How many times as a teacher or designer have you heard the complaint that the separate parts of a course ‘don’t seem to belong to each other’? You have probably had to respond to the complaint of non-integration in a course or lesson more than once. It’s a common problem. Usually, in my experience, the fault stems from a faulty decision over the learning sequence — over the student’s ‘response pathway’ through the content of the course. Below is an example close to home. It is about the ‘non-integration’ of concepts and content in an eight-day course on ‘course development’. The teachers involved are using the ‘course development activities cycle’ from this book as their special bit of content, ie their REO. This cycle is the one shown in Fig. 1, repeated here in Fig. 15. The course begins with the subject of activity 1, moves on to activity 2 and so on, in a clockwise direction. Each activity is handled by a different teacher.
The students like the course. They value it enough to recommend it to their fellow students. In principle the melody is there for both the teachers and the students. But . . . they don’t find it very effective, nor do they find it very efficient. They miss the integration of the course’s parts.
Figure 15 A course development activities cycle.
The problem is one of sequence. The five parts of the course (corresponding to the five activities in the circle) need to be taught in an anticlockwise sequence. In this way, the part which is being given has a clear and logical relationship to the parts which have come before. The course in anticlockwise sequence would look like this:
Part 1 End Evaluation: In this part, I learn (as a student) about the good and less good results of a course or lesson. I learn about assessment; about what assessment is and how to do it properly. I exercise my skill …
Part 2 Installation: I am now in a good position to look for and understand what things in the installation of a course (the teaching-learning process itself) account for good and less good results in an end evaluation. I know about these because I have already learned about what I -will, at the end of my course or lesson, be testing for. I learn about communication and the management of the teaching-learning process…
Part 3 Learning Experience Design: Knowledge of evaluation and installation tells me that good things and less good things in a learning experience have a lot to do with its design, ie with the plan, structure and strategy of instruction that (depending on its quality) will add music and/or noise to the installation and the end result .. . As a student I can integrate what I have learned and exercised in parts 1 and 2 with what I am learning now about design in part 3…
Parts 1, 2 and 3 provide the logical background and frame of reference for new things in part 4 (needs specification). Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 provide the background and give meaning to things about needs analysis (part 5). Eventually I complete my backward journey by returning to the subject of evaluation, but this time with an eye and ear open for things in evaluation that indicate a ‘Go’ or ‘No Go’ decision, to revise or not revise an existing course. This anticlockwise sequence has given me what (as a student) I needed. I can integrate the separate subjects in the course.
‘Backward chaining’, as this reversed sequencing is called (Gilbert, 1962, and Mechner, 1967), has been used to teach problem-solving in geometry, learning to avoid faults in playing a piece of music, teaching children to tie a shoelace, learning to hypothesize, learning to set up a complex experiment in physiology, selling shoes in a shop and waiting on table in a country hotel.
The backward chaining technique is a powerful teaching technique and a powerful integrator.