The Impact of Instructional Design with Dave McAlinden

Dave McAlinden is an instructional designer at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies. In this episode, we start by clarifying a question many educators have: What does an instructional designer actually do? If you’ve ever taken an online course, you’ve already experienced the impact of instructional design—whether you realized it or not.

You can connect with Dave on LinkedIn: (2) Dave McAlinden | LinkedIn
Feel free to reach out—Dave enjoys engaging with educators and talking through ideas about teaching, learning, and instructional design.

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What is Better Teaching: Only Stuff That Works?

Descriptions of effective teaching often depict an idealized form of "perfect" instruction. Yet, pursuing perfection in teaching, which depends on children's behavior, is ultimately futile. To be effective, lessons and educators need to operate with about 75% efficiency. The remaining 25% can be impactful, but expecting it in every lesson, every day, is unrealistic. Perfection in teaching may be unattainable, but progress is not. Whether you are aiming for the 75% effectiveness mark or striving for continuous improvement, this podcast will guide you in that endeavor.

Gene Tavernetti: Welcome to Better Teaching, Only Stuff That Works, a podcast for teachers, instructional coaches, administrators, and anyone else who supports teachers in the classroom.

This show is a proud member of the BE Podcast Network shows that help you go beyond education.

Find all our [e-mail].

I Am Gene Tavernetti the host for this podcast.

And my goal for this episode, like all episodes, is that you laugh at least once and that you leave with an actionable idea for better teaching.

A quick reminder, no cliches, no buzzwords.

Only stuff that

works.

My guest today is Dave McLendon.

Dave is an instructional designer and instructional media director at Columbia University School of Professional Studies where he builds online learning that's clear, practical, and effective.

His work blends video production with instructional theory with a focus on multimedia learning, instructional design, and relationship building.

He has a special interest in memory and how people actually retain and use what they learn.

We just scratched the surface on this whole idea of instructional design and instructional media, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Good morning, Dave.

Welcome to Better Teaching Only stuff that works.

Good morning.

Thank you for having me here.

Really appreciate it.

Well, here's the thing, not to put any pressure on you, but in the introduction to the show, every week I say that I hope that everyone will laugh at least once.

And learn something actionable.

So no pressure Dave.

No pressure, but yeah, be funny singing and Dance monkey.

There you go.

Alright.

Well, you know, I was introduced to you by a mutual friend, Sarah Oberly, and she says, you gotta talk to this guy.

And so I looked you up and said you were an instructional designer and.

That's great.

And then I had no idea what it was.

So, so what exactly is an instructional Dave?

Well, first I want to thank Sarah for introducing us.

I'm, it's so important to have connections and it's so important to have like really great mutual friends and she definitely is one of them.

So anyone listening to this check out Sarah Ober Lee's work.

She's awesome.

She just came up with a book with niche.

That's right.

Anyway, what is an instructional designer?

So you won't like the first part.

No one likes the first part of this answer.

So an instructional designer baseline answer for any question that they get asked, including this one.

What is an instructional designer is it depends.

So IDs are basically in the business of creating learning experiences, and learning is really contextual as it turns out, and that includes the systems and environments in which that learning is designed, not just when it is delivered.

So it depends.

Having said that, at a high level, instructional designers, create and organize the necessary and sufficient conditions for learning to happen.

So the job.

Basically what that means is you take a goal or objectives or a set of objectives, like students should be able to do X and Y under conditions P and Q to the degree of Z, right?

Very specific, measurable, objective, and then design a path that kind of shortens the distance and enhances the quality.

Of the journey from not knowing something or being able to do something to knowing something or being able to do something, which means that you have to do a needs analysis, an audience analysis.

What are kind of like the larger goals for this?

Is it for the person?

Is it for the, you know, return on investment of this training in an institution?

Right?

Breaking complex skills into smaller steps, building practice and feedback into the experience and evaluating whether or not what you did worked.

At the end.

So it's not just making content look nice in an online format or in the resources and materials you're given, which a lot of the time I think that that's what people think instructional designers do.

Especially like in the LMS space, they kind of conflate course developers with instructional designers, which are kind of different things, but they work together.

It's systematically designing instruction.

So learning is more likely to happen.

The history of it goes back to like before or during World War II when we had a dearth of pilots and the US air Force was just like, we
need a training program to get people who have never flown before into planes taking off, flying, shooting, flying back, and landing safely.

So they got all these psychologists together to.

Figure out how to best create that training line.

And that was kind of the birth of what was, I think then called Instructional systems design.

That might've came after the first name for it.

But that's basically where it comes from and it's evolved into all sorts of different areas and verticals, and it applies to learning institutions.

And they're more, ever since COVID especially, they're more the field is growing and growing.

Well, what's interesting, before you brought technology into it, and just to reflect on your answer, the technology piece was a much smaller piece of your answer.

If somebody were to just start listening and hear your response about what instructional design is, it sounds a lot like instruction.

So, so what was your background, you know, to get into this?

So, the, it's interesting what you say about the technology piece being secondary 'cause it's part of my educational philosophy or philosophy as an instructional designer is that technology should never drive pedagogy.

Pedagogy should drive technology decisions.

So we're not putting the cart before the horse or trying to shoehorn the right solution to the wrong problem which often happens because people are always trying to get ahead of the market on specific things.

We'll see, we're kind of seeing that with ai, people are trying to bolt AI onto everything instruction when that's really putting the cart before the horse, and there's a long way to go with that.

And I, I digress there, but my background was, like I, I mean, I was a bartender for years and did a lot of different jobs.

I was a writer.

The recession happened and I went back to being a bartender.

I was a truck driver, all that stuff.

And then eventually I found my way to teaching ESL abroad during the recession in like oh 8, 0 9, up to, you know, you know, 2011 and all that stuff.

I would go back and forth and I really learned how to teach.

And then I went back to the same school that had this wonderful methodology.

And students were learning and you could see progress, and it was just really well designed instruction.

You could tell that the materials were designed by an instructional designer with subject matter experts held to a really high standard,
and all of a sudden they switched to a tech model where they gave kids tablets and they went from like very solid, explicit instruction.

To much more of like a constructivist model with technology and you just saw it just tank in terms of outcomes, like immediately.

Because they basically like the kids a toy to put you in between them.

All these different distractions.

There's all this other stuff going on.

You weren't like, you were trying to get them to discover stuff.

Based on like knowledge they didn't have.

And I was really frustrated and I didn't really know what instructional design was at the time.

And I was constantly complaining in the teacher's lounge about it, about the change.

And my friend Thomas was just, he was taking a class in instructional design at Texas a and m at the time, and he's just like, I think you'd be really interested in this, 'cause what you're saying aligns with what they've been teaching us here.

So I kind of discovered it that way.

And then before you know it, I was in a graduate program for instructional design.

And then I just, you know, through that became an instructional designer.

So in your coursework, in instructional design, did a graduate level?

Mm-hmm.

How much.

Because I know that you in your post you talk about science of learning.

You talk about a lot of the topics in that.

Was that included in any of your coursework, those conversations?

Yeah, so like all of the, like the coursework was very much like entry level points to all of those things, right?

They give you really good, solid foundation in a lot of that stuff.

And it was kind of like a buffet and wherever you wanted to dig deeper.

You could dig deeper.

And then afterward, I just got really intensely I guess obsessed with learning theory.

And that was something that really led into how things apply.

Like at first I was talking a lot about like, oh, like this is the theory.

This is how it works.

Here are the frameworks, this is how it works.

But then I didn't really give a whole lot of consideration to how that would be delivered, what it would look like in the classroom, what it
would look like in the training center, what it would look like, one-to-one apprentice mentor, what it would look like in a coaching situation.

Again, learning is very contextual.

So the theory kind of.

Provides the grounding.

But it has to change and shift and all of that stuff.

So in the grad program, it gave you a lot of hands-on project-based stuff, but also tons of reading to really understand what the implications of these things were.

You know, what the difference between schools of thought were, where they came from, what they were aiming at.

But ultimately afterward it was just like.

It kind of felt like, you know, going through a bootcamp as like, here are all the tools you need to survive.

And then when you're out in the field, you're gonna realize which ones you don't need and which ones you need to be able to do better, you know?

So is it, is your background unique, having a teaching background in this and I know you are in a supervisorial role now.

Is it something that you look for?

That type of background when you are hiring people or training people or well, I don't think that my, my background in, in teaching per se, is unique to this position.

I think my background in the service industry might be because it's kind of, you know, a heady academic field.

Like TE teaching isn't a prerequisite to be an instructional designer, I don't think.

I think a lot of teachers will say it is.

That's a really good question.

It's not something I look for.

If you have teaching background, it helps because you kind of understand whether or not something might work based on the behavioral conditions,
uhhuh of whatever environment it is you're delivering this designed instruction and understanding like, you know, learners' needs and stuff like that.

Accessibility how and reconciling the design with the delivery.

But I don't really.

Look for that.

I don't hire much.

I have two contract workers that work under me, and then I work with a team of directors laterally and in honor to them, they have contract workers and full-time workers.

And I'm mainly concerned with the media piece and designing instructional media and.

What I look for in, what I was looking for in the people that I hired who are fantastic is proficiency and consistency with the tool and understanding how to where the applied piece is from the theoretical base.

And if they were just familiar with a couple of, they didn't need to be full on instructional designers or needed to be full on teachers,
but they needed to be able to create things using a set of premises principles and practices that aligned with our goals as a team.

Okay.

So let's talk about, you're at Columbia.

Who are your clients?

Who are your clients?

Who do you design?

These products for, and actually, when you're done designing a product, what is it?

What does the product look like?

Oh well, what for the instructional design side and the instructional media side, they work together.

So I started as an instructional designer, moved to senior designer, then moved to associate director of instructional design and media.

So the media thing is, that kind of falls under my purview in the larger instructional design team.

So, our main clients are the academic programs at SPS in Columbia.

So you have.

They're all master's degree programs and they're all very like, market focused and you kind of very applied.

So like wealth management is one.

Enterprise risk management, conflict negotiation and resolution.

Information and knowledge.

There's a lot of, you know, very.

Kind of white collar, I guess, job focus training in these, you know, master's programs.

So our kind of main clients are each program and then they would pair us, or at least request.

Support for instructional design on any one of their courses or several of their courses.

And we would get paired with the subject matter ex expert, which is the faculty member who is teaching this course, and they would come in with some goals and resources and an idea of what they want to teach or a ready mid course already.

And then they would work with an instructional designer to shore all that stuff up, tighten it, make it to standards, make sure things are accessible, things work in the LMS.

Things are lean, but, you know, not easy.

And to reach an amount of rigor.

There's a lot of like committees like on instruction that make sure that the the syllabus is tight and to standards and aligned.

And there's a balance of.

Like academic resources with like market resources, you know, more practitioner based.

'cause we have a scholar practitioner model and then they decide whether or not they need media created.

And this could be like video lectures job aids or one pagers to help people redesigns of slide decks to make them a bit more instructional focused than either like, you know, just looking nice.

So that, that's kind of what we do.

So a product would be a course and in the.

The media area, it would be a piece of media or several pieces of media.

It could be producing a podcast, it could be doing a set of lecture videos, some animated explainers.

It could be a one pager, it could be a slide deck.

So there's all of these different kind of instructional products that get made out of the.

You know, the development system, which then all COHEs at the end to one very tightly aligned intentional course that we can maximize the learning out of according to what objectives were set.

So just my check for understanding you're talking about developing asynchronous courses.

That may be within the university in a master's program or something that somebody from outside could also access.

Well, they're not all asynchronous.

Some of them are asynchronous.

Okay.

Some of them are not.

So some are synchronous online.

Some of are hybrid, some of 'em are fully synchronous or a are asynchronous.

But even those asynchronous courses have office hours.

Where everyone goes at the same time.

So it's not exactly that.

So you have like the video lectures, and then you have like basically clarification sessions in the office hours, which everybody goes to.

Okay.

So the it's, yeah, not fully asynchronous, even though they're labeled as such.

And they're all, you know, the cohorts are all filled with people with lots of experience, adults with lots of experience in that field who want to get these more advanced
degrees to either advance their career or update their information about the field because they might have been siloed in their job that they've been in for 20 years.

And they want to understand what a, you know, what's been updated, what's been not.

Or just networking purposes.

depends on, so it kind of goes back to your initial answer about context and audience and that sort of thing.

Every time you give an answer.

I have another question because I, things that I, there's so much, I don't know.

You're making a distinction I think between instructional media and media.

Well, what, can you talk about that?

What is the difference?

Sure.

I explain this quite often and sometimes it doesn't always get across because of our set schemas around things like media.

So, like most media as we learn in school is to like, inform, persuade, or entertain, you know, that could be a, you know, your piece of writing or a video or whatever it is you're making.

Instructional media instructional, underlined can do all those things.

They can inform, persuade, and entertain, and hopefully they do.

But those are necessary but not sufficient conditions for optimal learning.

Now, like it doesn't mean you can't learn from something that isn't designed as a piece of instructional media.

Of course you can, but.

If you really wanna optimize the media for learning specifically it, it ends up being a little bit of a different thing.

So what makes instructional media different is it's built to scaffold understanding, right?

Support skill building, and help learners from like kind of form these like durable connections they can use later.

And that comes from using a set of like com cognitive premises.

On, on how the brain works or the mind works.

A set of multimedia learning principles and, you know, maybe some UX stuff, gestalt principles, stuff like that.

But mainly multimedia learning principles that come from the great and wonderful Richard Mayer, who's one of my heroes in this space.

And a set of best practices on how to, like design activities and how to carry these things out.

Also, how do we build in accessibility and, you know, control for bias and stuff like that.

But all this stuff has to scale too.

So you have, you can't, you're never gonna have a perfect piece of instructional media.

You'll have a really effective one that's based on like, you know, these principles that you apply that have very large effect sizes, but you still have to really work hard to step back at some point in time and not let perfect be the enemy of execution.

As one of my friends says you never wanna let good be the enemy of good enough, especially where you are working with these huge things.

So you have to do, keep in mind that like media's gonna work, whether it's instructionally designed or not, but an instructional, a piece of instructional media is going to work better.

And that's what we do.

It's kind of a game of inches and you just really want to make it as conducive to learning.

Effectively, efficiently and enjoyably for the learner.

It's all about the end user.

You know, I'm people ask me where I grew up mm-hmm.

And I could tell 'em, you know, I lived at a certain place for a certain amount of time.

I don't know if I got any more mature, if I grew up or not.

But when I ever have done any sort of online learning.

Asynchronous or not?

My attention wanes, I'm in and out, like we're speaking.

I've been looking forward to this conversation for a week.

Yet every time I get a notification on my phone, I gotta check, you know?

Yeah.

So, so having said that, what sort of things do you do to make sure.

Or at least do the best you can to ensure that folks are remembering content a week later or whenever the next session is.

That's a great question.

And this is where kind of the applied part comes in.

So I had the baseline theoretical stuff.

You need to do these things.

But what are those things and how do you carry them out?

So, dis first off your point about distraction.

Distraction is the arch villain.

Of learning or just doing anything.

Right.

Distraction.

And we live in a world of constant distraction and you know, everybody wants to drive engagement for their thing, which means that they have to distract their targets from other things that they're doing.

Right.

Engagement's great, but like doesn't mean that just 'cause you're engaged, you're gonna learn anything.

You could be engaged because you are being presented with a multitude of entertaining distractions.

Doesn't mean that you're gonna learn anything from it.

So we operate, as I said, on like kind of premises principles and practices.

So there's three main premises.

I'm gonna look at my notes here because I don't wanna plum anything.

There's three men premises.

That I design under.

And one is that working memory is very limited for anyone listening doesn't know.

Working memory is what you're currently thinking about.

And there's limited store and limited or limited capacity and limited time.

So you can only think of like, you know, you know, five plus or minus two things at once for 30, around 30 seconds without having to rere rehearse it, right?

Otherwise it goes out.

So you have a very limited capacity for that which allow, which, which affords for a lot of distractions to creep in.

And you can jump from one thing to another because we kind of operate on benefits and threats detection.

So anything that may, might be a distraction that causes threat or benefit, and then we go to that thing, right?

A lot of the time it's, we think it's a benefit because it's giving us dopamine, but it's actually a threat because it's sapping our attention and focus from something else.

So limited working memory.

The second premise is that learners are active processors of information, not passive, consumers of it when it comes to learning things.

So they have to be actively doing something, attaching new information to prior knowledge.

We can only think of the unknown in terms of the known, and we have to think analogically.

We make relationships between things.

This is how we process information so we don't forget it.

Understand it and make meaning out of it.

And the third one is that learning improves.

And this is especially for media.

When we optimize what's called dual coding Alan Pao is a researcher who came up with dual coding, is basically we learn better from words and visuals together rather than words or visuals alone.

They, these two things form a better signal in our mind when they're presented simultaneously.

It's dual coding.

You're coding two things.

Together.

So that means that we're, as instructional media designers we're challenged to make sure that one, we manage kind of an essential processing.

That active processing.

How do we sort the need to know from the nice to know and then get the relevant information into the heads of the learners most effectively.

Well, we do this by making sure that the resources and the exercises are aligned with the objectives.

Alignment is an overriding quality, right.

And then everything else about relevance kind of falls into place.

Two, we have to optimize for cognitive load.

So how do we eliminate distractions provide clarity for the learner without kind of like.

Being super obvious about it, you know, Don Norman said, good design is invisible.

And I always try to keep that in mind that the design is supposed to serve the function of what you're giving them, rather than showing off to the design itself.

And also how do we improve focus, right?

So we do that by applying these multimedia learning principles to units of structure units of instruction and content and media.

And then the third.

Challenge that we have is how do we foster generation?

So how do we get learners to generate ideas?

Remember, we're active processors of information.

How do we get 'em to retrieve concepts and create deeper understanding for the next time they have to generate something?

So the way we do that is we scaffold moments in the run of the media where learners.

They really have to do something with the information, not just hear it right.

Then you you space out your assessments.

Hopefully you can strategically time those spaced assessments, like right before the learner is probably gonna re forget some of the key things that they're supposed to know.

You make them generate those ideas again, because as it turns out, like.

We make a like much stronger memories and connections when we encode them really well to begin with.

And then when we retrieve them, like right before we're about to forget them, our brain kind of puts a mental hashtag on those things.

Is oh, hashtag useful.

It was about to kind of fall out of your, you know, re, you know, strength and retrieval memory.

Then you brought it up again at this moment, even after a long time.

So you must probably need to know it later on.

So it forms stronger connections or ngrams in your brain.

That's kind of how we do that, right?

You operate on these premises, you apply these principles, and then you make sure that these practices are in place so you can have the best possible conditions in that piece of media.

That's gonna help the learner learn what they need to know.

Hopefully that wasn't too long-winded What?

Just kidding.

well, it seems like two things going on with in, with instructional design in, as I was following your answer, one, the importance of, it sounds like you are working with someone to design a course.

Somebody just says, oh, Dave, please design a course on X. No you're working with someone.

And it would seem like when you're in this design phase about the design that you just talked about with regards to cognitive load retrieval practice working memory, et cetera it seems like there needs to be a knowledge from the instructor as well.

Because whether it's asynchronous with office hours a hybrid model, they can't, they have to know how good you designed this stuff to be able to take advantage of it.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely.

You and at the end of the day, this is their course, so they make the final decisions on it.

So you have to form a lot of relationships to build trust.

And confidence and the skills that you have.

You do this by modeling.

You do this by doing a lot of discovery at the onset and really trying to understand what and empathize with what the instructor is
trying to do, and then make recommendations for selection filtering organization that they can map out, and then we can fill in together.

So it's not just, you know, me and my team making all this stuff and then being like, here you go, professor.

It's all of us working as a team together to make sure everybody's in alignment and doing it in, you know, a timely fashion that when they leave the, whatever working session that we have, that they leave feeling better than when they came into it.

And the relationship piece is something that they really don't teach you in grad school about it.

And I feel like that's where I kind of got.

I've kind of felt like, you know, bartending and serving really kind of carried over into this work, and I didn't really realize that's what was happening.

It's just relationship building, listening, you know, talking to people on their level and instead of trying to like teach them what, you know, to get them to like buy in.

Yeah, it's, you use what you know to help them accomplish their goals.

You don't need to tell 'em how the sausage is made.

You just need to give them like an array of sausages to choose from.

And then recommend which one would go best with, you know, whatever dish that they're adding it to.

So, speaking of relationships I know one of the things that is very popular in, you know, in-person education, and now with the technology, you know, that in this virtual space.

You know, like, I know Zoom has meeting rooms mm-hmm.

Where people break off and get into groups and do these things.

What's your thoughts about this group work especially online?

What is, how did, do you have to have design thoughts about that?

So group work is tricky because we have to kind of define what it is first, right?

So a breakout room in an instructional session online is great.

It's good.

It gives you, you know, a break from the initial lecture so you can go and do something with other people.

And then kind of, you know, you get the empathy piece there too.

Like, did you understand it?

No, I didn't understand.

Okay.

Let's have a conversation and figure out what that meant.

Right.

And then, you know, if the breakout room is well designed and moderated and you know, you're keeping them on track or you're giving them some kind of template.

Like you give 'em a Google Doc with a pre-designed template, you put 'em in breakout rooms and like, this is group one's template.

And then they can all work in that because they have a, an advance organizer that keeps them on track and guided.

So guided is, guided instruction is really paramount in those type of things.

And that kind of group work is great.

But when it comes to like project work, right, like you do in a group project or something it kind of falls apart.

And I don't think it's just online.

I think group work.

Fails in all contexts, online, face-to-face, whatever, hybrid, you know, they all I tend to fail when it comes to what they set out to achieve.

So I think it's because we kind of fail to make the distinction between collaboration and cooperation.

So that's usually unclear.

Either for the instructor, the in instructional designer, and especially the participants.

So collaboration, just so I can make the distinction clear means everyone is responsible for learning everything and working on everything and coming together to synthesize that knowledge under very well-defined and equitable production roles.

Right.

So everyone does everything, and then everyone has their roles, and they usually rotate those roles at certain points in the group work.

And then everybody, you know, you make a whole thing together.

However, if there aren't intentionally designed guardrails like that, the Pareto principle kicks in, and then 20% of the people end up doing 80% of the work.

And I think anyone listening to this who has ever been in a group project knows that there's always some schmuck who says immediately, oh, I'll do the intro.

I call the intro.

And then collaboration becomes cooperation, meaning that each person is responsible for one part.

So they learn that part and then they present that part and those parts get clicked or stitched together to make a presentation or a project that sat satisfies the group performance requirement.

So you make the whole thing by putting disparate pieces together, which is different than collaboration.

The big problem with that is that after each member only walks away with deep knowledge of their part only, and now they're dependent on others to fill in the gaps.

So one value add to learning anything is building enough self-reliance in an area.

That you can add value to a group when that you're, when you are in one, right?

Not learn dependence on others in order to extract value from whatever group you happen to find yourself in.

Right?

So it kind of does the opposite of what it intends to do when you're cooperating.

In a learning context, cooperation might be better in a business context when everyone just has to do their part to get to a performance outcome.

But most groups in learning end up being cooperative.

They might even start collaborative and then does devolve into cooperation rather than collaboration.

One of the big issues with that is what it really just like makes the learning experience itself performance oriented rather than mastery.

Oriented.

So, like a quick explanation of what that means is that like students aren't doing this to learn the thing, they're doing it to get a score.

So they're oriented toward the performance and how it's gonna be scored rather than the learning and what they're gonna take away from it.

And I always think that like a person who does a project on their own and let's say gets a c probably knows way more in the long run than a person who is part of a group that got an a.

So there's this law that comes out of economics called Good Heart's Law.

It basically means it basically states, once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

And I think that's what performance orientation effectively does in learning context.

It turns a measure into a target, and that may be one reason why many students who have completed prerequisites seem.

To not have the requisite prior knowledge for a more advanced class and sequence and have to play catch up.

And this applies to K through 12 and higher ed.

And kind of they experience the same pattern.

So that kind of general take is mine as cynical as it may be on group work.

Well, I don't think it's, I don't think it's cynical at all.

I think it's clarifying and we're gonna get away from instructional designers for a second and just talk about this because I know, well, even though we're a
quarter of, of a century in talking about 21st century skills and one of the big collaboration, and we're gonna have kids, you know, every period in a group quote.

Collaborating, unquote.

And I think I think in my lifetime, my entire life, I have maybe been able to collaborate a couple times now.

I think one of the skills that we went from our kids, the soft skills is cooperation.

I think cooperation.

We can design things like you just said, you know, or, you know, you said, I'll do the intro.

I know in all the poster projects, there was somebody who was, had the best handwriting.

You know, you're gonna, you're gonna do that piece.

Never had to learn anything.

Just tell me when to write.

Not that, that's not important.

In project management who can do this, who can do the, you know, that and be able to communicate effectively, but collaboration and building knowledge, synthesizing I think that's organic.

I think it's just it's kind of magical when it happens.

We can't put kids in a group and say, okay, collaborate and I can say that now and I'm gonna be quoting you.

Dave I'm gonna take this transcript and I'm gonna take what you just said.

I thought that was very good.

Thanks.

Yeah, I think that like, yeah, you're right.

It's a very organic thing, like real collaboration and the magic in that and we're trying to like reverse engineer and then manufacture it and that never works.

Like so when.

I see a lot in like online discussion threads that are housed in l in LMS for higher education.

They're trying to get kind of an authentic discussion going, but the real authentic discussion happens in the back channels, in the WhatsApp groups, right?

In, in the chat threads and stuff like that.

That's where people feel the safest.

To say what they wanna say or admit fault.

And then out of that, maybe that informs like the manufactured authentic conversation of a discussion thread.

The thing you say about 21st century skills, which always makes me like kind of cringe, is that like, you know, collaboration, creativity, all of that stuff, whatever the Cs are.

Like you can't have collaboration without knowledge building first.

And I think that's what like 21st century skills kind of implies is that.

You don't need to teach knowledge, you just need to teach the skills and then everything will fall into place.

Like you can't, you know, you can't develop critical thinking skills if you have nothing to think critically about, you can't, you know, collaborate.

On a project where you have no knowledge of the project.

And I think the idea is that, no, through collaboration, through critical thinking, through creative practices, you'll build knowledge and just it doesn't really work that way for novices.

You have to build a base of knowledge first before you can kind of do those higher order things.

Here I agree.

You know, now that we're, now that we're in agreement.

I understand.

I totally understand an answer.

Do you have any questions for me?

Yeah, I do.

Because I am a media, I work in the media space in education and learning.

You are podcaster.

I've loved this podcast, by the way.

I'm so thrilled to be on it.

I was a little nervous.

I was like I feel like I'm punching a butt, my weight being on this podcast.

But through your podcasting experience, how has the act and the process and procedure of podcasting itself, you know, you know, gathering information on a
potential interview coming up with sets of questions, how you want to kind of design it, not too rigid, but also not too loose, so it's not directionless.

How does that.

The process of then having the conversation, you know how they say that the the map is not the terrain or the plan never survives the battle.

Right?

Right.

How do you reconcile what you plan with what actually happens, and then the editing process afterward and then coming back to it later and reviewing it and then getting response on that.

How is that entire arc added to your.

Your knowledge base practice philosophy of being an instructional coach?

That's, I'm really curious about that because I feel people start podcasts or creative projects just 'cause they want to, it'll be fun and then they get so much more out of it in terms of like refining their process and then going through it each week.

It's funny the genesis of this is I had a couple books.

I wanted to sell the books, and I asked somebody, what should I do?

And they said, oh, get a podcast.

And then guess what?

I am so terrible at promoting myself and promoting my products.

It has had no impact at all.

But what happened was the site benefits of what you're talking about.

Because, you know, one of the things that I am very interested in.

Is, you know, what to do with kids who aren't reading at grade level.

And so the things that I, my knowledge, I've gained more knowledge, like you said, preparing to talk to Doug, la Ma preparing to talk to Faith Howard,
preparing to talk to those people, watching their videos, watching everything that I, man I don't know about anybody else, but I learned a lot preparing.

And and then the other thing for me, I just like talking to people, you know, it's so much fun talking to people and talking to people with whom I know that if I met in real life, you know, we'd get along for at least half hour, you know, that we'd have fun.

So it has become, you know, the arc is, I was very selfish.

Then I became a great learner because I realized that I needed to prepare, and that preparation means I needed to find out something about everybody.

And I will confess that I'm looking for videos with you and I watched five minutes of a video with somebody about.

What the LMS code was supposed to be or something.

And I said, you know, I am over my head in this but what you're saying is true, you know, just preparing and finding out about folks just have blurted a tremendous amount.

And so right now writing and literacy in secondary schools is my big.

My big search.

Yeah, I think that's wonderful.

'cause it speaks to not only your character, which is great, but like it speaks to this idea that like, you do have to build knowledge first.

Like you kept going back to preparation.

Preparation.

That's a synonym for knowledge building, right?

Yeah.

Like it isn't just like, okay, we're gonna do the process, show up and I'm just gonna talk to you.

You spent.

A considerable amount of time preparing all this stuff, building knowledge so we could have a good conversation, not just having a, you know, some offhand conversation, so maybe you get something out of it later on.

There is intention in that's instructional design, right?

Is creating the necessary conditions with the, you know, minimal viable content or requisite knowledge in order to shorten the distance between not knowing and knowing.

Or doing and not doing right.

Those kinds of things.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

I'm, I, it pleases me to hear your.

Emphasis on preparation, which is why it's so easy to talk to you as well.

Well, well, well, thank you, Dave.

It was, really a pleasure.

I hope folks get something out of this.

Next time they see an online course you know, they see an online course.

Everybody wants to do one.

Right.

You know, they say, oh, you know, have an online course.

Make some dough.

It's funny, my I'm gonna see one of my buddies tonight and he just like, recently had some back problems and he had back surgery and stuff like that.

So he is been laid up and he's had an idea for an online course.

And he's, I'm meeting him up tonight.

He's like, let me pitch it to you.

I wanna pitch it to you and maybe we could just make it together, you know, blah, blah, blah.

So I did even like my buddies who have no interest in this stuff whatsoever.

And when I do talk about it, their eyes glaze over.

Are even just like, well, I think I, yeah, maybe I'll make a course myself 'cause there's so many out there.

Right, right, right.

Any final words?

Dave?

Final words.

Do the source reading.

Read the source material, please.

Everybody out there before you adapt a model or a framework or a theory don't just base all your ideas on an infographic.

That's how we get lethal mutations and things like Spawn, because they look nice and.

We might be stripping the nuance out of them.

So if you get in, if you get really excited by an idea, please do the read the source material because you're gonna get so much out of it and you're gonna feel, you know, so much more enlightened by it.

Or you might feel like, oh, I had the wrong idea about this, you know?

And I just see that way too much.

And I think it's a source of a lot of unnecessary arguments that are trying to disguise themselves as debates and.

We, it, this is like collaboration is key.

Yeah.

But knowledge building comes first.

So please read the source material.

All right.

Great.

Dave, it was a joy talking to you.

I think people are going to really get a lot out of this episode.

Thank you so much.

Well, I hope so.

Thank you so much for having me.

I, a humbling experience being able to be on here.

Appreciate it.

Talk to you soon.

All right.

Take care.

Gene Tavernetti: If you're enjoying these podcasts, tell a friend.

Also, please leave a 5 star rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

You can follow me on BlueSky at gTabernetti, on Twitter, x at gTabernetti, and you can learn more about me and the work I do at my website, BlueSky.

Tesscg.

com, that's T E S S C G dot com, where you will also find information about ordering my books, Teach Fast, Focus Adaptable Structure Teaching, and Maximizing the Impact of Coaching Cycles.