Instructional goals, critical thinking & creativity

This week our chapter in the DCC book was all about identifying instructional goals. 

When I first saw this, I was frankly a little appalled...the examples included things like performance measures and instructions on how to interact with customers in service jobs. In short, these kinds of "objectives" quickly brought back all my worst experiences with learning -
either as a student with a boring textbook, or as an employee at a crappy job, being instructed on how to hold my face all day long (!!!)   For example, there was an example which was all about creating learning in a call center, as well as customer service in a bank.


These examples instantly made me feel "squidgy" about who instructional designers are and what they do in big companies...and I don't want to ignore this reaction...I think sometimes with crappy service-sector jobs, corporate management ideas can absolutely be about the best way to eek out the maximum productivity out of the least-compensated people doing the most boring/stressful jobs at the company - putting an extra burden on people who already have to take an enormous amount of crap in their daily work.  And textbooks can make even the most lively critical thinking exercises seem dull, stilted and un-creative.  We as humans want to think of our skills as fluid, coherent & organic - we don't necessarily want our learning (or daily activities) broken down & micromanaged into tiny, measurable chunks.  Unless....

Unless it helps them perform a task better.

I also came up against this conundrum when teaching writing to my students.  I came from the creative writing field, where everything was supposed to be about one's personal journey, discovery, launching oneself into the unknown - etc.  However, what go the best response from my students?  When I broke down a complex task (creating an academic paragraph) down into concrete parts, gave them a model and made them practice it and then use it in context- they loved it!  What did they hate?  Anytime I gave instructions or an essay prompt that seemed unclear or ambiguous.

As a creative writer, I came into the writing field to give students agency, control & confidence in the area of writing.  But I also came hoping that they would feel they had a voice & could assert their own creativity & ideas in their writing.   The idea of giving them sentence templates & paragraph formats gave me the absolute willies...at first.

Eventually, however, I have come around to them.  Part of this came from an experience I had as a student teacher, where the instructor loved the idea of having students, "wander in the wilderness" of an essay prompt,  trying to find an argument and "their voice."  However, I noticed when grading was done, often it was very concrete skills (giving context & background, orienting readers to sources, integrating quotes & tying evidence to a thesis) that were being evaluated....and students, for all their "creative" room - hadn't been specifically taught how to do these things.  So....what is more empowering?  Having the "room" to discover your own thoughts & voice (maybe....especially for students that already have basic skills!)   Or is it actually learning the material you'll be graded on - and feeling confident about that?

As a teacher, I've sought for a long time to find ways to do both...but it's hard.  Practicing those needed skills is so important, and so empowering for students that had never acquired them...but as a teacher, it moves my experience of teaching from one of wonder and discovery to that of, say, a track coach putting athletes through their (grueling, difficult) paces.  They may hate what we do at times, but they trust us and know it'll make them stronger in the end.

So when it comes to design...I think I undersstand the need to articulate objectives.  The worst lessons I've taught were always the ones where I wasn't 100% sure WHY I was doing what I was doing.  Some of the best ones were when I had a laser-like focus on what students would be able to do at the end, each activity tailored to a goal.  Some of the other best ones, however, were ones where discovery & "wandering" were the goals - and students reported really valuing these, also.
 

Out there in the "real world," I imagine these concepts also apply.  As an employee, I don't want my every movement and thing I say to be micromanaged.   But if my boss is looking for very specific things - even in terms of customer service - so that I can pass a performance review/get a raise, of course I'll want those broken down.   If I work at a call center and computer problems keep ruining my day and making my work stressful, having a trouble-shooting plan on hand probably will make my job easier.   In a survey course, yes - I want to know what I'll have to know for the final exam!  Nobody wants to be evaluated on skills that were never taught!

At the same time...I do strongly believe that every single person in the world deeply desires to use their critical thinking skills and have their insights heard and valued. 

 My brother, who teaches high school and interacts a lot with state-wide standards & benchmarks & testing, always says, "the tests measure what is easy to assess...not what is most critical to learning."   Is this also a pitfall of ID?  That instruction can get limited to the things which are easy to measure?   Critical thinking is such an important skill - yet so difficult to articulate in terms of "observeable skills" - much less to assess!

Wouldn't it be cool if even in low-wage jobs, there was room for information to flow two ways, for insights about productivity & performance to be heard from the "ground up" and for workers to be more than just recipients of information, but to actually have a hand in solving problems at their work?