Visualizing high school technology teachers’ creative process in instructional design using the eight trigrams (BaGua) approach

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges to teachers. Teachers need a creative way to continue the engaged teaching process under the constraints of physical separation, emotional anxiety, and insecurity. Technology teachers who develop students’ technology literacy or skills should be aware of the importance of integrating technology or facilitating a more creative process in instructional design. Especially, it is valuable to explore creative instructional design to solve problems. The Yin and Yang of BaGua, representing opposite connection, is regarded as a catalyst for fostering creative problem-solving abilities, and offers a theoretical perspective on the process of instructional design. Hence, this study aimed to incorporate the BaGua-based creative problem-solving model into Dick and Carey’s instructional design process to visualize each stage of creative instructional design, encompassing the initial stage of design development, formulation of plans, plan demonstration stage, and effectiveness in completing instructional design. Through eight hypotheses, this study investigated the correlation between activities in the model’s adjacent stages. A total of 1,169 high school technology teachers completed the survey. Structural equation modeling was used to verify the hypotheses. The results showed that analyzing learning needs can positively predict interaction and stillness, interaction and stillness can positively predict idea generation of instructional design, support and confrontation can be positively predicted by idea generation of instructional design, and completing instructional design can be positively predicted by support and confrontation. This study presents a creative procedural model of creative instructional design to facilitate teachers’ comprehension of the sequential steps that should be followed in creative instructional design and enable them to implement it accordingly.