Analysis - Breaking to Build

Instructional Design

You break it, you build it. Toddlers seem to understand perfectly!​

Analysis - or even organization - consists of making a mess in order to clean it back up again. Right? You want to organize your room? You gotta take it apart first. You want to fix your engine? You gotta take it out of your car and lay the parts out. You want to create an online course? You gotta break it down before you can construct it. Seems to be part of the creative process - to destroy first. Just ask any toddler.

This break-it-to-build-it process was more painful than I imagined when I started my Instructional Design course, but then I long-ago misplaced the toddler's harmless joy of destruction (which I am now finding again as I build it back up again through my process of emotional healing).

Somehow, except for toddlers, breaking things apart feels inherently destructive, even if you're doing it for a "con"structive purpose! Toddlers taking really great joy in destroying the castle they built of blocks is a consequence of not being trained to think re-building can be painfully time-consuming. They're not programmed that way. Yet I cannot think of another situation where breaking something down in order to build it back up - again - has been anything less than painful; maybe it's the programmed-adult condition! It's true for emotional healing as well - we have to go inside our hearts and break down the emotions into their component parts before we can make true sense of why we feel what we feel. The process of destruction, even as part of creation, whatever the motivation, just seems inherently painful for many adult humans.

Yet this is what we must go through in course design. We have to lay our academic cards on the table of our minds so we can build a proper hand out of them.

We gotta start with the Objectives. They are the bricks of the foundation of the course, the literal building blocks.

What do we want our students to know or be able to do as a result of our course? The answer is the objectives, the nuts and bolts of course design.

The thing is, you work backwards! It does seem contrary to the creative process, but it's exactly what you do. You start with what you want to come out of the course - your students' knowledge and skills - and work backwards to create the building blocks of the objectives of each module, each lesson, each unit of your course.

Maybe it's the fact that analysis itself is a pretty abstract concept. Analyzing is the fourth of six levels of higher-order thinking on Bloom's taxonomy, after all. Pretty complex thinking.

But analyzing involves abstracting, which is a pretty abstract concept 8-) in itself. Maybe it's the painful part, actually. You have to separate things out that ordinarily blend in together when you're analyzing. That process of separating things out, of abstracting them, in order to analyze them means taking things out of context.

Abstracting = intentionally taking things out of context!

No wonder it's so painful! To abstract our course objectives from the rest of the course in order to consciously design it the way we want it involves separating them out from the context of the course.

Now that I think of it, teaching itself is breaking things down into their component parts so that the student builds them back up in a context s/he understands. Hopefully, s/he re-builds the components in ways that make sense to the student instead of just the way the teacher wants them to think! This is the magic of the creative process of learning.