For most of my life many things that I did came natural, whether it was picking up a microphone and singing in front of a large crowd, playing sports, being a good student, or teaching with no real prior experience. I have been blessed with a gift of being able to be successful at these things and just doing the right thing to excel naturally.
When I first began teaching I had never been a substitute teacher, I had never stepped foot in a public education setting other than being a student. On many occasions my administrators would always compliment me on doing a great job, and they would often say how teaching was natural for me. I have never known or studied the technical side of teaching, I only did things that seemed to be best and right. While encompassing this naturalness I did not realize that I have been utilizing an instructional design method for many years.
As I was studying for this week's assignment I realized that I have been using Gagne's Instructional events model and possibly even Merrill's model. During our math lesson each day we have to go in steps to ensure that the learner understands and learns what we are teaching. So we follow the same sequence on a daily basis that is much like the steps of Gagne's model. The sequential steps are:
1. Gaining Attention
2. Informing the learner of the objective
3. Stimulating recall of prior knowledge
4. Presenting information
5. Providing Guidance
6.Eliciting Performance
7. Providing Feedback
8. Assessing Performance
9. Enhancing retention & transfer
Every math lesson begins with a hook of some sort to catch the student's attention. Then we discuss what our objective for the lesson will be, review material that has been previously covered and then teach new information. After we model step by step using math manipulatives and hands on activities, as guidance, we show the students how to do the math problems, and then we have them to complete some problems independently (elicit performance). After the independent practice we give feedback and then assess them on whether or not they learned the material. After assessment the students are then put into independent learning centers that correlate with the lesson they learned that day to increase their retention of what they were taught. This is a cycle of steps that we repeat with every lesson.
This is something that I have done for the last 4 school year's, but I was oblivious to the fact that this process had a technical name. With or without the name the Gagne instructional events model has been very successful for me in my classroom.
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