How can I "translate" my teaching experience for an Instructional Design position?

I've partnered with Stojanka Berry , the author of the Educators in Ebb newsletter , to show you how a common experience in the classroom can be approached and used to help you get your dream job.

Each month, I will highlight a prominent career pathway that a lot of teachers are targeting. I will focus on translating skills used in the classroom into those that would be valued by employers in the corporate world. This month's career pathway is?Instructional Design.

This same scenario will be used for each scenario to show how your skills would be interpreted and communicated differently based on the career path you've chosen to target. To do this, the following fictional, though very realistic, scenario acts as the basis for these articles.

In preparation for a possible return to virtual learning, you've

been tasked with moving all of your course materials for the rest of the school

year into your school's LMS so that they can be accessed by students online.

This includes creating educational content such as visual aids and videos. You

also have to design digital assessments and provide students with a place to

collaborate virtually. Your principal notes that this is not simply an

asynchronous online course, and it is important that you maintain the same

daily teaching schedule as you would in the classroom. They told you that

everything you are doing right now in person needs to be replicated in the

online teaching environment. This means that your online course needs to be

highly engaging and aligned to state standards.

Let's take a closer look at how you can approach this scenario from an Instructional Design lens.

How does this scenario relate to Instructional Design?

Instructional Designers often design synchronous virtual and asynchronous eLearning experiences for learners. This initiative is a challenge, but also a great way to look at your work from an instructional design perspective.

As an instructional designer, it’s important that you can not only design effective virtual and eLearning, but that you understand the why behind your instructional decisions.

What to keep track of throughout this initiative:

Before:

Gather data on how you previously taught this topic if you can.

• How did you know if students were engaged in the lesson?
• How did you know if students achieved the objectives?
• How did they perform on assessments?

Conduct a needs analysis

• What are the objectives? Specifically - how will you know if students were successful in meeting the objectives in a synchronous learning environment?
• How are your current students currently performing when it comes to this topic?
• What virtual tools can you use to best address the students’ needs and measure their progress?
• How should students interact with each other specifically around the topics you’re teaching in a way that will deepen their learning?
• How can you improve student performance compared to previous years or lessons?
• How will you document student improvements?

Document your planning process!

• Combine the information above along with the decisions you made in one document so that someone can see and follow your planning process.
• You don’t need to use a template or anything specific, but find a way to document your planning, ideas, and the design of your learning solution.
• How will you keep track of all of the deadlines and moving parts of this project? If you're not familiar - this is project management and is an important part of being a great instructional designer!

During:

Collect data!

• How do you know if the students are engaged?
• How do you know if the students learned something?

Train the Trainer

• As part of this initiative, do you/will you need to train other educators on the tools or strategies you’re using?
• How did you/would you train other educators?

After:

• How does this data compare to previous years’?
• What positive changes did you see as a result of this initiative?
• Upload artifacts from this learning initiative to your portfolio
• Update your resume!
• BONUS: If you saw great results, suggest to your administrators that you share the techniques/strategies/tools you used in a professional development session so that others can see similar results in their classrooms. You can add this to your resume as well - it’s a win, win, win!

It’s important to note that even if you collect data and design the best possible synchronous learning solution, you may not have a quantifiable positive result! Your students may not have shown any difference in assessments between the live instructor-led training and the synchronous learning versions. And that’s OKAY! Obviously, having data to support your success is ideal, but sometimes you just don’t have the numbers, and that’s okay! You can still talk about positive changes without data.

But you should be able to articulate in your resume, portfolio, and in an interview what positive changes were a direct result of your efforts.

Some questions to ask yourself (even if you don’t have an exact number to attach to these things):

• Did student engagement increase?
• Did other skills improve that were not explicitly included in the objectives?
• What percentage of students met the objectives?
• How are you remediating instruction for students who didn’t meet the objectives?

What to include in your resume:

• Data on the success of this project
• The positive changes you saw in student engagement and behavior as a result of your efforts
• Planning materials, videos, and aids from the project in your portfolio
• Tools you used to make this happen

How to talk about this initiative in an interview:

It may be helpful to talk through the ADDIE process in an interview. Explain how you determined the learners’ needs, how you determined the design of your project based on the information you gathered in the needs analysis, what tools you used to develop the learning solution, how you implemented the solution, and the results of your efforts. How did you know it was successful? What did you learn from this initiative?

Next month I'll be showing you how to use this?same scenario?to your advantage when targeting a career in Project Management.

Check out last month's post about Customer Success: