Narrowing down context ideas...

I've thought more about my particular context and what I'd like to use as my focus for my instructional design model. A colleague and I are teaching an undergraduate course for pre-service teachers together, and both of us are encountering New York State standards for the first time. In our discussion of how to make our students aware of the need to address standards and how to do it, I brought up how in PA, the standards are written for the grades when students take their state standardized tests. When I was teaching there, this was grades 3, 5, 8, and 11. This is great if you're only teaching those grades, but a lot trickier if you've got anyone else. My colleague suggested I use the process of creating a grade-specific curriculum as a context for my model. It makes sense, since I spent a few summers at my old district helping to create a uniform, grade-specific 7-12 ELA curriculum. At the time, I focused mostly on the 10-12 range, since those were the grades in our school. However, we did work a lot with the 7-9 teachers, too, since alignment was needed across all grades. (The elementary curricula were also examined by the 7-9 teachers for alignment.)

It's definitely a process that could be applicable to many different situations, and it's one that is needed when there is a push for uniform standards. It helps that I had experience in doing the task itself, but at the same time, I was not thinking about it from an "instructional designer" point of view. Time to start from that vantage point.