Instructional System Design

Working in K-12 is great for someone who likes to work on complex issues. For me, education truly represents a challenging public institution that is beset by bureaucracy, run under archaic rules, facing demanding state and federal legislation and, at times, plagued by individuals who have no business being in education. School boards are an especially sore spot for me since many representatives are elected and truly do not have the skills necessary to govern the business of a school district.

But within this challenging environment are a number of very bright people who are dedicated to helping find solutions to the many issues that confront K-12. One of the areas that is widely discussed is school reform or school improvement in support of student achievement. Many of these approaches are based on W. Edwards Deming's continuous improvement model and use an iterative repeating approach that can be described as Plan, Do, Check and Act. Several people have taken this approach and turned it into a repeatable methodology. The 8 Step Instructional Method was coined by Pat Davenport and Gerry Anderson at Brazosport ISD. Larry Lezotte has built an entire company around Effective Schools and Tom Guskey has built a Mastery of Learning method around Benjamin Bloom's work.

All of these methods are dependent on at least three universal items: good curriculum, effective instruction and sound instructional system design. While I have been knowledgeable of school reform and the many experts and companies around it, I was not familiar with the concept of Instructional System Design. That was until a friend of mine at Tetradata recommended a book to me: Fix Schools First: Blueprint for Achieving Learning Standards by Jack Bowsher, a former IBM VP in charge of corporate training.

In his book, Jack educates the reader on Instructional System Design (ISD), which is an approach developed by the military in WWII. In WWII, the military faced the task of taking thousands of untrained troops and having to get them trained very quickly on complex equipment and military tactics to be ready for battle. The system developed, ISD, was based largely on Robert Gagne's Conditions of Learning and the Nine Events of Instruction

Jack advocates the theory that everyone, except for the few such as severely disabled, can master curriculum content if effective ISD has been executed. Jack, like myself, is a proponent of curriculum standards, integrated curriculum, frequent assessment to determine mastery and required mastery of standards for advancement. Jack correctly presents an approach that is standardized and top down. Challenging curriculum standards are developed by government agencies, district directors of curriculum and instruction design a supporting curriculum with appropriate content, teachers are given the foundation of the curriculum and then personalize it for their classrooms, students are frequently assessed to determine mastery and specific professional development is given to teachers in support of their efforts.

Today, we see many teachers designing their own lesson plans and many districts with multiple curriculum's and differing curriculum resources. Teachers don't have the time to develop curriculum lesson plans and content and their time is better spent on delivering instruction effectively. And students who are highly mobile within their district, should not have to encounter a different curriculum or instructional calendar as they move to a different school. All lesson plans should have the same instructional approach and method to determine mastery. Common standards, common content and common assessment allow us to then use data to accurately measure and analyze our efforts to determine success.

ISD merits your attention if you have not learned about it yet. Gagne's 9 Events of Instruction are a practical approach designed for success that should be of value to any educator as well. Good ISD is a complex effort and should not be taken lightly, but rather well thought out and implemented to survive transition in leadership and district administration. Follow the links in the blog and explore these ideas. I believe they have foundation and can help you be successful in successful education for all students.