Reflection Paper 3 7:15PM    Fall 2019                                     Jonathan Pratt

              During the last few weeks of class, my reading has mostly been in relation to the final project.  Several times I have returned to Cennamo and Kalk’s Real World Instructional Design as I and my group members have worked to ensure alignment between evaluation and instructional objectives.  During our project, I have gone back and re-written objectives and redesigned assessments multiple times until satisfied that they function in tandem with each other to bring our hypothetical learners closer to the instructional outcomes we have in mind for them.

              In doing this, previous readings and class discussions on instructional objectives have become clearer in meaning.  At one point, after a long session with my team-mate, it was as if a penny dropped in my mind and I could see that clear instructional objectives should build towards our desired outcome, and if written nicely will define their own evaluative process.  From that point forward, it was much less difficult to “make an objective behavioral” or “think of an aligned evaluation process for the objective,” because I was naturally thinking in terms of building students’ behaviorally toward our final objectives.

              I think the most difficult part of beginning a study, and probably the most rewarding as well, is that everything is basically new.  Because of this, there is no set place for these new things inside ones mind, and nothing nearby for concepts to attach to.  I mentioned in one of my other reflection papers that I had started on the Wikipedia for Instructional Design and read some of the referenced texts prior to beginning this first semester of classes.  I wanted to give myself some sort of context to understand what was going on.  To some degree I succeeded, but ultimately there still remain a lot of terms and concepts I will need to create to proper connective space for.

              Simulations are my own favorite method of teaching.  It seems obvious that the closer one can get to having a student actually perform the desired skills in the desired environment, the better the learning outcome will be.  Thus, I appreciate that the main project in our class has been a simulation.  Because I like simulations, I have committed to imagining the scenario in a lot of detail and working through the problems with teammates.  Luckily, my team was rather engaged, and my teammates both had their own experiences and ideas related to instructional design, so we had good learning synergy.