Instructional Design Practices in Teacher Education Programs
Abstract: Instructional design (ID) simply refers to the effective and efficient design and development of instruction. The goal of instructional design is to help students better learn and remember what they have learned by arranging an environment that is conducive to their learning. If by formal education, we understand its intentional and carefully arranged nature, instructional design becomes an integral and essential part of any formal education effort. In addition to the contributions to the learning process, which is the heart of any educational or training activity, instructional design also helps us save time and monies to deliver instruction. Considering the importance of instructional design, one can assume that most teacher education programs make it a foundational and key part of their curricula. But, a quick survey of various teacher education programs will reveal that ID is reduced to the teaching of lesson planning at best, and that many programs miss the mark to deliver a well grounded series of ID courses to their teacher education students. This paper reviews the current status of ID practices in teacher education programs and argues that with the accountability movements of early 2000s, teaching and researching of ID is pushed back and replaced by design-based research (DBR) in teacher education.