As we move through our Covid 19 distance learning experience, my focus of inquiry has turned to what role instructional design and assessment play during distance learning.  When you take away the carrot and the stick of earning a grade for engaging in learning, how do we motivate students to show up and engage in learning?  

• Focus on the critical learning targets - scale way back
• Make the learning intention clear.
• Make the learning relevant.  Students should be able to answer the question "Why do I need to know this?"
• Articulate the success criteria that will be used to determine when students meet a learning goal. 
• Provide examples or good models for students to reference.
• Offer choice in how it can be learned
• Focus on feedback
• Be clear about how you will know if students "get it" and not worry about quantifying their performance on a scale of 0 -100

By making student learning our primary focus and helping students share that same focus, the learning experience moves from knowledge transmission to active learning.  Teachers are the authors of their instructional design and should take into account the different ingredients when designing instructional experiences.  Think about something that you are good at.  More than likely, you were not always good at it. How did you get good at it? Look at the graphic below, were all or most of the elements below a part of your learning pathway to achieve the level of proficiency you now have now?

Learning should be assessed formatively using digital tools in small checks for understanding along the way. These are low or no stakes experiences or practice assessments that yield feedback to students.  Check-out Retrieval Roulettes developed by Adam Boxer as a tool to use. The brain science behind retrieval practice is solid and this is an excellent tool to empower students. It allows them to spiral back through content knowledge.  

Generating opportunities for students to give you "summative output" can be done by student created products or student performance within an online testing environment. Check out 100 Things Students Can Create to Demonstrate What They Know or the website Exam.net.   Exam.net is free to use right now if your school is outside Sweden.  An additional resource for math teachers to look at is a post by Alice Keeler, From @mathdiana: Have Students Talk About Math.  (I prefer to call it a task not a test” – @mathdiana) 

During these difficult times, we will learn new and better ways to guide students along a learning pathway than placing a number on a paper.  I believe that growing and getting stronger in instructional design and assessment practices will transfer to improved learning experiences for students once we are back in our brick and mortar classrooms.  And this goes without saying, but if you have a solid relationship formed with students this is all going to be a lot easier!

If you have additional resources and ideas on instructional design, assessment and feedback practices, please share them! I know that I have only scratched the surface in my own learning. 
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​I just finished reading 17,000 Classroom Visits Can't Be Wrong; Strategies that Engage Students, Promote Active Learning and Boost Achievement by John Antonetti and James Garver.  There are so many things that I want to share from this book. The authors first look at Bloom's Taxonomy and the focus on learning in classrooms. In their thousands of classroom visits, they looked for evidence of how the level of thinking intersected with brain research. They sought to find out whether Bloom's Taxonomy was still relevant in today's classrooms.  In short, the answer was YES. 

Fractus Learning [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

In 87% of the 17,000+ classrooms visited, students were tasked with low-level thinking activities. Antonetti and Garver identified four reasons that the abundance of learning was occurring at this level.

• Teacher focused classrooms. Students passively receive information which they later repeat, reproduce or restate.
• Professional development not focused on better instructional design or presentation styles and pedagogy that supports active learning.
• Standardized assessments encourage educators to use rote instruction for students to have success in low-level tasks.
• Students cling to being "right and done". 

How do we move the needle and get better in 87% of these classrooms? It's simple; we learn! As educators, we have to evolve in our practices and improve instructional design and incorporate advances in brain science into learning experiences. In the 17,000+ classroom visits, they found that the key to raising thinking in a meaningful way was to focus on the middle two levels of Bloom's taxonomy, application, and analysis.

• Application - the human brain likes to gather information and then find ways to use it.
• Analysis - finding patterns is one of the most natural ways for our brains to learn. 

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​I often hear focus on "the verb" to increase the level of thinking, but Antonetti and Garver point us towards looking at our Instructional design and what science tells us about how the brain learns. As a student, when asked a question by a teacher, I would give an answer if I knew it. If not, I'd more than likely sit and wait for the next person to provide the solution. If the teacher is in control of all of the questions, what impact does that have on learning?

​​So if this is how our brains are wired, how can instructional design help facilitate students towards engaging in learning that involves application and analyses? John Medina, a molecular biologist, published Brain Rules in 2008. His researched formed 12 big ideas about the brain that apply to our daily lives, especially at work and school. (It's been 11 years since his rules were published and I have never read his work.)  The complete list of Brain Rules can be accessed here and here. 

​http://brainrules.net/pdf/12brainrules.pdf

​Reading about Medina's Brain Rules led me down a path to learn even more about them!  
In the podcast Vrain Waves hosts Ben and Becky interview John Medina. Medina connects his research to both learning and teachers. (If you don't have time now to listen to the podcast, I highly encourage you to stop and add it to your playlist. It is SO good!)

​To improve learning experiences, we must not only strive to design instruction so that we push thinking to the middle, we must take into account what we now know about how the brain learns and responds.  Need an example? In 17,000 Classroom Visits Can't be Wrong, Antonetti and Garver shared an example of a simple vocabulary lesson they obsereved in a 4th grade classroom.  The lesson was learner-centered and had students working in the mid-levels of Bloom's Taxonomy.)

• The students were shown a group of images. (Brain Rule #10- Vision)
• The teacher partnered students up and assigned roles. One student was to be the recorder and one was to be the reporter. Students were given 30 seconds to find as many patterns as they could in the three pictures. (Brain rule #4 - Attention)
• At the end of 30 seconds, the teacher had pairs share out. Some of the patterns shared by students were; there all big things, there all things people didn't make, you usually find all of these things outside, they are all rough, etc. The students continued to share out until they exhausted the patterns that they had found. (Mid-level thinking here. Students are analyzing) 
• The teacher asked if every group had found the pattern of size, and they had. Next, she had students switch roles in their pairs and then gave them 30 seconds to think of as many words as they could think of that mean "big". 
• After 30 seconds students shared out more than 20 synonyms before the teacher heard the vocabulary word she wanted students to learn. That word was MASSIVE. When she heard it she identified it as a "cool word" and added it to the vocabulary list for the week. No need for students to be given a definition to memorize, they had told her what it meant.

These ideas and resources are just the tip of the iceberg of ways we can improve the experiences students are having in classrooms and teachers are having in their professional learning. The next time you plan instruction, how might you help activate learning by what science has taught us about the brain?  How might learners experience and process the content in a more meaningful way using application and analysis? 

Next up on my blog, I'll look into the levels of engagement in learning. Are there qualities present in instruction that increase student engagement?