Module TWO:
Instructional Basics

Every time you write a lesson plan, you make a decision about how hard you want students to think. That decision has consequences. If you aim too low, students coast through material they already know. If you aim too high without building the foundation, they flounder. Bloom's taxonomy ► Walkthrough gives you a shared language for making this decision deliberately, with six cognitive levels that run from simple recall at the bottom of the pyramid to original creation at the top.

The taxonomy was first published in 1956 by Benjamin Bloom and a committee of educational psychologists. In 2001, Lorin Anderson (one of Bloom's former students) and David Krathwohl revised it in two important ways: they converted the category names from nouns to verbs, because thinking is something you do rather than something you have, and they moved Synthesis to the top of the pyramid, renaming it Create. The revised version is what we use in this course, and it is what your textbook covers in Chapter 4.

According to your textbook, the taxonomy helps teachers in five specific ways: planning appropriate instruction, designing valid assessments, aligning instruction with objectives, sequencing learning from simple to complex, and communicating expectations to students. The levels are cumulative, which means each one builds on the ones below it. You cannot analyze something you have not first understood, and you cannot evaluate an argument you have not analyzed. The pyramid is a sequence, and that sequence matters when you sit down to write objectives.

The revised version also added a second dimension called the Knowledge Dimension, which crosses all six cognitive levels and includes four types of knowledge: factual (terminology, specific details), conceptual (categories, principles, theories), procedural (techniques, methods, criteria for using skills), and metacognitive (awareness of one's own cognition). When you combine the two dimensions, you get a table that can classify any learning objective with precision. A task that asks students to "recall the steps of the scientific method" is Remember + Procedural. A task that asks students to "evaluate their own problem-solving strategy" is Evaluate + Metacognitive. Your textbook presents this as the Taxonomy Table, and it is worth spending some time with.

Click any level of the pyramid to see its definition, key verbs, and examples. Each level builds on the one below it.

Here is the sentence that gets written in lesson plans more than any other: "The student will understand photosynthesis." It sounds reasonable. It might even be what you want students to do. The issue is you cannot see understanding. It is an internal process, invisible to the teacher, and therefore impossible to measure. What you can see is a student explaining the stages of photosynthesis, or comparing photosynthesis to cellular respiration, or designing an experiment to test the effect of light color on photosynthesis rate. Those are observable actions, and each one tells you something specific about what the student knows.

This is why the taxonomy matters so much for objective writing. It gives you verbs you can observe and measure. "Explain" is at the Understand level. "Compare" is Analyze. "Design" is Create. Each verb pins down what the student will do and what you will see them doing when they do it. "Understand" gives you none of that. When you sit down to write an objective for your assignment, the verb you choose is the single most important decision you will make.

As you work through the sort activity below, focus on the verbs. The verb in a learning task determines its Bloom's level. If the verb asks students to list, define, or recall, you are at Remember. If it asks students to judge, defend, or justify, you are at Evaluate. Read each task, find the verb, and let the verb guide your placement.

Drag each task into the Bloom's level where it belongs. Use the verb in each task as your guide.

An objective describes what the student will be able to do after instruction. That sounds simple, but the emphasis on "do" is where most new teachers trip up. "I will lecture about the Civil War" describes what the teacher plans to do, not what students will learn from it. "The student will sequence five major events of the Civil War on a timeline with 100% accuracy" is an objective, because it names an observable action (sequence), sets conditions (a timeline), and defines a criterion (100% accuracy). The shift from teacher activity to student performance is the whole ballgame.

Your textbook makes the case that objectives do three jobs at once. They guide your instruction by telling you what to teach and how deep to go. They shape your assessment by defining what you will measure. And they communicate expectations to students by making the target visible before the lesson begins. When all three of these elements align, you get what the textbook calls curriculum alignment: objectives, instruction, and assessment all pointing in the same direction. When all three align, students trust the system is fair. You teach one thing, you test another, and students learn that preparation does not pay off. We will come back to alignment on the Standards tab, because it is the thread that runs through every piece of this module.

Your textbook (Orlich et al., Figure 4.3) identifies three required parts. Every performance objective must include all three. If one is missing, the objective is incomplete.

Notice how the three components work together. The condition sets up the task. The performance statement names the observable action. The criterion measure tells both teacher and student how good is good enough. Remove any one of these and the objective loses precision. Without a condition, you do not know under what circumstances the student must perform. Without a criterion, you cannot determine whether the student succeeded.

Drag the chips into the workspace in correct order: Condition first, then Performance, then Criterion. The gray chips are distractors. They look like objective components but they are too vague to be measurable.

Standards define what students should know and be able to do at each grade level. They tell you what to teach, but they do not tell you how to teach it. That gap between the what and the how is where your professional judgment lives, and it is the source of both the power and the frustration that teachers feel about standards-based instruction.

In North Carolina, the NC Standard Course of Study lays out content standards for each subject and grade level. Every public and charter school follows the same standards, but teachers choose the methods. Two fifth-grade classrooms in the same building might teach the same standard through completely different activities, and both teachers would be doing their job well, as long as students meet the standard by the end of the unit. For your Standards and Objectives assignment, you will select one NC standard for your subject area and work through the process of unpacking it, which is what the rest of this tab is about.

Standards also have critics, and you should know the major arguments. The Fordham Foundation graded state standards across the country and found an average grade of C-minus. Some researchers argue that certain standards are developmentally inappropriate for the grade levels where they appear. Others argue that standards narrow the curriculum by pushing teachers to focus only on tested content at the expense of everything else. Your job as a teacher candidate is to understand these debates, form your own view, and plan instruction that addresses the standards for your subject area while still using the best methods available to you. The standards tell you where to go. The methods are yours to choose.

Your textbook calls this the "Teaching Alignment Model" (Figure 4.2). The idea is simple: objectives, instruction, and assessment must all point in the same direction. Drag the three elements into the correct sequence below.

When alignment breaks, students notice. When you teach one thing and test another, students stop trusting the system. When your objectives target analysis but your instruction only covers recall, students miss the practice they need to perform at the expected level. Alignment is a practical principle. It is what makes students trust your class is fair.

Your textbook (pp. 101-102) outlines a process for working from a standard to a lesson. Click each step to expand it. Notice how each step builds on the one before it. This is the process you will follow in the Standards and Objectives assignment.

Chapter 9 opens with a scene: Alexander Daniels observes a middle school class where desks are arranged in circles, eight students per group, and the buzz of conversation fills the room. The topic is cell phones. Students talk, debate, and build summary statements on newsprint. The teacher walks the room, sitting briefly with each group, then steps back. After the discussion, groups report to the class. Alexander is impressed by the level of responsibility and control the students show.

Discussion is a teaching technique that involves an exchange of ideas, with active learning and participation by all concerned. It requires the teacher to develop a viewpoint and to tolerate and encourage a wide range of ideas. Discussion is an active process of student-teacher involvement in the classroom environment (see Brookfield & Preskill 2005). It allows a student to discover and state a personal opinion or perspective, not just repeat what the teacher or text has already presented.

Before you can run a discussion, your students need to know how to listen. These are learned behaviors, not instincts.

Four elements shape how you organize groups in your classroom.

Your textbook identifies four concepts you need to understand before initiating small-group discussions: process, roles, leadership, and cohesion.

Five functions keep a discussion moving. Click each to learn more.

Your textbook presents six basic types of small-group discussion. Each type serves a different instructional purpose. Click each to explore.

Drag each classroom scenario to the discussion type it best represents.

Cooperative learning has much in common with the methods already discussed. Its essential characteristic is that it builds positive interdependence by teaching students to work and learn together in a small-group setting. Traditional cooperative learning groups consist of three to four students who work on an assignment or project together in such a way that each group member contributes to the learning process and then learns all the basic concepts being taught.

Traditional models of cooperative learning share five distinct features (Jacobs, Power & Loh 2002; Johnson & Johnson 2004). Drag each feature to its correct definition.

Research supports these eight benefits across grade levels and subject areas.

Getting cooperative learning started takes careful planning. Here are the key steps.

Your textbook lists these social skills students need to practice within cooperative groups.

Chapter 10 opens with Diana Shaw's social studies class. Students work in small groups of three to five. A few students sit at the computer center. The teacher is helping a small group of students with learning disabilities align their data on a large poster. Walls are covered with student work. Their project resembles the output of a professional convention.

What do we mean by thinking? The word is a construct or a label we apply to processes we can observe only indirectly through actions or products. In other words, when someone behaves in a careful, prudent manner, we infer that behavior resulted from deliberate thought. We propose that thinking is a combination of knowledge, skills or processes, and attitudes. Knowledge: the more knowledge you have about any area, the more effectively you can think about it (Schallert 2006; Shayer & Adey 2002; Steinberg & Spear-Swerling 1996). Effective thinking also requires particular attitudes, such as a disposition to perceive and relate to one's surroundings in particular ways.

Four attitudes distinguish effective thinkers from passive learners.

Higher-level thinking skills, also known as critical thinking, consist of the application of the top two levels of Bloom's taxonomy: analysis and synthesis, plus evaluation (determining value). Critical thinking is a multistage construction of meaning.

Nearly all writers agree on the generic aspects of thinking highlighted in the Core Skills of Thinking box (Lyons & LaBoskey 2002; Wallace & Bexley 2003). These five skills are core skills. To build these skills requires careful teacher planning, appropriate sequencing, and a continuous building of cognitive and attitudinal factors.

The basic processes of inquiry learning are listed below in order of complexity. Each process requires progressive intellectual development: as you develop one process, it spurs development of others. Click each to learn what it involves.

Inductive inquiry can be approached in two different ways: guided and unguided. If you provide the specifics (the data or facts) and want the students to make the generalizations, then you are conducting guided inductive inquiry. If you allow students to discover the specifics themselves before they make generalizations, then the process is unguided inductive inquiry.

Drag each classroom scenario into the correct category.

Problem-solving models of instruction are based on the ideas of John Dewey (1916, 1938). Among his major educational contributions was his advocacy of a curriculum based on problems. He defined a problem as anything that gives rise to doubt and uncertainty. Dewey held that a problem has to be appropriate to students' level of study, has to be important to the culture, and has to be important and relevant to the student.

Strike (1975) establishes two categories of discovery: absolute discovery (something discovered for all humankind, like DNA's molecular reproduction) and relative discovery (a concept that is already known by others but is found out for himself or herself for the first time by an individual learner). Strike also presents four modes of discovery.

Strike provides a basic criterion that is essential for any act to be labeled a discovery: the discoverer must communicate both the what and the how to others. If you discover the Lost Dutchman Mine in Arizona but do not tell a single individual, then you have not made a discovery.

These ten behaviors, drawn from the research, help students improve their thinking processes. Match each behavior to its description.

Critical thinking skills are also called strategic learning: students develop a capacity to accelerate their own learning. The textbook lists four assumptions about learners and learning that shape how we teach these skills.

Metacognitive skills: being aware of your thought processes while you are thinking. Research indicates that effective problem solvers subvocalize; in other words, they talk to themselves, constantly reading the situation, rechecking their progress, and evaluating whether their thinking is moving in an appropriate direction. Five techniques help students build these skills.

Reading about instructional design is one thing. Recognizing a design problem in the middle of a classroom is something else. These four scenarios drop you into classrooms where something has gone sideways, and your choices determine what happens next. Your choices determine what happens next. Each response leads to a different outcome, and you deal with the consequences before you move on.

This is closer to how teaching works. You make a decision, you see the result, and then you make another decision based on what happened. The scenarios cover objectives (Ch. 4), curriculum alignment (Ch. 4), cooperative learning (Ch. 9), and inquiry teaching (Ch. 10). Work through all four. If a wrong turn teaches you something the right answer would not have, that is the point.

These instructor walkthroughs cover Chapters 4 and 10. Each video does what the textbook cannot: it lets you watch someone think through a concept in real time and shows you the reasoning behind the choices an experienced teacher makes.

One practical suggestion: as you watch, write one sentence connecting something in the video to something specific from your reading. Not a summary, a connection. You will use these connections in your VoiceThread discussion, and having them written down gives you a concrete starting point when it is time to record your response.

These instructor videos walk through each chapter's key concepts. Copies of the PowerPoint slides are in the Modules section on Canvas.