Instructional Design and Teaching Styles

Delegator Approach

Overview

This approach to curriculum planning focuses on personal growth. The instructor believes that it is not sufficient to teach only content, procedures, or skills. Rather, the purpose of education is to enhance the holistic development of the individual through knowledge, practice, and skills. This approach takes shape when the instructor chooses a model of human growth. This model usually describes a vision of human potential and some ideas about factors that inhibit its development. The instructor must assess the current beliefs and abilities of students and arrange experiences that allow them to become more fully human through the use of disciplinary knowledge and skills. Inevitably, the design of the activity is crucial to achieving the goal. Students are evaluated by their growth during the course. This is usually evident in their personal reflections, their projects, or action projects they undertake. This approach is most closely linked to Sections IV and VI of Angelo and Cross's inventory.

Goals

The goals of the delegator are to enhance individual growth but what that means depends on the model which he/she adopts. Effective teachers do not rely on a generic sense that people are "better off' because of the course. Instead, they articulate a vision, or even key indicators, of a successful person. Alverno College, for instance, lists eight qualities they feel their graduates should have (communication, analysis, problem solving, valuing in decision-making, social interaction, taking global perspectives, effective citizenship, and aesthetic responsiveness). Paulo Freire offers a description of a "critically conscious" person as the goal of all education.

In many instances, the steps to developing a whole person are part of the vision. These provide the smaller goals around which to organize units and lessons. Alverno College has a special study unit on social skills. Paulo Freire claimed that there were four levels to becoming a fully conscious citizen. The instructor must assess which level the students are living when they enter the course and plan ways to bring them to the next. Patient acceptance of learners' experiences and beliefs as well as their personal paths of growth is a necessary supplement to the actual definition of the goals.

Lesson Plans

For delegators, the medium is the message. The relationship between the teacher, the subject matter, and learners is the central point of academic work. People must act socially appropriate in order to learn social skills; therefore, the lessons must be designed to model these relationships. The learners relationship to disciplinary material must also be modeled in the lesson. If it is presented in an authoritarian way, the teacher would not expect students to understand how to feel empowered around scholarship. If teacher's answers are always presented, then students can not be expected to be active investigators.

Thus, lessons must be dynamically scripted -- often with teachers planning how to start the conversation and how to help students work their way through the learning processes effectively. For John Dewey this became a problem-solving process where the teacher provides a challenge or puzzle that can't be solved without recourse to the course material. Paulo Freire calls his method problem-posing; in it he presents an example of an issue and helps students learn how to use the discipline to complete their analyses. The instructor must have a keen sense of students' responses and an ability to connect their efforts to a more effective intellectual and social processes in order to move the Learners along the path of growth.

Evaluation

If there is any summative evaluation of the student or the program it is through a process of self- reflection and improvement. Action oriented initiatives, successful completion of problems or projects give some indication of the individual's growth. The delegators also feels that the student's self-assessment of their own learning and growth is just as important. Both of these need to be measured in terms of real world competence.

By contrast, the formative role of self-assessment is a fundamental part of the learning and growing process. Delegators build reflection into activities as a normal part of the work people do. These reflections are not meant to focus on weaknesses but develop a confident ability to understand and work with both weaknesses and strength, providing the ideal curriculum guide -a personal development plan.

Some Useful Sources

Mary Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, and Jill Tarule (1986). Women's Ways of Knowing. NY: Basic Books

Stephen Brookfield (1995). Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. SF: Jossey-Bass.

John Dewey (1906). School and Society . NY. Harper (there is a recent re-publication)

Peter Frederick (1991). "The Medicine Wheel" To Improve the Academy v. 10 pp. 197-213.

Paulo Freire (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. NY: Seabury

bell hooks (1994). Teaching to Transgress. NY: Routledge.

Judeen Schulte and Georine Loacker (1994). "Alverno College," Assessing General Outcomes for the Individual Student. Milwaukee, WI: Alverno College.

Connections to other Instructional Design and Teaching Styles pages:
Introduction
Formal Authority Teaching Style
Facilitator Teaching Style
Demonstrator Teaching Style

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