Week Seven


Gathering the Materials

     When I asked a former class, what would you like to learn from this class. One answer resounded around actually putting together the details of teaching the lesson. He was looking for hints so that after one has a goal, objectives, a space and an audience; how do you create the actual instruction. So the text book titles that section "Heuristics for Developing Instruction." One of my electronic dictionaries says heuristic is "of, pertaining to, or based on experimentation, evaluation, or trial-and-error methods." Lightly can I say that there are many ways of creating instruction and they are based on "trial and error?

Some heuristic hints      So there are ideas that can be found (straight from the textbook):

  • Make it concrete
  • Control the step sizeUse appropriate pacing
  • Maintain consistency
  • Use cues
     And there's more in the textbook, ideas that seem old and some new, ideas that natural and some that are new, ideas that have been used before but now fit a category.