Speaker 1: Alignment, it's not only critical to the role of the instructional designer, it's critical for curriculum development. I want you to consider the three-legged stool as a way to consider how alignment works and how it needs to be balanced. We take a look at planning, delivery, and then assessment as being the three legs of the stool, and we need to find an alignment or a balance with those three components. Consider also this perspective. The intended curriculum is what we plan on teaching. The implemented curriculum is how we plan to teach that curriculum. And the achieved curriculum is an assessment of the evidence of that student's learning. This is really what alignment can be considered. It's a balance of the intended, the implemented, and the achieved. So what is it that we're doing, how are we doing it, and how are we assessing it? That's the alignment that we want you to consider. Now if you're out of alignment, there are going to be challenges. Effective alignment means you have learning outcomes or goals, learning activities, and assessment all aligned, and you've got balance. Now you're out of balance when your learning outcomes and your learning activities and assessment don't align. In the first scenario, your learning outcomes are bigger and broader. The activities really don't cover or encompass what your outcomes are, your intended outcomes have outlined. And your assessment only catches a small overlap of both the outcomes and activities, and you're assessing things that aren't even within the outcome. So this is really not a good scenario. Scenario B is a little bit better in the sense that your outcomes are bigger and broader, and your activities are getting a little bit closer, but your assessment really doesn't cover everything that was addressed. And students might complain that they've done all this work, but they haven't really been assessed fairly. In the final scenario, C, this is a little bit better. You've got an alignment between your learning outcomes and activities, but you're assessing things that are out of scope. So this might be a scenario where you hear the question, well, that question wasn't covered in the material. So you want to have effective alignment. Effective alignment addresses outcomes or goals aligned with activities and assessment. This is over the context of environmental and situational factors. Now it's really important to understand that you can apply this to both competency-based and outcomes-based education. Now depending on where you are in the continuum, if you're doing competency-based education, you're focusing on skills, information assessment, credentialing exams, introductory courses, a little bit more teacher-controlled content center. It's traditionally a lot of what we see in education today. You would be dealing with competency-based education, and you would be dealing with goals and objectives. If you are moving towards the outcomes-based education scenario, you're looking at real-world authentic learning assessment, real projects, higher-order thinking skills, you're looking at higher-order courses, senior courses, graduate courses, things like that. There's learner control. It's a little bit more learner-centered, and you're moving into the higher-order thinking. So depending on where you are on this continuum, if you're doing outcomes-based, you're going to be looking at the outcomes. This is to help you clarify the terminology, because the terminology is going to be influenced by the tools that we use as well. So if you're using competency-based education, you're going to be using a DACM as your design document, and you're going to have goals, which will be broken down into objectives. And those goals and objectives are realized through activities, which are assessed traditionally through testing or verification or some other thing, demonstration. And those goals and activities then lead to the objectives, which lead to the goals. That's alignment. Now, with outcomes-based education, you are going to use something like an outcomes map or traditional outcomes map, where you've got your outcomes, you have a list of activities or instructional methodology and strategies, and you have a list of activities and tasks and assessment, which will lead to those course outcomes. And so you can see the alignment that you have here as well. That's one of the most effective tools for seeing alignment is the variation of Fink's three-column table. And it's a variation where I use a big, hairy, dacious goal at the top, and then I have an alignment of outcomes, assessment, and activities demonstrated in this table and in the three different columns. And you can see very clearly that you've got your outcome, which is identified, and you can see what the assessments are. You can see the learning activities, and you can see how these activities lead to the assessment, which lead to the outcomes. And you see that for all the different levels of Fink's taxonomy. Very effective tool, very easy to plan for alignment. Understanding or getting to alignment is often a challenge. And I would argue that there's probably four key reasons or four impediments to effective alignment. And the first one is systemic. We are in a system of education where we do information transfer and content delivery. We use standardized testing and a lot of test prep because that's the way our system works. And mostly related to that, we often tend to do what was done to us. And so if people taught out of the text or taught from the syllabus, that is what we are comfortable with. And that's often what we do when we're educators and we just get going. And to make adjustments to that, we also run into a bit of a challenge. We're looking for a quick tool, quick fix. We're often not able or don't understand what's involved in what I would refer to as an extended DIY, where you take a look at a solution to the problem in a more complex way. But yet you're using simple tools, give me a method, give me a process, give me a simple tool to solve my complex problem. That doesn't work. Perhaps the fourth impediment, which is the biggest one, is that we often only look at the cognitive domain. In the last little scenario, I did talk about the cognitive domain, and you can take a look at alignment, cognitively speaking. And that is enough for instructional design. That's often enough for your curriculum development. But if you really want to take a look at effective learning and want to go deeper, you need to move beyond the cognitive domain and take a look at the other two-thirds of the learner. And what I'm referring to here is what Bloom had referred to earlier on in the 50s. And he looked at three aspects of the learning domain, the effective, the cognitive, and the psychomotor. Yes, Bloom's taxonomy is not just about the cognitive. He stressed the effect of the psychomotor domains. And the effective domain is about values, about attitudes. The psychomotor is what you physically do. The cognitive domain is where we all live. Most people live. You're familiar with Bloom's taxonomy and the verbs. But it's only one-third of the individual. We're familiar with Bloom's taxonomy in this regard, and we're often not familiar with the other aspects. I often like to use a variation of Bloom's taxonomy when we're looking at the structure of the terminology that we want to use, the verbs, but also to stress the fact that Bloom's taxonomy does point to higher-order thinking. By inverting Bloom's taxonomy and putting the synergy of analyzing, evaluating, and creating at the top, you recognize that when you move into the higher-order thinking, these three activities, which lead to the synthesis of deeper knowledge, are really important. And they help us to recognize that if we want to move into that outcomes-based education, we need to be in that realm of analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Now there's another way that we can look at this, and I would argue we need to change our focus. We need to focus on authentic learning opportunities, which will help us to recognize learner growth. When we do that, the knowledge, skills, and standards that we have in the curriculum that we need to address are taken care of by the actual authentic learning opportunity. I refer to this as creating a significant learning environment where you give your learners choice, ownership, and voice through authentic learning opportunities. I refer to it as the CSLE plus COVA approach. Now in that approach, I use a tool called Think Taxonomy as Significant Learning to help develop my instructional plan, my three-column tables, and my planning documents. And those planning documents address foundational knowledge, application, integration, human dimension, caring, and learning how to learn, or becoming a self-directed learner. And if we look at Think Taxonomy, it addresses the cognitive and the effective, as well as when we incorporate real projects, we can address that psychomotor domain. Let's just take a closer look here. With foundational knowledge, this is really a matter of understanding key ideas, information, the foundation, the basics. What do you need to know? How do you apply it then? What types of projects are going to be involved to apply that? How do you realize that? What type of a project can you use to tease that out? When you start building real-world projects, well, guess what? You're connecting real activities to the real world. You've got people, so you have different realms of life. When that happens, you need to consider the human dimension, learning about oneself and others. As soon as you involve people, guess what? There's caring, feelings, values, ethics, all those good things. And the final component is really about becoming a self-directed learner and an autodidact. And that's the notion of learning how to learn. So Thinks Taxonomy is a very powerful tool. And it's powerful because it focuses on multiple dimensions of learning, not just the single content-centered paradigm, which is very, very shallow, and it really focuses on just that one dimension. But with Thinks Taxonomy, you go much deeper, application, integration, human dimension, caring. And that notion of learning how to learn, becoming that autodidact, very, very effective tool. It's realized through a three-column table design document, very easy to use. And here's a practical example. My variation of Thinks Taxonomy includes a big, hairy, dacious goal, which really drives a focus of the why we're doing these things. And this big, hairy, dacious goal is really about innovation planning. How do you use technology as a catalyst to bring about change and bring about change in your organization? So I'm summarizing that, obviously. So with my three-column table, I have three different columns. If I take a look at my foundational outcome, I want my learner to understand what disruptive innovation is. How is it used as a catalyst for change? How could it be an innovative catalyst? Well, guess what? My learning activities, students explore it. They look at it. They look at examples. They start to build an idea of an innovation plan, right? That's the assessment piece. I get them involved in discussions and collaborations. As they go a little bit deeper, they take a look at literature reviews. They explore the research on this. They find out what other people are doing. So that's the assessment tool, the literature reviews assessment tool. And that gets them to the application of them being able to see examples of how this works in other places. So this is a wonderful tool for building a design plan for your courses that will allow you to go much, much deeper and to address those authentic learning opportunities that can drive deeper learning. Why is authentic learning so important? Why is deeper learning so important? Why is higher order thinking so important? Well, consider Jean Piaget's quote here, principal goal of education is to create people who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done. People are students who are creative, inventive, and discoverers. The second goal of education is to form minds that can be critical, can verify and not accept everything they're offered. Powerful words of wisdom. I want to leave you with this final challenge and thought. Are you just preparing your students for the test or are you preparing them for life?