
The Q&A session took 15 minutes. The two most challenging questions was this one: How is I.D. different from methodology experts and why instructional designers are different from teachers? Here, I realize now, there were attitudinal and traditionalist aspects, because the former USSR trained professionals in the methodology of teaching any school subjects (methodology of teaching French, methodology of teaching physics, maths, chemistry, etc.). First, obviously, I.D.s do not tell anyone how to teach and how to manage a classroom—something teachers do constantly. Second, methodology has a good deal of ideology, one example being that the Soviet mandatory component was always “character building,” that is, rearing well-behaved, meek, and patriotic citizens. This “rearing” element is lacking in I.D., to my mind, for good reasons. For instance, in Belarus we still have subjects such as Industrial Arts in schools where boys are taught to use a saw while girls are taught to sew and cook, whereas either a boy or a girl has a capacity to look for children or build airplanes. And I.D. gives more freedom in that sense to design less ideological instruction. Alas, this answer did not satisfy the person who asked the question about the difference between methodology experts and I.D.s. I will have to think of more arguments in the future.
Overall, 8 people came to me after the event and thanked personally, asking to share any material I had on me (e.g., e-textbooks, lesson plan templates, presentation). I did not do a formal evaluation part of the master class by reaching out to those who came to the event. The person who helped me organize talked to a lot of guests after the event to know what they thought of it. Half of the audience remained skeptical about the idea of an I.D., but I still consider it success. Now the presentation is available online in Russian for anyone who speaks the language.
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