Teaching With Purpose in Next Generation Instructional Design

By: Anna Brannen and Susan Strait

Teaching with purpose! That is what comes to both our minds as our biggest take away so far during this process of creating our unit for Next Generation Instructional Design. This process is making us both more purposeful teachers which we hope will lead to more engaged and successful students.

We have just finished our first week of our three-week unit of teaching students to be able to identify the character and setting in a story. The first part of our unit was to complete a student interest inventory on each of our students. Getting to know our kids and their interests is not new to us. Every year we send home a student information sheet for parents to complete so that we can learn more about our students. We want to learn more about their likes and dislikes. In addition, we are always taking time during morning meeting and meal times to have one-on-one conversations with students to establish a stronger relationship with them. The student interest inventory served as a good starting point for establishing these relationships. Not only did we ask students about their likes and dislikes and how they learn, but we also used the student inventory to plan our instruction. Our objective here is to make our lessons more engaging. We also used this information to help us choose texts that are based on student interests.

After our student inventories were given, we gave an initial assessment on the students' ability to identify character and setting. Here are our results:

Susan: 16 knew characters, although only 7 could remember a name; 2 knew the setting

Anna: 14 knew characters, although only 1 could remember a name; 1 knew the setting

From these results, we made adjustments in our planning. We were initially going to have students identify any character in the book. Since so many students had identified a character on the initial assessment, we decided to dig deeper and have students learn to identify the main character in the book. We also decided to have students focus more on giving specific names of characters since in our pre-assessment many students identified the character but not by name. Our pre-assessment reflection allowed us to see how we could expand the students’ knowledge further. Without this, we would have just skimmed the surface and perhaps bored many students leading to less engagement and perhaps even behavior. This is a great example of why pre-assessment is so important and useful.

Texts were chosen based on student interest.

Overall, our intention on using student interest and reflecting on pre-assessment has made a huge impact on engagement as well as on our ability to take a concept much deeper. We both chose our books this week based on what we learned about our students--their favorite books, TV characters, and play activities. We have read texts this week about princesses, Sponge Bob, and Paw Patrol. These texts were not super “meaty.” They would not be texts we probably would have chosen in the past. Instead we would have searched for texts that have stronger story-lines and are more well known as read aloud kindergarten texts.

Spongebob is not a typical text we would choose.

However, choosing texts based on student interests had students more engaged and able to recall and have much deeper-level conversations. This process has made us both aware that choosing student interest to lead our text choices can lead to more engagement than a text we choose based on content. Our first week, implementing our Next Generational Instructional Design unit certainly is showing us how it promotes more purposeful teaching.





Source cited:
 Burns, L. D., & Botzakis, S. G. (forthcoming, 2016). Teaching on Purpose. New York: Teachers College Press.

Anna and Susan are Kindergarten Teachers at Jessamine Early Learning Village & NGID Participants. Currently, The Fund is featuring blogs from teachers in the Next Generation Instructional Design network. They will share their journey, their ideas, and their collaborative work related to being in the network and with building units of study with LDC modules embedded.