Instructional Strategies

The design of sequences and methods of instruction for facilitating learning, especially concerning how to teach. The design of instructional strategies is informed by developments in psychological and educational research in learning, instructional design, curriculum development, and philosophy. The convergence and divergence of educational research findings indicate, on the one hand, that educational communities view learning as active meaning construction in general and, on the other hand, that learning is multidimensional with different foci on acquiring facts and skills, developing mental structures and cognitive abilities, or participating in resource-rich learning environments. While insights from this research help generate major instructional models and supporting strategies, instructional strategies serve instructional purposes defined contextually and thus can be used strategically in the face of different learning problems. In other words, effective instructional strategies have both theoretical and pragmatic grounding.

[Page 262]Instructional strategies are prescribed in direct response to instructional objectives, shaped by content and performance. Different categorizations of objectives result in different groupings of instructional strategies. At the same time, local instructional objectives should be embedded in a larger coherent instructional unit that emphasizes active learning. In this case, the grouping of instructional strategies can benefit from recent research on expertise, which indicates that adaptive experts are high on both processes that lead to innovation and processes that lead to efficiency through well-practiced routines.

Instructional strategies are also prescribed with the consideration of (a) desired instructional outcomes and (b) instructional conditions. Desired instructional outcomes include effectiveness (attainment of instructional objectives), efficiency (effectiveness as against time and costs), and appeal (learner enjoyment). Given that instruction has complex relationships with learning, learners, and resources, the design of instructional strategies should address the issue of when and when not to use certain strategies by looking into the nature of the learner, the learning environment, and the resources, as well as the learning. It should be noted that instructional strategies can be reconfigured due to dynamic learning processes, whereby instructional decisions are constantly made. As such, instructional strategies are a set of heuristics, or flexible problem solving strategies.

Depending on the stages and needs of learning, instructional strategies fall along a continuum from direct to indirect instruction, from teacher fronted to experiential, from structured to ill structured, from interactive to independent, and from teacher (or peer) facilitated to technology mediated. Each instructional strategy features a variety of more specific instructional tactics, such as presentation, demonstration, role playing, discussion, brainstorming, and reflection. For more information, see Reigeluth (1999).