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:
“… 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.
