Lesson 4: Developing an Instructional Strategy

1. Introduction

An instructional strategy is an overall plan describing the information and activities you will present to your learners to help them achieve your instructional goal. Note that it is more than an outline of what you will present to your learners. You will use the information from the planning stage, your goal statement, and learning objectives to create the instructional strategy. When finished, you will have a plan to guide the development of your webinar presentation that includes a set of learning components to achieve the learning outcomes.

Without an instructional strategy, your chances of developing effective instruction are slim. It is like the image shown above of someone throwing darts while blindfolded. They may hit the target, but most likely not the bulls-eye, and many of the darts will miss entirely. You don't want to do this with your instruction.

2. Overview

In this lesson, you will learn how to create an instructional strategy to guide the development of your webinar presentation. At the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

• Recognize the elements of Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction.
• Recognize how Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction help learners process information in a way that enables deep learning. 
• Describe how Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction can be used to create an instructional strategy.
• Using Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction, create a lesson plan for your training webinar.

3. Gagné's Nine Events of Instruction

Robert Gagné was an educational psychologist who is often called the father of instructional design. He originated the concept of an instructional strategy with his systematic approach for developing instruction called Gagné's Nine Events of Instruction. This approach is based on his Conditions of Learning theory which was influenced by information processing theory.

You read about information processing theory in Lesson 1 (Applying learning theories and instructional design models for effective instruction). In this theory, students must first attend to what is being taught (sensory memory). Then the information is placed in their short-term or working memory, where they process it somehow. If they process it in a way that promotes learning, the information is placed in their long-term memory (i.e., they learn it). Gagné proposed that his nine events are necessary for designing instruction because they help students process information.

The Nine Events of Instruction are:

1. Gaining attention
2. Informing learner of objectives
3. Stimulating recall of prior learning
4. Presenting the stimulus material
5. Providing learning guidance
6. Eliciting the performance
7. Providing feedback
8. Assessing the performance
9. Enhancing retention and transfer

3.1. Gaining Attention

SQUIRREL!!!

The first of Gagné's nine events is to gain the attention of the learner. As you learned previously, students must pay attention to learn. This doesn't mean you should do something like shouting, ringing a bell, or other annoying actions. Instead, you want to start the lesson with something that captures their interest in what you are about to present.

Methods for gaining attention include:

• Tell an interesting story that is relevant to the topic and audience
  
• Display and explain an image related to what they are about to learn
• Use an analogy to familiarize the audience with what they will learn and provoke their interest
• Give a demonstration showing what they can achieve from your instruction
• Ask a thought-provoking question

Share your examples for gaining attention during a webinar.

3.2. Informing Learner of Objectives

Once you have your students' attention, the next step is to tell them what they will learn. This will help them organize their thoughts and focus them on the key elements of your instruction. It also helps them determine its relevance to their specific needs. Adult learning theory says that if the material is relevant, it will increase interest in learning it.

Often this step results in a listing of the instruction's learning objectives. This is fine, but you shouldn't list the formal learning objectives you wrote word for word when designing your instruction. These are written for your use, not the learners, so you should transform them into a more casual form. Also, you should list only the top-level objectives. Listing too many will instantly turn learners off. You want to give them the big picture, not every little detail.

Methods for informing learners of objectives include:

• Provide an informal list of learning objectives describing what they will be able to do after completing the webinar
• Pose a set of questions that your instruction will answer
• Conduct a short, informal quiz covering key concepts that you will teach (good use of polling)

Share your examples for informing learners of the objectives.

3.3. Stimulating Recall of Prior Learning

Gagné's third event is to stimulate recall of prior learning. Two reasons for this step are to:

1. Determine if learners have the prerequisite skills they need for the instruction.
2. Help learners relate the new content with what they already know.

Although you probably won't exclude anyone for not having prerequisite skills, it may make them realize they aren't quite ready for what you will present. Ideally, the course description explains these clearly so students can either prepare in advance or find another resource more suitable for their level of knowledge. If your presentation is adaptable and you find that learners don't have the prerequisite skills, you can add additional information to your instruction to get them up-to-speed.

The second reason is more important than the first. You want to help learners integrate the new content with what they already know. This activates their mental processing and helps them learn more easily. It's like helping put together the pieces of a puzzle in their brain.

Methods for stimulating recall of prior learning include:

• Review prior material
• Explain how what you are about to teach relates to the previous instruction
• Ask questions to elicit recall of prerequisite knowledge
• Ask for input about previous observations and experiences
  

Share your examples for stimulating recall of prior learning.

3.4. Presenting the Stimulus Material

This step is commonly referred to as content presentation. You are presenting content that will stimulate learning. The lecture format is typically used to present information in a webinar. This is acceptable, but don't forget that you need to structure your lecture in a way that maintains participant interest.  Talking non-stop through a set of bulleted text items will not do that.

Methods for presenting the stimulus material include:

• Demonstrations
• Examples
• Videos
• Organizing and chunking information in meaningful ways

Share your examples for presenting the stimulus material.

3.5. Providing Learning Guidance

When providing learning guidance, you assist learners while they practice with the new information. However, you don't do it for them. This step is similar to a GPS, it guides you on your journey, but it doesn't drive you.

One important way to provide learning guidance during a webinar involves how you format and present new content.  For example, providing an outline at the beginning of the webinar and then revisiting it as you move through the content. Or displaying your bullet points one at a time rather than all at once. These techniques give a structure to the content that makes it easier to understand and remember. 

Other methods for providing learning guidance include:

• Showing worked examples.
• Conducting short hands-on exercises and provide step-by-step instructions.
• Asking a question and giving hints to the answer (this can be done using polls and surveys).

Share your examples for providing learning guidance.

3.6. Eliciting the Performance

For this event, eliciting the performance, you give students practice activities to perform on their own. Like providing learning guidance, this event is not always feasible given the short duration of a webinar.

However, there are short activities you can do to let participants practice their newly acquired knowledge. These activities typically fall in the Remember and Understand categories of Bloom's taxonomy. These are ideally suited to the use of interactive webinar tools.

Methods for eliciting the performance include:

• Asking a question (using poll or chat) to check for understanding.
• Conducting a short hands-on activity and asking students to use the hand-raising emoticon when they are finished.

Share your examples for eliciting the performance.

3.7. Providing Feedback

Providing feedback to students after they have completed a practice exercise (Event 6) can enhance their performance.  You can't typically provide individual feedback during a webinar, but you can give general feedback to address anticipated errors and explain the correct response.

Methods for providing feedback include:

• Demonstrating the correct solution.
• Conducting a Q&A session to address problems participants may have had while completing the exercise.
• Providing a link to a document describing the correct solution.

Share your examples for providing feedback.

3.8. Assessing the Performance

Accessing student performance is necessary to definitively evaluate the effectiveness of your instruction.  You need to find out if they learned what you intended them to learn. You must align performance assessment with your instruction's learning objectives.

For a webinar, giving a comprehensive assessment (test) is difficult. Your participants would typically not be obligated to complete it and most likely would not do it. However, you could give a short assessment at the end of the webinar on the key concepts addressed in your presentation. One way to do this is to use the assessment as a review or summary of your presentation. Not only will this help you determine if your instruction was effective, but it will also give your participants more opportunities to practice.

Methods for assessing the performance include:

• Summarizing your presentation by asking a series of questions aligned with your learning objectives instead of giving a bulleted text summary.
• Conducting a survey asking students to rate their knowledge after completing the webinar. The questions in the survey need to be directly aligned with your objectives. If short enough, you could do this at the end of your webinar. Otherwise, you can send a link to it in an email.
• Making an optional assessment available after the webinar to test their knowledge. Motivate them to complete it by offering something, such as a digital badge or certificate if they are successful.

Share your examples for assessing the performance.

3.9. Enhancing Retention and Transfer

Just because your webinar is over, you shouldn't think your job of instructing is over. Students need to practice what they were taught to learn it. Short practices during the webinar are not enough. This event, enhancing retention and transfer, addresses actions you can take to help your students retain what they learned and transfer it to their work environment.

Methods for enhancing retention and transfer include:

• Summarizing lesson content. (Always do this)
• Providing references they can use to further their study of the topic.
• Providing practice exercises with solutions they can complete afterward.
• Providing how-to guides, links to documents.
• Offering post-webinar Q&A to answer questions they may have after they have had a chance to apply what you taught.
• Providing a recording of the webinar.

4. Webinar Lesson Plan

A lesson plan is a detailed guide outlining your strategy for teaching your learning objectives. Creating a lesson plan involves developing the activities and materials you will use for your instruction. There are various ways to create a lesson plan, you will learn how to create one using Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction but slightly modified to use terminology found in Dick and Carey's Systems Approach Model for Designing Instruction. The instructional strategy component of the Dick and Carey model is influenced by Gagné's Nine Events. It differs in how it organizes the events into five learning components:

1. Pre-Instructional Activities
2. Content Presentation
3. Learner Participation
4. Assessment
5. Follow-thru Activities

We will work through developing a lesson plan using Dick and Carey's components.

Throughout this section, you will have the opportunity to develop a lesson plan for your webinar topic. You can download the Webinar Lesson Plan Template to guide you through the exercise. The first step is to enter the topic of your instruction, goal statement, and learning objectives you developed in Lesson 3.

4.1. Content Sequencing and Clustering

Content sequencing and clustering is a process for identifying the order and groupings of the lesson content. Your instruction's learning objectives are the starting point for this process. First, you review your learning objectives and decide the order in which you want to teach them. Typically, this is in the order of simplest to the most complex. Then, you organize them into manageable clusters determined by evaluating the information needed to explain the subject. Depending on the type and complexity of your topic (and the number of learning objectives), you may want to present information objective-by-objective or cluster multiple objectives.

Clustering is essentially the same as chunking, the concept for organizing your content described in lesson 2. Recall from lesson 2:

Chunking is a strategy used to break information into smaller pieces that the brain's working memory can hold more easily. George A. Miller introduced the concept in 1956. His evidence showed that working memory capacity is limited and can only hold approximately seven chunks of information at one time. Other researchers have found that the number of manageable chunks is smaller, with a range of four to five bits of information.

Chunking aims to reduce cognitive overload so that information is not lost. This is done by presenting information in amounts the learner can manipulate in working memory, making it more likely to be moved to long-term memory (i.e., learned).

Remember how Sam, in Lesson 3, began developing his webinar? Content sequencing and clustering contrast with his method. Instead of writing an outline of topics to present, you start by identifying your learning objectives. Then, you decide what information will help your learners achieve the intended learning outcome.

An Example

The following goal statement and learning objectives are given as an example. This example will be used to explain the remaining concepts in this course.

The order of these learning objectives already seems reasonable. The first two objectives involve learning the basic concepts – the benefits of interactivity and using common tools. The third objective involves applying what students learn in the first two objectives. Each objective's content will be presented in individual clusters/chunks. 

Enter your webinar's learning objectives (in teaching sequence and clustered) into your Webinar Lesson Plan.

4.2. Plan Pre-instructional Activities

The first three of Gagné's nine events are pre-instructional activities. They occur before you present the main content of your instruction. Review the previous sections describing these events for ideas on the type of activities you might use for your webinar.

An Example

Below are the pre-instructional activities for our example topic: Using Interactivity to Engage Webinar Participants.

Enter your webinar's pre-instructional activities into your Webinar Lesson Plan.

4.3. Plan Content Presentation and Learner Participation

In this next part of our lesson plan, we combine multiple events into two sections - Content Presentation and Learner Participation. These sections include information for the following events:

CONTENT PRESENTATION

4. Presenting the stimulus materials
5. Providing learning guidance

LEARNER PARTICIPATION

6. Eliciting the performance
7. Providing feedback

One reason for this is the need to repeat these sections for each of your objectives or cluster of objectives so it makes organization easier. More importantly though, it is because they are intricately tied together. This is where you help your learners process the information to enable deep learning. First, you present the information and then you help learners understand it using demonstrations and examples. After that, your role changes from being an instructor to being a guide. Your job is now to provide assistance as learners practice by attempting to recall, use, or apply the information you have presented.

Remember that at this point, you are just describing the activities you will conduct, not writing your content.

An Example

Below is the Content Presentation and Learner Participation section of our example lesson plan:

CONTENT PRESENTATION AND LEARNER PARTICIPATION

Enter your webinar's content presentation and learner participation activities into your Webinar Lesson Plan.

4.4. Plan Assessments

Next, you need to explain how you will assess participant understanding of your instruction. You can review methods for doing this in the previous section on 'Assessing the Performance.' 

As was mentioned previously, assessing the performance is not always feasible during a webinar. There is generally not enough time to have participants work on unguided exercises or complete formal assessments such as a quiz or exam. If you do decide to assess participant understanding, be sure to align your assessments with the learning objectives for your webinar.

An Example

Below is the Assessment section of the example lesson plan:

ASSESSMENT

Enter your webinar's assessment activities into your Webinar Lesson Plan.

4.5. Plan Follow-thru Activities

In the Dick and Carey model, Gagné’s event 'Enhancing Retention and Transfer' is called 'Follow-thru Activities.' These are the activities you provide your webinar participants at the end of your presentation and following it. They are activities, documentation, and so on you provide to help your students retain what they learned and transfer it to their work environment.

An Example

The follow-thru section of our example lesson plan is shown below:

FOLLOW-THRU ACTIVITIES

Enter your webinar's follow-thru activities into your Webinar Lesson Plan.

4.6. Sample Lesson Plan

Once you have described what and how you are going to teach your topic, you will move on to creating your presentation materials. Below is the complete example lesson plan developed in this lesson. It will be used to show how to create a PowerPoint presentation from the instructional strategy it describes.

Topic: Using Interactivity to Engage Webinar Participants

Goal Statement: Students will be able to use interactive webinar tools to enhance participant engagement.

Learning Objectives:

1. Recognize the benefits of interactivity in webinar training.
2. Describe ways common interactive tools can be used to promote engagement.
3. Identify ways interactive tools can be used in different scenarios.

PRE-INSTRUCTIONAL ACTIVITIES

CONTENT PRESENTATION

ASSESSMENT

FOLLOW-THRU ACTIVITIES

5. Summary

In this lesson, you learned about Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction and how they help learners process information in a way that enables deep learning. You also learned how the nine events can be used to create an instructional strategy which serves as a framework for developing your instructional materials. Finally, you learned how to describe learning components based on the nine events and document them in a lesson plan to be used for preparing your instructional materials.

Now, let’s review the purpose of each of the nine events. (For examples of how to use them review their individual sections in this lesson.)

1. Gaining attention is about capturing your learner’s interest at the beginning of instruction. It motivates them to pay attention, which is required for them to learn.
2. Informing learner of objectives puts the spotlight on what you are going to teach. This helps learners organize their thoughts and focus on the key elements of your instruction. It also helps them determine if the instruction will be relevant to their specific needs. If it is relevant, their interest in learning it will increase and they are more likely to pay attention.
3. Stimulating recall of prior learning is useful for both student and teacher. As a teacher, it provides you with information about what students already know giving insight into what you might need to review before beginning your instruction. For a student, it gets them ready to receive the new information by connecting it with something they already know.
4. Presenting the stimulus material is the delivery of your instructional materials. You are presenting content such as the concepts and principles required to understand the topic.
5. Providing learning guidance is the process of helping students practice with the information they have been taught. These are guided activities that help students process the information in their working memory so that it will eventually be stored in their long-term memory.
6. Eliciting the performance is when you give students an opportunity to practice with the information on their own. These activities further the processing required to move the information to long-term memory.
7. Providing feedback after students practice what they learn furthers their understanding of the information. It can be used to confirm whether they performed correctly or not, correct performance, and direct them to additional information to further enhance their performance.
8. Assessing the performance is used to evaluate the effectiveness of your instruction. This requires assessing student performance to see if they achieved the intended learning outcomes. Assessments must be tied to your learning objectives.
9. Enhancing retention and transfer provides students with further opportunities beyond the instruction to practice what they learned. This event is essential for helping your students retain what they learned and transfer it to their work environment.

6. Self-Test

Check your understanding of the material presented in this lesson.

Take the Lesson 4 Self-Test