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A teacher has many things to do, and one of his most important activities is making sure that the learning of students is supported in every possible way. The previous chapters have described the nature of learning processes and learning outcomes and, thus, have indicated the potential ways in which student learning can be influenced. In this chapter and the next, we propose to discuss how procedures of instruction can be devised and used to make these potential influences become actualities.

Two Aspects of Instruction

Like many complex human activities, instruction has two parts to its accomplishment. Because it is complex and subject to the various constraints of specific situations, it must first be planned. Teachers may plan specific next assignments" for particular students. They may plan lessons for groups or classes of children. They frequently plan a set of topics to be included as part of a year or semester course and often the course as a whole. Sometimes, too, they plan larger programs or "curricula," either independently or as members of a team. Again as team members, they may be called upon to plan an educational program for an entire school or school system, such as a program of independent study or of environmental education.

The second component, following the planning, is the conduct of instructional "operations" or the delivery of instruction. Here the teacher may be arranging an external supporting situation for an individual student, a small face-to-face group, or a larger group like a class. Teachers may be engaged in motivating, stimulating recall, or in any of the other kinds of learning-support activities implied. They may be communicating to students verbally, demonstrating how to do something, displaying some phenomenon before a class, or behaving as human models in adjudicating disputes. Thus, besides the planning the teacher has done in preparation for instruction, many moment-to-moment decisions are required for instructional delivery.

The planning of instruction will be dealt with in this chapter, leaving the matter of delivery to the next. It will be desirable to describe first the basis for planning large units of instruction like courses and topics and then proceed to the individual lesson and its component events. In connection with individual lesson planning, we shall need to pay particular attention to those instructional events which are of critical relevance to the different kinds of learning outcomes. Throughout these descriptions, we continue to have in mind the question, "How can instruction be planned to support the processes of learning most effectively?"

The Planning of Courses Instructional planning is frequently done in terms of relatively large units such as courses. Naturally, such a unit of instruction may occupy various periods of time, from a few days to many months, and a definition of "course" in terms of such time intervals is not a matter of concern here. A course is often conceived as containing several topics, each of which in turn may have a number of different instructional objectives. Thus, a course in American government might include topics on local government, state government, the Congress, the court system, and so on. Each topic in its turn may be further subdivided into subtopics and then into lessons.

Teachers sometimes plan entire courses, although the structure of such courses may often be provided by a textbook or other curricular materials. Within such frameworks, many kinds of adaptations can be made to insure the best usage of the course materials. In some cases, teachers or teams of teachers may undertake to plan a series of topics or an entire course. Here we shall describe course planning without regard to the question of whether the materials are being designed initially or whether they are selected from existing texts and adapted for classroom use.

The rules of planning applicable to courses and topics are primarily the rules of outlining, in which the more inclusive entities are broken down into logically subordinate ones. In addition, a course whose content contains a time frame, like history, may be organized in sequences corresponding to the natural progression of the events it includes. These organizational principles are logically based and have no particular concern with the goal of promoting learning, except insofar as a logically sensible organization may help to establish a favorable student attitude. In contrast to topical outlining, the defining of specific objectives, as described in the previous chapter, is most appropriately done within a topic or within a lesson. There are, however, two aspects of course planning that may have an influence on learning the identification of multiple learning goals and the arrangement of sequences of prerequisites.