Engaging in a systematic instructional design process is a new experience for me. My tendency when preparing to teach a new course is to “prep as I go.” I have a clear idea of where I want to end up, but generally do not create more than a cursory outline of the steps necessary to achieve various goals. While I do assess how successful my instruction is, and I do have clear learning objectives, I tend to operate on a “rapid prototyping” model (albeit not rapid) so that adjustments to my instruction occurs the next time I teach a course. The systematic process requires me to engage in a lot of the work and labor up-front, which is not my typical practice. However, this upfront work also helps me to see the big picture with a lot more clarity. As I mentioned when creating my Instructional Plan, the process of creating the Content Map helped me see exactly how my list of learning objectives fit together, and how I could stack them to lead to the over-arching outcome. As I engaged started looking closely at the Instructional Strategies and Instructional Materials for this proposal, I realized that I do have an attitudinal learning objective, even though it was not ever articulated. I also decided that I did not want to officially add this attitudinal objective to my list of goals because reinforcement is beyond the scope of my proposed training: it will rely on buy-in and a general shift of NHCC campus culture so that both supervisors and colleagues can hold employees accountable. We are not yet to that stage.

Because teaching is my primary profession, I can easily see how engaging more frequently in a systematic instructional design process can benefit my teaching: it will help me be more strategic in sequencing learning activities, in thinking about which strategies should be applied at which point in the semester and in the learning activities. It will also help me better define how the various skills I want students to learn should fit together. Although I have not overtly engaged in systematic instructional design for the courses I am teaching this semester, I did have a moment when I realized that two skills I had been teaching in isolation were actually related. One of the things that is hardest for me to teach is historical analysis within a historical argument: I have steps and guides for students to help them with this skill, but one of the things I was missing was the underlying concept of exactly what constitutes historical thinking. This semester, I realized that I need to not only expose students to the key concepts related to historical thinking (which I have been doing for two years), I also need to have them practice engaging in historical thinking as a part of constructing their historical arguments. As much as I tend to like to develop my materials on the fly, having the knowledge of a more systematic process is making it easier for me to see the connections among the various skills and concepts that I teach.