Trends and Issues in IDT: If you design it will they come?

The reading of this last week had me wondering how I rate as a twenty-first century teacher.  Most of the time I would say that I always teach my students to think critically and solve real-world problems, but my thirteen year-old son informed me that I could use more training and resources in this department.  Don't you love the honesty of a teenager who is confident he will solve all the world's problems when he gets older?  I guess I need to print the quote here and paste it in a prominent place in my classroom to remind me of the type of teacher I want to be when I grow up. 

1.  Chapters in Section V identify trends and issues in IDT in various contexts:  business & industry; military; health care education; P-12 education; and post-secondary education.  Select at least 3 of these 5 contexts and compare/contrast the IDT trends and issues.  Then explain how they are similar or different from the IDT trends and issues in the context in which you work.  

Technology Setting	Trends	Issues
Business and Industry	Many industries are moving out of the country. Demands for design cycle time reduction, increased effectiveness, and efficiency.	Instructional designers must create instruction for cross-culture situations based on societal cultural factors, learner cultural factors, and for cross-cultural workforce.  This may cause many issues if they are themselves not from the country they are trying to design instruction.  Design cycle times are often reduced and thus they must find ways to increase effectiveness and efficiency.  They are sometimes able to use rapid prototyping which allows them to design and develop while also evaluating the product at the same time.  The increase in technology-based instruction has also improved efficiency and allowed them to produce instruction and deliver it via computer to the clients.
P-12 Education	Computer access has increased across the country with a 4:1 ratio of students to computers within the last 3 decades.  All states have also adopted technology integration curriculum or standards.	Still a gap in where we are and where we want to be.  These are some key reasons why. 1.  Students use computers for both high- level instruction and low-level tasks which negate the gains. 2.  Professional development not always available or adequate for teachers. 3.  Technology may be in –line with higher level thinking, but state assessments are still geared toward low-level learning. 4.  Employers state our high school graduates are still deficient in 21st century skills needed for higher-level problem solving. 5.  Standards are in place for all states, but only 42% of states require a technology course for initial state licensure and 20% of states require technology training or testing for recertification.
Post-Secondary Education	Faculty instructors tend to also be the instructional designers, which means, they not only teach courses, they also develop and design the instruction.  Collaboration with colleagues allows for them to see what is and is not working for instruction.  Instructional Designers also are the ones who develop training for their fellow faculty members and give workshops.  Since they are continuing with research and publications, they are on top of the latest trends in ID.	Some of the issues they face are the same for other industries.  They still face time constraints and must work around them.  Finding time to conduct research and publish findings is difficult when teaching a full course load and designing instruction.  They must push fellow faculty to make time for training and also developing instruction.  They also need to take into consideration that their fellow colleagues may or may not have ID theory background which will affect how they design instruction.

After looking at these three industries for Instructional Design, I have decided that everyone struggles with issues when designing instruction.  It was very refreshing for me to see that even in business and industry, ID’s deal with cultural issues too.  We are constantly reminded in teaching to remember not every child lives in a home that believes as we do.  For some districts with more diversity, that is truer than ever.  Understanding how to look at these issues and account for them in instruction is a harder job than we might think.  I especially enjoyed reading how they suggested looking at word choice and subtle signals and cues in illustrations that may have different meanings in other cultures.  I have heard humorous stories from previous professors that made a gesture while talking and unknowingly offended someone in the country they were visiting.  Knowing this is a possibility and taking measures to avoid it is difficult, but necessary if you want to be an effective teacher. 

We have been discussing how to help students become twenty-first century learners and prepare them for college and the workforce.  I think sometimes it is hard for teachers who have taught all of their adult life to understand what that really means.  My friends who have only taught do not understand when I tell them things are different in the corporate world.  I worked more than 10 years outside education and know that students need to think beyond knowledge and comprehension and to synthesize and evaluate.  This means we need to stop teaching to the state assessments and start working towards higher level thinking.  If only it were that easy to do.  Unfortunately, our school districts think more of how TEA rates us based on our test scores than producing students who will think outside the box we have put them into.  Of course, more quality professional development may help with this issue if teachers find the time to attend.  This is where the desire to be life-long learners helps with motivating teachers to carve out that time for training.  I know our lives are busy and it is hard to find time for one more thing extra, but I feel strongly that quality training is important for making us better teachers.  If we don’t desire to know more, how can we expect our students to want to know more? 

2.  Chapters in Section VI discuss global trends and issues in IDT.  As the world’s population grows exponentially, we face unprecedented challenges that have implications for learning.  How and can we prepare our youth to address the problems of living in a world with 9 billion people when the earth’s resources cannot sustain that many?  Do our current education system, curriculum, and instructional practices help learners foster the complex problem-solving skills necessary to tackle these issues?  Are there methods and practices used in European and Asian countries that we should use here in the US?  Why or why not?

How often do we as a society make a decision to push our problems further in the future in hopes that we will not have to deal with them.  Why are we setting up our youth for the downfall?  I do not have an answer to this, but I hope that someday we will realize it is okay to solve our own problems.

After reading all three chapters in Section VI I have come to realize that Instructional Design is not a highly regarded profession in other countries.  Of course, I did not expect it to be a high priority in third world countries.  These countries deal with so much contention between tribes and coups to overthrow the current governments, that education and more importantly instructional design is not as important as who will come out on top.  However, with all the “technology” in Asian countries, I certainly expected more from them.  I was impressed to see that in Korea they require technology courses for both licensure and re-certification.  I think in the twenty-first century, this should be a requirement in all countries.  It also should be required for our administrators who ask us to adopt a technology for use without even understanding how it might work in the classroom.  Then they might decide to test on their own the latest technology craze before asking us to use it in our classrooms.  

It was almost shocking to know that educators did not enjoy the respect they deserve by the business world in European countries.  I then began to think of how teachers are regarded in American and realized we are not given the respect we deserve either.  I have been told on more than one occasion that teachers don’t work that hard and should be happy since we get summers off.  I don’t know where they heard that, but after 10 years in corporate America, I have worked harder in the five years of teaching than I did any other time in my life.  I think America and Europe might need to take some notes from Korea and even Japan to some extent on how to show respect to our teachers. 

It seems like our education system is trying to become more conducive to thought-provoking instruction and curriculum.  I just think that we have looked at testing for so long we are not sure what that should look like.  With current teaching practices, our youth will not be prepared to handle our sustainability issues.  This week my son went to a Texas Brigades Camp in South Texas.  Why am I mentioning this and why is it relevant?  Well, they did something in four and a half days that some teachers do not manage to do in 182 days of instruction.  They taught the kids to be leaders while working as a team.  They learned wildlife management and how to help sustain populations of quail.  The binder he brought home actually referenced TEKS for 7^th grade Science.  I was surprised when he got in the truck and did not stop talking about all he learned until he fell asleep (evidently sleeping was not as high a priority as team building).  Why don’t our students do this when they leave our classrooms?  The slogan or motto of the organization is “Tell me and I forget.  Show me and I remember.  Involve me and I understand.”  They involved the kids in learning about not only habitat management and ecology, but also anatomy of the birds and egg development.  He said he learned a lot and wished I had done more of that in my science class that he happened to be in this past year.  Ouch!  To go back to camp, he will be required to give presentations on all he learned and write articles for newspapers and magazines.  This is all for a camp that I paid for him to attend!  How do we design instruction that works like this?  Maybe it will take more than looking at what technology will work best.  After all, they were only allowed to use computers minimally and the biggest form of technology they used was a radio telemetry receiver to locate quail with radio collars.  Our kids are being “dumbed down” as Phil Green said when talking about infantilism as stated in “Big Babies or Why can’t we just grow up?”, by Michael Bywater.  I completely agree with this statement.  We are putting a band-aid on a dam that is about to burst and we don’t even realize it.  I love to ask questions that are not necessarily in the textbook or reading material, but can be disseminated if they read and think about it.  However, many times I hear the same thing over and over again, “where do I find this in the book?”  At times I laugh it off and remind them that we were given a brain to use.  If used right, we will be able to discern the answer with the knowledge we have stored in it.  Other times, I would have to take several deep breaths because I knew they were going to Google the answer at any minute for a quick fix.  Even teachers such as me who want to ask the questions that make my students think critically and problem solve are finding resistance from our youth.  They have become lazy and do not want to think.  That does not stop me from requiring them to think, and I will continue to do so until they begin thinking for themselves.  I only hope I can outlast them.  

Reiser, Robert A., and John V. Dempsey.Trends and issues in instructional design and technology. 3rd ed. Boston: Pearson, 2012. Print.