Supporting Quality Instruction: Building Teacher Capacity as Instructional Designers

Abstract

A predominant narrative about adult education during the COVID-19 pandemic has been about how teachers, under unprecedented hardship, endeavored to work in new ways, drawing on technology tools and digital resources to sustain instruction when they could not meet learners in person. In order to succeed, teachers had to embrace working in entirely new ways--especially in the way they planned or designed instruction. In this article, Jen Vanek offers the suggestion of encouraging structured use of technology integration frameworks and strategies to evaluate the effectiveness of their decisions and implementation. Doing so can help teachers build on what they learned as practitioners during the pandemic and build their capacity to design technology-rich instruction that meets the needs of diverse learners. This article discusses the following tech integration models: (1) Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK), (2) Puentedura's Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition (SAMR), and (3) the Triple E Framework--Enhance, Extend, and Engage.