What is instructional design?

Instructional design is a scientifically-proven approach to developing training and education.

First developed by the U.S. Navy during World War II, instructional design was developed to address the growing need to teach new sailors how to operate and maintain sophisticated weapons systems. Since the sailor’s previous expertise was probably gained on the farm, they needed a way to teach them how to safely operate the systems that would save their lives, and win the war. As with most lessons, the “discovery” of instructional design was hard-won. It doesn’t take much imagination to recognize that an untrained gunners mate on a 16 inch gun (that’s the diameter of the gun!) didn’t make more than one mistake and walk away from it.

So what is heartfelt instructional design?

Heartfelt instructional design is a more complex way of looking at learning and learners than the standard scientific model. Learning how to accomplish a technical task (like software or something) is pretty straight forward. But what if you need to change peoples’ hearts and minds?

That is where heartfelt instructional design comes in. There are a lot of characteristics of the heartfelt approach, but in a nutshell it combines art and science. It uses story telling and situational learning. Above all heartfelt instructional design is based on an intuitive synthesis of competing theories and approaches to arrive at an effective training solution. A few of these theories are mentioned on the following pages for reference.

Levels of learning

According to Bloom’s revised taxonomy there are 6 levels of comprehension. From lowest to highest they are:

• Remembering: Retrieving, recognizing, and recalling relevant knowledge from long-term memory.
• Understanding: Constructing meaning from oral, written, and graphic messages through interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, and explaining.
• Applying: Carrying out or using a procedure through executing, or implementing.
• Analyzing: Breaking material into constituent parts, determining how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose through differentiating, organizing, and attributing.
• Evaluating: Making judgments based on criteria and standards through checking and critiquing.
• Creating: Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning, or producing.

For heartfelt instructional design these can be considered one way to define the objectives of a course. How deeply does the new knowledge or skill need to be integrated to achieve the benefits of the course? All to often a course is designed to provide understanding and the reality requires application. I can understand something and still not be able to do it. The higher up this taxonomy the more resources it will take to accomplish your goals. But with your goals clearly defined at the onset, and a commitment to success there is no reason you cannot be successful.

Multiple intelligences

Howard Gartner in his ground breaking work Frames Of Mind: The Theory Of Multiple Intelligences introduced the world to the concept of multiple intelligences. The most important steps taken by Gardner involved arriving at a working definition of ‘an intelligence’
and devising a set of criteria of what counts as an intelligence. As he describes it, an intelligence is a
biological and psychological potential to solve problems and/or create products that are valued in one or
more cultural contexts. Armed with this definition and these criteria, Gardner identified seven relatively
autonomous capacities that he named the multiple intelligences:

• Linguistic
• Logical-mathematical
• Musical
• Spatial
• Bodily-kinesthetic
• Interpersonal
• Intrapersonal

In more recent writings, Gardner has added:

• Naturalistic
• Existential

These intelligences all represent different ways to problem solve, different strengths and weaknesses that can help us create education that effectively reaches more people.
If you have a high linguisic intelligence you may learn well from a lecture. If you are stronger in your kinesthetic sense you will probably learn better by actually practicing a task. But more important than the ability to reach more people is the ability to reach each person on multiple levels.
Combining teaching strategies to speak to as many of these intelligences as possible allows us to design more meaningful learning experiences.

Multiple learning styles

Honey and Mumford have identified 4 distinct learning styles.

• Activists—‘hands-on’ learners prefer to have a go and learn through trial and error
• Reflectors—‘tell me’ learners prefer to be thoroughly briefed before proceeding
• Theorists—‘convince me’ learners want reassurance that a project makes sense
• Pragmatists—‘show me’ learners want a demonstration from an acknowledged expert

If you have had any exposure to training or instructional design you are probably familiar with scaffolded training that uses this approach. It is summurized as Tell Me, Show Me, Let Me. Some how “convince me” never made it in to that model.
As with most of these theories that try to categorize people, it is never as simple as saying, “I am an activist. That is how I learn.” Most people do have a default, and even a back-up learning style, but we all move back and forth from one to the other based on the needs of the situation. Of course moving out of one’s comfort zone takes work so if we can design a learning experience that addresses all of the learning styles we can make learning easier for everyone.
A personal note about learning styles
Even if you do not design training and education a good understanding of your personal learning styles can help you be a better student. Check out thbe link above. It could revolutionize the way YOU learn.
So if multiple intelligences identify different ways we think, learning styles identify different ways we learn.

Personality types

One variable that is often ignored in designing learning experiences is the personalities of learners and how that influences their learning experience. The Myers-Briggs is just one way to identify different personality types. The four dichotomies of the Myers-Briggs indentify how we think, feel, and act in the world:

• Extraversion / Introversion
• Sensing / iNtuition
• Thinking / Feeling
• Judging / Perceiving

It is impossible to design a specific learning experience for each of the 16 personality types, but by considering that different people see the world in different ways does allow us to effectively reach introverts and extroverts, those who analyze with their heads and those who use their hearts, and so on.

Integrating it all

All of these ways to break people up into different groups are interesting, and could make a one-on-one tutoring or mentoring experience more effective, but what if you need to teach thousands of people?
These taxonomies are just a few of the factors that point to the fact that each learner is unique. They are not the same as each other, and they are certainly not the same as the teachers or instructional designers. This is where heartfelt instructional design comes in.
Instead of treating your audience as a group with average characteristics, we treat the groups as a beautifully diverse collection of souls on a related learning journey. If some of them won’t get on the bus, give them bikes! If someone needs special accommodations, provide them! Only by addressing the needs of the individuals can the needs of the group be met.