Consequential Educational Practices

Instructional Design Models are usually articulated as frameworks and rubrics to support systematic design, development, and presentation of lessons or sequences of lessons. There are many variations, but most Instructional Design Models involve identifying learning needs, specifying desired outcomes, crafting a plan to achieve those outcomes, and devising a strategy to assess whether the outcomes are achieved.

Teaching Styles Discourses include any attempt to identify and/or categorize modes of teaching. The least sophisticated are presented as undifferentiated lists of teaching approaches, and the slightly-more-sophisticated use questionnaires, scales, and grids to generate teaching profiles.

Technically, Assessment and Evaluation encompasses any activity intended to monitor student learning. It can be planned or spontaneous; it can be focused on an individual or on an educational system; it can be systematic or haphazard. More concisely, Assessment and Evaluation tend to be uncritical consequences of other discourses on learning.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines three forms of learning: Formal Learning usually involves certified teachers, accredited curricula, and institutional settings. Non-Formal Learning (sometimes called Incidental Learning) refers to structured learning situations in which one or more of the elements mentioned in the previous sentence is absent. All of those elements are absent in Informal Learning, which is not oriented by or structured around explicit learning outcomes – and which, from the point of view of the learner, is never intentional.

Standardized Education includes those approaches to schooling that emphasize common programs of study, age-based grade levels, and uniform performance outcomes. The movement drew much of its inspiration and content from ancient traditions and religion, but its main influences have been industry and the physical sciences.

Classroom Management was originally coined to refer to those tactics used by a teacher to maintain control and order. The term has recently been elaborated to encompass any efforts intended to ensure educational settings that support learning.

Schools of Education in universities and other settings have profound influences on popular understandings of learning – through, for example, their roles in preparing teachers, their research into learners and learning, and their contributions to other aspects of school life.