Instructional Strategies In Education

The teacher has for many years been seen as a giver of information to the learners. This role has rapidly changed with the introduction of new options and aids for instruction. These new concepts include team teaching, individualized instruction, learning, new buildings, television equipment, electronic learning laboratories; computer assisted terminal learning, dial-access retrieval systems.

These options have tremendously increased a teacher’s choice of ways to accomplish defined learning outcomes. This creates new concerns for the individual learner new ways of presenting information in order to plan effective instruction, your role as a teacher is changing rapidly, as teachers tend to become directors or facilitators of learning experience and goals.

This gives a teacher the freedom to design an instructional programme more suitable for the individual students to be taught. With this freedom, a teacher is now strictly required to possess the basic knowledge contained in the educational curriculum made syllabuses, and must know what she/he wants to teach by selecting proper content, in order to be a successful coordinator of the learning process.

The teacher must be able to describe specific objectives and skills that the students should be able to display under defined conditions and at a designated time. Using the systems approach in education improves the decision-making process by enabling the teacher to understand the education process and all that is involved in education. The information necessary is found easily and within the teacher’s reach, since everyone in the educational setting is involved in a systematic manner. With the help of systems approach, we are able to provide feedback.

Feedback means a reaction to the message sent from source to receiver or vice-versa. Knowledge gained from feedback helps the teacher applying the systems approach to apply feedback at almost every stage in the process of preparing source material. Therefore teaching becomes a science, since educational practitioners and theorists will be using scientific methods of going about their work.

By applying recognized principles that have evolved through research and have been field tested, you can become a better teacher. Today’s teacher must assume the directorship of learning and must develop a plan or system for reaching defined goals. Your teacher’s role as a director is to find ways of dealing with the teaching of such comprehensive systems as those of human growth and development, where most elements are related to each other and contribute to a given common goal. A change in one element may cause a change in other elements or in the system itself.

THE ELEMENTS OF AN INSTRUCTIONAL SYSTEM

Looking at an instructional or educational system, there are ten elements that must operate within the system:
A teacher should be able to monitor the entering behaviour of the students in other words, he or she should know what each student brings with him to the course. A course should be planned to meet the level of an average student, in order to be able to reach students both above and below the average. This can be done by designing a pre-test, to test the general achievement of a class before the course starts like the pre-assessment test in this module. The test should reveal to what extent the student knows the terms, concepts and skills which are part of the courses to be offered.

It is important for you, as a teacher, to determine your instructional strategies and techniques. A strategy is a teacher’s approach to using information, selecting resources defining the role of students, and specific practices used accomplish a teaching objective. In the instructional sense your method is defined as a systematic plan for presenting information. The major instructional strategies are: The expository approach and The inquiry approach.

Any organization of students into groups is determined by the specific objectives. When objectives have been well stated and refined content selection made; criteria of satisfactory performance identified and entering behaviour measured, then the following questions can be answered:

• Which objectives can be achieved by the learner by themselves?
• Which objectives can be achieved through interaction among the learners themselves?

• Which objectives can be achieved through formal presentation by the teacher?
• Which ones will be achieved through interaction between learners and teachers?

Instructional Strategies and Classroom organization

Many variations may be suggested in classroom organization, but in practice a decision about dividing children into groups must depend on the objective in question. Some objectives require small groupings while others require large ones. You must also take account of the characteristic of the content. Some of the material you teach may require about 40% of the time to be allocated to group work, while some require 50% face-to-face discussion.

Current instructional planning and design calls for an individualized approach to learning, in order to take account of the entry level and skills of the individual learners and the speed with which each is capable of learning. Depending on the learning styles of the individual students, some may reach a given objective efficiently through independent study, while others may reach it most efficiently through formal oral presentations. Some students may need a tutor nearby for guidance over difficulties.

The Instructional strategies and techniques used in various groups entail a decision about the use of time. The plan for use of time will also depend on the subject matter, objectives, space availability, administrative patterns, and the abilities and interests of the students. The best determinant of time allocation is the teacher’s own analysis of the above three issues. Decisions about time are usually dictated by the objectives and activities planned, the use of groups and size of the class.

A teacher must therefore ask;

• How can I best attain the objectives with the time constraints imposed on me?
• What groupings?
• What space utilization?
• What teaching strategy?
• What resources are most compatible with the time allocation pattern that I must use?’

Most school days are usually divided into periods of 40 to 80 minutes controlled by bells. This makes it rather difficult for the teacher to schedule time allocations, but you can still plan your approach in the context of such a pattern.

Many classes are taught in classrooms equipped with 50 student desks, a teacher’s desk, and built-in teaching tools like chalkboards and bulletin boards. To some teachers, this kind of arrangement is unhelpful, while to others it is a traditional approach to be retained. The classroom space can be arranged for different purposes into: large group spaces, small group spaces and independent study spaces.

The allocation of learning space must be based on the three learning objectives. Teaching becomes more effective once you begin to group learners in relation to the objectives you wish to achieve.

You need to decide on the content of your teaching before you can select instructional material or determine your objectives. The teacher selects the approach and techniques appropriate to the objectives for each lesson, group size and time to be spent on the lesson. Media selection should be in terms of the responses desired by the teacher from learners and not in terms of stimuli alone. From this point of view, the term ‘learning resources’ should be applied instead of ‘teaching’ or ‘instructional resources’. There is no one instructional medium which is categorically better that another. The choice of an individual medium must be based on its ability to contribute to the learning activities planned.

Performance is the interaction between the teacher and the learners, between learners or between the learner and an instructional medium. It is during the performance that stimuli are presented and responses are made. Performance covers both the act of teaching and the act of learning. It cannot be contained by time, although its evaluation does occur at many points even though there is also a cumulative sequence during which many varieties of performance learning can be measured or evaluated.

Performance is the focal point of learning. All the objectives designed and the planning that has been done become significant at the time when performance is evaluated. The most important parts of instruction are the entering and terminal behaviour. Evaluation of performance is one of the later elements of the instructional strategy and system and one of the first concerns of the teacher in answering the question, ‘has the terminal behaviour been manifested at the level specified? Under the conditions stated?’

Feedback is the final element. In the reading above you must have identified the following elements of an instruction system.

1. Specification of objectives
2. Selection of content
3. Assessment of entering behaviour
4. Learning strategies
5. Classroom Organization
6. Allocation of time
7. Allocation of learning spaces
8. Selection of learning resources
9. Evaluation of teachers’ and learners’ performance
10. Feedback by the teacher and by the learner.