Teresa Journal Blog #3

I guess the one thing I'm confused about as far as instructional design goes and the project I have chosen to do is the front end analysis. I am confused as to what all it should entail.
I guess the material that I strongly related too was in Chapter 10 dealing with Learning Environments and producing instructional activities. I know we would all like our classrooms to be an open-ended environment where the students drive the instruction and the teacher is just the guide, but in education today what seems to drive the learning is the assessments. I view my instructional philsophy as one that is both directed learning and at times open ended. I guess I feel uncomfortable with an open ended environment. I guess I'm a bit of a control freak and like to conduct a more directed learning environment where I decide which way the instruction will go to meet the end goals. The Library/Media curriculum will be changing next year and so I will have to rethink how I will develop my lessons. WE are going to have certain goals that we will have to cover before the end of the school year and use assessments to track the students learning. I think for my subject content area this will kinda be sad. I think our main purpose as Library/MEdia specialists especially at the primary level is to teach our students basic library skills and instill in them a love of reading and a thirst for knowledge. I think it will take the edge that the Library/Media specialist had over the classroom teacher in that they didn't have the same pressures with us that they had in the classroom and this change to our program will make the children feel that we are becoming more and more like their classroom. Some of our magic and mystic will be gone.

I can.t remember what I posted on the first blog. I guess my philosophy leans still more toward the directed learning environment, but striving to become more open-ended. I have learned through the course of the reading we have done what points I need to look at when I'm designing a lesson or unit and how to more deeply dig into learning the target audience and trying to design instruction that will catch their attention, tap into previous experiences, and to have opportunities to keep the students more engaged in the learning process.