instructional design

Contributor: Teryl Cartwright @TerylCartwright

Idea: Teaching creativity starts with creative instructional design, especially through utilizing the very structures or rules of your subject. Think of the key concepts of your discipline and try thinking about how you could use them as metaphors in teaching. For example, from biology take the idea of cell structure: what would the student say is the ‘nucleus’ of a lesson plan? What is the wall/barrier? If the content learned is about music, what three notes of theirs go together to make a chord of complementary facts?

Practitioner comments: “Since students learn best through various approaches, why not change the generic instructional designs patterns and mirror the very creative and distinct identity of each unique discipline? I believe biology’s ID should look and feel distinct from geometry’s ID. For fun, I’ve even used geography’s orientation concept and art’s golden ratio as instructional designs for teaching leadership.”