Page 97 - Making Instruction Work

chap 8 3/4/97 3:43 PM Page 83

skill hierarchies 83

Why Now?

Since you won’t be sequencing your lessons (modules) into
a course until after you’ve drafted them, why draft a skill hier-
archy now?
Good question. Because you’ve just been thinking about,
and drafting, the objectives of your instruction, you’ve got
objectives on the brain. So it will be a little easier to simply go
the next step and draft your hierarchy while you’re hot.
There’s another reason. Once you’ve drafted your hierarchy
and TPop. (target population) description, you’ll be able to
decide on the prerequisites for your course. In other words,
you’ll be in a position to decide which skills you will teach in
your course and which you will require students to bring with
them when they arrive. This type of intellectual baggage is
referred to as prerequisites and means,“I’m not going to teach
it here; so if you want to benefit from my instruction, you’d
better learn to do it before you come.” Because you’ll want to
make the prerequisite decisions shortly after you draft your
hierarchy, now is a good time to see what the hierarchy will
look like.

What Does a Hierarchy Look Like?

A skill hierarchy looks very much like an organization chart
(ugh!), except that instead of depicting the relationships
between people, departments, and divisions, it depicts the
relationships between skills. Here’s an example.