Abstract
This paper describes how an interdisciplinary design team used the Four-Component Instructional Design (4C/ID) model and its accompanying Ten Steps design approach to systematically design a professional development program for teaching differentiation skills to primary school teachers. This description illustrates how insights from a cognitive task analysis into classroom differentiation skills were combined with literature-based instructional design principles to arrive at the training blueprint for workplace-based learning. It demonstrates the decision-making processes involved in the systematic design of each of the four components: learning tasks, supportive information, procedural information, and part-task practice. While the design process was time and resource-intensive, it resulted in a detailed blueprint of a five-month professional development program that strategically combines learning activities to stimulate learning processes that are essential for developing the complex skill providing differentiated instruction in a mathematics lesson.
Highlights
Today’s primary school teachers face an increasing demand for dealing with student diversity
To answer the question of how instructional design teams can design an educational program aimed at teaching unfamiliar complex skills in the workplace, we have demonstrated how the Ten Steps approach can guide a design team through an extensive analysis of expert performance and the design of a 4C/ID-based professional development (PD) program for in-service teachers
This paper presents the design process and blueprint for a primary school teacher PD program aimed at fostering differentiated instruction (DI) skills
Summary
Today’s primary school teachers face an increasing demand for dealing with student diversity. A one-size-fits-all approach in which the teacher presents the same teaching activities to the whole class is being replaced by a differentiated approach In such an approach, the teacher presents tailored activities to individuals or groups of students to best suit their particular needs (Deunk et al, 2018; Roy, Guay, & Valois, 2013). Similar results are reported in international research, giving rise to interventions to improve teachers’ differentiation skills (e.g., Eysink, Hulsbeek, & Gijlers, 2017; Prast et al, 2018; Valiandes & Neophytou, 2017; Wan, 2017) Spurred by these findings, a design team consisting of researchers from the University of Twente and Maastricht University in the Netherlands set out to design and implement a professional development (PD) program aimed at developing teachers’ DI skills in the context of mathematics lessons.
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