Model development

There are currently classroom experiences that are not reaching or engaging all students, because of the No Child Left Behind era, and in the hopes of producing educated individuals, all students need to be placed in classrooms are that engaging them in learning.

In looking at the costs, in order to meet this need there would need to be additional resources and/or materials provided to teachers, along with the possibility of training to learn how to integrate these resources and materials into their lesson plans. By ignoring this need, students who are not being engaged will continue to not excel, or do poorly in school. They will also have a higher potential to drop out once they are old enough to make those decisions.

By including Front End Analysis (FEA) in a model, you can evaluate whether or not the problem that you are looking at is something that can be solved with instructional design. It also allows you to pinpoint what are the root causes of the problem you are attempting to solve, thus providing you with a better idea of what instructional strategies would be worthwhile employing. It also allows for a greater understanding of the student learners, specifically what their learning styles are. By conducting a FEA, the teacher's instructional strategies can be informed by the obtained information.

When conducting a FEA, not just the teacher lesson plans need to be considered. The environment that the teacher works in also needs to be considered. There is a possibility that the teacher would like to employ new methods in their teaching, but because of the school culture, they don't. There is also the likelihood for budget constraints. In listening to many teachers talk about their classroom, many of them mention how anything "extra" in the classroom typically comes out of their own pockets, and not the school budget.

The learner also needs to be considered. If they lack the necessary prerequisite skills, they could be disengaged from the lessons simply because they're confused, or don't understand what is being taught.

In my mind, this model is beginning to come together slowly, I just need to figure out how to transfer those ideas into "boxes and arrows". That's my goal for the next week, to begin to sketch out what this is going to look like, and possibly have it informed by the Gerlach and Ely classroom model. Because of my interests specifically, I do believe there's going to be a little more FEA work, but I llike that a lot of the work is done concurrently, though it's still a linear process.