EIT 632: Part B “Application of Gagne’s Nine Events in Designing Instruction” There are many effective instructional models available for teachers to follow in their teaching and learning practice. Malaysian classrooms, for example, are using the format of PPP instructional model; Present, Practice, and Produce. However, this model may not be enough to guide teachers particularly in integrating technology in their instruction. Gagne’s Nine Events of Instructions is one of the effective models which offer a distinct explanation of how an effective instruction should be. Gagne’s Nine Events of Instructions has outlined nine events of instructions; 1) Gain attention, 2) Inform learners of objective, 3) Stimulate recall of prior knowledge, 4) Present materials, 5) Provide guidance, 6) Elicit performance, 7) Provide feedback, 8) Assess performance, and 9) Enhance retention with transfer. Even though the events are listed in sequence, Gagne indicated that either of these events can occur before, after or simultaneously at the same time in teaching and learning instruction. Hence, by adapting the nine events of instruction, I will attempt to demonstrate how to conduct two effective language lessons, especially in teaching writing in English as Second Language for 12 years old learners. Present stage Gain attention Getting attention is very important before teachers start their lessons. Motivation towards engagement can vary especially in the initial part of a lesson, hence producing appealing stimulus could do the trick. Failure to gain attention before a lesson would make learners lose interest, resulting from a lack of focus on the entire lesson. Hence, to create an appealing and novel situation for learning, I need to begin my set induction by using a random recording of a day at the beach and let the learners guess where they can find such an atmosphere. This should happen before they start on an essay writing activity on the topic “A Day at The Beach”. Emotions are one of the human elements that teachers could trigger to gain attention that lasts. Therefore, sharing a PowerPoint picture gallery on bullying or reviewing news articles on bullying at school or work for a flipped classroom in Whatsapp group, could appeal to learners’ emotions, let them be concern about bullying, and gain their attention to the lesson of on the topic of “Bullying” in the following EIT 632: Part B day. After successfully gaining attention, there will be no doubt that learners are fixed to the next stage of their lesson. Inform learners of objective Right after the Gaining Attention step, I will then outline the learning objective of my lesson. Teachers, therefore, need to bear in mind that translating learning standards from academic documents into clear and understandable learning objectives act as the foresight to allow learners to prepare mentally for the lesson. Learners will activate their executive control, facilitated by the learning objectives, and start to browse on any effective learning strategies they had known to use during the lesson. It is vital to give doable descriptions of tasks learners need to achieve in their lessons to guide their executive control. Such descriptive learning objective could start with, ‘After this lesson, pupils should be able …’ and continued with ‘to construct three descriptive paragraphs essay on the topic “A Day at The Beach”’ or ‘to create an awareness poster on bullying’, to give learners ideas on what learning strategies they needed for the lessons. I would write the learning objectives on the whiteboard for my learners to see or refer to at the course of their lesson. As a result, my learners are more focused and engaged with my lesson because they know what they need to achieve in the duration of my lesson. Stimulate recall of prior knowledge The next stage that comes after the Informing Learning Objective stage, would be to stimulate learners’ prior knowledge. In general, prior knowledge requires learners to recall information or information about what they know in response to a certain idea or stimulus. This process of retrieving old information will create strong relationships between the new knowledge and the old ones. The easy way of doing this is to recycle keywords, visual aids, ideas, or relate previous activities to the new lesson. Learners will also be able to retain their previous knowledge when the lesson is memorable. Thus, conducting my lesson in a positive environment and stimulatingly exciting activities. I would recycle words such as ‘picnic’, ‘family’, ‘sunny’, ‘windy’, ‘happy’ and ‘weekend’ from my previous lesson on “A Day At The Park” for my essay writing on “ A Day At The Beach”. As for creating a poster, I would refer to our previous Language Arts project on making a poster of an on-coming Shakespeare play which was quite memorable because they had performed the play in class at that time. EIT 632: Part B Practice stage Present materials / information Upon reaching the practice stage, I can now present the materials of the lesson. The essential part of presenting materials is to emphasize on the relevant details of my lesson. My learners need to interpret the details correctly because any misleading interpretation of the materials will result in them not achieving the learning objective. I will also present my lesson points in chunks; taking into account the types of learners I have and preferably, I would be blending the points from previous lessons to aid my learners to recollect what we had learned previously. Using an LCD, I would play a video of “A Day At The Beach” and somehow physically show to the class the things people would bring to the beach; such as sunglasses, picnic baskets, and sunblock lotion. As for the ‘bullying’ topic, I would include a selection of awareness videos about ‘bullying’ and conduct Hot Seat sessions for learners to ask me questions about bullying. Provide guidance for learning In the practice stage, my learners will need guidance on how to achieve their learning objective; the skills they have to know by the end of the lesson, and some learning strategies to acquire the skills. Referring to Bloom’s Taxonomy, my materials should be sequenced from easy to difficult. This arrangement would allow my learners to have ample time to practice and get immediate feedback as they move on to the next learning stage. Usually, I would start by demonstrating how to brainstorm ideas related to my lesson; a strategy of gathering information based on a stimulus. For “A Day At The Beach”, my learners will practice constructing bubble maps to list out words in association with the topic, and to help my weak learners, I would provide a picture illustrating a scene at the beach. On the other hand, I would give a crossword puzzle on bullying in handouts for my learners. Next, they have to relate the words to bullying through the internet; I will be demonstrating and guiding my learners the skill to use the search engine online. Production stage Elicit performance, Provide feedback and Assess performance EIT 632: Part B After my learners have utilized the learning strategies that I had taught them, they have to present their performances. My learners will start to practice and perform their tasks until they achieve their learning objectives. This stage can be done simultaneously with my learners receiving assessment of performance on their initial performance. Corrective feedback is one of the best ways to assess my learners’ performance. The corrective feedback, either written or verbal, should guide my learners to improve their writing performance. Meaningful feedback will encourage learners cognitively in their reviewing process (Hartshorne, McCollum & Wolfersberger, 2010). If meaningful feedback allows my learners to make significant outcomes, then my feedback should help students understand why and how something needs to be changed. In my lesson on writing an essay, my learners will produce a few drafts of their essays in class and I would be giving corrective feedbacks mostly focusing on descriptive sentences and organization of ideas. If the task needs to be done at home, by using Google Document, I could leave my comments and use the track changes feature to provide my feedback when my learners transfer their drafts to online documents. I could do the same for my lesson on creating a poster, apart from putting out poster exemplars as reference for my learners, I would also be providing verbal feedback on their drafts during class or in our Whatsapp group when they share their posters’ progress. Generally, I would ask my learners to provide at least two drafts of their work or progress for my corrective feedback. Essay writing and making posters do take time. It is not an unusual scenario that learners have to complete their tasks on their own, however, it is important for teachers to keep track of their progress. In order to keep learners motivated to complete their tasks, teaches need to provide positive feedback as they progress positively toward the learning objectives. Positive feedback needs to include positive statements and reasons for progress such as “Good job, Lina! I love how you use adjectives and nouns to describe your day at the beach”, or “Both of you are amazing, Jaswinder and Kamil! It’s already been 15 minutes but you have found more than 5 words about bullying and some good pictures too”. Enhance retention and transfer To enhance retention and transfer, learners should be given opportunities to practice retrieving the learned skills. In the next lessons to come, teachers should blend in some of these learned skills so that learners will recall and practice the skills in different or almost similar transferable situations. Enrichment exercises can aid to enhance retention while still offer problem-solving EIT 632: Part B task to expand learners’ understanding. Remedial exercises, on the other hand, would help poor learners to distinctly recall, transfer and practice their understanding in repetitive situations to ensure total retention. I would provide my learners with another descriptive essay enrichment exercise for my excellent writers and differentiated remedial exercise for my poor writers. As for creating a non-linear text, I would focus on providing remedial exercise on information transfer for my remedial learners. In conclusion, the Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction can be adapted effectively in a primary English as a Second Language classroom. Teachers may be comfortable using the usual Present-Practice-Produce lesson plan; however, Gagne’s instructions offer a distinct explanation of how an effective instruction should be. Therefore, it is important for teachers to integrate Gagne’s instructions in their lesson plan to improve their learners’ learning experiences and their teaching methods. Reference Evans, N. W., Hartshorn, K. J., McCollum, R. M., & Wolfersberger, M. (2010). Contextualizing corrective feedback in second language writing pedagogy.
