Instructional Design and Delivery
What this domain tests
Instructional Design and Delivery tests whether you can build coherent, standards-aligned literacy units and enact them with adolescents. Prompts may ask you to sequence a unit, choose discussion structures, scaffold complex texts, or differentiate without lowering cognitive demand.
Core rules and concepts
- Backward design (Wiggins & McTighe): identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence, then plan learning experiences. Essential questions should be arguable and recurring, not trivia.
- Alignment: every activity should serve an objective and an assessment; “coverage” is not a rationale.
- Gradual release (Pearson & Gallagher): modeled, guided, collaborative, and independent practice, with scaffolding faded as competence grows.
- Workshop and discussion structures: mini-lesson, reading/writing time, conferring, and share; Socratic seminar or text-based discussion protocols build accountable talk.
- UDL and differentiation: vary representation, expression, and engagement while keeping the same conceptual target for all students.
Worked example
A 9th-grade team wants a three-week argument unit. The essential question is “How do we decide when a community rule is fair?” The summative task asks students to write an evidence-based proposal to the student council. Formative evidence includes a rhetorical precis, a Toulmin outline, and a small-group debate. Daily activities-mentor-text analysis, claim workshops, and peer response-each feed one of those assessments. Reasoning: the unit is coherent because the question, task, and daily work all require the same reasoning; the debate is not an isolated game but rehearsal for the written proposal.
Traps that cost marks
- Designing activities first and inventing objectives afterward.
- Scaffolding that does the thinking for students.
- Using discussion without a text-dependent purpose or accountability.
- Treating differentiation as easier texts for some students rather than multiple routes to the same standard.
- Pacing by calendar rather than by evidence of learning.