The Study On The Training Model Of Instructional Designers’ Reflective Practice Abilities

With the increase of the social demands for the instructional designer and the improvement of quality requirements for them, improving the professional knowledge of instructional design has become the top priority in the professional talent training of instructional technology. However, the instructional design professionals trained by the current professional training models, which are dominated by the theory of technical rationality, can not solve the complex issues in real educational situation by completely relying on the instructional design expertise learned in the classroom. This gap between the professional knowledge and the practical demands needs to be bridged by changing our professional training models. The theory of reflective practice, which is put forward by Donald A. Schon and is flourishing in the field of professional education, provides a new perspective for us to rethink the practice of instructional design and to change the professional training models of instructional designers.This study firstly examined the practice process of instructional design from the perspective of reflective practice, theoretically demonstrated that the instructional design practice, with the aim of solving complex ill-structured problems in teaching situation and the process of the iterative reflective dialogue between the instructional designers and the teaching situation, was also a kind of reflective practice. According to this, the author constructed a conceptual framework of the instructional designer as reflective practitioner, advocating that instructional designers should be trained into reflective practitioners. This is meaningful in helping professional practitioners and researchers in the field of instructional design to deepen their understanding of the complexity of the instructional design’s practice process in the real world and the understanding of instructional designers’ability and quality.Based on the theoretical arguments, the author, adopting the way of the design-based research, surveyed and analyzed the cultivation actuality of the instructional designers’ reflective practice abilities. According to the problems found in the professional training of instructional designers, such as the overlook of the real situation, the less attention on practice than theory while reflecting, the lack of specialized coaching in reflection, the author provided some relevant solutions to assist the construction of the new training model of instructional designers, involving creating a real situation for instructional design practices, focusing on learners’ reflection on the practice, manifesting the reflection through reflective writing, providing scaffolding guidance and support for reflection. Then, in the light of the above-mentioned solutions, the author constructed the reflective writing-based training model of instructional designers’ reflective practice abilities. The construction of this training model provided a new perspective for colleges to answer the questions of what kind of instructional design professionals should be trained and how to train.To explore the effectiveness of the training model, the author applied the model into the real teaching practice, trying to develop the students’ ability of reflective practice by arranging real practise programs of instructional design and reflective writing assignments. In the end, this study used the REFLECT rubric to evaluate the quality of reflective writings submitted by students, and investigated the student’s attitude to reflective practice by the questionnaire survey. The experimental results showed that, the reflective writing-based training model of instructional designers’ reflective practice abilities gained a large magnitude of effects in developing instructional designers’ reflective practice abilities. What’s more, the improvement of reflective practice abilities can also contribute to the development of instructional designers’ professional skills.