Why Instructional Design

Instructional Design is one of the trendy, educator-speak kinds of words that drive my professor-husband crazy. It's right up there with "assessment matrix", "learning outcomes", "rubrics," learner-centered teaching" and the like. As someone who thought she would be a high-school history teacher after graduating from college in 2001 and as the sister of an amazing teacher (who is the pioneer of a STEM-based charter school in my hometown), I know that instructional design is just a fancy word for what good teachers have always been doing. You think about what you want students to know, how you (the teacher) will know that they know it, and then the lesson plan is how you get from the one to the other. Currently, that's called "instructional design."


When I became a librarian in 2009, I was dumped straight into library, or bibliographic (worst descriptor EVER), instruction. Thankfully, I had taken a years worth of education classes post-BA, so I was comfortable in front of a class, I felt like I knew how to engage students, and hoped that they remembered something. In that sense, I felt miles ahead of some of my library-school peers. However, as I became more aware of library-specific instruction, I saw a lot of flaws in my approach, and in our approach as a department. First of all, all of our instruction was skills-based. The goal of every library session seemed to be finding something relevant for the assigned research project. That goal of course assumed that students could assess on their own the meaning of "relevance."  Students consistently complained that they "knew everything" about the library, and professors complained that students "use terrible sources." Clearly, there's a disconnect.

What I really appreciate about the current instructional design movement is it's intentionality to connect educational theory, which has long been the realm of K-12 professionals, to other arenas such as higher education, library instruction, and media (or digital) literacy. It gives purpose to those assessment matrices that we have to produce for our accrediting bodies, it provides opportunities to integrate new tools into our teaching in incremental but significant ways, and its incredibly satisfying to know one has put thought and effort into one's chosen vocation.

All of those thoughts are why I have enrolled in a 4-week course provided by the ALA on Instructional Design Essentials. Taught by librarians in an online environment, they state that if I do my work thoughtfully and carefully, I will have a course, session, or module ready for student consumption at the end. The temptation is of course to try and revamp every library session I teach over the course of an academic year during this four weeks, but I will refrain. However, my coworker and I have long toyed with the idea of creating a module for our the students in the Division of Adult and Graduate Studies. These are all distance-education students who rarely make it to the library in person and who at the most receive two library instruction sessions. We spend a lot of those sessions on basic research skills and don't have a lot of time to dig into more advanced searching, refining results, and thinking about sources. I hope to use instructional design to create an orientation module for those students so they are familiar with library resources before they attend a library session. Library research continues to affirm that skills-based instruction in an online format can be effective and as a result can make face-to-face library session more productive as well.

On a professional level, I'm excited to be actively engaged with other librarians, to have the accountability that helps me apply the ideas and theories I encounter at workshops to my daily tasks. I hope that this course also helps me define the broader goals our department has for integrating library instruction across the curriculum and for working with faculty as they apply those learning outcomes to their own course design. So, why instructional design? The short answer is: I want to be a better teacher. So here it goes.