Unit 3 Being an Online Instructor
A. Learning through Direct Instruction
Students become aware of your teaching presence through direct instruction techniques. Direct instruction can be described as
“is educational leadership that provides disciplinary focus and structure or scaffolding but also offers choice and opportunity for students to assume responsibility for their learning. This instruction is more than a ‘guide on the side’ but less than ‘a sage on the stage’. It is an approach whereby learning is socially shared. This is the path to a meaningful, systematic, and worthwhile educational experience” (Garrison & Vaughn, 2008).
Learning through direct instruction means creating structure and deliberately designing opportunities for engagement at the right moments. If you have taken the Instructional Skills Workshop or a similar workshop, you would have learned a model called the “BOPPPS”: this is an example of a structure that supports direct instruction.
Typically, Direct Instruction involves the following four phases:
1. Presentation Phase
- Review: of previous material and/or pre-requisite skills
- What: what is to be learned
- Why: why it is important
- Explanation: of the topics and/or skills
- Probe & Respond: where instructor informally checks students’ initial understandings.
2. Practice Phase
- Guided practice: where students practice new concept/skill under instructor’s supervision.
- Independent practice: where students practice new concept/skill independently.
- Periodic Review: where, during instructor probes, guided practice or independent practice, students review topics/skills they’ve already learned.
3. Assessment & Evaluation Phase
- Formative Assessment: using the information from teacher probes, guided practice or independent practice, or using additional assessments (eg. quizzes and assignments) the instructor determines if students have learned the topic/skill or require further instruction
- Summative Assessment: the instructor gathers summative assessment data to see if students have acquired the topic/skill.
4. Monitoring & Feedback continuously through three phases on an as-needed basis
- Cues & Prompts: instructors use cues to hint at what’s important, while using prompts during student demonstration of learning and during guided practice; both provide scaffolding to students during their learning phase.
- Corrective Feedback: done whenever the instructor has made an assessment of student learning at any point during the lesson.
(summarized from Huitt, W.G., Monetti, D.M., & Hummel, J.H. (2009) ‘Direct Approach to Instruction’ in Riegeluth & Carr-Chellman, Instructional Design Theories & Models III. Pg.73-97)
These should sound familiar as these phases are parallel to the instructional models we discussed in the section on Cognitive Presence in Unit 1.
