Designing Instruction for Learning - Brendan Lee

Effective instruction requires more than simply presenting content and hoping learning occurs. In this episode, Brendan Lee explores how instructional design can help educators better understand what they are teaching and how students learn. Drawing on the Instructional Hierarchy and different types of learning, Brendan discusses prerequisite skills, acquisition, fluency, generalisation and adaptation, and how educators can deliberately design instruction to support successful learning.

Show Notes

Different types of learning require different instruction

One of the central messages throughout this conversation is that effective instruction begins with being clear about what we actually want students to learn.

Drawing on the work of Tiemann and Markle, Brendan explains that learning can be broadly considered across psychomotor, simple cognitive and complex cognitive domains. These include everything from physical skills, facts and procedures through to concepts, principles and strategies.

The important distinction is that these different types of learning require different instructional approaches. Rather than viewing explicit instruction as a single routine or sequence, Brendan discusses why educators need to identify the type of learning they are trying to produce and select instructional strategies accordingly.

The conversation also explores why the final response alone may not tell us whether learning has occurred. A student might arrive at the same correct answer through prompting, memorisation or genuine conceptual understanding. Understanding how the learner arrived there matters.

The problem that presents may not be the problem to solve

A significant focus of the episode is identifying the skills that sit underneath successful performance.

Brendan uses the example of an equivalent fractions lesson where students were required to fold strips of paper. Although the intended learning was mathematical, difficulties with the psychomotor skill of folding began to derail the lesson.

The same problem can occur with cutting, gluing, handwriting, drawing tables or other skills that may be effortless for an adult but require significant attention from a novice.

This leads to an important question when planning instruction: Do students already have the skills required to successfully participate in this learning?

If a secondary skill is not important enough to explicitly teach, Brendan discusses modifying the task instead. Something as simple as providing a prepared table rather than asking students to draw one can allow attention to remain on the intended learning.

Acquisition and fluency

The conversation explores the importance of moving beyond initial acquisition and developing fluency in carefully selected foundational skills.

Brendan discusses facts and procedures as forms of learning where memorisation and repeated practice can serve an important purpose. Rather than memorisation being the end goal, fluent foundational knowledge can enable students to engage more effectively with complex learning.

A student may be able to produce the correct answer but still require considerable time and effort to do so. When that skill becomes one small component of a larger task, the effort required can compete with the more sophisticated thinking the task requires.

Brendan describes fluency practise as more like a sprint than a 400-metre slog: short, focused periods of high-quality practice. The discussion reinforces the importance of identifying which foundational or “tool” skills are important enough to build to fluency rather than attempting to build fluency in everything.

Teaching concepts, principles and generalisation

When the conversation moves into complex cognitive learning, Brendan explores the difference between being able to recall information and being able to generalise it.

A student being able to state a definition does not necessarily demonstrate that they understand the concept. Brendan uses the example of defining a “chair” to illustrate why definitions alone struggle to capture the full range of examples within a category.

Instead, the discussion explores the use of examples and non-examples to help students identify the important features of a concept. Understanding can then be assessed by presenting examples students have not previously encountered and seeing whether they can correctly discriminate between them.

A similar distinction applies to principles. Memorising a rule is different from knowing when the rule should and should not be applied.

The conversation extends this idea beyond academic learning to social, emotional and behavioural skills. Students may be able to state a school expectation while still requiring explicit teaching and practice to discriminate when, where and how that behaviour should be used.

Building towards problem solving

The episode then considers what needs to happen if we ultimately want students to solve novel problems and apply their learning flexibly.

Brendan describes strategies as the processes experts use when they encounter unfamiliar situations and need to determine what to do next. However, experts bring extensive learning histories to these situations, including fluent facts and procedures, conceptual knowledge and an understanding of relevant principles.

Problems can arise when educators begin with the complex performance they ultimately want to see without sufficiently establishing the learning required underneath it.

Rather than simply presenting students with open-ended problems and hoping they discover effective strategies, Brendan discusses the importance of engineering the learning journey so that students progressively develop the knowledge and skills required for increasingly complex and adaptive performance.

Instructional design, behaviour and the learner's experience

An important thread throughout the episode is the relationship between instructional design and student behaviour.

Repeated experiences of high effort, errors or failure can become part of a student's learning history and influence how they respond when similar academic tasks are presented in the future.

This creates an important connection with functional approaches to behaviour. Identifying that a student's behaviour allows them to escape an academic task provides useful information, but it also raises another question: why has this particular task become something worth escaping from?

The conversation encourages educators and behaviour support practitioners to examine whether students have the prerequisite skills, whether important component skills are sufficiently fluent and whether the instructional task is appropriately matched to the learner.

The episode concludes by encouraging educators to begin with what successful performance should look like and work backwards from there. By identifying the different skills and types of learning required, teachers can more deliberately design the pathway towards acquisition, fluency, generalisation and increasingly flexible application.

As Brendan explains near the end of the conversation, “the learning is in the doing.” The challenge is to ensure that what students are being asked to do is actually preparing them for the learning we ultimately want them to achieve.

Resources

1. The Lost Blueprint of Learning - Brendan Lee's Substack

2. Analyzing Instructional Content - Phillip W. Tiemann & Susan Meyer Markle

3. The Morningside Model, Dr Kent Johnson & Andrew Kieta - Knowledge for Teachers Podcast

4. Unpacking the Morningside Model, Dr Russ Fox & Karina Stocker - Knowledge for Teachers Podcast

5. Knowledge for Teachers Podcast - Brendan Lee

Contact Brendan Lee

Brendan Lee

Brendan Lee is an educator, consultant, writer and host of the Knowledge for Teachers podcast. His work focuses on helping educators and school leaders translate research into effective classroom practice, particularly across the science of learning, explicit instruction, instructional design and primary mathematics.

Through Knowledge for Teachers, Brendan speaks with researchers, educators and experts about what the evidence tells us about effective teaching and what it takes to successfully implement that evidence in classrooms and across schools.

Brendan also works directly with schools through professional learning, coaching and consultancy. Across his work, he is focused on helping educators better understand how learning occurs and how instruction can be deliberately designed to support students through the Instructional Hierarchy.

Email: brendan@learnwithlee.net