Through the weeks that followed, I reflected on many components of instructional design. But my main source of focus when moving forward in my classroom came from the structure of the assignment. I started to think about group work and the concept of collaboration. Traditionally, I've used mostly direct instruction in my classroom. Teaching science is sometimes very methodic. I've tried different constructivist activities and had little success in the past. On paper, science classrooms should be a exploration into content which lends itself greatly to investigation and discovery. But from my experience, these sort of activities fall flat on their face due to lack of ambition and innovation from the students.
When thinking about collaboration in my classroom, I've have been limited to collaboration in my classroom alone. The nature of this assignment got me pondering that collaboration in my classroom needs to be not just inside the classroom walls, but also outside. With access to internet resources and social media, students should be able to collaborate constantly on a learning activity. But if I want students to collaborate more efficiently and effectively, I need to design the activities such that it promotes such an action.
To do so, these activities need to be to given to students such that they have time to collaborate. They need to occur over a longer period of time than just one class and it needs to be decided whether the collaboration would occur before or after the content they are required to learn. This would require long term planning by myself, which made me think about myself as more of an instructional designer. I was starting to consider more aspects to instruction than just the content. This was my first real growth since the start of the course. Therefore, I designed a learning activity with collaboration in mind and assigned it to my chemistry 12 students.
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| Flipped Model Designed by The Noble Nobels |
