Build your teaching competency

You’ve completed an important first step toward your new career by reading this chapter. I hope that The Four Competencies Model, and the first aspect of it has opened your eyes to the many similarities between the skills of an effective teacher, trainer, college instructor, writer, and visual designer and those of an instructional designer.

Now, it’s time to deliver upon a few resources that I believe will help you to hone your Teaching Competency. Consider this a cafeteria-style offering: take what you want, leave what you don’t.

Build your needs assessment skills

The first step in developing any type of training should always be a needs assessment with your stakeholders. Often, stakeholders will think they know exactly what their organizational performance problems are, but as the instructional designer, you’ll want to verify what people are currently doing. Additionally, you’ll want to assess what the performance gap is between the actual and your stakeholder’s desired performance level. If you can, it’s even helpful to learn why people aren’t performing to the level that your stakeholders desire.

Down the road, skipping this step can lead to developing a course with the wrong amount of content, or even incorrect or irrelevant training content, for the target learner.

As such, I’ve curated a few articles here for you that explain why conducting a needs assessment is important, and how to go about doing one:

• eLearning Industry: https://elearningindustry.com/the-what-why-and-how-of-needs-assessments
• The eLearning Designer’s Academy by Tim Slade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDZ6_iVZlt0
• Learning Solutions Magazine: https://learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/instructional-design-begins-with-needs-assessment

Build your skills in defining a target learner audience

As mentioned in Use Case 1 earlier in the chapter, defining your target audience is an important early step in the instructional design process. Without knowing the basics of who your target learner really is, you run the risk of building a course that is entirely off-kilter for your learner – and not hitting your LOs/performance goals. For my former teachers, think of this as being told you’re teaching fourth graders, but really, your learners are seventh graders! Or just think of the 45 million male millennials I was asked to capture in my first project as a contract ID!

It’s important to learn how to ask the right questions of your clients and/or stakeholders. Here are a few resources to help you get started with your target learner analysis:

• Shift: https://www.shiftelearning.com/blog/template-elearning-audience-analysis
• e-LearningHeroes: https://community.articulate.com/articles/how-to-do-an-e-learning-audience-analysis
• eLearning Industry: https://elearningindustry.com/how-use-audience-analysis-and-learner-personas

Build your learning objective (LO) writing skills with Bloom's Taxonomy

We’ve discussed the development of LOs as an important beginning step in an instructional design project. As with much of the other content in this chapter, developing LO's belongs squarely in the ADDIE analysis phase.

Think of your LOs as the foundation for everything you design later in the course – and the basis for which you can measure actual behavior change after the course has been completed by your target learners.

Believe it or not, writing measurable LOs is a bit of an art form, and IDs love to geek out over LO development. Often, you can tell who’s a more experienced ID from a less experienced one through their use of Bloom’s taxonomy (https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/).

Bloom’s (as IDs affectionately refer to it) is the cornerstone for choosing the correct verb as related to the level of learning you want your target audience to complete.

In use with teachers, college instructors, and instructional designers for over 50 years, Bloom’s taxonomy lays out six levels of learning. In 2001, a group of educators and cognitive psychologists revised Bloom’s in their text, A Taxonomy for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment (https://bit.ly/3YTSEQo), in which they redefined six levels of learning, from basic recall to creation, and added dynamic action verbs describing the cognitive processes people use when acquiring knowledge, as shown in the following revised Bloom’s taxonomy model:

Figure 2.4 – Bloom’s taxonomy , Armstrong, P. (2010). Bloom’s Taxonomy. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, (https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/)

Here are some resources that will help you build your skills in writing LOs. You’ll note that each resource listed cites Bloom’s taxonomy:

• How to Write Learning Objectives with Blooms Taxonomy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXGOjzcQdhQ
• Bloom’s Taxonomy: https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/
• An Introduction to Bloom’s Taxonomy for Instructional Designers: https://community.articulate.com/series/practical-instructional-design-how-tos/articles/blooms-taxonomy-elearning-instructional-design

Build your skills in setting performance goals

LOs and performance goals are, indeed, similar. However, one of the key differences is that performance goals are used to improve job performance (I’m talking to you, corporate IDs!).

That said, when your stakeholders are skeptical of what someone will really take away from your learning, discuss setting performance goals to measure before and after the training behaviors.

Developing specific and actionable performance goals is another art form in itself, as you’ll need to work closely with your stakeholders to clearly define the desired behavior change (the new skills acquired) and how this new performance level can be observed and measured.

Here are a few resources to get you started on how to write performance goals in order to measure behavior and new skills acquisition:

• Why and How To Use Performance Goals in eLearning: https://elearningindustry.com/use-performance-goals-in-elearning
• 4 Tips to Promote Transfer of New Skills to the Job: https://community.articulate.com/series/practical-instructional-design-how-tos/articles/4-tips-to-promote-transfer-of-new-skills-to-the-job