MEDT 7490 - Comprehensive Instructional Design Plan

Christy Dryden

Client Description and Instructional Problem

My client for this design plan is Mrs. Kati Stephan who is currently serving as a Fourth
Grade Teacher at Doerun Elementary. Kati has taught for several years and has worked in a
variety of grade levels within the elementary school. Social studies instruction, especially in our
elementary schools, is often the first to be left out when time is running out at the end of the day.
Many schools do not have a designated time set aside for social studies instruction each day and
Mrs. Stephans school is no different. Each day she teaches two different groups of students math
and science or social studies. She often needs to teach two hours of mathematics which leaves
her about 40 minutes to teach science and social studies. What she usually does is devotes the
entire time to one subject, so she will teach science until she has completed a unit and then solely
teach a unit of social studies. So I was not surprised when I approached Mrs. Stephan about
helping her with a unit that she immediately wanted assistance with her social studies
curriculum.
Mrs. Stephan mostly uses the units designed by the Georgia Department of Education and
the resources supplied by them for her primary instructional tools. These resources often include
a PowerPoint that is informative but not very visually appealing. Mrs. Stephan asked me to work
with her to create some additional resources, beginning with the first unit for the upcoming
school year. This unit is titled The Discovery of North America and covers six settlements of
Native Americans. Mrs. Stephan asked me to focus on creating supplementary resources for two
specific standards: SS4H1.The student will describe how early Native American cultures
developed in North America. a. Locate where the Native Americans settled with emphasis on

Arctic (Inuit), Northwest (Kwakiutl), Plateau (Nez Perce), Southwest (Hopi), Plains (Pawnee),
and Southeastern (Seminole) and SS4G2.The student will describe how physical systems affect
human systems. A. Explain why each of the Native American groups (SS4H1a) occupied the
areas they did, with emphasis on why some developed permanent villages and others did not.
Description of Redesigned Lesson
While she previously taught this lesson using a PowerPoint presentation, Mrs. Stephan feels
that the addition of a digital poster showing the Native American settlement locations would
serve to engage the students and help them learn to better organize their information. As a preassessment she will give the students the graphic organizer where they will collect information
on the six Native American tribes. She will ask them to complete it with the information that they
already know before taking the original paper up and then giving the students an almost identical
paper to use for learning. After allowing time for any students to fill in the blanks with
information, the teacher will begin the lesson using the infographic. The teacher will use the
presentation option for the digital version of the infographic and will project it onto her
Smartboard to refer to during her lesson. First Mrs. Stephan will introduce the students to the six
tribes they will learn about this week. She will direct them to fill in the tribes names in the
correct place on the graphic organizer. Next the teacher will point out, using the map graphic,
where each of the six tribes lived. She will also direct the students to complete this information
on their graphic organizer. She will then ask the students if they think their environment has an
impact on their cultures. They will respond to the question that is reflected on a slide in the
presentation using eInstruction response devices (clickers). The students will see the results of
the survey and the teacher will allow a few students to support their responses. As the lesson

proceeds, the students should be able to complete their graphic organizers with information from
the lesson and infographic.
Lesson Assessment
At the end of the lesson, the graphic organizer for the six Native American tribes will be
taken up by the teacher as a ticket out the door and used to assess their learning and
engagement in the lesson. This information will also be included on the end of unit assessment.
The infographic will be printed for the classroom to serve as a visual reference during this entire
unit of instruction and the pre-assessment, initial graphic organizer, and the end of unit test
scores will all serve to measure the effectiveness of the lesson redesign.
Defense of the Artifact
An infographic/digital poster was the right solution for Mrs. Stephans instructional
problem as it provides flexibility in presentation and sharing, it has fewer words and more
images, and serves to focus the students attention on the most important information visually
even while the teacher may be providing much more detailed information audibly. The dual
coding theory suggests that the use of visuals and text together can increase comprehension.
During course readings on dual theory, the powerful mnemonic effects of imagery were
mentioned and I attempted to harness those powers by providing an important image that
represented one aspect of each tribes way of life. Because the visual is also accompanied by
relevant text, these two pieces of information should help the students move the information
from short-term to long term memory more easily. For each slide or section of the infographic it
was important reduce text to focus on the important concepts. I also chose to use color as a
connecting theme through the infographic by color coding the regions and then color coding each

tribes information section. As stated by text book authors Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher
(2008), color visuals can increase motivation and improve retention by more than 75 percent. I
chose to use the colors black and yellow for the base of my presentation because of the textbooks
suggestion that yellow is the most attention grabbing and that black signifies authority. Each
section is filled with a single color background easier navigation of the poster when printed.
Visual and Literacy Competency Standards
This lesson focuses on standards three and four of the Association of College & Research
Libraries (ACRL) Visual and Literacy Competency standards. Standard three states that visually
literate students interpret and analyze the meanings of images and visual media. The students
will be asked to look at the images and identify their content which will only be possible through
their examination of details in the images, reading captions, and analyzing it in relation to other
images on the infographic. The second element of standard three expects that a student will be
able to place an image in its cultural, social, and historical contexts. This will be very important
in this lesson as not many photographs of the Native Americans traditional homes and clothes
exist today. Indeed, in many photographs the European settlers added clothing to the Native
Americans before they would even allow them into towns and buildings. It will be vital that the
students begin to explore representations of gender, ethnicity, and other cultural or social
identifiers in not only these images but in the others they encounter, especially in the social
studies course. In regards to standard four, the students will be expected to evaluate the images
and their sources as they are provided on the infographic. The students will need consider the use
of visual signs, symbols, and conventions to convey meaning and assess the information that
accompanies images for accuracy, reliability, currency, and completeness. As the unit continues,

the students will be expected to corroborate the information that accompanies the infographic
images by consulting multiple sources.
Challenges
One of the most challenging aspects of instruction always seems to hinge upon the
element of time. As social studies instruction occurs at the end of the day, it is frequently
interrupted with school assemblies, students leaving early, and announcements. That is why it
was important for the artifact to focus on the important information that the teacher hoped to
impart. It was also important that the lesson could be broken up into smaller chunks of
information, if necessary and still convey the data. Originally, I had planned to provide a
completed comic strip to use for instruction and then the students will be expected to create a
comic strip on one of the other five tribes. As Mrs. Stephan and I discussed the lesson though,
she quickly determined that we did not have enough time for that element. I intend to work on
incorporating a comic strip element into the next unit of social studies instruction for her which
includes the explorers.
Another challenge in completing this project involved original resources. I began
attempting to create images for my infographic. I created a map that I color-coded and labeled.
This was very time and skill intensive and I must confess to a lack of artistic ability. Luckily, I
was able to find a great deal of photographs of the Native American subjects that were available
on the public domain as they were images taken prior to 1920. All of my images were either
created by me, found within the Piktochart gallery of images, or found online. The images found
online were all licensed with either creative commons license 2.0
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/ ) or were licensed under the public domain
through Wikimedia commons.

This process has helped to reignite some of my passion for social studies instruction and I
have made it my own goal to attempt to add at least one visual artifact to each grade levels units
by the end of the year. I have already asked a few subject content experts and experienced
teachers to help me choose the one theyd like for me to begin with for now. After we work
together, I think I will have a better idea of the instructional needs and hopefully I will encourage
teachers to create their own visuals by offering training on a variety of the software, resources,
and theories behind the importance of visual literacy in todays classrooms.

References
ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. ACRL Board of Directors,
2011. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/visualliteracy
Frey, N., & Fisher, D. (2008). Teaching visual literacy: Using comic books, graphic novels,
anime, cartoons, and more to develop comprehension and thinking skills. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Mayer, R. E. (2014). Multimedia Instruction.