Post-Mortem Analysis and Reflection

As a second grade teacher, instructional projects for me are different than what others may think of.   Younger students are the target audience compared to adults in the training world. Even at the elementary school level, however, there is a lot of design that takes place for the students to get the most out of the lessons that are delivered to them.

While reflecting back on some of the units that were taught, the unit on American Indians last year really sticks out as being an instructional design project that was a failure overall. The objective for Virginia with regards to American Indians is:

“The student will compare the lives and contributions of three American Indian cultures of the past and present, with emphasis on the Powhatan of the Eastern Woodlands, the Lakota of the Plains, and the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest” (Virginia Department of Education, 2008).

 As a teacher, and looking back through the eyes of a project manager, common mistakes were made that impacted the instructional design negatively.  One mistake that comes to mind is jumping directly from the conceive phase to the perform phase.  This mistake often happens when projects are on short time schedules.  When this is the case, project managers may at times think that jumping in and starting the work right away will save time.  The problem with this, however, is that the project manager may not have defined what activities need to be completed yet.  As a result, the project could potentially take more time in the long run because work may need to be redone because it was not satisfactory from the beginning (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer, 2008).  The unit was originally scheduled to take place over the course of 4 weeks but with days off of school from snow days and holidays, the unit was forced to be crammed into a span of 3 weeks.  As a result, it seemed important to take a look at what the students needed to know for the test and get started right away with planning, cramming as much into the 3 weeks as possible.  This was a mistake because the objective requires students to compare the lives and contributions of the different groups but it seemed that it would work to teach each of the groups in isolation and then compare them at the end.  This was not the case, however, because students had difficulty making connections between the groups when bringing them all together.

Whenever planning a lesson or unit, I always plan with the end in mind.  That means, I consider what students need to know and be able to do by the time they have learned the material.  This reminds me of the concept of “backing in.”  Backing in, is when an individual starts at the end of a project and working back towards the beginning, identifying activities and estimating durations that will ultimately add up to the amount of time that the project has been given (Portny et. al., 2008).  This is interesting to consider because it goes against the standards based planning process that I have been taught by the school system that I work for.  To help better ensure success with units now, teachers at my school create unit plans.  These are developed in advance of a unit being taught as compared to single lessons being created and then made to fit together for a certain topic.  With developing unit plans, time is not as big of a negative impact now because they are created before the content is taught at all and then the more detailed lesson plans are created from them.

In closing, reflecting back on this unit was very eye opening.  It can be more clearly observed why this instructional project was not a success.  Although the project was not a success, a lot was learned from it that has since been used to make stronger lessons and units.  Even if a project may not turn out the way that we would hope, if we keep our eyes open, I don’t think anything is a complete failure.  As project managers or instructional designers, we can use the lessons learned from the failures to then build other stronger projects.

 

Resources:

Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Virginia Department of Education. (2008). History and Social Science Standards of Learning Grade Two.  Retrieved from http://www.doe.virginia.gov/testing/sol/standards_docs/history_socialscience/index.shtml.