Week+Four

This week, you and your group members will determine the instructional strategies to be included in your curriculum design proposal. Consider the principles of effective instructional strategies described in your Learning Resources. Consider how the content of your curriculum would be delivered most effectively. What type of activities will allow learners to grasp the content and meet the learning objectives? How might technology drive or enhance these experiences? Return to your group wiki and review the strategy suggestions posted by your group members. How do your ideas compare with those of your colleagues? Do some ideas overlap? Do the ideas of your colleagues cause you to have a different perspective?
 * Group Project: Determining Instructional Strategies**
 * //By Wednesday//**, post to your group wiki a description of at least two instructional strategies that you think should be included in your group’s curriculum design proposal. For each strategy, describe the purpose, format, and overall content it would include. Include a brief rationale explaining why you think each of your suggestions would be effective.
 * //By Friday//**, each group member should post his or her suggestion for the group’s final instructional strategies (as a group, three instructional strategies must be included in the final proposal). These suggestions should reflect a combination of what you consider to be the best ideas from all group members.

**Alexander**

**Molly** I agree with Cheri in that the volunteers are not expected to be experts and that we must start with basic training. Thus, supplantive instructional stategies must be used. In addition, because volunteers will be leading tours, I also think they will need a lot of declarative knowldege to be able to recall facts such as artist names, eras, etc. Thus, we need to incorporate assessments that will ensure the learner can recall specific information. Matching scenarios, multiple choice, or fill-in-the-blank assessments are ideal. The procedural tasks can involve a lot of practice time before the volunteers "go live".

**Molly's Final Ideas** Based upon what everoyne else has said, I think that we need to incorporate supplantive instructional strategies to teach the content to the volunteer. I agree that they must be interested in the content in order to volunteer in the first place, but I have to assume that we may be taking volunteers who have little to no prior knowledge. Thus, we will need to provide step-by-step instruction for them.

We need 3 strategies - here is what I propose based on all entries: 1. It appears as though everyone agrees that we need to utilize a **Macrostrategy for Problem-Solving in the form of Simulations** as part of our instructional stategy. We can use simulations of the art galleries to allow learners to practice before they lead real tours.

2. Everyone also seems to agree that some sort of **Declarative Knowledge Strategy** (Chapter 8 of our textbook) needs to be incorporated due to the vast amount of information that the volunteers will need to memorize in order to give successful tours. I suppose we could always go back to one of Cheri's original ideas that the volunteers would have some sort of database to help them answer questions, etc. If we don't want them to have to memorize all of the information, we could maybe teach them how to utilize some sort of database on an iPad like device that they can carry with them when giving tours. It's a thought. Then, we can pretend that they already have this **Expert System** available in the museum & we just need to teach the volunteers how to use the expert system. So, I suppose we would need to decide between these 2 strategies & just pick 1 or the other to go with.

3. Again, everyone seems to agree that we will need to use **Procedural Strategies** in order to teach the volunteers how to format & compose e-mails to send to patrons and also on how to enter & maintain data in an excel spreadsheet.

**Maria** I don't disagree that volunteers don't have to be subject matter experts on all things that are part of the gallery and the exhibits, but usually if someone is volunteering at a museum it is because they are truly interested in that area and they probably already have some knowledge of the articles in the museum. I'd say we should leverage this interest (maybe not knowledge because we don't know if this is shared across the board) to make training a little bit more exciting! I love Molly's idea of assessments with matching scenarions and multiple choice, I still think that an interactive tour of the galleries and simulations that would allow volunteers to go on virtual tours of the exhbitis and even create their own would be beneficial for learners.

**Michael** Having the benefit of reading both Cheri and Molly response, I will say that I also agree that the level of expertise or mastery required of these volunteers is indeed something less than a subject matter expert. The declarative knowledge that needs to be recalled I think would be better assessed via fill-in-the-blank or multiple choice coupled with some role-play that would requre the voluteers to recall information on the "fly" and apply the knowledge is a close to "real'life" environment. As Cheri and Molly both state, the more procedual material can be document via work step instructions and a possible quick reference guide and practiced before "go-live".

To have one set of final ideas I will have added to Molly's final thoughts above and sugget we use thoose as are final strategies for the week.
 * Michael's Final Ideas **

**Cheri** I think we should be using mostly supplantive instructional strategies for our training. The reason being; these are volunteers-novice, not expected to know everything or be "experts". We are giving them very general and basic knowledge and skills to function in the gallery. For some of the tasks, such as updating the excel sheets, sending patron emails and making phone calls, we probably will want to provide simple procedural learning tasks to take them through the steps.