Teaching Goals and Instructional Patterns

The key to developing effective technology-based learning activities is to start with a clear goal about what you wish to accomplish. The materials, methods, and technology choices you must make should emerge from the ends you hope your students will achieve.

This simple truism is made more complex because all teachers have multiple goals. We want our students to behave responsibly and know our content. We want them to think critically and speak insightfully in class. Even when we help them master one aspect of scholarship, we have nagging doubts that they do not have other competencies. There are so many possible goals (Angelo and Cross list 52 goals in higher education), that it can be very difficult to weigh priorities and decide that one or two of these are the primary ones in our classes.

The dilemma, in short, is that we do not simply pick a one or two goals but have to balance a number of competing ones. Bob Guell (Economics) uses the concept of "opportunity cost" to explain this problem. In economic theory, a decision to invest your resources in one way is a decision to not invest them on other enterprises. To buy a $50 bottle of wine instead of a $10 one, another economist explained to me, is to value the better wine more than $40 worth of something else — nice cheeses, steaks, or entertainment — that might make the evening enjoyable too. The choice is not about right and wrong but about which resource expenditure will provide most satisfaction.

In a similar way, Bob explains that the teacher must make decisions about how to invest his or her time and other resources. It is possible to spend our time exclusively on covering subject matter. However, we thereby exclude other potentially valuable goals we might purchase with our time— such as enhancing critical thinking or promoting higher standards on work products. However, to add lessons about critical thinking or production skills means we cannot spend as much time on content. Again, it is less a question of right and wrong and more one of defining the combination that is most satisfying.

There are a couple of guidelines we might use in deciding what goals must be satisfied. Certainly, a clear understanding of how your course fits into the curriculum program of the major should provide some indicator of what ought to be accomplished; the student outcome assessment plan should help determine valued competencies more precisely. The second guideline comes from the beliefs of the teacher.

College teaching, more than any other grade level, gives the teacher broad latitude in determining what and how to teach. It becomes vital, therefore, that the college teacher work through the balance of competing goals so that he or she is comfortable with the values that will guide their time investment. The Teaching Goal Inventory prepared by Thomas Angelo and Patricia Cross is one helpful tool for reviewing the range of competing goals and weighing the relative values they have in your course. The link to an on-line version is in this folder, as is a copy you can print out. The Lilly First Year Experience project encourages faculty to review 8 competencies that will facilitate student success, if faculty will invest the time to help students gain minimal abilities; you may want to review this list as a possible framework from which to make your choices.

There are other strategies for working through the potential option and defining what commitment you feel are best. Anthony Grasha's Teaching with Style compiles a number of useful activities to encourage reflection on our teaching commitments. You could write a definition of teaching (learning, or education), you could list a series of value statements, create a metaphor, or choose among formal teaching models. Whatever your approach, the first step is to be able to describe the goals you are ready to commit your time to.

Grasha has also shown the links between the college teacher's goals and the techniques they employ in their classroom, what he calls "teaching style." If ruminations about abstract goals do not seem to profitably square your mind about the right balance of goals in your class, you might try his Teaching Style Inventory (a link is provided in this folder). He will ask you to choose the teaching practices you prefer. Making a common sense leap, he argues that the pattern of choices you make will help reveal the underlying commitments that are important to you (it might reveal the uncomfortable fact that our practices are not in line with our real goals; an insight that we can use to adjust our class accordingly).

In his research, Grasha noticed that teachers tended to cluster around four styles and, thus, four profiles of goals for the classroom. These are the four areas I mentioned in my talk last week: content, skills, abilities, and personal growth. Depending on which of these areas you find yourself, your lessons and the use to which you will put technology will be different. As a result, you will go about detailing the objectives for your lessons differently.

It maybe suggested that your goals will connect to your instructional patterns. Grasha's four teaching style clusters are evident in the patterns by which teachers organize their courses. Each style uses a different kind of pattern for putting a course together. The formal authority style has content objectives and blocks the course schedule as a sequence of content. The demonstrator style has skill goals and organizes the course around mastery of distinct skill sets. The facilitator style aims to improve a general ability, like problem-solving, and plans a course around opportunities for working on topics in increasingly more complex ways. The delegator has a model of personal growth in mind and prepares a series of experiences that promote this kind of growth. While you may not be familiar with these classifications, you can, by writing down the sequences by which your organize your lesson (and by trying some of the reflective activities described above), help clarify the assumptions that are important commitments to you.

Our role will be to help you work toward designs that will help you successfully reach these commitments. We will help find instructional patterns that you can use to accomplish your goals. We will help design media that best deliver these patterns.

To introduce a technology into your classroom without first understanding its purpose and adapting it to meet your goals can be a recipe for disaster. The leading authors on teaching with technology converge on this point. If you have the time for further reading, you will find their recommendations vary according to the teaching style they assume. Once you know your preferences, you will find the suggestions offered by some approaches more suited to your style.

An overview of the styles and how they guide teachers in planning a course can be found here.

The conventional, content-oriented style suggests that we translate our goals into content objectives. It recommends a clear organization of materials and/or web pages.
 
The skill-oriented (demonstrator) style recommends that teachers lay out the competency objectives for their students. Heidi Schweizer, in Designing and Teaching an On-Line Course, describes how to use performance objectives to plan a web-based course.

The aim of this part of the CTA is to make you aware of the considerations about goals that will influence the shape of your course. It is not a simple or quick process to either settle out the right combination of goals or to perceive all the implications in course design that result from your commitments. Now is a good time to start the dialogues with yourself and others that will help you clarify just what it is you are prepared to invest in. As the CTA continues, you will have on- going opportunities to reflect on how these decisions will influence the patterns you hope to use when applying technology to your lessons.