Page 227 - Making Instruction Work

chap 18 3/11/97 5:14 PM Page 213

course procedures 213

for your students and include them as the number-one item in
every student’s package of materials.

Where Do Course Procedures Come From?
But where do these procedures come from? How are they
derived? After all, you wouldn’t just sit down and dream up a
set of rules at random. Neither would you write a set of rules
that reflects the philosophy of “I’ll teach them the same way
that somebody taught me.” That would be the amateur’s way
out and probably would result in instruction 40 years behind
its time.
So how do we derive course procedures? We do it by devel-
oping rules that put ideal characteristics into practice as close-
ly as local constraints will allow. This means that we compare
an ideal or desired course characteristic with our own situa-
tion (space, equipment, budget, time, students) and then write
one or more rules that will come as close as possible to imple-
menting that ideal characteristic.
These ideal characteristics are derived from research, vali-
dated learning principles, and experience; they represent state-
ments that describe what we would be doing if we developed
and implemented our instruction in the very best way we
know how. Here are some of the main ones.

Ideal Course Characteristics

1. Instruction exists only where it is a solution or remedy for
a problem in human performance. If they already know
how to do it, they don’t need instruction. If they don’t
need to know how to do it, they don’t need instruction.

2. Instructional objectives have been derived from competent
performance on the job. This guarantees that there is a