In 2001, I started describing a way I thought I would like to use (when it is available) to increase learning by students assigned to my classes. I adapted concepts from business, where failure to manage and use certain data to make daily decisions can lead to business failure.
Teachers make thousands of decisions daily about the best wording, visuals, movements, timing, incentives, consequences, etc. that may affect each student’s learning before, during, and after instruction. Yet interestingly, teachers operate without a clear decision matrix beyond professional judgment, administrative oversight, and standardized test results.
And data about a teacher’s decisions are less than precise enough for that teacher to know what specifically to do differently next time with specific students about specific instructional content.
I started outlining a business approach to this situation. The approach appears doable as a project. At other times, it seems like a fantasy, becuase I imagine its competition.
The increasing use of Tablet PCs and other notebooks in schools leads me to rethink what information I would want so I could refine my teaching in order to increase learning by each student in my classes.
I’d like a core Instructional Technology Platform (ITP) through which I may make and monitor my decisions about instructional transactions and interactions. The ITP relies on a Decision Matrix.
This Decision Matrix is to instruction what a Microsoft operating system is to a Tablet PC or other personal computer.
Ideally, the ITP will include instruction related processes, including those that I may take for granted, such as logical and axiological assumptions used (sometimes unknowingly) to plan and conduct a lesson. This platform will clarify for me the most logical and empirically supported ways to design instructional outcomes, identify materials and steps to use as well as alternative presentation and persuasion tactics to obtain these outcomes.
I would use the Decision Matrix through my Tablet PC when planning, instructing, evaluating student responses and deciding what to do next.
Decision Matrix will add value to my instruction by delineating consistencies of my decisions and spurous actions to support and promote selected learning outcomes for individual students.
This is doable as a simple business start-up venture, maybe with an education ASP, or another entrepreneur. It’s a project, not a career.
I’m sure others share a similar vision and still more are addressing the topic as requiring installation of a massive, expensive bureaucratic infrastructure.
I think I’ll keep working on the simple side of a Decision Matrix as a core digital instructional technology business venture that draws on existing databases.